Pessimism collapses into quietism- even if change has been hard the world is now in an age of chaos where resistance can bear fruit

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

But the Harlem intellectuals were so overwhelmed at being “discovered” and courted that they allowed a bona fide cultural movement which issued from the social system as naturally as a gushing spring, to degenerate into a pampered and paternalized vogue. —Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro lntellectual The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider I’m not of the Frankfurt School. One must live a life of relative privilege these days to be so dour about domination, so suspicious of resistance, so enchained by commodification, so helpless before the ideological state apparatuses to conclude there’s no conceivable end to late capitalism’s daily sacrifice of human life to the singular freedom of the market. Yet, in the context of an avalanche of words on contemporary “bona fide cultural movement”—especially movement by the young, formerly enslaved, or colonized; urban, everyday, popular—Cruse’s assessment of the political failure of the Harlem Renaissance rings true. We are in an epoch of social revolution—capitalism hasn’t won, but not for lack of trying. It is both possible and necessary to pass the word that these times too might pass, but not inevitably toward a more secure fascism. At the same time, (passive) counterrevolutionary forces are pampering into being an intellectual comprador class comprised of some of the very people who have been engaged in the post-1945 freedom work to decolonize our minds. The late poet-warrior, Audre Lorde, warned that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As with any theoretical premise, Lorde’s caveat is useful only if the elements whose paring away enables its elegance and urgency are added back, so that the general truth of the abstraction has concrete meaning for day-to-day life. The issue is not whether the master uses, or endorses the use of, some tool or another. Rather, who controls the conditions and the ends to which any tools are wielded? Control is not easy. In the culture of opposition, control, tentative at best, results from risky forays rather than documentable ownership through capital accumulation. Lorde proposes a decisive seizure whose strategy works toward multiple ends. First, Lorde’s focus on tools requires us to concentrate on fundamental orderings in political economy. If the master loses control of the means of production, he is no longer the master. Thus, relations of production are transformed in the process. Second, her focus on the master’s house guides our attention toward institutions and luxury. The house must be dismantled so that we can recycle the materials to institutions of our own design, usable by all to produce new and liberating work. Thus, the luxurious is transformed into the productive. Without both parts of the strategy at work, nothing much is different at the end of the day. In the past decade or so, an astonishing number of people housed in and about the relatively secure luxury of institutions of higher education have picked up the work a few politically committed souls began in the earlier postwar decades. The purpose of the work—called variously cultural studies, Black studies, and so on—had been to try to understand the means through which ordinary people do or might organize, promote ideas, and bargain in the political arena. Such understanding might be achieved through figuring out how people make sense in and of their lives. Activist/scholars pursued their inquiries by studying cultures and “subcultures” as politically vital forces in the anatomy of society. Today’s plethora of intellectuals who think about marginal, or oppositional, or simply non-Arnoldian, cultural practice are often in, or influenced by, literary theory. Sensibly enough, the realm of literary criticism “from the margins,” as bell hooks might say, has focused on a formidable assemblage of neglected letters—both art and polemic—snatched from the dustbins of history by the diligent graduate-student laborers of such Black studies stars as Henry Louis Gates Jr. These texts occasion many reflections: what was said, in forays into the printed page during the last and current centuries, that will tell us what happened and what might happen? How is literary production a political act? What theoretical work might be hidden in a story, a character type, a way of telling? How can the interpretive skills refined through these processes of thought be turned toward understanding cultural expressions that are not bound to the page, such as the various arenas of popular culture—music, dance, movies, costume, language? What are the processes of creating audiences? And, most of all, why bother? Intellectuals studying these questions lay consistent claim to politics as both cause and effect of their work, harking back to the practitioners (themselves mostly still at work) who shook higher education to free up some intellectual and material resources on behalf of the always already excluded.