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English professor debuts book on race and radicalism

By EMMA ROALSVIG | February 2, 2017

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COURTESY OF EMMA ROASLVIG Prof. Hickman deconstructs Marxist material to talk about race.

Jared Hickman, associate English professor, spoke about the publication of his book Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, on Thursday, Jan. 19 at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse.

Together with Hopkins colleague Herbert Baxter Adams, Chair and Associate Professor of History Nathan Connolly, Assistant Professor of English Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Africana Studies Lecturer Shani Mott and Director of the Center for Africana Studies Hollis Robbins, the event prompted a discussion on questions of race, materialist critique and the history and future of Atlantic radicalism.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration and amid right-nationalist upsurges throughout the world, Hickman hoped that Black Prometheus would spur reflection on how to resist in the current political moment. Hickman believes Black Prometheus speaks to many questions about what place there is for identity politics and race in leftist theory and in practice.

“It seems to me often times in these conversations that race, if it is amitted into the equation at all, is frequently a supplementary term,” Hickman said. “It’s accepted into the conversation in those cases in which race is aligned with class only when it can be fitted nicely into an analytic framework.”

Hickman stated that the debunking of race as a biological reality is problematic.

“There is a way in which ‘anti-racism’ in many of its dominant formulations is fundamentally ‘anti-race.’ There’s a fundamental antipathy towards race as a category,” he said. “There’s often this inescapable feeling that even as one is talking about race, one shouldn’t be talking about it and one day won’t have to, because on some level it is not real.”

In Black Prometheus, he tries to historicize and deconstruct Marxist materialism to see how race might appear in that reconceptualization. Hickman introduced his theory of ‘theo-geo-political economy’ and argued that race originates in global encounters between people making sense of their and others’ respective places in an encompassing culture of a finite space, the globe.

“This is where race originates,” he said. “In encounters between humanizing divinities and divinizing humans. These are the moments in which specific territories and peoples are being marked in certain ways and positions in certain ways within this encompassing global reality.”

In the following discussion with fellow panelists, Connolly spoke about how emancipation is linked to the figure of Prometheus meditated on the white theory of Marx and Hegel.

“We’re all historical figures,” Connolly said. “Prometheus steps away from the gods by risk of giving man the power of fire: a refutation of the godly power, and the extent to which any of us challenge a large system, we are essentially engaged in a kind of Promethean activity.”

Jackson spoke about the need to do justice to a differentiated population in global literature and to resist the urge to generalize.

“One of the difficulties for me reading this book was not Jared’s work, but rather the need to rely on a notion of ‘African fetish’ or the ‘African subject,’ when you can never do that when working in actually global scholarly idio,” Jackson said. “To call something African, I would be booed out of the room.”

Mott spoke about white western desires to de-racialize history and her difficulty understanding her own relationship with the Marxist white western dichotomy of race and class.

“When I was coming through graduate study, I too was taught that class was the predominant way in which we should encounter, but race for me was very material, very real in my life” Mott said.

Robbins spoke about the plasticity of the Prometheus myth itself and how it is told by Hesiod, a mortal omniscient narrator, and not Prometheus himself.

“Prometheus can be many things: political rebel, cultural hero, scientific genius. What does it mean to narrate a rebellion in the midst of the rebellion?” Robbins asked.

In response, Hickman expressed his belief that everyone is unknowingly fashioning his own mythical narrative of empowering and creative revolution.

Sophomore Sam Norwood appreciated the critical yet open nature of the discussion.

“It felt productive and vivid, like getting closer to the truth in real time,” Norwood wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “They dealt with many important issues to consider in the discussion of liberation, especially during the discussion on post-revolutionary power structures and hegemonies borne of radical uprisings.”

Sophomore Matthias Gompers enjoyed how apt the discussion was to the current political climate.

“The talk ended up being as much about blackness in literature as it was about blackness in a broader societal context,” Gompers wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “Because it was the eve of Trump’s inauguration, there was a strong focus on the historic aspect of blackness on truth and power dynamics.”


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