Writing in solidarity: the new generation

Abstract

How can we build a new generation of radical scholars to survive the new world order? How, practically, can such scholars participate in, sustain and recreate the Black radical tradition for the future? The November 2004 Symposium on Cedric Robinson’s Radical Thought was one such initiative, which, both in its intent and its format, subverted the standard mode of the academic conference. Drawing on her experience as one of its organisers, the author reflects more deeply on the nature of academic life and its tendency to isolationism, the specific challenges it poses to radical women academics of colour and the need to develop ongoing, collaborative writing and scholarship.

Keywords

academia Black Marxism Black radical tradition Cedric Robinson women of colour

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References

Cedric J. Robinson , Black Marxism ( Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press , 2000), pp. 268-269.

Ibid., p. 257.

Ibid., p. 260.

Ibid., p. 265.

Ibid.

I am not privileging writing over speech. Writing for me is simply another type of speech, just as ‘reading’ involves many levels of engaging with printed texts. But when writing comes from people who reject slavery, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia, liberalism, tokenism, hat-holding; who reject procedural but not economic democracy, civic education but not freedom schools; when it shows up the lie that health care is not a right; when it exposes a lot of other mystifying hokum all of a sudden, then it must not be written any more, must not be read in the printed text any more. And once such ideas go out of print, even when they have infiltrated cultural discourse so profoundly that they change law, the texts that inaugurated those social changes can never be taught or read again or investigated again so that the mistakes they made can be seen in their originary premises.

Zora Neale Hurston talks about anthropology being the looking glass through which she came to understand the world she inhabited. Robert Park also shares this moment of self-reflexivity.

Robert Boice , Professors as Writers: self-help guide to productive writing ( Stillwater, OK, New Forms Press , 1990), pp. 100-102.