Abstract
The archive is a complicated place for those who do historical work on black political thought. 1 On the one hand, archival work – and historical investigation in general – can form the basis of arguments which contest oppressive orders. Historical projects can be corrective, for example, working to amend the historical record against harmful misconceptions. 2 They can be vindicatory, seeking to prove that ‘the wrongs that have been done and are ongoing must be accounted for, reckoned with, and repaired’. 3 They can be reconstructive, aiming to recover lost ways of thinking or recognise the contributions of undervalued actors. 4 They can also be contextualising, revealing new truths about historical ideas by situating them in their political context. These projects can, in other words, help form the foundation for black political thought which seeks to subvert dominant theories and histories. When Fred Moten writes ‘we have what we need’, he is in part suggesting that within blackness – and its manifested archive – lie the materials needed to elaborate the language and tools of liberation. 5 Likewise, when Audre Lorde suggests that ‘there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings’ and that we must rely on ‘old and forgotten [ideas], new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves’, she is suggesting that there is already a kind of complete black feminist archive, vibrant and filled with potential, if we can only seek it out. 6
However, the archive is also a difficult place for black political thought. Its contents – especially when investigating the history of racial violence – are horrifying, disturbing and enraging. Beyond its emotional significance, recovering histories of racial violence engenders difficult ethical questions for researchers. As Saidiya Hartman asks: ‘How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?’ 7 and ‘If it is not possible to undo the violence that inaugurates the sparse record [. . .], then to what end does one tell such stories?’8,9 In other words, we must learn to relate and examine stories of racial violence and domination without reproducing their languages, ideologies and patterns. Furthermore, we must question the impulse to re-tell these stories at all if their re-telling can neither change what happened nor end systemic patterns of violence. Hartman here urges us to consider the harms which emerge from simply unearthing history and thus shows a need to ethically tend to the black archive.
Black scholars across disciplines have tackled these questions through a range of new methodological techniques: Hartman herself employs ‘critical fabulations’, a method which blends both story and theory to think through the gaps and omissions in black history. 10 Alternately, Christina Sharpe proposes ‘wake work’. 11 For Sharpe, to be ‘in the wake’ involves consciously existing in slavery’s ‘unresolved unfolding’. 12 Here, I suggest that three recent books on international black political thought – Musab Younis’ On the Scale of the World, Deva Woodly’s Reckoning and Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa – embody a proper kind of ethical attentiveness to the black archive, showing how attentiveness to overlooked materials can yield new, radical insights into historical movements and contemporary black international thought. In particular, I suggest that each book demonstrates and calls for an ‘archival pluralism’ which can help political thought better mobilise its history. Each author engages texts, materials and thinkers not generally taken to be political theory in the strict sense, such as statements by activists and newspaper clippings. In embracing a pluralism about what counts as theoretically valuable, these authors show what the black archive can be, if we embrace what exists at its margins.
Archival Pluralism and the Politics of Disappearance
By archival pluralism, I refer to a methodological commitment to exploring new sources and, most importantly, new types of sources that creatively cohere to a field’s self-understood remit. Thus, to some extent, archival pluralism is a process of deepening the kinds of sources we take seriously qua political texts. Archival pluralism forwards inclusiveness, seeing it as having two benefits: one epistemological and one ethical. Epistemologically, being archivally pluralistic helps capture experiences which may not be represented by dominant theories or approaches. As Sara Ahmed explains, deviating from the standard archive can incur institutional penalties; using ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘unserious’ texts or artefacts as texts can mean that one’s work will be disregarded or discounted. 13 To be archivally pluralistic in this sense is to risk those penalties because a different approach reveals inadequacies in the assumptions of the instituted archive. Ethically, an inclusive archival practice also helps scholars relate to their research subjects better; it both renders the subjects more accurately to the literature and helps to capture the natural differences within communities which – when theorised attentively – can assuage tensions within transformative heterogeneous movements. 14 In this sense, archival pluralism encourages scholars to reckon with the full extent and potential of the materials one has at their disposal.
There is also, however, something deeper at stake in archival pluralism. Importantly, it is not primarily an additive project, seeking only to expand what we consider as valid. Archival pluralism wishes to use the added materials it considers to reformulate what we understand the archive as doing or being. Through both sources’ content and their form, archival pluralism prompts us to reorder what we think matters, what our political goals or orientations should be and what relationship we need to have to the sources with which we engage. It does this by deliberately bringing conflict, difference and disagreement into the foreground while stressing the importance of the archive as a whole. So, it is both a methodological commitment to the archive’s capaciousness while having a constant commitment to destabilising itself, hoping to, as Charles Mills says, ‘aggressively engage the broader debate’. 15
Archival pluralism is a remixing of the archive, using it, redeploying it, refashioning it and venerating it; it is an attempt to keep archive alive, fresh, accessible and useful. In this way, archival pluralism widens the meaning of ‘archive’ itself, expanding the term so that we see it as more than just a static history depository but also an ever-changing and plural space of creation and discovery. Perhaps then, archival pluralism is an approach to seeing the archive as a ‘living archive’; its job, as Stuart Hall says, is to ‘always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past’. 16 Hall here suggests archives are the places one goes to understand the stakes and possibilities of the current political moment. To see the black archive as living then is to see all the history of the black struggle as offering an impending liberatory critique of the present.
For example, in On the Scale of the World, Musab Younis employs archival pluralism by canonising a set of perhaps unfamiliar West African newspaper writers. By examining an ideological range of interwar West African papers within the anticolonial struggle – including papers like Negro World, Gold Coast Leader, Africa Morning Post and West Africa Pilot – Younis expands our conception of what anticolonial writers thought, desired and fought for. Looking broadly at these authors’ analyses, he suggests these writers made a ‘scalar leap’, arguing to readers that the refusal of empire required a wide, global coalition to undertake a project of global reconfiguration. 17 In other words, they argued that change required that we think on the scale of the world.
In this way, Younis shows how interwar black Atlantic anticolonial writers built a hitherto unappreciated framework which challenged the imperial force of whiteness across the globe, contesting white hegemony specifically on a planetary scale. ‘Scale’, a term scarcely used in political theory, is more popular amongst international relations scholars, gaining its familiarity from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory. It remains underutilised as a distinct form of investigation however, more often appearing as a feature of other broader analyses. ‘Scale’ is a mode of investigation that foregrounds how a phenomenon is understood through the different levels on which it is experienced and analysed. In one landmark explanation, Peter Taylor positions scale as ‘the main obstacle’ to understanding the relationship between one’s experience of domination and how it functions globally. 18 In this way, to be scalar in thought is to consider how the same phenomenon acts and occurs across nodes of analysis.
While scale is more commonly used by geographers, Younis’ deployment of scale is meaningfully political. On his account, using scale – and showing its value to interwar thinkers – has clear normative uptake for contemporary readers. On Younis’ account, critical scholarship has engaged in a ‘retreat from the global’. 19 This retreat, enacted by some Foucauldian, postcolonial, feminist and posthuman theorists, is often based on epistemological reservations about viewpoints that can perpetuate a universalist assessment of people’s lives. These theorists worry that a universal view perpetuates domination through epistemic elision; in other words, it ignores or fails to speak for marginalised people. On this view, theorists ought to turn either to the standpoint of the marginalised or to write only from a narrow position of partiality. For Younis, however, we need not imagine that thinking on a global scale is always or necessarily marginalising. Rather, he shows that thinking globally was the dominant standpoint and frame for interwar black Atlantic colonial writers; using the global scale was the only tool textured enough for these writers to combat the forces of whiteness and its empires. By scaling up their analyses, black Atlantic anticolonialists were able to forge connections that pointed to imperial contradictions and chart new demands for what a new world order should include or might be like. Global scale made their analyses multidirectional, pragmatic and expansive; by theorising in a scalar fashion, Younis suggests, black anticolonialists attempted to seize and transform the world.
Drawing on archival work, Younis shows how black interwar anticolonialists were already seeing the world through ‘scale’ before the term was coined. To validate the claim that the movement was already thinking on the global scale, he engages with informal materials which have been largely disregarded by theory. Younis takes an archive of texts normally valued only for their literary merit and re-evaluates their content, showing them to have both political and economic ambition. 20 In this way, his project not only safeguards the loss of nearly forgotten texts and histories but also fights against their depoliticisation.
Archives are made necessary in the first place by the reality of disappearance: we create archives because texts, ideas and stories naturally get lost over time. However, the natural fact of loss often masks the politics of disappearance. We must be careful not to forget this pernicious politics when it comes to anticolonial scholarship, which has had to combat institutional suppression of materials, cultural erasure and imperial purges of their own incriminating documents. Britain’s Operation Legacy, for example, was an empire-wide 20-year long programme of document destruction that included dumping scandalous documents in the sea with weighted crates, setting boxes of records on fire as well as flying documents back to London to be concealed.21, 22 Similarly, the murder of influential activists by state and state-aligned operatives means that thinkers have died before having the time and opportunity to write their reflections or relate their experiences. We are often left with only partial records, second-hand accounts and speeches. These materials tend to present a challenge to a discipline used to handling workshopped, edited and published pieces. Ultimately, working to combat these disappearances often means reading the absence as much as the presence.
However, disappearance can also be a political tactic of resistance. For protesters at risk of prosecution or organisers working against state bodies, revealing information can be dangerous and undermining. 23 Hiding and destroying evidence is in this way a tool of survival. When this is the case, the process of uncovering may reveal closely guarded political tactics against the state, leave research subjects open to investigation or prosecution, or draw focus away from the key messages actors may want to stay prominent in discussion of themselves or their project.
There are ways, however, to do grounded and informed political theorising on political struggles that navigate this difficult terrain. Deva Woodly’s Reckoning narrates the formation of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and evaluates its political theory. In doing so, she makes a broader argument about the fundamental value of social movements to democracy. While Woodly’s political project is American – both in focus and ambition – its topic’s scope is profoundly global. As she points out, M4BL protests have occurred across every habitable continent, in 60 countries, bringing millions of people to the streets. Woodly’s book makes two significant interventions in re-telling the story of M4BL. The first is to introduce radical black feminist pragmatism as a distinct and novel practice emerging from protestors. The second is to fully situate social movements as the corrective cornerstones of depoliticised democracies, a type of fifth estate of the body politic. Therein, she makes the claim that social movements are not social aberrations, but that public ‘protest creates political possibilities that did not exist before it and could not exist without it’. 24 Her book is a methodological feat, working from interviews with activists and organisers in the M4BL; it systematises a living theory, developing as the movement developed.
Woodly’s work demonstrates the potential of theory that sits in the tension between activist silence and scholarly documentation. She positions her book as ‘testimony, an act of political care rendered by way of scholarship’, a way of bridging the gap between the politics of activism and the possibilities of university-based scholarship. 25 On her view, her role is to employ activists’ understandings of black politics to ameliorate and situate the insights of the political theory canon. Woodly puts the M4BL into dialogue with canonical stalwarts, engaging Emile Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’ to describe both the group effect of early activists’ collaboration and the black joy she poses as a central element of the M4BL’s politics of care. 26 She shows how the M4BL’s ‘leaderful’ style is tied to John Dewey’s ‘social intelligence’ as a process-orientated form of pragmatic imagination. 27
As Kimberley Hutchings and Patricia Owens point out, discussions of canonisation come up against the politics of influence. 28 If one’s importance to a certain field is evaluated through the murky concept of ‘influence’, then historical thinkers and actors – particularly those impacted by both racism and sexism – can often be relegated and forgotten for the same reasons others are included. This is particularly likely to happen to movements or organisations like the M4BL, which lacks a figurehead or individual thinker to canonise. 29 It is perhaps for this reason that Woodly makes sure to emphasise that the M4BL – often ‘misperceived as merely a reaction against police brutality’ – intentionally rejects hierarchical organisational structures, deflecting a focus on the individual in favour of a democratic and expansive political project that experiments with bold types of collective decision-making. 30 The M4BL, in embodying and theorising a new radical black feminist pragmatism, thus has much to offer a political theory concerned with solidarity and building accountable networks. In order to explore this rich potential for political theorising offered by the M4BL, Woodly has had to look beyond theory’s reliance on individual thinkers; she has had to expand our understandings of what is viable material for theoretical uptake. Woodly’s living and breathing archive consists of the testimony and experiences of the usually unseen and forgotten. In doing so, her archive becomes a nexus between history-makers and freedom dreamers that speaks to formal theory from its grounded political underpinnings.
Combatting Despair and the Processes of Retrieval
Younis and Woodly both centre the role of despair in the development of the theoretical frameworks they outline. On Younis’ account, interwar West African writers dreaded a genocide of the African population. With advances in tropical medicine making prolonged European mass-settlement a genuine possibility, the ‘extirpatory nature of colonialism thus constituted an ideational foundation of West African anticolonialism’. 31 In other words, the backdrop of contemporary anticolonialists’ theoretical innovation was an existential despair. Meanwhile Woodly, following Deborah Gould, suggests that ‘a politics of despair’ grounded the emergence of the M4BL. Her project points to collective action as a type of self-belief that rises out of institutional alienation, material deprivation and the affective torment of despair. Both authors thus suggest that new political ideologies come from contexts of despair. Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa agrees, but also suggests that those interested in black politics would benefit from a closer examination of despair’s relation to black thought, lest we realise those frameworks forged from despair are in fact contaminated by it.
Okoth’s incisive intervention is a wide-ranging tour of black international thought. The primary focus of his book is to argue for a new canon of largely ignored second wave anticolonial Marxists predominantly from the Lusophone world, a group which Okoth calls ‘Red Africa’. 32 Red Africa emerges from a civil society of former Portuguese colonies, which according to Okoth, functioned upon different racialised lines (incorporating more complex pigmentocracies); Portugal’s mass emigration to the colonies changed the more common binary analysis of race that Okoth says often emanates from the ‘“malpractice” of diaspora’. 33 The result is a ‘Red Africa’, whose unusual racial politics and international focus can provide a lodestar that can guide us towards crafting ‘a communism for our times’, privileging the perspectives of those ignored by the modern academy. 34 Piecing together a range of published and unpublished writings, Okoth gathers a new canon hallmarked by its refusal to engage in the academic debates to which its thinkers are seemingly tied.
Okoth’s project is perhaps motivated by the worry that certain black political projects have retreated from the realm of politics and have ‘nothing to offer activists’. 35 Chief among his opponents is the Afropessimism of Frank B. Wilderson III. 36 However, Afropessimism is on Okoth’s view only one dead-end. The book also critically examines: reformist and institutionalised African-American Studies departments; aesthetics-monopolised black studies subfields; Senghorian – and to a lesser extent Césarian – Négritude; Fanonians disinterested in his anticolonial activism; and ‘first wave’ African socialists. For Okoth, each of these projects fail to offer us a real, grounded, normative politics. Ultimately, Okoth makes the judgement that the most valuable lessons for black political theory are the ones which work through discomfort to forego despair – and its commonly adjoined ‘romantic particularisms’ – in the name of a grounded, situated and pluralistic (revolutionary) political project.
In this sense, Okoth’s book foregrounds an optimism. Indeed, all three books agree that grounded and global political change is possible – once one challenges predominant narratives about the inescapability of hegemonic power. For each author, concrete answers to our political predicaments can be found by turning to historic black movements. In On the Scale of the World, Younis seeks to disregard the ‘[provincializing impulse of localism]’ by resorting to the rich and purposefully international archives of black Atlantic strategising. 37 Woodly wishes to fight against the notion that the M4BL’s successes were built on spontaneous and aberrant political circumstances and instead suggest that grounded and committed organising is at the centre of the M4BL’s political arrangements and evolution. Meanwhile, Okoth insists upon challenging depoliticising projects – such as, he suggests, Afropessimism – in favour of a black project which commits to a historical materialist analysis and forges global approaches to world transformation. In this sense, these three authors each follow Avery Gordon’s statement that ‘Perceiving the lost subjects of history [. . .] makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present’. 38 In other words, tied to their optimistic analysis of the political present is a desire to see the past candidly; in attending to the failures and sufferings of former black political projects and their scions, those projects’ archives suggest destabilising insights into the projects of the present.
The Lessons of Archival Pluralism
How, then, should we think about approaching the black archive, knowing that its contents speak through violence, despair and loss? Moreover, to return to Hartman’s worry, how can we then recite that violent history without replicating its oppressive grammars, given those histories often become the lens through which we articulate new political projects? These three books provide potential ethical paths towards the archive. Firstly, they seek to balance loss with life; they reckon with despair while foregrounding a normative politics. As Juliet Hooker has argued, black loss is frequently mobilised by well-meaning activists at the expense of black mourners. In these activists’ mediation between political despair and hope, they ‘too often romanticize calls to sacrifice for [white] democracy’. 39 Hooker suggests that this call consists in a ‘parasitic world building’, and, instead, one should opt for a politics of refusal. 40 By refusing an archive of pain, one can open up new visions centred on life and contestation. If we take up this view, we might think that part of ethical archival work might involve refusing to relate some stories, realising that some histories and arguments should not be instrumentalised or awoken. For Hooker, we must instead ‘sit with loss’ rather than wield it in a parasitic politics. On her view, ‘sitting with loss’ is a necessary part of any expansive and powerful political project for change in the wake of despair. Each of these three books exemplify how one might sit with loss and despair but also turn to a normative politics grounded in the facts of black life. Younis’ project, for example, takes thinkers currently disregarded – who already exist in the anticolonial movement that is usually understood by its supposed failure – and demonstrates the methodological triumph they represent for transformative politics. Woodly suggests that despair is the reality when citizens fail to see themselves as authors in collective political struggles. Social movements then are both the antidote to and the dismantling of the parasitic world-building Hooker describes; the hopeful and pragmatic politics Woodly suggests is a different category of politics to the white democracy reliant on black grief and, in choosing it, one opens up new avenues of political understandings. Okoth points to black politics’ regression to despair when detached from a grounded and international politics that keeps the black political project productively radical and committed to preserving and appreciating its own archive’s depth and differences.
Secondly, these books suggest that the black archive exists as a space of dialogue between present necessity and historical ambition. Hooker argues that one problem plaguing black politics is the way ‘racism has narrowed the political imaginations of both Black and white citizens’. 41 In other words, one of racism’s ideological functions is to foreclose radical visions. Archival projects can work to repair this imaginative damage, broadening the battleground through which one can articulate dissent. In this sense, we can use the archive to articulate different positions which challenge the current order while ‘unsettling the very ground on which [that] theorizing takes place’. 42 Powerful archival pluralism relies on using forgotten materials to demonstrate how narrow we have allowed politics to become. The corollary of this is also significant: projects inspired by rich archives open new domains of contestation that demonstrate the potential for politics. Here lies a project like Woodly’s, which uses the black political project to make fundamental claims about the functioning of American democracy.
Thirdly, each book demonstrates a meta-critical commitment to valuing the capaciousness of the black political tradition. Black activists, scholars and thinkers have always contested the given racial orders of their time. As black ideologies cataloguer Michael Dawson has said, central to all ‘black visions is a sense of pragmatic optimism combined with a stead-fast determination to gain black justice’. 43 In this way, archival pluralism involves recognising the myriad ways that blackness can be articulated in grounded, practical and timely struggles against a shifting order of oppressive power. Elaborating on historical black lives and their many interpretations promises a series of insights that can always prompt more complex figurations of what justice might look like. Okoth’s book, for example, represents a type of agonism that comes from archivally plural inquiry. In tracking points of agreement and contestation, Okoth attempts to recast the character of the black political project by changing the resting position of his archive; his work is unsettling in that it puts into conflict those often aligned and prompts a frank reappraisal of the political present.
Lorde’s claim that ideas can no longer be created but only re-seen, re-displayed and revived captures the archive’s polyphony. For Lorde, the archive relies on a collaborative attempt to transform its own meanings and content and, in doing so, show the full extent of what it can be. To meet the archive’s potential, one may have to return its forgotten and unheeded materials, like Younis and Okoth do. Some archival formulations, however, need to be created – painstakingly so – by forging relationships of accountability to capture a present-in-the-making. In building a theory based on an ever-evolving, radical collective, Woodly builds such an archive. By pushing at the boundaries of what we consider theoretically viable and valuable, looking to the archive’s margins for insights into the complex histories and potential futures of black politics, each of these three scholars have demonstrated the power of an archival pluralism for international black political thought.
