Seeking the Beloved Community

Joy James

Description

Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse—those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.
Foreword by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Acknowledgments

Part I. Feminist Race Theory

1. Teaching Theory, Talking Community
2. Politicizing the Spirit: Toni Morrison
3. Black Feminism in Liberation Limbos
4. Resting in Gardens, Battling in Deserts: Black Women’s Activism
5. Radicalizing Black Feminism
6. Angela Y. Davis: Liberation Praxis
7. Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency

Part II. Democracy and Captivity

8. Democracy and Captivity
9. Black Suffering in Search of the “Beloved Community”
10. American Prison Notebooks
11. Violations
12. War, Dissent, and Social Justice
13. Academia, Activism, and Imprisoned Intellectuals

Part III. Sovereign Political Subjects

14. Activist Scholars or Radical Subjects?
15. Campaigns Against Blackness
16. Sovereign Kinship and the President Elect
17. The Dead Zone
18. Racism, Genocide, and Resistance
19. “All Power to the People!”: Arendt’s Communicative Power in Racial Democracy

Sujets

• Ethnic studies
• Activism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438446349
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, editors

SEEKING THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
A Feminist Race Reader

Joy James
Foreword by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
James, Joy
Seeking the beloved community : a feminist race reader / Joy James.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, philosophy and race)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4633-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Feminism—United States. 2. Womanism—United States. 3. African American women—Intellectual life. 4. African American women—Political activity. 5. Imprisonment—United States. 6. Radicalism—United States. 7. United States—Politics and government. I. Title.
HQ1197.J36 2013
305.420973—dc23
2012018269
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the cyborg maternals and ghost warriors—
Chicago Mamie Tills; Oakland Georgia Jacksons;
Soweto and São Paulo mothers—
all who made and make the impossible demand
to the omnipotent state, its allies, and apologists:
“Resurrect the child you killed.”
Foreword
… we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
—The Combahee River Collective, 1983
… dissidents are anchored to revolutionary possibilities that demand both intellectual discipline and irrepressible courage to speak the unspeakable, to stand alone if necessary, and to accept the material and emotional consequences of tramping over hegemony's “holy” ground.
—Antonia Darder, 2011
I am reminded while reading Joy James's provocative essay collection, Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Theory Reader , of Antonia Darder's riveting anthology, A Dissident Voice: Essays in Culture, Pedagogy, and Power . Educators, scholars, endowed professors, activists, critical race theorists, dissidents —James and Darder emerge from marginalized/racialized communities in the United States and Puerto Rico. It is important to embrace the dissident women among us, so often maligned and misunderstood. For nearly two decades, Joy James's dissenting voice has been loud and unrelenting, beginning with the publication of her first book, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S . Culture (1996), followed by Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics and Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals . Her edited books include Spirit, Space and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe ; Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy ; The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings ; Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion ; States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons ; The Black Feminist Reader ; and The Angela Y. Davis Reader . One of the most prolific and radical, black feminist scholars, she is completing a book on interracial rape cases, tentatively titled, Memory, Shame, and Rage .
Like the Angela Y. Davis Reader that James edited, her own feminist race theory reader underscores the heterogeneity of contemporary black feminist discourse, a perennial theme in James's writings. Like dissident Angela Davis and the architects of the Combahee River Collective document above, Joy James emerges from a robust African American left tradition that is anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and passionately critical of the U.S. state. Davis and James have been perhaps the most vocal black feminist voices with respect to the ravages of the prison industrial complex and U.S.-sponsored violence, including genocide, here and around the globe. James's work has been pioneering as well in its careful attention to radical black women such as Harriet Tubman, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and Ramona Africa. In fact, without James's work, it would be difficult to imagine the existence of black women revolutionaries since African American political history has privileged male figures such as Huey Newton, George Jackson, Malcolm X, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, to name a few.
While most of the essays are not new and have appeared in various publications, this Joy James reader is at its core a portrait of “the making of a dissident voice,” to borrow from the title of Antonia Darder's introductory essay in the reader to which I alluded earlier. What we most desperately need in a world that fears and silences opposition—or worse—are revolutionaries who speak truth to power and beckon us to stand with them in solidarity. A luta continua . The struggle continues.
B EVERLY G UY -S HEFTALL , Women's Research and Resource Center, Spelman College
Acknowledgments
Assisted by researchers Maddy Dwertman and Rebecca Bradford, this project was begun at the suggestion of several radical scholar-activists, and benefited from the support of SUNY series editors Robert Bernasconi and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and the skills of editor Andrew Kenyon. Seeking the Beloved Community also received support from UT-Austin's African and African Diaspora Studies, chaired by Edmund T. Gordon, and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, directed by Omi Joni Jones, in both the writing of new articles and the editing and revision of those previously published.
In 1998 and 2003, respectively, students at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU) and Brown University organized two large conferences that led to a decade of anthologies on injustice and incarceration. At the request of Angela Y. Davis, I organized a spring 1998 national gathering on U.S. imprisonment at CU as a precursor to, or prototype for, the fall 1998 “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” In March 1998, “Unfinished Liberation” took place with panels that incorporated the contributions of academics, graduate students, and activists from California, Colorado, New York, and beyond; Davis's campus keynote drew several thousand. CU invested significant resources into the conference, but the heart of the endeavor came from the volunteer labor of activist students. Conference papers became States of Confinement (2000), and subsequent anthologies and conferences, such as Brown's 2003 “Prison Intellectuals,” prominently featured incarcerated activist authors. Encouraged to attend to their studies first, as were CU undergraduates, Brown students found the disruption of organizing for justice more compelling—a desire that appeared incomprehensible to nonactivist academics. Students' preference for social justice—over grades, political conformity or careerism—has brought greater critical scrutiny to mass and political imprisonment within democracy. My thanks to all who have expanded the boundaries and commitments to intellectual inquiry and political acts for justice.
Part 1.
FEMINIST RACE THEORY
1
Teaching Theory, Talking Community
[P]eople of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic … our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create … [in] dynamic rather than fixed ideas…. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity? And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world…. My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory—though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is both sensual and abstract, both beautiful and communicative.
—Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”

E RASURE IN A CADEMIC T HEORY
Contemporary African American theorists such as Barbara Christian, who writes that theory not rooted in practice is elitist, think within a community-centered tradition in which the creativity of a people in the race for theory sustains humanity. However, teaching theory as nonelitist, and intending the liberation and development of all of humanity, specifically Africana communities, contradicts much of academic theory, which is Eurocentric. 1
All philosophy and theory, Eurocentric or Afrocentric, is political. Academic “disciplines,” when sexualized and racialized, tend to reproduce themselves in hierarchically segregated forms. To confront segregation means recognizing that current academic or educational standards have never worked, and were never intended to for us as a people. Our paltry presence in (white) universities and colleges speaks to the fact that individ