Essentialism and Difference: Tensions and Trajectories in Black Political Thought and Black Aesthetics

Introduction

Beginning with the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay traces back the tension in black political thought between the seemingly conflictual positions of (strategic) essentialism (i.e. sameness of experience) and difference. In order to begin to circumvent this apparent problem, and expose Fanon as the ‘precocious if sometimes perfidious ancestor’ to the post-modern tension between difference and political categories (Sekyi-Otu, 1996:2), the essay begins by showing that not only can Fanon be read as an intellectual precursor to post-structuralist thinking (problematising both dialectics and essentialism) but that his work also forewarns us of the pitfalls at the extremities of post-structuralist thinking (particularly the abandoning of dialectics altogether). The section entitled ‘Fanon’s Dialectical Subject: Strategically Essential’ thus deals with the hypothesis that the subject may in fact be conceived of as a strategic necessity, turning to the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to shore up such an assertion.

Having presented Fanon’s treatment of the subject and dialectics as pre-empting the tension that would later arise between political action and post-structuralist notions of difference, the essay then turns to the work of Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, analysing how they construct ‘Standpoints on the Precipice of Difference’ in order to retain blackness as a mobilising category for political activism based on a notion of sameness.

Though these theorists provide illuminating insights into and criticisms of the premature post-structural dismissal of identities, the essay then discusses how, despite their efforts to incorporate difference into a notion of blackness, black feminist standpoint theory results in a ‘thoroughly Cartesian racial subject’ (Gilroy, 1993:53); this works against the useful insights of post-structuralism which view the current delineations of subjectivity as the product of power relations and discourse, arrived at through history.

The next section, entitled ‘Black Aesthetics are not Black and White: Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy’, attempts to more thoroughly trace the implications of the legacy of these relations of power, detailing the colonial collapsing of complexity and contradictions into a Manichean logic. In particular, it sets the stage for an elaboration of these ideas within black aesthetics, which presents critical ground upon which to launch such discussion and through which the tension between difference and essentialism can be traced.

Finally, the essay applies these insights to the specific works of Kerry James Marshall and Kendrick Lamar, concluding that it is not necessary to resolve conflicting positions within the object or idea if we reject the western intellectual episteme from which racism was originally born. The final section entitled ‘Internal Difference and Contradictions’ assesses the ways in which these complex critical and theoretical insights into the nature of racist relations of power (and the potential pitfalls of anti-racist action) are currently being articulated, with particular regard to aesthetics.

The essay thus concludes that any notion of blackness contains, by definition, contradictory and aporetic positionalities and that the tension between these can be elaborated internally, without a recourse to an outside Other (e.g. whiteness). Instead of jettisoning the category due to its paradoxical nature, however, the essay demonstrates that these very contradictions give anti-racist action its strength in resisting a pervasive and historical colonial Manichean logic which relies upon polarities and binary oppositions.

Fanon’s Dialectical Subject: Strategically Essential

Discussing the role of essentialism in the work of Frantz Fanon merits an investigation into those theories of the subject upon which Fanon elaborates and to which his work is indebted, namely existentialism and phenomenology (from which the former was birthed). Such an endeavour invariably leads back to a Hegelian notion of dialectics in which the subject and object are both continually and mutually (re)constituted (1977 [1807]), and which may be capsulized as the striving to re-establish a lost totality in which ‘the individual’s essential activity is the sublation or negation of the difference between itself and the outside world’ (Bird-Pollan, 2015:27). In his study of the development of self-consciousness, Hegel outlines the process by which two proto-subjects ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognising one another’ (Hegel, 1977 [1807]:184), thus setting in motion the Master-Slave dialectic. This act of mutual recognition shifts toward a moment of negativity, as each subject attempts to comprehend how an Other could understand the subject’s own subjectivity. Such a struggle culminates in the assertion, according to Hegel, of their independence from one another and thus domination over each other in the dialectical process (an inevitable domination as the dialectical process strives toward totality).

A dialectics in which the subject is continually constituted through its interactions with the world, however, relies on the notion of a unified subject at any particular moment, which itself relies on an abstracted idea, essence or image. Such a unification enforces a boundary between the finite (self) and the infinite (world), and it is this distinction which characterises phenomenology and essentialism as opposed to post-structuralist accounts of the subject, primarily that proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1988, 2005). It is not the intention here to show that Fanon represents a nascent fragmented subject as some have argued (Bhabha, 1994, 1999), or that his work is explicitly anti-dialectical (as it surely is not). Rather, it is to show that it might be used (or construed) in such a way as to invite a process of becoming, into which black political thought could begin to theorise the tension between essentialism, difference and political organisation.

In Hegel’s reading of this encounter, it is the slave that retains their agency and freedom, as they come to recognise their (self)consciousness as separated from their body (which is under bondage) and thus it is their recognition of their own agency or choice (Geist) that allows the slave to work. The master, on the other hand, is unable to have their subjectivity validated by an Other, as the slave is no longer ‘free’ to offer such a validation. Given this account, Fanon is often read as revising this dialectic so that ‘the last shall be first and the first last’ in the ‘murderous and decisive struggle’ that is the Hegelian dialectic (Fanon, 2007:2-3). This revision takes place in order for Fanon to assert that the mind of the colonial subject (or the black subject in racist society) has in fact been the location of a kind of mental colonisation. The pursuit of freedom from this psychological colonisation and trauma permeates Fanon’s work, in which he deals with the psychology of colonialism, subjugation and resistance (1982, 2007).

Though Fanon’s work may not stray into the anti-dialectical approach to the subject that permeates some post-structuralist thought (Deleuze, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, 2005; Derrida, 1992, 1994, 1995; Foucault, 1977, 1998), I would like to offer a reading of Fanon that goes further than simply ‘reversing’ this dialectic, instead setting the stage for a revision of the notion of synthesis and perhaps even dialectical thinking itself (and thus later, a revision of the ‘subject’). Fanon appears to reject the notion that an identity could inhabit the space of either thesis or antithesis within a dialectics that strives towards total-ity:

When I tried to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic (1982:132).

He goes on to quote Sartre’s Oprhee Noir (1948), in which Negritude is presented as the ‘minor term’ in the dialectic, as the moment of negativity that races towards a humanism that transcends race. Sartre concludes that ‘negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end’ (Sartre cited in Fanon, 1982:133). The positioning of negritude as an antithetical identity clearly troubles Fanon:

The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is. It is its own follower (1982:5).

Clearly if a dialectic is to be had, Fanon appears to be rejecting the status of blackness or Negritude as the ‘antithesis’. Yet the above quotation highlights the problematic nature of any identity or subjectivity as an ‘antithesis’ when there is a view toward synthesis, as it is always necessarily the terms of its own destruction. He also seems to problematise the motivation behind dialectics, which for Freud (another of Fanon’s key influences) is desire, and which for Hegel is a remarkably similar ‘drive’ to re-establish a lost totality (understood then as a lack). Seen in this light, Fanon seems to at least prepare the reader for a critique of dialectical thinking, or a critique of the moment of synthesis in which a larger critique of essentialism or static identities is undermined.

As such, Fanon’s thought might well be compared to Theodore Adorno’s work on Negative Dialectics, which attempts to find the internal contradictions within the object, bringing these to the forefront of consciousness through critical thought, and utilising the subject to reflect on the subject-object tension without necessarily entering into a synthesis. This undermines notions of identity within/through form (Adorno, 1981; 2008). The opening up of the object to view its internal contradictions (showing that it is thus not a coherent object at all), arguably leads to an ontology of pure difference, as Deleuze contends (1994). What distinguishes Fanon from such post-structuralist accounts is his commitment to the possibility of freedom, which is to be found within the subject. Fanon’s ‘new humanism’ is undeniably rooted in a distinction between the finite self and the infinite world, through their continued interaction in the dialectical process.

Like Adorno, Fanon retains the subject as capable of freedom and agency, a process that is realised through perpetual critical reflection and the rectification of the (psycho)pathologies that colonialism imparts. This critical approach by the subject has been taken up as a core tenet of resistance and subjectivity in black political thought, such as that of Angela Davis (1971, 1982, 2008).

It is clear that Fanon rejected the notion of essentialism as a cultural search for authenticity; he ‘viewed a politics of restitution of lost culture as romantic, nostalgic, and frequently stereotyping’ (Deutscher, 2002:7). The perspicacious Fanon was implicitly aware of a becoming of identity, as opposed to a fixed or static notion, as Bhabha makes clear:

He is far too aware of the dangers of fixity and fetishism of identities within the calcification of colonial cultures to recommend that 'roots' be stuck in the celebratory romance of the past or by homogenizing the history of the present (1994:9).

Clearly Fanon sought to disrupt the stereotypes and essentialised identities which he rightly regarded as oppressive; additionally, unlike some of his contemporaries, he did not attempt to locate an essentially hidden nature with which to replace this. This strikes an important parallel with Lukács’ position (1971a [1920], 1971b [1923]) that the disruption of a ‘second nature’ should not pass through the futile search for a ‘first nature’ (Jay, 1984).

Fanon perceived the dangers of essentialism and consequently moved towards existentialism, in line with the insights of phenomenology and the dialectical constitution of the subject. However, as post-structuralist theorists have pointed out, dialectical thinking itself holds a problematic relation to essence/identity due to its constitution of the object as form through the Idea/image (Deleuze, 1994), its pursuit of totalising knowledges (Foucault, 1991) and it’s privileging of polarities (Derrida, 1982, 1998). Clearly a post-structuralist account of the subject has devastating consequences for a Kantian notion of freedom, which are certainly not in line with Fanon’s humanism (Sekyi-Otu, 1996:46). Despite this, there is an important recognition within Fanon’s work of the dangers of pursuing a total rejection of dialectics (and its construction of form). This resonates with the extremities of Deleuze and Guattari’s own position, which they concede that if taken too far, demolishes not only the static and coherent subject, but life itself:

A body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death (2005 [1980]:162).

Commenting on Sartre’s neglecting of the fact that ‘the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man’ (1982:138), Fanon goes on to seemingly expose the problematic position of being (or becoming) that has obliterated a dialectical position to the point of the subject’s destruction. In terms not dissimilar to Deleuze and Guattari’s warning, Fanon states that:

Between the white man and me the connection was irrevocably one of transcendence... I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning… A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence… Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep (1982:138-139).

The task here has not been to show that Fanon’s work is explicitly anti-dialectical, but that it might be read in such a way as to prepare for an anti-dialectical thinking that challenges forms, recognises the problem of difference (over synthesis and coherency), and which questions absolute or total knowledge. This break down of both the object and the subject into pure difference (thus collapsing the subject-object distinction), poses significant challenges to processes of political emancipation that have to rely on coherent categories (thus eliminating difference) in order to fight oppression. Fanon's work guards against this pitfall of political activism under post-modernism which many black intellectuals have pointed out and challenged. In this way his work may be seen as a precursor to these debates, to which this essay returns. Though this reading of Fanon’s work may be unorthodox, the tensions Fanon has at the very least exposed become a major theme in black political thought, which manifests itself in the aesthetic experiences of Kendrick Lamar and Kerry James Marshall.

Given Fanon’s insights into the problematic nature of dialectical thinking, as well as racial and colonial oppression, the essay now turns to examine whether this retention of the essentialised subject (as understood through the post-structuralist lens) might be better described as a type of strategic essentialism, a notion which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined in her work in the 1980s on the subaltern.

Post-structuralism often positions the unified subject as an essentialism in itself, with the implication that we should move towards new modes of becoming. Despite seemingly running counter to this discourse, Fanon’s use of the subject appears to be a historical and political use of the subject as an antidote in the restoration of ‘normal’ (i.e. non-racist) society, a possibility his work relentlessly invokes (Bird-Pollan, 2015). Despite later discarding the term due to disagreements with its (mis)use, Spivak proposed the notion of a ‘strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest’ (Spivak, 1996 [1985]:214). It might then be argued that such a conception is useful until such a restoration is made, at which point it is no longer necessary and need not be advocated.

Noting that an ‘essentialist identity can be employed for specific historical purposes and then jettisoned when the group’s aims are achieved’ (2013:349), Nielson argues that Fanon recognises ‘something like Spivak’s strategic essentialism’, and that through a reading that recognises this fact, ‘we can counter worries about Fanon unwittingly embracing a racialized essentialist subject’ (ibid, 350). It is not the intention here to counter the assertion that Fanon embraced a racialised essentialism (Scott, 1999), rather that it can be used to counter the broader post-structuralist notion that any image of thought that produces the subject is necessarily already essential.

Hegelian dialectics, inextricably linked to Fanon's work (though the intricacies of this relationship are debatable), leads to a totalised knowledge in which the Idea continually expands in an attempt to encompass the inherent contradictions in the object, as they come to light. Totalising knowledge, however, as Foucault amongst others has shown (1977, 1988, 1998, 1991), is intimately bound up in relations of power. As such, the attempt to establish and elevate situated, particular and marginal knowledges as a counter-point to this process has been a central conceptual problem for black political thought, and in which the continued tension between essentialism and difference is played out.

Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks: Standpoints on the Precipice of Difference

In response to this emerging tension between (strategic) essentialism and difference, which reflected the collision between the intellectual investigations of post-structuralism and a post-colonialism invigorated by the re-emergence (and perhaps appropriation) of Fanon’s work in the 1980s and 1990s (Macey, 2012), the works of Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1989, 1990) and bell hooks (1990, 2000) sought to contain these debates through the discourse and negotiation of feminist standpoint theory. It is useful to explore their justification and promotion of a specifically black feminist standpoint, as they directly confront the task of validating a political category based on shared group experiences, whilst also accounting for post-structuralist notions of difference often used to undermine political categorisations.

Standpoint theory was initially developed by Nancy Hartstock in Money, Sex, and Power (1983a). It ulitised women's specific lived experience and ‘unique standpoint in society’ as the ‘justification for the truth claims of feminism while also providing it with a method with which to analyze reality’ (Hekman, 1997:341). Drawing out the themes of this work further, both Hill Collins and hooks developed a more specific black feminist standpoint and set the task as defining these common experiences in order to assert a common position (Collins, 1989, 1990; hooks, 1990, 2000).

Observing the position of black women as the ‘outsider within’, Collins (1986) argued that this positionality gave them a unique perspective, and that it was through this status that their claims to truth gained objectivity (1986:15), a claim she later retracted in favour of a more situated knowledge or partial perspective (1990). In opposition to Hartstock, who aims to move those who are ‘othered’ from the periphery to the centre (1983a, 1983b, 1987), hooks developed a unique positionality in which validity and claims to truth were legitimated precisely through their marginality (hooks, 1990). Heeding her mother’s call ‘not to lose that radical perspective shaped and informed by my marginality’ (hooks, 1990:231), she asserts:

It is essential for continued feminist struggle that black women recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives up and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony (hooks, 2000:16).

Rather than meeting Hartstock in the centre, hooks states that ‘this is an intervention’ (1990:234), filled with the ‘creativity’ and ‘power’ that can only develop in the margin, she implores us to ‘enter that space’ (ibid:233). However just as Heckman critiques Hartstock for creating a binary logic between centre and periphery mutually reliant on each other (Heckman, 1997), hooks appears to commit the same error, through the privileging of certain epistemologies.

Though hooks is clearly committed to resisting oppressions and creating a more equitable world, her privileging of marginality appears to imply that there must always be some power to be resisted, in order for resistance positions or truth claims to be legitimated. This retention of the marginal position as a paradoxical position of power has the potential to sustain an identity based purely on victimhood, which theorists such as Gilroy have explicitly warned against (1993, 2000). This privileging of the ‘victim’ is often also met with great frustration from people trying to resist oppressions.

The necessity of affirming blackness as a useful position from which to vocalise the shared experience of continued institutional and culturally pervasive racism in the face of a post-structural and post-modern privileging of difference thus came to the foreground in black political thought through hooks’ work. Similarly, Hill Collins elucidates the futility in disbanding such categories as the only strategy in confronting the very real and actual racialized nature of politics:

Fluidity does not mean that groups themselves disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of decontextualised, unique women whose complexity erases politics… Instead the fluidity of boundaries operates as a new lens that potentially deepens understanding of how the actual mechanisms of institutional power can change dramatically while continuing to reproduce longstanding inequalities of race, gender, and class that result in ground stability (Collins, 1997:377).

Radical political thought that seeks simply to overturn essentialism and which is aware of the difference encompassed within certain identity categories negates the history of the present when it neglects the continued experience of marginality and when it attempts to dismiss the utility of these categories as a marker of real oppression and vehicle with which to fight those oppressions. It is true that these categories were initially formed in order to erase difference (a process of essentialism), however, the idea that their preservation is counter-intuitive relies upon the logic and sensibility that internal contradictions (differences) within the signified/object must be resolved (in establishing a totality). In other words, this approach is dependent upon the pursuit of a synthesis within dialectical thought.

As Collins suggests above, political action and radical critique of institutional power gains its strength precisely from the difference contained within these categories. It is by retaining this difference that we can show the categorical distinction to be originally flawed and void, whilst also retaining it as a form of political organising as long as it remains a lived reality. It is not necessary to resolve these conflicting positions if we reject the western intellectual episteme from which racism was originally born. Fanon’s own emphasis on the lived experience of the black man and the problematic nature of the moment of synthesis appears again to pre-empt such discussions, offering a vade mecum towards a ‘lightness of being’ (Fanon, 1982:89) for those committed to post-structuralist insights on the subject, difference and racial oppression.

In order to demonstrate the significance of the tension between strategic essentialism and difference within black political thought, I would now like to present the direction that this dialogue takes within the works of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. It is within Gilroy’s work that the contradiction between essentialism and difference can be both resolved and not-resolved, resisting an intellectual tradition through the rejection of a logic of polarity, or what might well be compared to a Derridean notion of undecidability (Derrida, 1992, 1994, 1995).

Black Aesthetics are not Black and White: Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

Both Gilroy and Hall examine these debates, paradoxes and contradictions through an analysis of black art and aesthetics. As the black body and subjectivity have historically been tied up with politics through representation, they utilise conceptions and discourses surrounding representation and aesthetics to investigate identity, difference and power, highlighting culture as the domain within which radical action and struggles against oppression take place (Gilroy, 1993, 1994, 2000; Hall, 2012). Given this history, ‘questions of culture... are absolutely deadly political questions’ (Hall, 1997:290).

Gilroy explains how this tension between essentialism and difference has distilled into an ‘antagonistic relationship’ between two competing schools or traditions, which is ‘especially intense in discussions of black art and cultural criticism’ (1994:122). He identifies the two positions as:

1. ‘The essentialist view… characterized by an archaic pan-Africanism that… [has] proved unable to specify precisely where the highly prized but doggedly evasive essence of black artistic sensibility is currently located’ (ibid).

1. ‘[The] pluralistic position which affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age and political consciousness... Essentialism is replaced by a libertarian alternative: the saturnalia which attends 'the dissolution of the essential black subject’ (ibid:123).

By pinpointing this tension in such a way, Gilroy is able to show that this ‘false’ dichotomy, presented as a choice between two conflicting schools, is actually the result of power relations inherent in the Western intellectual tradition which seeks simplified answers to complex problems (through the binaries of right and wrong, good and evil). This rejection of binaries, polarities and oppositions is a recurring theme in Gilroy’s work (1993, 1994, 2000).

Though Collins acknowledges the potential utility of difference within categorisation and groups, she does not go as far as to suggest that such differences can be inherently contradictory to the point of undermining the very category itself; these contradictions are not only a result of the imperfect relation between language and things but also the reverberation of the political and cultural suppression of differences inherent in the racist and racializing over simplification of the original category formation. Yet as discussed above, this does not have to result in the jettisoning of the category. Gilroy thus takes the notion of difference one step further in conjunction with a rejection of binaries and polarities, to argue that it is not the notion of difference within categorisation that gives political action such power, but the notion of contradictory critical differences, as such differences undermine the very binary polarity contained within the object, which Gilroy (like Derrida) goes on to assert as the ‘heritage’ of a Western intellectual tradition which is inseparable from its colonial and racist roots. It is precisely this logic that must be resisted (as anti-racist action): it produces obscurity and the further entrenchment of racist paradigms as ‘the opposition between these rigid perspectives has become an obstacle to critical theorising’ (Gilroy, 1993:101).

In a similar vein, Gilroy also warns against the dangers of an identity too thoroughly shaped by the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator too, stating:

The identity of the victim, sealed off and presented as an essential, unchanging state, has become… a prized acquisition… the image of the victim has become useful in all sorts of dubious manoeuvrings that can obscure the moral and political questions arising from demands for justice (2000:113).

Along with other essentialisms, victimhood (as well as its oppositional equivalent – perpetrator) works to negate history through its neglecting of the potential for change (e.g. becoming). This suppression of change is again comparable to the intellectual logic that produced oppression in the first place, and which appears to still be producing a will to ‘authentic, natural and stable identity’ (Gilroy, 1994:121). Further still, it negates the possibility that things can be better (implicitly assumed in any social action) as it inhabits an essential position (irrespective of time or change).

Given the emphasis placed earlier on hooks’ treatment of marginality, it is important to point out here that it would be wrong to assume that the pitfalls of complete marginality (and thus the loss of a Kantian subject) are completely omitted in her work. She states clearly that ‘it is there in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagination is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost’ (1990:231–232). Her over reliance on binaries, however, proves problematic and fails to free itself from the deterministic reciprocal inter-reliance of power and resistance for which Foucault was chastised (Fraser, 1989; Grimshaw, 1993; Hartsock, 1990; Philips, 1983; Taylor, 1986).

The fact that validity seems to derive precisely from one’s oppression predicates truth on the presence of oppression, and it is precisely this problematic conclusion that Gilroy attacks. The logical consequence of this trajectory of thought which seeks to resolve this reliance on oppression (or oppressive logics) is the following; the retention of the categorisation as long as it remains a lived reality of oppression, whilst simultaneously critically evaluating the contradictory differences inherent within such categories. These contradictions, which undermine the very nature of the category, do not result in the dissolution of the category but are in fact its strength within political action. Such a position is able to be maintained once one resists the intellectual baggage that the western intellectual tradition imparts. As both Gilroy and Hall make these arguments in relation to culture and aesthetics, this essay now turns specifically to the work of Kerry James Marshall and Kendrick Lamar in order to further illuminate this point.

Internal Difference and Contradictions: Kerry James Marshall and Kendrick Lamar

Born in 1955 in Birmingham Alabama, Kerry James Marshall grew up in Los Angeles before moving to his current location in Chicago. Given that his formative years were spent in LA, Marshall draws great inspiration from the black power movement. His work, which ranges from recreating ‘classics’ such as Vermeer’s painting of the girl with a pearl earring (Untitled (Pink Towel), 2014) to collages, films and installations feature the black body/subject exclusively, which Marshall purposefully paints into art history and historiography. His portraits of slave rebellion leaders such as David Walker and Nat Turner, with the former dated in its title as circa 1830 (Believed to be a Portrait of David Walker (circa 1830), 2009) reflect a larger movement to rewrite historical narratives, one which has occupied a central place within black political thought.

Through the juxtaposition of images and representations of blackness, Marshall draws out the internal contradictions in the category and the differences that exist within blackness itself, viewing this difference as the cause for beauty and celebration. In a talk at Portland Art Museum, he describes the different variations of black paint which exist, and how he combines and mixes these to continually create new results. These differences become apparent through their own interrelation, rather than recourse to a different Other:

There’s a red black, blue black, there’s a green black etc. They’re at a level on a spectrum that you can’t immediately perceive the colour, but that colour is all in there. If you put those colours side by side the difference between those things becomes clear, because of the temperature of the colours that are there… as a way of establishing distinctions between variety of black you can have on a single black figure (Marshall cited in Portland Art Museam, 2014:Online).

In doing so, Marshall is able to give blackness literal definition, through its contrasting shades, rather than relying on whiteness.

How do you render an object with real volume without destroying the depth of its blackness? … Having chosen to work in the register of blackness, what is the range you’re able to work in? Can you darken something that is already dark without losing a sense of volume?... the challenge is always how to handle the way light falls on a black object without allowing it to destroy the form, but rather merely reveal it. What I do not want is to have a black figure and then have to resort to tracing a white line to define or delineate the shapes in it, or otherwise create detail (Marshall cited in Haq, 2013:32, my emphasis).

In this context then, blackness is given its literal definition by its own interrelated differences, rather than recourse to an ‘outside’ whiteness. Clearly then Marshall has not shied away from the political implications of his work, yet he refuses an essential position within blackness by demonstrating its difference and internal contradictions.

This positionality of self-referring difference (within the group, category, idea or form) is also evident in the work of Kendrick Lamar. In March of this year (2015) Lamar released his highly anticipated album, To Pimp a Butterfly, to both critical and commercial success. It is hugely political and deeply philosophical in nature, dealing with both the internal complexities of blackness and the continuing oppressions faced by many African-Americans in the United States. The interwoven themes of subjectivity, oppression, self-love, ethics of self-care and self-creation, the history of black political thought and essentialism are all discussed on the album, which interweaves a political history and emancipatory call with a musical foray through the legacies of funk, jazz and hip-hop. Due to the nature of the content and the force of Lamar’s argument, many have already described the work as a ‘political manifesto’ with Lamar himself appearing to take up the gauntlet as a black political leader (Mortal Man, 2015). Other commentators have described and praised the ‘real political science dimension’ to Lamar’s work (Lynch, 2015).

In the penultimate track on the album, ‘i’, the song is interrupted by a fight that breaks out in the audience, Lamar states: ‘2015, niggas tired of playin’ victim dawg... we ain’t got time to waste’ (i, 2015), highlighting his frustration with an identity borne out of marginality, and what he perceives as a tendency within black political thought to undermine subjectivity through its reliance on ‘victimhood’ over agency. This suggests that Lamar thinks it possible to critique oppression, and rally support around radicalism without being defined by oppression. To Pimp a Butterfly is testament to the plausibility of such a programme, which relies on a complex and nuanced understanding of the interrelations of power and subjectivity.

Similarly to Kerry James Marshall, the exposition of difference within blackness is utilised as a mechanism for undermining essentialism whilst also allowing blackness to retain a definition outside the clutches of a binary reciprocal relation with whiteness, thus overcoming the binary dichotomies associated with essentialism (Cixous [1976]; Derrida, 1982, 1998; Irigaray, 1985 [1974]) and the Western intellectual tradition from which this emerges (Gilroy, 1993, 1994, 2000); the black Atlantic ‘cannot be apprehended through the manichean logic of binary coding’ (Gilroy, 1993:198). The songs Complexion (A Zulu Love) (2015) and The Blacker the Berry (2015), again testify to this fact. The former highlights the differences in complexion that occur within blackness, celebrating the beauty in difference itself (as opposed to sameness). The latter song, which follows as the next song on the album, takes this logic further in its celebration of diverse political positions as well as their inevitable and inherent contradictions:

So don’t matter how much I say I like to preach with the Panthers
Or tell Georgia State ‘Marcus Garvey got all the answers’
Or try to celebrate February like it’s my B-Day
Or eat watermelon, chicken, and Kool-Aid on weekdays
Or jump high enough to get Michael Jordan endorsements
Or watch BET ‘cause urban support is important
So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street
When gang-banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?
Hypocrite

(The Blacker the Berry, 2015)

Throughout the album it is clear that Lamar retains blackness as a valid political category in response to continuing oppressions, indeed it is a celebration of blackness, yet he categorically rejects a coherent notion of blackness and puts forth an explicitly complex, difficult and at times obscure and contradictory position. This approach does not fall into the dangerous territory that post-modernism has opened up and which Gilroy characterises as the ‘casual and arrogant deconstruction of blackness’ (1993:100). Given the earlier analysis of Gilroy’s work, we see that for Lamar, it is precisely the position of aporia ('hypocrite') that is paradoxically the least aporetic. This idea reaches its climax in a poem which develops at the end of each song, and which deals with the nature of Lamar’s own self-discovery. The poem reaches a crescendo at the end of the album in a conversation between Tupac Shakur and Lamar, in which Lamar presents the following metaphor:

The caterpillar is a prisoner to the streets that conceived it
Its only job is to eat or consume everything around it
In order to protect itself from this mad city
While consumin’ its environment, the caterpillar begins to notice ways to survive
One thing it noticed is how much the world shuns him, but praises the butterfly
The butterfly represents the talent, the thoughtfulness and the beauty within the caterpillar
But having a harsh outlook on life, the caterpillar sees the butterfly as weak
And figures out a way to pimp it to his own benefits
Already surrounded by this mad city, the caterpillar goes to work on the cocoon which institutionalizes him
He can no longer see past his own thoughts, he’s trapped
When trapped inside these walls certain ideas take root, such as going home, and bringin’ back new concepts to this mad city
The result? Wings begin to emerge, breakin’ the cycle of feelin’ stagnant
Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered
Endin’ the internal struggle
Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different
They are one and the same

(Mortal Man, 2015)

Though many interpretations of this metaphor have been suggested, given the historic tension within black political thought between essentialism and difference documented in this essay, and Lamar’s own exposition of black intellectual and political thought, it is certainly conceivable to imagine that the above passage pertains to something similar to strategic essentialism. The caterpillar, trapped within a condition for which it was not responsible, takes hold of certain ideas, such as the notion of ‘going home’, a notion inherently tied to an essentialised position. By acknowledging aporetic differences encompassed within blackness and shedding an identity defined by its victimhood, Lamar is attempting to define a new space away from strategic essentialism, away from the margins and yet resolutely political.

The closing line of the metaphor highlights the necessary contradictions found in the object, subject and arguably in the subject-object (finite-infinite relation), particularly when maintaining a position that both rejects essentialism yet retains categories for political struggle. The butterfly and caterpillar are both different and the same, thus defying a logic of binary polarity, which Gilroy asserts as the legacy of the Western intellectual traditions that haunts black political discourse (1993, 1994, 2000).

Conclusion

Through Fanon’s problematisation of dialectical thought, or the position of subjugated identities within the dialectical process, his work led the way towards a more critical account of the notion of synthesis and cohesion. This resultant tension between an essentialism borne of the dialectical process and the difference implicit in the object has been a critical locus within black intellectual thought.

Though many post-structuralist insights remain profoundly important and harbour clear implications for anti-racist action, for instance the refusal of a coherent subject, the rejection of totalising knowledges and the problematisation of the dialectical process, the predominance of difference (particularly when viewed as an ontology) has at times worked to undermine anti-racist theorising and activism. This tension in itself does not necessitate a simple response, as political categories are inherently flawed by aporetic differences, even though they may at the same time be buoyed by a seemingly paradoxical sameness of experience. As bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins have made clear, we cannot erase politics through a notion of fluidity.

Through the work on black aesthetics and in particular Paul Gilroy, we have seen that it is precisely this paradoxical position that garners strength for an anti-racist activism that rejects binaries and essentialism. Such contradictions must only be resolved within a paradigm that is already flawed as these are the terms in which this contradiction is constructed. Racism is, therefore, inherently paradoxical and contradictory within its own paradigm. The search for a static and coherent notion of self, arguably the most profound legacy of the enlightenment, confuses political action today.

A progressive and emancipatory position which encompasses the position outlined above has been taken up within black aesthetics, particularly in the works of Kerry James Marshall and Kendrick Lamar. One working in the medium of colours, textures and shapes and the other in words, beats and bars, they both expose the necessity for complexity, difference and contradictions in the articulation of an experience of oppression still centred around blackness.

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