“This analysis of the Black experience of and resistance against capitalism grounds what Bedour Alagraa (in their review essay of Black Marxism) describes as Robinson’s “Sankofa project for our late capitalist moment.” Indeed, this is a poignantly apt description, given Robinson’s looking-back to the “pre” of Europe’s trading of Africans to remind us of what Europe’s history of the West seeks to disavow, which is that “African labor brought [its] past with it.”… Robinson’s “Sankofa” project was about clarifying that “slavery altered the conditions of [enslaved Africans’] being, but it could not negate their being.”
Racial Capital’s “Social harvest”: Cedric J. Robinson’ s History of Black Oppositional Consciousness
In our present moment, we continue to search for alternatives to racial capitalism’s pervasive domination. In this vein, Cedric Robinson’s work remains instructive, as his historical methodology gives us a model of study for reading an archive of alternatives that came before us. This archive—a tradition of radical Black opposition—ultimately positions us to recognize, in our“ now,” alternatives against contemporary systems of domination that realign the fabric of social life. In other words, it is because of Cedric Robinson’s commitment to reading a history of Black social consciousness on its own terms that, as Black scholars and activists moving into the second quarter of this twenty-first century, we have a better and more robust understanding of the“radical” in the Black radical tradition.