Black thinkers and movements have long used apocalyptic rhetoric to critique racial violence—from millenarian narratives imagining the catastrophic collapse of slavery to Afrofuturist visions of the disasters of nuclear warfare and climate change. The Black radical tradition also contains rich reflections on democratic life, developing a vision of abolition democracy as a counterpoint to the dominant form of white democracy in the United States. However, scholars have not reflected on how these two tendencies, the apocalypse and democracy, relate to one another. This is a shame, because a number of key figures in the Black radical tradition have utilised apocalyptic narratives for democratic purposes.
The talk will focus on three thinkers: Maria W. Stewart; W. E. B. Du Bois; and James Baldwin. These thinkers, either implicitly or explicitly, offer a distinctive vision of democracy that centres on the necessity of establishing new forms of Black self-government capable of withstanding the chaos and catastrophe of white supremacy. Declaring the dominant institutions of government corrupt and doomed, they look to the informal practices of Black communities for the resources of both continued survival and democratic self-organisation.
Bio
Joe P. L. Davidson is a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations, Politics and History at Loughborough University. He is currently working on apocalyptic visions in political theory, publishing on the topic in the American Political Science Review, Political Studies and Environmental Politics. He has previously worked on utopian visions of the future and his book, Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times, is forthcoming with the MIT Press in March next year.
