Deleuze, Guattari, and Blackness: Applying Rhizomatic Analysis to the Study of Blackness

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Images of Reason and Inference in Qualitative Research: Posthumanist Innovations

Abstract

Objective: Blackness, it seems, is born into an existing ‘socius.’ This is a monstrous machine, a metaphor of and for society where attractors and opposites can and do co-exist. Their co-existence means a permanent presence of tension, a tug of war and on-going struggle. There are no simple resolutions within the socius (Deleuze, 2004), we are forever left with the curse of improvisation and living (with)in tension. The tension is not linear where we move from A to B to C. In the socius, we may move from A to C to B and back to A. This is the struggle of Blackness as it seeks to speak its name. This paper examines the implication of this condition for research on Blackness, Anti-Blackness, and Black identity in school settings.

Theoretical Framework: To truly comprehend this non-linear struggle for freedom, I introduce a rhizomatic analysis of Blackness. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) work, a rhizomatic analysis of Blackness refers to the complexity, multidirectional, and ever-shifting nature of Blackness. One is not born Black, I am arguing, one becomes one. This becoming is a different kind of unit of analysis than Blackness considered as a static personal or collective characteristic—and requires a different conception of rationality to be adequately understood. If this is the case, this paper then constitutes a cautionary note to social scientists not to forget the rhizomatic nature of Blackness.

Mode of Inquiry And Data Sources: To deepen our understanding of the rhizomatic nature of Blackness, I conducted a critical ethnographic study in 2011 where I followed a group of immigrant and refugee continental African youths who were attending an urban high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. As they translate and navigate their way in Canadianness, they enter (so to speak) a social imaginary (Castoriadis, 1997) —a discursive space in which they are already imagined, constructed, and thus treated as Black by hegemonic white supremacist and settler colonial discourses and groups. This imaginary is directly implicated in whom the students identify with (Black America), which in turn influences what and how they linguistically and culturally learn. Interestingly, they learn not English as a Second Language (ESL) but Black English as a Second Language (or BESL).

Substantial Conclusions: This critical ethnography, I conclude, demonstrates the dynamic and exogenous nature of racial identity development for immigrants in a North American context. It illustrates that for these immigrant students learning is neither neutral nor without a politics and pedagogy of desire and investment.

Scholarly Significance: The paper has significance at two levels. First, its conclusions are significant for the ongoing effort to address the experience of African and Black immigrant students in North American schools, as well as for studies of racial identity generally. Second, it is methodologically significant in that it provides a model of the application of Deleuzian theoretical formations—including his innovative conceptions of the object of study and of rational inference—to the analysis of institutionalized racism and the production of racialized subjectivities in our schools.

Author

• Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa