This article contests the criticisms of Black Marxism, asa basically masculinist text, that have circulated mainly in oral form. Based in part on an interview with Robinson, the article explores the concept of a closed, top-down narrative, which permits no further engagement or activity on the part of the reader, and an open-ended text, based on a methodology such as Robinson’s, which can act as a point of departure for other activist scholars. The article develops the notion of resistance itself as gendered, which is particularly evident in Robinson’s later work, and argues that the simplistic inclusion of women does not, of itself, render a text feminist.
republished by the University of Northern Carolina Press (2000), with a foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.
2.
World Health Report 2003 ( World Health Organization , January 2004).
3.
The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003 ( United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization , December 2003).
4.
UNICEF, UNDP (2001).
5.
Also see Gregory Meyerson , ‘Rethinking Black Marxism: reflections on Cedric Robinson and others’ , Cultural Logic (Vol. 3, no. 2, spring 2000).
6.
Joshua Foa Dienstag , Dancing in Chains: narrative and memory in political theory ( Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press , 1997).
7.
Ibid., p. 3.
8.
Robinson credits Blackfilm historian Thomas Cripps with the phrase ‘usable past’. Author interview, ‘A conversation with Cedric J. Robinson’ ( Goleta, CA , 31 December 2003).
9.
Kelley, ‘Foreword’, op. cit., p. xvii.
10.
Ibid., p. xii.
11.
Author interview, op. cit.
12.
Gordon, ‘Preface’, op. cit., p. xi.
13.
Here I agree with the observation that both Kelley, op. cit., and Meyerson, op. cit., made about this work being largely, and unfortunately, understudied. In addition to the handful of reviews noted in Kelley’s preface, Meyerson’s ‘Rethinking Black Marxism’, op. cit., however critical, is by far the most lengthy engagement (in print) with Robinson’s commanding work.
14.
Cedric J. Robinson , Black Movements in America ( New York, Routledge , 1997).
15.
Robinson, Black Marxism (2000), op. cit., p. xxiii.
16.
Ibid., p. xxxii.
17.
Conversations with Avery F. Gordon (July 2000).
18.
Robinson, Black Marxism (1983), op. cit., p. 452; my emphasis.
19.
Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, op. cit., p. 157.
20.
Dienstag, op. cit., p. 19.
21.
Ibid., pp. 19-20.
22.
Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, op. cit., p. 138.
23.
Author interview, op. cit.
24.
Marjorie DeVault , ‘Talking back to sociology: distinctive contributions of feminist methodology’ , Annual Review of Sociology (Vol. 22, 1996), pp. 29-50 .
25.
Ibid., p. 32.
26.
Ibid., p. 30.
27.
Robinson, Black Marxism (1983), op. cit., p. 215; my emphasis.
28.
Chela Sandoval , Methodology of the Oppressed ( Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press , 2000).
29.
Author interview, op. cit.
30.
Robinson, Black Marxism (2000), op. cit., pp. xxx-xxxi.
31.
Ibid., p. xv.
32.
According to Robinson, the first forms of struggle were rejection of slavery and revulsion at racism, and disengagement took on ‘the ideological currency’ of Black radicals (Black Marxism, 1983, op. cit., pp. 443-5). He writes, ‘[t]o reconstitute the community, Black radicals took to the bush, to the mountains, to the interior’ (ibid., p. 444).
33.
To be sure, having women at the centre of a narrative has never been a litmus test for what constitutes a feminist agenda. One needs only to mention the industry of male-fantasised literature or television to disprove the notion that ‘bringing women in’ is a simple solution to negate masculinist perspectives. Lifetime Television, an entire cable channel ‘devoted to women’, or Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew are good and obvious examples of this dubious and uncomplicated view.
34.
Author interview, op. cit.
35.
Ibid.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, op. cit., pp. 50-1.
40.
Robinson, Black Movements in America, op. cit., pp. 99-100.
41.
Author interview, op. cit.
42.
Etel Adnan , Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) ( Sausalito, The Post-Apollo Press , 1993), p. 56.
43.
Hazel Carby , ‘On the threshold of woman’s era: lynching, empire, and sexuality in Black feminist theory’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.) ‘Race’, Writing and Difference ( Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press , 1986), p. 302.
44.
Audre Lorde , Sister Outsider: essays and speeches ( Freedom, CA, Crossing Press , 1984), pp. 110-113.
45.
Sandoval, op. cit., p. 58; my emphasis.
46.
What Donna Harraway calls ‘a politics of articulation’. See ibid., pp. 41-66.
47.
Ibid., p. 177.
48.
Carby, op. cit., pp. 301-16.
49.
Author interview, op. cit.
50.
Robert Knight , ‘Arthur “Afroborinqueno” Schomburg’ , Civil Rights Journal ( US Commission on Civil Rights , 1995).
51.
Ibid.
52.
Arjun Appadurai , Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Public Worlds, Vol. 1) ( Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press , 1996).
