Ontologies of Resistance

This chapter explores the conflicts that arose between Ferguson protesters and local and national activist organizations, as well as the misrecognitions concerning relationships to, and alliances with, the Black Lives Matter organization and subsequent movements. These contestations of meaning, belonging, and territory, as well as concerns regarding who may speak for whom, reveal the multivalent and fluid conditions and constructions of blackness and gender. The Black diasporic subject is fundamentally shaped by shared loss, displacement, trauma, and forms of political death. However, the ways individuals and groups generatively (and differently) practice sociality and antagonize beliefs about “civil society” are creative acts that draw from particularized experiences across space and time. In this way, blackness is “the irreparable disturbance of ontology's time and space.” The resistance that emerged in Ferguson interrogated the boundaries of Black intelligibility and exposed the tensions and contradictions that simultaneously exist within the ontological totality of Black struggle. The chapter looks at some of those tensions in order to foreground the complexity and contradictions of an ontological blackness.

Postwar Feelings

This chapter discusses the Kennedy administration’s emotional repertoire since it set the tone for youth dissent for the decade. Corrigan examines the co-constitutive nature of hope and despair in the postwar period to understand how these competing political feelings expressed generational and racialized disputes about the nature of the polis, the uses and abuses of power, the role of political institutions in guaranteeing social and political equality, and the role of dissent as an emotional sphere of public discourse. Using John Kennedy’s speeches, Arthur Schlesinger’s writings on Kennedy, and Norman Mailer’s responses, Corrigan suggests that much of the black struggle in the United States has been aimed at producing new political feelings that worked both in tandem and against those being cultivated by the white establishment during the Kennedy years.

Introduction

Describes how Those Who Know Don’t Say uses the NOI as a vehicle to explore forgotten sites and forms of Black struggle that confronted the carceral state during the mid-twentieth century. Reconsidering the place and scope of the NOI within the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in this way expands the boundaries of Black liberation struggles by revealing a more dynamic freedom movement in which objectives and strategies were always contested and debated within communities themselves, changing who we see as political theorists and agents of change, and expanding our spatial lens to include prison yards and courtrooms as sites of activism.

Richard Wright and Black Women

Floyd W. Hayes III begins his chapter with the argument that apart from the figure of Aunt Sue in Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” Wright’s male-centered narratives often treated women characters as objects or props in male-ordered worlds, used to explain the protagonist’s situation rather than their own. Hayes argues that for Wright, black womanhood was marked by abjection. And, because black women suffered from deep, unsatiated hungers and prolonged experiences of impotence, they in turn participated in the stunting of black sons. Hayes concludes that Wright’s view of how alienation is expressed in and through misogyny and sexism and in relations with male characters who feel themselves homeless, limited his vision of black struggle.

Receptions of Rome in Debates on Slavery in the U.S.A.

American abolitionists not only invoked the Roman allusions and comparisons employed by the revolutionary generation’s fight for liberty from the British crown, but also adapted or subverted them in service of the black struggle for freedom. Rather than rejecting Roman society outright because it was a slaveholding society—the primal “Roman error” from their perspective—many abolitionists instead deployed figures and images from Roman antiquity in their own struggles against the despotism of chattel slavery. Supporters of emancipation and black civil rights, this chapter shows, thus engaged in an intense debate over the correct reception of ancient Rome with proslavery Southerners, who argued that slavery in both Rome and America enabled liberty and civilization. Bringing the discussion into the present day, this chapter offers a contemporary example of arguments over the correct reception of ancient Rome in relation to American slavery and the American Civil War.