Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd Christian Olbey This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Christian. On an afternoon in April 2000, one of the more remarkable convocation ceremonies of this year, or any year for that matter, took place at Antioch University’s graduation proceedings. The ceremony was noteworthy both for its choice of commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former Black Panther Minister of Information currently sitting on death row in a US prison), and for the latter’s call to commit “class suicide” as the explicit theme of his address. Abu-Jamal states that this topic is in response to the graduating class’s “proposed query about an individual’s impact on the world” (Abu-Jamal and Kissinger 3). He names several figures (Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Y. Davis) who should appear on any “logical” list of people we admire for having impacted our world. Abu-Jamal then locates the common and decisive characteristic of these figures neither in race nor in their shared commitment to leftist politics. The tie that binds these figures together is the fact that each, within his or her specific historical context, chooses the decisive practice of class suicide: “when you look at these people, you find folks who committed class suicide, who turned their backs on the acquired class advantages and potential opportunities to give voice and supportive presence to the most oppressed sectors of their society” (3). He fleshes out this thesis by explaining how each of these figures consciously sacrificed individual and material comforts, objects, and opportunities consistent with their privileged class location in order to work for the liberation Du Bois of the most oppressed groups, communities, and classes of their respective societies. “We admire these people,” says Abu-Jamal to this audience bursting at the seams with class privilege, “because at critical junctures of their lives, they cast their lot with the oppressed, the poor, the worker, or those in the third world” (4). C. Clark Kissinger notes that, at the end of the address, an audience of over a thousand Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 152 “gave a prolonged standing ovation to Mumia’s remarks” (2). Although not specifically addressed to Black intellectuals and cultural producers, Abu-Jamal’s call does resonate with recent developments in Black Studies, as noted by Jeff Sharlett in his article “Taking Black Studies Back to the Streets.” Sharlett speaks of a change in direction in what he calls the “new black studies,” which has turned away from preoccupation with what Manning Marable calls the “postmodern sensation within academe—‘esoterica ’ that obscured the day to day brutalization of black people” (Marable qtd. in Sharlett 2). Confronting the hardly paradoxical fact that “while black studies was gaining legitimacy in the white world of academe, it was losing ground in the black communities from which it sprang” (2), Sharlett observes that the new Black Studies is re-orienting itself around much more activist lines and issues such as police brutality, the rise in incarceration rates, reparations for the descendants of slaves, and so on. “Key to the revitalized black studies of the last few years,” says Sharlett, speaking of work now appearing on black figures such as Ella Baker and Robert F. Williams (the Black militant who, in the 1950s, advocated armed self-defence against the Ku Klux Klan), “has been an emphasis not only on activism now and in the future, but also in the past” (Sharlett 5). I suggest that Abu-Jamal’s emphasis on class suicide and Sharlett’s identification of the progressive turn in black studies form an intersection of crucial importance to the further development of Black Canadian cultural studies. This essay takes advantage of the double emphasis on class suicide and the question of insurgent intellectual praxis to contribute to the recuperation of an early Black Canadian example of both in the figure of Mary Ann Shadd, the truly remarkable woman who carried the struggle against American slavery into...