Cedric Robinson (Black Lives) by Myers Joshua

Author:Myers, Joshua [Myers, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509537938
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Though important work on individual intellects and the historical nature of slavery and resistance had emerged from this basis of the orders of western knowledge, they could not and would not be synonymous with Black Studies. They could not deal with the fact that “it was neither a sense of racial oppression nor a sense of surplus value which propelled Blacks into revolution and rebellion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” It was rather a worldview that tended to escape the “intellectual structures of western thought.” The task remained instead to understand this history differently, “to construct a Black Studies which contains the terms and reflects the internal ordering of the Black experience.” 69

It was only from these foundations that Black antisystemic movements could be understood within Black Studies. Though Hopkins and Wallerstein had evinced similar protestations regarding the organization of disciplinary knowledge, it is unclear what became of Cedric’s proposal. But this powerful statement was an early window into how Cedric understood questions of Black Studies and methodology. Yet it was not the only such foray into these matters.

Two years later, in an article entitled “Historical Consciousness and the Development of Revolutionary Ideology,” Cedric extended his thoughts concerning ways of studying and understanding Black social movements. The piece proceeds from the premise that western historiography, inasmuch as it is grounded in a scientism that removes other ways of knowing from its project, could not provide us with the understanding we might desire. It was not simply enough to add new subjects to an already developed or developing field. One had to recognize that scientism has “disrupted the meanings ascribed to the notion of culture.” 70 In fact, the very term “modernity” was merely cover for a European experience masquerading as universal. This technology of materialism was a proxy for European culture, a highly rationalized form of power and conquest. It was both the means of colonial subjugation and its intellectual context, “the criteria for perception, analysis, and judgment.” 71

More people had myths than had historians. And, for Cedric, this was not a problem or a gap to be filled. For these very myths provided a means for conceptualizing new experiences, even those signified under the rubric of progress and technology – experienced by Africans and others as settler terror. He learned from African thinkers like John Mbiti, whose study of African religious traditions uncovered that there was no concept of progress as such, an idea so vital to historical thought in consequence of and beholden to modernization. But it was his engagement with Amilcar Cabral that drove Cedric’s point home. Cabral’s revision of Marxism enabled a different kind of vision. What Cedric saw was not something as simple as incommensurability – for Europe also had myths – but a kind of incompleteness when it came to western scientific thought and Black experience. If class struggle, as Cabral wrote, did not unfold in the same way across time and space, it might be also true that class struggle was not the dominant mode of human experience across time and space.

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