Emancipatory social inquiry: democratic anarchism and the Robinsonian method^†

^† An earlier version of this essay was presented at the ‘Critical Ethnic Studies & the Future of Genocide’ Conference in March 2011 (Quan, 2011).

Abstract

In Black Movements in America, Robinson observes that ‘[s]lavery gave the lie to its own conceit: one could not create a perfect system of oppression and exploitation’ (1997, p. 11). This is especially so, in part, because oppression is after all, as Robinson argues in Black Marxism, only one condition of being, and racial regimes, however inventive and pernicious, are only the forgeries of actual lived experiences as illustrated in Forgeries of Memory & Meaning. He thus concludes, in Anthropology of Marxism, that ‘domination and oppression inspire…an irrepressible response to social injustice’ (2001, p. 157). Robinson's scholarship has trained several generations of radical scholars to recognize an epistemological advantage in insisting that ‘men and women were divine agents’ of history, instead of the ‘fractious and weaker allegiances of class’ or any other monolithic social positioning (2001, p. 139). Robinson thus peoples his theoretical terrains, potently mobilizing historical density as a guide for radical social inquiries. One of the main contributions of his most influential work, Black Marxism, for instance, is its claim that no matter how much we believe in the state (and the economy) as the only entities that organize modern life, the historical Black radical tradition, as it turned out, granted a previous ungoverned and ungovernable conception of life itself. Robinson's collective work provides a liberationist method for social research and theorizing – a necessary task for continuing feminist and ethnic studies as an emancipatory project. This paper explores the scholarship of Cedric J. Robinson and the ways in which he displaces state and capital forms of expression as epistemological a priori to render Black people and communities as liberationist subjects, and in so doing, he renders himself an intellectual anarchist.

Keywords:

• liberationist subjectivity
• anarchism
• Black radical tradition
• Cedric J. Robinson
• Black Studies
• ethnic studies
• social movements

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Darryl C. Thomas, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Jean Sheppard, Peg Bortner, and C.A. Griffith for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

 1. Emphasis added; Cabral, 1972, pp. 86–89.

 2. Cabral was a movement organizer, spokesperson, commander, theorist, and, at the time of his assassination, the Secretary General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands – the main organ of the revolutionary movements of Guinea-Bissau, which was ultimately recognized by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1972 as the sole representative body of its people.

 3. Even with the setback following Cabral's assassination by the Portuguese secret police on 20 January 1973, Guinea-Bissau achieved independence in September 1973.

 4. For further information about intellectual influence on Robinson, see Morse (1999) and Quan (2005).

 5. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith observes that ‘the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism,’ and research ‘is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized’ (1999, pp. 1, 7). Because of this, radical historiography requires a decolonizing of research methods.

 6. For further reading on Robinson's methodological contributions to radical historiography, see Herard (2005), Myers (2012), and Quan (2005).

 7. Because ‘racial regimes are commonly masqueraded as natural orderings’ (Robinson, 2007), the recognition of them as forgeries is inextricably linked to the recognition of power relations and thus threatens their own stability as racial regimes. As Robinson explains: ‘Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power…. [T]he covering of racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernable origins and mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime and from the realization that, paradoxically, so are its social relations. One threatens the authority, and the other saps the vitality of racial regimes’ (emphasis added; pp. xii–xiii).

 8. Although their ideational histories are distinct and perceived as dissimilar in fact, authority and order are kin (Robinson, 1980, p. 30). While I agree with Robinson that order ‘is the precept which is authority's precondition,’ and that ‘authority is the rationalization of order’ (p. 30), I believe that the metastasizing of order is itself the rationalization of authority.

 9. It is important to note that this is not a label used by Robinson. Rather, and in the next section, I characterize the Robinsonian method as one that embodies a philosophy of democratic politics and anarchism.

10. In consideration of history and theory of social transformation, I emphasize the importance of life and knowledge, as well as dream. ‘Freedom dreams,’ as Kelley (2002) so successfully noted, are essential to assessments of movement's success and failure because the best social movements are ones that ‘transport us to another place, compel us to live horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society’ (p. 9). As he argues, these dreams transport us ‘somewhere that exits only in our imagination that is, “nowhere”’ (p. 2) or utopia, and dreaming of new worlds – ‘from the dreams of an African utopia to the surreal world of our imagination, from the communist and feminist dream of abolishing all forms of exploitation to the four-hundred-year-old dream of payback for slavery and Jim Crow’ (pp. 6–7) – is the essential task of radical movements.

11. Here, I argue that the ungovernable and ungovernability provide useful theoretical insights for thinking about life and the politics of life, instead of the politics of death or ‘necropolitics.’ On necropolitics, see Mbembe (2003).

12. Here, Smith's understanding of knowledge-sharing is particularly instructive: Knowledge-sharing implies reciprocity and ‘is a long term commitment’ (1999, pp. 15–16). It is not ‘simply sharing surface information (pamphlet knowledge),’ but the sharing of ‘the theories and analyses which inform the ways knowledge and information are constructed and represented’ (p. 16). The Robinsonian method, as this essay will demonstrate, also contains a strategy for knowledge-sharing.

13. The problem with state addiction is that it pathologizes authority, reifies order, and forestalls the emergence of discoverable counter-alternatives.

14. For an exposition on the awesome power of the national security state, see Agamben (2005).

15. See also Foucault (1970) and Newfield (2008).

16. As Rojas (2007) argues, the growth of Black Studies as an academic discipline is a consequence of social protests.

17. Especially on the appropriation of Black Studies and the disappearance of Black people from academic institutions, see Brown (2007).

18. In May 2010, the Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, signed into law a House Bill (House Bill 2281; endorsed by the Senate; State of Arizona, 2010) that bans ethnic studies in public grade schools (K–12), specifically targeting the Mexican-American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. As codified in the House Bill 2281, no school district or charter school may provide instruction or courses that include the following: 1. Promote the overthrow of the US Government. 2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people. 3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. 4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating pupils as individual. (House Bill 2281, Title 15-Sections 112) Given the rise of xenophobia, nativism, and economic violence against poor Brown people, and neo-confederate politics in Arizona, that this bill was passed is neither surprising nor unanticipated. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that by conflating ethnic studies with treason and explicitly banning solidarity, the state and its allies reveal their own dysfunctions, panics, and anxieties about the capriciousness of their authority.

19. Okihiro, G. (2011). The future of ethnic studies: The field is under assault from without and within. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Future-of-Ethnic-Studies/66092/ [Accessed 15 December 2011].

20. Hersh, S. (2003, May 12). Selective intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable? The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?currentPage = all [Accessed 15 December 2011].

21. Not surprisingly, this charge would generate considerable debate among the practitioners of Black Studies. See, for instance, Fenderson (2009).

22. It is important to note that Rojas does not interpret this development as entirely problematic.

23. Some may argue that many practitioners of critical Black Studies have never left the source. The proliferation and potency of Black feminist scholarship, especially of activist scholars such as Alexander (2010), Cohen (1999), Davis (2003), Gilmore (2007), Smith (1998), and Young (2006), to name a diverse few, bear witness and attest to the importance of culture and the interconnectedness between movement praxis, knowledge production, and radical consciousness.

24. This framework is part of my larger book project, ‘Why Not Life? The Politics of the Ungovernable and Democracy.’ It studies anarchism, ungovernability, and tools for democratic living, and investigates practices of refusing to be governed. Empirical accountings of instances of withholding availability for governing, such as marronage, border crossing, prison abolitionism, and transgenderism, suggest that there exists an alternative genealogy of anarchism to the Western anarchist tradition. While conventional understandings of anarchy (without rule) suggest a contradiction to or an absence of democracy (rule by the many), this alternative genealogy of anarchism (as distinct from the anarchisms of the West) suggests that a democratic politics is a prerequisite of an anarchism that relies on justice in solidary (Hames-Garcia, 2004; Mohanty, 2003) and egalitarianism as precepts.

25. For a sample of works that partially disrupt conventional narratives of anarchism, see Chomsky (2005), Scott (2010), and Zinn (2007).

26. Robinson explains that this is so because anarchism in the West ‘was a theory of society conscious of and in opposition to political society’ (emphasis added; 1980, p. 187).

27. Perhaps, one of the most influential theorists on the acceptance of the political as theology is no other than Schmitt (Political as Theology). For instance, his great influence on the influential theorist Agamben's work on the power of the state is self-evident. For further reference, see Agamben (2005) and Schmitt (2006).

28. Jacques Rancière is one of the most provocative among contemporary anarchist philosophers. His work, especially on the hatred of democracy (Rancière 1991; Rancière & Corcoran, 2009) and artistic egalitarianism (Rancière, 2006), is cogent for a radical reformulation of anarchism (May, 2006). Rancière (2006) locates aesthetics as a site where equalitarianism is possible in ways that the political denies, and argues that through this ‘aesthetics regime of art’ artistic egalitarianism can create conditions for the destruction of other regimes of hierarchies. He also concedes that ‘art and politics are not two permanent and separate realities’ (2009, p. 25). That Rancière fails to fully appreciate the fact that the making of aesthetics is, thus, not unencumbered by cultural violence and multiple regimes of hierarchy is not only naïve, but also tragic given the recognition of the possibility of a radical egalitarianism and anarchism that his work engenders. Without the benefit of a radical historiography analogous to that of Robinson's, Rancière's work is thus, at best, productively contradictory. Alain Badiou uncharitably sums up the problematics of Rancière this way: ‘Always situate yourself in the interval between discourses without opting for any of them; reactivate conceptual sediments without lapsing into history; deconstruct the postures of mastery without giving up the ironic mastery of whosoever catches the master out’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 107). Robinson's Forgeries instantiates a more effective interrogation of aesthetics and politics, one that relishes in history and readily gives up the precepts of the order that it opposes.

29. As stated by Bull (1969), anarchy is ‘the central fact of the international system and the starting place for theorizing about it’ (p. 35). See also Waltz (1959).

30. On the ‘totally administered society,’ see Horkheimer and Adorno (2002); on the Frankfurt School, see Wiggerhaus (1995).

31. Just as there exists many forms of anarchisms, there exist many forms of critical theory that engages with authority, relations of ruling, order, and meaning. Rebaka (2009), for example, documents an alternative and older genealogy of critical theory, one that is nurtured by the Black radical tradition – Africana critical theory. To make this case, he points, for instance, to Dubois' ‘developing and doing authentic interdisciplinary critical social theory either before the Frankfurt School critical theorists were born, or at least, when they were toddlers’ (pp. 6–7). As he explains in Africana Critical Theory, ‘frequently the only form of critical theory that most people [recognized] is Frankfurt School critical theory…[but] there are many forms, many traditions, of critical theory’ (p. 6). As a fruit of the Black radical tradition, Africana critical theory is, thus, inherently emancipatory: ‘as a materialist social theory, [it] focuses on actually existing human needs and suffering, the ways in which hegemonic historical and cultural conditions produce suffering, and impede the changes necessary to eliminate human suffering and enable human liberation and social transformation’ (2009, p. 243). Precisely because it is so, it goes beyond the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Similarly, Robinson's deconstruction and reconstruction of authority, grounded in the life-worlds, lived experiences, and aspirations of the Black radical tradition, instigates a counter genealogy of anarchism than that of the West.

32. Foucault as cited in Robinson (1980, p. 216).

33. In ‘Geniuses of Resistance,’ I demonstrate how Black Marxism is fundamentally an open narrative, conspiring and instigating co-conspirators into a larger plot to radically reform the past and present (Quan, 2005).

^† An earlier version of this essay was presented at the ‘Critical Ethnic Studies & the Future of Genocide’ Conference in March 2011 (Quan, 2011).