EP 100 of Hella Black is out now! This episode is a culmination of some of our earlier episodes as well as a reflection of how we got here. Much love to our Patrons who help support us. And s/o to Maya for producing this for us. Patreon.com/hellablackpod

EP 100: We is Not Dead!

This is the part 2 of episode 100. If you tap in with our youtube, this was a video episode.

EP 100: WE IS NOT DEAD PT 2(Youtube edition)

I Learn

On January 20, 2017, just a few hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump, one thousand people gathered in Washington, DC’s Lincoln Theatre (and 200,000 across the United States and abroad watched at home or at livestreaming parties) for The Anti-Inauguration, an event from Jacobin, Verso Books, and Haymarket Books.

The event featured author and activist Naomi Klein, journalist Anand Gopal, the Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill, the Guardian‘s Owen Jones, and Princeton African-American Studies professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with introductions by Jacobin editor and publisher Bhaskar Sunkara.

You can watch the video from the event here and download a free ebook from Jacobin, Verso, and Haymarket here.

Jacobin Radio

Anti-Inauguration — Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Owen Jones, Anand Gopal

Amie Césaire writes that: “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” 

Sylvia Wynter adds clarity in that “[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo economicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!”  

Elsewhere, Wynter writes that “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.”  

Wynter’s vocation, according to Katherine McKittrick, works towards “the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.” 

According to David Scott, “The story of humanism is often told as a kind of European coming of age story.  But this coming of age story has another aspect or dimension that is often relegated to a footnote, namely the connection between humanism and dehumanization.”  

This fact, in all of its complexities and simplicity, is the foundation upon which, as I argue in my work, human rights theory and practice was constructed.  However, the tradition of resistance to this othering process and all of its knowledge production capabilities and capacities, an alternative conception of the world was formed. Conceptions that I call an Africana critical human rights consciousness. 

The processes of creating whiteness, and its antithesis blackness being stripped of its agency, its human—being was essential.  Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks highlights this dialectical process as the ‘zone of non-being’.   

Since its inception, capitalism has displaced and disappeared peoples not only through commodification and mystification, but also through marginalizing non-Western understandings of the world. For Wynter, social categories such as class, race and gender are all part of “the performative enactment of the Western world system’s [allocation of] degrees of domination/subordination.” 

What we will hear next is Dr. Paget Henry engage the life and work of Sylvia Wynter. Dr. Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000), Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), and co-editor of C.L.R. James's Caribbean (Duke UP, 1992) and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983).  

Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought. 

Sylvia Wynter is professor emeritus at Stanford University.  She is normally described by some as a Caribbean novelist and playwright. Her thought is centered on advancing our understanding of the contradictions in the Man/human dialectic universalized by a Western project to assert its philosophical, ontological, epistemological, cosmological understanding as being THE standard to which all others should be measured—modeled. By will or force.

Professor Wynter was born of Jamaican parents in the Oriente Province of Holguin, Cuba. Educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. In 1977 she became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. Wynter is among the most noted contemporary women playwrights of the Caribbean, rooting much of her work in the folk idioms of the region. 

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities...

Sylvia Wynter: context & extensions w/ Paget Henry

On this episode of Hella Black we continue our discussion about Jay Z and his partnership with the NFL. We also take time to discuss Dave Chapelle's bigotry. Tap in! 

Song: Shy'an G "Top Down"

EP 52: All Skin Ain't Kin: Jay Z and the NFL + Dave Chapelle's Bigotry

On episode 63 of Hella Black we talk with artist, community and book club organizer Noname! We talk about Chicago, Noname’s politicization,  the Noname Bookclub, and radical politics. Tap in! For an extended episode got to Patreon.com/HellaBlackPod

EP 63: N*ggas Tryin'(feat Noname)

African Peoples Socialist Party Heightens Global Struggle
Omali Yeshitela said his African Peoples Socialist Party’s upcoming plenary gathering is designed to “build and strengthen the regional components of our party through the world.” The APSP aims to “turn every African community in the world into a bastion of anti-colonial hostility,” said chairman Yeshitela.
Black Women Against White Supremacist Empire
Black women played a central role in the fight against European colonization, said Annette Joseph-Gabriel, professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan and author of the book, “Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire.” Joseph-Gabriel examines the lives and struggles of seven women activists who “understood that white supremacy was global in scale and scope, and that the resistance – and imagining of new worlds – also had to be global,” she said.
Claudia Jones: Black Feminist Fighter for Socialism
Zifeng Liu, a doctoral student in Africana Studies at Cornell University, has authored a paper on Black activist Claudia Jones, who was deported from the US for her communist affiliations. Jones was an unstinting fighter for socialism and decolonization. Liu’s paper is titled, “Decolonization Is Not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones, China’s Nuclear Weapons, and Afro-Asian Solidarity.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.

Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 27, 2020

On the previous episode around mutual aid we provided insight as to why we consider PBO mutual aid. On this episode we follow up with that and discuss how we survive capitalisms response to COVID19. Subscribe to our Patreon for an extended episode!

EP 69: Surviving Capitalism’s Response to COVID-19

On this episode of Hella Black we sit down with D.Lo and talk about his time incarcerated, what led up to it, and also his experience being a fire fighter at fire camp. This is a first hand account of what it's like being incarcerated and fighting fires. Tap in with our Patreon to support our work. Patreon.com/HellaBlackPod

EP 83: Incarceration + Fire Camp (feat D.Lo)

TAO - Triangle Afrobeat Orchestra, led by bassist/composer Vattel Cherry, is an effort to wake up consciousness, bring people together, interpret, explain, denounce, keep record, and provoke changes through music.  TAO takes its inspiration from Afrobeat creators Fela Kuti, pianist/singer Nina Simone, and activist/revolutionary Fred Hampton.

I Learn

triangle afrobeat orchestra