Blog Post 11/11
A particular part of the reading that interested me this week was when Alexis Pauline Gumbs says, “how can there be an end of the world…if there’s no linearity of time?”. Honestly, I am unsure what this statement means, but yet I still find it fascinating to grapple with. However, in some sense, it seems as if it could be a tool of power to envision something greater. As we have seen, the rebuilding of society towards the goal of black liberation has not occurred. From Slavery to Jim Crow to the present, black lives are have been and remain in a precarious position. When Alexis discusses how Harriet Tubman drew on the power of what could happen, it gave her the agency to help free her people. Potentially, Harriet pulled on the force of the Black Radical Imagination to build these new and unknown worlds into their current realities. She drew on the power of people today, while people today draw on her power to fight for black liberation today. I believe she is getting at this idea that we are so profoundly interconnected to people across different spatial and temporal dimensions that time must be non-linear. But then if there can never be an end of the world, will there always be something greater that Black folks can achieve? I don’t believe that that is necessarily what she is getting at, thus, the question still remains.
In regards to the radical black imagination, as Imarisha states, it is a force that gives black folks the agency to think beyond their current existence to better and greater beyonds and new worlds where nobody is left behind. In order to create these new futures, the first step is to imagine them. However, I can’t help but think about Michelle Alexander and her pessimism for being able to break the cycle. While the black imagination is a process that allows black folks to think beyond, is it enough to finally break the cycle of oppression and truly create a new world? Yet, maybe with the enlightenment of the mechanisms that allow anti-black racism to occur and the understanding of the radical roots of oppression, could something truly different be able to occur.
Lastly, I thought the work that the black radical imagination as a tradition has done in unifying other struggles is central to many works we have discussed this semester. It is a collection of thoughts and collaboration that will lead to the liberation of not one but many different groups. Together these groups can re-label and identify themselves in the image they choose, not the image of domination and oppression.
