UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Modern Capitalist State and the Black Challenge: Culturalism and the Elision of Political Economy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gs4b7z3 Author Burden-Stelly, Charisse Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Modern Capitalist State and the Black Challenge: Culturalism and the Elision of Political Economy By Charisse Burden-Stelly A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Percy C. Hintzen, Chair Professor Jovan S. Lewis Professor Keith P. Feldman Professor Ramon Grosfoguel Spring 2016 © 2016 by Charisse Burden-Stelly All Rights Reserved Abstract The Modern Capitalist State and the Black Challenge: Culturalism and the Elision of Political Economy by Charisse Burden-Stelly Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Percy C. Hintzen, Chair This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. Cold War liberalism institutionalized the hegemony of cultural politics and Culturalism by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, the African diaspora as an analytical framework became reduced to its cultural aspects. It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies. The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies. Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural critique by criminalizing and disciplining critiques that opposed the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and 1 cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism. Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in the dissertation. The cultural specification of blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique. 2 For Essie, Elizabeth, Clariece, and Gianna, my beloved Burdens and Savannah my eternal guide i TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………1 DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………i TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………iv INTRODUCTION BETWEEN RACIALISM AND RADICALISM: THEORIZING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA AND THE BLACK RADICAL STRUCTURE OF FEELING…………………………………………1 The Harlem Renaissance…………………………………………………………..3 Garveyism………………………………………………………………………….5 The Black Left……………………………………………………………………10 Endnotes……………………….......……………………………………………..17 CHAPTER 1 NEW NEGRO CULTURALISM, COLD WAR CULTURALISM, AND AFRICAN DIASPORA THEORY…………………....21 Theorizing Culturalism…………………………………………………………...23 The Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Culturalism………………………..…29 Cold War Culturalism and the Horne Thesis……………………………………..36 Niggerization, Bad Faith, and Cold War Culturalism………………………...….42 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..46 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………….46 CHAPTER 2 THEORIZING ANTICOMMUNISM/ANTIRADICALISM/ANTIBLACKNESS……………....50 Anticommunism and Antiblackness: Metaphor and Analogy……………………51 Shifts in Anticommunist Discourse and Discipline………………………………57 Black Liberalism, Antiradicalism, and Cold War Culturalism…………………..71 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..75 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………….76 CHAPTER 3 CASE STUDIES IN ANTICOMMUNIST/ANTIBLACK ANTIRADICALISM…………………………………………………………......81 “Communism”/communism……………...………………………………………83 Anti-Imperial Anticolonialism……………………………………………….…..96 ii Anti-Internationalism……………………………………………………………117 Interracialism and Antiracism…………………………………………………..127 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………142 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………...142 CHAPTER 4 THE AMERICAN ACADEMY, ANTIRADICALISM, AND AFRICANA STUDIES: THE UC BERKELEY EXAMPLE……………157 American Studies, Area Studies, and the Institutional Formation of Africana Studies ………………………………………………………………………….157 Africana Studies at the University of California, Berkeley: A Case Study in Culturalist Antiradicalism…………………………………………………….....177 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………185 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………...185 CHAPTER 5 THE CULTURE WARS AND WARS OVER CULTURE: AFRICANA STUDIES AND CULTURALISM………………….192 Black British Cultural Studies on Both Sides of the Pond……………………...194 Africana Studies “Culture Wars”……………………………………………….200 The Black Atlantic and the Formation of African Diaspora Studies……………214 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………223 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………...225 CONCLUSION POLITICAL ECONOMY, AFRICAN DIASPORA THEORY, AND THE NEW GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE……...231 Against Culturalism……………………………………………………………..232 A Materialist Theory of the African Diaspora…………………………………..233 Africa as the New Asia and the Diremption of the Black and the Nigger……...242 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………...246 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….251 iii Acknowledgements The shift from being a consumer to a produce of knowledge—of which this dissertation is a representation—is not possible without the mentorship, guidance, support, and consideration of many. My mother Elizabeth Burden and grandmother Essie Shelton Burden provided encouragement, advice, wisdom, and reassurance throughout the process. I am proud to carry on their legacy of collegiate achievement and distinction. My sister Clariece Burden-Stelly, niece Gianna Charisse Burden-Corella, and step-father Mike McLeroy were also immensely helpful in the informal ways that are essential to the successful completion of so daunting and protracted a project. My dissertation committee contributed significantly to my intellectual progression and to the scope, direction, and execution of my project over the years. Ramón Grosfoguel’s Ethnic Studies 240 course, “Transnational Paradigms in Ethnic Studies,” and our ongoing conversations were critical to the development of my dissertation’s analytical framework. Additionally, upon his invitation, I attended the Decolonizing Knowledge and Power Workshop in Barcelona, Spain in July 2015, where I was exposed to a number of scholars, paradigms, and texts that helped to shape my engagement with coloniality, antiblackness, and antiradicalism. Keith Feldman’s breadth of knowledge, attention to detail, and thoughtful contributions ensured that my dissertation