“Can't Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the

265 Pages·2009·1.12 MB·English

by  Abbie Langston

“Can’t Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the
Black Radical Tradition in the Twentieth Century”
by
Alvaro Andrés Reyes
Literature Program
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Wahneema Lubiano, Supervisor

___________________________
Michael Hardt, Supervisor

___________________________
Kathi Weeks

___________________________
Fred Moten

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Literature Program in the
Graduate School of Duke University

2009
ABSTRACT
“Can’t Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the
Black Radical Tradition in the Twentieth Century”
by
Alvaro Andrés Reyes
Literature Program
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Wahneema Lubiano, Supervisor

___________________________
Michael Hardt, Supervisor

___________________________
Kathi Weeks

___________________________
Fred Moten

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Literature Program
in the Graduate School of Duke University

2009
Copyright by
Alvaro Andrés Reyes
2009
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of “Blackness”
and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century
Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the work of Stokely Carmichael,
Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton in order to delineate a shift within
Black Radicalism which, due to an intense de-linking of Black nationalism from the
concept of territorial sovereignty throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led to the
formation of a new subjectivity (“Blackness”) oriented against and beyond the Western
tradition of political sovereignty as a whole.
This dissertation begins by outlining the parameters of the concept of
sovereignty as well as its relation to conquest, coloniality, and racialization more
generally. I then examine the formation of Black Power as an expression of anti-colonial
sentiments present within the United States and uncover there the influence of W.E.B.
DuBois’ concept of double-consciousness. I then further examine the concept of Black
Power through the work of Amiri Baraka and his notion of “Blackness” as the proximity
to “home.” Each of these expositions of Black Power are undertaken in order to better
understand the era of Black Power and its relation to both Black nationalism and the
Western tradition of sovereignty.

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Next, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, whom I claim prepares the way
for the idea of “Blackness” as an ontological resistance beyond, not only the territorial
imperative, but also the logic of sovereignty more generally. This notion of “Blackness”
as an antidote to sovereign logic present within the work of Fanon allows me to turn to
the work of Huey P. Newton in order to demonstrate his conceptualization of
“Blackness” as an antagonistic subjectivity within a fully globalized society whose onset
he had theorized and which he termed “empire.” I conclude by drawing on each of the
above theorists as well as the work of Angela Davis in order to build a retrospective
summary of this alternative lineage of the Black Radical Tradition and its importance for
the conceptualization of resistances to and life beyond our contemporary society.

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Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
1. INTRODUCTION: SOVEREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS ...................................................... 1
2. Sovereignty, or Domination .................................................................................................. 12
2.1 The Concept of Sovereignty .......................................................................................... 12
2.2 The Logic of Conquest ................................................................................................... 15
2.3 Sovereignty: The Mirror of Power ............................................................................... 21
2.3.1 From the Sovereign ................................................................................................... 21
2.3.2 To The Sovereign Subject ......................................................................................... 24
2.3.2.1 Francisco Vitoria ................................................................................................ 24
2.3.2.2 In Vitoria’s Footsteps ......................................................................................... 28
2.3.3 And Back Again, or, Putting the Split Subject to Work ....................................... 33
2.4 Sovereignty and “The Veil” .......................................................................................... 36
3. BLACK POWER OR SOVEREIGN POWER ....................................................................... 42
3.1 Introduction: The Legacy of Malcolm X ...................................................................... 42
3.2 Black Power: Blackness as “Double Consciousness” ................................................ 48
3.2.1 “What We’re Gonna Start Saying Now” ................................................................ 48
3.2.2 DuBois as Precursor .................................................................................................. 53
3.2.2.1 Double Consciousness, the Narrative ............................................................. 54
3.2.2.2 DuBois’ Unhappy Consciousness .................................................................... 56
3.2.2.3 Critical Idealism and the Talented Tenth ....................................................... 65

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3.2.3 Double Consciousness and the Political Imaginary of Black Power .................. 69
3.3 Amiri Baraka: Black Power as “Home” ....................................................................... 78
3.3.1 “Home,” Baraka’s Impasse ...................................................................................... 85
3.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 96
4. FANON: SOVEREIGNTY, ALTERITY, AND AUTHENTIC LOVE ............................... 99
4.1 Fanon and the Reductions of Manicheanism ........................................................... 101
4.1.1 Ambivalence............................................................................................................. 101
4.1.2 A World Divided in Two ........................................................................................ 103
4.1.3 Manichean Inversion............................................................................................... 106
4.1.4 Manicheanism, Partisan Struggle, and Anti-colonial Strategy ......................... 109
4.2 Power, Repression, and the Black Slave .................................................................... 116
4.2.1 White Master, French Black Slave ......................................................................... 116
4.2.2 The Power of Fanon’s Refusal of Labor ............................................................... 119
4.2.3 Help from Friends ................................................................................................... 122
4.2.4 War and Repression ................................................................................................ 124
4.3 The Dialectic and Black Ontological Resistance ....................................................... 127
4.3.1 Initial Misgivings ..................................................................................................... 127
4.3.2 Substantive Absoluteness ....................................................................................... 128
4.3.3 Beyond Negation, Authentic Love ........................................................................ 132
4.4 The New Nation and the New Man .......................................................................... 136
4.4.1 Beyond National Consciousness ........................................................................... 136
4.4.2 The New Nation and Class Conflict ..................................................................... 141

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4.4.3 The People Themselves .......................................................................................... 149
4.4.4 Conclusion: Sovereignty and the New Man ........................................................ 152
5. HUEY NEWTON: CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, BLACKNESS IN THE AGE OF
EMPIRE ...................................................................................................................................... 156
5.1 Introduction: Huey Newton, Radical Theorist ......................................................... 156
5.2 Founding the Party ....................................................................................................... 158
5.2.1 Beginnings ................................................................................................................ 158
5.2.2 A Nation Within a Nation ...................................................................................... 162
5.2.3 Picking Up the Gun ................................................................................................. 165
5.2.4 The Death of Non-Violence .................................................................................... 168
5.3 Intercommunalism ....................................................................................................... 171
5.3.1 Revolution is a Process, Not a Conclusion .......................................................... 171
5.3.2 The International Working Class Will Be Transformed Out of Existence ....... 178
5.3.3 Nations No Longer Exist ........................................................................................ 186
5.3.4 The Non-State Has Already Been Accomplished ............................................... 190
5.3.5 The World is One Community .............................................................................. 195
5.4 Surviving Empire ......................................................................................................... 200
5.4.1 Contradiction and Cultural Revolution ............................................................... 200
5.4.2 The Primacy of Affirmation ................................................................................... 204
5.4.3 Multitude and the Death of Sovereignty ............................................................. 206
5.4.4 Black Power, or the Power of Blackness? ............................................................. 211
5.4.5 Territory and Community ...................................................................................... 217

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5.4.6 Not a Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 219
6. CONCLUSION: BLACKNESS AND BIOPOLITICS ........................................................ 222
6.1 Introduction: Biopolitics, Race, and Resistance ........................................................ 222
6.2 Some Common Characteristics of the Black Radical Tradition ............................. 224
6.2.1 In the Beginning There Was Resistance ............................................................... 225
6.2.2 Blackness and the Location of Living Labor ........................................................ 226
6.2.3 Blackness and the Production a New Subjectivity ............................................. 232
6.2.4 From Territories to Territorializations .................................................................. 234
6.3 Blackness and the Exception ....................................................................................... 236

Appendices ................................................................................................................................ 238
Appendix A: Black Panther Party Platform and Program 1966 ................................. 238
Appendix B: Revised Black Panther Party Platform and Program 1969 ................... 243
References .................................................................................................................................. 248
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 255

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1. Introduction: Sovereign Entanglements

It was in 1852 that Martin Robinson Delany, a second-generation American
born in Virginia to a slave father and free Black mother, first formulated the
establishment of national sovereignty as the central problematic of Black liberation in
the United States. In contrast to the history of “integrationist” strategies aimed at
bringing Blacks into the fold of American citizenship under the banner of political
emancipation and equality, Delany had concluded that such assimilation was
impossible. Given the social quintessence of the American nation, and its juridical state
form, Delany reasoned that even the abolitionists among white Americans could never
truly recognize or accept Black people as their equals. He was an early proponent of
the back-to-Africa ideal, a program which he briefly abandoned during the American
Civil War when he enlisted in the Union Army and recruited many other Blacks to do
the same. But following the war, the disastrous disappointments of Reconstruction,
and the deeply deformed version of “freedom” it wrought, Delany would once again
embrace a sovereign solution for Blacks in the U.S. From this historical perspective, he
discerned that Blacks in the U.S. constituted a “nation within a nation,” a people
denied their full humanity and subjectivity by their exclusion from the space of state
sovereignty (Delany 1968, 177). His approximation of the Black condition has remained
a popular one, and the political remedy proposed for this predicament has remained
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