Abstract
While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations.
What is Black politics? What is Black political thought? Michael Dawson’s Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies shows that there are many answers. Visions describes the contours of Black political thought and asks how intramural ideological differences come to bear on Black political behavior. A key implication of Black Visions is that Black political thought and Black political ideology are observable phenomena that are formed and performed at the grassroots. As such, those who study Black political thought and Black political behavior turn to Black Visions as a guide when explaining the intellectual influence and expansive nature of Black thought.
Although Black political thought recognizes a range of streams of Black political ideology, to the untrained eye, the persistence of a nearly uniformly Democratic party voting bloc might obscure the ideological diversity among Black people. Dawson’s first book, Behind the Mule (1994), explains that Black Americans’ relatively homogenous voting behavior is a function of the continuing significance of race in the United States. 1 In light of the persistence of anti-Blackness and its likelihood to impact one’s life and livelihood, Black Americans often make political decisions using race as a proxy for their own interests. But behind the political calculus of Black collective behavior is a rich and consequential theoretical heritage.
Black Visions draws readers back to the importance of ideology in informing Black political behavior. Dawson argues that ideologies “represent the everyday, commonsense knowledge of the political world” and are “lenses through which political information is focused” (55). He challenges Arendtian and Habermasian notions that ideologies only cohere among bourgeois elites and pushes back against commonly held ideas in American public opinion that the public is, as Kinder suggests, innocent of ideology. 2 Dawson demonstrates that Black Americans subscribe to a range of Black ideologies, including strains of Black nationalism, Black feminism, Black Marxism, and Black liberalism. Black Visions demonstrates the complex and varied nature of Black politics, particularly the differences in Black belief systems around what kind of political action will facilitate Black liberation and freedom. Black Visions also shows the inadequacy of the typical liberal to conservative spectrum of American political ideology for explaining or measuring Black political ideology with any depth.
An additional essential contribution of Black Visions is Dawson’s discussion of a Black counterpublic. Building upon his 1994 essay in Public Culture, Dawson emphasizes that Black Americans have been excluded from both the bourgeois public sphere and subaltern counterpublics. 3 In response to such exclusion, Black Americans have created their own spaces: clubs, organizations, media outlets, academic journals, and, of course, the Black church. Despite marginalization from mainstream political discourse, Black discursive life contributes to the development of Black politics through interaction between Black elites and the Black grassroots in everyday spaces controlled by and for Black people. Dawson laments that a robust Black counterpublic and civil society has been undermined through state repression, economic devastation, spatial separation, and the assimilation of Black political elites.
Dawson explains how Black political ideologies show up in Black political attitudes, which I will briefly review here. He offers chapter overviews of Black nationalism, Black feminism, Black Marxism, and Black liberalism. Black Visions shows the significance of Black nationalism as a persistent strain of Black political thought, organization, and radical action. Dawson also describes nationalism’s shortcomings around sexism and its skepticism toward solidarity. As for Black feminism, Black Visions outlines the struggles of Black women for recognition within the Black community and American law. Dawson dissects the complications of Black political differences and discusses the Black feminist belief that strong coalitions can only be built through acknowledging differences rather than by papering over them in the interest of unity.
Black Visions further details the development of Black Marxism in the United States. In his empirical analysis, Dawson finds that, among Black Americans, the tenets of Black Marxism are not as widely held as Black nationalism and Black feminism. Lastly, in his treatment of Black liberalism, Dawson questions whether liberalism works as a viable ideology for Black people and if it is able to deliver radical egalitarianism and racial justice within the confines of a historically racist system. Although Black Americans strongly support and espouse ideological commitments to radical egalitarianism, he finds that among Black Americans, liberalism has less impact on Black opinion than Black nationalism due to disillusionment.
Black Visions’ Influence
Black Visions offers an overview of the development and influence of Black political ideologies and sets a research agenda for in-depth exploration of these topics. Although the study is limited in its ability to treat each Black political ideology with the (as Dawson writes, book-length) depth they warrant, Black Visions is a detailed and important book for breaking down the key anchors of Black political thought and ideology in the United States. The impact of Black Visions stretches to both theoretical and empirical works in Black studies, political theory, and American politics. I will focus here on the book’s impact and the subsequent dialogues developed in works of Black political thought and politics.
Scholars succeeding Black Visions have taken up questions of the Black counterpublic and have argued for a more expansive understanding of what counts as the Black public sphere. Melissa Harris-Perry’s Barbershops, Bibles, and BET (2004) and Michael Hanchard’s Party/Politics (2006) consider the role of the Black counterpublic, incorporating everyday talk, Black media, Black culture, and Black social life as dynamic contributors to and spaces for Black political thought. 4 These studies find value in the Black subaltern, politicizing spaces that are not recognized as traditionally political. The book In a Shade of Blue by Eddie Glaude (2007) further discusses the role of Black media and grassroots politics, specifically with an eye toward the substance and practice of Black discourse. 5 Glaude urges the abandonment of the elite-centered politics of the Civil Rights era and supports the adaptation of a “deliberative” Black politics guided through a lens of Deweyan pragmatism. Richard Iton’s pathbreaking In Search of the Black Fantastic (2008) points to the vastness of Black culture across the diaspora as key grounds for the development of Black theory and politics post–Civil Rights. 6 Iton demonstrates that Black politics cannot be contained to formal political spheres and asserts the value of Black cultural contributions for shifting the terrain of Black politics.
A second category of engagement with Black Visions can be found in works that take up the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. Robert Gooding-Williams’s In the Shadow of Du Bois (2010) and Lawrie Balfour’s Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois (2011) consider how Du Bois speaks to Black politics in the twenty-first century. 7 Gooding-Williams diverges from Dawson by avoiding typologies of Black political thought and dealing more directly with individual thinkers. This choice, for Gooding-Williams, leads to a more distinctive engagement with Du Bois through the study of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as well as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). 8 Balfour, on the other hand, asserts that Du Bois’s writing is an opportunity to work through the American racial past in the present and directly face how the scourge of slavery shapes American political culture. She points to Du Bois’s “American assumption” as evidence of the distinctive nature of Black ideology rooted in Black life experience in the United States, departing from typical conceptions of the American Dream that do not match up with reality for Black people.
The implications of and need for Dawson’s Black counterpublic and a twenty-first-century Black politics would become exceedingly clear in the decade after the publication of Black Visions. Black Americans suffered crisis after crisis: the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the “post-racial” neoliberalism of the Obama era, and the repetition of Black death on social media. Black scholars responded to the times. Cathy Cohen excavates the politics of Black youth and their alienation from the political sphere in Democracy Remixed (2010). 9 Dawson himself turns to Katrina and neoliberalism as unmitigated disasters for the Black community in his 2011 work, Not in Our Lifetimes. 10 Fredrick Harris’s The Price of the Ticket (2012) examines the state of a Du Boisian “talented tenth” Black politics that brought about Barack Obama as well as the costly struggle to get a Black man elected president. 11 These works highlight important Black cultural and political precursors to the Black Lives Matter mass movement. Each study laments the breakdown of Black political discourse, the ongoing marginalization of youth and intersectional identities within the Black community, and the invisibility of Black Americans in the eyes of the state.
Since Black Visions, studies in Black political thought have grown to include more work on the influence and role of Black feminism, the significance of Black thinkers, Black internationalism, and Black social movements. Although this list is not conclusive, I would posit that Neil Roberts’s Freedom as Marronage (2015), Shatema Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice (2016), Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire (2019), Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner’s African American Political Thought (2021), and Deva Woodly’s Reckoning: The Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (2021) as important guiding texts for the future of Black political thought. 12 I will offer a brief word on the important implications of each of these texts, though their contributions are vast and warrant in-depth engagement beyond this space.
Threadcraft (2016) and Woodly (2021) elaborate on the significance of Black feminism. Threadcraft’s work on Black women’s body politics and the intimate opens grounds for concepts of refusal, bodily freedom, and self-determination, which are always relevant offerings for feminist and queer political thought amidst state encroachment on queer, women, and gender nonconforming bodies. Black feminism, Woodly shows, has exploded beyond the academy and turned out to be the most consequential praxis of radical Black politics of the twenty-first century, with mass mobilizations started by Black feminist advocates and organizations. Roberts’s (2015) and Getachew’s (2019) diasporic focus demonstrates the global nature of Black political ideological development and problematizes a (persistent) U.S. and Eurocentric focus in Black political thought. These texts engage essential notions of Black freedom making, self-determination, and concepts of the nation. Rogers and Turner (2021) stake their work in a tradition of engaging deeply with individual Black thinkers to solve central questions of political theory. With a collective of Black scholars, they provide devoted space to the contributions of a range of Black thinkers across time and ideological orientations.
Some additional exciting threads for scholars of Black political thought and Black politics to follow from Black Visions are studies of Black radicalism, Black nationalism, and Black grassroots politics. Black radicalism and nationalism are continually obscured to the margins of Black politics, even as Dawson has demonstrated their impact on Black opinion and their significance in the overall development of Black political thought. As such, these subjects warrant deeper intellectual attention to relevant thinkers as well as their ideological influence and practice. In addition, given the ideological diversity of Black Americans, where are new formations of Black political ideologies being practiced? I suspect that the proliferation of new Black political representation at the local level, the resurgence of Black radical organizing, and grassroots civic engagement offer generative opportunities to consider how Black Americans are working and learning together to develop political lenses and ideologies among the fits, starts, and stagnation of American progress. But even beyond these overtly “political spaces,” as we have learned since Visions, Black thought is established in the workplace, in Black social spheres, in Black queer clubs, and Black-women-only spaces. The expansive nature of Black politics and ideology calls for the continual development of more creative approaches to theorizing Black life.
As this book review section intends to reflect upon the impact of books not initially reviewed in Political Theory, a cursory search of the journal reveals minimal engagement with Black political thought in comparison to more traditional topics. And one must wonder, why? Given the consequential nature of Black political thought and the ways it bears on Black political decision-making as well as some of the most cutting-edge politics both past and present, one would assume that broad engagement with the various contours of Black political thought would be highly represented in the political theory subfield’s flagship journal. And this is not to suggest that Political Theory is unique; many of the political science discipline’s flagship journals relegate Black politics and thought to more specialized subfield journals. Yet, for topics to have broader impact, for Black thinkers, writers, artists, and philosophers to truly shape the direction of the political theory subfield, shouldn’t they be considered of interest to a general audience? I should think so. Black thought creates the conditions for progress and informs consequential political behavior. The vision is here. It is past time to take a look.
Footnotes
1.
Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
2.
Donald Kinder, “Diversity and Complexity in American Public Opinion,” in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983), 389–425.
3.
Michael C. Dawson, “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 195–223.
4.
Melissa Harris-Perry, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
5.
Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
6.
Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
7.
Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31.
8.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989) and Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
9.
Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
10.
Michael C. Dawson, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
11.
Fredrick C. Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
12.
Neil Roberts, Freedom As Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, African American Political Thought: A Collected History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Deva R. Woodly, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).