Black Studies

RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Critical Race Theory; Whiteness Studies 

Writing in 2020, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Ashwani Sharma contend that,

“In a manner similar to ‘French’ post-structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. Black Critical Thought offers an urgently needed – if not always satisfactory – grammar to address the racial faultlines of UK knowledge formation.”

In discussing how this more recent intellectual importation came about, Brar and Sharma trace the prior influence of black British cultural studies, developed by the likes of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy from the 1970s to the 1990s, on what they are calling US black critical thought, practised by the likes of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Marriott and Denise Ferreira da Silva (Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg, 1996; Brar and Sharma, 2020).

It is this cycle of influence that makes US black critical thought so recognisable in the UK.

Black Studies in the USA

Marable (2008: 2) points out that, since the founding of Black Studies in academic institutions in the USA in the 1960s, there has been an ideological debate about what the appropriate geopolitical and cultural boundaries for the study of blackness should be. Marable outlines three main approaches:

• The Afrocentric approach argues that the black experience in the USA is but a subsidiary of a much larger African civilisational story. Therefore, Black Studies should trace its intellectual lineage back to classical Egyptian civilisation.
• The African Diasporic approach, taking note of the destructive effects of the transatlantic slave trade, focuses on the cultural and political resistance of African Diasporic populations scattered across North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia as a decisive element in the making of the modern world.
• The African American-centric approach, developed by scholars educated in the USA, emphasise the struggles waged by African Americans to achieve political rights and equality against the American nation-state.

Characteristic of the absence of a theoretical and conceptual consensus within Black Studies, Marable (2008: 2) notes, is the diversity of names given to departments and programmes practising Black Studies. The names include, as given by Marable, Afro-American Studies, African American Studies, Africana Studies, African and African American Studies, African Diasporal Studies, and Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies.

Given these distinctions, it might be argued that Afro-Pessimism, for example, takes place primarily within the horizon of the African American-centric approach, in as far as it focuses on the experience of people of African descent in the United States and grants that experience ‘exceptional’ status. However, in other respects, Afro-Pessimism borrows from the African Diasporic approach, in as far as the argument is taken to extend beyond the USA, as a national horizon, to the world, specifically the world of ‘modernity’, as a global, historical, geopolitical horizon.

Pan-Africanism

For Marable, it is not possible to tell the full story of the experiences of people of African descent in the United States, the Caribbean and the Americas without close integration and reference to the history of the peoples, languages and cultures of the African continent. For example, Marable argues, Pan-Africanist-inspired social protest movements, such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), although starting in Jamaica, became a mass movement in the United States and then in Central America and Africa. The UNIA’s complex story cannot be told  adequately by focusing solely on the events of any one nation. In a similar fashion, South Africa’s ‘Black Consciousness Movement’ of the 1970s, especially as seen in the protest writings of Steve Biko, cannot be interpreted adequately without reference to the ‘Black Power Movement’ in the United States during the 1960s, paying particular attention to to the influential speeches and political writings of Malcolm X of the United States and Frantz Fanon of Martinique.

The belief that ‘Blackness’ acquires its full revolutionary potential as a social site for resistance only within transnational and Pan-African contexts motivated W. E. B. Du Bois to initiate the Pan-African Congress Movement at the end of World War I. The Fifth Pan-African Congress, sponsored by George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois and others, held in Manchester in October 1945, grew out of the recognition of the political linkage between the destruction of European colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, and the demise of the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation in the United States. 

A further recognition was that advances toward democracy and civil rights in any part of the black world lent assistance to the goals and political aspirations of people of African descent elsewhere.  From an historical point of view, an internationalist perspective also helped to explain the dynamics of the brutal transnational processes of capitalist political economy which involved: 

the forced movement of involuntary labor across boundaries; 

the physical and human exploitation of slaves; 

the subsequent imposition of debt peonage, convict leasing and sharecropping in post-emancipation societies; and 

the construction of hyper-segregated, racialised urban ghettoes, from Soweto to Rio de Janeiro’s slums to Harlem.

The twentieth century, Marable notes, was full of examples of intellectual-activists of African descent initiating movements of innovative scholarship, as well as social protest movements, throughout Africa and the African Diaspora.

The Colour Line

In 1900, Du Bois forecast that the central problem of the 20th century would be what he called ‘the colour line,’ by which he meant the unequal relationship between lighter-skinned versus darker-skinned peoples. 

For Du Bois, the colour line did not just include the racially segregated Jim Crow Southern states of the USA and the racial oppression of South Africa. It also included the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese colonial subalternisation of indigenous populations in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. 

According to Marable, the problem of the 21st century, given Du Bois’ analysis, may be said to be the problem of global apartheid: the racialised division and stratification of resources, wealth and power that separates Europe, North America and Japan from the billions of mostly black, brown, indigenous, undocumented immigrant and poor people across the planet. 

Under this global apartheid, Marable argues, the racist logic of herrenvolk, or ‘master race’, is embedded ideologically in the patterns of unequal economic and global accumulation that penalises African, South Asian, Caribbean, Latin American and other impoverished nations by predatory policies. This process of separating has been exacerbated since 1979–80, when the USA and the UK, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan as US president and Margaret Thatcher as UK prime minister, embarked on domestic economic development strategies that are now widely known by the term ‘neoliberalism.’ Neoliberalism sought to dismantle the welfare state, to end redistributive social programs designed to address the effects of poverty, to eliminate governmental regulations and regulatory agencies over capitalist markets and to ‘privatise’, that is, to transfer public institutions and governmental agencies to corporations.

The value of the work of black activist-intellectuals and social protest movements in the 21st century, Marable argues, is that they can contribute significantly in a transnational context as part of a collective struggle against the intensifying social (and environmental) injustices perpetrated and propagated through the practices of global apartheid as a reiteration and exacerbation of what Du Bois characterised as the colour line.

Implications for Design Practices

For design practices, the importance of taking note of Black Studies is to consider where and in what ways designs, of whatever degree of complexity and of materialisation or dematerialisation, may be contributing to the ongoing enactment of the divisiveness of ‘global apartheid’ or the reiteration, reinforcement and refinement of ‘the colour line’ as a means of global governance.

This may be explored in relation to the ways in which designs incorporate the symbolic and cultural values associated with lightness and darkness as processes of generating ‘racialisation’, ‘black’ taken as the most intense or extreme form of darkness, with lightness associated with the good, innocence, the lawful and the moral, and darkness associated with the bad, sinfulness, criminality and immorality. 

The role of designs in innovating and articulating new perceptual distinctions that are mobilised in processes of denigration, subaltnern-isation and racialisation also needs to be considered carefully, understood as part of the process whereby the political economy is shaped and integrated with the libidinal economy, through the commodity-form.

In terms of the methodology of the design of narrative environments, the question is to understand the ways in which the (economic-libidinal) values articulated in and cascading through the narration, the human interaction and the environmental immersion are interwoven to form a situation that draws particular contexts or horizons into view and thereby orients ongoing interaction.

References

Baker, H. A., Diawara, M. and Lindeborg, R. H. (eds) (1996) Black British cultural studies; A Reader. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Brar, D. S. and Sharma, A. (2020) What is this “black” in black studies? From black British cultural studies to black critical thought in U.K. arts and higher education, New Formations, 99(99), pp. 88–109. doi: 10.3898/newf:99.05.2019.

Marable, M. (2008) Blackness beyond boundaries: Navigating the political economies of global inequality, in Marable, M. and Agard-Jones, V. (eds) Transnational blackness: Navigating the global color line. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–8.