Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive.
The blitz on monuments signifies not the abandonment of history, but rather the rejection of a narrative of modernity created by the heirs of global plunder.
Building on the work of Hortense Spillers and others, this article uses the “yet to come” of Black culture as a lens to read the political and cultural interventions of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The “yet to come” also serves as an avenue to consider how, on what terms, and to what end Black political thought has evolved since #BlackLivesMatter emerged. By wielding an unapologetic Black joy as both a capacious embodiment of Black presence and a prefigurative politics that forecasts a world free of antiblackness, M4BL, and its demand for abolition, has shifted the meaning and mode of Black politics and thought. At the same time, when placed in conversation with earlier Black political-cultural formations, Black joy and abolition help crystalize the current conjuncture in Black thought as rooted in a temporality that is simultaneously now, before, and not yet. This multi-temporality follows what Margo Natalie Crawford describes as “the power of anticipation” in the Black radical tradition, facilitating a new correspondence between the Black present and the Black past, one that is attuned to historically situated racial regimes. Put somewhat differently, in its circulatory, its “back and forth flow,” Black culture and Black thought, intramural renderings of Blackness itself, builds and repurposes rather than simply breaks away. Seen through this light, I suggest that M4BL’s politics and culture are not merely pronouncements of the “yet to come” but a philosophical “return to the source”—the radicalism of the colonized and enslaved.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.