← New Books Network
New Books Network
Michael E. Sawyer, "The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black" (Temple UP, 2026)
01:06:48
Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:00]
A
Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees.
- [00:04]
B
Turn the temperature down with blinds.com and
- [00:07]
A
get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day Mega Sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. This is your last chance to shop up to 50% off site wide during the Memorial Day mega sale.
- [00:26]
B
At blinds.com, rules and restrictions apply. It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale from May 4 through June 9. You can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50 that's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu the sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:24]
A
hello everyone, and welcome back to the New Books Network. I am Bridget Wallace. Today we have the honor of conversing with Professor Michael Sawyer. Professor Sawyer is a Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as a Director of Graduate Studies. He is a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies and director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies and as well as an elected Faculty Fellow in the University's David C. Fredericks Honors College. His research interests include Africana political thought and philosophy, post colonial studies, critical race theory, political theory, political philosophy, naval history and tactics, Revolt, Revolution and rebellion, literary theory and criticism, history of the American, French and Haitian revolutions, slavery, mass incarceration, creative writing, African American music, the Italian Renaissance. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Sawyer served as an Assistant professor of Race, Ethnicity and Migration Studies in English at Colorado College, where he founded and directed the Africana Intellectual Project. He also held an appointment as Distinguished Visiting professor of English and the Fine Arts at the University the United States Air Force Academy. A scholar, author, and artist, Professor Sawyer has published four monographs, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality, Homo Limitless, Black the Political Philosophy of Malcolm X, the Door of no Return, Being as Black Sir Lewis A Cultural Biography of Afro British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, has been translated into 12 languages as and is an international bestseller in his category in addition to his academic work, Professor Sawyer is an artist in residence at owenx Studios in New York City and Athens, Greece. He is co editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and serves on the Executive Committee of Political Concepts, A Critical Lexicon. Professor sawyer holds a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy, an M.A. in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in African Studies from Brown University, and an M.A. in International Security Policy from the University of Chicago's Committee on International Relations. Today we will be discussing his current work, the Door of no Return, Being as Black, published by Temple University Press. Welcome, Professor Michael Sawyer. It is great to meet you. Why don't we start about telling the origin of this book, why this book is, and maybe you can expand on your research interests and how you got into being who you are.
- [04:16]
B
No, I really appreciate it, and thanks a lot for the time. I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk about this book. So as a practical matter, I think this book probably started off as four books. At first, I spent a lot of time studying the work of Toni Morrison. So I really wanted to write a comprehensive study of Toni Morrison's work, particularly on Beloved. So that was kind of one book. Then I was thinking that it'd be interesting to write a book on the black aesthetic, probably broadly defined, to get it sound literature, visual art, dance, and also athletics. So that was kind of book two. And book three was an interest in thinking through the relationship of Hegel's philosophy to Africana philosophy. So that's kind of book three. And book four was just spending more time with thinking through Ralph Ellison as a philosophical thinker. So when I got started on the project, I kind of started with the Hegel portion of it, which led me to figure out how I could weave all four of those things together and get at them all at the same time. So as a practical matter, Toni Morrison's work is probably the kind of internal framework of the entire project, particularly an essay that she wrote that thinks about the question of whether double consciousness, as Du Bois kind of articulates it, is a telos or more a choice. And she proposes that it's a choice. And there's a possibility of what she calls a third, if you'll pardon the expression, world, meaning that there's another way for us all to exist in space and time. So thinking through that, that kind of pulled together all four of those projects for me. And so the point of entry to them was definitely Toni Morrison. And in this book, excuse me, you'll find that kind of all roads lead Back to Beloved is kind of the central architecture of the argument. Particularly, Morrison's concept of rememory serves as the system of cognition in the project.
- [06:10]
A
Yes. What got my attention with this book was your reference of Toni Morrison and Bob Marley from the beginning and the introduction. I'm a Toni Morrison fan as well, especially her book Beloved and her theory of memory, of how important memory is to the legitimization of the black person. Because as a historian, I'm looking at it that we are not a tabula rasa, that African people were not blank slates when they were brought through the middle passage. And that was one of the questions I had for you. So I wanted to start out with the importance of the middle passage, as you call starting foundational event, because I noticed you using the word event as I use spaces in my writing and you call what I call spaces events. So. So I want you climb to expand your theory of the idea of first the event, the space as an event, and then why the middle passage? What is so important about the middle passage that makes it the foundation from what I understood? Now, maybe I may be wrong, but from what I understood as being this foundational event that pushes the book through all the sections that you write about.
- [07:42]
B
Yeah, no, you've read it exactly correctly. My concept of the event. So to back up a step. So at the end of finishing this book and kind of going back and reading it, I think what I'm articulating is what I want to call black event theory, which is a way of looking at the world and articulating what I call intervening ontological events. Events that happen that are so catastrophic or world shattering that they establish the possibility or even necessity of a new kind of world. Right. So for me, the middle passage serves as just that type of event. So in the book, I kind of sketch out this is world prior to the anti black world, which we'll just call the anti A N T E anti black world. Right. Black world prime is what I call it. So the middle passage serves as kind of the physical and metaphysical point of entry until the world that we exist in now, which is the anti black world, which is delimited by the way in which the world exists. Where to your point? Right. Black memory prior to the middle passage is consciously and effectively erased by the kind of logic of the middle passage that tries to prevent us understanding kind of our history, our culture, lineage, et cetera. This is kind of Orlando Patterson Kind of 101, right? The kind of way we understand the kind of travail and. And catastrophic event of slavery. And particularly the middle passage as the kind of opening moment, the long dur of the middle passage. Right? Like not just a single moment of it, but everything that happens to figures who have been affected by it, which includes us. Right. Kind of genealogically and also metaphysically. So that's why the middle passage serves as such an important point of entry. The Bob Marley opening of the book is important for me because that gets to this kind of black aesthetic question. And what I argue. I do a kind of close reading of Marley's performance of War no More Trouble. I think it's in 1976 in London, where he takes Haile Selassie's, you know, kind of really effective understanding of what the world needs to look like, right? Where Halassi says, until, you know, there's a world where, you know, the color of a person's skin matters not. Right. That whole thing. There could be no such thing as kind of international morality until that happens. So I use that and also the kind of pauses and alterations of Bob Marley's performance to indicate the possibility of these kind of spaces that I call spaces that offer the opportunity for what I would call intervening events. And some of that is what Professor Moten would call the break, or what Ralph Ellison understands is the breaking kind of invisible man. These kind of spaces that open up, that are full of possibility, and there's not necessarily motion forward or backward. In many ways, it's kind of a pause, and you can take stock in the situation, then launch yourself into a different trajectory. So that's. That's the way I'm using the term event primarily in this book.
- [10:36]
A
So I want to push you a little bit. So you mentioned Toni Morrison's beloved. So Beloved. Her time, her periodization is antebellum South, I want to say, right before the Civil War, right after the Civil War. And you talk about the Middle Passage. I would argue that another one of event, using your definition of event as something that pushes change or impacts change, is domestic slave trade that took place in the Southern region. How would you place that particular event into your logic, into your boxes, into your anti black. Your primer, your boxes that you. That I still haven't figured out yet, but these boxes that you have. So because Her Beloved is written right there in that periodization, if I'm correct, and I think I am. So how would you place the domestic slave trade? Because when I look at Middle Passage, I look at it through a global lens, because, remember, I'm a historian, so I'M looking at Africa to Brazil to the Caribbean, up to the United States. Because that's how I study race backwards. Not from the US out from York, over. So help me place the domestic slave trade of the region into this.
- [12:06]
B
Yeah. So you're right about the timeline of Morrison's beloved. It kind of. It has, it's both. Right. It's a time slip. So she's talking about the time at Sweet Home, the plantation, kind of before the Civil War. Then the time where as you get towards the, the, the. The point where she's escaped to. To Ohio. And it's just before the kind of, you know, Civil War kind of terminates. Right. So there's all kinds of space between. And the Fugitive Slave act becomes the catalyst for the storyline kind of need to kind of pull her back to a different space. So I would argue, following you exactly right, that that domestic movement of black bodies was not just a product of the internal enslaved condition also included kind of getting outside of it. So crossing the Mason Dixon Line becomes exactly that type of event. So it creates a different type of perception and system of cognition. I think you're exactly right. I think you get it the internal slave trade also in the, in the Americas. I get it that through Benito Serino. Right. Which is Melville's story about the slave revolt that happens on a slave ship that's leaving Cuba and headed, you know, forward. And it's fascinating. This gets me to Ellison in a particular way because the last lines of Benito Serino are the epigraph. But he uses for Invisible man to argue that there's a way that bodies being transported around internally or externally. So what I would say is the middle passage becomes the internal trait that you're talking about is a typology of movement that the middle passage serves as kind of exemplar for from an international perspective. But regionally there's also a regional kind of transportation of bodies that still has the same implications.
- [13:48]
A
Okay, yeah. That helps me understand. Cause I study movement migration myself. And that helps me understand movement of black people within your argument. So you say that being as black is a mode of existence that defines itself not through negation, but through generative world making. Explain and expand that because we are in a very. Currently, I think all African Americans are questioning what are we as being as black with everything being sort taken away from us. So how can we use what you state, what you argue and help people understand how to navigate what's going on right now as being as black?
- [14:42]
B
Yeah, I think going back to where we Started right, Where Morrison proposes that double consciousness, this notion of being dialectically opposed to whiteness. Right. We only in that mode, blackness exists in opposition to whiteness. And black political thought and black philosophy in many ways is an oppositional practice. And black historiography, Right. It's an oppositional practice of recovery. Right. You're recovering what has been erased in a particular way. Right. That's a particular practice. So what I'm arguing is that being as black is self referentially black. Right. There's a way in which we can study the politics, sociality, economy, culture, et cetera, of black people self referentially rather than having it always be opposed to kind of whiteness. Which gives us, I think, a platform from which to then address the kind of problems that you're articulating in a different mode. Right. Because if everything becomes. This is just a practical political question. Right. If existence only becomes the way in which you can always oppose whiteness in a particular way, you're never going to be able to get out of that mode of constant back and forth. There's always this up and down sine wave of positive and negative. So the argument that you're making is basically from 1965 forward, we've been in an arguably generally positive trajectory. So what happens is, and I would argue that in practical political terms, the election of Obama throws the system into a particular type of crisis because the system that's designed in this country is not designed to accommodate black political viability in particular ways. So what we're seeing now is this kind of rapid reverse of everything is showing just how the system is designed to work. The reason it happens so rapidly and doesn't seem to be able to be scrapped is that's how it's meant to happen. It's like if you were to sit down with James Madison, have some conversation with him, he'd be much more scandalized by the fact, I would argue probably that there had been a black president rather than the fact that there's a president like Donald Trump who violates all these kinds of fundamentally constitutional principles that they articulate kind of in the Federalist. They talk about the exact type of figure that he is, but they have no mention except for the fact that black people, only partially to be understood as political actors, are human, for that matter, within the concept of this Constitution. Which gets me to the box question. Right. So the box thing is, and that's the space in which the anti black world operates, right? And that box of boundaries are composed of kind of memory, the erasure of memory and also with legal strictures, international boundaries, et cetera, become the framework of the kind of anti black world that we exist in now. What's happened is internal to that linear time signature. There's been a recursion back to arguably properly know. You could argue probably the early 1940s, if not the 1840s, in some ways, with some of the conceptualizations that are running around, like the ICE raids were obviously indicative of what we were just talking about with the Fugitive Slave Act. Right. With people who cross particular borders and find themselves hauled back into a situation of detention, deportation, all kinds of catastrophe are just showing you how the system is designed to accommodate that. So I think you're right. I mean, this is, you know, a time that's fraught with possibility, both positive and negative. Right. So it. It is what I would call an intervening ontological event space where we have the opportunity for things to change pretty rapidly and they can go in one dramatically in one direction or the other. There doesn't seem to be any possibility of things staying as they are from the place that we're at right now.
- [18:13]
A
So I'm going off my interview a little bit. So how do we. So how do we fix it? How do we protect ourselves then in this space? Because, you know, all you hear is problem, problem, problem. But I'm looking for resolution. I'm a product. I'm a product of the civil rights movement. My parents are activists. I grew up in all that. I'm a baby boomer. I grew up. I'm older than I look. I grew up in all of that. And I'm a historian. And your book opened up possibility of resolution because a lot of people who are fighting the fight really don't see a resolution. They see a backwards going. They see everything backwards going forward. Because I had argued that the election of Barack Obama, only the election of Barack Obama and the emergence of Donald Trump did two things. The election of Barack Obama allowed white people's conscience to be seen in a quiet way because they could go into a voting booth and vote for a black man claiming that, oh my goodness, the United States is racially cleansed. United States is not racially cleansed, but they could go into a voting booth and let their conscience make a decision quietly because nobody saw them. With the emergence of the current person in the White House, he was able to say and speak, and you talk about speaking and seeking. He was able to speak the real truth that white people wanted to hear. He was able to say what they were not willing to say and because he was able to say what they were not willing to say. That's why we're at this point right there. And that he was the cleanser of the White House. Because I have gone back and read Madison's, the Federalist Papers and Alexander Hamilton, and you are right, this system, political system was not designed for me, us to be in that place of power. And he, Trump, became the cleanser of that upset, that disruption of the system. And that's why we're living through what we are living through right there. Does that make sense? And then I want to know, is there a resolution to this?
- [20:41]
B
Yeah, I think it makes complete sense.
- [20:42]
A
Do you see a resolution to it?
- [20:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the most articulate version for me, and in addition to what you're saying is Charles Blow's op ed, I think it was called the Lowest White man that argues that, that Trump is a knee jerk opposite reaction to Barack Obama. And you can have whatever critique you want of Barack Obama, centrism, et cetera, et cetera. Fact of the matter is that Barack Obama is viewed by the right as basically the equivalent of Stokely Carmichael. They really believe. You don't have to go further than. I think it was, what was it, the New Yorker, the Atlantic magazine that put he and Michelle Obama on the COVID as the Taliban? I think, yeah, the Atlantic magazine that shows you in their minds, whatever cognitive dissonance, cognitive world in which they exist, they actually see that him as being this, a supreme radical right. As you know, there's no difference between Barack Obama and H. Rap Brown as far as they're concerned. Some of that and what we've seen in the disruption of the system is probably accurate. Right. And so what happens is Donald Trump as this kind of cultural, the epitome of kind of a type of radical populism, white supremacist populism, that says we have to reclaim all these kinds of things that were never lost in the first place. The argument that freedom or opportunity or some type of pizza where there's only so many pieces, if someone else takes them, they've taken something from you. This is kind of Donald Trump. And Trump is I'm kind of 101, right. So, yeah, I think that the election of Donald Trump throws the progress of the night, which you're proposing. Right. The progress of the 1960s, because I was born in 67, so I was the first person in my immediate family born with the theory, theoretically with the right to vote. Right. So this is not. These are not ancient historical Documents that we're pursuing. Right. These are like, you know, kind of our own lived experience. Right. And so what happens is the kind of rapid, the rapid deconstruction of that is. Is only facilitated because the system allows it. And that system is dialectical. Right. So the question that you're asking about what are the possibilities? First, I think you're right. Right. There's a. The Afro and I use Afro pessimism. The system of Afro pessimism, I think has accurately mapped the four corners of the anti black world. Right. My question is a different one. To say, to acknowledge that they've got that right. That there is all these kinds of things. The, the kind of desperation of the way blackness is situated. Where I disagree is that I don't believe that blackness forms itself out of whiteness. I don't believe that blackness is necessarily a response to whiteness. Right. I believe that blackness is an ontological condition that predates the interaction with kind of white supremacy. So what I, what I'm arguing.
- [23:25]
A
I do too.
- [23:26]
B
Yeah. What I'm arguing in the book is that that, that fundamental argument is the thing that gets you through this kind of problem, Right. Where the fact that blackness endures across different perceptions of catastrophe, even benefit. Right. And so what I try to embed in the book, and part of the reason I start with Marley is because even in, even in that articulation that, that he's making of war, no more trouble, it ends with love. Right. So this is notion of joy becomes the kind of centerpiece of recovery. Yeah. Love is freedom. Right. So I think that's the way through it. Right. And there's, there's all kinds of travails that happen and there's all kinds of political complications. You know, Fanon, the work I've done on Malcolm X are fundamental to understanding how that all functions. Right. But I think the, the kind of North Star in this whole routine, this is question of joy and imagination that create the possibility of what I call being as black. As a type of typology of what we would understand as philosophical terms as being. In the humanistic argument of what do we mean by being. This is kind of Heidegger and the German philosophers kind of 101, where they basically eliminate the possibility of black being. What I'm doing is trying to recover that by making ontological argument that blackness as a condition is beyond and predates any kind of articulation of the way whiteness describes what I would call negatively framed blackness. So the first process is to get out of the Dialectical relationship. We're trying to recover blackness from a position of it being negatively framed in the first place.
- [25:00]
A
So then I'm gonna skip. I'm gonna skip to this. You on, on page 109. When you start talking about the black aesthetic consciousness, you talk about conversations about race. And when you talk about it from an artistic perspective, point of view, the racial imaginary. That's where I'm at. The racial imaginary, which you talked about. And so you talk about racial imaginary, the academic philosophies of theory, Max Lafrieda and Rankine. And then you say that it seems a lot of us here, when asked to talk about race, are most comfortable, or at least uncomfortable talking about it in the language of scandal. In addition to scandal, authors also wish to avoid the common language of the sentimental, the past tense and the past tense. And writing artistically about race, I would argue that limiting language of scandal, the sentimental and the past tense also encumber the theory, philosophy and critique that dominate our current discourse around matters of race. Okay, I. I'm a historian. What's the difference between writing historically versus writing artistically? I write about the past. So am I encumbering this or am I messing up these discussions about race? Am I making it too uncomfortable or am I making it comfortable? Because here's the problem as a historian that I face. I'm in the archive And I'm in 18th, 19th century, where the archives, the 80%, I'm going to say, of the archives written about African Americans. And I do mixed race people are written by white people because black people back then weren't, you know, writing or keeping records, or we weren't getting the oral histories that we're now starting to get to define families and who we are. So what's the difference? And how does historical writing encumber the conversation versus artistically writing about it? What's the better way to go about it?
- [27:16]
B
Yeah, so the quote that you were using, that's from. That's Claudia Rankin's quote from the opening of that book where she's talking about this kind of question of the racial imaginary. What I want to do is, in some ways in contradistinction to what Rankin is arguing is that all those modes are essential to our understanding. So I don't think the historical mode is problematic at all. I think it's useful because it gives us a linear timeline in which to kind of articulate events. Right. So what we've been dealing with so far is like I was working through a linear time relationship between what I call anti. Anti. The anti. Anti. Black world of Black World prime is a. Is a mode of existence that is historically bounded. Right. You can find it. Right? Right. It's ancient Egypt, whatever the Dogon, whomever you decide to pay attention to, all over the world. Right, then. So historical writing, to get to the heart of your question, historical analysis gives us a linear timeline in which to explore things. What I would argue is that artistic approaches give us a way to approach things asequentially out of temporality, out of time, sequence so many times. And even as I'm writing, I'll go to one subject and I don't write in linear fashion. Right. Some of the complication in tracing and keeping up with what I'm trying to propose, and this is just the way I think about it, I don't think in linear fashion. So some of these events compound themselves and appear out of sequence in particular ways. This is kind of Morrison's notion of Remembering 101. Right. Because what Morrison is telling you is that you'll absorb information that can come to you and you're not certain in what order it is, who it's from. This is the transaction, generational and transubjective notion of what she proposes as we memory. So artistic writing, and in my. And what I'm trying to say about artistic writing is to be able to capture those type of events in ways that we can write down and then express to other people. Because I don't think that linear. Linear argumentation basically allows us to do that, though it is essential. It's not at all. And it should not have come. I don't want it to come across that I have some. Some problem with historical or linear writing. I think it's really useful. Right. Because obviously we're historical actors and we need to place ourselves in a kind of coherent time, space, continuum. So that's essential work that has to be done. But I think it also is limited because it doesn't allow us to a. You know, what do you do when the archive has errors in it? Right. Like if you can't find the error or the lie. Right. The archive is very difficult. From my understanding of what happens is if someone embeds a lie into the archive, which is not to your point, the people who have control of the archive oftentimes embed fictions and falsities inside of them. That becomes the only way in which we can articulate what happens. And this is Saidiya Hartman in many ways, with her notion of critical fabulation is to fill in Those gaps that are presented by what we understand as the historical archive that has done the project of erasure or to distort exactly what historical fact happens to be. So I think that's the kind of what I'm using to kind of think through the difference between historical and artistic writing or expression.
- [30:17]
A
Right. So Michael Trullo wrote a book, Reading against the Archive. And this actual use of historical imagination is becoming very prominent right now in historical writing. Even for my thesis, I used. 10% of my thesis is historical, educated historical imagination. Because. Because the sources conflicted with one another. One said one thing, one said another thing. Time dates and time, especially in the 18th, 19th century, are very not accurate at all. And you have to use other sources, secondary sources. I was lucky enough to. My project is built out of a family genealogy project. They did a very comprehensive one. I mean, they published a book. It was very comprehensive, but it was things in it that spoke to what I'm studying. Movement, race, movement theory, race theory, anti bound South. So this idea. And I like how. And I'm going to get this book because Nell Painter, who's another historian who discussed memory, I don't know if you know about her, but she works with Toni Morrison's work as well. Memory, Memory has become now, I think, the foundational component that academics need to attack. We need to attack memory because I want you to explain to our audiences the idea of Toni Morrison's memory as not being dependent, literally her concept of home being dependent on memory. It was on page seven. But I want our audience to understand how important memory is to their current past, future life, and how important it is to instill that memory in our future generations. And I'm talking children because I think that's where our disconnect is coming from. Just me and my father and family that I came from. I know my family all the way back. All the way back. Because it was important for my parents to make sure that I knew the struggles and not just where we came from or just the hardships. I knew of what was good, what was bad, what was indifferent, what was disruptive, what was chaotic. I knew it all. And I ta with undergraduates in these history classes and what they are missing is memory. They don't have an understanding of who they are and from whence they came to understand how they can move forward or how their parents move forward and thrive during these disruptive and chaotic. And you talk about her concept of home and. And home to me is very important right now. I think it's the one Space that we can control. And I think your book in the undercurrent talks about if we understand these disruptions and these events that happen in our life, that we can protect home. And it's from home that we can push out. Especially when you talk about your post lineal, your pre lineal, lineal and post lineal spaces. So I know I threw a lot at you, but if you can kind of tie it together and make it relevant, especially to our young audiences that are listening, that will be listening to this.
- [34:01]
B
No, absolutely. I think there's, you know, historical methodology is important, but I think you can't on either side of this equation, you can overdo it, right? So if I become tethered to the archive, where that's the only way in which I can understand the world, and if it's not in the archive, it didn't exist or I can't articulate it, then we got a real problem. This is to your point, about what Painter and the rest of the people are doing with thinking through memory in the archive really effective ways. And Trullo's book becomes central to that. In thinking with the hatred revolution. What do we understand about these types of distortions, the distortion that the archive can present when it's controlled by the actual hegemonic kind of power? The other side of that that's also dangerous is going too far in an imaginary space. Imaginary space where the archive doesn't matter and historical fact doesn't matter. Right. You can't, you know, you can't have absolute fiction, right? Because, you know, and that can. Can border on, you know, most. Most cultural projects are based upon some kind of mythological relationship to the past, right. Like Romulus and Remus. Right. The Roman identity is based upon these two twins who basically nursed with a wolf. It's completely ridiculous. That did not happen. But that's the foundation of a mythological relationship, right? So part of what happens is there's a process in which black people, as we understand them, and when I'm using that term, I'm using it kind of broadly to understand maligned people across time and space, have been limited in the opportunity that we have to mythologize about ourselves. We can't. We're forced to make academic, principled arguments to tether them to an archive that doesn't exist, which then prevents you from having effective kind of relationship to memory. So if I say, you know and you know, for me, right. I. My father's from rural Alabama, right? From Hale County, Alabama. And there's not Much we can trace back. Because, you know, Sawyerville, that plantation, is exactly what it is, right? And so if I then say to myself, well, I can't know anything besides that, or the only way in which I could then imagine a project of futurity is by being able to articulate an effective relationship to the past. White supremacy has already erased that possibility for you by situating that saying, if you can't make a coherent historical argument, you can't tell the Roman people that they're not Roman because they can't make a coherent historical argument to Romulus and Remus. It's mythological, but there's also. There's limits to that possibility. So what I think for students and anybody, even for me, right, From a perspective of method, what I kind of want to be able to do is have historical grounding that gives me the framework in which to kind of be able to improvise in and around the possibility of imagination. So when you talk about the kind of the preliminal, the liminal and the postliminal, what I'm saying is there are points of entry to realms of kind of dramatic change or. Or the possibility for things to kind of alter themselves. And as you go through those spaces, you have to be able to hold on to something as you cross over. Right? Now, what has to be careful. This is a revolutionary thought kind of as a matter of principle, right? The French Revolution failed in many ways because a. It was French, right? It didn't. It had boundaries to it which were re. Articulating. Right? Which were re. Articulating the kind of national boundaries which are the kind of problem in the first place, right? And then it becomes. And then for the Committee of Public Safety, it becomes impossible for them to see kind of any terminus to the kind of revolutionary project because he had tether it to some kind of progress forward, right? So when Robespierre writes that letter, it's like, when would a revolutionary end? He's like, never. Right? That's not possible either. Right. So part of the imagination, and this is the question of home that you're articulating, right? So what Morrison is proposing is that kind of leap into the unknown is towards something like home. And then my point is that then you imagine what that looks like and that becomes the goal. And so many of the things that are questioned, many of the things that are unavailable from an historical perspective, because if we use historical perspective to understand everything, we can't understand anything because there was nothing like the Haitian Revolution before it. So we were sitting there saying, well, that can't happen because it's never happened before. That's not how historical events happen. There's all kinds of stuff that happens for the first time. So part of what I'm proposing is that in order to ground and both elevate the possibility is to allow the kind of freedom of imagination, improvisation, and to queer and destabilize the relationship to kind of historical fact is the only way in which we can think about futurity. Because it's a practical matter. I say the Manifest Destiny wasn't a thing. They had no idea what they were talking about. That was imagined space. This is back to your point about space and memory. Right. So what Manifest Destiny was was an articulation of a futurity that. That didn't exist. Right. That didn't actually fills itself in with geographic space. So when we look back at Manifest Destiny, it seems like the smartest thing in the world, which is complete phantasm. They didn't even know what was beyond the Rocky Mountains. Right. They get to Salt Lake City and think that the Salt Lake is the Pacific Ocean because they have no coherent idea as to what the actual reality of the world is. But then that imagination gets filled in with reality at some point. Point. So what I'm proposing to your question about the kind of leap forward in home is to imagine and articulate what home looks like from a perspective of imagination grounded in fact. Because we can't forget, to your point. Right. What your parents kind of engendered in you is the kind of necessity of understanding the ground from which we kind of come from. You can't lose that. So it's not a possibility of where the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, all we go through doesn't get erased as if it didn't happen. That becomes the coherent relationship, but it doesn't define the future. And I think that's the kind of point that I want to make, is that those kind of historical events placed in that proper understanding should not be used to kind of limit the possibility of imagination of a particular type of future or home in the way that Morrison describes it.
- [39:56]
A
Right? Yeah. Yeah. We can't let the past define who we are, but we can let the past come kind of understand from where we came and how we got to the point. Because it was like you always said, until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned. Everywhere is war. And I agree, everywhere is war. So then the question becomes, how do we abandon this philosophy using the arguments that you present in your book.
- [40:34]
B
Yeah, so I think that was so, you know, when Halle Selassie makes that speech in front of the United nations and then Bob Marley turns into that song that we all hear, right. And that notion of discrediting, discrediting and abandoning requires careful study of it. So in the chapters where I kind of walk through and kind of slowly, and for some people laboriously, what Hegel's up to is to find the kind of weak points in what I consider to be a kind of coherent philosophical articulation of how the anti black world functions and how the anti black world is designed to limit the possibility of blackness. Right. So in order to discredit it, you first have to understand it kind of in coherent fashion. I can't exceed boundaries that I don't know exist. Right. This is to your point about talking to students, et cetera. Right. You know, I have students who come to me and they want to study black literature. And I do that. Right. I love black literature. And you know, when I teach to this point, right. When I teach Invisible man, we start off by reading Herman Melville's Benito Serino. Because you can't understand the beginning of Invisible man without understanding the end of Benito Sereno. That's. That's what Ralph Ellison is telling me, right. So his kind of conceptualization of what's going on in that book is tethered to that Morrison the same way, Right. You can't understand Toni Morrison without understanding Faulkner, without understanding Greek tragedy, without understanding religion. All kinds of things are embedded in that. And what Morrison's project is to understand all of that, then to get rid of the white gaze. And this is back to what I was talking about, self referential blackness. And what I'm trying to do is to operationalize that is to get rid of the white gaze and then be able to understand all of these things from a perspective of our own point of departure. So that's how you discredit it. You abandon it by then of agining new projects and then working to do them both, starting from a philosophical perspective and then developing kind of practical political programs out of that. And it takes care, it takes imagination, and it takes being comfortable with failing and not having things work out exactly as you would like them to in the opening moments of it. I think progressivism oftentimes becomes encumbered with an all or nothing kind of philosophical position. Right. Like if you notice, and this is, you know, now, and I'll get back open, I'll stop talking so you can get back to it. If you notice, this is practically right. Donald Trump was allowed by his political base to lie about Project 2025 by the entire. For the entire election. Said he didn't know nothing about it, never heard of it, didn't know the people. Right. And then as soon as he gets in, he enacts that same project. Right? The left, we don't allow that latitude. We don't. We don't allow the latitude for people to be like, I never heard of this person. Right. What are you talking about? Right. The Nation of Islam. I don't know nobody. Nation is not. Then it turns out you actually do. We, we require a type of constant articulation that doesn't allow to participate in this kind of politics, which is, you know, these guys got a bat wrapped in barbed wire and we're sitting there playing chess, right? And they hit you in the head across the table with this bat. You're like, you're not supposed to do that. They're like, it's not what we're not supposed to do. Now what are you going to do about it? Right, Right. So part of what I'm arguing is that imagination also requires to be very nimble in kind of understanding what, what has to happen as you progress through the different kind of modalities of, of a revolutionary progressive project.
- [43:53]
A
Right. You articulated what I was listening to the news channels. I'm a news junkie. And one of the conversations we're having about the Democratic Party is exactly what you said. They allow no nimbleness and. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes, you did. Yes, you did. Just speak it. Just be honest and speak it. One of the things that I'm always saying is that we have to be. And I'm a revisionist historian because I am challenging a lot of historical ideologies and arguments that I believe are very, very bogus. But you have to be able to be authentic in what you say and, and back up what you say. You know, I'm not going to live and die solely by a secondary source, a primary source, even a oral history. I need to put everything together, then I need to think about it and I need to visualize it myself. What does this actually going to look like? Or what did these people go through authentically? And if it's ugly, then it's just going to have to be ugly. If it's nice, then it's going to have to be nice. And it takes. This takes me to you, trouble, W.E.B. du Bois, very much so. Especially putting him against Grant Fannin. I studied W.E.B. du Bois. So I understand some of your argument. I don't study Fannin quite a bit. So this was new to me. So explain to me how you come to put these two in conversation and then trouble them at the same time.
- [45:29]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, and Du Bois is a fundamental thinker for me. Right. It's like I grew up, you know, reading Du Bois and the Crisis magazine. Like, didn't even really know, you know, it's a kid, you really didn't even know. But you get, you know, your parents orders, it comes to the house, you're reading, right? You're reading this kind of thinker, right? So then when you actually begin to understand the kind of complexity of this person's thinking, you know, then you realize just what you were dealing with. Right. His ability to kind of express himself in different modalities is important. So what I'm troubling about Du Bois is Du Bois relationship to German Romanticism and Hegel in a particular way where it's dialectical, where he works through cognition, consciousness and being. His system of cognition is what he calls second sight, which is, I know about myself through the eyes of the kind of enemy, basically, that leads to what he calls double consciousness. In many ways, for some reason, in many black thought, black theory, we get stuck in double consciousness and don't get to his final mode, which is twoness, which is a black body that has inside of it two warring kind of factions, which is in many ways the reason Fanon and the psychoanalysts come up in this is because that's a psychoanalytic argument. If I'm thinking about myself, internal to myself, and I think that there's an opposing subject internal to my own being, then I got an almost iron, irresolvable problem, which is what Du Bois kind of articulates in the Souls of black Folk. What I'm trying to do is take that as not I trouble him. I positively trouble him as a point of departure and say that what Du Bois is articulating and what Morrison says about what Du Bois is articulating is a point of departure and one very articulate way of understanding the world, right? And I'm saying, okay, if we understand that as a possibility, there are other possibilities that deal with first recovering or reinventing a new system of cognition, which I'm saying is, which is Morse, a system of remembrance, which leads to a different system of consciousness, which is not related to double consciousness, where you're basically relating yourself to kind of blackness versus whiteness, which then leads to What I would consider to be being as black, which is the revolutionary positionality that I would argue that Fanon gets to at the end of Retro of the Earth when he talks about the new humanism. That's what I would consider to be the dehumanism is self referential blackness as being able to articulate its own terms and conditions of being and then relate itself to others kind of external to that. So that's how I put those two kind of figures, canonical figures and both equally important, I think, in the way that I kind of study this kind of stuff. So yeah, I couldn't, none of this would be possible without kind of, I think Du Bois kind of pointed departure. And what Neil Tenderbill, Revolutionary Algerian Revolution becomes in many ways an articulate version of what Fanon is living through lived experience. And then for me, obviously Malcolm X becomes kind of the bridge between those two systems of thought that then renders it understandable for me as a person who grew up on the south side of Chicago. So I understand the world from a perspective of what that world looked like. And I think that to put all those things together, that kind of is the kind of triumvirate of figures with Morrison being the person sitting outside of it that can basically articulate through fiction in her novel practice, exactly what that looks like from a perspective of imagination.
- [48:48]
A
Okay, so does Martin Luther King Jr. Not radical enough for you?
- [48:53]
B
No, I think Martin Luther King Jr. Is sufficiently radical. I haven't had a chance. I've been toying with probably trying to write a book on Martin Luther King similar to the one I wrote on Malcolm X, to dig into his kind of political philosophy structurally. Right. And understand exactly what it proposes. I think King and this is Peniel Joseph's work in many ways. His book, the Sword and Shield, right. It says that the two figures, Martin and Malcolm, are basically essential to one another. Where Martin Luther King's radicalism seems less radical as it's opposed to kind of Malcolm X's radicalism, which is again, if we zoom out a bit, that's what I'm calling self referential blackness. You have two black figures articulating for themselves ways of being black. And then give a point of departure that for that time and space was what was available. That was what was available. And I think Malcolm X had to do that. Martin Luther King kind of knew that towards particularly as. As both of them preach towards the end of their very short lives. Right. This is back to what you're saying about kind of what these people are going through These are very young people who have the weight of the world on them. Right. So I'm very careful about. I'm very careful about what I consider to be. Trying to avoid what I consider to be irresponsible criticism of people who have taken on burdens that I would never have been able to take on. Right. I'm not a person who. I don't know that I had the courage to walk into a room to the Audubon Ballroom, basically knowing that someone's going to kill me or to what Martin Luther King kind of obviously could presuppose the night before he was murdered in Memphis. Right. He knew, right, that this was. He could feel, you know, that that's a particular type. So I honor that. And I think it will be useful to kind of take up Martin Luther King from that perspective as well. Just, you know, both as a perspective as an intellectual exercise, but also to kind of honor that position, Natalie, as what I would consider to be a kind of work towards the progress of what I would consider being as black.
- [50:47]
A
I think you're argument for the visualization of home. Martin Luther King was a visionary, and I think he visualized home in a broader context of the America. I think he actually took what Alexander Hamilton especially was trying to write in the Federalist Papers when he was trying to deal with the issue of slavery. I do know that he read that very carefully and I think he kind of took this undercurrent because Hamilton struggled with how to put black people in this democratic experiment. And he was facing uphill battle with James Madison confederation, everybody. But I think Martin Luther King, after reading that and after studying under in India and his theological studies and. And his vision, because God gave him a vision. And I think he took these undercurrents of what these founders really wanted to do with black people, and he kind of visualized what a United States home would look like. And I think using your arguments that you present and your argument for home, I think you could really write a nice book about Martin Luther King because I think he needs to be in your repertoire because you've written about Malcolm X, because I argue that they were the same. They were the same type people with these big weights, but just looked at them through different lenses. That's my argument because I do the same thing with Toussaint, l' Ouverture and Napoleon. They were the same type of personality, but they just looked at this revolution and how people through different lens and then some of these lenses overlapped, overlapped very much well. And that's my project, once I get this PhD, that's. That's the thing that I'm looking to do, to do a work that compares the both of them. So. So saying I really want to do work that compares both of them. I am a French Revolution Haitian Revolution historian. I'm French historian. So everything that you study, I study you and I need to talk. But anyway, saying all that, what's your. What does your future look like? What is your next. What is your next project? What does your future look like? And then explain your title to me a little bit. The Door of no Return. It's an interesting title with the no cross. With the no crossed the slash in the no.
- [53:26]
B
Yeah. This is part of my marketing genius to write a book that you really can't say the title. Right. So the no. So after. This is months after the books gets turned in. Right. So I was preoccupied with that as this notion of negation. Of negation. Right. So I'm arguing that if we think about the middle passages as being unrecoverable. Right. You can never get out of it. That's the notion of the door of no return, which, when I'm saying that by striking it and not eliminating it, I'm not calling it the door of return. I'm calling it the door of know where to strike through a return. Which means that there's a way out of this, which is, I think, is Morrison's argument by leaving the notion of the door of no return intact. Right. This is what we said a short while ago about always being conscious of historical memory to note that this actually is a real occurrence and gets us to where we are. I think in the book, there's a section where I take up August Wilson's book Fences, his play Fences. And then that really important scene for me when the son asks his father, how come you ain't never liked me? Right? And the Ain't never, you know, this is kind of, you know, the double negative is, you know, you're. When you're growing up, you're telling not to do that because they're basically saying that you're going to do it. So if we take that from a perspective of colloquialism, what he's actually saying is, how come you always like me? And what his father can't say is love. Right? So the overarching term. So the. The title of the book, really, if I have to say it, is probably the Door of Ain't Never a Return. Right. And there ain't never being a double negative. Which means always. You know, in my. Where I grew up, if you say I ain't never going to do something means you're about to do it. If you say I ain't never going over there again, you're basically headed over there as soon as you finish saying it, right? So I'm saying is that to both leave it there so you can see the no and then strike through it to say that this is something that's there always. But we're trying to kind of recover it from a particular means. There's all kinds of complicated Heidegger stuff that's embedded in that negation. Negation. But it's not worth going into it. But that's principally what I'm trying to do with the title. So what comes after this is. I'm working on a couple of things. There's a follow up book to this that I'm calling Quantum Blackness. It has a subtitle that's a theory and fiction of else here. Right. And so what I'm using in that is theory and kind of fiction kind of combined to articulate what the world looks like beyond the kind of anti black world. Because I think in many ways I don't have possession of music in order to. I'm not a musician in order to perform what that looks like. I'm not an artist in order to kind of paint or sculpt it. So I think from a perspective of writing fiction gives you. This is Morrison, right? And Morrison, you name the Afrofuturist, et cetera, who use fiction in order to think about a world that's not in front of us right now. So I'm kind of working on that. And I finished a project that's out for review. My agent has it out for review now. That's a fiction project that's basically a black thriller that in many ways takes the spook who sat by the door and basically brings it into the 21st kind of century and thinks about what it means to be a kind of global actor as it is a fiction project. So that's done and kind of out and bouncing around right now. But I think what I'm really focused on, and you know, it's Martin Luther King thing that we've been talking about is really something I really want to spend the time kind of reading carefully, getting that kind of all pinned down to figure out how to write something like that that gives. Gives us an opportunity to kind of think together with King in that way. So that's what I kind of got in front of Me right now.
- [56:54]
A
I would look forward to having conversations with you about him. He's my hero. I grew up with him.
- [57:00]
B
Yeah, I'm a Napoleon person, too. I read pretty much every Napoleon biography that's out there. So I look forward to seeing what you're doing with Napoleon. Toussaint l' Ouverture as well.
- [57:10]
A
I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm gonna finish this PhD work. But that's my ultimate goal, to write the big book. You ended your book with a mat. Remember it. To remember them. And you have all these sections of Rememory. How was it? How. Why did you end the book that way?
- [57:28]
B
Yeah, it closes itself out. So I kind of get through that. Through. The book starts with Bob Marley and in some ways ends with Aretha Franklin. Right. And with Aretha Franklin's kind of master performance of Amazing Grace, which is. I kind of grew up with that. And where Aretha's talking about this kind of question of the never grow old, right? So we're back to this notion of negation at some point, right? What I'm doing with the kind of recurrence of remembering it, remembering it over and over again, is trying to bring us. Bring myself and the reader back to grounding myself in the system of cognition that Morrison proposes. I'm kind of saying don't use just memory, right? Use Rememory. Where I'm able to take metaphysically what I'm understanding. What I understand is kind of what the archive has given me and what I understand. Imagination gives me at the same time to kind of combine ways of. Kind of being that are limited by either any one of those modalities on their own. Right? So when I keep saying, I intercede those kind of articulation with remembering it, remembering it, what I'm saying is ways of. Is that project is kind of ongoing. And what I've tried to do in this book is to give the kind of structure and format of how philosophically or theoretically, depending on your position with those two terms, it basically situates itself from a perspective of using the black aesthetic as the point of departure.
- [58:48]
A
So then you started the book saying that acceptance of the world as it stands is a luxury that black people can ill afford. And you ended the book with the same sentence. Is that a rallying call to being as black?
- [59:03]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think, you know, this is written in the wake of everything that you're describing, right? This kind of desperate situation where, you know, we're having conversations that we thought were behind us. You know, we thought these, these kinds of questions of voters rights and stuff. We thought this was settled and it's not. And this is a situation that we can ill afford. And we need to marshal ourselves and get rid of kind of petty, internecine kind of arguments that aren't productive, that are just circling around the bowl, basically because we're at war. Basically, that's however you want to describe it. Doesn't have to be physically at war, but we're metaphysically at war. We're subjectivity, we're subjectively at war. We're spiritually at war with these people. And there's gotta be a way for us to kind of work together to understand that we cannot afford to let, you know, let slip and to your point, right, all the people that sacrifice and can't allow that to be in vain. So we need to, whatever tools we have, and the one that I have is to be able to write in a particular kind of way and hope that it's useful for people to kind of think through this process, the same thing that you're trying to do with the work that you're doing. So I'm really excited about to kind of continue conversation over time in space as you're working through your project as well.
- [60:14]
A
It was a pleasure talking with you, discussing with you. I think that you have gave us a map to resolution. I feel that this book is targeted not just for academics, but for the average person. I think it addresses, it helps, maybe older people kind of go back and look at where they have come from and kind of remember it and then kind of sit down within themselves and visualize what is home to them. Because I think home is the space that these things, these revolutions can start and push out. Because like you say, love is freedom. And I think if we develop a space of home that contains love, we can push that out and then do the work of the revolutionary and understand, as you say, we cannot accept the world as it is right now, that we are in definite war. I look forward to your future work. I thank you for coming on New Books Network, African American Studies Podcast channel. And this is Bridget Wallace with Professor Michael Sawyer. Please read his book the Door of no Return and the no, it has a slash going through it. Being as black, I am Bridget Wallace. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.