Editor’s Note

As we all still navigate the deadly maze of the COVID global pandemic, scholars of the African Diaspora continue to mine the archives (and find and create new ones), crunch the data, debate the interpretations and engage in transformative praxis based on new understandings and intellectual paradigms that have been created for a new time.

Souls has hosted a number of powerful special-themed issues that have helped to facilitate conversations on critical topics related to Black politics, culture and society. This issue, however, is our general issue that allows us to publish and showcase essays that may not fit one of our particular themes, but nevertheless provide important insights and analyses on critical topics. Of the seven research essays in this issue, three themes run through most of them: the politics of art and culture, trans-nationalism and Black internationalism, and the ubiquity of anti-Black racism.

Professor Marketus Presswood offers an in-depth essay on the variegated history of the jazz performance, and culture in China from the interwar years, the period between World Wars I and II, through the early period of the Chinese revolution of 1949. There are interesting and surprising twists and turns as Presswood maps how jazz, anti-Blackness and politics intersect. In the process, he chronicles the robust jazz scene that, for a brief time, flourished in Chinese cities and colonial enclaves. His conclusions will undoubtedly advance more scholarly exploration and debate.

Continuing to grapple with the themes of music, culture and transnationalism, Professor Peter Clavin’s essay focuses on Black Arts poet and radical political thinker and cultural icon, Amiri Baraka. The author teases out the musical themes in Baraka’s poetry and the jazziness of much of his literary offerings, infused with historical and political analysis. This thread weaves through all the periods of Baraka’s eclectic political life from his early cultural nationalist period, to the Marxist ideas that informed his art and praxis near the end of his life. Throughout his artistic and political career, Baraka was also influenced by world politics and culture, from African cultures to Maoism and Chinese-inflected Marxist politics in the 1980s and onward.

Dr. Wilson Sherwin’s essay on the Welfare Rights Movement (WRM) of the 1960s and 1970 s pushes us to acknowledge and think about economic justice beyond a standard Marxist or labor framework to ask the question, as some leaders of the WRM did, what are the oppressive features of wage work and a culture of compulsory work in a world of relative abundance. Sherwin situates WRM thinkers in the context of “anti-work politics” that challenge the presumed wisdom of the “American work ethic.” This is a critique of work as a form of social control and exploitation, not necessarily voluntary work and reproductive work and service outside of the market. This all raises a critical set of questions in the era of rapid automatic, artificial intelligence and robotization that is making a great deal of human labor redundant. Like Jeremy Rifkin’s popular 1999 book, The End of Work, Sherwin uses the narrative of the WRM to interrogate new ways of viewing work and the social and political relations that surround it.

The three essays by Professors Tiffany Packer, Kia Caldwell, and Melissa Stein deal with the matter of state and vigilante violence in one form or another. Packer revisits the heinous Ku Klux Klan murder, likely with police collusion, of anti- racist protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, linking it to the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia during the Unite the Right rally in 2017. The essay by Kia Caldwell foregrounds the intersectional politics and transnational influence of assassinated Brazilian socialist, feminist and queer political leader, Marielle Franco. Her murder, which seems to have been a combination of state violence and vigilantism, catapulted tens of thousands of people into action, to pick up where she left off, to honor her legacy, and to replicate her courage. Finally, Stein’s essay on the 1985 bombing and state orchestrated fatal assault on the MOVE organization, a radical Black commune in Philadelphia. The military-like assault on a Black urban political community in a major U.S. city sent a signal that we are all vulnerable to state violence, and was a warning to groups and individuals that seek to forge a path that diverges from the script of racial capitalism.

Finally, Professor Jonathan Howard’s essay grapples with the theoretical tensions involved in studying blackness. Using the framework of “black ambivalence,” Howard offers a way out of the impasse between pessimism and optimism that has beleaguered Black Studies and invites us to consider a more nuanced black study beyond the antiblack world.

All of these writers are addressing critical questions of the day, questions that expose the violence and injustices of capitalism, colonialisms, and heteropatriarchy. They are also holding up the artists and organizers, past and present, that have envisioned and continue to envision a liberatory future, transcending borders, overcoming violent repression, and centering art.

Barbara Ransby
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