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Critical Exchange Remembering and reading the work of Richard Iton (1961–2013) Contemporary Political Theory advance online publication, 24 February 2015; doi:10.1057/cpt.2014.59 Duppy State, Duppy Conqueror: In Search of Black Politics ‘Yes I’ve been accused, many times And wrongly abused now But through the powers of the most-High They’ve got to turn me loose Don’t try to cut me off this bridge now I’ve got to reach Mt. Zion So if you a Bullbucka, let me tell you this I’m a duppy conqueror, conqueror’ The Wailers1 In Jamaican culture a ‘duppy’ is a term for a ghost or a spirit that escapes from the burial of the deceased. Incarnating the act of refusing to be buried, the duppy embodies the logic of haunting and disrupting everyday life. It reappears with a bearing of malevolence and mischief towards those who remain living. Taking any living form it chooses, the duppy is the quotidian possibility of danger and harassment; replicating the evils associated with the living person it previously inhabited. The duppy signifies the remains of the irrepressible (Leach, 1961; Alleyne, 1989; Iton, 2008). In his In Search of the Black Fantastic, Richard Iton (2008) uses the metaphor of the ‘duppy state’ to refer to residual and lingering punitive formations associated with formally disestablished and elapsed colonial-racial regimes of plantation slavery, territorial occupation and spatial segregation. These have resisted the Western consignment to buried history, continually reiterated in contemporary social and political forms of institutionalized racial marginalization, © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory 1–32 www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/ Critical Exchange violence and oppression, confronting black populations whose racialized violations are formally denied by credentialed Western democracies. The duppy state inhabits and intersects with liberal democratic formalizations of the ‘prophylactic state’ which ‘inoculates, injects, protects, and secures through the provision of public goods and wards off those elements suspected of spreading various diseases and contagions in order to ideally produce healthy, self-regulating, and self-fashioning citizens’ (p. 133). Where the identities and comportments of non-white populations are routinely stigmatized as social contagions, the privileged white Western citizen is the major beneficiary of the prophylactic state and its contemporary inarticulate forms of ‘racial rule’ (Goldberg, 2001). The latter accrues from the historical imbrication of the liberal and the colonial, the representational and the peformative, in the regulation of black populations both inside and outside the Western protections of citizenship and the certifications of social integration. In this way, Iton challenges us to consider what kinds of black politics are implied in exposing and overcoming the colonial-racial and political effects of the duppy state in the post-civil rights and post-colonial eras where there has been no ‘natural progression from the passing of colonialism to the end of coloniality’ (p. 197).2 Naming Black Politics C.L.R. James’ A History of Negro Revolt published in 1938 is perhaps the first attempt to name the modernity of black politics.3 James’ focus on the sixteenth to nineteenth century anti-slavery activities in the Caribbean and the United States and the early twentieth century anti-colonial activities in Africa situated ‘Negro revolt’ as one of the oldest and most enduring social movements of modern politics. James’ objective was not only to set the historical record straight but also to analyze these movements as struggles for politics within and against the racial dominative regimes of modernity. Although James went no further than editorializing the significant events of ‘Negro revolt’ hidden from history and the modern political implications of this erased history from below, his intervention continues to represent an important challenge to the dominant Western tradition of political theory whose paradigmatic narratives ensure black politics simply fails to appear. James suggested that whatever is articulated as black politics, whether in the Americas, Africa or Europe, emerged from populations formed by modern and colonial processes, structurally subordi- nated and pathologized racially as Negro/black. This inscribed the Negro/black populations in contextual and contestatory movements and practices that were rendered as politics insofar as they were anti-racial exertions for alternative social forms of being. Within the tradition of thought inspired by James it might be argued that black politics is enacted in the formulation of reasons for valorizing a particular collective existence when that collective existence has been ‘called into question’ racially and existentially (Glissant, 1989, p. 104). Nevertheless, it remains the case that black politics is one of the least developed concepts in black political thought. To 2 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory 1–32 Critical Exchange complicate matters, since the demise of the anti-colonial, civil rights, black power, black feminist, anti-racist and anti-apartheid movements, that diasporically criss- crossed the Americas, Africa and Europe during the mid-1950s – early 1990s, we could be forgiven for thinking the idea of black politics signified ephemera at best and anachronism at worst. During the last 20 years, black politics has been increasingly defined rather prosaically by US black political scientists largely concerned with various institutional levels of black participation in electoral processes (Hanchard, 2006). This perhaps explains the aspirations of recent elaborations in the field of black political thought among a number of very different theorists who have begun to grapple with how we might think historically, contemporaneously and diasporically about the meaning of black politics within the constraints and possibilities of its undecidability.4 Within this latter context, the signal achievement of In Search of the Black Fantastic is the way it attempts to clarify and re-imagine the complexities of black politics in relation to its contextual inscriptions and practices. Contextualizing Racial Inscriptions Iton begins his initiative in black political thought with what he describes as a ‘familiar dilemma’ that takes the form of two perennial questions: ‘How do the excluded engage the apparently dominant order? Does progress entail that the marginalized accept mainstream norms and abandon transformative possibilities?’ (p. 3). These are questions of practice viewed from the historical perspectives of black populations formerly racially enslaved, territorially colonized and violently segregated by institutionalizations of white dominant social orders. Iton suggests black populations experience this historically Western residuum of law and order as imbrications of social incorporation, racial regulation, economic marginalization and violent policing in Western societies. For Iton the prevailing political resolution on offer to the racially marked and excluded is racial inclusion but only on the grounds of unmarked racial marginalization. Such a resolution can only racially preserve and naturalize the democratic-colonial categories of majority and minorities, whites and non-whites, that characterize these formations as if they simply occurred demogra- phically outside of any historical and political constitution of an unburied racial social order. The familiar dilemma is recurrently ineluctable because ‘the excluded are never simply excluded’, but rather their ‘marginalization reflects and determines the shape, texture and boundaries of the dominant order and its associated privileged communities’ (p. 4). It creates a racial paradox of social inclusion. Black populations seek equal participation and representation within a white dominated social order, whose Western political identity is finessed on civil openness to non-whiteness and resourced by nationalist opposition to non-whiteness. The social participation of black populations in ‘this outside/inside dynamic’ is ‘experienced asymmetrically’ as ‘political disenfranchisement’ and ‘overemployment in the arenas of popular culture’ © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory 1–32 3 Critical Exchange (p. 4). Disenfranchisement takes the form of Western political opposition to black politics, repudiating black concerns with white racial domination and enforcing black pathologization. Against that background, the representational successes of black popular culture have become burdened with expectations of producing critiques of white domination and counter veiling susceptibilities to commodification for the consumerist pleasures and comforts of white affectivity. Consequently, in the United States and elsewhere across the African diaspora the lineage of black politics cannot be forged and bequeathed without navigating the relation between popular culture and the formalization of what is known as politics. If there is no possibility of black social and political inclusion or representation in Western societies like the United States without racial marginalization and racial subordination, this suggests two things. First, we need an understanding of the colonial-racial formation of Western liberal democracies; and second, we need a conceptualization of black politics in relation to that Western liberal-colonial and democratic-racial order. This has particular implications for how we understand

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