Afro-futurism’s emphasis on cultural articulations of anti-blackness in trope, image, and discourse de-mobilizes anti-capitalist political mobilization and ensures co-option by neoliberal institutions – emphasizing performance as the terrain of resistance abstracts away from the concrete, material, and political-economic foundations of racial capitalism

(Charisse Burden-Stelly, PhD in African-American Studies from University of California Berkeley, dissertation entitled “The Modern Capitalist State and the Black Challenge: Culturalism and the Elision of Political Economy,” pgs. 13-16)

Even though contemporary articulations of the African diaspora became abstracted from radical enunciations of Blackness, and became a form of cultural critical practice, of mutual recognition against the universality of black misrepresentation and abjection, and an articulation of the politics of identity and representation, the Black radical structure of feeling nonetheless provided the grammar and the pedagogy to critique and challenge regimes of coloniality79 that sustain the trans-spatial and trans-temporal conditions of Black abjection. It created an intellectual map for theories of the African diaspora to reflect anticolonial and antiracist grievance articulated in the conjunctural space of black radical consciousness. Unlike post-Cold War articulations of Blackness, the Black radical structure of feeling inflected a heterogeneous critique imbued with not only cultural, but also structural, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist foundations. “New Negro Culturalism”—the Harlem Renaissance enunciation of Black radicalism—had yet to become the hegemonic mode of theorizing and asserting Blackness, so the project of constructing Black modern subjectivity became inhered in a robust theoretical framework that included structural critiques of capitalist exploitation, analyses of racialization, and the politicization of cultural production.

This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. As Deborah Thomas explains, “Herein lies the root of the epistemological violence generated by the turn to [C]ulturalis[m]... The question of where black populations stood in relation to states... became secondary to the question of how blacks in the West were connected to roots, to Africa... the language of cultural politics... abandons the impetus within internationalism toward imagining political community. It derails a more global political economic analysis...”80 Herskovitsian cultural analysis, which asserted Black humanity and equality based on evidence of African cultural legacy,81 inaugurated the shift from political economy to “the language of moralism.”82 The focus on cultural continuity did not take into account historical conditions of forced labor, racialized oppression, colonial imposition, or capitalist exploitation;83 instead it codified the “assumption that the history and culture of peoples of African descent in the New World have to be argued out anthropologically in terms of an identifiable authentic past persisting into the present.”84 The latter was determined to be the key to citizenship and equality for Blacks. Cold War Culturalism institutionalized the hegemony of antiradical cultural politics by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, “diaspora became reduced to its cultural aspects... the question of origins became a question of culture.” It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies.85

The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized the Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The ascendance of New Negro Culturalism as the progenitor of, and therefore the predominate structure in, post-Cold War theories of the African diaspora is the unfortunate consequence of the entanglements of anticommunism, antiradicalism, and antiblackness. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies. Post-Cold War theories of the African diaspora became divorced from the Black radical structure of feeling and reduced to the Harlem Renaissance enunciation of black radicalism in a manner that does not sufficiently theorize the conditions of Black abjection and their connection to the material realities of Black people.

Culturalism supports the constitution and maintenance of Blackness as a category of economic exploitation and dispossession and racialized abjection in three fundamental ways. First, it reinscribes the Black on the margins of the state by accommodating Blackness in a way that maintains their subordination and subjection on cultural grounds. The foregrounding of the culture, behavior, and performance of Black people leaves the effects of inequality, increased poverty, unemployment, and structural features of the global political economy on Black people largely undertheorized. Thus, on the one hand, deteriorating conditions of Black people globally are understood as innate cultural lack or pathology. On the other hand, it is assumed that Black empowerment and equality can be achieved in the struggle over cultural representation. Both of these positions reproduce cultural specifications of Blackness that negate the role of state and capitalist structures in its production and maintenance.

Second, Culturalism creates the condition for the Black that is inscribed in the modern project to “niggerize”86 radical Blacks who present a fundamental threat to the organization of global and statist structures on the basis of racialized capitalist exploitation. Culturalism asserts a particular outlook, behavior, and set of goals for Black people,87 and those who deviate from these norms that are ostensibly shared by the entire group are cast out. In other words, culture is asserted to rationalize the marginalization of those who occupy the constitutive outside of the state because they have been construed as seditious, subversive, and dangerous. The latter are foreclosed from belonging and are therefore subjected to the violation of their civil liberties, confinement, and deportation. By severely curtailing the possibilities, potential, and forms of freedom of those who are inscribed in the modern project and niggerizing those who are not, Culturalism ultimately functions as a technology of state repression and subjection.

Third, Culturalism has the dual function of erasing political economy as a means of understanding and critiquing the Black condition, and of specifying Black articulations of freedom and equality in terms of culture:

[A]nalyses of race and class began to privilege a focus on culture over a focus on socioeconomic inequality. This had both academic and practical effects. Academically, it supported a liberal view of development that naturalized capitalist competition and that positioned the cultural... practice of middle-class white Americans as normative... practically, the cultural model... directed attention away from the overall political economy of American capitalism and of how it ‘uses, abuses, and divides its poorly organized working class’...88

Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural analysis by criminalizing and disciplining critiques of the entanglements of the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism.89

Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in this dissertation. The cultural specification of Blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of Black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique.