James Chiyoki Ikeda, "“The Intimate Face of Universal Struggle”: June Jordan’s Search for a Shared Liberatory Project in a Time of Apocalyptic Crisis"
My paper traces the development of poet and educator June Jordan’s conceptualization of a shared, global liberatory project blending antiracism with anti-imperialism—her vision, that is, of universal liberation—between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s. During this period, Jordan frequently used the word apocalyptic to describe conditions both within the United States and globally, and her vision of universal liberation was shaped fundamentally by her perception of this apocalyptic context and the overlapping crises that constituted it.
I argue that Jordan’s understanding of crisis and the liberatory vision arrayed against it led her to embrace a binary conception of global political struggle and a coalitional politics which enabled her to think expansively about solidarity across many different categories of difference. She ultimately came to see a shared global ‘enemy’ in imperial white male supremacy and a shared end-goal of self-respect and self-determination for the racialized, imperialized global majority, expanding her application of the idioms of American race politics to the so-called Third World.
At the same time, this group-based coalitional thinking was undermined by Jordan’s need to reconcile the utter uniqueness of the individual with politically meaningful groupings like race, gender, nation, and sexual orientation, especially in a world marked by imperial hierarchy. Thus, at the root of her political thinking was a desire to ground collective political identities in something substantive and politically operable without subsuming the individual, whose full existence always cuts across those identities in untidy way. This was the political task Jordan faced as she worked through how to respond to what she saw as an apocalyptic crisis.
My paper will provide direction for people today who are grappling with the strategic question of how to advance collective political struggle against crisis conditions without eliding the individual who is never reducible to their political group identities.
Ki'Amber Thompson, "Emerging Abolitionist Infrastructures of Feeling In and Beyond Times of Crisis"
What do abolition geographies feel like? What are the affective states, or feelings, that maintain carceral geographies? What affective states do we need to attune to in order to make abolition geographies? How can we emerge abolitionist infrastructures of feeling in and beyond times of crisis? This paper explores how we might attune to potentially liberatory affective states that emerge in times of crisis and beyond times of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic put the state in crisis, and this crisis exposed vulnerabilities of the state, leading people to call for change. The experience of the pandemic and the affective states it created (loss, rage, uncertainty, fear, stillness, clarity, suffocation, etc.) created an opening, an opportunity for liberatory transformation to occur. The COVID-19 pandemic was/is a crisis that came together with the ongoing crisis of police killings of Black people, emerging an abolitionist structure of feeling, where abolition became more thinkable for a broader population and thus more possible. This paper draws upon a queer Black feminist affect theory to inquire beyond the limits of our visual imaginations in making abolition geographies. This paper moves beyond the prioritization of the visual over other ways of knowing and takes us through a sensuous exploration of our capacities to feel with all of our senses to exceed the limits of our imagination that prioritize the visual field. Thinking with the affect theory concept of infrastructure of feeling, this paper examines ordinary or everyday affective energies toward growing our capacities to imagine and practice abolition geographies in and beyond times of crisis.
Jessica Wright, "Bending Toward Gender Equality: Women’s Evolving Roles in the Black Panther Party, 1968-1971"
This paper examines women’s complex roles in the Black Panther Party (BPP). While the BPP’s ideology was egalitarian because of its socialist leanings, female Panthers experienced gender discrimination. Between 1968 and 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) struggled to resolve the gender discrimination that female Panthers experienced. Through party policies, actions, and ideology, male and female Panthers both perpetuated the BPP’s male-centered environment and enacted reform. This paper argues Panthers Linda Greene and Kathleen Cleaver’s descriptions of women’s roles in the BPP demonstrated the party’s changing stance on gender equality.
First, I examine Greene’s 1968 article, “The Black Revolutionary Woman,” in The Black Panther newspaper. Greene’s definition of Black gender roles against U.S. societal expectations exemplified the complexity of the nascent BPP’s views of Black women. Although Greene depicted the ideal Black woman as a self-sacrificing assistant and a sexual object, Greene also reflected the BPP’s egalitarian, socialist ideology. Greene described Black women with masculine adjectives and their equal capacity to be revolutionaries.
By 1971, the BPP began coalition efforts with the women’s liberation movement, renounced the Black nationalist argument for reclaiming masculinity, and implemented internal reforms. I discuss how Kathleen Cleaver’s 1971 interview with The Black Scholar demonstrated the extent of the BPP’s reformative policies and actions on the issue of female party roles. Cleaver articulated the BPP’s motivations for enacting gender equality reform, the party’s rejection of Black women’s subservience, and the discrimination female Panthers faced. By detailing inequalities and stressing women’s roles as mothers, Cleaver showed that the BPP did not fully eradicate sexism by 1971.
Despite the BPP’s shortcomings, Greene and Cleaver emphasized female Panthers’ po
