Poetic Labors and Challenging Political Science: An Epistolary Poem

ABSTRACT

The author, a political theorist, uses poetry to reflect on and spur structural change in admissions committees, hiring committees, funding decisions, curriculum development, and the institutionalized awards-making structure regarding African Politics in the American Political Science Association. This poem, delivered and performed at the American Political Science Association 2018 meeting in Boston, provides empirical and verifiable data about how scholarly awards are distributed in the discipline. The analysis of this process reflects on a long history of erasing, minimizing, and tokenizing the scholarship of African political scientists in the discipline of political science. Written as an epistolary poem, the author explains how #MeToo accounts for complex and interrelated forms of exclusion from the production of knowledge and uses the history of Black women in politics associations, writings by Patricia J. Williams, Pearl T. Robinson, Darlene Miller, and poetry by June Jordan (1936–2002) and Sweet Honey in the Rock (f. 1973).

KEYWORDS:

• Scholarly awards
• African Politics Conference Group of APSA
• Pearl T. Robinson
• June Jordan and Zenzele Isoke
• Darlene Miller
• Sweet Honey in the Rock
• Alice Walker
• spirit murder

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This essay is indebted to the brave walking ahead of me that my contemporary Zenzele Isoke has done in her research on aesthetics, ethnography, and the politics of poetry. I move with joy and pleasure in her wake. Both of us build on June Jordan’s Poem About My Rights (2005).

2. The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Williams’s (1991) classic text on political thought and legal theory about racism and contract law, along with West’s (1992) writings about “spirit murder,” speaks to the nature of the injuries I am most concerned with.

3. Pearl T. Robinson (2003[2007]) has had a monumental impact in Political Science, Anthropology, African Diaspora Studies, and African Gender Studies.

4. The a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, has offered musical anthems, spirituals, and chants across multiple genres for decades. Their song, Echo (1988), was precisely the kind of haunting account of disappeared past-present spirit injuries that refuse to stay dead of necessity. I use Echo and its literal sound and repetition, it’s haunting as an analytical device to understand how the award process was organized and also to remind hearers of the potency of understanding institutionalized discrimination in the context of everyday practices, embodied choices and decisions—of institutionalized convenience, of roboticized neglect, of refusing mindfulness, of refusing listening. Their account of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for Black Liberation across the world has become and remains a watchword for political protest and a sound database for the work that music continues to do as testimonial, historiography, and political organizing technologies. See also Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2014) and her chapter with Kwame M. Phillips in Futures of Black Radicalism (2017). Redmond and Philips call such repetition a heretical reminder whispered (208) in the face of lethal practices of domination and raw violence (216), “a verb—an action—requiring that one recognize injustice and willfully declare it inferior” (217).

5. Darlene Miller’s title of her 2018 article specifically references gendered racial colonialism and racial slavery in South Africa using this term. This translation of the Afrikaans follows Miller’s. See also Yvette Christianse’s Unconfessed (2006).

6. See Walker (1982 [2006]), 206.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of South Africa, Gender Studies Institute [Visiting Faculty Researcher].