In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 Womanist Interventions in Historical Materialism ANGELA L. COTTEN Alice Walker has been a writer and activist for over forty years. Her second novel Meridian (1976) deals with a broad range of subjects, including: African American and Native American struggle, the race/class/gender matrix underlying black feminine subjectivity, Christianity as an opiate of black consciousness, and the critical methods and tactical problems of revolution in America. Of the latter, this paper focuses more specifically on her treatment of Karl Marx’s historical materialism. Meridian is a historical novel interlaced with autobiographical currents of Walker’s activism in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the life experiences of its titled protagonist, it narrates both actual and fictional events of the civil rights and black power movements and probes the concrete textures and nuances of African American struggle. Meridian Hill navigates a maze of sexual and racial inequality while finding her passion and a sense of dignity in civil rights womanist activism. Her feelings of hope intertwined with bouts of despair captures the experiences of many activists during that period. Meridian’s reflection on the movement’s trajectory as a way of ascertaining lessons of value and preparing for struggle in the future was an important moment for activists like Walker who believed that much work still remained to be done. The novel conveys some of these lessons , one of which entails a more critical consideration of Karl Marx’s ideas for organized resistance taking place today. One of Walker’s major concerns in the novel is the utility of historical materialism as an analytic tool of contemporary social struggle, including his conception of social totality and power. She shares certain perspectives with Marx on alienation, agency, and revolutionary struggle . Walker insists that infrastructural analyses are a necessary component of emancipatory protest and signals the importance of Marxian 121 thought in varying ways in the novel. They depart, however, on crucial issues of political economy, like the determining dynamics between political forms such as the state, infrastructures, and ideology and what constitutes capital and power in the modern body politic. The role of the lumpenproletariat revolutionary struggle is another point of difference between them. Her engagement with Marx’s ideas yields insights on multiple levels. Walker presents a scenario of class, race, and ethnicity in America that suggests the need to reconsider (even contemporize) historical materialism as a critical tool of revolutionary struggle. Her critique of fundamental assumptions embedded in Marx’s approach to history and capitalism, moreover, and her recognition of the dialectical character of white supremacy in America, suggest the need to rethink determining relations between the state, economic infrastructures, and ideologies of race in modern society. And finally, Walker’s insistence on the facticity of racialized-gendered bodies initiates an important discussion on how capital and power have evolved historically since Marx’s time. Social class is constituted by more than one’s relationship to the means of production. Walker’s treatment of Marx’s ideas enriches both the Marxian and black radical tradition, which has treated Marxian philosophy since at least W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, and Lucious Outlaw. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois draws on black history to challenge some of Marx’s writings on revolution . DuBois argues that Reconstruction was “the historical moment in the developing world system” (Robinson 1983, 312). Racist ideology foreclosed the unity between ex-slaves and poor whites which had previously emerged as a major revolutionary force in the Civil War, disabling and weakening the Confederate cause. DuBois showed how Marx’s notion of the peasantry as a backward class (in contrast to the bourgeoisie and proletariat) incapable of revolutionary consciousness and action did not hold true on American soil. The revolution had been brought about, not by the working class as Marx and Engels had postulated , nor by the intellectual vanguard, as Lenin had necessitated, but rather by a contradiction between the modes of production and the social relations out of which black slaves and poor white people emerged as a revolutionary force. They deserted the plantations and Confederate armies in what Du Bois identifies as “the General Strike.” The plantocracy was toppled, slaves were freed (nominally at least), and Reconstruction was initiated, only to be undermined by racism. The white working class that emerged after the Civil War could have helped established a proletarian dictatorship in the South, but had no class 122 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT...

Share