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Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013)

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Notes

  1. ‘Duppy Conqueror’ from The Wailers, 1973.

  2. Iton understands coloniality as the recurrent gap of lived experience between the end of the direct colonial rule of Western states over non-Western populations, and the racial deferral of guaranteed citizenship rights and legal protections for non-white populations within Western societies (p. 199).

  3. James (1938) was later republished in 1969 under the title ‘A history of Pan-African Revolt’.

  4. In addition to those already mentioned, see: Balfour (2011), Bromell (2013), Gilroy (2010), Gooding-Williams (2009), Marshall (2011), Makalani (2011), Stephens (2005).

  5. This distinction is inspired by Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of ‘normative Western political theory’, that represents broadly ‘liberal thought’ in ‘general public discussion in all contemporary democracies around the world’ (Chatterjee, 2011, p. 3).

  6. The reference to ‘Duppy Conqueror’ in the epigraph that begins this article indicates the focus, readiness and resourcefulness of the protagonist who considers dealing with a ‘bullbucka’ (Jamaican word for a belligerent ‘bully’), insignificant compared with challenging and vanquishing the vastly greater threat of any duppy.

  7. 1 It’s important to note here that they aren’t alone (see for example Baraka 1963; Cohen 2010; Cruse 1967; Dawson 1999; Gilroy 1987, 1993; Hanchard 2006; Harris-Lacewell 2004; Henry 1990; Henderson 1996; Kelley 2002; Perry 2004)

  8. 2 In an August 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter Belafonte (a prominent Black United States actor with a long legacy of Black left activism) excoriated Jay-Z and Jay-Z’s wife Beyoncé for turning their back on social responsibility, explicitly arguing that (white) artist Bruce Springsteen was more ‘black’ than they were (‘give me Bruce Springsteen and now you’re talking. I really think he is black’) (Zawia 2012). The debate between Jay-Z and Belafonte itself is an interesting example of how black popular culture functions as a space of political discourse for at least three reasons. First Belafonte understands himself as being one in a long line of activists and artists to recognize the political functions black popular culture serve and to both create propagandistic popular culture, and to urge black artists to do so. Second in criticizing Jay-Z and offering (white) Bruce Springsteen as an alternative, Belafonte makes a charged claim about the existence of a certain type of ‘blackness’ that goes beyond phenotype. Third, Jay-Z takes to the airwaves in his response to Belafonte, using the record ‘Nickles and Dimes’ on his album Magna Carta Holy Grail to respond rather than choosing another venue.

  9. 1 Iton in essence abandons the white left and shifts his focus to the B-side of solidarity blues by reflecting on intra-black solidarity and what he describes as thicker and thinner black solidarities. Thicker solidarities refers to strategic forms of solidarity that nonetheless anticipate the ‘transcendence of race’ while disrupting conservative constructions of the relationship among the properties of race, sexuality, gender, class, and nationality. The ‘default position’ of thinner notions of black solidarity, on the other hand, are framed by the realization that blacks remain racialized and therefore marginalized. It represents a foreclosed racial discourse in which unanimity supersedes or suppresses racial complexity, including along the lines of gender, sexuality, and class, for a more homogenous conception of what it means to be black (p. 149).

  10. 2 This is a taken from Margot Natalie Crawford’s introduction to a presentation by Richard Iton, ‘Tricky Times and Liquid Spaces: Text, Play, and Diaspora,’ in the spring of 2011 at Cornell University. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPaVvrYinw

  11. 3 For an intriguing reflection on the film Finally Got the News and 1960s Detroit see Fred Moten, In the Break: Black Aesthetics and the Black Radical Tradition, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 211-233.

  12. 1 This essay is both a critique of and nod to hooks’ important book length works on love—which put forth a spiritually recuperative love-option, one that simultaneously undoes the narrative of white sexist romance, draws attention to the most unloved, and at times reinforces our existing infrastructure of love (romantic consumerist love of power and domination) by inadvertently positing it as ‘wrong’ (and oppositional to the art of loving), rather than generative of different, new, necessarily incomplete (forever), and often unrecognizable, praxis of love and care. With that in mind I note too that my thinking here is, in part, inspired by hooks’ superb essay ‘Loving Blackness As Political Resistance,’ which in my view requires a much more difficult re-coding of what it means to be human than her book length works (see: hooks, 1992, pp 9-20, 2000; hooks, 2004, 2001).

  13. 2 Listen also to: Prince, ‘Love,’ from 3121, (2007): ‘Love is like the sky/you know it never stops.’

  14. 3 Funkadelic (1971) sings: When you base your love on credit/And your loving days are done/Checks you signed with love and kisses/Later come back signed ‘insufficient funds’/Yeah, get to that!/Can you get (I wanna know)/I want to know if you can get to that (hey!) (get to that!)/Can you get (can you get to that)(I wanna know)/I want to know if you can get to that).

  15. 4 cf. Freud, ([1949] 2011); Klein (1995); Manalansan IV( 2003).

  16. 5 I am not abandoning Freud but I am displacing Freud. It seems, at least to me, that the depth of anti-black hatred and the monumental racial violence of the plantation are affective sites and logics that exceed, just as they anticipate, a Freudian frame. Add to this I am certain the stakes of loving blackness were radically outside Freud’s imagination! These racial and affective sites and logics can be usefully analyzed and tracked, however, in a meta-Freudian a posteriori forthrightly Fanonian psychoanalytic (interdiscipline) context, to make sense of the complex workings of white supremacy, racial marginalization, colonialism, and mundane ancestral privileges. Freud, ([1949] 2011), Klein (1995), Fanon, (1952); see my comments on recuperative love, too, at n7.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lori Marso and Sam Tenorio for their helpful comments.

Thanks to Samah Affan and Sam Tecle for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, USA

    Barnor Hesse

  2. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 21208, MD, USA

    Lester K Spence

  3. John Abbott College, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Montreal, H9X 3L9, QC, Canada

    David Austin

  4. Queen’s University, Kingston, K7L 3N6, Ontario, Canada

    Katherine McKittrick

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Hesse, B., Spence, L., Austin, D. et al. Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013). Contemp Polit Theory 14, 377–408 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.59

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