The theoretical possibilities of freedom as liberty, emancipation and revolution that are opened up by the study of Black visions and movements of freedom challenges the critical frameworks of how these concepts get placed on and taking up by embodied identities. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, Black Power, Transnational Black Feminism, Queer Black
Imaginations, and Black Lives Matter offers an important challenge to conventional renderings of self-made autonomy because it does not adhere to any of guidelines and parameters found in Western and mainly liberal notions of liberty. It becomes important then to trace the
conversation as it is played out on land, memory and bodies as a means of establishing the political stakes in denying Black visions and movements access to these definitions. Liberty
10 Following many feminist researchers, the term private here is placed in quotes because private spaces cannot be thought of as distinct from public/political spaces. It is precisely because the private is considered a separate space outside of the rule of law that allows for the continual discrimination of women and minorities.
means something, not only in the United States, but around the world. It is a process that carries with it not only theoretical, but political, social, cultural and economic significance, privilege and property (Foster 2007). Its attainment renders one worthy of self-determination and full
humanity, and as a result can be seen as a highly-valued commodity. Thus, this project takes seriously the need to think about freedom as having a genealogical history that is predicated on maleness, individualism and citizenship (a symbiotic relationship to the state that since
modernity has required whiteness in order to be actualized) that does work to distance itself from the genealogy of freedom that is predicated on gender queering, community and connection, and the recognition of radical love.
In developing the claims made in this introduction, I divide my study of the pitfalls and potentials of autonomy, space and bodily identity into three different genealogies: liberty, emancipation and revolution. This project is a dwelling with connected parts both inviting and hidden, and I begin with the outer layer of a dwelling that establishes context and expectations.
Chapter Two is a conversation about liberty as it is performed by right “white” bodies. “Front Porches and Freedom Trails: Boston Liberty as American Foundations” focuses on liberalism’s construction of liberty. Drawing upon prominent political theorists of freedom as liberty, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, this chapter provides a well-established and easily accepted narrative of how to claim freedom as liberty for oneself and one’s country. “Front Porches and Freedom Trails” focuses on what needs to be established in order to invite people into the conversation of genealogies and freedom trails. The Boston Freedom Trail serves as the most prominent freedom trail in the country, and is credited as the hub of the American Revolution that helps establish the ideals of revolution in America and claimants of liberty. As a result, the sites associated with the trail are toured by individuals across the country and globe, which does
work to establish a social-political memory of where and how freedom as liberty is possessed and maintained in the U.S.
Chapter Three, “Open Windows and Still Nights: Markers of Freedom from Slavery”
changes the conversation from the dictates of the political theory’s traditional definition of freedom as liberty, to its genealogy and construction of emancipation. Chapter three focuses on the promises that emancipation holds for Black people both free and enslaved. Emancipation operates on a rhetoric of liberty and citizenship for those bodies that were once denied access to its privileges. The goal of emancipation is to provide legal, political and economic rights to previously disenfranchised persons/groups, and thus emancipation serves as the next step in the evolution of liberal constructions of autonomy. In order to fully explore these notions of
emancipation, I turn to the work of Karl Marx. This chapter, will use the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion and its route to establish notions of the promise of emancipation, and its clear relationship to the state. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, particularly a look at the historical memory, motivations and most importantly its failure, serves as the catalyst for thinking about the abolition of slavery as the simultaneous production of newly admitted bodies to the category of man. There is much to be gained in emancipation, but still much left to be desired.
Chapter four, thinks radically about possibilities, imaginations, dissent, and love through the genealogical tracing of the term freedom. “Violent Structures and Fused Arms: Black Revolutionary Freedom and Gendered Space” is about Black revolutionary constructions of freedom and their complicated relationships with “white death”. I use a combination of
geography of the imagination, the textual, and the body to talk through the strategies and legacies of the Black Panther Party (herein referred to as the BPP). I will focus on the speeches and writings of BPP founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale (Kwame Ture) as a means of
establishing how the organization thought about freedom as revolution and the capabilities of the body. I then use Transnational Black Feminism to form a productive critic of the revolutionary potential of the BPP and its singular axis of bodily captivity. Transnational Black Feminism demands an intersectional approach as the focus of Black Revolutionary Freedom, and is further expanded upon by incorporating land and embodied geography into the questions about why Black Revolutionary Freedom necessitates “white death” and Black violence. The queering of these spaces and conversations allows for the emergence of rhetoric, movements and freedom that does not hinge upon state acceptance or majority consent. Freedom, and indeed Black Revolutionary Freedom, requires commitment to community and a challenge to violent structures, systems and institutions that threaten the humanity and dignity of non-liberated bodies.
I conclude this dissertation not by returning to the past, but by looking to the present, in
“Concluding T(r)ails: Toward a Black Sense of Freedom”. “Concluding T(r)ails” in used to analyze how our current moment draws upon all these lineages to establish a powerful moment of a Black sense of freedom. My thesis does not propose that Black people (both minds and bodies) in 2017 have achieved full and total freedom. In fact, our current political climate supports the notion that Blackness, both narrowly and broadly defined, continues to face discrimination, rights curtailment, travel bans, deportation, imprisonment, detention and death.
There is, however, something strong, encouraging and radical that emerges out of this history and material reality of the now, and that is the Black Lives Matter movement. I conclude by looking at the radical potential of Black love, revolution, freedom, and determination that is Black Lives Matter as a movement. Black Lives Matter claims and political commitment that
draws upon the histories of struggle and continuous rebellion that is Black Revolutionary Freedom.