This essay surveys the writings of Walter Rodney, the late Guyanese scholar-activist, in an effort to elicit a distinctive way of thinking politically about underdevelopment. Focusing on a range of primary sources, including a series of unpublished notes and lectures on Marxism and development theory, I consider how Rodney’s engagement with the concrete struggles of Black people informed his appropriation of historical materialism. An avowed “Black Marxist” working at the onset of the neocolonial order, Rodney suggested that collective human development, (...) the historical expansion of productive and social capacity, had become routinely delimited by racially charged political blockages, the effects of a kind of zero-sum game in which development for some was secured only through the active underdevelopment of others. Ultimately I suggest that Rodney’s work invites serious reconsideration of the enduring explanatory power of the Black radical and Marxist legacies, in this case by providing a rich theoretical framework that can help to orient and sustain critical engagement with the elusive racial politics of persistent underdevelopment. (shrink)

_Offers a new perspective on the political significance of the Hegelian dialectical legacy._.

_Offers a new perspective on the political significance of the Hegelian dialectical legacy._.

Adorno’s critical theory aims to open space for the expression of alternative futures, but its insistence on dialectical reflection encourages at the same time our sustained attentiveness to the psychic and material constraints that may prevent the very possibilities we imagine. In this article, I argue that dialectical reflection signals a location at which transcendental claims enter our thinking and that, for Adorno, such reflection provides a locus for a critically animating interplay between rhetorical figurations of darkness and redemption, or (...) material constraint and alternative possibility. Concerned less with the substance of Adorno’s criticisms than with how his dialectical mode of thinking can be said to shape critical reflection as such, I suggest that Adorno provides a model orientation for democratic engagement in our time and a sobering critical supplement to recent Derridean discourse on radical democracy. (shrink)