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Abstract
This article presents a preliminary sketch of a broader investigation into encounters between “engaged Buddhism” and Black liberation theology in the United States from 1965–1968, motivated by the eventual goal of articulating a different approach toward a politics of death, or what scholars now call “necropolitics,” at this interface. Focusing on a world-transformative dialogue between Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King, Jr., this study begins with Hanh's vindications of the practice of self-immolation during the imperialist wars in Viet Nam, as mediated through his pedagogy of “engaged Buddhism” and its epistemological and historical elaboration in the West. Decisive to King's momentous shift toward both anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist political commitments, formally enunciated in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam,” I interrogate how this encounter develops and globalizes a distinctive epistemology of death, justice, and nonviolence—one that absolutely cannot be accessed without an avowal or faith in something beyond those ontologies assumed by the limits of modern secularism or any formation of civil society. Ultimately, my goal is to bring this earlier formulation to bear on contemporary discourses of bio- or necropolitics that predominantly revolve around either terroristic martyrdom or the limits of white ontology precipitating Black “social death.”
Acknowledgments
An early sketch of this essay was presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Chicago, IL. Many thanks for comments and support from Ashon Crawley, Imani Johnson, Tasneem Siddiqui, and the audience there, as well as generative suggestions from the external reviewer and editors at Souls.
Notes
1 Thich Nhat Hanh et al., Dialogue: (The Rev) Thich Nhat Hanh, Ho Huu Tuong, Tam Ich, Bui Giang, Pham Cong Thien Addressing (The Rev) Martin Luther King, Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, René Char, Henry Miller
(Saigon: La Boi, 1965). All translations from French to English were provided to the author by Cassandra Chaney.
2 Oprah Winfrey and Thich Nhat Hanh, Oprah Talks With Thich Nhat Hanh, May 6, 2010, https://plumvillage.org/thich-nhat-hanh-interviews/oprah-talks-to-thich-nhat-hanh/ (accessed October 12, 2018).
3 bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh, “How Do We Build a Community of Love?,” Shambhala Sun, January 2000, 32–40.
4 hooks and Hanh, “How Do We Build a Community of Love?,” 34.
5 For more on the topic of substantive differences between Euro-American and Asian American Buddhist praxis during this period, see Karen Jackson Ford, “Marking Time in Native America: Haiku, Elegy, Survival,” American Literature 81, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 333–59; Jane Iwamura and Paul Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jane Naomi Iwamura et al., “Critical Reflections on Asian American Religious Identity,” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 161–95; Michael K. Masatsugu, “‘Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence’: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years,” Pacific Historical Review 77, no. 3 (August 2008): 423–51; Gary Y. Okihiro, “Religion and Resistance in America’s Concentration Camps,” Phylon 45, no. 3 (1984): 220–33. Additionally, I might note here that homologous elisions would also result from investigations based on critical Asian American studies analytics that, as Colleen Lye has pointed out, grow from inventive applications of French post-structuralism and/or take as their main point of departure affinity with Black liberation ideologies and movements—directions which do not fully engage global Asian intellectual and political traditions as a viable center for developing a locus or field of thought that could be considered distinctively “Asian American.” See Lye, “Asian Socialism, Magical Realism” (Paper presented at the University of Oregon, Eugene, January 2018).
6 Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). As Crawley argues, this endeavor entails elaborating the epistemological fabric and implications of discourses of liberation that deliberately articulate in non-secular terms, in language or organizing metaphors meaningful to a majority of people who continue to frame their most essential worldviews within theological—distinguishable from, even as they are mutually constitutive of, political—discursive limits.
7 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1983] 2000).
8 Hanh et al., Dialogue, 13–14.
9 Jude Lal Fernando, A Paradigm for a Peace Movement: Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr (Dublin, Ireland: Columba Press, 2007).
10 Hanh et al., Dialogue, 15; original emphasis.
11 On this point, homologous assertions vis-à-vis other Abrahamic religions may be possible to draw, a relevant and important task that currently lies beyond the scope of this article.
12 Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 1.
13 Ibid., 2–3.
14 It is worth mentioning here the existence of “people of color”/“racial justice” sanghas organized by various monasteries and meditation centers in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village network (see, e.g., https://www.bluecliffmonastery.org/racial-justice/ [accessed October 12, 2018]). In the final analysis, the organizing logics of these sanghas abide by definitions of racism and social identity consistent with hegemonic critical race understandings that, as I have argued elsewhere, reproduce dominant Eurocentric epistemologies of human being. That is, popular “racial justice” paradigms move away from a view of racism as ontological crisis to emphasize race as a descriptive category, racism as an effect of political power and privilege (rather than productive of it), and meditation as a form of “self-care” in these contexts.
15 At time of writing, the film has not yet been publicly released; my initial reading is based on discourses presented in marketing and public discussion, from features and lengthy interviews with the filmmakers in political news outlets such as Democracy Now and The Root to reviews in entertainment outlets such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
16 Hanh et al., Dialogue, viii.
17 Ibid., xii–iv.
18 Ibid., x.
19 Cf. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
20 Hanh et al., Dialogue, 18–19.
21 Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington, Reprint edition (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2003), 38.
22 Ibid., 38.
23 Ibid.
24 Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1–2.
25 Ibid., 3–4.
26 Ibid., 11.
27 Ibid., 4.
28 Ibid., 2.
29 Robinson, Black Marxism, 168.
30 Ibid., 168.
31 Fernando, A Paradigm for a Peace Movement, 40–46.
32 King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 36.
33 Ibid., 40.
34 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from MLK to the Nobel Institute,” The King Center Digital Archive, January 25, 1967, 1, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/letter-mlk-nobel-institute (accessed March 14, 2018).
35 See King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 238; Hanh, Vietnam, 81.
36 King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 39.
37 On this point, further historical analysis that incorporates the interventions of Latin American liberation theology would, indeed, also be compelling. For now, I privilege King’s encounter with engaged Buddhism based on the assumption that King’s ongoing critiques of Marxism, alongside the effects of McCarthyism in the United States and the particular complexities of American hemispheric history and relations, created conditions and affinities more conducive to the explicit influence of engaged Buddhism—the latter which also expressed a critique of communism and commitment to non-alignment.
38 King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 234.
39 Ibid., 240.
40 Ibid., 40.
41 Ibid., 241.
42 Ibid., 233.
43 Ibid., 242.
44 Cf. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (July 3, 2008): 177–218.
45 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
46 Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Social Issues 24, no. 1 (January 1, 1968): 2.
47 Ibid., 2.
48 Ibid., 4.
49 Ibid., 7.
50 Ibid., 10.
51 Ibid., 10.
52 Ibid., 11.
53 Clyde Woods, “Necropolitics Blues” (Paper presented at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference, Riverside, CA, March 2010); Clyde Woods, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 427–53; Clyde Woods, “Life After Death,” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 62–66; Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues In The Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso Books, 1998).
54 Cf. Chenshan Tian, Chinese Dialectics: From Yijing to Marxism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).
55 King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 286.
56 Cf. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (December 21, 2003): 11–40.
57 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, March 1, 2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle (accessed October 12, 2018).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sharon Luk
Sharon Luk is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She is author of The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (2017, University of California Press). Her research is concerned broadly with intellectual and social formations attendant on contending movements of world-making.