Blackness and Primitiveness
This week’s dispatch connects my writings on “Countering Power” to my writings on “Overturning Humanism” by remarking upon the beauty of the black radical tradition.
Many thanks to Joe Razza at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown DC for inspiring this dispatch through conversation and through introducing me to the work of R.A. Judy.
Powers form themselves by making clear and unambiguous distinctions — (i) a ruling power forms itself by making clear and unambiguous distinctions between one group and another, (ii) a disciplinary power forms itself by making clear and unambiguous distinctions between the stereotypical members of a given group and the atypical members, (iii) a normalizing power forms itself by making clear and unambiguous distinctions between those members of a given group that fit the normal distribution and those that are outliers, and (iv) an optimizing power forms itself by making clear and unambiguous distinctions between those members of a given group that are the subjects of varying interventions and those that are control subjects.
Counterpowers, by contrast, form themselves by undermining the making of clear and unambiguous distinctions. To riff off the title of a book by Fred Moten on the black radical tradition — whereas powers aim to enlighten and discriminate, counterpowers aim to black and blur.
In his writings on the black radical tradition, Moten stresses, again and again, that the black radical tradition is not the tradition of a crisply defined set of peoples that can be said to fall under the designation “Black”. Rather, the black radical tradition is the tradition of a blur of peoples, a fuzzy and indeterminate set, perpetually engaged in the process of troubling the designation “Black” that has been imposed upon them and staying with the trouble. This is to say, in other words, that the black radical tradition is a counter-cultural tradition: it is a tradition dedicated to countering the imposing power formations of dominant cultures.
The black radical tradition was formed in response to Western capitalist modernity’s imposition of the designation “Negro” and, concomitantly, the designation “Black” on the descendants of dark-skinned peoples form Sub-Saharan Africa.
As R.A. Judy writes in the book Sentient Flesh, the imposed designation “Black/Negro” has had two distinct senses. On the one hand, the imposed designation has a political economic sense: “the word Negro, along with all its cognates, entails an anthropological categorization, whereby those so designated belong to a physically distinct type of not fully human hominid, which is what makes them legitimately available as prospective commodity assets.” On the other hand, the imposed designation carries an ethnographic sense, “the term [Negro] connotes not only the slave formed in capitalism but also the populations of people who may be enslaved, and who remain Negro after slavery’s abolition.” Considering these two distinct senses of the term “Negro” together, Judy observes, “While it is indeed the case that in every instance of its expression, Negro connotes the formations of political economy in the Atlantic World in modernity, it also has historical usage as an ethnographic designation for a specific population of people, ‘the Negro.’ [...] Yet even though that ethnographic sense of Negro contradicts the commercial Negro by recognizing the full humanity of the designated population, it is still within the ambit of the same anthropological categorization.”
In sum, only those dark-complexioned Sub-Saharan African peoples who have been made into slaves are Black/Negro in the political economic sense, yes, but all those who are susceptible to becoming Black/Negro in the political economic sense are considered Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense. The political economic sense of the designation Black/Negro is thus the definitive sense: the ethnographic Black/Negro being nothing other than the person susceptible to becoming Black/Negro in the political economic sense. Using myself as an example here, being a child of dark complexioned persons from Sub-Saharan Africa, I am Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense, which is to say, in other words, that I am a person susceptible to receiving the political economic designation Black/Negro under the power formation of racialized slavery. That the power formation of racialized slavery is no longer operative today does not put an end to my being Black/Negro in the ethnographic sense: I continue to be ethnographically Black/Negro because the power formation of racialized slavery did effectively operate for a period time and the remnants of its effective operation have been maintained and repurposed by the power formations that have succeeded it.
My parents migrated from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and then to America during the postcolonial period. As a result of this, my being designated Black/Negro has not rendered all my ethnographic designations prior to that of Black/Negro illegible for me. This is, of course, because colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa made use of such prior ethnographic designations to administer and supervise its subjects. Racialized slavery in the Americas, by contrast, endeavored to obliterate all ethnographic designations prior to the designation Black/Negro. The peoples who were forced to cross the Atlantic and made into slaves in the Americas were the victims of ethnocide: they were forced to put any and all designations prior to that of Black/Negro under such intense erasure that all prior designations became illegible for them and for their descendants. The fact that designations prior to that of Black/Negro have been subjected to erasure remains partially discernible, yes, but these prior designations themselves, though partially discernible, have been rendered more or less indecipherable. The prior ethnicities of the Black/Negro slave have been worn down by racialized slavery to such an extreme degree that, although the slave and their descendants know that they have prior ethnicities, the slave and their descendants cannot know with any certainty what these prior ethnicities are. The prior ethnicities of the Black/Negro slave are like worn silver coins known to have been struck as currency of a certain provenance and value but that have been worn down to such a degree that it cannot be known for certain what provenance and value they were struck with.
The beauty of the black radical tradition is to be found in the manner in which it has embraced peoples without any certain knowledge of their prior ethnicities. In affirming blackness, the black radical tradition neither affirms the ethnicity that racialized slavery imposed upon the Black/Negro nor does it affirm a newly self-constructed ethnicity for those who have become Black/Negro. To the contrary, the black radical tradition affirms blackness as the act of living with uncertainty about one’s prior ethnicity. The black radical tradition may be contrasted with the many black reactionary traditions that have sought to make the Black/Negro into a defining ethnic identity, thereby conceding victory to the racist powers that first endeavored to eradicate prior ethnic identities in order to create the Black/Negro as a defining ethnic identity. By contrast, the black radical tradition troubles all black reactionary traditions by affirming blackness as the act of living with uncertainty regarding one’s prior ethnicity while also affirming the discernible remnants of prior ethnicities in spite of their erasure.
In line with and in furtherance of the black radical tradition’s affirmation of blackness, I have been endeavoring to affirm “primitiveness” not as a definite anthropological rubric but, instead, as the act of living with uncertainty regarding anthropological rubrics. To give you a sense of what this endeavor entails, allow me to quote another passage from R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh on the different senses of the term “primitive”.
[I]interpolation into capitalism’s terms of order [...] results in the dissolution of long-enduring formations of human community, engendering cosmic disorder by throwing disparate cosmogonies together under the anthropological rubric primitive. This term has a rather broad connotation, comprehending both an original inhabitant, an aboriginal, and a person belonging to a preliterate nonindustrial society, but also ancestral early man, or anything else that is archaic. It has been inclusively applied to a wide array of types of natives—also a conceptual category—engendered along the way in capitalism’s global expansion and colonial rule. Not all colonial natives are designated primitive, however; there are those who belong to age-old civilizations, the effects of which, according to the narrative of translatio, transferred westward to feed the foundations of capitalism—outstanding examples of which are China, India, and most of the Muslim world. The distinction of having been civilizationally long-in-the-tooth does not mitigate the disordering effects of capitalist expansion, however. On the contrary, being construed as archaic civilizational formations surpassed by Western capitalist modernity is another sense of primitive and tends to exacerbate the disordering effects with an aura of civilizational degradation and loss of authenticity. Terminologically, primitive and Negro share the same semantic space to the point of synonymy. Those populations designated Negro, however, are seemingly always primitive, this attributed state playing a role, almost as a neo-Aristotelian afterthought, in legitimating their designation: the absurdly Hegelian argument that the primitive, enslaved and made Negro, enters into civilization and thus benefits from the transformation.
Just as all peoples that were susceptible to racialized slavery were thrown under the ethnographic designation Black/Negro, we find that all peoples who were susceptible to colonization by Western capitalist powers were thrown under the anthropological rubric primitive. What’s more, just as all those who endured racialized slavery were forced to put all prior ethnicities under erasure in being designated Black/Negro, we find that all those who endured colonization were forced to put all prior anthropological rubrics under erasure in being designated primitive.
Not all of those who have been designated primitive have been designated Black/Negro, but all who have been designated Black/Negro have also been designated primitive. This means that all peoples who have been designated Black/Negro have had prior anthropologies put under erasure alongside prior ethnicities. It follows from this that the black radical tradition has always also been a radical primitivist tradition insofar as it has affirmed the act of living with uncertainty regarding anthropological rubrics alongside the act of living with uncertainty regarding ethnic identities. What’s more, it is as a radical primitivist tradition that the black radical tradition has concurred with and made common cause with the many radical anti-colonial traditions.
