#14- Reflections on “Using Every Part of the Animal”
One of the most useful pieces of writing advice I’ve ever gotten was “use every part of the animal.” This means that everything you write can be published or circulated somewhere, so even if you end up scrapping a draft, section, or paragraph of a project, save it for future use.
I was reminded of this as I was outlining the chapters of my next book project. It dawned on me that I had written about the mutual comradeship of married couples before—and sure enough, back in 2017 I had proposed an article on the subject for a special issue of a journal focused on Black love. The title of that article was to be, “For the Love of Revolution: Black Radicalism, Mutual Comradeship, and the Challenge of Gender Roles, 1919-1969,” and the proposal read:
This article theorizes the ways that the conjuncture of radical Blackness, political activism, and statist repression produced gender and relationship dynamics that defied bourgeois understandings of Black womanhood and masculinity. Through an analysis of the relationship between radical Black couples, including Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, Esther V. Cooper and James Jackson, and Louise Thompson and William Patterson, I argue that involvement in political organizing, radical Black internationalist circuits, and “communist front organizations” that rendered them susceptible to antiradical and antiblack repression required these couples to navigate traditional gender roles in interesting and complex ways. They supported and assisted each other through I process I call “mutual comradeship,” which combined love, affection, solidarity, and political commitment. I maintain that even when these couples adopted traditional roles—such as when James Jackson was forced underground after his Smith Act indictment and Esther V. Cooper assumed sole responsibility for the children—the demands of sustaining a loving relationship while surviving anticommunist repression stretched and exceeded these roles. I also attend to instances when the political and romantic dynamics of these relationships required the jettisoning of mainstream gender standards altogether. I conclude with the argument that the ways these couples contended with love, family, and relationships can best be understood not through Black Feminist frameworks, on the one hand, or through theories of Black pathology or deviance, on the other hand, but rather through what I call Radical Black Humanism, which provides an alternative understanding of racialized gender.
Though I did not end up submitting (or even writing) this article, I am nonetheless struck by how long I’ve been thinking about mutual comradeship—and how my ideas about it now are very similar to my position in 2017.
I was also reminded a few weeks ago of how long I think about, work on, and write about ideas that are foundation to my body of scholarship. A colleague sent me a photo from the Fall-Winter 2012 issue of The Diaspora, the magazine published by the UC Berkeley African American Studies Department. I was featured on the “Congratulations” page for completing my Qualifying Exams in the areas of neoliberal globalization, race and Enlightenment thought, and political economy of the African diaspora. One of my position papers was titled “Racialized Global Capitalism, Black Abjection, and Diaspora.” This reminded me that, though I didn’t used the term “racial capitalism” in my dissertation, I’d been effectively theorizing about it since 2011. While I thought I came to racial capitalism a few years after finishing my PhD, I have, in fact, been thinking and writing about it in other language for more than ten years.
Another reason I’m thinking about returns and reverberations in my work is because I am teaching again after two years of sabbatical. Crafting my syllabi was much less difficult because I could draw from courses I had previously taught. Though I significantly revised my Introduction to African American Studies syllabus, I will utilize some of the texts, in-class activities, and assignments from the Introduction to Africana Studies course I taught at Carleton College. And, my Black Social and Political Thought syllabus is a hybrid of the Black Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century course I taught at Carleton and the Theory in African American Studies course I taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Akin to my writing, my course design contains new elements and innovations, but it also draws from the stores of knowledge I’ve cultivated over the years. To be sure, this isn’t anything novel or pathbreaking; it’s simply good practice to use every part of the animal.