Among other fields, The Borders of Dominicanidad resonates in rich ways with the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies, writ globally. In the powerful epistolary exchange below, Robin D. G. Kelley (UCLA) and Laurent Dubois (Duke University) respond to a set of guiding questions about the importance of thinking, theorizing, and historicizing race and racial blackness globally, internationally, and transnationally.

Dubois and Kelley address a global black radical tradition, its struggles, social movements, and revolutions, and the writers who have provided methodological frames for pursuing and writing about this black radical tradition from the perspectives of those imagining and struggling for a better world. They also delineate the role of formative teachers who use their positions in institutions of higher education to mentor additional generations of scholars, pushing them to continue writing in and from the global black radical tradition.

Laurent Dubois | Begins:

Dear Robin,

I feel like it makes sense to start by recalling the formative place you’ve had in my own thinking and work on the question we’ve been asked to dialogue about. The two classes I took from you at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, which focused around African-American Urban History, profoundly shaped my later work writing about the history of revolution in the 18^th century Caribbean. You guided me as I wrote my first in depth history paper, which was a study of the 1968 uprising in Washington, D.C., that was part of hundreds of such events that took place in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I used oral histories at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University, gathered just after the events, along with other sources.

The question that preoccupied me was how to write a history of these events from within, from the perspective of the actors who drove the uprising itself. This was about finding a way through the labyrinth of outside representations and interpretations of the event and towards a different kind of story, one that tried to get at the crossroads of past and future at work at the moment, the way in which the uprising was about a response to events but also an attempt to map out a different kind of vision for the future.

Looking back, I now see that the questions you had raised through what we read and our discussions, and those you asked about this paper, ultimately became central to the way that I approached the parallel problem of writing about enslaved insurrection and revolution in the Caribbean. By then, you had left the University of Michigan, but the lessons you taught—the way you tended to tilt and challenge received stories, and received wisdom—was always an inspiration.

So my answer to the second part of this question is that in a way, in my work, the challenge of writing about the moment of the late 1960s has become intertwined with the challenge of writing about the late eighteenth century. They are united by the demand, one you often issued in your teaching, to remember that revolution is about possibility, about mapping out a different kind of terrain through imagination and action. And that the revolutionary struggles of the past have created rich genealogies of thought, forms of challenge and perspective, that we have to grapple with and root ourselves within.

And this works best when we think truly globally, across diasporic spaces and experiences, always aware of the intricate differences while retaining a sense that there is a field of inter-connection at work. This is what the foundational work of Julius Scott in The Common Wind allowed us to see about the eighteenth century Greater Caribbean. He traced out a world of motion, of border-crossing (primarily in the form of water-crossing), largely using the archives of those who sought to stop and repress this motion to trace out its contours.

There are parallels to this in the way Lorgia García Peña’s work allows us to see a range of figures who challenged the imperial and national projects aimed at constraining and circumscribing forms of Caribbean being. Her historicizing of race seems to me particularly important as a model within the North American academy because of the way it makes clear the imbrication of colonial and imperial racial formations and practices with the deadly phantasms of authoritarian nationalisms in the Caribbean region.

I look forward to hearing your responses to these initial reflections!

Robin D. G. Kelley | Responds:

Wow! I appreciate your kind and generous memories of my classes during those exciting days in Ann Arbor. I remember it differently; sitting back and being in awe of your prodigious work and startlingly brilliant ideas.

Of course, your books have advanced your ideas in that class and more, and your point in your response “that the revolutionary struggles of the past have created rich genealogies of thought, forms of challenge and perspective” reminds me why, every year, I assign your article, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the intellectual history of the French Atlantic,” Social History (2006), to both graduate and undergraduate students.

This is a great segue into the question before us. “Thinking, theorizing and historicizing race and racial blackness” sits at the heart of what we call “Black Studies.” Which is to say, it has always been about Black lives, the structures that produce premature death, the ideologies that render us less than human, and the struggle to secure our future as a people and for humanity, for all life, and for the planet. It emerged as an intellectual and political project rooted in a Black radical tradition without national boundaries and borders. As you know, my main teacher was Cedric J. Robinson when I was a grad student at UCLA in the 1980s, and he was up the road at UC Santa Barbara. Incidentally, his first faculty job was at the University of Michigan—a place that connects all of us, including Lorgia. In any case, he said, “Black Studies is revolutionary in its political and historical origins and intellectual impulses. To paraphrase C. L. R. James, who insisted that Black Studies was the study of Western Civilization, Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization” (Morse “Capitalism” 8). Of course, he meant it was both and more with the hilariously brilliant caveat that “Western Civilization is neither.” So the “thinking, theorizing, historicizing race” includes interrogating the production of difference and its relation to power, exploitation, and the persistence of inequality; it means examining how Blackness as a category imbricated by gender, class, and sexuality came into being as a central feature of Western thought; how colonialism and the enslavement of human beings from Africa served as a fulcrum for the emergence of modernity, and in many respects presented political and moral philosophy with its most fundamental challenge; how people of African descent tried to remake and re-envision the world through ideas, art, and social movements.  This is work you and Lorgia and others have done so brilliantly, while acknowledging—as Cedric always had—that the racial regimes upon which the so-called West stands are dynamic yet unstable conceits and fabrications, fictions that stand in for our actual selves but fictions with real material consequences.

Ironically, I don’t teach courses on race nor do I write about race theoretically. Lorgia’s The Borders of Dominicanidad is a brilliant example of this kind of work. My teaching and writing focus on social movements. Of course, the history of the black Left, mostly movements connected to the Third (Communist) International, as well as radical nationalist and anti-colonial movements, and the links between movements across borders, has been formative. However, rather than rehash all of that, I want to turn to the global/international movement that has been most formative for me because it links our work with Lorgia’s and with my dear friend Julius Scott: the Haitian Revolution. I first read James’s The Black Jacobins when I was 18, my first year in college at Cal State Long Beach. James, Walter Rodney, and W. E. B. Du Bois were the holy trinity for me, but nothing compared to James’s treatment of the San Domingue revolution. Just as Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution served as James’s model for understanding Toussaint and mass rebellion, The Black Jacobins became my model for understanding how revolutions happen and their potential global ramifications.  Of course, your work on this is magnificent. The Borders of Dominicanidad make the profound point that “‘Fear of Haiti’—the overwhelming concern that overtook slave economies like the United States and Spain following the slave revolt that began in 1791 and led to Haitian independence in 1804—is foundational to the production of US notions of race and citizenship” (7).  But I want to spend a moment on Julius Scott’s The Common Wind, which you rightfully cite for allowing us to see the Greater Caribbean, for Scott’s ability to unearth those silences in the archives to find dynamic motion and revolutionary spirit that drove radical “Republicanism” in the hemisphere. (His subjects are the original “Black Republicans”!) These were the masterless people fighting for freedom—a common wind—not bound by nation, condition of servitude, religion, etc. You can see why the Haitian revolution was so dangerous and why it stands back of U.S., imperial, and regional racial regimes from the beginning of the 19^th century until now.

Julius and I go way back; I credit him with being one of my most influential teachers and I had the privilege of reading his dissertation back in 1989—just three years after he completed it. I was struck by his vivid portrait of the “masterless” people during the early years of Caribbean settlement, that rebellious, unruly class of pirates and buccaneers, maroons, and other fugitives—who refused to be tamed and could only be subdued through force and control of a settler colonial order. The theme of masterlessness as a social practice and vision of horizontal power actually challenged—or at least potentially challenged—the prevailing racial regimes. This made them dangerous, but it also marginalized “masterlessness” in the face of theoretical conceptions of race that treat anti-blackness as fixed and totalizing. The Common Wind carries a radical anti-slavery, antinomian, leveling vision of Republicanism—an emancipatory vision. In other words, the masterless people, these traveling insurgents, not only spread news and information; they spread ideas—ideas about revolution. Scott makes the crucial contribution that it was precisely the circulation of ideas and people across the Western hemisphere and Caribbean basin, not just immiseration and repression, that gave birth to significant political movements such as an abolition Republicanism, Pan-Africanism, and new, often suppressed, expressions of internationalism. In many ways, The Common Wind carried a vision of the future world far more radical than anything being pursued in France or Philadelphia. Your own Avengers of the New World and A Colony of Citizens illuminate and brilliantly elaborate on how the rebellions and the networks that carried these radical ideas were the force behind a genuine revolution in the hemisphere, but were ultimately defeated.

Again, all three of you—in your own way—demonstrate that there was no discrete, bounded English Atlantic or Spanish Atlantic or Portuguese Atlantic. These New and Old World Africans moved through all empires, maroons coordinated insurrections across language, and that border between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. connected rather than divided peoples. This is not to say that that all empires are undifferentiated, but rather Black people in motion and in struggle were no respecters of nations.

Laurent Dubois | Continues:

Dear Robin,

Wow back! This is really humbling and moving to read. It means so much to have you speak to and engage my work like this, and that you see it in this way as part of a broader effort to re-think the geography of ideas and struggles in the diasporic context.

This all got me thinking about the fact that none of this work would be possible without the environments that faculty and students create at certain moments, in certain institutions. It was only because of the intellectual space that you, Julius, and others among the faculty at University of Michigan at that time, including Rebecca Scott and Fernando Coronil, two other key mentors for me, created for those of us just starting out that we were even able to imagine doing the kinds of projects that we ultimately did. Your writing was an example of what could be done, but what you did in the classroom was really create a site of possibility from which to think openly about what we considered important, compelling, and potentially impactful as work. Without that, I can easily imagine that I would have run into a dead end in graduate school, since I was proposing to work on something that at the time was quite marginalized as a topic in History. We still have a long way to go, of course, but it’s striking how much the history, literature and culture of the Caribbean are now at the center of so much scholarly conversation in ways that was not true at all when I entered graduate school and then proposed a dissertation on the history of Guadeloupe. Thus the accumulation of efforts and steps and pushes that have taken many shapes. A few years into my graduate school training, Michel Rolph Trouillot visited campus and circulated a draft of one of the chapters from Silencing the Past, the one on Sans Souci, and just reading that and hearing him talk about it was deeply influential in me deciding to pursue the path that I did.

Which is to say that presence and space within institutions matters so much in so many ways, for that is how our perspectives and geographies of knowledge actually shift. Lorgia recognizes this really powerfully in the opening to The Borders of Dominicanidad, with a story that is a counterpoint to what we have been describing here, a moment of exclusion and othering that she experienced at the University of Michigan a few years after the period we have been discussing. It’s a brilliant beginning for the work because it is such disturbing example of the processes that she explores throughout the following chapters, of the ways in which individuals get fixed into certain categories, imprisoned in certain rubrics, with deep, violent consequences for the constitution of our worlds. I know it resonates with many readers in part because this kind of nefarious marking and exclusion happens constantly, in so many ways and on so many levels. We all see it in our different institutions. It takes different forms, frequently combining the proud parochialism of Eurocentrism and disciplinary bordering with racialized habits of mind, to produce the effects we see all around us.

Through this beginning, and throughout the work, Lorgia analyzes the ways in which the freedom of movement and self-constitution, the creation of cultures and practices that join together multiple worlds, all become seen as threats to white supremacist and imperial orders. And it is prophetic, too, in a disturbing way about the larger story of continued marginalization and denial that this very project is about illuminating and contesting. This moment is very much about fighting for the kinds of spaces that are essential, for the university as an institution and therefore also for the broader social world, if there is to be hope for a different kind of future.

Part of what is so powerful about her intervention in her first book, and so important about all the contributions she will continue to make in the next one, is that it represents a lucid and unflinching diagnosis of the profound imbrications of all these different practices of exclusion. The island of Ayiti, redubbed Hispaniola in the first of many acts of erasure (though one later resisted through the restorative naming of Haiti in 1804), has always been the pivot between the constitution of white supremacy and the development of imperial projects of enslavement. It really is where so much all began, and as many of the great novelists of the island — I’m thinking notably of Jean-Claude Fignolé, but we could list so many others —have , that long and deep history of colonial violence continues to transect the present, to be ever-present, spiraling. Lorgia’s incredible chapter on the 1937 massacre of Haitians, “Speaking in Silences,” notably her readings of work by Edwidge Danticat, really strike a chord in this regard, for they show how that period of violence is situated within this larger nexus of histories of structures and categories. But the book also does the vital work of memory, of reconstituting the worlds that Trujillo sought to destroy, and more broadly of the work of restitution of the stories of past and present day rayanos, counterparts to the “masterless” that Julius Scott writes about in The Common Wind.

There’s obviously so much more we could discuss here, and I’m grateful to the organizers of this project for having created a space for us to re-connect and dialogue.