EMBODYING THE CIPHER: REVOLT AND RECONFIGURING "BLACKNESS" IN THE BLACK RADICAL MOVEMENT

PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002)

ISSN: 1543-0855

Krishna Manavalli

As Abdul JanMohamed points out about the racialized subject, “all socio-political-cultural relations on the racial border are predicated on the definition of the ‘other’, the black [subject], as nonhuman, as a being who does not belong to the human realm of the master’s society and who consequently has no ‘rights’ within that society” (JanMohamed 1992, 97). Thus, the cultural politics of inscribing the racial border gets predicated, among other things, upon the hysterical denial of the black subject’s “humanity.” Within the colonialist Manichean economy of producing socio-historical dissimilarities between the imperialist and the colonized subjects in terms of universalized moral/metaphysical binaries, “blackness” often becomes a powerful signifier of the ultimate evil—”non identity.” ¹

It is the crucial understanding of this cultural politics and also the centrality of the Manichean color binaries within the dominant imaginary that impel the appropriation and reconfiguration of blackness within the black radical movements both in the European and American contexts. Dubois’s durable insight about color lines surfaces continually in this black counterdiscourse. However, even while articulating their oppression within the color hegemony, black revolutionaries are able to refigure blackness and construct it as an oppositional paradigm to challenge systems of oppression. It is particularly interesting to examine the ways in which the interlocking discourses of race and class are engaged here.

That the production of blackness in the dominant discourse in terms of the Fanonian “negation of values” is also contemporaneous becomes obvious in Sylvia Wynter’s sharp foregrounding of how the jobless black youth of the ghettos still get defined as “the lack of the human, the conceptual other of North America.” The official term employed to identify these urban pharmakons of capitalism is N.H.I, or “no humans involved.” (Wynter 1992, 13). In George Jackson again, we have this complex insight that within the repressive state system in which he lives, “race is class.” Jackson’s prison letters emphasize how “black men born in the U.S [. . .] are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison,” even as the dominant order attempts to reinforce their erasure from representational discourses (Jackson 1994, 4).

Thus, the material history of the representation of black as negation must be examined in both class and racial contexts, and particularly, the manner in which it gets predicated upon color lines. Therefore, while Robert F. Williams disagrees strongly with the idea that racism can be explained away by reductive economic/class paradigms, he is also aware that at the “core of racism” there is economic oppression—something that gets underlined in terms of dollars and “unemployment percentages” (Williams 1998, 38).

Wynter’s argument that the post-Enlightenment narratives of human progress, which construct the “dysselected” Other (with black as the archsignifier of the ontological “defect”) becomes palpable in this seamless context of black economic oppression (Wynter 1996, 306). As Wynter examines the production of black as absence vis-à-vis the West’s conception of its “true self” (collapsed with the Western white middle-class self), she reveals how this construction of the black Other becomes not only a way of inferiorizing the black body, but also a way of rationalizing/justifying the economic oppression of the black peoples across the globe.

The rhetoric of the economic “backwardness” of the black subject/s in the dominant discourse (whether it is the narrative of the “underdevelopment” of Black Africa, or the construction of the wastrel behavior patterns of the ghetto youth in the U.S cities) gets closely tied up with producing the black subject as “embodied liminal negation” (Wynter 1996, 304). Walter Rodney’s articulation of how the Western blocs perceive themselves as “developed” because “their people are innately superior,” and also how within this dominant imaginary “the backwardness of Africa lies in the general backwardness of the race of black Africans” becomes relevant here. Rodney’s demystification of this “European version of things” reveals how such a construction of the non-human, “defective Other” underlies the West’s systemic “robbery of Africa” (Rodney 1982, 23, 21). It is the awareness of this knowledge-power nexus within the dominant project of coding “backwardness” in the black body which leads Wynter to call for a complete undoing of the Western teleology of human development. She urges for a total epistemological shift—the “rewrit[ing of] knowledge” (Wynter 1992, 14).

Further, Wynter also contests the containment strategies of the dominant intellectual discourse which reinforce the representational erasure of the black subject. In unpacking the attempt of dominant theoritics to contain this marginalized black subject—”the Symbolic Object constituting the Lack,”—Wynter reveals how these oppressed black subjects have always resisted their dehumanization. In the teeth of the dominant maneuvers of effacing their resistance, from the earliest slave rebellions to the contemporary politico-cultural subversions of black revolt, the black countercultures have all along attempted to “constitute another self, another collective identity” that moves beyond dominant ideology and signification (Wynter 1977, 152, 156).

Thus, the resisting subject of this black counterdiscourse has always refused to “disappear” into the specular blac/nkness of colonialist imaginary. Instead s/he has redeployed the crucial colonialist metaphor of blackness not only to jam the Manichean machinery of the oppressive discourse, but also as the ground of his/her rebellion. At the outset, the colonial relation predicated upon the notion of the non-existence of the colonized subject—the denial of the black subject’s attributes of humanity—leads to the ineluctable Fanonian question which this repressed subject asks: “in reality, who am I” (Fanon 1963, 203).

The white gaze, which renders the black body “sequestered” in this manner, leads to the existential angst of the self-alienated, colonized black subject: “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics,” and “on that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, I took myself off [. . .] made myself an object” (Fanon 1976, 112). Again, Malcolm X replicates this discourse of color as existential “confinement” within the historical erasures effected by the racialized discourse of U.S. neocolonialism: “our color became a chain,” and “a prison,” and “the black American was made to feel “trapped” in “Black skin, Black features, and Black blood” (Malcolm X 1992, 54-55, 94).

The black subject’s existential angst, and the idea of “revolution as existential affirmation” figure continually in the black radical discourse. Whether it is the “desperation” born out of actual physical confinement of the black subject in Jackson, or the feeling of being “trapped” in black skin in the early Fanon through Malcolm X, or even the recurring theme of “exile” in the Negritude writers—the particular predicament of the black subject gets politicized in existential terms. The initial existential angst experienced in the discovery of this subject’s differential identity impels him/her to affirm self by rebelling against the structures of repression.

For Fanon of Black Skin, the colonial situation is an “existential deviation.” It is by living through this colonial paradox, where black exists in its non-existence, that the later Fanon of The Wretched will declare that “revolution” alone can affirm black life. In this context, Nigel Gibson’s rejection of Homi Bhabha’s articulation of the postmodern Fanon, who is seen as positing “transient identities” within the ambivalence of colonialist discourse, becomes important. Instead, Gibson firmly foregrounds how the dialectic of oppression-resistance in Fanon must be placed in the context of the historical becoming of the black liberation movement (Gibson, 111-12). Therefore, as Francoise Verges rightly points out in another instance, the “revolutionary” impulse in Fanon is crucially linked to existential and identity issues in terms of this material history. For Fanon, the political liberation struggle becomes the only way for the black subject to dis-identify him/herself with the former slave identity (Verges, 267). Later again, Walter Rodney reinforces this idea: “if there is to be any means of proving our humanity it must be by revolutionary means” (Rodney 1982, 51).

Thus, it is fascinating to trace how the process of reconfiguring blackness within the black radical movement leads to its rearticulation—its shift from signifying nonidentity to functioning as an “existential” category. Validation of blackness here is closely bound up with the Fanonian “ecstasy of revolt.” The racialized subject’s exhilarating rediscovery of his/her “humanity,” being, and identity, in the very process of destroying the oppressive structures within which his/her access to existence has been denied, occurs via the conscious occupying of the oppositional position of blackness.

Interestingly enough, Fanon’s revolutionary moment disengages itself from the black past. In him there is no fierce longing for a lost tradition, his affirmations are in the future, in terms of revolutionary kinship: “the very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend,” and “individualism is the first to disappear” with the disappearance of the colonial bourgeoisie (Fanon 1963, 38). The Fanonian “being-for-others” becomes a collective self-affirmation.

Again, when Williams points out that “as ‘black revolutionaries [. . .] we must revolutionize ourselves,” he is stressing the collective over the individual—the condition where the revolutionary is able to embrace the whole of revolutionary community into self (Williams 1970, 12). Jackson’s recognition of the collective aspect of black oppression, “few blacks over here have ever been free” leads to the assertion that these “most desperate and damned” people will not be “snuffed” out of existence. The “unbendable Black fiber” of collective black revolt stands against “the thing that constricts” and, in the process, affirms itself (Jackson 1994, 68; Jackson 1971, 217).

Further, Fanon’s unflinching assertion, “the colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence” must be located within this complex existential paradigm of resistance to colonialism (Fanon 1963, 67). It has been continually misread—the Maurice Cranston type of misreading, for instance. Cranston, while foregrounding Fanon’s commitment to revolution within the existential praxis, seeks to escape from confronting this question of violence within the brutal colonial system by overdetermining Fanon—in pathologizing Fanonian violence in terms of a compensatory reaction to the anxiety that “the blacks are less than men” (Cranston, 130-34).

However, the “rebellion as existential affirmation” of the black subject in Fanon, and also the later black radical thinkers is closely linked with the conscious embodiment of blackness. Such an investment of crucial existential meanings in blackness gets predicated upon the perception of black as the very condition of difference, and therefore, the vantage position of rebellion. Aime Cesaire’s anguished equation “colonization= thingification,” gets ruptured in Fanon’s “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself” (Cesaire, 42; Fanon 1963, 30).

Even as they contemplated the black subject’s existence within the Manichean world of color binaries, the early anticolonial writers like Fanon and Cesiare, for instance, had already begun to unravel the dominant narratives of “blackness as nonhuman/savage” as mystifications to hide the underlying socio-political agenda of brutal economic exploitation. Cesaire, citing Frobenius, foregrounds “the idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention,” and forcefully declares “Africa [is] not some [. . .] blank page in the history of humanity” (Cesiare, 53, 92).

Cheikh Anta Diop’s strategy for challenging this dominant tendency of “dehistoricizing” the black subject (and thereby writing him/her as a historical “tabula rasa”) is reintroducing history into the notion of blackness. Diop’s historicizing of the African subject leads to rewriting World history in terms of the history of Black Africa. He turns the tables against the white discourse, and its famous “civilizing mission” by pointing out that “this race of black men” who had been their slaves, “is the very race to which [they] owe their arts, sciences and even the use of speech” (Diop, 28). Years later, Malcolm X is still asserting himself by invoking his historical roots “within the subconscious of the Black man in this country, he’s still more African than he is American” (Malcolm X 1992, 97).

In this reversal of the “civilized-savage” Manichean binary of the dominant discourse, Diop attempts to construct a historical space for blackness, thus, leading to the deconstruction of the grand narratives of universal “blanchitude” against which the historical non-presence of the black subject gets written. Even Fanon, to whom revolution is a forward-looking thing, revels in this sense of past sometimes:

All of that [history] exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historical place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago (Fanon 1967, 130).

The defiance of the white gaze, which reduces the black body to a phobogenic object (something which even gets introjected in the black subject’s mind), in the Negritude poets takes the form of tracing and drawing upon a black cultural tradition. There is a continuation of the Diopian preoccupations. It is in these terms, that Leon Gontran Damas makes his counter-assertion to destabilize the dominant color aesthetics, “White will never be Negro/For beauty is Negro/And Negro is wisdom” (Damas, 52). This is imbricated within the structures of constructing the identity politics of difference. Damas’s strategy here is to expose the dominant discourse itself as lack of values. Similarly, Jacques Roumain’s call for revolt is linked with the rediscovery of the collective black past: “When, o my people/[. . .] shall I see the revolt of your hands” asks the anguished poet (Irele, 12). This conscious reconstruction of a past and the revolutionary potential of it unleash resistance.

In the French intellectual circles of the early 30’s, the contribution of black culture to humanity was already getting foregrounded: “the Paris Noir [. . .] reacted against the discourse which posited Africa as a blank page” (Verges, 265). Clayton Eshleman describes Cesaire as the “first poet” to seize the political potential of Negritude in his poetry in ways which could “affirm blackness individually and culturally,” and also “develop an ongoing polemic against the conditions of life” of the black man within the colonial situation (Eshleman, 72). According to Eshleman, the initial nihilistic anguish which gets articulated in terms of the metaphor of color in Cesaire, “What is mine/A lonely man imprisoned in/ Whiteness/A lonely man defying the white/Screams of white death,” paves way for future affirmations (Eshleman, 92).

Even though “Negritude” sometimes tended to naturalize blackness, it still provided a politico-cultural space to perform the embodiment of blackness. To this end, Cesaire was even willing to appropriate Surrealism, that extreme expression of Modernist individualism as a way of “disalienating” self from the colonizer culture. The “decolonizing” of “minds [. . .] and inner life” in Cesaire does not lead to self-alienation, but ends in reclaiming his African heritage and forging solidarity with the black peoples all over the world (Cesaire, 84, 94). Gibson’s emphasis that, in Cesaire, Surrealism and Negritude were not just “cultural artifacts,” but should be “seen in the context of ‘the lived experience of the black’” points to the revolutionary potential that Cesaire envisioned in this cultural movement (Gibson, 104).

This reinvented Africa breaks with the negativized representations of the black world in the Western aesthetic discourse. In this context, Kim Hall’s fascinating study of color aesthetics in Renaissance England throws some light on the discursive formations within which white supremacist ideology has been constructed and maintained. Hall foregrounds how the cultural/linguistic articulations of the color binary in early modern England were impelled by the material presence of black people in England. This “binarism of black and white [which] might be called the originary language of racial difference” was getting formed in the period of nascent imperialism when European interests in Africa were getting consolidated (Hall, 2). Thus, it became “increasingly infused with concerns of skin color, economics.” The binarism of black and white was not just associated with metaphysical/ aesthetic preoccupations, but “supported an ideology that still continues to serve the interests of white supremacy and hegemony” (Hall, 4).

In challenging this dominant Manichean aesthetics, Negritude resists the non-identity imposed on the black subject within the racialized discourse. As Cesaire points out, “we adopted the terms ‘negre’ as a term of defiance” (Cesaire, 89). By reconfiguring blackness as a term of cultural defiance, Negritude attempts to provide visibility to the cultural identity of the black self, which again, gets articulated in collective terms. In his discussion of the Negritude movement, Abiola Irele defines it as the “collective consciousness of the black writer,” thus emphasizing the centrality of the idea of the collective (Irele, 7).

This highly self-conscious marking of color lines in Negritude is linked to the construction of a political program of resistance. Further, the strategic construction of blackness as embodied opens up infinite performative possibilities. Therefore, the postmodern rejection of Negritude in terms of its so-called essentializing tendencies becomes untenable. Not only does the appropriation of blackness in Negritude occur as a crucial ideological maneuver, but this movement also often aligns itself with the Left, thus locating itself within the constructedness of material history. Cesaire reaffirms that, though Negritude refused to perceive “the black question as simply a social question,” it was very much “a part of the left” (Cesaire, 94).

Yet, Rodney’s fear that the “constricting notion of Blackness,” especially the realization that some extreme Negritude positions could turn into black chauvinism in the hands of the petty bourgeois, is a serious warning. But, as Wynter points out, though Senghorian Negritude began to get incorporated within the dominant white discourse as “licensed heresy,” one of its major achievements, in its self-conscious construction of black aesthetics, was to draw attention to “implicit cultural blanchitude.” In this process, it challenged the universalization of white as Norm (Wynter 1977, 150).

Similarly, Black Modernism, influenced by the black consciousness movement of the 60’s, was another crucial intervention in the hegemonizing agenda of the cultural norms of its time. Ralph Ellison’s appropriation of the color paradigm to destabilize the “originary” myths of the white Christian discourse in the Invisible Man is a fine instance. Here blackness gets configured as a strategically occupied ontological space. In declaring that “my text [. . .] is the Blackness of Blackness,” or in articulating how blackness will “make” or “unmake” the black subject, Ellison is deploying the ontological as a representational counterspace to question the metaphysical, meta-lingual certainties assumed by the dominant white discourse (Ellison, 22). This becomes an attempt to unravel the culturally constructed white mythologies. However, the constructedness of black is foregrounded here, according to Devonya Havis, in how it becomes a “text’ that is “written upon bodies and psyches” and is, thus, open to “deciphering.” ² Further, Kimberly Benston points out that this doubling of blackness as an archsignifier in Ellison (everything/nothing) counters any attempt to see the condition of “being black” as exhaustive of the black experience itself (Benston, 10-11).

The search for the language to articulate black selfhood in the black Modernist movement has always been a complex and intensely troubled discourse as Ellison’s work reveals. Henry Louis Gates’s agonized question, “how can a black subject posit a full and sufficient self in a language in which Blackness is a sign of absence” is at the core of this writing (Gates, 12). A deep suspicion of language steeped in the imperialist aesthetics and structured by its heirarchic binarism surfaces again and again. Ellison’s resistance to the dominant language of alienation, which interpellates black subjecthood, takes the form of eroding it from within in order to open up spaces for self-articulation.

In Amiri Baraka’s “revolutionary theater,” beyond Ellison, blackness becomes ideologically charged. The foregrounding of the collective over the individual in black Modernist writers like Baraka also occurs in resistance to the subjective/individualistic tendencies of Modernism. The Barakan theater is not engaged in foregrounding “habits of presentation and spectatorship” that just “image” cultural revolution. It aims to reshape and revolutionize the world. Baraka’s criticism of the “enervation and mediocrity” of black writing in America lead him to reject its fetishizing of the “learned” and “imposed.” This theater foregrounds revolt as linked to “authentic” blackness (Benston, 32). Tracing the reactionary tendencies of black American literature to its middle-class origins, and criticizing the slavish mimicry of white literary models in these black bourgeois writers, Baraka celebrates Negro music which could still draw “its strengths and beauties out of the depth of the black man’s soul” (Baraka 1966, 107).

While this seems to lend itself, in hasty misreadings of Baraka, to the idea that he is equating blackness with emotion and naturalizing it, Baraka undercuts such simplistic conclusions by stressing the idea that the American Negro is a “product of America,” and thus reinforces the conscious invention of this cultural tradition (Baraka 1966, 111). After all, Bell Hooks’s argument that the identification of the “gut” feeling with blackness (even with the most oppositional intent) could reinforce the stereotypical constructions of Negro experience in terms of emotional, rather than intellectual paradigms remains a caution, especially since, as Wynter foregrounds, “the sign that pointed to [the] nonpossession of [the intellectual faculty] was blackness of skin” in the dominant discourse (Wynter 1977, 152). ³

Again, Baraka’s foregrounding of black identity (“the negro could never become white and that was his strength”) is associated with the desire to move “outside of the white myopia” in order to create legitimate black literature (Baraka 1966, 114, 113). Still playing with the color trope, Baraka urges the black writer to foreground this identity even from within the “no-man’s-land, a black country, completely invisible to white America, but so essentially part of it as to stain its whole being in ominous grey” (Baraka 1966, 114). What comes through powerfully in this image is the manner in which the black at the heart of this whiteness has, however, already “stained” it and eroded its identity. Blackness, which figures as “erasure” within colonialist/neocolonialist socio-cultural imaginary, gets refigured here. Baraka’s articulation of the black subject’s effacement, of locating black self within the “wasted symbol” X (“x humans, x slaves, unknown, incorrect, crossed out”) begins to accumulate tremendous revolutionary charges (Baraka 1996, 68).

In her engagement with the identity issues in black Modernism, Hooks reinforces the politicization of blackness as a crucial revolutionary category in this movement. Therefore, her concern that the Black Power movements in the sixties were influenced by Modernist perspectives, that the ways in which “black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda,” gives way to the acknowledgement of how these movements, nonetheless, “put black liberation on the national political agenda.” While Hooks is aware of how the postmodern “de-essentializing” imperatives often erase the very “grounding which made activism [in the black radical movement] possible,” she still calls for a strategic appropriation of this discourse to counter the tendencies which represent blackness “one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy.” Such negotiations with postmodern identity discourses, in her opinion, would lead to the discovery of black radical subjectivity and its “oppositional and liberatory” possibilities. ⁴

However, the notion of blackness as biological/ naturalized (perpetuated within colonialist discourse—the impossibility, for instance, of whitewashing the Ethiop) repeatedly gets deconstructed within the black radical discourse itself. Beginning from Fanon through Malcolm X and Williams, these radical thinkers have always set black revolt against, and firmly defined their difference with, not only the white discourse but also the black bourgeoisie seeking to align itself with the colonizer class—”the Uncle Toms” Malcolm X talks about, or the “black quislings who betray us” in Williams’s words. Thus, the Fanonian rejection of the black comprador class remains an ongoing preoccupation in this movement.

In Malcolm X, this schism in black identity gets configured in terms of the distinction between the black bourgeoisie identified in the image of the “house Negro,” and the revolutionary “field Negro.” The reinforcing of his revolutionary self occurs by dissociating it as much from the “house Negro” as marking his difference from the white colonialist discourse (Malcolm X 1992, 27). Williams even calls for a “struggle within our own ranks” to eliminate this betrayer of the black cause. Here, the construction of difference within self surfaces via the trope of destabilizing color boundaries. In his imagination, the compromised black subject becomes “an Uncle Tom whitewasher of black oppression and injustice” (Williams 1998, 33, 75). Jackson sees the schizophrenia of capitalist co-optation as disturbing color solidarities and, in the process, becoming self-destructive: “black capitalism, black against itself” (Jackson 1994, 237). He maintains that it is this class, which stalls revolution that must be destroyed.

Further, the language of “internationalism” which becomes central in the black radical movement refutes the notion of black as biologically coded. This discourse of internationalism is able to draw within itself a range of color markings, even as it maintains the binarism of white/not-white for defining its political opposition. Therefore, deconstructing the color categories within the not-white discourse Malcolm X maintains, “Negroes just can’t judge each other according color, because we are all colors, complexions.” And, for him, black begins to encompass everything, “the brown struggle, a red struggle, or a black struggle” into the common battle against racist forces (Malcolm X 1989, 84). Rodney reinforces the selectively permeable boundaries of blackness by showing how in the Guyanese context “‘black’ must of necessity embrace the majority of African and Indian populations” (Rodney 1990, 75).

It is still along these politically traced color lines that Williams’s anguished identification with the interpellated black soldier of the Vietnam War occurs. Invoking this differential identity vis-à-vis the white discourse, he tries to break the Fanonian paradox of the “white mind still imprisoned in a black man’s skin” in order to make it possible for the erring “brother” to recognize his false consciousness and forge solidarity with the black cause: “to die for black freedom, for black dignity, for [black] self” (Williams 1968, 15). That this call also draws into itself the cause of the colored Vietnamese (by exposing the black soldier’s fight against these other “brothers” as unethical) reinforces how blackness here is not at all the constricting/claustrophobic construct which Hooks fears (Williams 1968, 23).

An exploration of the self-fashioning of the black subject, particularly in relation to the figuration of blackness as counter-spectacle in the Black Panther Party becomes interesting. Even as black becomes the condition of self-definition, the conscious “staging” of blackness as a strategy of revolt gets highlighted here. As Huey Newton and his comrades walked in the capitol in Sacramento, California, under the full glare of camera lights, seeking and ensuring media visibility for the cause of the black subject, blackness turned into not only a term of defiance, but also a force which could effectively manipulate and, at the same time, challenge capitalist media power.

Huey is supposed to have instructed his party men, “call the television stations and tell them we’re the Black Panthers,” and also “we’re coming from Oakland, we’ve got our leather jackets on, we’ve got our rifles, and we’re going to walk into the legislature with guns. See what happens.” ⁵ In the context of black oppression within the U.S, the Panthers were crucially concerned with the task of instilling confidence in this threatened section of the population. This maneuver of getting mainstream media projection was effective not only in foregrounding the message of self-defense to the black masses, but it also underlined the BPP’s “show” of its ability to stand up against repression.

In this context, Stanley Crouch’s subjectivizing of Huey’s media image makes him insensitive to the cultural politics within which it was formed and disseminated. Crouch’s ironic invocation of the image of the dead BPP leader: “in his beret, his black leather jacket, his bandolier, holding his shotgun and his spear, hectoring his followers to ‘off the pigs’,” ends in the declaration that “he was less than what he seemed” (Crouch, 10). In dissociating the personal from political, and private from public, Crouch eludes, among other things, the symbolic power of Huey’s media image. It was especially imperative to cultivate this aggressive (and, perhaps glamorized) image of the black revolutionary during the times of FBI and COINTELPRO terror. The popular image of Huey (in spite of its tremendous mass appeal, it also negativized him sometimes) should be examined in terms of this BPP oppositional discourse.

Malcolm X, who was himself a victim of counterintelligence antipropoganda, reveals that these campaigns were organized to criminalize the black radical movement: “America is guilty of image making through the press to justify anything they have in mind to do.” He goes on to show how the press always projects “the Black man as a criminal” (Malcolm X 1992, 21). BPP leaders were also the prime targets of this anti-propaganda. For instance, during a trumped up trial of Bobby Seale, not only was he refused the right to represent himself, but “the country was treated to the spectacle of [the] major Panther leader bound to his chair and gagged in open court.” ⁶ In the face of such terror tactics, BPP made brilliant use of the television, radio, and print media for resisting its annihilation.

The color line politics, which has always figured powerfully at the interface of black/white, dominance/repression discourses, makes any attempt to reduce the black subject’s oppression within the raciliazed Western societies to “class” paradigms simply impossible. This is revealed in the failure of “explaining” black repression in terms of class narratives within both the myths of racial democracy and the revolutionary regimes in Latin America. Within these geopolitical contexts, the privileging of cultural whiteness has been reinforced and actively promoted by official policies through “blanqueamiento” programs. Abdias Do Nascimento challenges the mystifications of this “whitening” discourse—the cultural desire for whiteness being articulated as “purely aesthetic.” He shows how the material conditions of socioeconomic oppression of black people in Brazil get predicated on blanqueamiento politics (Nascimento, 114). Carlos Moore foregrounds the similar restlessness and resistance building up within Cuban black population in the face of blanqueamiento and the official/cultural promotion of the mulatto-white identity (Carlos, 210).

Thus, the ongoing polemics of blackness in cultural representations underlines its significance within the black counterdiscourse. In the brilliant appropriation and reconfiguration of blackness within the black radical movement, black gets configured as an oppositional category. This ideological blackness becomes charged with revolutionary potential. The rearticulated paradigm of “blackness as oppositional” remains crucial within the interpenetrating discourses of race and class, especially because, in spite of the postmodernist celebration of ambivalence and hybridity, the Manichean economy of the dominant discourse still needs to be actively challenged.

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Citation Format

Manavalli, Krishna (2002). EMBODYING THE CIPHER: REVOLT AND RECONFIGURING "BLACKNESS" IN THE BLACK RADICAL MOVEMENT. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness : 1, 1.