Volume 65, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Black Studies - Paradigm Shifts / Issue Editors: Carsten Junker and Marie-Luise Löffler

“The Current State of Black Studies in the United States” presents the advances and the challenges of the discipline. The perspective of the essay is grounded in the tradition, established in 1915, with the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, and considers the changes since its entry into mainstream academia in the late 1960s as a result of black student activism. The discussion considers recent research and theoretical paradigms, as well as institutional and societal impediments.

This article argues for the necessity, for white scholars, to turn to the study of what I call enslavism, a term necessary to situate current anti-Black practices in the “future that had been created by men and women in chains” (Hartman, Saidiya V. [2007]. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route . New York, NY: Farrar, 233) and thus to critique them as the ongoing afterlife of enslavement, instead of addressing slavery as an event in bygone history. Conceptualizing their work with this term, white scholars may labor to contribute to Black Studies by way of “sitting with” (see Sharpe, Christina [2016]. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being . Durham, NC: Duke University Press) black knowledge which can enable us to produce a critical protocol, to paraphrase Hortense Spillers, of enslavism as the ongoing afterlife of social, cultural and political anti-Blackness in the future that transatlantic enslavement has made. To produce those critical protocols means to re-read the longue durée of humanism in a way that abolishes the human’s ontological reign of life, and of knowledge, based as it has been on black non-existence for the human.

This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, to argue that the positioning of the Human within scientific and political thought necessitates an underscoring of violence as it relates to blackness. This position interrogates how Arendt positions slavery in the Greek polis and the Roman res republica to establish her foci on modern political life. I offer an analysis of Prigg v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , as complicating Arendt’s political dichotomy, by shifting focus to the legal history of US American slavery. Prigg rewrites and establishes the demarcations of US Federal and State law. However, the majority opinion and dissents make fleeting reference to the fugitive slave in question, Margaret Morgan, and the possibility that she may have been sexually violated while being forcibly returned to slavery. I conclude that the contours of this case, specifically the erasure of sexual violence, demonstrate how racial slavery provides contexts to modern political life not explored by Arendt’s primary concern with slavery in antiquity.

This article examines the development of ‘Critical Mixed Race Studies’ (CMRS) as a crucial framework to critically engage with the shift in US racial discourse from long-standing politics of the one-drop rule to a pervasive celebratory multiracialism and its support in the early formation of ‘Mixed Race Studies.’ With a focus on the black-white paradigm, this contribution sketches the preconditions of this academic discourse, discusses a number of its foundational scholarly texts and contrasts them with prominent black critiques. Finally, a call for CMRS as a part of the Black Studies project will be formulated via trend-setting examples.

This article discusses a range of African Atlantic figures whose vagrant and vagabond lifestyles help to broaden Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic. Geographically, the author moves away from metropolitan concerns to discuss the rural and the provincial as key areas to discover hidden truths about African Atlantic peoples. The article investigates North British historical concerns from slavery and its aftermath in Scotland to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire. It takes a close look at the radical Scots-descended Robert Wedderburn, the North-of-England-based circus performer Pablo Fanque and the fugitive slave and wanderer James Johnson. It also discusses contemporary artistic responses to black presence in North Britain by Ingrid Pollard and Jade Montserrat to show how these presences are being remembered and reimagined. It uses the theoretical model of multi-dimensional memory, developed by Michael Rothberg, to investigate the way these historical characters and events are key to the fullest understanding of the Black Atlantic in Britain and beyond.

In this essay, I consider the ways in which the visual representations of four contemporary black queer diaspora artists – Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), James Chuchu (Kenya), and Adejoke Tugbiyele (American-born Nigerian) – constitute, reflect, and challenge the porous intersectionality associated with the concepts ‘black,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘diaspora.’ The essay foregrounds the inter- and trans-cultural processes of visuality in highlighting the shifting terrains of black (African) and queer diasporic concerns that reside and circulate in physical and ideological spaces beyond the Anglo- and US-centric ones. As well, what follows offers the potential for opening up new horizons and nuanced significations within and beyond these categories. The investigation begins broadly by first exploring the slipperiness of the notions ‘black,’ ‘queer,’ and ‘diaspora,’ and then examines selected forms of visual representation that both sustain and disrupt the intersecting dimensions of these ideas. The essay takes interest in envisioning a diasporic future that liberates black queer lives and imagination.

The work of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright provides a unique entry point into an under-studied area of Black Studies: the Spanish role in the construction of racial categories and racially determined practices. My essay examines how Hughe’s and Wright’s reactions to the Hispanophone world were mediated through the issue of race. While Hughes articulates a de-othering or entanglement with his surrounding space, Wright colludes in a historical process of racial differentiation of Spain and things Spanish. Hughes’s writings on the Spanish-speaking world and the 1936–1939 Civil War address issues of race and coloniality and precede current historiography’s recognition of the conflict as a racialized and colonial event. Wright, Hughes’s near contemporary and one-time co-author, provides an intriguing – if problematic – vision of Francoist Spain in his travelog Pagan Spain , published some twenty years after Hughes left the war-torn country in 1937. If Hughes partakes of the Spanish (racial) reality and historical moment, Wright acquiesces in the Black Legend, the exceptionalizing Protestant response to the Iberian superpower of early modernity.

Fred Moten offers a unique philosophical perspective on the deadlock between black optimism and Afro-Pessimism. This essay presents Moten’s “black mysticism” as a philosophy that imagines blackness without Being, thus shifting emphasis from a phenomenology of anti-Blackness (political ontology) to a phenomenology of black spirit (black mysticism). By shifting emphasis, Moten opens up an alternative grammar for understanding black existence and black endurance in a hostile world.