Abstract
This article engages the work of Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter—particularly her 1994 article, “No Humans Involved.” We examine the unprecedented post-2020 climate of invitation and recognition of Black scholars, Black research, “Black excellence,” and Black Studies in the Canadian academy and inquire into its implications for research methodologies. We identify the current Canadian academic climate, like those that Wynter examines in her work, as emerging in the aftermath of Black death, anti-Black terror, and race rebellion. We argue that despite the ostensible epiphanies that this moment might be taken to represent, the anti-Black ordering of bodies and knowledge that Wynter outlines might well persist in the Canadian academy embedded in methodologies that produce Black people as non-human. We take seriously the possibility that the new discourses of recognition, invitation, excellence, and incorporation might be the new strategies by which BlackLife is cast beyond the realm of the Human in Canadian universities. As Wynter proffered for Black Studies, we argue that Black research cannot leave the university or its methods intact as it enters the university. We reflect on ways forward for Black researchers that insist on Black humanity in a university context that routinely denies it.
Part 1: Contexts and Framing
Introduction
Black radical knowledge everywhere is under attack in familiar, if reconfigured, ways in the contemporary moment. Some of the most obvious manifestations are taking place in the United States, with the banning from classrooms across that nation of critical bodies of knowledge. These banned bodies of knowledge include such areas as Critical Race Theory and histories that contest celebratory national mythologies. Many Canadian researchers readily join in the condemnation of these developments in the United States while overlooking similar developments taking place locally. These include the province of Quebec’s Islamophobic Bill 21 (National Assembly of Quebec, 2019) against which several educators and researchers have refrained from speaking out (Howard, 2022) and the strong objection from francophone professors in Quebec and Ontario to Black students’ bids to challenge the indiscriminate use of the “n-word” in university classrooms. This suppression of critical bodies of knowledge can also be read into the rise of book bans taking place across Canada. According to recent reports by Canadian librarians, the bulk of books being put forward for banning deal primarily with topics of sexuality, 2SLGBTQ + themes, or gender diversity. Yet, other texts that deal with reframing the mythology of the benevolent Canadian nation-state to address its structural anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism are also among those on the proverbial banning block (see, e.g., Beaudry, 2023; Wong, 2024).
As these correlated examples demonstrate there is a related, if seemingly contradictory, reality that currently frames the Canadian academic context from which we write. The globally viewed lynching of George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis in May 2020 and the ensuing racial rebellions taking place during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Canadian universities naming and condemning anti-Black racism. In many cases, universities followed up these statements with policy decisions to address anti-Black racism on their campuses—which played out as initiatives to, variously, hire more Black faculty and staff, set up Black Studies units, and invest in research by, for, and about Black people/communities (McGill Office of the Provost and Vice-Principal (Academic), 2020; Office of the Dean of Education- University of Alberta, 2021; Office of the Vice-President: Equity & Community Inclusion--Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), 2020). We know that these measures were enjoined by Black communities at these universities and would not have happened without their efforts over decades prior as well as in 2020. Nevertheless, this naming of antiblackness—to say nothing of commitments to address it—was sudden and unprecedented since, with few exceptions on the Canadian academic landscape, BlackLife 1 had previously simply not been reckoned at an institutional level in any meaningful way (see Walcott, 2014a). Therefore, we recognize this moment in which Black Studies, Black academics, and research by and about Black people are recognized in the research enterprise to be a point of inflection in the Canadian academy.
Of course, Black Studies, Black academics, and research by and about Black people have long histories in Canadian universities, and so are not a new phenomenon, though they have hitherto existed fugitively within it. Nevertheless, now, post-2020, BlackLife is suddenly recognized, invited, and given access with unprecedented vigor—sometimes with accompanying resources and funding. Yet, recognition and invitation always already invoke questions of power, belonging, knowledge, and knowledge production. We must ask, “who is positioned as inside and therefore as having power to recognize, and who is positioned only to be invited because always already recognized as outsider?” Sara Ahmed reminds us that “[s]trangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognised as not belonging, as being out of place” (Ahmed, 2000, chapter 1). We cannot but notice the resonance between the current situation in the Canadian academy and the academic contexts that Sylvia Wynter writes about in her work, and particularly that in which her No Humans Involved (N.H.I) article was published (Wynter, 1994a; 1994b, 2006). While Black people have long agitated through social movements at Canadian universities, the recognition of Black scholars, Black research, and something that might be called Black Studies that we are now witnessing across the Canadian postsecondary landscape emerges only in the aftermath of Black death, anti-Black terror, and racial rebellion, much as it did in the United States after Martin Luther King’s assassination during what became known as the Civil Rights Era. Therefore, this new constellation of factors in Canadian academia makes it an apt moment to re-read and re-engage the work of Caribbean theorist, playwright, artist, and scholar Sylvia Wynter, whose work cites Black exclusion as a premise for knowledge production and urges us to rupture anti-Black genres of the Human. We, like Wynter, write attempting to make sense of the ways in which the academy consumes Black catastrophe and what the consequences might be for Black communities. We wonder, too, about the implications for us as Black researchers in the academy, who are now being tasked with creating Black knowledge by, in some ways by extension, corralling Black communities. Wynter’s writing—No Humans Involved (Wynter, 1994a) and beyond—would implore we read the extant moment of recognition in the Canadian academy for possibility, but also with due diligence and criticality.
While the situation we describe above has repercussions at many levels, we seek to explore the implications for research methodologies at this juncture. Within the longstanding terms of academic research, Black people have existed for experimentation and consumption to produce the discourses of deviance upon which our ejection from the community of Humans is based. As Walcott (2020) writes, “black people remain data, an impersonal entity in the university at one level and a problem at another level when actual black people show up in the university community” (pg. 486). Historically, the research done about, or done to, Black people, including in Canada, certainly shows Walcott’s claim to be true. Highly criticized studies (such as the 1965 Moynihan Report in the United States, Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve, and J. Philippe Rushton’s work in Canada) demonstrate this, but also less roundly contested research that—explicitly or implicitly—bandies about pathologizing tropes like “Black crime,” “Black deviance,” and “Black failure.” With reference to the discipline of sociology, Walcott writes: The antiblack nature of the discipline of sociology and its ongoing pathologization of black people means that it cannot actually account for them within its realm and must seek to position them as external figures of research, data, and objectification as opposed to members of a community the sociologist might also belong to (Walcott, 2020, p. 485).
It is precisely this positioning of Black people as out-of-place—as not ever belonging (Walcott, 2020, p. 485)—that is the normative condition in these institutions. Within the extant definitions of the human and of the academy, neither the university nor other societal institutions have had much interest in the humanity of Black researchers, Black students, or Black communities. Walcott’s writing here points to the dynamic that we—as Black researchers—must be especially wary and critical of the fact that as we are being tasked with bringing in Black communities under the guise of research in the wake of Black catastrophe, we must at the very least ask: what are we to do with these seemingly new invitations amidst the knowledge of Black people as always and already out-of-place-not ever belonging in the university? What Walcott asserts regarding sociology, Wynter (1994a), as we shall see, asserts is the case for all disciplines and the entire academic industrial complex, and we now apply specifically to the Canadian university—including in the current moment that would appear to extend an invitation to BlackLife. What are Black communities and Black researchers to do with the swiftness of our apparent transition from discarded people—what Wynter termed dysselected others—to invited subjects and collaborators in research? In what ways might these Canadian university announcements be evidence of epiphany, or openings for the same? Or in what ways might they be non-events—non-performative discursive shifts that simply reconfigure the terms of slavery’s afterlife (Ahmed, 2012; Hartman, 1997, p. 116, 2007, p. 6).
In what follows, we argue that the extant ordering of bodies and knowledge that Wynter outlines might easily persist in the Canadian academy post-2020—stubbornly embedded in the methodologies that produce us as non-human, though now in the guise of recognition, invitation, and incorporation—even if still alongside strategies of exclusion and erasure. Indeed, we take seriously the possibility that discourses of recognition, invitation, and incorporation might well be the new strategies by which BlackLife is cast beyond the realm of the Human in Canadian universities.
We reflect on our collective experience, advancing that there is much about the normative processes used to codify and certify university research by and about Black people that remains anti-Black and against Black communities. We feel that if Black researchers uncritically take up the new post-2020 invitation of BlackLife into the university, particularly as it now takes shape with respect to our research, then we risk becoming party to the university’s business-as-usual antiblackness that has produced Black people and communities as problems to be solved (Walcott, 2020, p. 486). As we consider this moment, with dreams of Black liberation in mind, we recall that Wynter (1984b, p. 68) insisted that if Black Studies has any task as it enters the university, it is to rewrite knowledge. We consider how we might aspire toward this in the post-2020 moment in the Canadian university.
Culling from Wynter’s N.H.I: A Review
Sylvia Wynter’s (1994a) No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues is, as its title suggests, a published appeal to fellow academics from Wynter who, at the time, was chairperson of African and Afro-American Studies and professor of Spanish at Stanford University. Written in the aftermath of the Rodney King police brutality case and subsequent trial, the letter was inspired by the revelation that the Los Angeles police services and judicial system used the acronym, N.H.I., to refer to crimes committed against certain categories of people—notably including, though not limited to, unemployed Black young men who do not own property. This designation, meaning “No Humans Involved,” apparently served to dismiss such crimes as undeserving of follow-up because of the sub-personhood of the victims and to divert the judicial system’s attention to ostensibly more worthwhile endeavors.
For Wynter, this case was yet another paradigmatic example of the autopoietic fabrication, through modalities of race, gender, and class, of the category of Man/Human—an imaginary that she had long contested through her work (e.g., Wynter, 1979; 1984a; 1984b, 1991, 1992) and would continue to address throughout her scholarly career (e.g., Wynter, 1995a; 1995b, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2006). Wynter’s objective was to alert academics to their/our collective complicity in crafting and perpetuating this exclusive category through our scholarship (Wynter, 1994a, p. 44). Wynter indicates that it is largely those who have graduated from universities who, through logics that they learn there, are responsible for the policy decisions that produce some people as N.H.I (Wynter, 1994a, p. 59).
In Wynter’s inimitable style, No Humans Involved is a detailed and sweeping treatise. There are, however, a few key insights from this article that we wish to highlight to frame our intervention. First, Wynter asserts that academics are implicated in producing the epistemes—what she refers to as “inner eyes,” referencing Ralph Ellison—that mediate perception and make BlackLife illegible as Human (Wynter, 1994a, p. 44). Drawing on Asmarom Legesse, Wynter argues that: all mainstream scholars necessarily function as the grammarians of our order; that is, as “men and women” who are well-versed in the “techniques of ordering a select body of facts within a framework that is completely consistent with the system of values, the weltanschauung and, above all, the cognitive model” of the society to which they belong. … It is only by the “trained skills” which we bring to the ordering of such facts, that intellectuals as a category, are able to ensure the existence of each order's conceptual framework, which we rework and elaborate in order to provide the “inner eyes” by whose mode of subjective understanding, each order's subjects regulate their behaviours … (Wynter, 1994a, p. 55, emphasis original).
Wynter explains that these epistemes structure the parameters of racially defined fictive kinship—that is, what she, citing Helen Fein, identifies as “the sanctified universe of obligation—that community of Humans with reciprocal obligations to protect [and care for] each other” (Wynter, 1994a, pp. 44–45).
In our effort to understand the (re)production of “inner eyes” in the post-2020 Canadian academic complex, we focus attention beyond the obvious site of the university classroom and onto the knowledge-producing endeavor of research, and more specifically, the methodologies that undergird such endeavors. For us, method/ology does not begin with ethical approval processes, never mind with attempts to gather and analyze data. Rather, we suggest that method/ology must include all the ways in which Black researchers in Canada, historically and since the ostensible awareness of BlackLife in 2020, have had to, and will now have to, justify the import and relevance of our work to gain the support of departments, colleagues, reviewers, and funders to conduct it. Moreover, methodology—from the framing of research projects (to whom and for whom?), project approval (read: access to Black people and Black communities, and gatekeeping Black knowledge), to fieldwork (“going native,” as anthropologists would say), and finally writing up the research (within current order-making classificatory systems)—is circumscribed by the existing structures of the university, which contrast sharply with a politics that recognizes Black humanity. We argue that Canadian academics in 2020, as the “grammarians of our current order(s)” of the Human, remain (potentially) complicit in the cultivation of the logics that cast Black people beyond the universe of moral obligation. Further, social science methodologies often create the knowledge that produces BlackLife as Western Humanity’s problem, but never as human, as Du Bois so poignantly captures in his provocation, “How does it feel to be a problem?” (DuBois, 1994, p. 1).
Second, we take up Wynter’s argument about the malleability of the boundaries around the N.H.I category (blackness). In so doing, we consider the broader Black Studies understanding of blackness not primarily as an essential ethnic (or even primarily socially constructed) racial category that adheres exclusively and immutably to the Black body. Rather, we understand blackness as a technology of dehumanization that has been perfected on, and indefatigably targets, BlackLife, yet repeatedly draws and re-draws the boundaries of its exclusions (Walcott, 2014b; Weheliye, 2014).
Wynter explains that the differential between categories of Human and disposable has been: “replicated, and transracially so, between, on the one hand, the classes (upper middle, middle, lower middle and working, whether capital owners or jobholders), who are therefore classified within the ‘universe of obligation’ … and on the other hand, the category of the non-owning jobless young of the inner cities; primarily Black with Latino, and increasingly also, White, assimilated to its underclass category” (Wynter, 1994a, p. 45, emphasis original).
Wynter thus articulates the ways in which the social category of those considered Black is, itself, cross-sected by the logics of N.H.I. (Wynter, 1994a, p. 46). This insight draws our attention to the ways in which nationalism, racial capitalism, 2 and, of course, the overarching fiction of Western Man/Human might conditionally seduce Black people into their projects, while incorporation remains an ontological impossibility. In the context of research methodologies, then, we attend to the ways in which blackness as N.H.I is re-crafted through the ways in which Black researchers are now newly being taken up in the Canadian academy and the precarity of such a category in the first instance. We meditate upon the ways in which inviting Black researchers not only fails to guarantee an end to Black disposability but in fact is also mobilized by the university as a means through which to re/produce this disposability.
Such an insight also reminds us that the impossibility of incorporating BlackLife into extant institutions is the opening through which Black life explodes existing conceptions of humanity and promises to create ways of being together that are liberatory. We hope this article will contribute toward rehearsing a politics of methodology for Black intellectuals/researchers, grounded in Wynter’s claim that we occupy the positions of liminality from which we might escape the confines of extant orders of the Human. We see this liminality as grounded in a conviction of Black humanity and a moral imperative against Black suffering that is embodied, but not guaranteed by the body. Our objective is research methodologies that might secure Black people and our communities within a more broadly defined universe of moral obligation.
Part 2: Meditations on Our Experience
In this section, we reflect on experiences that the authors have had engaging with university processes while attempting to conduct research with and alongside Black communities. We bear in mind the broad definition of methodology that we outline above.
Our research has involved conducting empirical research with Black communities, and in schools, largely working in the liminality of the hyphen in community–university relationships. In many ways, our work is to make sense of the myriad ways Black people make life in the pervasive climate of Black liminality. In conducting this work, we repeatedly encounter the consequences of an ongoing history of problematic and predatory research relationships between universities and Black people. Among these are the schedules on which this work is to be produced, the discourses within which our work is understood (e.g., ostensibly to prove “Black excellence”), and the ways Black researchers are enticed to become a part of the university’s dehumanizing machinery.
Of Timelines and Such
Here, we take issue with university timelines for research, arguing that they are largely incompatible with what it means to work with Black communities living within the N.H.I climate of antiblackness.
Building Relationships as Humanizing and Ethical Practice
Research with Black communities relies on the relations of trust and reciprocity that (often Black) researchers must take the time to build with Black communities and that we should bring with us as we enter university and research institutions (see, e.g., Batlle & Carr, 2021; Mason, 2021). An integral, if not primary, component of Black research and Black knowledge production when led by Black researchers is the reality that the researchers’ membership in and alongside Black communities are central—particularly when that research is being conducted in/through the university. The substantive participation and engagement of Black communities is a requirement if any ethical research endeavor with those communities is to proceed in a manner that is not exploitative. All research requires a level of trust, but given normalized oppressive and institutional relations, any research done through institutions with marginalized communities requires substantively more trust among participants and with researchers, and a decidedly different politics of method (see, e.g., Batlle & Carr, 2021; Ince, 2023; Miles, 2025). Such is the case with Black communities and the Black researchers tasked with shepherding/spearheading knowledge generation activities. As we repeatedly ask in this article, what are the ethical demands placed upon Black researchers as universities in this moment position us to bring Black communities into the university in more substantive fashion and ultimately to act as a mediator between Black communities and the institution?
One such point of high stress emerges from the competing understandings of time and expedience held by Black communities, researchers, and the university. University research timelines such as for research ethical approval processes, funding deadlines, and tenure timelines arrive in a hurried, never ending, and demanding fashion. Yet given the fraught, ongoing histories of the relationships between university research endeavors and Black people, trust is a necessary healing balm, and time the only hand that can apply it if we are to accept as non-negotiable the humanity of Black communities in our research. Therefore, the hurriedness of university timelines and the constant demand to explain our research and our community-based methodologies that will always necessarily take more time than university timelines generally allow are all, as Toni Morrison put it in an address at Portland University on May 30, 1975, part of “the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being” (Morrison, 1975, p. 7). The university and its timelines are diametrically opposed to the humanizing relationship-building that is required when doing good work with good people, to again reference Morrison (as quoted in Harris, 2008, p. 9). These hectic research processes belie—or, in fact, contradict—the kind of communal, co-constitutive, capacity-building processes that are required for the generation of community-based, liberatory knowledge. Building on Morrison, we should just get on with it, in spite and perhaps despite the institution, because if we spend our time on the distraction of racism, the constant need to justify and explain our work, our communities, and our timelines, we will never get anything done. Despite the openings provided via the post-2020 invitation, the institution has an endless capacity to require of us explanations and justifications anew, and with the reservoir of distraction that racism endlessly provides “there will always be one more thing” (Morrison, 1975, p. 7).
An Example: Black Organizations and Their Anti-N.H.I Priorities
Here, we consider how the normative expectations of the university and funders regarding timelines for research might be imbricated with casting Black people beyond the realms of the Human. We consider how these timing expectations for data collection are positioned in opposition to the anti-N.H.I missions of Black community organizations who provide the care for Black people that the Canadian state fails to prioritize.
In a recent research project, scheduling interviews with the Black community organizations at the center of our research was challenging. In some instances, just setting up an interview was difficult, and once it had been scheduled, prospective participants would often postpone at the last minute. Sometimes, they were unable to immediately give an alternative date, thus requiring us to start the scheduling process all over again. In other instances, organizations stopped responding altogether. The onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated these challenges, and this phase of our research took a great deal longer than we had anticipated.
The organizations explained that they were dealing with one crisis after another, which, of course, took priority over speaking to us—as much as they agreed about the importance of our research to their work, and despite having helped to co-design the research activities through our Community Research Reference Group of which they were members. Further, we understood and agreed with their decisions—even as we fell woefully behind on institutionally determined project timelines. We might consider this a challenge one would face with any community organization. Nevertheless, we reflect on the type of work that some of these Black community organizations were engaged in and the ways in which that work is produced by N.H.I. relations that cast Black people beyond states’ sense of obligation to Black people.
One illustrative example concerned a Haïtian organization with which we worked in Montreal. The organization’s participation in our research was delayed because of the intense work that arose for this organization in response to the 2022 earthquake in Haïti and the most recent iterations of the migration crisis affecting Haïtians—particularly those forced by immigration law and policy to cross the Canada–US border irregularly. This organization works on the settlement issues that arise for migrants, offering multiple forms of support with finding them lodging and employment in an anti-Black landscape that always already makes such endeavors arduous for Black people.
This latest iteration of the migration situation was produced by the highly criticized Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) between the United States and Canada. The Agreement is based on the presumption that Canada and the United States are equally safe countries for refugees—a claim that has been shown to be untrue in several instances (Wilkins, 2019), and became dramatically so for Haïtians in the United States when the Trump administration ended temporary protection status for asylum seekers in 2017, augmenting the flow of such persons into Canada (Therien, 2022, pp. 72–73). At the time that we were setting up interviews, the STCA did not apply at unofficial points of entry. Consequently, large numbers of Haïtians—approximately 10 000 in 2022—crossed into Canada at Roxham Road, a relatively accessible, unofficial port between Champlain, NY, and Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec (CBC News, 2023a; Major, 2023). Crossings of this sort during this time were irregular, but not illegal, and were the only way in which some asylum seekers could claim the refugee status they urgently needed (Wilkins, 2019, p. 80). Nevertheless, these crossings are risky and have resulted in unnecessary death and risk to human life (CBC News, 2023b; Stevenson, 2023).
While the STCA is immediately responsible for the Roxham Road situation, it must be understood in broader context. The context of global racial capitalism both creates migrants of Black and racialized people in the Global South by way of the West’s capitalist interventions abroad and then produces them as easily accessed, manipulated, and disposable workers within Western nations through immigration frameworks that create multiple modes of racially determined non-citizenship (Immigrant Workers Centre, 2023; Walia, 2010, pp. 71–72). We saw this happen when Canada was able to exploit the precarity of asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their cases for the riskiest, most unprotected forms of frontline work during the global COVID-19 pandemic in order to maintain its healthcare and service sectors and safeguard capital accumulation for corporations (Dalexis & Cénat, 2020; Edwards, 2021).
The point that we make here is that while all community organizations are busy, Black community organizations, like many serving indigenous and racialized people, are overburdened with the urgent work of addressing the needs of those cast beyond the realms of moral obligation, taking up the work that is routinely done by the state for those it considers deserving. How, then, does one determine an appropriate timeline for research with those undertaking this urgent work—particularly when these dehumanizing crises are always already both perpetual and unpredictably episodic? How might the demand for strict timelines always already exclude Black people? How might such timelines always be a demand to put research activity, however necessary, before communities’ work—even when the research is part of the work? How does insistence on university timelines break trust with Black communities? And what are the consequences for Black researchers who are constrained by such a double-bind—even as the university purports to invite Black researchers and Black research? Of course, to ask these questions is to point to impossibilities, and these impossibilities, in turn, draw our attention to the constitutive coloniality and antiblackness of the neoliberal North American university, the organization of which has always been founded in colonialism, coloniality, slavery, and racial capitalism.
Black Excellence: The New Fetish
The methodological issues that we have mentioned thus far—those related to the academy’s normative timelines—have been long-standing. Yet there are also unique formations that deserve our attention in the post-2020 climate of invitation which, we argue, have altered the university’s façade while the N.H.I principles that undergird it remain intact. In this context, we suggest that the discourse of “Black excellence 3 ,” the calls for research that accompany it, and the identity-constructing demand it places on Black researchers require attention.
Black scholars in Canada have long argued for the need to understand the experiences of those Black persons who manage to make BlackLife in the face of pervasive anti-Black conditions, and they have pursued research that does so (e.g., Codjoe, 2001, 2006; James, 2010). Nevertheless, in the current climate that ostensibly invites Black people into the university—a climate that has long contrived a conflict between equity and excellence—we are wary of mainstream universities’ (and other institutions’) newfound preoccupation with Black excellence and the ways that this might impact research.
In Note 56 of Ordinary Notes (2023), Black Studies author, writer, and theorist Christina Sharpe remarks “I am annoyed by the phrase Black excellence. It doesn't do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gets it precisely right when she tells me that ‘Black excellence’ is the answer to a racist question.” In reading Sharpe’s passage, we imagine racist questions and requests that might sound something like this: “Aren't Blackness and excellence irreconcilable? Who are your best, if you have them? Show us how they measure up, and all the ways they contort themselves to meet our standards. Who will serve our Humanizing/civilizing agenda? Let us put them on display for you! Aren’t they quaint?”
We relate Sharpe’s passage and our imagined questions to our experiences and to our colleagues’ experiences as new Black faculty entering the university in this moment of invitation. We think first about the many ways we are cajoled for photographs, websites, brochures, and for features in department, faculty, and university-wide publications. And this celebration of us might be welcomed if we weren’t primarily positioned as evidence of the institution’s equity, and if our scholarship, as nuanced as it might be, weren’t so quickly and dismissively categorized under rubrics like “diversity” and “identity.” Secondly, we think about the ways that, as Black hires, we are increasingly expected to take up service roles on equity committees and in equity offices, and as spokespersons who will assume responsibility for, and be its representatives in, the university’s dealings with Black communities within and outside of the institution. This expectation—often at odds with, and at the expense of, our research—is an example of what James (2019, p. 29) observes: that role models (prototypes of Black excellence) are expected, in white nation-state and institutional logics, to serve as corrective agents. This practice of treating Black people and communities as problems to be corrected falls in line with the discourse of Black excellence that institutions are inviting us to engage in. Of course, both ways of categorizing us and our work let us know that the university struggles to understand our various research agendas as other than components of its own unimaginative, “one-track” diversity agenda. This sets normative parameters for how our research will be read and assessed, and for whether/how it will be appreciated and rewarded.
So, here we wish to indicate the very crucial need to reject these hegemonic notions of “Black excellence,” no matter their ostensibly well-intentioned deployment. They are problematic notions that attempt to stratify and reify Black communities and people into those deemed necessary, those deemed worthy, and those ultimately deemed Human, from those who are not.
We take seriously Wynter’s assertion, following Fanon (1967), that “the conception of the human [is] hybridly biological (bios) and narrative-discursive (logos)” (Wynter, 1994a, p. 48, 2001; see also Wynter, 1991) and that the logos aspect constantly shifts (as it has from a pre-Columbus theologos to the logos of Darwinian thought and now neoliberal thought in the “West” (Wynter, 1984b, 1996)). Black excellence, however it is conceived, clearly has an implicit foil—that is, another kind of BlackLife, against which it emerges in relief—that of the always already institutionally presumed Black incompetence (Daniel, 2019; Howard, 2023, p. 126). As other Black scholars in Canada have noted, the discourse of “black excellence” serves to place superordinary demands on Black people who are already overburdened by inequitable academic structures (Andrews, 2022; Hampton, 2023, pp. 66–67).
In its naming, Black excellence is also distinct from an ostensible generic excellence that is presumed white and thus needn’t be named because it is assumed. Thus, the discourse of Black excellence—particularly as it emerges alongside the recent recognition of BlackLife that Canadian universities have resisted hitherto—potentially constructs another iteration of what Wynter refers to as the Cosby-Huxtable variant of the genre of the Human—a “respectable” form of blackness taken to be exceptional. As Hampton (2023) reminds us, the deployment of Black excellence bolsters the meritocracy logics that justify the whiteness of the university. Consequently, what is achieved is at best a reconstituting of the category of “les damné.e.s” (Fanon, 1961)—a category that is paradigmatically Black and has always been disproportionately (though not only) applied to those who are Black and poor. The disregard of the world of Humans then falls with greater vengeance on this reconstituted category of the outcast, as Wynter argues it fell (and still does) on “jobless young Black males” in 1994 (Wynter, 1994a, p. 46). In the new configuration of the (anti-Black) terrain of the university post-2020, we wonder, then, about the ways in which the invitation to focus on Black excellence in academia might play out as an invitation to participate in delineating alternative N.H.I categories of Black, Indigenous, and racialized persons who can be disregarded, and furthermore upon whom deadly violence can be inflicted with impunity. Such questions seem crucial at the time of this writing when, for example, university administrations tout Black excellence and claim to address antiblackness even as they circumscribe protest against the Israeli state’s razing of Gaza, making Gaza into an intensified death zone and subjecting protestors on Canadian campuses to violent force and surveillance through the very N.H.I logics that have disregarded BlackLife.
On Being Invited: Black Professor/Researcher: Makin’ It or Unmaking It
So, within the context forged by the recognition and ostensible welcoming of BlackLife at the university and complicated by the discourse of Black excellence that accompanies it, we wonder about the ways that processes of research involving Black communities might be affected and about how the category of Black researcher might become integral to the production of alternative N.H.I categories. An inquiry into methodology in the new climate of recognition and the accompanying discourse of Black excellence requires us to attend to the politics of invitation. Recalling here again Ahmed’s (2000, chapter 3) analysis of power, invitation, and the stranger in research, and Wynter’s critique of the category of the Human, we consider the ways that invitation is reconfigured in methodology at the post-2020 moment in the Canadian university, and to what ends.
Invited as a Black Community Researcher: Rejected as a Researcher
One of the first posts in the academy that one of us had was a result of experience working in and with Black communities. The position sought a community-based researcher with a background in participatory methods and some credibility in community, as well as a familiarity and an intimacy working with and advocating on behalf of Black communities. As the position began, it became evident rather quickly that there were going to be ongoing difficulties with conducting research because while the position was advertised as being one dedicated to “(Black) community” and participatory research, there was no administrative apparatus to allow the holder to move forward with the research process. There was difficulty getting REB approval and continuing the work while at this institution because the position—while defined otherwise—did not expect the holder to actually do research. Because of the way in which the position was constituted, there was no framing or structure set in place within the department and university architecture that positioned the holder as a researcher in the institution, which severely limited the ability to do research. It seemed that the university actively promoted a position for a community-based Black researcher inviting them into the institution under the pretense that this would be a space from which to continue this kind of work. That was not the case in our experience with this institution because while the position promoted an invitation, there was nothing administratively or structurally put in place for the successful candidate to do that work. Indeed, the structures largely barred that work. It would seem then, that in the institution’s eyes, the Black community researcher is something other than researcher (see, e.g., Henson, 2021), and the position itself became somewhat of a paradox. In reflecting and looking back at this experience in the context of this paper, it would seem then that the posted community-based researcher position was a means of incorporating those who have paradigmatically only been understood as “community” (i.e., Black as well as Indigenous and other racialized persons) in contradistinction to “academic” (which is prototypically white). Nevertheless, this incorporation gesture, while looking good on the surface (inviting to Black community and university under the guise of partnership), could not escape the accustomed structures of the university, could not accommodate a position thus conceived, and also failed to account for the realities of those who might take such a position (e.g., the precarity of this kind of academic labor). So, methodologically, in the end we experienced the impossibility of community research/er within the intractable colonial, anti-Black structures of the university.
Invited as a Black Researcher: Legitimization and Invitation
Many areas of the academy are rightly critical of outsider research—that is, research done on BIPOC and marginalized populations without the meaningful involvement of members of these communities. 4 The power relations involved have long been a thorny issue for anthropological and feminist research and its authority and are difficult to satisfactorily address. Indeed, Sara Ahmed has proffered that, “[t]o argue that there has been … a shift in the relation between ethnography and authority is to presuppose the possibility of overcoming the relations of force and authorisation that are already implicated in the ethnographic desire to document the lives of strangers” (Ahmed, 2000, chapter 3, emphasis in original). For these reasons, in the context of the rush to Black research, Black participation is in high demand as a means of overcoming the insider/outsider question.
Many Black communities have become wary and weary of research about them, even as they recognize the importance of research to their understanding of themselves and their conditions. The trust relationships that we have cited above have become crucial for gaining access and establishing legitimacy.
As a methodological result, the question of invitation works in two directions. One direction relates to who gets invited/recognized by the university as a researcher, and the other relates to who might be welcomed by communities (in this case Black communities) to engage in research about their community. Regarding the latter in ethnography, Marie Louise Pratt has long noted that it is “an ethnographer’s dream … to be invited by [a] group to study their lifeways” (1986, p. 31 emphasis in original).
If the questions of legitimacy and invitation represent an impasse for ethical mainstream research, then one attempt to address it has been to invite members of the researched community to co-present research findings in what Ahmed suggests is “a counter-move to define the ‘native informant’ as a ‘co-author’” (Ahmed, 2000, chapter 3). As Ahmed argues, this move does not redress the blatant power issues at play—particularly those around voice and institutional authority.
Another work-around has long existed but seems especially relevant in the post-2020 academy in Canada. This is where Black academics are invited onto research projects as co-researchers and are positioned as intermediaries for the university and white researchers in their relationships with Black communities. We understand this also as a strategy to circumvent the ethical/methodological questions around insider/outsider research and thus to feign having accomplished the (outsider) ethnographer’s dream of being invited. In increasingly intense ways, Black people (faculty, researchers, research assistants, and students) are now sought out for the ways in which their bodies can legitimize a project and offer access to Black communities. Questions of power are blatantly present here also.
In the post-Floyd moment, when research on and about Black people has a new cachet, not to mention new purses of funding, we notice many researchers who formerly had little interest in Black people clamoring to do this work. It has been all too simple for non-Black academics to participate in this, wittingly or otherwise, under the university’s easy, fashionable, hegemonic but vacant claims to equity and diversity that ignore critical scholarship, and leave antiblackness, colonialism, and racial capitalism in place.
Furthermore, Black academics are being invited onto these projects led by non-Black researchers with greater frequency and fervency. At one point, it was difficult for Black researchers to find Black research assistants to work on our projects because the numbers of Black students were relatively few. Now, we have found it difficult because these Black students all have jobs on one project or another run by non-Black researchers and that often use the customary N.H.I disciplinary frames that fetishize BlackLife or produce Black people as a problem (DuBois, 1994, p. 1; Walcott, 2020; Wynter, 1994a). The amount of research about Black communities, and funding for this research, is increasing, but there is not an accompanying commitment to methods informed by Black study that foster and are respectful of BlackLife. In some instances, there is a crude representational politics at play that invites any Black person on to legitimize the project using the important, but usually poorly defined, notion of “lived experience,” regardless of whether they have the kind of background in Black study or the community experience that could meaningfully move the project beyond accustomed N.H.I norms. Overall, the extent of invitation to Black researchers to participate as co-investigators and research assistants on projects has mushroomed, but far exceeded any objective that might hope to disrupt the default N.H.I norms that routinely guide these projects.
Clearly, we are not denying the agency of Black academics to refuse such invitations or to substantively shape the research projects they are invited onto. Nor are those of us who accept these invitations absolved of accountability. Nevertheless, we must also consider the limits to this agency in the post-2020 moment of Black invitation, the disingenuous demand for Black excellence, and the climate of the broader neoliberal university with its strident “publish or perish” demands. Black people in vulnerable positions or in junior positions (such as graduate students and untenured faculty) who are seeking exposure, or experience or who just feel they cannot say no or cannot risk rocking the boat, and all Black people in the university, since we are structurally subject to negative assessment regardless of the quality of our work, are subject to subtle coercive forces that would sweep us up into projects that may still perpetuate N.H.I principles.
Ahmed writes, “the redefinition of the ‘informant’ as an ‘equal partner’ […] works to conceal the power relations that still allow the gathering together of a document [and] the narrative of overcoming the relations of authorisation in traditional ethnography constitutes another form of authorisation” (Ahmed, 2000, chapter 3). If that is so, then similarly, the new climate of invitation that claims to have overcome the university’s antiblackness, whose logic perceives the inclusion of the Black researcher as easily overcoming N.H.I relations, only constitutes another form of N.H.I relations.
Our contention, then, in Wynterian terms, is that the superficial welcoming of Black people, where not accompanied by a will toward a true departure from the “inner eyes” and “prescriptive categories” (1994a, p. 67) of our “rule-governed negation” (1994a, p. 66), ought not to distract us from the reality of our continued relegation to the categories of N.H.I, and from recognizing the seduction that would implicate us in the creation of those categories, and invite us to reify such relegations.
Conclusions
We set out in this article to make sense of the post-2020 climate of ostensible recognition and invitation of BlackLife in the Canadian academy through the N.H.I concept that Sylvia Wynter invites us to consider in her 1994 letter to academic colleagues. We wished to focus at this juncture on research, and particularly research method, as sites of knowledge production and anti-Black relations, rather than on the more typical sites of classroom and curriculum. Our discussion has drawn from our experiences as Black researchers living through this discursive shift.
In our exploration, we identified the timelines that attend research. We identified the ways that these timelines undermine the processes of building trust with Black communities, which are crucial for foregrounding Black people’s humanity in an anti-Black world and anti-Black institutional contexts. We also investigated the ways in which these timelines run up against the necessary work that Black communities do to ensure that Black people are cared for, given that we are routinely cast beyond the state’s understanding of humanity and its obligation of care.
We looked at the harms of the rising Black excellence discourse and its implications alongside the neoliberal demands of the university for how they might perpetuate anti-Black research that produces Black people as problem, as pathology, as N.H.I. We highlighted the ways in which we might be fetishized as paragons of black excellence, but made researchers with no say; how we might be located as both gateways and gatekeepers to our communities; how we might, as researchers, be positioned vis-a-vis our communities as those who are “excellent” against a foil of those who ostensibly are not, thus exacerbating the pathologization of BlackLife.
These are situations that are not easily solved through a set of recommendations, and therefore we do not presume to propose such. Nevertheless, we seek to reflect on how can we understand the double bind, the looking in both directions at the same time, and the demands that rest at the intersection of Black community member, researcher, and member of the institution? What kinds of strain are placed on this ethic of trust and reciprocity by the university?
Taking up Wynter, we insist that the way forward—the means of rupturing business-as-usual N.H.I relations—is for us to
We live the caution that reminds us of the possibility and potential costs of our seduction as Black researchers into secondary status within the “sanctified category” of the rational, which the classification of university researcher involves. We want to recognize and reject those invitations where an assessment of our excellence requires an eschewing of Black studies and, more importantly, from a black politics that prioritizes the humanity of and care for Black people—for all Black people not only those deemed excellent or worthy of care. We are troubled about the seduction to a kind of success that rips us away from community, that makes us no longer in community with Black people. We want to refuse research that is precisely what this liberally fraught notion of excellence requires: pedestals and separation. In this moment of tedious invitations and endless searches for Black excellence or to somehow make Blackness excellent, it is a form of refusal to simply be in communion with Black communities, rather than to locate, separate, and elevate Black excellence as exceptionality to appease institutional diversity quotas. Our refusal means researching to and for ourselves; research where we are our own main audience; research that is not an attempt to explain, legitimize, or create differentially valued categories of BlackLife.
It is only as we insist on our humanity and that of all Black people—through our work but also by taking up space and by just doing life in the multiple Black-affirming ways that we do (Howard, 2023, p. 221)—that we move ourselves “out of [the] negated place, [and] therefore, that [we who are also] the grammarians of an order … can be freed from [our] system-maintaining ‘structural models’ and prescriptive categories” (Wynter, 1994b, p. 67) towards a new understanding of what it means to be human and new ways of being together. This must be our focus.
Of course, we call on our non-Black colleagues who would consider themselves working for justice to also seriously consider their roles as grammarians of the current order inevitably entangled, by default, with the extant epistemes that create categories of disposable humans. What might it look like to seriously engage radical scholarship rather than presume, as a “good” person, to know what justice looks like without deliberate efforts to upend what now passes as justice but fails to mount a challenge to the dehumanization of Black people? In the Canadian academy post-2020, when antiblackness has assumed the seductive guise of being on our side, it becomes the more urgent that we all ask ourselves what it might mean to take up Wynter’s charge to “marry our thought to the plight of the new poor and the environment” with a view toward breaking out of our default epistemologies into those that might make a truly different world (Wynter, 1994a, p. 60).
As Wynter notes, “we as Black intellectuals owe our group presence in the university system (rather than as pre-Sixties, where our exceptionality as the token Black scholar verified the rule which excluded our ostensibly I.Q.-lacking population group), to the call for a new intellectual order of knowledge that was originally made in the wake of the Civil Rights movement” (1994a, p. 56). To put a finer point on it, our existence as BlackLife in the university (in the U.S. post-1960 and now in Canada post-2020) is properly attributed to protracted Black struggle (e.g., civil rights, abolitionist, antifascist, and Black Lives Matter movements) that was both sparked and defended by Black death. It is not rather to be attributed to sudden “epiphanies” out of nowhere in universities that have been backed into responding to these movements (and are just as quickly backing out of their commitments). We do well to remember this debt as we plan how we will take up our “invitations.” For those of us mired in the entanglement that is the university, it would also do us well to take advantage of—or to use Moten and Harney’s (2004) terminology, to “steal” and “smuggle”—the resources that accompany these invitations, meagre as they might be, and direct them toward ends that might benefit our communities and those with whom we are in relation in struggle towards remaking this world anew. As Black researchers working in the belly of the beast, we are interested in the good work that can come from the possibilities of research—the desire to know us and each other better, and the joy that can come from sustained wonder while in communion and community. Where these “invitations” make those relations and formations more possible, then they are worth taking up—critically, cautiously, and vigilantly—but of course, there are no guarantees. Where, however, this is not, and will not be, their direction—where our and others’ humanity is on the line—we do better to resolutely refuse them.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture; FRQ-SC NP-252799, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; 435-2019-1064.
