Black Reconstruction as a Portal
This piece was written as a cover letter application for the 2022–2023 Black Reconstruction Fellowship at UC Irvine
I am something of a practicing apostate social scientist — one whose aim is to become intimately familiar with the various discourses, methodologies, unspoken assumptions, and animating desires that comprise the western social scientific project in order to be sober-minded about the limits and potentials of the social sciences for achieving black liberation. My interests tend to fall within the broad vectors of the concepts of social change, war, violence, and aesthetics. As I come of age in an age of intersecting big “C” Crises, one of my desires has been to sit still with my analyses and work slowly as opposed to being yanked around by the presumed urgency of the moment. How can we stay attuned to the violent continuities that so often subtend the anemic indicators of “social change” that hold a hegemonic grip upon the imaginations of so many? What happens when we understand “war” to be understood as a structural antagonism as opposed to an empirical event with a beginning and (potential) end? Is “nonviolence” an oxymoron when it comes to the condition of blackness, a condition defined by its symbolic representation as violence itself? What is the form of aesthetics as a terrain of struggle in domains ranging from cultural production to guerrilla combat? These are some of the questions that haunt me in my waking dreams, wandering through the surreality of an antiblack world.
Oxford Dictionary defines the word portal as “a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one.” Portal metaphors seem to abound during periods of acute crisis, perhaps for good reason. But as Joy James once said in a talk, “I don’t believe in dreams that don’t have the possibility of turning into nightmares.” I do not believe in portals that do not have the possibility of bringing us right back to where we were, or to a hazy simulacrum, or to a place worse than we could have imagined. Which is not to say that I am against jumping through the portal — I believe that the high risk stakes articulated by Fanon across his written works are necessary for any authentic upheaval towards black liberation. It is to say that I wish to study dreams while being weary of the interpretive tropes — tragedy, romanticism, nostalgia, idealism, etc — that can overdetermine theorists’ engagements with black practice. So as Frank once said, “Some of my most comforting dreams may resemble your worst nightmares.” I could think of few more capacious or generative themes than “Black Reconstruction as Portal.”
As a black thinker located in the discipline of sociology, Du Bois has been a central catalyst in my intellectual trajectory, peaking with my undergraduate thesis “Du Bois and the Question of Black Sociology,” and set to reach another high point in my dissertation work. My dissertation labors to follow the development of Du Bois’ conceptual thinking on war across a number of historical and contemporaneous contexts. Tentatively, I want to think through how the Civil War, World Wars, and the wars of decolonization had an effect on his thought. As a scholar who primarily deals with theoretical and archival materials, Black Reconstruction is ripe for thinking through Du Bois’ attention to method, form, and creative analysis given the dearth of materials he had access to. In another project, I work with an archive of Cameroonian decolonial resistance where much of the relevant material documents were burned by the French as they exited. I would love to be able to bring in my experience alongside the insights from students and faculty that will inevitably be generated through the seminar. Luckily for me, I am able to learn from a realization that Du Bois came to later in his life — realizing the inadequacy of even the most precise empiricism for shifting consciousness and producing revolutionary social transformation.This is why thinking alongside Du Bois in this seminar will only electrify my other scholarly efforts.
I have had a number of roles that have given me organizational experience. As an undergraduate, I was vice president of an affinity group for men of color that coordinated many events on and off campus. The most rewarding of these was a program for local high school students where I worked to develop a syllabus of activities and field trips meant to smash the “college prep” mentorship paradigm and orient the program towards building relationships and having critical conversations around masculinity. Since coming to UCI, I have worked as a DECADE representative for my department to coordinate events around fellowship and research funding, mentorship, and critically interrogating diversity discourses. I am extremely interested in taking on this position because I now have four straight years of being a teaching assistant under my belt. My pedagogical skills have a strong foundation in the classroom, but how can I experiment with the form of a year-long seminar? If Du Bois taught me anything, it is that I can never go wrong honing my theoretical skills in a range of contexts and with a range of audiences. In this role, I would have the opportunity to not only facilitate but provide fertile ground to nurture students’ engagements with one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. This is something I do not take lightly.
