Why Manning Marable Retrieves Blackwater and Its Normative Significance for Africana Studies

• In Event: Black radical politics, spirituality and environment

Description for Program

Vincent Harding’s book, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, was published in the same year as Manning Marable’s book, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness, and Revolution. Both Harding and Marable emphasize the blackness of the water and both employ the metaphor of river. For Marable, like Harding’s river, the concept of “Blackwater” refers to “the activist tradition” of Black religions that represents some of the most crucial (re)sources of self and social transformation, particularly in the context of struggle. With special attention to Marable’s Blackwater, this paper explores the normative significance of the longstanding analytic of river in and for Africana Studies, considers what role, if any, should it play in our theories and methods, and the possible consequences of those methodical choices, particularly for understanding Black radical politics in the past and present. The paper will asks: How do we critically account for the norms, values, or attitudes that are part of the basis for being able to distinguish between forms of domination and liberation? In other words, how do we identify and analyze the normative differences between Black god-talk and white god-talk, “Blackwater” and “whitewater”?

Author

• Xavier Pickett, Cornell University