Modernity’s (non)objective character

On problems of method

The title of this discussion alludes to two key texts in Black thought: Cedric Robinson’s rendering of the Black radical tradition, which begins with an analysis of what he calls “the non-objective character of capitalist development,” and Fred Moten’s rendering of the Black aesthetic tradition, which begins with an analysis of what he calls “the resistance of the object.” ¹ Contemplating this juxtaposition became such an important part of crafting my overall approach to the endeavor of research—that is, our methods of problematization or of generating questions—in at least three related aspects: first, their centering of knowledge regimes in modern systems of domination; second, their painstaking attention to the ways that modern pursuits of knowledge and inventions of race are interlocked and bound to movements of European settlement as endless war; and third, their privileging of the problem of human being at the heart of it all.

This analytical foundation ultimately became the means through which I could address persistent struggles I faced giving shape to my first book project:as a work focused on three different regimes of mass incarceration, each with their own dynamics of racial articulation and social struggle. Namely, this orientation allowed me to clarify the material force of racialism in my sketches of history, at grating conjunctures of racial capitalist and settler colonial projects. Perhaps more significantly, it also established grounds to acknowledge the autonomy and worldviews of groups differently disenfranchised from the category “human,” and moreover, to examine the problems and the richness of such traditions through frameworks that extend beyond logics of category as well as comparison, in order to articulate yet unrecognized social forms that are (or can be) created through their historical interminglings. ² In this sense, in tandem with intellectual frameworks that situate dominant figurations of the “alien” migrant in relation to indigeneity, as Iyko Day’s work has done, ³ my research participates in the broader development of a discursive terrain for the examination of human positionings that can transgress limits of “race relations” paradigms.

On this set of issues, Black feminist thought and praxis helped me to confront a particular methodological anxiety I harbored throughout my earliest stages of formulating a research agenda: that is, how to attempt to articulate the existence and perspectives of communities under siege without ultimately echoing assumptions of any variety of innocence, heroism, documentary realism, and/or sanctimony—in other words, representational modes and affects typical of what Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have critiqued as “the proliferation of damage-centered studies, rescue research, and pain tourism.” ⁴ On the one hand, Tuck and Yang’s injunction to problematize settler colonial knowledge regimes has been so crucial to my work. Particular to contouring my first book project, The Life of Paper, my research on epistolary aesthetics required centering specifically the efficacies and endurance of settler colonial pedagogies that have prevailed over, as they compete with, tendencies of knowledge industries built to reproduce racial capitalism (the former a requisite to produce the citizen-subject, while the latter to produce the global consumer). On the other hand, however, I struggled with how to maintain a “pedagogy of refusal” that further enjoins scholars to keep certain knowledge out of reach, in response to the broader dilemmas of research and representation within the complexities of settler regimes. I felt this ethical imperative of refusal constantly jeopardized, since my pursuit of the goal to articulate insurgent and already-existing forms of human being seems precisely to necessitate bringing those forms into open view.

To the extent that I was able to do so effectively, I moved through this urgent contradiction by studying Black feminist thought and aesthetics, which have as conditions of their possibility always had to navigate the twinned perils of inaccessibility and spectacle. On this point, I will quickly touch on three basic insights that guided my work both to engage and to render relationships between the archives and the people and practices bound to them. First, Black feminist aesthetic praxis does not assume the transparency of language and yet neither disavows its material force; this informs literary production and hermeneutics—for example, what Hortense Spillers calls an “intramural protocol of reading”—whose practices of historical consciousness and interpretation problematize those training masculine subjects and civil society. ⁵ Second, techniques of Black feminist literatures are often animated by recognition that modern concepts of knowing and being known are always-already out of reach. Correspondingly, renderings of human being emerging from this condition have necessitated embracing original narrative approaches and assumptions as means to generate—in tense dialectic with negation—social subjectivity and meaning. ⁶ And third, queer and feminist Black performance scholarship has contemplated an irreconcilable contradiction of fugitivity, wherein ephemeral performances that evade capture and constantly reproduce Black social life necessarily take place within historical existence marked and policed as spectacle, the oppression of embodying modernity’s scandal. ⁷ In these senses, as Terrion Williamson’s meditations on Black feminist praxis clarify, any of our attempts as scholars to corroborate presence ultimately come less as claims of knowing than as vital assertions of existence, at times despite or in contradiction with their forms of appearance. Regarding this seemingly simple endeavor to affirm life, then, I will say just a few words on the interventions made available by Black feminist geographies and ontology to overturn the world that colonial settlers have made.

Black feminism and social reproduction

Not enough can be said of the contributions of Black feminist geographies to demystify histories of conquest in general and mass incarceration in particular. Compelled now to attempt a summary comment, I will merely highlight the significance of a Black feminist lens that has consistently positioned regimes of captivity as innate to the total contradictions of modernity. That is, Black feminist intellectuals have centered and substantively elaborated histories of confinement as part of modernity’s genocidal tendency and reproductive exigencies, in contradistinction from prevailing analyses that continue to situate mass incarceration in relation either to the market demands of capitalism or to the juridical boundaries of civil society—neither approach ultimately capable of transgressing the assumptions of either racial capitalism or settler colonial humanism. From a perspective of social reproduction, cultivated by scholars including but certainly not limited to Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Sarah Haley, Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, and Rashad Shabazz, ⁸ mass incarceration must be understood not in limited terms of means or mode of production but in the context of the conditions of possibility for settler productivity as such: necessitating investigations not only of logics and processes of labor exploitation, as common analyses of prisons as capitalist institutions have emphasized; or of logics and processes of repression, as common analyses of prisons as punishment have emphasized; but of the sum imperatives involved in preserving a civilization ultimately dependent on racial, gendered, and sexual practices of elimination.

It might be worth noting here that research from this point of view begins with the historically particular and opens out in dialectic with the global and, ultimately, the unknown. As such, on the one hand, Black feminist standpoints on Western civilization’s genocidal force primarily trace through historical genealogies of racial slavery at particular resolutions. On the other hand, such views still yield an analytical frame capable of problematizing the distinctiveness of settler colonial practices and problems and, in fact, compel us to interrogate further the ways that multiple regimes of violence interact at specific conjunctures of time and space. Borrowing from this intellectual tradition to shape my research, then, enabled me to bring into clearer articulation multiple regimes of confinement within fuller dynamics of migration, displacement, killing, and settlement. For example, the book’s outset highlights the simultaneity of efforts in the mid-19th century to forge the International Settlement of Shanghai and settlement of the U.S. West through the Free Soil Movement; moreover, I was also able to bring into focus transnational civilizing efforts and global regimes of colonial literary training to transform processes of subjectivization and affect the contraction of possibilities for modern subjectivity. In these regards, as I note in my book’s introduction, I do not intend nor claim my research to be comprehensive by any means; yet, I do hope that the work can help avail for thought other investigations that would further elaborate dynamics of war, social movement, and reproduction as they relate to the lives of various communities in Native American, Indigenous, trans-Pacific, and/or American hemispheric contexts.

Before ending with contending ontologies, I would like to touch on one more point of distinction regarding Black feminist geographies and insights into mass incarceration as a problem of social reproduction. Growing out of a tradition committed to clarifying the interlocking relationships between captivity, genocide, and sexual violence, Black feminist studies of mass incarceration have highlighted the significance of the scale of the family in productions of carceral space. This intervention, still underappreciated in all the ways that feminized perspectives and spaces are, makes possible in the context of this discussion a critical point of suture in articulating connections between Black feminism and critiques of settler colonialism. That is, in recognizing the Black female body, household, and family unit as sites where wars of both capitalist production and social reproduction take place, a unique window opens not only to problematize the emergence of racial capitalism but to examine where systems of racial capitalism and settler colonialism converge in both complementary and conflicting ways. Specific to thinking about contemporary mass incarceration, centering the scale of the family generates greater cognizance of the foundational and ongoing processes of settler colonialism which, distinct from the progressive tendencies of racial capitalism, maintain a distinctive place for the preservation of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family and settler enclosures. In this sense, Black feminist analyses of incarceration avail a view of the ways that prevailing logics of racialization and elimination—rested on ideologies of upholding the safety, integrity, and sanctity of the citizenry—draw from settler colonial as distinct from racial capitalist social imperatives. Black feminist approaches are thus also able to place into clearer focus the dialectical relationship between practices of captivity, whether articulated through the homestead or through the prison, and quintessential ideals of freedom in the U.S. settler state.

Black feminism and reproductions of the social

Ultimately, in providing means to understand mass incarceration as genocide, Black feminist meditations on ontology also make possible a way to live and/or imagine life beyond settler colonial dialectics of civic life and systematic killing. As most recent examples, reflections on Sylvia Wynter’s contributions to modern thought foreground the massive implications of her work to clarify that Black life need not reproduce itself at the expense or elimination of an Other. ⁹ Directly to the point, Tiffany King’s work has truly crystallized the significance of Black feminist praxis for reorienting our analytics of conquest and responses to settler colonialism, in contradistinction to prevailing tendencies that privilege settler subjectivity and land claims. ¹⁰ Such work, instantiating long-standing traditions of world-making, has shared with us means both to exist and to think within socialities that exceed the violence constraining them; moreover, as I have attempted to demonstrate here and elsewhere, this work has also helped to sustain a diversity of other worldviews threatened with elimination. Within these radical interventions, and returning to my own work in The Life of Paper, Black feminist analytics have paved ways to position and study quotidian activities not typically acknowledged as political, let alone significant. In pursuing reproductions of the social that take place through letters and under conditions of systematic dismantling, I took cues from as many domains as I could—from Anthropology’s directives to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar to Geography’s techniques to elaborate the global in the local and vice-versa. Across all fields, in the final instance, Black feminist praxis is singular in its gifts to help us appreciate the unfolding of history’s ontological struggles within the mundane, and within the profundity of our intimacies the mediation of life’s renewed Mystery.

Postscript

The above comments were originally written and presented for a roundtable session at the November 2019 annual meeting of the American Studies Association. Since then, at time of submission for publication, communities around the world are struggling to survive an extraordinary global health pandemic, bringing to immediate surface long-standing political and economic crises matched only by ensuing radical movements around the world for an end to anti-Black state violence. In the latter regards, we are witnessing in visceral ways the revolutionary impact of Black feminist praxis on the abolition of settler state practices of killing. As highlighted in my original comments, Black feminist interventions focused on relations of social reproduction raise the demands of global activism to their highest stakes. Namely, the Black queer and feminist leadership of the Movement for Black Lives, including Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrice Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, present a platform that transgresses normative demands for U.S. police reform and legal prosecution of individual police officers: instead proposing “that prisons, police and all other institutions that inflict violence on Black people must be abolished and replaced by institutions that value and affirm the flourishing of Black lives.” ¹¹ This expansive view—capable of connecting and addressing fatal inequities or apocalyptic crises across sectors such as health, militarization, climate, migration, education, and the list goes on—presents one of the clearest challenges to the devastations of racism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism today.