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IOL News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Honouring Frantz Fanon: Screening of 'Concerning Violence' at UWC
A screening and discussion event of 'Concerning Violence' will be hosted by Adwa movement and the University of Western Cape's student organisation, HIM Society, on Tuesday at the Bellville campus. Image: UWC / File A screening and discussion event of 'Concerning Violence' will be hosted by Adwa movement and the University of Western Cape's student organisation, HIM Society, on Tuesday at the Bellville campus. The screening is set to mark the centenary year of the birth of Frantz Fanon. The organisers said that even though Fanon's scholarship has had an enormous influence on postcolonial/decolonial studies, political ideas, historical materialism, and the humanities at scale, the philosophical undertones of his work remain unclear. The screening of Göran Olsson's documentary 'Concerning Violence' will help bring engagement on the past, present, and future of pan-African decolonial thinking and what Fanon envisioned with the ideal of a new humanism. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ 'Concerning Violence' is a 2014 documentary film that uses spectacular archival footage which tells the story of the African anti-colonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Tuesday's film screening will begin at 1.30pm, with discussion on the film set to start from 3pm, focusing on 'The relevance of Frantz Fanon's philosophy from the colonial period to the present day'. A screening and discussion event of 'Concerning Violence' will be hosted on Tuesday at the Bellville campus. Image: Supplied Former UWC SRC president and pan-African researcher Azania Simthandile Tyhali will deliver a keynote reflecting on Fanon's work, legacy, and ideals in the context of decolonisation, followed by a Q&A. The discussion will be moderated by Ras Hein, former UWC student and HIM Society alumni coordinator. The initiative is free of charge. The Adwa movement is a pan-African cultural heritage community movement established in 2015 as a platform engaged in an ongoing struggle to build a decolonial society through advancing the three-fold cause of repatriation-reparation-restitution. It confronts its coloniality through continuous praxis. HIM society is a student structure at UWC that has existed on the campus for over two decades. Its office is a hub for pan-Africanists, critical thinkers, and the black radical tradition in general and RasTafari students in particular. The film 'Concerning Violence' is based on the essay De la violence (On Violence) by Fanon, from his 1961 book 'Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth)'. Fanon was a psychiatrist born in Martinique and educated in France, whose thought has had a wide influence on anti-colonial and feminist movements as well as on post-colonial studies. His work focuses in particular on the psychological effects of colonisation and the possibilities for liberation. Fanon worked in an Algerian hospital during the Algerian-French war and died of cancer in 1961, aged only 36. The languages of the film are English, French, Swedish, and Portuguese, and the film is presented with English subtitles. The film is narrated by American singer and actress Lauryn Hill.
Middle East Eye
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
War on Gaza: Why Frantz Fanon's words are more relevant today than ever
Israel's ongoing violence against Palestinians, including the genocide in Gaza, have left many searching for historical and moral frameworks to make sense of the brutality. The works of Martinique-born anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon from the mid-20th century offer a valuable tool. Although none of his major works directly address Israel's colonisation of Palestine, they offer timeless observations about the axioms of political and armed struggle within the context of decolonisation. From a Fanonian perspective, the war on Gaza is fundamentally a colonial war, coming decades after Europeans shattered and displaced a pre-existing community from their land. Better known as the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine led to the destruction of around 530 villages and towns, as 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees to facilitate the creation of Israel. The Nakba was not an isolated historical moment, but the foundation of a continuing project. Today, 77 years later, Palestinians continue to endure siege, bombing and deprivation - conditions made possible by a Zionist ideology that sees them not as human beings, but as obstacles. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Fanon defines the colonial situation as one where the initial encounter between native and coloniser is marked by violence, sustained by 'bayonets and cannons'. He understood that naked colonial violence is justified by the notion of 'divine right', mirroring historical abuses like the transatlantic slave trade, and by casting the colonised as inherently dangerous, irrational or subhuman - 'the quintessence of evil', as he called it. In Palestine, such logic plays out in disturbing ways. Israeli colonisers have referred to Palestinians as wild beasts, snakes, inhuman animals and cockroaches. These words are not careless insults; they are tools of dehumanisation, paving the way for policies of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Reframing violence The Zionist discourse also fuels slogans focused on 'fighting Palestinian terrorism' or 'freeing Gaza from Hamas', language that reframes colonial violence as a moral necessity. Fanon warned of such deliberate obscuring of reality, as measures including arbitrary detentions, movement restrictions, home demolitions, targeted assassinations and other forms of collective punishment are reframed as security measures. What Frantz Fanon can tell us about the West's colonial war in Gaza Read More » This environment of perpetual violence and dehumanisation corrupts both coloniser and colonised. Ordinary Israelis are conscripted into a violent and expansionist army, while Palestinians suffer not just physical attacks, but the trauma of generational oppression. At the same time, privileged members of the colonised population reflect the coloniser's violence upon their fellow colonised people, as observed with the Palestinian Authority (PA), which effectively acts as a security contractor for Israel. From a Fanonian perspective, it is not surprising that PA forces have shot at protesters denouncing the war on Gaza, or otherwise cooperated with Israel by shutting down critical digital media platforms. Even Amnesty International has sounded the alarm on the PA's repressive tactics, citing a crackdown on journalists, lawyers and civil society activists. Yet Fanon insisted that the majority of colonised peoples were 'overpowered but not tamed'. Resistance is thus not only inevitable, but a means of reclaiming dignity and humanity in the context of anti-colonial struggles. Global justice If, as Fanon implies, the violent resistance of colonised peoples is proof of their humanity, then Israel's Zionist forces are attempting to prevent the Palestinian people from regaining that humanity by waging a genocide. Yet, by attempting to strip Palestinians of their humanity and their internationally enshrined right to resist colonial occupation, Israel has mobilised the world in support of a free Palestine. Israeli Zionist colonisation converges with European colonialism as a system of total domination, naked violence and dehumanisation. But there are also differences. Fanon's insights into the dehumanising nature of colonialism - and the transformative power of resistance - remain profoundly relevant today Fanon argued that 'colonialism is not a thinking machine'. In the Israeli context, however, it is very much a 'thinking machine', characterised by a Manichean narrative and accompanying strategies, political objectives and timeframes. The outcome is a land sliced in two; a zone where the Israeli colonisers live in safety and privilege, and a zone of nonbeing, where the colonised Palestinian people are denied recognition and rights. Israel's exclusivist, racist, settler-colonial regime has appropriated parts of Judaism to justify the expulsion of Palestinians. The idea of a shared state, or a Palestinian state alongside Zionist Israel, is structurally impossible within this system. Fanon's work ultimately provides a compelling framework for understanding the deep-seated violence and psychological toll of Israeli colonialism. While acknowledging the unique qualities of various anti-colonial struggles, his insights into the dehumanising nature of colonialism - and the transformative power of resistance - remain profoundly relevant today. Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with a call for a 'new man' - a humanity healed from the scars of domination, racism and revenge. That future was possible, he believed, but only after the fall of the colonial world. The struggle for Palestinian liberation, then, is not only a regional issue. It is a global question of justice, dignity and the right to live free from racist, supremacist ideologies. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Daily Maverick
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
What colonialism hides and the selected class interests its serves (Part 2)
Both Chris Hani and Steve Biko echoed Frantz Fanon's warning that unless the fight against oppression is a fundamental one, decolonisation will just mean 'the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period'. Part 2 in a two-part series. Many of the people who invoke Fanon don't seem to have read his extraordinarily prescient The Wretched of the Earth, and, more particularly, its chapter 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness'. Written in 1961, it could easily be thought of having been published yesterday, as will shortly be demonstrated. So germane is this chapter that it merits a longish quotation: ' The (post-independence) national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neocolonialism. 'The (post-independence) national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie's business agent… But this same lucrative role, this cheap-jack's function, this meanness of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolise the incapability of the national middle class to fulfil its historic role of bourgeoisie (embedded in capitalism). 'Here, the dynamic, pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and of the discoverer of new worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisies are lamentably absent. In the colonial countries, the spirit of indulgence is dominant at the core of the bourgeoisie; and this is because the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the Western bourgeoisie, from whom it has learnt its lessons. 'It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention, stages which are an acquisition of that Western bourgeoisie whatever the circumstances. In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.' For our purposes, the main takeaway from Fanon is the post-independence leaders' and business supporters' acceptance of their dependency, provided they remain the beneficiaries of the inequalities produced by their particular country's peripheral position within the global capitalist order. It must be presumed that Professor William Gumede, whom I quoted in Part 1, has read 'The Wretched of the Earth' — but with the same selectivity that allows him to advocate entrepreneurship as the antidote to colonialism, when giant transnational corporations (TNCs) dominate all capitalist economies. Although merely junior partners in this capitalist order — a 'pure appendage of the stock exchange', according to Frederick Engels' 1895 characterisation — the dependent bourgeoisie had capitalism 'in their bones', as noted US economist Paul Baran would have said, with a commitment to protecting — while helping to camouflage — the capitalist nature of their various societies. This line of enquiry led to the development of underdevelopment analyses, beginning with Andre Gunder Frank's 1966 book, The Development of Underdevelopment and Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, of 1972. In need of emphasising is that by the time of independence, all former African and Asian colonies had been integrated into the world capitalist system. Colonialism and the specificities of the societal features of each of the former colonies did indeed leave their imprint — most commonly in adopting the language and religion — of their erstwhile colonial owners. Their market-driven economies, however, along with its profit-maximising imperative, monetarisation, various forms of commodification and working class of different sizes and functions, were all characteristically those of capitalism, even allowing for a sometimes high degree of variability. That most of the people in these post-colonial countries were — and many still are — peasant farmers made no difference: they were and are chained to the unequal trade of capitalist markets worldwide for their livelihoods. Fanon's 1961 insights additionally alert us to yet another major feature of the African dependent bourgeoisie. Fanon presents us with the seemingly paradoxical promotion by the dependent bourgeoisie of nationalisation, the supposed policy of left-wing socialists. Yet, it is the dependent bourgeoisie who, he alerts us: '… never stops calling for the nationalisation of the economy and the commercial sector. In its thinking, to nationalise does not mean placing the entire economy at the service of the nation or satisfying all its requirements. To nationalise does not mean organising the state on the basis of a new programme of social relations. For the bourgeoisie, nationalisation signifies very precisely the transfer into indigenous hands of privileges inherited from the colonial period.' 'Africanisation' This 'Africanisation' has swept through Africa in various times and forms. Uganda was the first instance of this phenomenon when, in 1972, its then president Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the sizable South Asian minority. As elsewhere in British Africa, the colonial administrators had brought thousands of people from British India to Uganda to serve as labourers and mid-level administrators. These migrants — known simply as 'Asians' — held a middle position in the colonial Ugandan social hierarchy, being between the white colonial administration and the few white settlers and the African majority. Following Uganda's independence in 1962, Ugandan Asians came to dominate the country's commercial life. Resentment by Uganda's African commercial interest ultimately culminated in their 1972 expulsion. Importantly, the expulsion of Ugandan Asians was justified by a nativist logic that sought to paint the country's Asian minority not as fellow countrymen who had shared the Ugandan people's experience of colonial subjugation, but rather as parasitic relics of the colonial past. Amin repeatedly referred to Ugandan Asians as 'bloodsuckers', and declared that his 'deliberate policy' in expelling them was to 'transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans, for the first time in our country's history'. The expulsion was Africanisation in practice. This policy of affirmative action, as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out, benefited only a 'privileged minority' of African Ugandans despite being dressed up as providing redress to all those who had experienced the brunt of colonial oppression. South Africa's 'transformation' — the new and more neutral terms for affirmative action and BEE in all their various forms — replicates this Ugandan pattern, with the white supremacy of the apartheid era being replaced by persisting white privileges in post-1994 South Africa. This is the rationalisation used by the nominally non-racial South African state for its promotion of what former president Thabo Mbeki called the black bourgeoisie. Except that the coloureds and Indians — the 'races' still used in all official statistics — are, like white South Africans, seen as non-African. The intended de facto beneficiaries of transformation are thus those people able to claim they are the African bourgeoisie. (There are no longer any legal definitions of the four apartheid races invented by apartheid and still used in all official statistics and, no less importantly, that frame the thinking of most South Africans.) Fragmentation At an African continental level, this fragmentation is part of Fanon's foresight: ' National consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe… Consequently, wherever the petty-mindedness of the national bourgeoisie and the haziness of its ideological positions have been incapable of enlightening the people as a whole… there is a return to tribalism, and we watch with a raging heart as ethnic tensions triumph.' The anachronism of still referring to colonialism to describe aspects of the contemporary world obscures these realities when not entirely obliterating them. With activists for change still attributing colonialism, in some shape or form, to the burdens faced by most of their citizens, the resulting misunderstandings are ideal protections for the status quo — 'the most universal system the world has ever known, both in the sense that it is global and in the sense that it penetrates every aspect of social life and the natural environment', in the assessment of noted American-Canadian historian Ellen Meiksins Wood. A colonial mask is ideal cover, at a local level, for the peripheral bourgeoisie. Their dependence on the metropolitan bourgeoisie for the economic and political privileges keeping them as the ruling class in each of the dependent countries needs the true nature of the relationship to be camouflaged in any way. This colonial associated confusion makes impossible the very notion of a meaningful 'Africa'. Other than the accident of being on the same continent, which, in geological time we know will be short lived due to continental drift, there isn't even a semblance of any such homogeneous Africa. Longstanding civil and regional wars; competing economic blocs geographically defined; exacerbated still further by all the major African countries prioritising what they see to be best in their own competing interests; growing authoritarianism and social conservativism, all beg the question: What is this 'Africa' we so readily invoke? Yet, we continue speaking of Africa as though it is a meaningfully unified entity. Hence the longstanding and repeated calls for Africa to build robust, pan-African institutions and markets. Hence, too, as an extension of this call, is delinking from exploitative global systems — whether controlled by Washington, Brussels or Beijing — together with deepening trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Nepad Proponents of agreements like the AfCFTA seem to have forgotten Nepad. NEE who? The New Partnership for Africa's Development, an economic development programme of the African Union, adopted in July 2001. Yes, 24 years ago! Its 'newness' was being an African partnership, designed by and for Africans dedicated to an overarching vision and policy framework for accelerating economic cooperation and integration among African countries. Yet AfCFTA is among the myths still being peddled by a leadership dependent on retaining its privileges by bamboozling the masses. Its incessant message is that the enemy of development is entirely 'out there', beyond national borders. China is a new addition to this rogues' gallery, with the 'West', America and Europe being the foundation members. With the demise of Rhodesia, South Africa is unique in recognising an internal enemy, 'whites', the beneficiaries of our colonial and apartheid history, but not the inequality produced and reproduced by our unbroken assigned place in the international capitalist order. Racialising this inequality extends to White Monopoly Capital. Note, capitalism is exempt; it is only the whiteness of the capital that is the problem. South Africa is further unique by simultaneously championing both 'Africa' and the xenophobia directed at anyone more black than the local standard for Africans, and any other marker of being a non-South African African. The 'Global South' is no less of a mystification than Africa. Both, however, have the bulk of their populations bedevilled by poverty, which, in turn, is guaranteed by the role they play in what used to be promoted as a globalisation designed for their benefit — mainly via job creation. Despite this mass of people who suffer the consequences of global normality, changing the status quo is something even Hercules would have found daunting. For those of us seeing the need for significant system change, we needlessly make it even more difficult for ourselves. Our starting point must be a broadly agreed understanding of what it is that we seek to change. The way forward Fanon recognised that decolonisation could merely entail 'quite simply the replacing of a certain 'species' of men by another 'species' of men'. His analysis of the newly independent African countries invites the conclusion that unless the fight against oppression is a fundamental one, decolonisation will just mean 'the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period'. Steve Biko made similar warnings: ' If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through to the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday.' (I Write What I Like.) Adopting the 'Coca-Cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds', he argued, would guarantee the relations of domination to continue. (ibid.) Chris Hani, another hero of the Struggle against apartheid, was equally forthright in his expectations of what must follow the victory over apartheid. In October 1992, shortly before his assassination, he warned: ' What I fear is that the liberators will reveal themselves to be elitists… drive in Mercedes-Benz's and use up this country's resources… and live in palaces and gather riches.' Similarly, the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean theorist and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral argued in his seminal 1974 essay, 'National Liberation and Culture', that as harmful as 'the denigration of the cultural values of the African peoples based on racialist prejudices' has been, it would be just as harmful for the national liberation struggle to engage in 'blind acceptance of cultural values without considering the negative, reactionary or retrogressive (aspects) it has or can have.' Though Cabral described cultural revival and resistance as a 'return to the source', he nevertheless made clear that the national liberation struggle in its efforts to promote and nurture indigenous culture cannot afford 'confusion between that which is the expression of an objective and material historical reality and that which seems to be a figment of the mind.' (Amílcar Cabral, National Liberation and Culture, Transition, no. 45; 1974) In his Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Jean Paul Sartre, one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, merits the last words to this article: ' The reader is sternly put on his guard against the most dangerous will o' the wisps: the cult of the leader and of personalities, Western culture, and what is equally to be feared, the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture. ' If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy. ' The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.' In historic time, 1961 is but yesterday. It is tomorrow that beckons. New confusions will arise. But we should no longer be burdened by the muddles over the meaning of decolonisation. DM
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Biopic explores the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon, a century after his birth
Soldier, psychiatrist, philosopher... who was Frantz Fanon? A new film by director Jean-Claude Barny seeks to answer that question in a year that marks a century since the birth of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century anti-colonial thought. Barny, who hails from Guadeloupe, said it was important to understand Fanon's Caribbean culture, his Western culture, his African culture, but also to view him as a man "capable of absorbing all cultures" – and of detaching himself from them too. "I started reading everything I could get my hands on and looking at everything I could about Fanon. I had a kind of [binge] of curiosity, of information, of pedagogy, to be able to understand what I was going to do with it and why," Barny told RFI, ahead of the film's release in French cinemas on 2 April. Born on 20 July 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Fanon led a colourful life. He was a soldier in the French liberation army fighting the Nazis, then a young doctor in training in Lyon in the 1950s. His exposure to racism in these environments became the basis for his first major book, Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952. 'Paris Noir' exhibition showcases work made in French capital by black artists In his film Fanon, which took 10 years to make, Barny chose to explore a critical chapter of Fanon's life; his time as head psychiatrist in Blida, a small town in Algeria 45km south-west of Algiers, between 1953 and 1960. Read more on RFI EnglishRead also:The night of rebellion that changed France and Algeria forever'Paris Noir' exhibition showcases work made in French capital by black artistsAlgeria's colonial past still haunts 60 years after independence
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Archives Tried to Erase Her Family. She Tells Their Story.
When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called 'Black Sociology' with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen's class could offer. Despite her fair skin and 'hair too limp' (her words), she relished the chance to become 'sisters of the skin' with her classmates. Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon's book 'A Dying Colonialism.' Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, 'The Trouble of Color,' Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon's. 'Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,' she writes. 'Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.' Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon's work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a 'suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident' student, who scoffed, 'Enough of this. We shouldn't have to listen to this. She doesn't even know where the French Antilles are.' Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students' assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, 'Well … the French Antilles are in France.' She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: 'Who do you think you are?' 'The Trouble of Color' is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones's own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession. Jones's paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as 'Grandy,' although he died before she was born. The affectionate nickname belies David Jones's significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the 'Vassar of the South,' a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina's first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator. Martha Jones's father, David Dallas Jones Jr., along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship. 'The Trouble of Color' is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples' histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and '90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women's history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family's past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion. Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones's wife and Martha's beloved grandmother Musie, whom he'd interviewed for his book — an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance. As Martha Jones puts it, 'I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie's stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she'd battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name — 'Mrs. Jones' — rather than the overly familiar 'Susie' or the demeaning 'Gal.' For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.' Jones's account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent 'diversity hire.' Black women's history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements. Although she never says so explicitly, Jones's compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves. At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor. Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves's enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty — their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones's family. This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to 'remember the blood on the page' — a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy's kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that 'the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.' In 'The Trouble of Color,' Jones has done more than honor her family's history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones's work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America's enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life. 'The archive of slavery is not a black hole,' Glymph said. 'The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.' At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record — precisely what Jones's beautiful memoir confirms.
