4.2: Key Theorists, Movements, and Principles

Methodological Approach

The methodology for how this chapter seeks to think through abolition is grounded in the intellectual outgrowth of various Africana Studies practitioners. This section of the chapter will investigate the key theorists, movements, and principles that grapple and think through iterations of abolition and alternative modes of being. A few of the key theorists this section will highlight are Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Harriet Jacobs. This by no means captures the breadth of theorists who have thought through and who are theorizing abolitionist work, but instead provides key theorists, movements, and principles the authors situate and engage with while thinking in, with, and through ideations of abolition that directly aligns with the desires and goals of this chapter. The movements centered are varied attempts to abolish enslavement and the prison industrial complex. The principles engaged center  fugitivity, dispossession, and refusal. The richness of the Black radical tradition and varied displays of Black radical performance are intentionally utilized to display the expansive possibilities of abolitionist praxis.

Frantz Fanon 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Frantz Fanon. (Fair Use; author unknown via Wikipedia)

Frantz Fanon, an active insurgent with the National Liberation Front Algeria (FLN), lived and exemplified a deep commitment to revolutionary worldmaking, abolitionary struggle, and intentional fugitivity. As a revolutionary psychologist and theorist, Fanon produced seminal texts such as: The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, and the posthumous collections of letters and essays, Toward the African Revolution. Throughout these texts, Fanon deployed a variety of critiques that cautioned against revolutionary shortcomings; yet, for the desires and interest of this chapter it is most productive to engage in his desire to produce a new human. In our estimation, Fanon’s calls for a new human is a form of dispossession and negation that abolishes the common sense understanding of the human and opens pathways to alternative modes of being. Fanon’s seminal text Black Skin, White Masks, serves as the ideal text to uncover Fanon’s desire for the production of a new human. Within the opening pages of Black Skin, White Masks Fanon posits, “There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential form which a genuine new departure can emerge.”[1] This passage properly positions an aspect of Fanon’s desire for a new humanism, the emergence of “a genuine new departure” through the "zone of nonbeing.” Although, Fanon further details, “In most cases the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell,”[2] of interest here is the claim “in most cases.”  This signals and symbolizes, there are cases where Black folks are able to take advantage of this zone of nonbeing to allow a kind of departure that leads to a new zone of non/being to emerge. Fanon seeks to problematize and critique the Western conception of man arguing,

Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world.[3]

It is of grave significance to point out this critique against man employed by Fanon as it is a critique against the Westernized conceptualization of man, which is a bifurcation and operates independent from Black iterations of humanity. Fanon continues, “Blacks are men who are black; in other words, owing to a series of affective disorders they have settled into a universe from which we have to extricate them. The issue is paramount. We are aiming to liberate the Black man from his self.”[4] Fanon articulates a distinction and draws between the Westernized man and the Black man. Yet, how is Fanon trying to save the Black man from himself, or what is Fanon trying to save the Black man from? The answer to this line of inquiries may be satisfied in this small unsettling passage, “The black man wants to be white.”[5] If this is to be the case, then the “Striving for a new humanism”[6] that Fanon seeks, becomes the pathway to save the Black man from himself. In the chapter “conclusion” from Wretched of the Earth Fanon declares, “Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”[7] Clearly situated is Fanon’s desire for a new humanism, a production of the human that operates beyond, even in contradiction to Western understandings of personhood. Fanon’s mode of thinking is negation and dispossession par excellence. To save the Black man from himself, or from his desires to emulate whiteness, is to negate that iteration of humanity. To dispossess one’s self from that version of reality and tense one’s muscles and thinking in a new direction, produces a HUMAN in full, not just a man.

Saidiya Hartman 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Cultural Theorist and author Saidiya Hartman. (CC BY-NC; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation via MacArthur Foundation)

Saidiya Hartman’s literary canon, which includes Scenes of Subjection, Lose Your Mother, and Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, is filled with theoretical acts of negation, fugitivity and abolition. Previously, in this chapter we have engaged Hartman’s desire to negate the reproduction of Aunt Hester’s beating as an act of intellectual debasement, engagement with Hartman’s text Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments, deepens this work by approximating her role as a key theorist  to abolitionist praxis. In the opening chapter of the aforementioned text titled “A Note on Method,” Hartman articulates her desire for the text observing,

“At the turn of the twentieth century, young black women were in open rebellion. They struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they were free. This book recreates the radical imagination and wayward practices of these young women by describing the world through their eyes. It is a narrative written from nowhere, from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.”[8]

Within Hartman’s desire to recreate the wayward practice of her subjects we locate  theoretical negation, dispossession and abolitionism in praxis. Hartman continues,

“Every historian of the multitudes, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor. In writing this account of the wayward, I have made use of a vast range of archival materials to represent the everyday experience and restless character of life in the city. The aim is to convey the sensory experiences of the city and to capture the rich landscape of black social life.”[9]

Hartman’s ability to cut against the archives’ capacity to silence and render historical Black social life as unknowable is another testament to her acts of negation. Hartman refuses to allow the quotidian lives of these Black women to be rendered invisible by the supposed “power” and “authority” of the archive and so she labors within and against the archives to produce the unknowable.

In an act of refusal and fugitivity, Hartman opposes and rejects the idea of succumbing to the archives’ rendering of Black life, and instead steals the lives of these women, highlighting their brilliant capacity to form alternative modes of being. In this work, Hartman abolishes the archives’ power and authority to erase, silence, and negate Black subjectivity. 

Hartman unabashedly cuts against the archive and the master narrative of urban Black life, which sought to depict Black sociality as criminal, malcontent, shiftless, and unproductive. Hartman stands firm in her commitment to the fugitivity of this project asserting,

“Wayward Lives elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century. The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know. I prefer to think of this book as the fugitive text of the wayward, and it is marked by the errantry that it describes. In this spirit, I have pressed at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.”[10]

Implicitly, Hartman directs us to a fundamental aspect of fugitivity and abolitionist praxis: the power of the imagination and its unlimited ability to make the impossible possible. Moreover, what is abolition work, if not the power to render the impossible possible. 

Fred Moten 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Abolitionist and author Fred Moten. (CC BY-NC; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation via MacArthur Foundation))

Fred Moten, like Hartman, is an abolitionist theorist par excellence.  Black performance and acts of dispossession are a recurring theme in his works of theory and poetry.  Moten is employed at the inception of this chapter to inform that even an object can resist. To further engage Moten’s ideations on dispossession, a turn to his seminal text Stolen Life: Consent Not To Be a Single Being becomes  the ideal entry point to further exploration of dispossession.

“Party over here, party over here, party over here, this party is riotously other than itself. In constant telling us that there’s a party going on, the party is constantly showing us that there is a riot going on.”[11]

A party? Yeah, a party. Moten provides an unconventional point of entry for investigating an overlooked space of Black study— the party. This is  not a political party, as Moten points out, “

This new party is not political. This is the new political party to end all political parties. Like most genuine new things, the new party is old. It’s not the grand old party. It’s not grand, just elegant, and nasty. It could be called a house party but don’t let that mislead you into thinking that house implies ownership; this party is of and for the disposed, the ones who disavow possession, the ones who, in having been possessed of the spirit of dispossession, disrupt themselves.”[12]

A close reading of this passage makes one attentive to the subversive nature of this party: the disavowal of possession, and the idea of the new party that is old. In fact, Moten likens this party to a riot proposing, “This riotous being-beside-itself of the party is kinda like this guy during the second great Los Angeles rebellion who was coming out of a sears in South Central with a massive box of Huggies.”[13] Moten continues,

“The television news reporters, who were reporting on the riots as if it were a party, as if it were the violent birth or birth announcement of the last political party, put a mic in his face, because they couldn’t put the mic in his hand because his hands were full, which meant that he couldn’t try to take the mic, not because he was too small but because he was rocking the party he was in, which meant that he only had time to look into the camera, and say into the mic, ‘I’m not like this.’”[14]

The guy with a box of Huggies in this passage serves as an alternative mode of dispossession. By stating “I’m not like this” he is seeking to dispossess himself from being captured (by the camera and news report) as criminal. Hence, “I’m not like this,” or in other words, I’m not a criminal. Lest we not forget that he is “stealing” a box of Huggies. The Huggies, a seemingly small detail, highlights a large impetus behind Moten’s abolitionist desire. For Moten, the issue is not with the stealing, but with a system that would force a father to have to go out and commandeer diapers for his baby. What must be abolished, is not the supposed act of theft, but the systems of capitalism and commodification that would force a father to liberate basic necessities for his family.

To further unpack Moten’s abolitionist desire, we turn to another one of his seminal texts, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study  where it is posited,

“The undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we ‘take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them.’ The undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal— and the ‘we’ is always the right mode of address here— is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed.”[15]

Within this detailed articulation on the desire of the undercommons, we are provided keen insight into Moten’s ideations on abolition. It is not sufficient to simply seek to abolish the prison industrial complex, according to Moten and the Undercommons, one must work to abolish the world that created the rationale for the prison industrial complex to exist and flourish. Henceforth, in order to do true comprehensive abolitionist work requires the capacity and imagination to build new worlds.

Harriet A. Jacobs 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Abolitionist Harriet Jacobs. (CC BY-NC; author unknown via Flickr)

Harriet A. Jacobs’ life was one that embodied dispossession, fugitivity, and an abolitionist praxis. Born with an enslaved status, Jacobs engaged in tremendous feats of dispossession and performances of alternative modes of being. Within her seminal text Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs provides readers with a keen definition of the abolitionist movement of her time:

The realization of the exploitation and brutal discrimination gave rise to the abolitionism, a major reform movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which sought to end the practice of slavery and improve the conditions of the people of color in the United States. Also sometimes referred to as the antislavery movement,

abolitionism in the United States was part of an international effort against slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic World. The roots of abolitionism lay in the historic black resistance to slavery. It aimed at evolving interpretation of the Christian morality, the ideas of enlightenment which included the concept of universal human rights and economic changes. The early reformers who voiced their opposition to slavery sought to improve the conditions of slaves instead of seeking an outright elimination of slavery.

Some of the antislavery movement advocates supported the idea of a gradual abolition of slavery while others advocated for immediate abolition. By the 1830s the term abolition applied only to those who advocated for immediate abolition.[16]

 Jacobs charts the evolution of the abolitionist movement from a position of reform, to a more evolved desire for the immediate abolition of the inhumane system of enslavement. While Jacobs’ text is instructive for providing an overview of abolition, what becomes of interest for this chapter is the text’s ability to detail Jacob’s performances of constant flight from the possession of enslavement. In the chapter “The Loophole of Retreat,” Jacobs details the crawl space in her grandmother's home, which gave Jacobs refuge and a place to escape capture,

A small space had been added to my grandmother’s house years ago. Some boards were laid across the joist at the top, and between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never occupied by anything but rats and mice. It was a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles, according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor.”[17]

 Jacobs continues,

There was no admission for either light or air. My uncle Phillip, who was a carpenter, had very skillfully made a conceal trap-door, which communicated with the storeroom. He had been doing this while I was waiting in the swamp. The storeroom opened upon a piazza. To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on my other without hitting the roof.[18](23)

Within the restrictions of the nine feet long and seven wide crawl space that was only meant to be occupied by rats and mice, Jacobs found a liberated space, a miniature maroon colony for the disposed. Within the crawl space, Jacobs found an alternative mode of being that allotted her access to freedom and an alternative from enslavement. Jacobs expresses,

This continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I would have chosen this, rather than my lot as a slave, though white people considered it an easy one; and it was so compared to the fate of others.[19]

Jacobs would occupy the crawl space for seven years, opting for confinement over  possession, opting to steal herself away over being stolen and subsequently, owned. Jacobs lived a life that embodied a kind of abolition that animated her quotidian performance of Blackness as a constant state of resistance and negation to capture, objectification, and commodification.

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Endnotes

[1] Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. 1952. xii

[2] Ibid. xii

[3] Ibid. xii

[4] Ibid. xii

[5] Ibid. xiii

[6] Ibid. xi

[7] Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. 236

[8] Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2019. xiii

[9] Ibid. xiii

[10] Ibid. xv

[11] Moten, Fred. Stolen Life: Consent Not To Be a Single Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 188

[12] Ibid. 188

[13] Ibid. 188

[14] Ibid. 188

[15] Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013. 9

[16] Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston: Published for the Author, 2021. 11

[17] Ibid. 133

[18] Ibid. 133

[19] Ibid. 133