Primitive at the Plantation’s Edge

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

The Studia must be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an “outer view” which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject … to attain to the position of an external observer, at once inside/outside the figural domain of our order.

—Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism”

As a result of rallies we got courses in “black literature” and “black history” and a special black adviser for black students and a black cultural center, a rotting white washed house on the nether edge of campus.

—David Bradley, “Black and American, 1982”

There comes a time when the only thing that one can do is admit defeat. Standing at the tail end of a Black Studies movement established as part of the articulation of anti-segregationist, anti-colonialist African and African American political and cultural insurgencies, one is made painfully aware of a sort of necessary and inevitable social and professional marginalization structuring the everyday existence of the so-called black scholar. The broadly imagined ethical outlines of even the most valued projects of black intellectualism continue as ornamental, overly moralistic, never quite fully valid aspects of the industry / government / education complex that we decorously name the American University. Accommodated in ever more brightly colored, if distantly placed and institutionally vulnerable, houses, the Black, African, Africana scholastic project has only the most limited means by which it might affect a sort of inchoate articulation. When times are good and the funding secure the history, thought, and culture of the peoples of the African Diaspora might be taken as a sort of reiteration of the central conceits of American and European cultural and intellectual orthodoxy. A single red/brown/yellow/blue face appearing intermittently in recruitment brochures or faculty lounges boastfully reminds us of the meritocratic liberalism that presumably underwrites the basic structures of our most cherished educational and intellectual institutions. More impressive still, the scholar of Black Studies might make great use of an apparently never too tired for service “plus one” account of black subjectivity in which the most traditional ideas of universalism, cosmopolitanism, and western modernity are presumably broadened and deepened through the indication that some representative black individual “was there.” And when times are lean and narratives of scarcity rub harshly against notions of open-minded largesse one might enact again and yet again a sort of hysterically ineffectual theatrical rebellion, identifying the many always easy to uncover moments of racialist hostility and insensitivity that are among the most profoundly resilient aspects of American and European society.

Still, regardless of the modes of attack and address, only the most limited consideration of Africa and the African Diaspora can be discerned within the best supported and most cherished precincts of the human sciences. There is so little awareness of the broad ideological structures on which the various practices of professional humanists are established that it becomes difficult to imagine that we might either critique or redirect basic modes of research and study. Broach the topic of lists, fields, and curricula with the most generous of colleagues and you will very likely be met with a handwringing and apologetic, if firmly conventional, story of limited resources, fixed traditions, bureaucratic obstacles, and the rigid expectations of a harshly disciplining market. At the moment of challenge, humanistic studies are imagined to exist not so much as a complex of ideologies, discourses, and institutions with an identifiable and relatively short history, but instead as an impossibly distant force, almost metaphysical in nature, that we are able to approach with only the most unstable of intellectual prosthetics.

The crisis of the humanities is first and foremost a failure of the political and ethical imaginaries that stabilize the labor that one presumably does as a practitioner of the human sciences. It is the ever more vertiginous social reality confronting intellectuals who approach their work through a sort of willed ignorance of the ideological organization of the Studia. The...