A Creative-Theoretical Immersion into Black Radical Intellectual Thought

This post is part of our roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea.

At first view of a book with the title, The Dialectic Is in the Sea, my immediate assumption was that the editors were using a popular Caribbean analytical framework.  Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” (1979) came to mind with its classic poetic declarations of the sea as a repository, archive, or conduit of Caribbean history created via a series of journeys of conquest and the parallel attempts at re-creation. Another well-known articulation through Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics” came to mind, along with his assertion that the unity is submarine. Indeed sea, ocean, and tide metaphors are a strong thread in Caribbean discourses. Antonio Benitez Rojo’s The Repeating Island (2001) offered a theoretical assertion of the sea with the Atlantic-Caribbean interaction as carrying positive and negative history. Ocean and metaphoric representations abound. Some of these have been advanced recently in several ways such as in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016) and more recently in Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned (2020). In “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art,” authors Elizabeth Deloughrey and Tatiana Flores provide a good discussion of some of these movements. But here, coming from the Afro-Brazilian angle of viewing, we see another stream in this ocean dialectic continuity in a rich collection of essays, poems, reflections; analyses that deftly articulate this framework with the Black Radical Thought from the South Atlantic.

Claiming her place in this theoretical aspect of the Black radical intellectual tradition is s concept “transatlanticity/transatlanticidade.” Transatlanticity “always elevates dignity and human singularities, seeing, ecologically, the Atlantic Sea as a means, a medium, and a vector between the peoples of Europe, Africa, and America”.¹ Beatriz Nascimento reminds us that the Afro-Brazilian corpus provides an entire other cartography outside of Old World (European and African) frameworks, which resituates the Caribbean-Latin America and the Caribbean-Brazil as one unit of “New World” spatially. It also reminds us that the Caribbean does not own the maritime analytics either. More significantly for this reading, in the same way that the North Atlantic has been spatialized as one unit of analysis, this work and its titling and indeed its content similarly assert the Brazil to the Caribbean analytic and creative field as similarly usable as perhaps a more generative geographically-adjacent unit of analysis.

A short reflective essay in this collection in the section on “Black Aesthetics, Spirituality, Subjectivity, and the Cosmic” is titled deceptively “Portugal” and begins:

The earth is round’ the sun is a disc.

Where is the dialectic?

In the Sea

It is about the encounters between the Atlantic and the Americas, this time, the Southern Atlantic, which was overshadowed in previous Atlantic discourses that focused on the north:

Parents and nations.

Atlantic – mother

I am Atlantic.  Now I have found a beautiful reference

Some went through the ocean.

Others came from it.

And I am here, I went from it, and came from it.²

Another echo immediately becomes audible for this writer and compares well with the North Atlantic re-crossing which Claudia Jones expressed on her way to exile in London. In “A Paean to the Atlantic” she would write:

To understand your motion

Is to reason why like you

Millions move towards ascension

Nurtured by your ancient dew

Thereby, we can make another connection in the Black radical tradition, this time along gender lines a framework missing from its early articulation.  In “Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Radical Intellectual Tradition,” I engaged the laudable though very male-gendered formation of this intellectual framework, arguing for the placement of Claudia Jones as a Black radical intellectual. So here is another addition: Beatriz Nascimento. This assertion is supported and demonstrated in a few ways in this collection: her involvement with Black political movements for Afro-Brazilians, her engagement with the discourses of racialization there, and particularly, her visible struggles engaging European/masculinized theory. As she engages the work of Guattari and Deleuze, she says:

I always feel that I am writing about myself, but that this myself contains many others.  I write therefore from a collective, about and for collectivization.  I am left without someone else as an interlocutor, this desire sometimes paralyzes production.  It is a moment of otherness, imbued with utter solidity, The solidity of the Black Panthers or of Biko.³

According to the editors, this paper was generated by a graduate class on theory. Because of the timeframe of its writing, it retraces a time also expressed by Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory” (1985), when many scholars spent an inordinate amount of time in workshops, conferences, and reading groups trying to master the intricacies of the language of postmodern theories only to realize that there was a whole other theoretical legacy to which we were also beneficiaries. Beatriz Nascimento was making similar moves and expresses similarly the contradictory tendencies generated thereby.

Thus, we find that the current popularity of the decolonial theory has another precedent in her work. Her essay “Aruanda” is perhaps the most representative. It is an essay that brings alive Fred Moten’s logic of “Black Study” through institutions like the creation of CERNE – Centro da Referencia Negromestica: “To a certain extent, too, the internal colonizer was expelled,” she says. Her critique of European and North American anthropology occurs here as well as for her while these provided cultural details, it was via Black movement that they came “to know ourselves, to decolonize ourselves”.⁴  Thus, she sees continuities available in a deliberate turn to “Central America and the Caribbean” through history, spirituality, and its various diasporic correlates, such as through Black movements. Observable here, as well, is another intellectual collaboration in the thinking of Sylvia Wynter, who also foregrounds the issue of 1492 in which the “great drama of slavery and economic colonialism are the original crime” which has rendered millions across the Americas in what Wynter calls the catastrophe.

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