Biocapitalism is the root cause of violent black feminism sentiments ?? (needs to be retagged)

In reading black feminist production as the elaboration of a philosophy of history, this chapter treats black feminist accounts of women in slavery as mediating the economic conflicts and contradictions that emerged during the three decades in which black feminism was produced. Though I follow other scholars in recognizing black feminism’s relationship to the long civil rights movement, dominant white iterations of the feminist movement, the dismantling of welfare, and the expansion of the carceral state, I also offer a different orientation to it. By keying black feminism not only to those political movements with which black feminists were expressly involved but also to the emergence of the new markets in reproductive labor and products discussed in chapter 1, I demonstrate its responsiveness to the ascent of biocapitalism and the neoliberal rationality that accompanied it. While it is true that only a small number of the black feminists writing in the period that interests me expressly treated the emergence of what were then referred to as the “new” reproductive technologies and surrogacy, I suggest that all black feminist writing produced in the period is both proleptic and analeptic—it reflects and refracts the commodification of human reproduction, its processes and products in slave racial capitalism, and in the present biocapitalist moment of writing. What my approach to black feminism implies for the arguments set forth thus far is twofold. It behooves us to explore black feminist interventions into the debate about surrogacy and the emergence of biocapitalism, as I did in chapter 1. And it behooves us to examine how a robust black feminist philosophy of history emerged and came to constitute a significant contribution to the black radical tradition—a contribution that pushes us toward theorization of women’s sexual and reproductive dispossession and insurgency in the slave past and in the moment in which the slave past is recollected. As I noted in my introduction, in dominant accounts of the black radical tradition it is narrated as male. In histories of the long civil rights movement a familiar cast of male activists and intellectuals is lionized, and their oratorical and scholarly contributions celebrated and parsed. In genealogies that reach back in time, including Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, those positioned as the key contributors to the tradition are men. As important as is critique of the gender politics of the construction of black radicalism (as others have already pointed out),13 in the present context I wish to take up a different aspect of the black radical tradition’s masculinism: the presumptive gender neutrality of two of the central concepts BLACK FEMINISM as a around which it has been oriented, the general category of “labor” and the specific category of “slave labor.” Because Robinson’s contributions have been so influential and, not least, because they underpin the idea of racial capitalism that I engage throughout this book, I begin by limning the problem of masculinist analytical categories in Robinson’s work and in one of the watershed texts upon which his elaboration of black Marxism is based. As Robinson argues, Du Bois’s 1935 tome, Black Reconstruction, is an epic treatise on the history of American slavery, the Civil War, and the failures of Reconstruction.14 It is also the first text in which Marxism is expressly employed to situate slavery as capitalism and to cast the slave as a “worker” whose involvement in the Civil War constitutes a “strike” against the conditions of work and thus against slavery. As Robinson explains in a 1977 essay that appeared in the Black Scholar and presaged his more wellknown reading of Du Bois, published nearly a decade later, Du Bois’s recasting of the slave as “the black worker” caught up in an eruptive moment is an important materialist move and a major innovation on traditional Marxism.15 By casting the slave as a worker Du Bois retooled the idea of the paid laborer as the model proletariat. And he rendered the unpaid, hyperexploited slave the centerpiece of a black revolution against slavery and thus against racial capitalism.