In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities

349 Pages·2022·1.534 MB·English

by  Joy James

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May 1, 22 Draft J. James In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, London: Divided, Fall 2022.

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love
Precarity, Power, Communities
Joy James
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May 1, 22 Draft J. James In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, London: Divided, Fall 2022.

Oshun’s fan.
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May 1, 22 Draft J. James In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, London: Divided, Fall 2022.

Contents
Preface: Oshun’s Flight
Introduction: Black Revolutionary Love Reimagines Democracy

I. Analyzing Precarity and Power
1. “Sorrow, Tears and Blood”
2. 7 Lessons in 1 Abolitionist Notebook
3. Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition
4. The Algorithm of Anti-Racism Meets Abolition Alchemy
5. Panther Afterlife Plan A: Build Community
6. Panther Afterlife Plan B: Organize Social Communalism

II. Communal Organizing and Podcast Pedagogy
7. Black Lives Between Grief and Action (Yancy/The Opinionator)
8. Reaching Beyond “Black Faces in High Places” (Truthout)
9. Coming to Political Theory in the Academy (PWIP)
10. On the Academy, the Captive Maternal and the Central Park Case (Time Talks)
11. The Plurality of Abolitionism (Groundings Podcast)
12. (Re)Thinking the Black Feminist Canon (Black Feminist Futures)
13. “What Are Our Sources for Struggle?”: Black Feminisms (The Malcolm Effect)
14. Pragmatism and Revolutionary Love (Black Myths Podcast)
15. On the Rise of the Black Bourgeoisie (This Is Revolution)
16. I. We Remember the Attempts to Be Free (Millennials Are Killing Capitalism)
17. II. We Remember the Attempts to Be Free (Millennials Are Killing Capitalism)
18. Universities De-Radicalize, Agape Re-Radicalizes (“RAW”/Political Theology Network)
19. In the Spirit of Jericho (Jericho Movement/In the Spirit of Nelson Mandela)
Conclusion: The Agape of Peaches
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Preface
Oshun’s Flight
I do not seek to represent or dishonor any spiritual or religious traditions. If I err, please
forgive. I merely note that thirst compels this writing.
I heard one story about the African orisha Oshun. I do not recall all the details so I
embroider here to make my own political-ethical points. According to the griot, as the ambitious
lofty conspired to overthrow the creator, they mocked Oshun who had refused to join in a coup
or genuflect as a political demimonde. Angered by upstarts’ challenges to authority, and the
disorder of things, Spirit—Olodumare— withdrew protections. Waters in skies and on lands
dried up.
Oshun sided with the lower castes, dispossessed masses, animals-humans dying from
malnourishment, parched and perched amid poisoned and absent waters. Oshun so loved the
world. Only the embodiment of the beauty of rivers and streams dared to fly to the heavens to
petition Spirit for redress and aid to those suffering cracked earth under dry, burning skies. As
Oshun flew closer to Spirit, the radiated sun took its toll. Their beautiful peacock-like feathers
began to smolder, then burn, and fall. Despite the agony, Oshun focused on the desperation of
those left behind and so reached their destination.
Shorn of beautiful feathers, scorched and scarred with the ashen appearance of a gray
vulture, Oshun stumbled from the torturous flight to approach Spirit. Oshun bowed. Spirit
observed, then agreed to listen to Oshun petition on behalf of those betrayed by life, abandoned
by gods, bereft with broken defenses to ward off “leadership” alien to the needs of the mass.
Was it compassion or grace that led to respite from desertification? Or, was the catalyst
the beautiful boldness wielded by a defiant orisha compelled to care? Whatever the motivation,
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Spirit heard risk, love and courage in the pleadings; and ceased to punish the mass for the crimes
of arrogant challengers who sought to dethrone, and imperialize misery. Thwarted but
unpunished, destructive wannabe gods continued to transgress for accumulations. Unforgiven,
they were forgotten by many except the dishonored and desperate who recalled and recoiled
from their violence. Ignoring the imbalance on the scales of justice, the heavens’ granted relief
from pain by releasing rain to all as Spirit met our desperate needs for flowing waters.
The path of a worthy returnee is a painful sojourn. Oshun flew into scorching skies
seeking to sabotage authoritarianism and to serve the people. Taking flight as warrior, Oshun
navigated sacrificial labor. Carried by the echo of protective spirits, Oshun’s heart beat became a
radar for struggle. With(out) feathered beauty, their persistence fueled revolutionary love. Thus,
the orisha returns wearing the radiance of agape. Reverence seeps through the labors of saints,
ancestors, healers, doulas to fall upon captive communities and kin.
Survivors battle catastrophes unleashed by would-be gods— rapists, capitalists,
overseers, imperialists, traffickers, abortion bounty hunters, prison guards, environmental
desecrators, military-mercenaries, and death squads. Willing to hear the echoes of griot-speaking
love, survivors coordinate flights and fights to ensure that —even when muddied —we remain
within sacred waters.
Is Oshun’s flight as tortured messenger a form of the Captive Maternal? Or is their labor
to give birth to community care a “gift” from a transcendent deity? Are deities captives to agape?
Do they (un)willingly suffer or are they emotionally/spiritually compelled to sacrifice? Can all
forms of communities —deified, humanized, dehumanized, cyborg—generate or produce
Captive Maternals? Oshun is a sovereign. Sovereigns suffer. Yet, are they captives?
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[1]
“Killmonger’s Captive Maternal is M.I.A.” juxtaposes Black Panther’s mythical
Wakanda royalty—described as “sovereign captive maternals”— with the Oakland sister/brother
on the block. In the Hollywood blockbuster, it is the latter—the prole/rebel/lumpen— not the
former —the salvific elite —that becomes the catalyst for transformation. Fictional characters in
film or narratives are incapable of “saving.” Yet, Spirit exceeds the talents of celluloid
narratives. Spirit is not a synonym for “Deity” or “Orisha” or “God.” The issue of “hope” is not
an exegesis, or vice versa, i.e., the issue of an exegesis is not “hope” as a promissory note. If
agape is absent, life struggles falter.

A Dread Doula’s Intervention
What gives birth spans the expanse between life and death. A dread doula, ( ) tracks
within struggling communities the emotions found in Oshun’s flight. In Mar’s May 2, 2022 essay
[2]
“Dear Mariame Kaba, Hope Is Not a Discipline,” they open with a quote by Mariame Kaba,
who has made significant contributions to abolitionism:
Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other
emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not
[3]
optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.
s poetic prose underneath Kaba’s quote expands consciousness on “Hope”:
Hope requires complete trust and confidence; it requires faith.
Faith grounds.
Faith is the foundation upon which both our desires and expectations reside.
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[4]
Faith is at the root of our ability to hope.
Reflecting on Kaba’s contributions, ( ) concedes that hope is not an emotion and then proceeds to
describe it as “phenomena of [coexisting] emotions.” ( ) asserts that we must recognize the
impossibility of any project to render hope a “discipline.” Hope as “(cap)ability” accrues through
“power, privilege,” yet systemic abuse without transformative accountability or strategic efficacy
to address anti-blackness, capitalism, neocolonialism leads people to lose faith in institutions and
prominent leaders, hence those lacking “power, privilege, and/or capacity to hope. . . become
incapable of hope”:
Hope should not be contingent upon me (or those of us on the very margins)
being able to (self)regulate/discipline in the face of institutional and systemic
violence; there is no honor, healing, and spaciousness in that. Hope as a discipline
becomes restrictive, monotonous, exhausting. We must be able to occupy a
multifaceted consciousness and way of reasoning with what could be that makes
room for both the pragmatic and the impossible. We must practice a regenerative
and expansive hope, or else hope becomes contained only by what we assume
[5]
and/or are told is not possible.
( ) asserts that the capacity to “imagine beyond the carceral status quo” depends not on
“liberatory imaginings” but “faith” that what we can materialize what we imagine. Asserting that
learning “hope as a discipline” mandates that we “lower our expectations of liberation,” ( )
quotes Nicholas Brady: “[P]aradoxically, the most hopeful people are those who have no hope in
the system.” ( ) sets forth coda:
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We should not and will not discipline ourselves into hope. We will not build more
tolerance for disappointment in violent institutions and systems built upon our
[6]
erasure and pain. We will not police our doubt.
To move forward rather than become stuck in despondency or defeat, ( ) advocates that we
“embrace despair not as an end or an arrival point” but as a “bridge” constructed without
binaries.
This suggests to me that confidence shaped by skills and strategies is developed in
communal struggles and as well develops organizing that can frame and sustain movements.
Such struggles are energized and amplified by engineering revolutionary love not as “scientific”
but as sentient. The spiritual nature of that love is embodied in agape disciplined by political
will; that sustains this form of love even when one wishes its dissipation or for it to dissolve and
so dismember the entanglements and suffering of liberation struggles. There is also the
possibility that despair, rather than leading to nihilism or passivity and indifference, could be a
key catalyst to confrontational change. How else could Mamie Till Mobley disturb psyches
across the globe when she held an open-casket funeral—and allowed photographers to capture
the horror-as-catalyst— for her fourteen-year-old Emmett who was sexually-assaulted, tortured,
and mutilated before being murdered by white supremacists? Mamie Till Mobley despaired.
Later in 1955, in August, Rosa Parks shared that despair, and rage, as while thinking of Emmett
when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. Catalysts in
struggle are not always sparked by hope.
As do Marxists, ( ) asserts that “one cannot ‘discipline’ themselves into the phenomena of
hope without concrete material change.” Hence, absent “concrete material change,” influencers,
celebrities as well as religious and community leaders cannot discipline communities into hope
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when there are no material conditions to sustain it. Building on contributions, I would
argue though that it is struggle rather than “change” that serves as the catalyst for “disciplining”
strategies. Struggles on the later stages of the Captive Maternal’s evolution lead to maroon
camps or autonomous zones, sanctuaries and enclosures that make “hope” a possibility and a
stable accelerant for liberation struggles. “Hope” can be used to extinguish revolutionary
struggle, according to ( ), when leadership and platforms with the capacity to “discipline hope”
often “depend on teaching self-regulatory violence to their ‘followers’”:
This self-regulatory violence is usually dependent on a violent dismissiveness of
“dark” or heavy emotions and phenomena such as destruction, despair,
depression, and also deeply dependent on a constant lack of critical critique. This
does not imply that those who possess and/or practice hope are less critical and
don’t experience despair. However, hope as a “discipline” in the face of ongoing
systemic and institutional abuse (and modest material change) requires the weight
of the psychological and/or emotional consequences of our conditions and the
task of nurturing feelings of “productive” expectation (in the midst of our ongoing
suffering) dependent upon self-discipline. Hope should not be contingent upon me
(or those of us on the very margins) being able to self-regulate/discipline in the
face of violence; there is no honor and/or healing in that. The ability to hope
“requires psychological & emotional acts of diligence along with differing levels
of dismissiveness” and the ability to “occupy a multifaceted consciousness that
makes room for both the practical and the impossible in order to practice a
regenerative hope.”
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Reading ( ), I hear the generative and see the void as shaped by communal dialogue and
interrogation, as well as negotiations structuring theory, politics and strategies to further
liberation movements through community connectors. Democracy is said to be based in
discursive communication for the common good, according to European political theorists
Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. Yet, deities precede the demos. The recognition of their
political will —if it has validity— is based not on their super powers but on their capacity to
receive and return love. Oshun took flight not because she loved in the abstract and from on
high. Oshun took flight because she reciprocated the love she received, not from other deities but
from the mass.
Even when offering assistance, the largesse of overlords can be both overbearing and
disciplinarian. Yet, neither pity nor emotional grandeur fueled Oshun’s flight. Gratitude did.
Oshun returned the love given to them by the mass. The mass taught Oshun how to love. The
origin story of Spirit within revolutionary struggle is the agency of mass catalyzed by the
gravitas of loss—healthy childhoods, clean air, fresh water, freedom, dignified life and death.
Whatever Oshun’s capacity, the political will of the people to endure and love shaped their flight
plan. Oshun was the messenger. The message delivered: “Pursue revolutionary love.”

[1]
“Killmonger’s Captive Maternal is MIA: Black Panther’s Family Drama, Imperial Masters, and Portraits of
Freedom,” Southern California Library. 2019.
[2]
( ), “Dear Mariame Kaba, Hope Is Not a Discipline,” Medium/Patreon, May 2, 2022.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/dear-mariame-is-
65935224?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare
[3]
Source note.
[4]
( ), “Dear Mariame Kaba, Hope Is Not a Discipline,” May 2, 2022.