Scenes of Alternative Sociality in the Black Radical Tradition and Critical Theories

When Saidiya Hartmann describes slave dances, Paul Gilroy dub sessions, and Fred Moten jazz improvisations, the authors consistently emphasize that these are communal performances. They make the fragile moments of a relative self-determination arise from a social life of Black individuals. This dissertation project is primarily concerned with this empathetic reference to the Black social life (and the criticism of the optimism contained within). It asks how alternative sociality can be theorized in racist societies: how can the fragile, limited possibilities of sociality be foregrounded as much as the violence and the suffering? Which theory is the appropriate choice to approach this challenge?

Ever since there have been critical social theories from Black perspectives, there is a (fiercely contested) debate on the extent to which conceptual contexts of Western critical theories have the capacity to grasp the lives of enslaved individuals and those who migrated into the diaspora. Before this background, the project analyzes how the descriptions of Black sociality within the more recent Black Radical Tradition relates to those Western critical theories that sought emancipatory potentials amongst the lives of (mostly white) marginalized. Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Judith Butler, and others developed concepts such as Erinnerungsspur (memory trace), “structure of feeling,” or “performativity” to offer alternative forms of sociality to bourgeois modes of subjectivation. However, even though Hartman, Gilroy, and Moten do refer to these concepts at essential points of their descriptions of Black sociality, they reinterpret them to describe the sociality of slaves, colonized individuals, and their ancestors. These Umwendungen (conversions, Sonderegger) of theory and the observable intellectual alliances are meant to reconstruct both continuities and ruptures of theoretical thought. Thus, the project asks for the specificity of the theory paradigm of alternative sociality in the context of reflections on race/blackness.

On the one hand, through a retracing of theory constellations, the project aims to demonstrate how Black socialities are theorized differently within the Black Radical Tradition and how other fields such as literature influence this theorization (i.e., by Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison).

On the other hand, in addition to similarities and differences in the development of theory, it also aims to uncover the limitation of the Western canons (from Benjamin to Butler and from Habermas to Williams) when negotiating questions of race/blackness.

Fig. above: Bodies in motion at a dance workshop in Frankfurt am Main, © Christin Picard