Passages for Discussion
JAMES BALDWIN, “A Letter to My Nephew”
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I
know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my
countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they
have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and
do not want to know it. One can be--indeed, one must strive to become--tough and
philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has
been best at since we have heard of war; remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not
permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence
which constitutes the crime.
(The Progressive, 1962)
BALDWIN, “Fifth Avenue Uptown”
The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center
of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it—naturally, nobody
is—and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are,
to the anguish of black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard
grain of imagination, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the
children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps
even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his children living
this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness
which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population
becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased.
One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and
everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials,
speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what
happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.
(1960)
BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.
If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious
blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of others—do not
falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare
and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare
everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave,
is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.” (1963)
ACHILLE MBEMBE (Cameroon-born philosopher, political scientist, public
intellectual), Interview on “Africa and the Future” (2013)
[T]he category of the future was very central to the struggle for liberation if only in the
sense that those who were involved in it had constantly to project themselves towards a
time that would be different from what they were going through, what they were
experiencing. So the political, in that sense, was about a constant engagement with the
forces of the present that foreclosed the possibility of freedom, but it was also the
political, closely associated with the idea of futurity.
(2013)
This receding of the future and its replacement by a landing present is also fostered by the
kind of economic dogma with which we live; to use a short term, neoliberalism. The time
of the market, especially under the current capitalist conditions, is a time that is very
fragmented and the time of consumption is really a time of the instant. So we wanted to
recapture that category of the future and see to what extent it could be remobilized in the
attempt at critiquing the present, and reopening up a space not only for imagination, but
also for the politics of possibility.
The ultimate challenge, however, is for Africa to become its own centre. In order for
Africa to become its own centre, it will need, as I said earlier, to demilitarize its politics
as a precondition for the democratization of its economy. The continent will have to
become a vast regional space of circulation which means that it will have to dismantle its
own internal boundaries, open itself up to the new forms of migration, internal as well as
external, . . . As Europe closes its borders, Africa will have to open its borders.
ARUNDHATI ROY, award-winning Indian novelist and public intellectual
India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies
on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands.
Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of
civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfillment. And this battle
demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the
minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a
crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place
will not be the ones that come up with a solution. (The Guardian and Salon, 2011)
[W]e must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside
of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like
the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the
destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable
living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.
I don’t think the whole protest [Occupy Wall Street] is only about occupying physical
territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will
allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a
kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The
fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted
suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment.