The question of whether intersectionality and intersectional politics have something to offer cannot be simple in the face of a post-structuralist critique of identity-based politics. I would still argue, though, that politics of traditional reformation – arguably ill-configured as they may be – are provably productive, and even as the post-structuralist critique has its point, the point does not extend to wholly paralyzing political activity, even as it critiques it.

The initial, potentially simplistic point of intersectionality is this – that when two oppressions intersect, such as in the case of black women, extreme marginalization occurs. In paying attention to the oppression of the dominant group within either oppressive category, those that exist in this intersection conveniently disappear so as not to muddy the narrative of oppression of those groups. Black women, for instance, find their narrative of racism co-opted by (patriarchal) black men, and (racist) white women. They themselves, facing a double oppression, of sorts, cease to exist in the narrative of oppression.

Intersectionality seeks to uncover and champion these narratives of marginalized oppression of all strokes, in some sense. It tries to complicate and broaden conceptions of straight-forward discrimination. It is the inclusion of the last and the least – that is to say, it claims, ultimately, that there is no true liberation until all oppressions are addressed.

The critique against this, as by Butler, doesn’t have a problem with the morality of these claims, which I feel is important. The critique is based on the structuring of these claims. The problem is that these oppressions – of race, gender, class, sexual orientation – are reified – made things in and of themselves, that can objectively be eradicated from a detached distance and privileged, objective, identity. Thus the category of woman becomes reified and arguments of difference, and ‘equal rights with men’ are posited off of this assumption, rather than recognizing its very categorization as the basis of oppression.

Butler would argue, instead, that all ‘things’ – from identity to oppression – are constructed through relationships of power – and thus, equally, through lack of power, and oppression. As such, a positional argument cannot be revolutionary, inasmuch as it accepts the societal construction of power in order to make the argument. Thus to argue ‘as a woman’ is to accept the identity and position the system you might wish to change has given you. As Butler puts it, ‘There exists no standpoint of critique that is not sustained by and complicit with the forces it seeks to transform.’

Butler’s critique of ‘identity politics and the politics of scapegoating’ doesn’t preclude agency, inasmuch as it does autonomy – One being a matter of choice and action and the other the inevitable situation of a person within the structure. She looks towards knowledge of the structure and awareness of our on position within it for some form of emancipation.

Ultimately, this critique doesn’t negate the possibility of critiquing the structure itself, or of positive change coming from within it. It just critiques a particular way of considering this change. The morality of the movement seeking to affect change does matter, even if it works from within the structure of power, and thus is essentially using the tools of the metaphorical master to deconstruct the house. At least the house is being deconstructed.

Consider Rosa Parks in the context of this critique of positional, identity based politics. As Butler points out, Parks’ position within power is essential to her critique of it, enabled by the same racism and classism it sought to overturn. And yet – that does not necessarily detract from her action. The civil rights movement and subsequent movements have been essentially productive, in their positional, flawed critiques of power as something external to themselves. Pragmatic, ideological political positions, doing their bit, seeking to overturn very real oppression, if not the very fabric of society itself, which may be the impossible ideal of freedom, and to better the lot of pragmatic, idealistic people are still productive, even as they shortchange some things for others, even as they’re led by ‘heroes’ and not radical democracy.

To change the meanings of identities, to change the fabric of society enough that these new identities can have power behind them, to affect reform, even from within the structure, a more even redistribution of power across fractured identities – that is not precluded by Butlers’ critique, and is certainly still productive, even as it is not precisely revolutionary. In the end waiting for the last to enter so that we can all enter is still a worthy goal to strive for, even if we accept that we do this within the strictures of a power system, through our own positions within it.

‘In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action.’ – Martin Luther King

Non-violence to Martin Luther King is a matter of demanding radical justice through non-violent means. Of the ‘the relentless pursuit of truthful ends by moral means’.

For him, the ends cannot justify the means – more, the ends are the means, because you cannot really expect to achieve your dreams. Thus the path must be virtue, just as the end must be an ideal, if an un-achievable one in the immediate sense.

‘The non-violent resister is prepared to suffer even unto death. He believes that by suffering alone he can bridge the gulf between himself and his opponent and reach his heart.” frames MLK in his speech-plan. He continues: ‘He aims at raising them from the destructive physical plane to the constructive moral plane where differences can be peacefully adjusted. Thus, he seeks to eliminate antagonisms rather than antagonists.’

This sentiment only makes sense in the context of his conception of humans – all humans – as possessing infinite capacities for goodness. Thus nonviolence is an appeal to that goodness. It’s an attempt not only to achieve some form of individual emancipation by transcending any form of oppression through non-violent resistance, but also to redeem the oppressor by appealing to their better nature – by shaming them by relentless non-violent resistance.

The moral-high ground of the idea is undeniable. A non-violent movement demanding justice and faced with brutality in shutting it down will always be making a powerful statement – especially in de-legitimizing those opposing them. There is no denying that violence easily becomes a loss of moral high-ground and thus, shuts off avenues of compromise and reason. In the age of media and international conceptions of human rights, and pressure there-of, non-violence cannot be considered precisely ineffective either.

It’s this issue of appealing to the better nature of your oppressor that I find questionable. Why must the onus of redeeming the oppressor be placed onto the oppressed? Leaving aside the pragmatism of non-violence in trying to appease an oppressor with a monopoly of violence such that you cannot effectively demand change through violence, non-violence as an ethic of revolution, in that it is chosen for it’s redemptive nature rather than pragmatism, seems… difficult, at best.

For one, assuming the capacity of infinite goodness in all people – including those in power seems problematic. People in power – and here I refer not just to powerful people, but also to normal people benefiting off of an underclass – can be ‘good’ and still find it eminently reasonable to maintain this power, if simply by not recognizing others as worth their ‘goodness’. If Martin Luther King says there is nothing inevitable about progress, then I’d argue that there’s nothing inevitable about goodness being touched by suffering either.

For one, have they not already suffered? Is suffering not what they are protesting, in fact? Is the difference then a sort of organised, public suffering meant to attract attention such that it is un-ignorable? Assuming the ability to shame people into doing good thus becomes a matter of manipulating the media, perhaps, and that seems like a hollow endeavor to me, stripped of its righteous rhetoric of redemption and morality. Playing the media game is increasingly messy in the modern world anyway, and it is easy to imagine non-violent protest going un-remarked and unnoticed, just as it is easy to imagine any other form of protest being deliberately painted in a terrible light. There seem to be no easy answers.

On the note of the concept of the means being as much the end as the end itself – if the end is emancipation, to assume that violence is somehow an unworthy means to that end is also very much positional. To Malcolm X, for instance, violence – if not in the carrying out of it, then definitely in the willingness to carry it out to protect yourself – was very much emancipatory in and of itself. The ability to demand the application of the same laws for yourself as for others – the right to self defense, just as if you were any other (white) person was very much a radically transformative idea – just as much as any concept of turning the other cheek – in implication being stronger, being the bigger man than the oppressor was the emancipatory ideal of Martin Luther King.

Another problem with non-violence protest is its transformation from a radical ideal to the only way of protesting. Isn’t there an issue when the oppressor can demand that any protest against oppressiveness be conducted only by non-violent means? What does it mean when the oppressed are told to turn the other cheek?

The idea of non-violence remains attractive though, especially since violence is escalating, and it never remains confined to where idealism would have it remain confined to. It is emancipatory on a very straight-forward level, however, as a way of wresting power for oneself.

As the question is not exactly an academic one, I admit that the moral high-ground, and sheer lack of violence of non-violence appeals, despite my doubts as to how fair or effective it is to shame the oppressor into compliance. It’s in the academic sense that violent, clean, straight-forward emancipation makes its appeal – and even that isn’t as straight-forward as it might appear.

In the end – there is no simple answer. And perhaps that is the answer.

A central theme to decolonization is the reclamation of a humanity denied. This is what every thinker strives for – in outlining a humanity specific and special that is the sole prerogative of the colonized; in envisioning the world race-less and truly decolonized; in reclaiming the existence of a history – and not just a history but a great history.

On the last note, CLR James is not so different than, say, the envisioners of a great African past. He too makes a claim for the importance of a certain people based on primacy of history. In placing the center of the narrative squarely on Haiti as an agent, a definer of change and revolution in the world he inverts an accepted trope – that no revolution is not white somewhere, that all revolutionary ideas stem from Europe.

The trope is not unimportant – in some sense its the underlying theory of colonization: that the world is merely a stage for the European to act out his great destiny and all other people, cultures and history are but two dimensional props and faceless scenery -people that only become animated as the Europeans, the protagonists of their own histories, start to interact with them.

Thus CLR James takes the story and upturns it. The props are no longer window dressing, they’re the stage. The background actors are the stars. The previous protagonists – the ones that went through a crisis arc and gained a better understanding of humanity over the tragedy of millions – are mere villains – their character arc is no longer about redemption.

And in doing it he owns the stage.

The world is reformed. He claims the narrative as his – and claims in doing so, a history not of the fumbles and indulgences of the colonizers, but a history of revolution. For a moment the world is Haiti – and Haiti claims the right to be the entire world in that instance. It claims pride of place and all of history is rendered in relation to it.

This capacity of – owning oneself, not as incidental but as human, as protagonists of their own story, perhaps, is the element that Malcolm X, in all his incarnations seems to never compromise on. Its the reason he’s talking, really – he isn’t really a preacher of Islam, however that may be defined.

Malcolm X talks of the ‘house negro’ and the ‘field negro’ – and the difference between them is the amount they adopt another’s narrative as more important than their own. The house slave is a prop in the story of his master and has thrown himself into that role wholeheartedly. His story becomes his master’s. The field slave has never had that privilege, if privilege it is. He owns his own existence out of pure stubbornness, impossibly harsh as it is. This story isn’t about celebrating the field slave, though. No, that would be in very different vein.

Malcolm’s story is about the house slave. It’s about the person who has lost his person-hood in favor of his subjugators’ – and it is about redeeming this person. He reclaims his own humanity. Preserve your life, he insists, because it is worth something. Fight back – be people in your own right. Don’t be second rate people in your own home, among your own people. His anger is emancipatory, his speeches revolutionary: ‘When our people are being bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.’ There. He has inverted the narrative – his people are those marching determinedly towards a bright future, and are hounded by basic dogs.

This, then, is the hope – the need. To be people of the same level as all others. History doesn’t begin and end with the white man – humanity doesn’t begin and end with the white man.

To Senghor, Negritude is, as he puts it, ‘nothing more or less than […] the African personality.’ He’s willing to stretch this to include the African diaspora, making it a ‘racial’ thing – the ‘black personality’.

All of which makes the exclusive innateness of this conception of negritude undeniable. To him, Negritude is a ‘certain way of conceiving life and of living it’, the ‘sum of the cultural values of the black world’ – assuming a certain uniqueness in ‘black’ ways of conceiving the world – of innate cultural values that stem, somehow, from an African-ness, a unity that exists within black-ness as an essential quality, such that the black diaspora too belongs within this universal conception of African Unity.

This quality of Negritude is explicitly contrasted and opposed to European ‘static, objective and dichotomic’ philosophy. It lives in harmony with the movement of the world, in rhythm with its life-force and in understanding of its reality beyond the material. Through this depiction of a reality beyond the dispassionate, scientific, and factual, Senghor reclaims a world of mystery as essentially, naturally and organically African – as Negritude.

Senghor’s Negritude is essentially reactionary – reacting to Europe’s creation of the African in his homogeneity, in his other-ness, and, implicitly, in his lesser-ness, Senghor embraces the barrier between black and white as an innate difference in culture, in ‘ ways of relating to the world’, and overturns the implications by declaring the true understanding of the world to be in African mysticism and socialism, which is not backwards, as previously conceived, but profound, moral, and alive in a way that European conceptions of the world could never hope to achieve. A claim to a richer and better history and ontology is made – one that is essentially African and incomprehensible to the upstart, naive European who only sees cursorily into the world, and fails to comprehend the sheer mystical meaning of the world, of life itself.

In the traditional conception of Universal, Senghor’s Negritude definitely isn’t. This privileged view of and connection to the world is one constrained by nature, by history to belong to the Africans, to the black people of the world. They way of being and relating to the rest of the world is one a black person is born into, it is part of black nature and the defining feature of his society and culture.

And yet, Senghor has an image of the universal of which Negritude is a part. He refers to a ‘Civilization of the Universal’, the ‘humanism of the twentieth century’ – to which Negritude contributes.

The world Senghor envisions is both divided and interdependent. Multiple ways of relating to or conceptualizing the world exist within it – a world enrichened by diversity. These ways, like Negritude, are not universal (presumably they’re racial, or ‘organically’ cultural), but are in coexistence without jockeying for one true claim to universalism. They create a civilization of the universal, of diversity without hierarchy. An innate African way of being does not mean the negation of a European way of being, but can co-exist in a world of multiple humanisms, perhaps.

This, of course, is the ideal world. Negritude is an attempt at creating the possibility of multiple, if still exclusionary, humanisms on the same pedestal – a pedestal long occupied solely by western (european) humanism.It is a claim to equality in difference – a claim to a worth long denied by colonial rhetoric.

There are problems in this – yes. Problems that haunt Fanon with the possibility of falling into the trap of colonial thought – of embracing a humanity of negation, of embracing the limited possibilities imposed by European humanism. Fanon sees this as a weak attempt at decolonization – to him there is no decolonization until the definitions created through colonization, the ideas that supported it and the barriers that delineated it are entirely obsolete and all possibility of being is opened up.

And yet – isn’t Senghor’s conceptualization understandable. Negritude – a reclamation of the slur Negre, an affirmation of self, a declaration of worth of a people long denied it. It’s a standard of pride, a reassertion of nominal superiority, one that allows the African – a theoretical being at best – to look down on their previous masters, their supposed ‘betters’, and pity them for their ignorance.

Fanon’s theory – the new man born beyond colonization is bewildering in its sheer vision. It seeks to break the circle of colonization so thoroughly it will never define relations between people again. It is an abstract conception to a people who have been defined by colonization in the there and then. In that moment, Senghor’s claim of a racial pride makes sense. It’s exclusionary nature – if retaliatory – makes sense. The conceptualization of a world that can allow different but equal ways of being is also radical, if not sufficiently so.

It’s importance, it’s truth-value shouldn’t be disregarded by academic scorn that deigns it as creating an imagined past, addressing an imagined people and conceptualizing an imagined community.

Cabral envisions culture in neatly organic terms – A seed of history, rooting itself in a material and economic reality, shaped by external factors, and, in turn, affecting the external world. It reflects the conflicts, contradictions and compromises of a society through age, much like, if you follow the metaphor, a tree’s rings might reflect periods of drought and strife.

There’s something of a perpetual life cycle within this analogy, where culture is the product of history but also the vehicle for the continuance of history, in a way that is not precisely cyclical, in as much as it exists in all stages at all time, but definitely manages to convey the concept of flourishing, inexorable life despite the odds that Cabral seems to be arguing for.

Within this conception, Cabral argues that a liberation struggle must necessarily be a ‘seed’ of popular, mass, indigenous culture (an organism best suited for its own environment that will shake off everything harmfully foreign, different and less suited for the particular environment, simply by being thus better suited, should this ideal national liberation be successful).

This, of course, is based on what he sees as two ideal-types of successful imperialist domination: genocide or complete cultural assimilation of the dominated peoples. As genocide would be counterproductive to a form of imperialism that relies on the labor of indigenous people, Imperialism turns to various halting attempts to destroy the culture of their subjugated peoples.

Thus, where Imperialism must see threat, Cabral sees potential for liberation. As he says, ‘If imperialist domination necessarily practices cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.’

His liberation struggle must first understand the culture in which it is entrenched, and thus understand its own weaknesses, faults and flaws, and thus march on making allowances for this. Thus every liberation struggle will be unique to every culture, and every liberation struggle shall thus, in seeking to mobilize the masses, to address their faults, and their not-so-‘progressive’ aspects, shall also be a ‘veritable forced march on the road of cultural progress’.

Thus culture is both organically intertwined with history in a conception of the past that allows for a pride born of reclamation of denied fact under colonization – and must be driven forward on the linear march for progress.

In either case, a liberation struggle must be born from a mass indigenous culture, and must create a liberated culture, if liberation indeed be true, and not hijacked by the assimilated classes of the intellectuals and the elites who sold out to colonizers.

Cabral’s ‘culture’ avoids idealizing a past, despite acknowledging – even emphasizing – the role of history in shaping an essentially indigenous culture, conceptualizing a future shaped by cultural and historic forces in the present – that is a liberation struggle. He even acknowledges diversity in this struggle, making a point of disclaiming an ‘all-African’ culture.

He displays an interesting tendency to ignore or sideline the immediate history of colonization and its possible long term effects on ‘organic’ culture in Africa. If anything, his analogy shows a tendency to imply a period of dormancy in which African culture simply went into pristine refuge in the (familiarly idealized) villages and forests, untouched by the storms of colonization. Even counting the conditions under which African culture has been evolved, he prefers to focus on material reality and harsh environment, as in the context of the organic analogy.

However his attempts at pragmatic non-idealization are scrupulous, refuting all claims that African culture is perfect in anyway – other than as a vehicle for a liberation movement, for which it is essential flawed as it might be. And his concern about the liberation movement remaining true to this culture despite its flaws, as something of a shield against colonial assimilation, can explain his attempts to idealize it despite pragmatic disclaimers.

In either case, an indigenous culture is essential, in his view, to the rejection of alien Imperialism. This culture isn’t, and need not be – in fact, cannot be – static, but it must be essentially indigenous, born from their history and shaped by their circumstances, for true liberation, according to Cabral.

In the 1920s, Dada Amir is struck by the diversity in Moscow’s universities where the new generation of global communists is being trained. Prominently described are people from the ‘colonial and semi-colonial east’, but it seems the whole world could be there.

All are there to be trained and inculcated in a new way of life. The attractions of this life include, prominently, a pride of place. There’s a new world to be created, and in this one, these previously subjugated ‘backwards’ people are the first of this new breed of human and indeed, they shall be the ones to shape it. The Second world seems to offer Dada Amir and those he sees around him a way out of the humiliating circumstances of the first, with its iron-clad hierarchies.

‘What harm is in diversity,’ Sukarno says in 1955, ‘when there is unity in desire?’ While he is using this to describe the gradually decolonizing world, it rings equally true for Dada Amir’s account of the globally ambitious nucleus of the Second World. Desire is what unites the diverse students of Moscow’s University of the Peoples of the East, a nebulous desire for this new world, and the promise of dignity implicit within it.

A geographical shift in importance is evident in both these texts. Amir sees all the world come to gather in Moscow, and Sukarno celebrates holding Third world conferences in their own countries. Each is, in some way, evidence of the convention of a new world – perhaps evidence of a continuous search for an identity to own to be proud of on the part of the colonized – those systematically denied any dignity as an essential part of their exploitation.

Amir sees this dignity in being a proletariat of the Communist International, where his class, his oppression are seen as symbols of pride. Sukarno sees the same in a form of self-emancipation – of creating a defiantly separate identity.

In his speech, he draws an image of diversity in coexistence and cooperation, different ethnicity, cultures and religions, united by their pasts as the disregarded of the world, their recent history of a fight for freedom, and by a vision for the future undefined either by, or in opposition to their previous masters.

He envisions, thus, a third world – defined by this diversity and this pride,
this defiant dignity – in this definition of themselves, by themselves. There’s a
search for worth, a need to reset the terms of engagement. After all, the diverse nations he’s addressing cannot claim preeminence in the ‘modernity’ of Europe. Instead there must be a worth found in what is intrinsic to the Asio-African nations. 

Sukarno finds this worth in a morality lingering within the third world,
otherwise abandoned by a world driven to ever newer and, to him, madder, heights by cold-war polarization.

It is possible to see Sukarno’s words as the next generation of Dada’s vision of hope. Where the Second World essentially offered an alternative to the First, an alternative geography, an alternative scale of value, an alternative opinion of the otherwise epistemic empire, the Third offers a still greater break from what was, eventually, still a European conception of the world. In short, it offers a still greater reclamation of self-identity, if with less hope of a Utopian future attached to it.

In a sense, both texts offer the same thing – a new world in which a new dignity, a new worth, awaits those who previously had none. Their explanations are different – Communism sees the meek (or rather the workers – easily equated to the colonized and oppressed) as the celebrated heirs of the earth, and Sukarno sees Afro-Asia as offering a third way of humanity – a new hope for a grim world. Unity of desire, in both cases, is considered above the conflict-inducing diversity of the first world.

The difference is in the details. Both inter-war Moscow and Sukarno celebrate diversity within the unity of purpose. Moscow, however, treats it as the exporting of the second world, perhaps, where unity of purpose is emphasized over incidental diversity, while Sukarno seeks to make diversity an essential component of his third world – and unity a virtue.

Still, both together represent the evolution in counter-colonial thought, as well as trends in self-reclamation of the identity of the colonial world, first by allying with the diversity-tolerant second world, and then by owning their own diversity within their own identity. Perhaps, if there is one thing that shines through, it is the importance of reclaiming self-esteem, self-worth. Both of them represent a break from traditional first world limitations. Both of them represent hope in a new way – a new world.