“That Little Mistake We Made, the People Dem Love It!" The Art of Black Thought

• In Event: Theory and History in the Making and Reshaping of Black Liberatory Thought

Abstract

If all politics share an orientation toward the future, what distinguishes black political thought in its concern w ith bringing about a social order free of all forms of oppression? Indeed, one paradox of all projects concerned with the future is that they tend to shares modernity's conceit of progress, that these are projects moving society toward a more beneficial future. But how do these projects ha ndle phenomena they did not anticipate? What happens when the contingencies of history bring about something which the availa ble theoretical language cannot account for? One distinguishing feature of black political thought is the habit, especially among cultural producers, of making an epistemological shift away from what Edouard Glissant calls the "ideological stability" o f theoretical frames that insist on certainty and the comfort o f mastery. This al lows, as Suzanne Cesaire suggests, fo r the exploration of the poetic as a way “to know the unknowable." I n my paper, I take up this provocation by considering the emergence of dub music and hip hop as artistic forms that could not have been anticipated or planned, but once encounte red were pursued in ways that are instructive for how we might think about politics without the need for certainty about what might result from a given project of movement. In other words, it is in the arts that we find a model for a politics that allow fo r that which might appear unreasonable, outside the realm o f politics, and even the insane, but that has the ability bring a bout potentia lities that, given our current theoretical frames and available models, are politically unimaginable.

Author

• Minkah Makalani, Johns Hopkins University