Still Life

Richard Iton

Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2013 (No. 40), pp. 22-39 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/504065

Access provided by Northwestern University Library (3 Jun 2017 16:21 GMT)

Still Life
Richard Iton

It begins, perhaps appropriately, maybe inevitably, with a ghostwriter. “I loved the melody; I
loved the words. That song spoke to how I was feeling,” remembers Alfa Anderson. “Because
there was I, someone who was groomed to have a regular job, but my talent freed me from
that and I found myself in the middle of something that was incredible and slightly intimidat-
ing at the same time. Even though I did not write the lyrics, there was a lot that I could relate
to. I remember thinking that I wanted to put my heart into that song, so that someone else
could hear it and feel what I was feeling.”1 The song in question is “At Last I Am Free,” a track
on the Atlantic Records recording group Chic’s second album, C’est Chic, released in 1978.
“You call this love. All this lying, my friend, it just can’t be.” On its surface, the seven-
minute recording appears to be a somewhat subdued love ballad describing the end of a
relationship not entirely incompatible with the Quiet Storm radio format that had become
popular in the mid-1970s. The first version of the song, though, had been composed by the
group’s guitarist Nile Rodgers almost a decade earlier. In common with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s
Going On”—which was first drafted by Four Tops vocalist Obie Benson after witnessing a
police riot against a gathering of hippies in the Bay area—the recording’s genesis was rooted
in the clashes that were taking place at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.
As Rodgers recalls,
When I wrote ‘At last I am free / I can hardly see in front of me,’ I was in the Panthers—and
indeed a subsection leader of the lower Manhattan Black Panthers. We went to a demonstration

1 Alfa Anderson, quoted in Daryl Easlea, Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco (London: Helter Skelter, 2004),
130–31. Anderson is currently a school principal in the New York area.

small axe 40 • March 2013 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-1665416 © Small Axe, Inc.

 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 23

in Central Park. I had dropped acid and the cops had gotten the orders to disperse the crowd.
It was quite typical of the time; something that had started as a be-in turned violent. After the
cops had beaten us up, I remember trying to walk out of the park to the nearest hospital. Every
step I took, the buildings took a step as well. I was walking endlessly. When I finally got to the
edge of Central Park I was like—at last, I am free!2

In Chic’s rendering of the song, at least one political time zone later, Rodgers’s disorientation
becomes visual incapacitation caused by tears as the female protagonist walks away from a
problematic relationship. Rodgers notes that his songwriting partner and the band’s bassist,
Bernard Edwards, “later added the love song stuff.”3 While his reference to “the love song
stuff” is probably intended to be dismissive, despite the difference between Rodgers’s and
Edwards’s preferences both perceived the love ballad casing as a safer, less provocative—
and in Rodgers’s view, perhaps, less interesting—means of generating an audience: more as
an accessible sign of the availability of postpolitical leisure than a means of negotiating or
maintaining solidarity among the marginalized.4
On another level, it is hard not to hear in the title and tone, anthemic chorus, and epic
structure of Chic’s recording a reference to the familiar spiritual “Free at Last” interpolated by
Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, in which he spoke of a
day to come when freedom might be achieved. More broadly, one might argue that any black
invocation of freedom, whatever the context, is at least subliminally entangled with the long
histories of slavery, other practices within the colonial matrix, and their affects and effects.
With regard to the possibility that civil rights references are embedded in the original Chic
recording, Robert Wyatt, formerly of the British art-rock group Soft Machine, later covered the
song, releasing it initially as a single (backed with a cover of “Strange Fruit,” a composition
previously recorded by Billie Holiday and Josh White, among others) and later as part of his
1982 album Nothing Can Stop Us. Besides these two tracks, Nothing Can Stop Us included
covers of Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding,” the Golden Gate Quartet’s “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’,”
“Caimanera” (aka “Guantanamera”), and “Stalingrad.” Wyatt’s cover places “At Last I Am
Free” firmly, then, in a certain protest song tradition.5
What is particularly intriguing in this light is the way the line “free at last” with its echo
“I thank God I’m free at last” and its suggestion of a certain religiously inflected civil rights

2 Nile Rodgers, quoted in Easlea, Everybody Dance, 130.

3 Ibid.
4 See Easlea, Everybody Dance, 129; and Omoronke Idowu, “Start,” Vibe, August 1996, 160. Another recording perhaps
worth noting in this context is Phyllis Hyman’s “Gonna Make Changes,” Sing a Song, Buddah Records, 1978, compact
disc. The ballad, released in the same year as “At Last I Am Free,” and Hyman’s first composition, appears in terms of
its surface cues—lyrically and musically—to be a (rather compelling) love song in the conventional sense: “The things I
want, I want for you; moving together, willing to share.” Note that “moving together” could be easily misheard as “move in
together.” Closer attention to the lyrics—for example, “There’s power in the masses, collectively we can win”—suggests
another possible, and undoubtedly more accurate, reading. Hyman would perform the song for a 1984 television show
honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday; see “Celebration of Life: A Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.,” dir. Stan Lathan,
1984.
5 Liz Fraser, formerly of the Cocteau Twins and an occasional Massive Attack collaborator, would also record a remarkable,
and quite moving, version of “At Last I Am Free,” modeled on Wyatt’s template (and, indeed, meant as a tribute to Wyatt’s
version). See Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, Rough Trade, 2003.
24 | Still Life

narrative and arrival, and certain familiar expectations and teleologies, is disrupted by the line
that follows: “I can hardly see in front of me.” It is, at least on its surface, an odd coupling:
“At last I am free / I can hardly see in front of me.” The chorus arguably only coheres in its
original context: free from the confrontation in Central Park but unable to see because of the
repercussions of the attack (and possibly the hallucinogen that had been ingested).6 Indeed,
despite the relatively smooth albeit decidedly mournful musical setting, the Chic original,
as a whole, features a number of perhaps jarring, but arguably both distinct and parallel,
structures of feeling: Anderson’s personal commitment to the lyrics—that is, the personal
sense of risk and freedom from bourgeois respectability she alludes to and her reference to
finding herself “in the middle of something that was incredible and slightly intimidating at the
same time”; Rodgers’s chorus drawn from his late-1960s/early-1970s political past, his Black
Panther days, and the experience of being tear-gassed; Edwards’s subsequent late-1970s
revisions that push the song in the direction of a standard rhythm and blues ballad in which
the experience of being tear gassed and assaulted is transposed across time, and problem
spaces, into the key of emotional release and the end of a personal relationship; the indirect,
possibly unconscious, engagement of the civil rights movement and its various castings,
spiritual commitments, and sedimentations; and a melodic structure that suggests its own
distinct meanings and possibilities.7
The content of the group’s songs—in other words, the text minus the performance—and
image were mostly a matter of negotiation between Rodgers and Edwards, with Rodgers
pushing for what he perceived as more explicit “political” content and Edwards more con-
cerned about marketability in the conventional sense. “As a guitarist,” Rodgers recalls, “I was
into Jimi Hendrix; as a person, the Black Panthers; so I just wanted to make music that felt
like revolution.” With specific regard to the lyrical compromises struck, Rodgers notes, “The
bargain [agreed to] between Bernard and I [meant that] Mr. Black Panther was never going to
be politicizing our music.” Working within those parameters, and his partner’s resistance to a
more conventionally political approach, Rodgers states, “That meant the lyric writing had to
be as clever as hell. There’s no way I could write [a superficial lyric] and that was the end of
the story. It doesn’t work for my soul.”8
In some respects, the sound Chic established might be compared to that being developed
at roughly the same time by Fela Kuti with his band Afrika 70 in Nigeria. Both bands were

6 Regarding interpolations of the spiritual, see also Al Green, “Free at Last,” Livin’ for You, Hi Records, 1973.
7 The “Free at Last” reference might be unconscious, since Nile Rodgers has never cited the spiritual in his accounts of the
song’s genesis. Indeed, in his 2011 biography, Rodgers makes no reference to the song at all. See Nile Rodgers, Le Freak:
An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011).
8 Nile Rodgers, quoted in Idowu, “Start,” 160, and in Easlea, Everybody Dance, 93 (emphasis mine). Nile Rodgers’s retro-
spective claims of adherence to a radical purpose while working with Chic might be read against the grain. In other words,
he might be exaggerating his commitment to “revolutionary” work a little bit. Asked what Chic’s lyrical orientation might
have been without Bernard Edwards’s restraining influence, Rodgers has stated that he would have likely produced “move-
ment music . . . [though he] probably would have never been a Gil Scott-Heron or a Leroi Jones . . . [as he was] not that
cat.” Dorian Lynskey, “The Winter of Our Discotheque,” The Word, November 2011, 29. See also, on this point, Rodgers,
Le Freak, 115.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 25

influenced (directly) by the sound of James Brown’s bands, and in both outfits the implicitly
mocking function of the repetitive, disembodied vocals (primarily provided by women), and
irony, played central, defining roles (e.g., Fela’s “Expensive Shit” and Chic’s “Good Times”).9
Given this aesthetic economy, it is not surprising that Rodgers and Edwards rarely worked
with full-bodied, lead vocalists, with the possible exception of Kathy Sledge of the group
Sister Sledge. Similarly, it is possible that the characteristic indirection and ironic potential
of their recordings might have been lost, or at least diminished, if they had worked with
more traditionally soulful, proficient singers. If the classic soul aesthetic called for certain
conventions in the areas of authenticity, sincerity, presence, and performance—think here of
gospel-trained artists such as Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway—the kinds of irony, indi-
rection, and transparency Chic was seeking might have required more reserved, constrained,
and explicitly painted-within-the-lines sorts of vocals. Indeed, Rodgers negatively contrasts
Chic’s lead vocalists—“talented session singers”—with the “stars” he worked with on other
projects.10 While the extended mixes of Sister Sledge’s dance floor classics “Lost in Music”
and, particularly, “We Are Family” raise the question of what the Chic catalogue would sound
like if they had worked consistently with more orthodox gifted singers, it is possible that the
group’s particular form of expression benefited from a certain detachment, a “there but not
there” almost zombie-like quality, to borrow from Fela and Achille Mbembe, that marked the
gap between deep faith and reservation not only lyrically but affectively and consequently
vocally. The kind of absence, then, that generates traction, and calls into being and compels
a reflexive disposition. This is one possible reading.11
From another perspective, given the ways singing, and performance more generally, is a
form of composition, it is worth noting that many of the women vocalists with whom Rodgers
and Edwards worked, including Kathy Sledge, Diana Ross, and, quite briefly, Aretha Frank-
lin, expressed frustration with the lack of space for their own contributions. From this angle,
consider the following from Pauline Black of the late-1970s/early-1980s British ska group The

9 The third collective from this period that might usefully be grouped with Chic and Fela’s Afrika 70 is, of course, the late-
1970s iteration of Bob Marley and the Wailers. See Fela Kuti and Afrika 70, “Expensive Shit,” Expensive Shit, Edition
Makossa, 1975. Regarding the significance of repetition with black musics, see James A. Snead, “On Repetition in Black
Culture,” in Kara Keeling, Colin McCabe, and Cornel West, eds., Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/
African Contagions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 11–33; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in
Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
10 Luther Vandross and Fonzi Thornton regularly featured as background vocalists and arrangers on the classic Chic produc-
tions. While Vandross was arguably technically the best male vocalist of his generation, there was always a repressed and
indirect quality to his performances—a certain reticence—that aligns with the structure of feeling Chic pursued. Regarding
Aretha Franklin’s experience in the studio with Rodgers and Edwards, which produced no recordings in the end, see Aretha
Franklin and David Ritz, Aretha: From These Roots (New York: Diane, 1999), 160–61; Easlea, Everybody Dance, 190–91;
and Rodgers, Le Freak, 169.
11 Nevertheless, even with Kathy Sledge’s deeply soulful vocals, one can detect multiple meanings in “We Are Family,” and
“Lost in Music” is Rodgers and Edwards at perhaps their most Felaesque. Regarding zombies, Achille Mbembe suggests,
“It is only through . . . a shift in perspective that we can come to understand that the postcolonial relationship is not primar-
ily a relationship of resistance or collaboration. . . . Instead, it has resulted in the mutual zombification of both the dominant
and those whom they apparently dominate.” In Fela’s worldview, the zombie figures as “the kind of mind that takes orders
without thinking.” See Fela Kuti and Afrika 70, “Zombie,” Zombie, Creole 1977; reissue, MCA 2001; Dorian Lynskey, “Fela
Kuti and Afrika 70, ‘Zombie,’ ” 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New
York: Ecco, 2011), 239; and Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Africa: Journal of the International
Africa Institute 62, no. 1 (1992): 3.
26 | Still Life

Selecter. Contrasting the impact Poly Styrene of the pioneering punk group X-Ray Spex had
upon her—“She made me realize that . . . you can be that free and anarchic”—and her disin-
terest in being “all trussed up like the women in Chic,” raises the possibility that the subtlety
Rodgers’s and Edwards’s politics of irony and restraint demanded limited—or was read as
being antagonistic to—the performative agency of some of the black women with whom they
worked.12 In this light, it is significant that although Alfa Anderson discovered deep mean-
ing in Rodgers’s and Edwards’s composition, the narrative trajectory she embraced—and
wanted to transmit—diverged from both Rodgers’s arguably sedimented notion of “radical
politics” and Edwards’s attempt to generate a different sort of affective device, the market-
able love ballad. The undecidabilities that saturate the text—the irresolutions that mark the
relationship between the expectations embedded in the orchestrated politics of emancipation
and the agonistic reflexivities of the political—might best be reflected in, and captured by,
Anderson’s performance. The love song, in the postcolonial/post–civil rights context, with its
explicitly gendered impulses, can be seen as one of the more familiar and available sites for
the imagination of black political possibilities, radical and otherwise.

Posteriors
We might think of the various possible readings of “At Last I Am Free” as falling within a
long tradition and, moreover, as metaphors and perhaps allegories relevant to long-standing
debates about the status of freedom and pleasure in the “post–civil rights” and “postcolonial”
eras, and the meaning of black politics. In this light, “At Last I Am Free” and its summoning
of “free at last . . . free at last” corresponds, if not chronologically, at least sentimentally with
the sincere acknowledgment of the possibility of easier pleasure that, in many minds, Chic’s
other recordings, such as “Good Times,” suggest. Correspondingly, the line that follows “At
last I am free”—“I can hardly see in front of me”—speaks to the vantage point Saidiya Hartman
refers to from which “emancipation appears less the grand event of liberation than a point
of transition between modes of servitude and . . . subjection.”13 This dynamic is alluded to
by Zora Neale Hurston in her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, a retelling of Moses’s
story from the Old Testament in which the “free at last” refrain again figures. Writes Hurston,
The people cried when Moses told them [about their liberation]. He had expected wild clamor;
the sound of cymbals and exultant singing and dancing. But the people wept out of their eyes.
Goshen was very still. No songs and shouts. “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I’m
free at last! No more toting sand and mixing mortar! No more taking rocks and building things
for Pharoah! No more whipping and bloody backs! No more slaving from can’t see in the morn-
ing to can’t see at night! Free! Free! So free till I’m foolish!” They just sat with centuries in their

12 See Rob Hughes, “Interview with Pauline Black,” The Word, November 2011, 37. “Our aim was not to be tyrannical,” sug-
gests Rodgers, “but we only knew that way—‘Here it [i.e., the song] is and here’s how it goes’—of working.” See Rodgers,
Le Freak, 147.
13 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 27

eyes and cried. A few could express themselves like that. But the majority just sat in the doors
of their dwellings staring out at life.14

Moreover, the ambivalence that characterizes “At Last I Am Free” and Hurston’s text can
be read, I would argue, as evidence of an implicitly gendered zone of undecidability that exists
between the certainties underpinning certain liberationist narratives and the uncertainties and
qualifications characteristic of an instinctively reflexive category of perspectives. This familiar
and thickly dissonant space obtains between Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and
his earlier publication Black Skin/White Masks and, following David Scott, C. L. R. James’s
distinct sentimental castings of The Black Jacobins. Drawing from another creative tradition,
Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand” and “Dance to the Music,” on the one hand, and “Family
Affair” and “Running Away,” on the other (or the Wailers’ “Get Up, Stand Up” and Bob Marley’s
own “Running Away”), also speak to the difference between the confidence of the teleological
and the bittersweet, saudagic entanglements of the agonistic.15
With regard to the teleology/reflexivity dynamic, Stuart Hall has written of a related “ten-
sion” that is, in his view, “not disabling but productive.” Specifically, he is referring to the
relationship between the chronological and epistemological understandings of the postco-
lonial in which the first, the chronological, casts the end of European rule over other people
and places as the dividing line between the colonial and the postcolonial. The second, the
epistemological, links postcoloniality to the transcending—or perhaps more accurately, the
first attempts to transcend or perceive the limitations and grip of—a certain power/knowledge
system that travels under a range of surnames, including Europe, Enlightenment, modernity,
reason, science, philosophy, and the universal. In other words, Hall is suggesting that in those
spaces and gaps between the camps that read postcoloniality as emerging immediately upon
the granting or establishment of national independence and those that emphasize instead
subalterns’ ability to read critically and imagine beyond the master’s texts exists generative
albeit knotty theoretical territory. Hall asserts,
“After” means in the moment which follows that moment (the colonial) in which the colonial
relationship was dominant. It does not mean . . . that what we have called the “after-effects”
of colonial rule have somehow been suspended. It certainly does not mean that we have
passed from a regime of power-knowledge into some powerless and conflict-free time zone.
Nevertheless, it does also stake its claim in terms of the fact that some other, related but as

14 Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain: A Novel (1939; repr., New York: HarperPerennial, 2009), 180.
15 See David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004). Regarding the gendered narratives that characteristically underpin teleological (and charismatic) politics, with spe-
cific reference to the Moses narrative in Hurston’s work and elsewhere, see Ruth T. Sheffey, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses,
Man of the Mountain: A Fictionalized Manifesto on the Imperatives of Black Leadership,” CLA Journal 29, no. 2 (1985):
206–20; Barbara Johnson, “Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible,” in Bainard
Cowen and Jefferson Humphries, eds., Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1997); Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001); and Erica R. Edwards, “Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic,” in
Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 77–103.
28 | Still Life

yet “emergent” new configurations of power-knowledge relations are beginning to exert their
distinctive and specific effects.16

Continuing, he elaborates, “It is precisely the false and disabling distinction between colonisa-
tion as a system of rule, of power and exploitation, and colonisation as a system of knowledge
and representation, which is being refused.”17
I want to suggest a slightly different approach to this question of the relationship between
freedom from colonial rule and the assertion of national independence, on the one hand, and
the initiation of challenges to imperial systems of representation and common sense, on the
other. In this revised context, a distinction is drawn between colonialism—that is, European
rule over other peoples and places, the state of exception writ large—and coloniality, the
power/knowledge arrangement to which Hall alludes. In this take, coloniality is the matrix in
which colonialism functions or appears as a tactic or convenience. (Consider, for example,
the coincidence of the global shift away from the slave trade and then slavery itself in the
Americas and elsewhere toward the direct surveillance characteristic of Jim Crow and the
colonial projects enabled by the Berlin conference and the consequent parceling out of the
African continent to various European powers.) More broadly, pulling back from the immediate
scene of the accident the Westphalian order itself, in which the nation-state and narratives
of national independence appear preordained, natural, and desirable, becomes part of the
matrix to be questioned, challenged, recontextualized, or refused, as the case may be. From
this standpoint, the teleologies of the modern/colonial world, to borrow from Walter Mignolo,
appear as teleoillogica from a substantively—as opposed to procedurally—postcolonial per-
spective. In other words, as assumptions that do not lead to the outcomes expected, for rea-
sons that cannot be understood from within the matrix that is coloniality, that nevertheless are
embraced, somewhat understandably, by marginalized populations. “National independence,”
like freedom and liberty, as Saidiya Hartman suggests, is already burdened and enmeshed
within a colonial narrative that offers little in the way of pleasurable guarantees. “At last I am
free” yet “I can hardly see in front of me” speaks to precisely this relationship between the
teleologies and teleoillogica of the procedural world and the reflexivities and the double-and-
upward consciousnesses of the epistemological. There is, then, as Hall suggests, some sort
of intriguing play between these two conceptions, and it points to the sorts of ambiguity and
undecidability that have marked the last six or seven decades (and, more broadly, “black life”).
That said, the precise contours of the uncertainties in question are made more visible, tangible,
and audible, if we try to distinguish coloniality and colonialism and push into a harsher light,

16 Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘the Post-colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in Iain Chambers, ed., The Post-colonial Question:
Common Skies, Divided Horizons (Florence, KY: Routledge, 1995), 254 (emphasis mine).
17 Ibid. For an intriguing take on the connections between “Europe” and “philosophy,” see Rodolphe Gasché, Europe; or, The
Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 29

as David Scott has suggested, some of the narratives and assumptions that have shaped
anticolonial and postcolonial thought and activity.18
In this same passage, Hall raises another question that suggests the possible need for
an act of translation, following Brent Hayes Edwards, or, more likely in this instance, an act
of amalgamation and aggregation that recodes as it transcends two previously distinct—
or rendered distinct—discourses. Working through the different possible chronologies and
geographies one might associate with the postcolonial, in other words, within the procedural
realm, Hall asks, “Is Britain ‘post-colonial’ in the same sense as the US? Indeed, is the US
usefully thought of as ‘post-colonial’ at all?”19 These questions, I believe, point to one of the
more pressing questions underlying the postcolonial framework. On one level, it could be
argued that what Hall’s question requires is an act of translation. Accordingly, one might sug-
gest that the “freedom struggle” in the United States shares a metonymic relationship and
can be equated with the anticolonial campaigns that occurred in India, Ghana, Kenya, and
South Africa, among other locales, and seek some means—while minding the inevitable gaps
or décalage, to borrow from Edwards20—of reading together the post–civil rights narratives
marked as US African American and the postcolonial narratives attached to other places.
Alternately, and I would argue more fruitfully, we might think more critically about the post-
colonial/post–civil rights relation and consider the benefits of moving beyond the translation
of one teleology into the terms of another: that is, the struggle for modern citizenship status
leading to liberation and national independence and/or civil rights.
The suggestion that colonial frameworks and postcolonial theories do not apply to the
United States has a history. The shift toward a civil rights narrative within the United States
was hardly a natural phenomenon but rather the result of forces placed on black communities
in the United States—compelled, subsidized, and subsequently protected, speech—and the
internalization and naturalization with time of these perspectives. As has been argued else-
where, much of this shifting work takes place in the wake of the Cold War and the attempts
to stigmatize the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson by US governmental authorities and
in turn by African American civil rights leaders. One of the outcomes of this moment is the
rejection by many African American leaders of the notion that their situation might be usefully

18 See David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Suggests Timothy Mitchell, “The modern nation-state [represents] the paramount structural effect of the modern social
world.” Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Sci-
ence Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 94; and, more generally, Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who
Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012). Regarding the global dimensions of post-slavery political
economies and systems of surveillance, see Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German
Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
19 Hall, “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’?,” 245. See also Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Transla-
tion, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Regarding the status of
the American (US) case within the postcolonial matrix, consider Jacques Derrida’s comments at the “tRACEs: Race,
Deconstruction and Critical Theory” conference sponsored by the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute
in April of 2003 during which he offers that “the racism that develops in this country [the US] is not colonial” and “the US
is not a colonialist country.” See Jacques Derrida, “Keynote Response to Etienne Balibar” (Irvine: University of California’s
Humanities Research Institute, 2003).
20 Brent Hayes Edwards, preface to The Practice of Diaspora, 13.
30 | Still Life

compared to the situation of blacks elsewhere. Another dimension of this turn is the increas-
ingly teleological and procedural cast of the post–Cold War black agenda. According to these
new narratives, the key words were civil rights and citizenship (and, to a lesser extent, integra-
tion). This is the “eyes on the prize” account that gains traction with the elections of blacks to
Congress and of black mayors, with the end of apartheid and, some day far off in the future,
perhaps, with the election of a black president. It is a politics quite compatible and indeed
complicit with the notion of American exceptionalism and the mock post-Europeanism that
characterizes this sensibility; a vision that also rejects in many respects the wary and weary
agonistics of the blues perspective (thus explaining some of the tensions inherent in Ralph
Ellison’s work). On the flipside of this sensibility, married to process and the core elements
of modern and Enlightenment thought, of course, are the versions of anticolonial and post-
colonial theories that read national independence, constitutional government, and access to
International Monetary Fund loans as the sum total of postcolonial achievement in an almost
paint-by-numbers fashion.21
I have suggested a particular time-zero here, that is, the beginning of the Cold War. A more
accurate and subtle approach would note that these pressures, inducements, and inclinations
to embrace the dominant narratives of modernity—for example, a sterile language of individual
rights, the assumed neutrality of the state and the Westphalian order, a liberalism that cannot
explain its genesis and lacks a political account of its staying power, and a ticking-clock impa-
tience with substantively black political thought—predate and postdate the late 1940s and
1950s. For example, there is the end of politics/end of history narrative that attached itself to
the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the release of Nelson Mandela within months of each other
in late 1989 and early 1990. The urges to render blackness and black politics as open or closed
texts—as discursive, protean, and searching, or as given, rules-bound, and mechanical—are
as old as the imagination of “Europe” and the modern/colonial matrix themselves. In other
words, it is more accurate to suggest that the tension between teleological (closed-text) and
reflexive (open-text) forms of black politics is ever present and widely dispersed spatially rather
than to seek to assert some particular final turning point—1804? 1863? 1945? 1957? 1964?
1994? 2008?—after which one tendency or the other becomes firmly and fixedly hegemonic.
The function of black political thought, in this broader context, might be to insist on and assist
in the disclosure—that is, the opening up—of black and modern texts from an empathetic-
verging-on-ambivalent position to mark and recontextualize the protective casings, mock sov-
ereignties, and rhetorical impulses characteristic of closed-text regimes (including the emptier
freedom narratives), almost as a form of speculative antifoundationalism, through various
forms of reflexive labor and play, involving potentially prohibitive degrees of risk, incoherence,
and vulnerability, as well as generative flux, borderline antiarchivism, and contamination (i.e., a
politics without guarantees). To disrupt, by means of a substantively postcolonial politics, the

21 In this narrative, democracy figures as both the dependent variable/endpoint and the rhetorical limit, and questions
concerning relational, global, or exogenous systemic/structural factors are rendered irrelevant.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 31

teleological not just within black politics but also within the touchlines of the modern political
field in which closure mimics sovereignty, and sovereignty, in turn, mimics closure.
Aside from the scale and persistence of these colonial and postcolonial dilemmas, what
I want to flag, though, is exactly the significance of the disavowal of any connection between
the postcolonial theories that seek to understand this new old world rising outside the United
States and the civil rights strategizing and theorizing that sees little of value in the postcolonial
framework (often rendered as geographical detachment and mutual disinterest). While there
are certainly spaces in which both of these narratives are in conversation as a result of distinct
patterns of migration—for example, the United Kingdom, France, and even Canada—what is
more remarkable is the apparent agreement (with some exceptions, primarily in the area of lit-
erary studies) that postcolonial theory’s proper domain is the world outside the United States,
while civil rights scholarship and much critical race theorizing obtains the world inside.22 The
result is that postcolonial theory often remains if not quite silent at least nonplussed in the
face of specifically American hegemony, and civil rights scholarship with its conventions and
formulas remains tied to the nation as its organizing unit of analysis and, as a consequence,
blind to the nation’s central function within the modern project, the naturalization of coloniality,
and the sedimention of racial hierarchies. It is in this context that one might argue that x = -x,
in the sense that attempts to unseat and transcend race, and coloniality itself, are likely to
generate roughly the same results as doing nothing, and possibly indeed acting in a racist
manner, if the broader modern discourses and devices by and through which race and colo-
niality are embedded and commodified—that is, y—are not put in play and into question.23 Put
slightly differently, and drawing from the work of Barnor Hesse, if the discursive structures and
narratives that give race meaning and life are left in place, it will prove difficult to uproot race.
“At last I am free [yet] I can hardly see in front of me” marks, then, the tension between the
procedural and the substantive, and the chronological/geographical and the epistemological.
It signals the gap separating the urgent rush of the various and disaggregated, compelled and
demanded, teleological “posts” that distinguish black life after the mid-twentieth century—
the postcolonial (and post-postcolonial), post–civil rights, postnationalist, postblack, post-
soul, postracial, and posttactile—and the contending black thoughts defined by a differently

22 For exceptions to this division of intellectual labor, primarily in the area of literary studies, see, among others, Edward Said,
Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995); Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, Postcolonial Theory and the United States:
Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick:
National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Homi K.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); John Cullen Gruesser, Confluences: Postcolonial-
ism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Amy Kaplan,
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Rumina Sethi,
“The United States and Postcolonialism,” in The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance (London: Pluto,
2011), 87–110.
23 For a significant intervention regarding our thinking on race, see Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of
White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (2007): 643–63; and Barnor Hesse, Creolizing the Political: A
Genealogy of Race Governance and Black Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). On a separate note,
the afropessimist, social death, and homo sacer/bare life perspectives might best be understood as characterized by a
common refusal to engage (black) politics in the broadest sense, in other words, to put y in play.
32 | Still Life

gendered, chronologically disordered, and fundamentally reflexive spirit that is at times so

exterior as to be beyond representation, registration, and recognition. It is the former, this
sublative impulse always in search of the afterlives and posts that the dominant narratives
of emancipation encourage, that might be read against the grain. In this particular matrix,
freedom is oddly and awkwardly correlated with always being pushed away from the “scene
of the action”—almost, in a sense, being protected from the turbulence of the political—with
the result that it can be difficult to distinguish freely pursued options from compelled speech.

Terminals
Regarding the odd and awkward, it is in this light that we might use the German theorist
and Nazi supporter Carl Schmitt’s work to get at a sense of the relation between black and
modern politics, and open- and closed-text blacknesses. Schmitt’s insistence on the modern
project’s inability to mask its shortcomings as a coherent theology and the consequent and
desperate efforts to compensate for those inevitable failings contrasts quite starkly with the
commitments evident in Jürgen Habermas’s writing. Schmitt, in identifying modernity’s insta-
bilities and panics, names—and is ultimately consumed by—exactly what Habermas cannot
acknowledge as a defender and proponent of a coherent and sustainable (and self-contained)
European Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, then, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
Habermas distinguishes “dark” and “black” thinkers. According to this typology, he identi-
fies Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx as dark writers who think through their “disharmonies”
with the modern project in a constructive way—that is, remaining ultimately within the fold.
“Black” writers, in contrast, such as Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, and Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, are engaged, in his view, in various forms of obscenity. I do not want
to accord too much significance to Habermas’s anxieties—striking, telling, and amusing as
they might be—since they are rooted ultimately in a certain closed and convenient narration
of the Enlightenment project (in which, as Hesse has observed, the colonial dimension disap-
pears). Habermas’s distinction does raise, though, in a roundabout way, the issue of how we
might understand black politics—radical, reflexive, or otherwise—conceptually and especially
in relation to the texts and affiliated and compulsively harmonious projects of modernity.24
Following Schmitt, we might think of modern politics as being characterized by the
denial of any relationship between the hegemonic and repressed narratives of modernity and,
consequently, any connection between the modern and colonial worlds and their respective
currencies, reason and violence: in other words, the rejection of precisely the identity Walter

24 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987), 106, 211; Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab
(1922; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Hesse, “Racialized Modernity” and Creolizing the Political; and
Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, trans. Elisabeth Fay (2001; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010). The Schmitt/Habermas dynamic does, of course, raise the familiar question of whether “Europe”/“philosophy”
possesses the sustained capacity for thoroughgoing self-critique and substantive reflexivity. For example, see Gasché,
Europe; or, The Infinite Task.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 33

Mignolo and others have argued obtains between modernity and coloniality. Moreover, and
more specifically, we might consider an antipathy to black discursivity and a preference that
blackness remain in its objectified, commodified, and manageable forms—that it die—as part
and parcel of the Enlightenment. Modern politics, then, might be partly understood as the
desire to preserve a static, closed-text blackness as a necessary—exotic or threatening—
constitutive outside, while resisting those black forms energized by more deeply unsettling
tendencies. Black politics, normatively and conceptually speaking, might best be understood
as the always complicated struggle to make plain these denials of relationality and the com-
mitment to thinking reflexively with regard to the extended problem space that is the modern/
colonial matrix and to positively value discursive spaces in which black thoughts might occur.
It would entail, then, a substantively—as opposed to procedurally, time-and-space-based—
postcolonial dimension.25
And by the same token, a reflexive black politics would not be geographically based.
An aspect of this particular conceptual approach to blackness entails an agonistic approach
to the Westphalian order and the nation-state as a unit of analysis. In other words, it both
assumes a global frame and is energized by a conception of diaspora as an anaformative
and already cosmopolitan impulse or dynamic that recontextualizes attempts to draw tight
lines between power and space, gender, sexuality, and governance, and institutionalize and
naturalize the logically related hierarchies. In this context, as others have suggested, strug-
gles for national independence and nation-state status, and the associated epistemologies,
teleologies, and assumptions (e.g., the national as the universal), need to be revisited. Part
of the magic of the dominant narratives of modernity is their ability to render modernity and
coloniality as unrelated matrices; to mask the common commitments that sustain biopolitics
and necropolitics; to beat the clock that reveals the temporal heritage shared by governmen-
talities and subordinativities; to manage the symbiotics linking the prophylactic state and its
duppy extra-text; and to ghostwrite the coproductions of the citizen and the kaffir. One means
by which these two realms—broadly speaking, the consensual and the coercive—might be
brought together and various crucial pressure points made available, is, of course, diaspora.
If we think of diaspora as an example of aparenthesis, and as a rediscursive albeit agonistic

25 For evidence and critiques of this commodity/reflexivity preference dynamic within European theory, see, on the one
hand, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807; repr., New York: Oxford University Press,
1979); Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An
Introduction (1976; repr, New York: Vintage, 1990); and, on the other, Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry
26, no. 4 (2000): 821–65; Hesse, Creolizing the Political; Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in
Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 96–107; and Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault
and the Black Panthers,” City 11, no. 3 (2007): 313–56. An aspect of this reflexive disposition would entail a different
approach to the idealist/materialist frameworks that have underpinned the Hegelian and Marxist approaches as well as the
discourses through and by which “Europe” articulated its “humanisms” in relation to various non-“European” objects. On
a separate point, a substantive postcolonialism is, in a sense, no “post” at all but rather a thoroughgoing commitment to
reflexivity. An argument could be made for the interchangeability of the terms substantively postcolonial and substantively
postmodern. According to this logic, a procedural postmodernism would be linked to Nietzsche (avant la lettre), Benjamin,
Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School more generally, and would draw its sustenance from the two “world wars” and
especially the Holocaust. It would not engage in any thorough fashion the modernity/coloniality matrix and would generate
definitions of race and racism that would contribute to the naturalization of the marginalization of nonwhites. In contrast, a
substantive postmodernism would be haunted by other spirits as well: coloniality, colonialism, slavery, and so on.
34 | Still Life

field of play and possibility that rather than signifying social death, to borrow from Orlando
Patterson, and from Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva more generally, we might have means
to denaturalize the modernity/coloniality matrix and enable transformative agency.26
Related to this willingness to question the geo-orthodoxies that ground the modern/
colonial matrix is a commitment to challenging the assumptions around citizenship in which
modern state practices are rooted. Contemporary politics are devoted to narrowing the sphere
of politics to the national/formal and electoral, and then emptying even that space of partisan
potential and heightening the citizen/kaffir differential while pursuing policies that suggest—
under the rhetoric—a deep hostility to thick citizenship itself.27 In contrast, the diasporic
dimensions of black political sensibilities have historically promoted a broader conception of
the political and a more sanguine approach to the question of citizenship. The latter position,
characterized by an anarchic conception of citizenship and a certain kaffir cosmopolitanism,
has allowed for and supported the pursuit of thicker rights within states (e.g., comprehensive
and redistributive health care, income maintenance programs, and symmetrical judicial proce-
dures) while seeking to defetishize any particular citizenship in the name of broader diasporic
and transnationally sustainable egalitarian principles.
Moreover, with regards to diasporas themselves, this geoheterodoxical perspective has
meant being suspicious of homeland narratives and indeed any authenticating geographies
that demand fixity, hierarchy, and hegemony. Indeed, such impulses would mean—rather than
thinking of new superficially dissident maps—endorsing a “no maps” sensibility that would
make geography an impossibility. Toward this end, we might also consider the role played by
the “open city”—to borrow out-of-context from the title of Teju Cole’s recent novel and the
bargains struck during World War II to safeguard captured cities from unnecessary disfigura-
tion. In locales such as late-nineteenth-century Lagos, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Montreal,
New York City, Johannesburg, Marseille, Rotterdam, and Toronto, black cultures and modal
forms are in permanent and productive flux, given the interactions of black constituencies
from different parts of the globe and shaped by distinct governing narratives. The undecidable
blacknesses produced in these spaces, including the anarchic citizenship mentioned above,
in permanent revolution against the commodifying tendencies of the modern, have historically

26 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Julia Kristeva, Nations without
Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 26; Richard Iton, In Search of the Black
Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Richard
Iton, Rhizome A (forthcoming). For parallel considerations of the diaspora/nation-state dilemma drawn from the Jewish
example, see Daphna Golan, V. Y. Mudimbe, Aron Rodrigue, and Stephen J. Zipperstein, “The Jewish Diaspora, Israel,
and Jewish Identities: A Dialogue,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98, nos. 1–2 (1999): 95–116; and Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel
Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002).
27 On this point, see Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2007); and, among other developments, consider the introduction of voter identification laws in a number of
American states.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 35

been central to the generation of black political imaginations. Conceiving of diaspora as

anaform, we are encouraged, then, to put (all) space into play.28
In contrast, the post-1989/1990 teleological turn requires the assimilation of the values
and institutions of the redacting state (or what Aimé Césaire refers to as the “forgetting
machine”29): that is both the sensibility which calls for, by means of a series of unpublished
retractions, the recurrent disiteration of colonial linkages and entanglements, and as well the
spectacular installations and anxious texts that constitute the nation-state with its impulses to
render all that is liquid as sedimented and solid, and circumscribe considerations of alternative
political possibilities and imaginations (e.g., the eclipse of the feminist, substantively diasporic,
and anarchist possibilities within the Pan-African Congress movement once it was absorbed
by the Westphalian order). To be precise, I am thinking of this post–Berlin Wall/postapartheid
sensibility both literally as a way of being that emerges after a certain point in time, and—as I
noted with regard to the Cold War’s reshaping of black politics—a way of naming a dynamic or
tendency that obviously predates late 1989 and early 1990. Accordingly, the referent “89/90”
functions as a shorthand and points to a sublative tendency in black politics: a commitment
not to be “rude” and to assimilate or approximate dominant narratives and practices energized
paradoxically by an exhaustion with politics or, more precisely—following Schmitt, Ernesto
Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Bonnie Honig, among others—the “political.”30

28 See Teju Cole, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011); and Roma, Città Aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945. Regard-
ing Lagos’s and London’s functioning as open cities, see Michael J. C. Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth-
Century Lagos Life (London: Macmillan, 1977); J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism,
and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); the multivolume series
London Is the Place for Me (Honest Jons Records, 2002–6), charting the admixtures of calypso, high life, and jazz that
emerged from that city in the 1950s; and Val Wilmer, “Prince of the City: Fela in London,” Wire, September 2011, 30–37.
More generally, worth considering are the various expatriate carnivals, given their syncretic character. Coming from another
direction, Matory’s Black Atlantic Religion also illustrates the constructedness of many of the narratives that underpin
diasporic exchanges and, in particular, the problematic function of “Africa” as symbol—that is, as a master closed text—
within these discourses. The suggestion that space be put into play would correlate with a certain skepticism regarding
arguments—even otherwise persuasive arguments—that rely on (fixed) geographies to do conceptual work. See, for
example, Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social
Science (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007); and Gasché, Europe; or, The Infinite Task. Following the cues provided by the various
impossibilities of settlement that underpin and energize diasporas, it would appear that a certain commitment to the illegiti-
macy of settlement in its various guises would follow (e.g., unilateral or exclusive claims to dominion over various forms of
“the material”—including but not limited to land).
29 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1955; repr., New York: Monthly Review, 2000), 52.
30 It is as a result of these sorts of dynamics, as Barnor Hesse has argued, for example, that we find ourselves bound inevita-
bly—and strangely committed despite our dissonant viscera—to a postracial horizon while still submerged in a matrix satu-
rated with race, racial hierarchy, and racism. See Barnor Hesse, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Postracial Horizon,” South
Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2011): 155–78. Regarding the disinclination to engage in rude behavior, consider Othello’s
proclamation “Rude am I in my speech”; David Scott’s articulation of the ruud bwai in “Fanonian Futures?,” in Refashioning
Futures, 217–19; and the following from C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Stanley Paul, 1963), regarding the
racial and colonial politics of cricket:
I was determined to rub in the faces of everybody that Frank Worrell [a prominent black West Indian cricket player] . . .
was being discriminated against. . . . There was fifty years’ knowledge of discrimination behind it and corresponding
anger. . . . According to the code, anger should not intrude into cricket. . . . According to the colonial version of the
code, you were to show yourself a “true sport” by not making a fuss about the most barefaced discrimination because
it wasn’t cricket. (240–41)
With regard to the 89/90 dynamic, the ways “89” shapes “90” should not be overlooked. The fall of the Berlin Wall removed
global anticommunism from the proapartheid repertoire and made it more difficult for British and American authorities
to justify their support for apartheid in the ways Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had during the 1980s. Finally, it
is important to note the discursive elimination of alternatives to neoliberalism undertaken by New Labour in the United
Kingdom and the Democratic Leadership Council and the administrations of Bill Clinton in the United States and the
36 | Still Life

One aspect of this willingness to accommodate the death drive embedded within the
archive of “modern” black politics—its teleological, antireflexive casting marked by a cascade
of “posts”—is the decreasing capacity for certain forms of irony associated with a fear of unde-
cidability and a sublative impulse that requires that certain forms of transgressive politics be
stigmatized, closed down, and/or rendered inaccessible and irretrievable.31 We might also think
here of the struggles to establish and maintain space for substantive, open-ended deliberative
activity, including, but not limited to, the nurturing of potentially subversive forms of interiority
through and by which private geographies are made available to the public (e.g., Me’Shell
NdegéOcello, Richard Pryor); the support of comedy, writing, and music workshops (e.g.,
the classic Motown and Stax studio arrangements; the New York–based creative circle that
included Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, and James Baldwin; Horace
Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra; the Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians [AACM]; the Comedy Act Theater; the UCLA film school of the 1970s; the UK-based
Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective; and the Talkin’ Loud remix
network of the late 1990s and early 2000s); the black press; the political convention process
(e.g., the 1972 National Black Political Assembly, the mid-twentieth-century Pan-African Con-
gresses); the black music band; diaspora sensibilities and opportunities; black counterpublics
and soul architectures in general; and (conceptual) space within language itself.32 If modernity
is about the imagining and making and remaking of dark objects outside the range of reason
and the discursive itself—for example, the Habermassian template—a reflexive black politics
might be understood partly as requiring the privileging of signs and symptoms of black delib-
erative processes and the related generative incoherencies.33 By bringing into view and into
the field of play practices and ritual spaces that are often cast as irrelevant and categorically

related disinvestment in majority brown and black nations—if not their resource potentials—after the fall of the Berlin Wall
by American and European authorities. On this point, see Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold
War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Binyavanga Wainaina, “How Not to Write about Africa in 2012—A
Beginner’s Guide,” Guardian, 3 June 2012. Regarding the “politics”/“the political” distinction, see, among others, Chantal
Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005).
31 The 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, capped and triggered a
number of wishful gestures toward the termination of black politics. On this point, see Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to
Politics,” Commentary 39 (1965); Charles V. Hamilton, “Black Americans and the Modern Political Struggle,” Black World,
May 1970; Matt Bai, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?,” New York Times Magazine, 6 August 2008; Grutter v. Bollinger
539 US 306 (2003); Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder 557 US (2009); Concurrent Resolution, 111th
Congress, 1st Session, S. Con. Res. 26, 11 June 2009; and Fredrick C. Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and
the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a version of the whither-blacks-after-
Obama question applied to the realm of black writers, see Felicia R. Lee, “Black Writers Ponder Role and Seek Wider
Attention,” New York Times, 23 March 2010.
32 Regarding film collectives, see Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, eds., The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black
Audio Film Collective, 1982–1998 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Hamid Naficy, “Collective Mode of Produc-
tion,” in An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 63–100;
and Jasmin Tiggett, “Exclusive: Haile Geraima Talks ‘Teza,’ ‘Sankofa,’ and His Concern for the Future of Black Indie
Cinema,” shadowandact, 17 August 2012. Regarding the importance of physical community in the articulation of artistic
movements, see Giovanni Russonello, “A New Day in Harlem,” JazzTimes, February 2012, 34–39.
33 “ ‘Negroid form’ equals obscurantism plus occultism, mystery plus mysticism and mystification,” writes Jacques Derrida.
“Blackness is never far from the obscure and the occult. Spiritualism is but a spiritism. But, on the other hand, ‘Negroid
form’ might signal the enslavement of these pseudo-concepts that have no autonomy. They are not acknowledged as
having any internal necessity. For they are working merely as objects in the service of men, for men.” Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 172.
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 37

“beside the point”—indeed, unrecognizable as politics—these visions and disclosures might

help us gain normative traction in an era characterized by the dismissal of any possibilities
beyond the already existing.

Love You to the End(s)

“A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to
your flourishing,” suggests Lauren Berlant. Moreover, she contends that the “life-organizing
status” of an optimistic attachment “can trump interfering with the damage it provokes” and
that it might be “awkward and . . . threatening to detach from what is already not working.”
If we substitute teleoillogica for the optimistic, disclosure for interfering, and rude for awk-
ward, we can get a sense of the political, social, and affective stakes involved in pursuing a
reflexive black politics. From a broadly Gramscian perspective, the sublative turn or impulse is
understandable if we consider the apparent absence of appealing or retrievable alternatives—
post-89/90 in both the literal and metaphorical senses—the advent of increasingly sweet and
textureless time (stuck in a groove but revealing no constraints), and the hegemonic incentive
structures, protective regimes, and affective confirmations that subsidize our commitments to
certain casual/ties and closed text blacknesses.34 If we imagine that twelve-inch vinyl records
are to a specific generation of music consumers as printed books are to a particular form of
reading and nation-states are to modern politics—that is, the strength of attachments to the
familiar—the intimidating and understandably forbidding “I can’t see in front of me” dimension
of a black politics committed to reflexivity might be more apparent. Our political choices and
options are grounded in and saturated with affect. Or, put differently, the contrasting visions
considered here can be represented as contending conceptual narratives working the same
affective spaces and territories: the love song as post- or apolitical pleasure, on the one
hand (e.g., politics, arrangements/orchestrations, teleologies and rituals), and the love song
as agonistic text, on the other (e.g., the political, anarrangement/deorchestration, reflexivity
and disclosures).
Returning to the beginning, but moving in a different direction, in the same year that Chic
issued C’est Chic, the decidedly unorthodox collective Funkadelic, under the leadership of
George Clinton, released One Nation, Under a Groove containing the recording “Promental-
shitbackwashpsychosisenema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers).” The nearly eleven-minute song
features a characteristically surreal range of variations on the theme that “the world is a toll-
free toilet” and the scatological possibilities that might follow from such an observation. This
dissertation on ends and bottoms that resolves into the chant “Fried ice cream is a reality” is
accompanied by an extended guitar solo in which Gary Shider channels Eddie Hazel, one of

34 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1, 227, 263. “We don’t want casualties from
the past,” writes Binyavanga Wainaina, “they remind us of the essential cruelty of hope.” Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I
Will Write about This Place: A Memoir (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2011), 113.
38 | Still Life

his predecessors in the group, and unavoidably Jimi Hendrix, as well as an anonymous and
fluidly gendered vocal performance in the form of a standard rhythm and blues ballad that
includes the pledge “I’ll love you to the end.” The three narratives—the spoken word explora-
tion of “low-calorie logic,” the guitar solo, and the vocalizations, are laid over one another as
in a palimpsest. On the lyric sheet accompanying the vinyl release, the words sung by the
vocalist are not provided. Only the spoken word exchanges and chants—which reflect the
spirit of other Funkadelic slogans such as “Think it ain’t illegal yet” and “Free your mind and
your ass will follow”—are noted (in great and precise detail), suggesting that the love ballad
is in effect a form of background noise, as in something to be filtered out or talked or played
over. The recording does engage a distinctly different aesthetic than that deployed by Chic
on “At Last I Am Free”—practically its inverse, with its skin turned inside out and the form of
technically ambitious vocal performance Chic usually avoided—and offers, at its core, com-
mitment to a relationship while the Rodgers and Edwards composition narrates a departure of
sorts. The overall effect, though, is arguably the same: a cautionary note regarding the appeal
of preemptive scripted endings.35
Chic’s and Funkadelic’s installations interrogating the love song/black politics nexus
can also be read as sharing a family resemblance with Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman’s
respective theses on the impossibilities of redemption and emancipation; Lee Perry’s and King
Tubby’s dub exoskeleton’s vis-à-vis the narrative authority and autonomy of the lead vocal;
John Coltrane’s and postbebop’s renderings of show tunes and pop standards; Jacques Der-
rida’s deconstructions of “Europe” and “philosophy”; and Grace Jones’s literal and figurative
command to “Pull up to the bumper, baby, and drive it in between.”36 The marking and unset-
tling of boundaries—the evidence of aparenthetical dynamics—common to the sensibilities
and strategies characteristic of this particular category of disclosures, represent ways of think-
ing with and against the dominant narrations of post-89/90 life (and, as such, are particularly
vulnerable to derision, caricature, and dismemberment given their resistance to the dominant
archives and archiveability).
Moreover, a reflexive, substantively postcolonial black politics might compel us to think
more broadly about the relationship among black politics, sound, vision, and texture. I men-
tion this here in the spirit of the indirection, absence, understatement, and sideways singing
evident in the Chic aggregate articulation act that is “At Last I Am Free.” More specifically, if
modern narratives equate citizenship with the right to speak and perhaps compelled speech,
and more broadly to be seen, and prefer a certain arrangement of sounds, visions, and

35 Funkadelic, “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosisenema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers),” One Nation, Under a Groove, Warner
Bros., 1978. Regarding the tone of P-Funk’s chants, consider also the “Wake Up!” incantations at the end of early Spike
Lee films.
36 Following Robert Young, it might be useful to see anticolonialism and postcolonialism as having created the conditions that
gave rise to poststructuralism (e.g., Jacques Derrida’s Algerian roots). See Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies (New
York: Routledge, 2004). Hartman’s recasting of the potentials of emancipation should be read, it can be argued, much
like Gayatri Spivak’s warnings about the easier postcolonialisms: as comparable and overlapping arguments for greater
degrees of reflexivity (not the abandonment of the respective projects altogether).
 40 • March 2013 • Richard Iton  | 39

textures, and so on, it is to be expected, perhaps, that once excluded populations are super-
ficially included—as happens with the postcolonial transitions, including the post–civil rights
turn—they will seek the right to make as much noise and to be seen as clearly and as often
as possible as normative citizens. Indeed, the dominant narratives, one might suggest, will
require the former formally subaltern to make more noise, to sing out, to desperately seek
the camera, as a celebration and recognition of their supposed emancipation in a manner
perhaps reinscribing the citizen/kaffir relation (e.g., by making them vulnerable to mocking and
derision as suggested in Birth of a Nation’s post–Civil War narrative and many contemporary
“reality” shows). Against these expectations, and following in the paths laid out by Fred Moten,
those engaged by the projects associated with a substantively radical and Habermassian
black disinterring of the political—as opposed to mere politics—might consider the poten-
tials associated with the speculative forms of antifoundationalism alluded to earlier and the
anarrangement or deorchestration of the assumptions and norms of modern politics. If the
expectation is noise and the commitment to visual ubiquity, a deeply radical politics might be
correlated with aesthetic humilities, ablative disjunctions, intentional silences, hesitations, and
invisibilities, among other means of confusing politics, summoning the reflexive, and reveal-
ing the demands and imperatives underlying the Habermassian model. I am thinking here,
for example, of the use of space and silence in the musical works of Shirley Horn, Ahmad
Jamal, and Miles Davis, and in Erykah Badu’s video for “Window Seat” and Charles Lane’s
1989 silent film Sidewalk Stories; and the suspension of coloration in Toni Morrison’s most
recent novel Home.37
It might be, perhaps, that the issue is not the pursuit of a certain setting of the visual,
audio, and tactile levels but rather a refusal to assimilate any particular pattern (or assumptions
regarding their proper intersections). As in the transitions from J’Ouvert through Carnival to
Lent, noise today, silence tomorrow; visual surplus there with a potential and deep absence
at any moment. In other words, following the logic of thinking of diaspora as anaformative
impulse, and of black politics or the substantively postcolonial as anarrangement, anaformal-
ity, and a commitment to the practice of disclosure, it would not be a matter of just deliberate
sensory general strikes but rather the possibility that any of the channels or registers might be
flooded, invaded, or abandoned at any moment. Deorchestration, then, not as reorchestra-
tion—for example, through a commitment to silence or invisibility—but rather as a reflexive
and deliberate strategy according to which various confounding options are alternately chosen
and false happy endings rejected.

37 See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003); Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218; and “Interview with Toni Morrison,” PBS
Newshour, 29 May 2012, broadcast transcript, www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june12/tonimorrison_05 29.
html. Regarding suggestions that his use of silence and space is distinctive, Ahmad Jamal contends, “Some people call it
space, but I call it discipline. There was a certain kind of showiness in some musicians but I tracked off from that.” Quoted
in Stuart Nicholson, “Tough Love,” Jazzwise 160, February 2012, 31. For a fascinating take on raced bodies and the visual
register across time, see Simone Browne, “Everybody’s Got a Little Light under the Sun: Black Luminosity and the Visual
Culture of Surveillance,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 542–64.