This essay aims to demonstrate how attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory, and in modern politics more generally. Black political thought can be viewed as the attempt to develop a set of critical tools to help explain the political distinctiveness of black life-worlds and how this distinctiveness is structured by a series of relations between individual and community, self and other, state and society, citizen and non-citizen, and national and multinational (or global) circumstances. Too often, black politics is exclusively considered as a form of minority group politics and phenomena reducible to empirical investigation and observation, rather than a set of practices with underlying conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological premises. If we understand race as a fundamentally relational concept, namely, an assumption of dynamic interaction between two or more putatively distinct groups, and racism as a political phenomena that is conditioned and articulated through politics, then taken together they provide the opportunity for reflection and consideration of how black peoples and subjects have conceptualized, created and engaged in politics, political communities, and their articulation. Race and racism, the modalities of political participation and, conversely, the modalities of political exclusion have been recurrent themes in black political thought. The distinctiveness of black political thought is symptomatic of the distinctive trajectories of black politics, which first emerged from spaces of exclusion in Western polities and colonies. The histories of black political and social movements provide evidence of the ways in which black subordination in Western societies and polities required the reconfiguration of the actual boundaries between the public and private, the political and the social. Race and racism, the distinction between identity and identification, black solidarities, and the relationship between history, context, and politics and the political are themes central to black political thought.
Black philosophers in particular are to be acknowledged and commended for engaging canonical texts and themes, particularly in normative philosophy, about conceptions and theories of the good, justice, fairness, inequality, morality, ethics, and reason as these themes and conceptions relate to the history, aspirations, and struggles of black peoples. A small and unsystematic selection of contributions includes: Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2005); Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996); Charles Mills and Carole Pateman, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Lewis R. Gordon, ed., Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997); Derrick Darby, "Blacks and Rights: A Bittersweet Legacy," Law Culture and the Humanities 2 (2006): 420-39; Bernard R. Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984); Hawley Fogg-Davis, "The Racial Retreat of Contemporary Political Theory," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (September 2003): 555-64; Cornel West, "Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 17-34. My intention in this article is not to provide detailed examinations of specific thinkers who have produced writings that could be classified as forms of black political thought. There is ample secondary literature about thinkers who have made lasting contributions to critical race theory, black feminist theory, black philosophy, and African American and African diaspora cultural and literary criticism.
2.
Toni Morrison , "Speaking Things Unspoken," Michigan Quarterly Review28, no. 1 (1989): 11.
3.
Many of the classic texts and authors who are (or were, depending upon one’s perspective) part of the primary canon for much of the discipline’s history-Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Aristotle-to give four examples, were not political scientists in the sense that the discipline came to be understood and legitimized as a distinct area of scholarship and teaching, apart from the disciplines of sociology and political economy,. Political economy’s subsumption as a field in political science and sociology also provides a sense of how disciplinary and field status change over time.
4.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935).
5.
Ibid., p. 725.
6.
See Thomas C. Holt, "The Political Uses of Alienation: W.E.B. Du Bois on Politics, Race and Culture, 1903-1940," American Quarterly42 (June 1990): 100-15; Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro!; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919, vol. 1 (New York : Henry Holt, 1994).
7.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York : Vintage, 1966).
8.
Robinson, Black Marxism , 26
9.
Joan Scott, "Women in The Making of the English Working Class," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Colombia University Press, 1999), 72.
10.
Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 84.
11.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) outlines the epistemological crisis induced by the Haitian Revolution, as a course of action both unprecedented and unimagined by students of revolution.
12.
As noted by Golberg, few works even cursorily address the nexus of the state and race. See Martin Carnoy, State and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978); James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (New York: Polity, 2000).
13.
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell , 2002), 2.
14.
Ibid, 3.
15.
See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1986); Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell , 2002).
16.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 621. See also this work’s chapter, "Counter-Revolution of Property."
17.
Hannah Arendt , The Origins of Totalitarianism ( San Diego, CA: Harvest/HBJ, 1968), Part II, 161.
18.
In his critical biography of Frantz Fanon, David Macey traces the influences of phenomenology, and the writings of Merleau-Ponty, in particular, upon Fanon’s conceptual framework for Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008). Fanon’s emphasis on lived experience and the "living through of a situation of being-in-the world" evidences more than a trace of experience vecue, the French translation of the German technical term Erlebnis, used by Husserl and Hiedegger that denotes the act of living consciously in the world and as a result, having a self-conscious relationship to what one experiences and how one is viewed in daily life. See Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2001), 123, 163-65.
19.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part III, 362.
20.
Ibid., 386.
21.
Hannah Arendt , "Reflections on Little Rock," in Interracialism, ed. Werner Sollors ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 501. Originally published in Dissent 6, no. 1 (Winter 1959): 45-56.
22.
Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock."
23.
Danielle Allen’s nuanced reading of Ralph Ellison and Hannah Arendt’s divergent accounts of the lessons of the Little Rock Nine for democratic practice suggests that Arendt’s heroic, Grecian vision of democratic practice clashes with Ellison’s: "Whereas Arendt developed a political theory that might protect children from politics, by transforming politics into an epic arena for full-grown warriors only, Ellison has a more tragic vision; rituals to solidify the social order inevitably involve children in politics, however much one might wish the case otherwise" (28). Part of the limitations of both Ellison and Arendt’s reading of the events at Little Rock, however, is their shared emphasis on comportment as a gauge of individual and collective behavior, rather than the structural conditions of black political and economic exclusion, which made the participation of children in politics possible and plausible. In Arendt’s case, her Greco-centric view of politics and the political treats Grecian categorizations of polity and non-polity, citizen and non-citizen, as paradigmatic for politics in times and places other than ancient Greece. See Anne Norton, "Heart of Darkness: Africa and African-Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt," in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 259.
24.
Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture7 ( 1994): 107-46, 129.
25.
See Sherwin K. Bryant, "Finding Gold, Forming Slavery: The Creation of a Classic Slave Society, Popayan, 1600-1700," The Americas63, no. 1 ( 2006): 81-112; Frederick Cooper, Rebecca Scott, and Thomas Holt, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
26.
Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
27.
This particular justification of racial rule linked black autonomy with chaos and underdevelopment, much in the way that Western imperial discourses likened metropolitan rule of the colony to the relationship between mother and child. Anthony Pagden posits that the language of mother-child to describe dynamics of metropole and colony in Spanish, French, and British imperial ideologies has its origins in the Greco-Roman rationalizations of imperial management and relation to colonized subjects. See Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie and Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Goldberg, The Racial State; Thomas Holt, "‘The Lonely Warrior’: Ida B. Wells Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership," in Black Leaders in the 20th Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 39-61.
28.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn ( New York: Schocken Books , 2005), xxvii.
29.
See Norton, "Heart of Darkness,"259.
30.
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 6.
31.
Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975).
32.
See Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
33.
Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought ( Oxford , UK: Oxford University Press, 2006 ).
34.
See Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Macmillan, 2009); Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Cathy Cohen, Kathleen Jones, and Joan Tronto, eds., Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (New York: NYU Press, 1997); Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998).
35.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought ( New York: Routledge, 1990), 19.
36.
Hanchard, Party/Politics.
37.
Lee Brown , ed., African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); Olúfémi Táíwò, "Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy ," African Studies QuarterlyI, no. 4 (1998); Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press , 1987).
38.
See Hanchard, Party/Politics; Nell Irvin Painter, "Black Studies, Black Professors, and the Struggles of Perception," The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2000; Robin D. G. Kelley, "But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950," Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1045-77; Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics in Race and Nation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991) and Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
39.
Percy C. Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier, eds., Problematizing Blackness ( New York: Routledge, 2003).
40.
See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 ); Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222-37; Robinson, Black Marxism; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Henry Highland Garnet, "The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race: A Discourse Delivered at the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, N.Y. February 14, 1848" (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne, 1969); Paul Gilroy, Against Race; Outlaw Jr., On Race and Philosophy.
41.
Ludwig Wittgenstein , On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright ( New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972 ).
42.
See Otto Bauer’s discussion of the nation, particularly his analysis of the nation as a community of character arising out of a community of fate, in The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 109.
43.
Linda Zerilli , "Doing without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the Ordinary," Political Theory28, no. 4 (1998): 435-58.
