Final reflection

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Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

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“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world

Armond R. Towns

To cite this article: Armond R. Towns (2020) “What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17:1, 75-80, DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801

Published online: 31 Mar 2020.

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INVITED ARTICLE

“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world Armond R. Towns

Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, USA

ABSTRACT Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness outside Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new ways of theorizing for the field.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 January 2020 Accepted 27 January 2020

KEYWORDS Blackness; fanon; human; communication; self/other

Like the other contributors, I have been asked a simple question: Currently, where is com- munication and critical/cultural studies and where do you see it going? I want to start this short meditation on the field with a brief anecdote. One recent rejection that I received from a journal reviewer will serve as an introductory point: Reviewer number two informed the journal and me that my research should be rejected based on one of my main assumptions: that blackness was an organizing principle of Western, White life. As the reviewer informed the journal and me, this was an “overgeneralization” of what constituted Western life. Reviewer two suggested that if I reframed the Black as “the Other” and the White as “the self,” then my article could possibly be accepted but only at another journal.

I do not seek to use this example to personally complain about a journal rejection or to even protest the reviewer, per se. Instead, I want to point briefly toward one of the assump- tions of the reviewer’s critique of my own assumption. Whether it is explicitly stated or not, reviewer number two’s assumption is that some are allowed to overgeneralize. The more pressing question for me is not who are the gatekeepers of academic journals (though surely an important concern), but also what is and is not an overgeneralization? Indeed, what is the “self/Other,” as a generally accepted onto-epistemological conceptual- ization, other than an overgeneralization of Western life for much of philosophical thought in the humanities and social sciences?

The questions of this essay are not aimed at reviewer number two; they are aimed at ourselves, as communication and critical/cultural studies scholars. More specifically, I ask, what value does the self/Other continue to hold in our work? This is not to say that self/Other holds no use. There has been critical engagement with self and Other in

© 2020 National Communication Association

CONTACT Armond R. Towns [email protected]

COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 2020, VOL. 17, NO. 1, 75–80 https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801

communication and critical/cultural studies that illustrates the complexity of life outside of Western subjecthood.1 Yet, we should exercise caution. Indeed, Frantz Fanon provides insight into a critique of self/Other that we should utilize more in communication and critical/cultural studies. As Fanon warned us, the self/Other has been reinterpreted in a limited way in a lot of critical work, particularly those studying race; it has been deemed as a mode of sought-after “mutual recognition,” as a way in which to argue that the Other (the Black person, for reviewer two) requires recognition from the self (White) under the terms outlined by the self. If one were to put this into communication terms, the Other can receive recognition via engaging in dialogue, communication with the self, and vice versa.

What a Fanonian approach to communication and critical/cultural studies provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition: on the one hand, Fanon illus- trated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced, overgeneralized conception of the world; on the other, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness outside these Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new ways of theorizing communication and critical/cultural studies. According to Fanon, the self/ Other replicates a celebrated philosophical figure, who complicates the potential of mutual recognition: GWF Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel described fragmenta- tion as inherent in the “lordship/bondage,” self/Other dialectic. Hegel’s theory began with the assumption of recognition, which was to say shared commonality between the self and the Other. For Hegel, like the bondsman, the lord recognized, or acknowledged, the bonds- man, “he” saw his own humanity in the bondsman, and this functioned as a crucial moment in which self-consciousness materialized:

Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self.2

Hegel noted that the lord and bondsman both “recognize themselves as mutually recogniz- ing one another.”3 It is this relationship of recognition that scholars of the philosophy of communication largely figure as a human communicative/speech relationship.4 It is via communicating with one another that we come to mutually recognize one another as human.

On the one hand, Hegel argued that the self and Other come into “mutual recognition” with one another. As Fanon noted, this position often presumed that recognition was one mode through which human freedom was attained. On the other hand, and for me far more dangerous, a simple replication of Black people as the Other reads us into positions that suggest that through speech, Black people can be “revealed” as the Other. This runs the risk of placing Black people as historical actualities that exceed the West’s colonial/ racial project. Put simply, the self/Other can brush over the racial violence necessary to force blackness into the frameworks of self/Other to begin with. Rather than as products of the West’s colonial project, the universal application of the self/Other positions Black people’s subjecthood as a certainty; rather than necessary for the West to position itself as a monopolizer of subjectivity, Black subjectivity was waiting to express its actuality, as the Other, unfairly denied via racism. Here, the self/Other does what reviewer two asked of me: it replicates an unquestioned overgeneralization of subjecthood, as always

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already located in the West, of which Black people are distorted replicants of the original. Via accepting the terms of self/Other, one might argue that Black people have always been Black. We just did not know it until Western Europe “benevolently”/violently revealed this to us.

In her book Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that rather than the Other, Black and Brown people are better defined as the “Others of Europe.” This is no Eurocentric frame, but one that resituates race within its historically violent context to ask why was it necessary for the West to produce something called blackness, brown- ness, and more in the first place? Rather than Black people, those of us who belong to a complex, changing assemblage that cannot be neatly classified, blackness is Ferreira da Silva’s focus, a product of Western (which is also to say US) productions of self/Other as White subject positions, representative of humanness. The Others of Europe are not Others that attain mutual recognition with the self, they are not “always already historic.”5

This is the Other formulated out of racial violence. According to Ferreira da Silva, racial violence holds an inseparable, two-part existence: “obliteration” of the historical as signifier of non-White humanity (what we might call forced assimilation into Western history—colonization, English-only schools for indigenous peoples, and the erasure of African influence on European history) and literal murder and systemic violence, both of which produce the Western self/Other as an articulation of universal humanness.6 Borrow- ing from Fanon, Ferreira da Silva argues the self/Other is representative of humans (Western White people), but only via their potential to inflict violence on the Others of Europe they produced. Indeed, Western humanness is founded on the infliction of violence.

If we do not take a critical Fanonian approach to the self/Other, communication and critical/cultural studies scholars may run the risk of taking for granted the terms of humanness provided by the colonizer—terms that may be positioned as neutral modes of describing our life-worlds. This may place me fully outside communication studies, but I am skeptical that dialogue and/or communication is what is necessary between self/Other and Ferreira da Silva’s Others of Europe to spark mutual recognition, as the communicative terms are always structured on man’s terms of violence. Indeed, if the structures of chattel slavery and colonialism taught us anything, then it is that the West saw its racial violence against what would soon be Black and Indigenous peoples as ben- evolent gifts.7 Further, one’s blackness and indigeneity were a part of those gifts, as Wester- nized classificatory forms “brought Africans, like the indigenous populations of the Americas, into (Western) history” and this “was deemed benevolent for those soon-to- be-black, brown, and red people.”8 While many White people argued that slavery and colonization were tragedies, they also contended that at least such racial violence delivered the Others of Europe the technologies to move them into history, in the Hegelian sense.9

Thus, some were provided racial categories that made them legible (which did not mean human) under the terms of Western man. Communicative and technological forms monopolized by the West, then, were deemed as proof of racial superiority (what I call “technological Darwinism” in forthcoming my book). And because the colonizer/enslaver initially perceived their technologies as gifts for Black and Brown people, there is little to suggest that solely communication (one of the initial “gifts”) will forever transform the structures of coloniality and racism, though it may make many people feel better.10

The Others of Europe require alternative conceptions of communication. The whip, chains, small pox blankets, the reservations, the plantation, the border, and the gun

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(i.e., the multiplicity of racial violences) were communicative technologies that laid the foundation for both Black and Brown people to learn to speak English (and even Spanish)—to begin to think of themselves/ourselves in terms of man’s mutual recognition. Thus, as a Black man, the way that I can dialogue with a person, regardless of their race, is always predicated on the racial violence of chattel slavery—which is to say English was necessarily whipped into one of my ancestors on a plantation, until today none of that ancestor’s relatives can speak anything else. I write and speak in blood, despite promises of the recognition of “everyone’s” humanity.

If the colonizer’s frameworks structure the academic terms of communication, indeed, the practice of communication itself, then we should really begin to have a conversation as to the limits of communication or dialogue to grant us any capacity for mutual recog- nition. If that is the case, then how do we (scholars of all races, but especially Black, Brown, and whatever other color fabricated for us) articulate ourselves within human communication studies? If we are not the self or Other, then what are we? The answer is exciting, yet terrifying: We are whatever we want to be. Fanon is again of use here. In Black Skin, White Masks, he critiqued the universality (or overgeneralization) of Hegel’s dialectic, by contending that violence fragmented his body in “triple.”11 Fanon was not capable of self/Other recognition, but was, instead, the infrastructure necessary for the self/Other to exist in the first instance. Put simply, if the self/Other has a binary form, the tripled figure is the foundation, that third element unaccounted for in Hegel’s terms of recognition. Indeed, the black body does not have “being,” in the Western ontological sense, but is instead the “‘available equipment’ … for the purpose of supporting the exis- tential journey of the human being.”12 Racial violence against Fanon’s black body allotted the shared humanity of different groups of White people, but never between Fanon and White people. It is in the tripling that Fanon will later call for a radical alternative politics of the “wretched,” not based on a precolonial reclamation of a racially pure past, but “in the people’s struggles against the forces of occupation.”13 Often viewed as a theorist of vio- lence, I propose that Fanon be alternatively read in ways that mirror Kendall Phillips’ dis- cussion of Foucault: as a theorist of invention, only Fanon’s invention exceeds Foucault’s, as it begins at the end of the West.14

What if Black and Brown people’s conception of humanity did not rely on Whites “recognizing” us as human based on narrow colonial frameworks? What if a new definition of humanness was based not on whether or not a White person recognizes me—whether in their citation of my articles or by putting me on an editorial board— but on a shared decolonial fight against the overrepresentation of Western man as the human? Saidiya Hartman suggests answers to such questions have always been in plain sight, particularly in mutual aid societies, or groups that provided Black people with criti- cal associations, opportunities, and protections in the first 50–75 years after emancipation in the US. Hartman argues that mutual aid societies were spaces where the self/Other did not neatly fit onto Black lives; further, mutual aid societies illustrated that self/Other could not prevent alternative, Black conceptions of humanness:

Mutual aid did not traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from others or revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty, as much as it did singularity and freedom. The mutual aid society survived the Middle Passage and its origins might be traced to tra- ditions of collectivity, which flourished in the stateless societies that preceded the breach of the Atlantic and perdured in its wake. This form of mutual assistance was remade in

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the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto. It made good the ideals of the commons, the collective, the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the world. The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival.15

Mutual aid societies hold multisymbolic value for Hartman. On the one hand, they speak to Black survival under conditions of violence, which is to say, Black people have struc- tured such societies based on the violence enacted on us by Whites, those who aspire to whiteness, and the state; on the other, and more importantly, they rupture the Western self/Other overgeneralization. Here lies the potential for a new human, never monopolized by one racial group over another, but structured on a decolonial, survivalist fight against a thing called a racial group to begin with.

What Fanonian approaches to communication can teach us, then, are two things, at the least: first, that the conception of self/Other must be complicated when considering Black and Brown life; and that such complications point to the fact that Black and Brown life ruptures the foundation of the overgeneralization itself. Indeed, self/Other is not so much wrong, as much as a formulation of one “genre” of humanness: White, male, het- erosexual, middle-classed, and able-bodied.16 Communication and critical/cultural studies scholars should take note: we do not have to replicate our self-conceptions along the terms of seeking recognition from White people. I find it more productive to think about ourselves in two inseparable ways: one, theoretical (away from self/Other toward comprehending racial violence’s necessity for our self-constitution); the other, radical (Fanon’s tripling that points toward new humans). The call for more represen- tation can only go so far, particularly under our transnational capitalist system, monopo- lized by the same group that works to maintain its status (i.e., more representation can further the wealth of the one percent). Instead, what if we had a communicative strategy that reconsidered recognition on our own terms, on terms that criticized the linkage between Western structures of mutual recognition and correct overgeneralizations of humanity, as per reviewer number two? What if we reframed such overgeneralizations as complicit within the racial (which means capitalist, gendered, ableist, heterosexist) order of things? To do so would not only reposition the theoretical terms of engagement within communication studies, but also ask communication studies to think radical poli- tics. I would welcome such an intervention.

Notes

1. Jenna Hanchey, “Toward a Relational Politics of Representation,” Review of Communication 18, no. 4 (2018): 265–83; and Tiara Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cul- tural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

2. GWF Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.

3. Ibid., 112. 4. Leslie Baxter, “Mikhail Bakhtin: The Philosophy of Dialogism,” in Perspectives on Philosophy

of Communication, ed. Pat Arneson (Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007): 249–54; Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987), 133–50;

5. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN: University of Min- nesota Press, 2007), 6.

COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 79

6. For more on Ferreira da Silva’s discussion of racial violence, see Armond Towns, “Whither the ‘Human’?: An Open Letter to the ‘Race and Rhetoric’ Forum,” Google Documents, unpub- lished article, December 29, 2019, https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LFu8xlLpdoOV 92JG-8jCNJZQQyn5PMR6XczxTww00w/edit, 1–34.

7. Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Cres- cent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minne- sota Press, 2015).

8. Towns, “Whither,” 8. 9. Mehrsa Baradaran argues that, in the wake of racial slavery, the political and economic

figures of the United States used the end of racial slavery, and the “improvement” it suppo- sedly provided, as a reason to deny reparations. Indeed, slavery was deemed as a civilizing mission of the West. See Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10. To be clear, we are not making the case that to challenge Western humanness, one must learn or create a non-Western form of communication. But we are beginning with the assumption that Western forms of communication structure the way many of us can even imagine humanness, and there were material, political, and racially violent processes that make my communication with you possible.

11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008). 12. Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2018), 27. 13. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 159. 14. Kendal Phillips, “Spaces of Invention: Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault,”

Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2004): 328–44. 15. Saidiya Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” The

South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 471. 16. I am pulling the phrasing genre of humanness from the work of Sylvia Wynter. See Wynter,

“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial, 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

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