Alexander’s analysis of how Black and white capital operate together as well as hetero- & homosexual capital work together in tandem to still produce profit for liberal capitalism globally (specifically in tourism) is a key observation that many Black nationalists in the U.S. miss. Many non-white, non-Indigenous peoples are under the impression that capitalism can be saved, and what is needed is non-white leaders in control of it.  Alexander’s analysis highlights how capitalism profits off of all of the dialectics of race, gender, and sexuality.  It can also profit off of ableism and its liberal philanthropic negations.  Alexander puts what Dean Spade calls “pink-washing” into the context of the colonial historical record and the more dynamic neocolonial contemporary processes. The fetishizing as sexual other (p. 68) in for gay capitalist tourism is the new “native” within the commercialized “queering” of the oriental that is a process of nativization (p.70).  

The questions that Alexander asks at the beginning of the chapter are a reminder that much of the contemporary of hegemony is always in process. Capitalism is always co-opting, so is colonialism.  “This traveling agent assumes his rightful place in the competition between two segments of capital” (p.71).  That adaptive quality is key to our understandings of domination and how hegemony can profit from its dialectic/negation of its negation.  The gay consumer is the construct of the heterosexual imaginary (p.70).  Building a homosexual or gay capitalism provides a new form or type of niche market that presents the opportunity for profit, hence the need of capitalism to present itself as more progressive than the mainstream.

Busia (1985) opens with a very particular description of the signification of identity as a Black woman when speaking publically with wearing items that signify her heritage (e.g. kente cloth). Busia then moves on to state that race as well as gender are colonial phenomena (she refers to this as the master’s voice).  The ways in which Busia signifies who she is are key amidst the silencing of the dynamic interactions of colonialism, gender, and race.  There is an inability to speak within the inability to be understood as well as heard as Busia discusses signification.  Busia’s readings of the colonial literature reveal the silencing of Busia as a West African woman, the native woman is disappeared in early colonial imagination.  “This double silencing of the African woman – her silencing – is presumed silence and the acceptance of her a silence which is a fiction having consequences beyond the fiction itself” (p. 99).  Busia’s thesis, constructed through their analysis of African women in colonial literature reminds me very much of Audre Lorde’s erotics of power as well as Sharon P. Holland’s “The Erotic Life of Racism”.  Busia’s discussion of Blackness within the context of African-ness also brings the colonization of the African continent into context of Indigeneity.  People of African descent are an Indigenous peoples with a diaspora, who’s kidnapping and exploitation deploy mechanisms key to settler liberal colonialism.  This discussion as well as Alexander’s reminds me of the sentiment of the Zapatista’s political philosophy, ‘to seek to destroy colonialism is to seek to destroy ourselves’.  But this means the very destruction of the mechanisms of orientalism and colonialism lies the destruction of the very categories created for domination and we can to identify with under hegemony.  We must be careful of the master’s tools is the message of Busia as well as Alexander.  Power and domination operate in the most insidious ways as to disjuncture you from yourself in every way possible and absorb every reactionary social action.  Through re-reading the Tempest and the story of the Caliban, Busia highlights how silence is created through this dynamic between the native man, colonizer, the native woman, and the white woman.  For me, Busia also represents what postcolonial critique brings to analyses of the master popular literature texts as well as historical texts: there are messages and meanings within silence, there are reasons why and how specific bodies are silenced.  There are meanings in the silencing, presenting people as silent; what Busia refers to as dangers beyond the fiction of the silencing of the native woman.

In analyzing the politics of Cooper, Hopkins, and Wells; Carby (1995) walks through the ways in which these women conceptualized the gendered manifestations of racialized terror.  These women and their political work is key to Black feminist theory as well as the overdetermined matrix of what we understand as domination, also illuminating the inherent ways in which androcentric theories of Blackness fail to erase Black women and perpetuate racialization. Most importantly, each one of these women built their understandings of Black feminist theory within internal and external colonialization through analyzing rape as a weapon of political terror. Carby as well as Busia reveal key theorizations that construct how we understand hegemony through Black feminist theorizations.  

Wynter (1995) starts off the chapter laying out the orientalist story surrounding “modernity” and shaking lose the historical conception of Columbus and the intermingling of peoples.  Wynter asks “in which meaning, for what group, and from which perspective” (p.6).  Wynter, like Carby, evoke miscegenation within their theorizations of European colonial expansion.  While Carby theorizes it through Black feminist intersectional analyses of rape and lynching, Wynter theorizes it through the Metizos of Latin America.  Wynter’s historical analysis grounds the creation of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas (specifically the 15thcentury).  1492 is the point of departure here as the emergence of race to enable the Spanish state to “legitimate its sovereignty over the lands of the Americas” (p.11).  Reading this Wynter chapter has me thinking about where we see race emerging as an epistemic European phenomena and what that does to how we understand how hegemony operates.  These discussions of miscegenation also bring up the context of sexual violence, mixing, racial utopia, and family.  The mestizo, the metis, the racially ambiguous as categories provide a biological slippage in their racialization.  They will always signify the permanence of colonialism as well as its racial utopic vision where whiteness cleanses the races.  Lighter skin and the notion of “we’re all mixed now” signifies the land-bodiness and body-landiness of settlement.  This being difficult because in this understanding, then if bodies are colonized, then so were lineages.  Wynter’s analysis of colonialism and racialization within the context of Judeo-Christian philosophies underlies the importance of a specific kind of “family” and a central nexus of the cultural hegemony of Europeans via Spaniard and Portuguese colonialism.  This also reminds me of Lisa Lowe’s “The Intimacies of Four Continents” and the ways peoples of different societies have come to have tied histories.  But also this complicated decolonization, revealing that getting rid of whiteness is more complicated than we would like it to be. And to contend with what we have lost there are possibilities for reactions as well as resistance.

 I want to challenge myself to re-evaluate what scholarship I have read before this class. How does grounding race in Critical Indigenous Theory change how we understand colonialisms, imperialism, and whiteness?  What does Blackness look like then?  How will the boundaries be transformed?  Questions that I think Kwame Nkrumah tried to answer in “Consciencism” with his concept of categorical conversion, the notion that decolonization requires a complete reconfiguration of philosophical conceptions of human existence.  That these very categories that we have come to be branded with and see ourselves through must eventually be abandoned to move towards a world that has learned from the ancestors and our pre-colonial societies as well as our contemporary experiences to inform what kind of world we want to live in.  Thus requiring a new “ethico-behavioral system”.  

Citations:

Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, ed. by Vera Lawrence and Rex Nettleford (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57 (x) 

Abena Busia, “Silencing Sycorax,” Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989–90): 81– 104 (x) 

Jacqui Alexander, “Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias” Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 66–89 (x) 

Hazel V. Carby, “On the Threshold of Woman’s Era: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory” Critical Inquiry 12, 1 (Autumn 1985): 262–277 (x)