Fania Noël : French readers don’t know the work of Hortense Spillers. But due to some new developments around decolonial thought in French, they are more likely to know Luguones has decolonial feminism is pushed by many non-white feminist especially from a non-Black feminist. Why choose Hortense Spillers specifically, and not Joy James with “captive maternal,” for example ?
Selamawit Terrefe : When I first approached the analysis of decolonial feminism and decoloniality in general, it was twofold. First, it was motivated by the erasure of continental Africans and also what I saw to be the corporatization of the profession or how certain strands of thought that claim to be generated as a corrective to their foundational removal are in fact revisionist narratives—packaged and produced—that eventually stand in for historical accuracy despite not being true. So for instance, the idea that post-colonial theory does not originate in Africa, can only be maintained if one is thinking about it as a formalized trademarked field or profession. In terms of decolonial theory itself, what it claims to do as a practice rather than the theory it proffers, is mobilized by the very masses that are absented in the professionalized discourse.
I noticed multiple levels of erasure. Erasure isn’t really the precise term because it doesn’t carry the violent connotation of terms such as excision, which can only be done to thoughts, knowledge, practices or “nothingness” as in the framework of the “n’est pas” David Marriott presents within his latest book, Whither Fanon ? In terms of its erasure of Africa, it’s a different yet connected analysis. The excision of African Indigeneity and Africa’s foundational contributions to the fields of post-colonial and decolonial feminisms mirrors decolonial theory’s violent omission of Latin American Indigenous scholars, who if decolonial feminism was serious about proffering a practice, they would interact with.
So, here we have a type of a colonization of thought and a construction of historical and theoretical paradigms that’s used parasitically or utilizes the suffering of Black people only to conflate and erase, which is essentially why I chose to pick a hemispheric feminist analysis as opposed to a continental African one.
Lastly, I found the use and critique of Black feminism within Luguones’s thought to be predictable in its anti-Blackness and pernicious because it mobilizes a particular erotic effect that I find consistently produced within these theoretical, historical, and social projections about the relationship between Black thoughts and practices and suffering in relation to both the colonial political project in the Americas and the discursive production in academe.
One could say this pornotroping–or the term itself, the way I implemented it as a heuristic–was to place or attempt to place a magnifying glass over the strands of anti-Blackness that were evident but never discussed.
In your initial framing of the question via email, you mentioned Joy James’s “Captive Maternal.” I see that as different, because it’s a relatively new concept by James and it does provide a corrective, if not a political litmus test for the various types of Black feminist thought and production in the Americas, if we were to take the Combahee Collective, their project and definition of Black feminisms as James would suggest based on her previous published works. In terms of George Jackson being the quintessential Captive Maternal, rather than recognizing it like a reductive gendered subject position through identity politics, which in my view serves a counterrevolutionary purpose only, it functions to suppress legitimate political critique in (at least) the 21st century. But I’m excited for James’s book on the Captive Maternal and for people to begin serious public debate about how Black feminism, in similar ways to decolonial feminism, has become commodified and corporatized even though the former’s foundation was liberatory rather than exploitive and opportunistic. So, I think it’s because Luguones’s framework is pretty much situated within the hemispheric Americas, and it is purported to stand in as a universalist sort of theorization, that I chose to do an analysis utilizing a hemispheric Black feminist scholar.
Fania Noël : You point out that Luguones used the “we,” but this “we” fails to understand the ontological difference between Black woman, Black gender minority and non-Black. Do you think this shortcoming can be analyzed in the mirror, or is it the same as the moral panic we can witness from radical left Marxist media, like Jacobin Magazine, to not cite them. It’s this question around if centering Blackness and anti-Blackness will prevent Black people from investing in class-based and here gender-based organizing. Framed differently, say, we observe some fear surrounding Black separatism and the idea that, oh, if we descend into Black separatism and also reduce Black feminism and Black radicalism to separatism, there’s this idea that, oh, Blacks people won’t care about other issues, erasing the fact that they mobilize around other issues.
Selamawit Terrefe : That’s a really important question. First, I think characterizing Jacobin, for instance, their concern with centering anti-Blackness as dissuading coalitional organizing is very generous. The increasingly emotional and affective intellectual responses that aren’t even really required to provide citations or sources for claims are indicative of the policing practices of white US Marxists and communist organizing. If you look at the history of, at least in the Americas, Black people’s participation and departure from those organizations, you’d be hard-pressed to find any Marxist or communist organization in the US that has actively called for or supported Black revolutionary organizing.
Fania Noël : In France, we have Aimé Cesaire’s famous letter to the French Communist Party.
Selamawit Terrefe : Of course. Yeah. Especially if you look at the UCP USA, it has always been a very sort of anti-revolutionary organization. If you think about Black radical and revolutionary organizing, it has consistently engaged in internationalism, in anti-imperialism, and inclusive armed struggles. But I have yet to see any non-Black organizations or movements call for the same sort of political program while also making space for other groups, and especially Black groups. Space is only made for political demands that would serve to improve their group’s condition, whereas it is the inverse when Black people are the ones advocating and organizing.
But again, what’s particularly violent about chastising Black people or Black political formations as reactionary or separatist in their legitimate critiques of coalitional practices, is, firstly, the revisionist history that they offer about Black radical and revolutionary politics. And secondly, the critique is mobilized in print and in practice through aggression ; it’s an aggressivity that’s projected onto the very Black formations that have made the most significant bodily sacrifices, sharing strategies and techniques for the liberation of all marginalized communities. When I say aggressivity, I’m including the need and desire for, or dare I say, pleasure and enjoyment of deploying anti-Black reactionary and conservative tropes (such as separatism) like coded dog whistles, to tell Black people to heal or stay in their place.
So, the issue with “we” and the flattening of positionalities in terms of ontological differences, in decolonial feminism, is similar. I’ve never thought about it as moral panic, but I like the descriptor. I appreciate it, and I think it’s accurate in depicting the irrationality of fearing Blackness as a negative threat to the safety or wellbeing of individuals, if we’re going to omit structure from our analysis. So in other words : Blackness, Black thought, Black politics as an injunction against the past, present, and the future. That is the fantasy of temporality and spatiality that holds Black suffering as the linchpin of myths, presents appearance as metaphysics, its violence narrativized as positive law, legible in all manner of libidinal investments, aggressivities, and anxieties, so Blackness becomes the potential to upend what is heretofore veiled in these categories of articulation.
However, it’s mis-ventriloquized, and not by collapsing other groups’ political investments or positions within dominant state structures (which at first glance would appear to be so), but by maintaining the necessity for manipulating the discourse of race as a metaphor for ontology. This manipulation displaces the threat of the state obfuscates non-black investments in maintaining the necessity for antiblack violence. So it’s a metaphor that appears as a projection. The insistence that discussions of Blackness or anti-Black racism are merely reductionist, when race cannot be untangled from capitalism and patriarchy. What these conflations, and the panic that ensues on all ends, do is materialize as Black and non-Black policing of Black insurrectionist thought and movements that historically have generated the most radically beneficial legal and social progress for a host of non-Black vulnerable populations.
Fania Noël : Yeah. It is very interesting because, for example, in France, this kind of what I call moral panic also happens in non-white spaces vis-a-vis Black organizations. We emphasized how the concept of pornotrope underlines the notion of pleasure (as in the Afropessismism analysis), pleasure that non-Black people feel from acts of anti-Blackness. Do you think this element of pleasure is on display in academia regarding the distortion of definition and argument on pretense vis-a-vis Black theory ? I think about identity politics, critical race theory, or Afropessimism.
Selamawit Terrefe : Essentially, it’s about who gets to define what truth is. It’s always about power dynamics. The idea that identity politics only comes from Black populations in general is a form of gaslighting and redefining identity politics, because if anybody’s playing identity politics, it is the majority ; it is the liberal left ; it is academia, when it suits white women or white queer populations in particular. It suits them to play identity politics because it protects them from the type of eroticized antiblack violence—pornotroping—required to bestow Black people rights : liberties continually bestowed onto everyone other than Black people. In other words, narratives of Black women’s serial rape during the antebelleum period, postcards of Black bodies hanging from trees in front of crowds of white families, broadcast images of Black people being attacked by dogs, beaten by the National Guards, images of their assassinated corpses, Black children’s bodies in coffins, in contemporary streets or parks, victimized by state and vigilante violence---violence of this extent was not required for the rights gained by non-Black subjugated populations who deploy identity politics. But if you think about the history, identity politics worked for Black people one time and one time only since it was a political strategy rather than a presumed subject position. Anytime anything works in terms of an insurgent practice, it’s immediately co-opted by the state and used for counterrevolution purposes. At this moment, identity politics is counterinsurgency because, one, it is utilized for purposes of maintaining the state ; and two, it’s always displaced and gaslit onto Black people. And so that’s what they’re doing.
I would say the response to this question is similar to what I’ve said before. However, I want to preface everything by saying I don’t look at pornotroping as an Afropessimist term because it’s been incorporated in Black studies by other people besides just Afropessimist theorists, like queer of color critiques or other field analyses. But for myself and perhaps others, I incorporate it in order to sustain or support an argument that’s an indispensable analysis of violence. Similar to the concept of “Jouissance” in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but where the sexual violence and the enjoyment of that violence is against enslaved Black women and their racialized descendants. So, this eroticized violence or the violence of eroticized racial slavery–violence’s erasure as eroticized–it’s pleasurable.
I see this enjoyment obviously replicated in academe. How could it not be, since the academy is a principle ideological and discursive apparatus in the West, which is to say global empire. It’s a particularly nefarious mode of pleasure because it presents itself as quintessentially progressive. These are your experiences, what happened in the graduate program. It’s supposed to be progressive. It purports to be invested in rooting out the violence of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony and nationalism.
But these individuals who take the injunction to enjoy are also those who they benefit the most from the violence that produces their own enjoyment which appears as their agony. So, the gatekeepers of what can be produced, what’s learned, what’s disseminated and taken as truth have as their impetus a counterrevolutionary force at best, and counterinsurgent one at worst. It’s a blockade against what was initially insurgent about Black theories and practices, that generated what’s now been co-opted by anti-liberatory agents of the state. Here that means in academia : the gatekeepers of publications, the gatekeepers who are like peer reviewers, the gatekeepers of PhD programs, of jobs, of conferences. Everything is co-opted and it is determined by those who have the state and the academy’s interests at heart, which is anti-Blackness. So, whether it’s CRT (critical race theory), identity politics, intersectionality, pornotroping, Afropessismism–they’re all at risk of being put to use by the master’s imperative in similar ways as Black bodies. So, Blackness always bears the precarious status of an insurgency at the ready, but also a corpse lying in wait.
Fania Noël : Just continuing on the issue of academia, decolonial feminism, as conceptualized by Luguones acts as a bridge between academia and activism, carrying an intend/injunction to unify (feminism). For you, who is the target audience of this call for unity ?
Selamawit Terrefe : Blackness is never the audience unless it’s a captive audience to hold and be silenced. That’s the message that is consistently sent to Blackness in terms of any sort of Black potential to upend anything. So, I would say yes, the overarching injunction is to have the ideas invented, but then the energy and imagery of Black revolutionary feminism within a coalition, that equally erases. It’s an injunction of a scholar and activist, or the term that is in vogue right now in academia, “scholar-activist.” If the term is in a job description from the same public or private corporation financed, in the past or present, by slave auctions, plantation economics, the prison and military industrial complexes, and apartheids or built on stolen and occupied land, there is nothing radical in the position or the work of the scholar who proudly dons the moniker. It operates similarly in that the momentum is inspired by the takeover, let’s say, of institutions decades ago, tasked with the discursive production and obfuscation by groups that presented a challenge to white supremacy and imperialist ideologies. So, for example, Black studies, ethnic studies departments.
There was a moment where there was a takeover of these institutions in an attempt to confront the prevailing ideologies as a challenge to the state. There was a panic about this proximity to white youth and then their own taking on this sort of radicality and questioning the state at the beginning. I think that the function of the scholar and the activist or the hyphenated is very different in the 21st century than what we could have considered it to be decades ago. There’s no more threat to the status quo, but it’s the inverse. I haven’t seen any academic fields achieve the same threat or injunction through co-optation from other groups. What it’s done, it’s created a bourgeoisie or petite bourgeoisie class of Black feminist academics whose political, professional, and personal interests align more with the state than any group or political ideology calling for the dismantling of the state or revolution. So, this idea that there is an audience of Black feminists or Black people, it would be the Black petite bourgeoisie who would do the bidding of the white left or the non-Black lefts desire to silence any sort of Black revolutionary feminist potential.
We have to recognize that there’s various strands of Black feminism operating here and understand what is commodified about Black feminism in terms of liberal, let’s say, abolitionist feminism. What has the scholar-activist produced in terms of material gains for the masses ? I can say the same thing about decolonial feminism. You have the violence of femicide throughout Central America. I have yet to see what decolonial feminism in practice can do to address the material violence of femicide. I don’t think the academy’s interest is in ameliorating any type of violence. I think the interest is in parasitically using the mass’s suffering for various fields and individual scholars’ professional interests. I know. Whether it’s Black feminists advocating for voting, or the DNC (Democratic National Commitee).
This is the complete antithesis of what a Black feminist group like Combahee did in the ’70s. Combahee starts out as a collective for the liberation of all. It’s a Black feminist premise. Then a few years after they began, there was a spate of serial murders of Black women in Boston. I think it was like ’79. What the Combahee River Collective did was they wrote about these murders. I think there were 15 altogether at the end. But I think after the first five or six murders, there was a statement that they wrote along with notes on how to protect oneself against these serial murderers and they distributed these pamphlets throughout the city. I think Black women were being strangled, stabbed, and beaten to death. There were five Black women who were strangled to death and one who was stabbed to death in her home when Combahee wrote “Six Black Women : Why Did They Die ?” which was published in Radical America.1 I mean, there was a connection to the masses. There was connection outside of the academy. These are individuals who initially entered the academy teaching Black feminist theory as a praxis. We haven’t seen that in the 21st century. I have yet to see it in the 21st century unless it’s for liberal political purposes.
Fania Noël : So, you think there are few fields that can actually destabilize academia ?
Selamawit Terrefe : A field. Not a field. But... What’s the word ? What maybe Wilderson would call a structure of feeling or of positionality. I would just call it Blackness, in terms of Black thought. That is the only thing that could destabilize anything. That is why the interests of those who are the gatekeepers within academia, whether they’re Black or non-Black, is to maintain the hegemonic sort of hold on what is considered to be Black theorizing, which is also what they would determine to be Black political practice. It’s never been revolutionary in the 21st century. Luguones never mentions revolution in Toward a Decolonial Feminism or The Decoloniality of Gender. The terms “revolution” or “revolutionary” never appear. The focus is always on struggles for liberation. What are these struggles ? Outside of voting, in terms of Black feminism, what type of material struggle have they advocated for ? They can’t name it, because they know the only form of struggle that would actually upend the system would be violent struggle, and they do not want to mention violence, right ?
Fania Noël : Do you think–I imagine you don’t–that decolonial feminism provides a satisfactory vision for our (as Black women) potential paradigmatic status within an actual decolonial feminist revolution ?
Selamawit Terrefe : I think absolutely not. Like I said, there’s no mention of anything revolutionary. I reference it in my article in terms of an attempt to misrepresent or discredit Black feminism, and it’s not to the same extreme, but it is practiced against third world and women of color feminisms and critical race theory. So any feminist, decolonial, Black, third world, abolitionist theory in practice, if it focuses on difference in terms of identity categories, but reductively approaches violence as a unidirectional formation or just in terms of morality, it can’t be linked to anything revolutionary in theory or in practice. I think this is the pull or what draws non-white feminisms’ distortion or co-optation, commodification, depoliticization, all with the consent of non-white scholars. So, it’s not necessarily apolitical in a neutral way. It’s explicitly anti- and implicitly counterrevolutionary, precisely because of its refusal to address anything that would create a material change, which would be something like the necessity of violence, perhaps, to end violence.
These are paradigms that still benefit non-Black and non-white populations who suffer from white supremacy, but they often gain legitimacy by entering into the category of whiteness by practicing anti-Blackness.
To answer more directly, I do not think decolonial feminism or any other contemporary political theorization, feminist or not, has a satisfactory interpretation of Black people’s paradigmatic status in the world outside of Afropessimist analysis. I can’t address an achievement of revolution or revolutionary ideology as a product of theory that has yet to even acknowledge revolution as a viable political practice or goal. I haven’t seen any field or any theorization outside of Afropessimism that honestly understands or thinks about revolutionary violence in a serious way.
So, let’s say with Luguones, she purports to have this liberatory view of Blackness and Indigeneity using categories of multiplicity, rushing to conjoin them in this idealized coalition without any detailed material analysis of how these categories of difference employ violence or experience violence differentially, positioned on various cartographic and corporeal bodies. So, coalitions, they have precedent, right ? They have a history. With decoloniality and decolonial feminism, the emphasis on this idealization, it wouldn’t appear so anemic if it perhaps made references to material alliances in the past within the continental and the island sort of histories in the West, in the Western hemisphere.
So, here’s one of the biggest conundrums and points of hypocrisy, with the one group who struggles against white supremacy and imperialism and nationalism and fascism, while struggling for abolition, decolonization, human and civil rights. There’s one group that has demanded and achieved progress that’s been so beneficial to all, if not liberatory for everyone beyond the members of that particular group, but also to the detriment of the members of the Black vanguard fighting for these demands. It’s the very demographic that’s being chastised, derided for sort of being regressive or tribalist or anti-coalition.