Abstract

The historical and conceptual contours of Black anarchism are shaped by how ‘Blackness’ is understood to be modifying ‘anarchism’, or what the ‘Black’ of Black anarchism is made to mean. In the western world, Black anarchism might be traced to resistances to a newly global racial slavery, as enslaved Africans, suddenly marked by Blackness, were neither persons nor citizens to the societies that had enslaved them, and their resistance presented a challenge to the roots of the social order. In a more modern context, there are Black anarchisms that emerged from mid-century anticolonial struggles, radicalisations of Black freedom struggle in the United States, and the work of prison revolutionaries. Then, more recently, Black anarchisms formed within and parallel to the prison abolition, ‘anti-globalisation’, and Occupy movements. Some of these iterations of Black anarchism resemble other national and indigenous anarchist traditions, but others are more productively understood as radicalisations of the anarchist tradition itself. That is, they reimagine the subject of anarchism in ways that destabilise the meaning of foundational concepts like mutual aid, democracy, and freedom. This chapter will outline some histories of notable Black anarchists and anarchist movements in the United States, but will devote special attention to recent work that traces the anarchisms incipient in what Cedric Robinson called the Black Radical Tradition. These Black anarchisms posit Blackness not as nationality, ethnicity, or indigeneity, but as the negative condition of personhood, and theorise anarchism as the pursuit of new forms of being, being-together, and becoming-free.