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the concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. on the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope—reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change. above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and his life as one piece. —huey newton1 we didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world. —jim jones’ last recorded words2 6 To Die for the Peoples Temple Religion and Revolution after Black Power duchess harris and adam john waterman Although citizens of the First World commonly think of the 1960s as the decade of youthful rebellion, Civil Rights struggle, pop cultural explosion, and anti-war agitation, for our purposes it is necessary to reassert the overriding significance of Third World anticolonial revolutions in giving shape to the many popular rebellions of the era and to the global politics of subsequent generations. As Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, a vision of global class revolution led by oppressed people of color was “not an outgrowth of the civil rights movement’s failures but existed alongside, sometimes in tension with, the movement’s main ideas.”3 The anti-colonial movement that swept through Africa and Asia, and that brought socialist governments to power in different locales throughout Latin America, was part and parcel of the geopolitical restructurings of the post-war era, indicative of the political and economic instability of the European powers and of the new non-viability of overt white supremacist or Eurocentric ideologies in the wake of Nazi Aryanism. As it is all too easy to lapse into uncritical readings of this moment in political history, it is important to engage this context of revolutionary change as one borne by the particular, located, social interactions between people. It is a moment in which people, in their daily lives, labor to bring about new social and political relations, grounded in notions of economic equality and racial justice. It is also a moment in which people struggle to understand their relationships to each other and to the forces that are reshaping the world—a moment in which people imagine themselves in global perspective. Such were the labors of subjects throughout the African diaspora as blacks around the world began to imagine them- 104 harris and waterman selves in critical relation to each other. It is in these labors of cognitive mapping that we want to situate the work of Peoples Temple. In this chapter, we assert that the participation of people in Peoples Temple was predicated upon the Temple’s attempts to integrate a new cosmology that responded to both the failures and the successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States and to the emerging post-colonial order throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Peoples Temple, as a religious and political project, helped to give meaning to the world that was quickly emerging, and to position collective agency as a lever for progressive change. We substantiate this argument by examining the multiple forms of meaning and meaning-making in which the Temple was actively engaged . This takes the form of a general examination of the political discourses of leftist organizations in the late 1960s and 1970s, focusing particularly on the work of the Black Panther Party and the contradictions bred of the party’s emphasis on personal and communal empowerment in juxtaposition with its conscious development of a “cult of personality” surrounding Huey P. Newton. We then move into a historical analysis of the transformations in the post-war global racial and economic order that were facilitated by, and conducive to, greater black participation in new political spheres. Particularly, we are concerned with the significance of the early 1970s as the historical moment in which post-colonial projects are giving way to neo-colonial enterprises and progressive attempts to dismantle the colonial state are displaced in favor of the hegemony of First World capital. We also examine Jim Jones’ use of Black Power rhetoric in his sermons to the Peoples Temple community. We analyze his words for all their suggestive appeal to black people who are actively engaged in a project of making meaning out of the tense and contradictory nature of the historical present, and who are working to project themselves, psychically and socially, into new global concerns. Finally, it...

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