This dissertation traces U.S. higher education’s contemporary ‘diversity problem’ to 1865 and the racialized and gendered notions of the public good, social mobility, citizenship, and self-determination that rose in the aftermath of Emancipation. It brings together theoretical and methodological tools from ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical gender studies, and feminist geography to examine higher education as a site of contest in the black freedom struggle, arguing that the modern landscape of U.S. higher education is fundamentally shaped by white ‘architects’ responding to the pedagogical and geographic innovations of black radical traditions.

In the opening chapter I study the history of a vocational institute for black Southerners and demonstrate that education had been a crucial element of the ‘rival geographies’ created by the enslaved, but after 1865 became a technology of enclosure, tying socially mobile black workers to underdeveloped rural areas and respectably gendered occupations. The second chapter looks at the history of a 100-year old community college in Chicago. By tracking changes in the demographics of the neighborhood it serves and relating these to changes in the college’s form and function, I demonstrate how modern U.S. notions of the public good are always-already racialized, while arguing for a defense of the community service pedagogy championed by black neighborhood organizers. In chapter 3 I examine the institutionalization of a student-created ‘Third Worldist’ college in California to illuminate how universities can mold students’ thinking about race and racism away from global political and economic structures to personal identities and individual trauma. The final chapter considers the emergence of an ostensibly color-blind, progressive-minded neoliberalism in the rise of ‘leadership development programs’ like Teach For America. I demonstrate that despite the best intentions of participants, such programs further the criminalization of urban spaces while using the language of civil rights to insinuate the privatization of public services. Throughout I demonstrate how higher education has articulated academic and common sense notions of race, space, and belonging in what I call racial-spatial pedagogies, descriptive and prescriptive theories describing racial difference and how that difference fits in the larger body politic.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

“Be(Long)ing: New Africanism & South African Cultural Producers Confronting State Repression in an Era of Exile”

by

Martin Luther Boston

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

University of California San Diego, 2019

Professor Dayo F. Gore, Chair

My interdisciplinary research brings together cultural, diasporic and socio-political perspectives to present a socio-historical study of South African cultural producers working in an era of exile across the globe (roughly 1959 – the mid 1980s). “Be(Long)ing: New Africanism & South African Cultural Producers Confronting State Repression in an Era of Exile,” seeks to understand exile as a function of government control, as a way to theorize global anti-Blackness and modes of Black solidarity, and as an avenue through which South African cultural producers and artistic works became active in the politics of various countries around the world. Chiefly, I argue that the South African settler colonial state created the conditions for its own demise and one significant way it did this was by creating a stateless Black subject that relied on cultural expression, an exilic consciousness, and Pan-African solidarities and community making processes to topple this regime. Native Black South Africans used their cultural specificity and traditions as well as their long history of translocal and transnational cultural development to create and theorize the communities and tools necessary to be triumphant in this fight.

This dissertation consists of four body chapters, in which each explores a different set of objects that studies Black South African exiles and their collective cultural works. Ultimately, this project gives insight into how the condition of exile, its connections to Pan-Africanism and cultural exile’s struggles against anti-Blackness produced new forms of Black subjectivity in response to heightened state repression.

The first chapter, “Belonging Nowhere,” looks at two pivotal events that led to the era of exile in South Africa: the rise and fall of the township Sophiatown and its renaissance, and the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Chapter 2, “Prelude to Departure,” situates the 1959 jazz opera King Kong and the film Come Back, Africa as key productions that critiqued the apartheid state. These productions would also—due to an (im)perfect storm of events taking place almost simultaneously, including Sharpeville, the 1960 Venice Film Festival and a European run of King Kong—eventually lead to exile for some of the most prominent and infamous South African cultural producers in the country’s history. Chapters 3 and 4, “Armed Propaganda” and “Citizens of Africa,” respectively, look at what South African cultural producers were creating, how they lived, and the politics they took up while in exile. Chapter 3 focuses on the exiled African National Congress (ANC) radio program, “Radio Freedom” and its Women’s Section radio segment, “Dawn Breaks,” and Chapter 4 considers the lived experiences of exiled South African cultural producers, with particular interest paid to international superstar singer, Miriam Makeba, and writer and musician, Todd Matshikiza.

Didn't It Rain?: Religiosity, Swingin’ Jazz, and Black Community Formations in the Pacific Northwest (1844 – 1967) focuses on the ways in which the material conditions of anti-black racism, segregation, and exclusion affect the development of the Pacific Northwest from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. Furthermore I identify and examine the contributions of Black communities over time to the development of the Pacific Northwest, including the ways in which religion and jazz music have functioned to define freedom for Black communities and support community movements for freedom and equality. This project deploys an intersectional analysis, routed through political geography and historical materialism, which considers the ways in which the logics of slavery affect the development of communal relationships with land in the Pacific Northwest within the prevailing contexts of Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism in the US. Didn’t It Rain intervenes on the abstraction and normalization of the concept of ‘private property’ by engaging with the ways in which property is a racialized and gendered concept. At the same time, I am concerned with the ways in which Black communities have imagined and produce different relationships to land that exceed conceptions of private property due the material histories of chattel slavery.

“Dreams Eclipsed: Culture and Warfare in Black Los Angeles” investigates the language(s) of social analysis that emerges from Black Los Angeles since the 1940s in order to make sense of warfare at home and abroad. Engaging Black literature, film, and music, this dissertation bridges various fields ranging from Black studies, cultural studies, carceral studies, critical theory, as well as histories of California and the Third World to examine how Black life in Los Angeles has been made more or less possible when interrogated through transnational discourses of war and conquest. I draw on histories of African captivity to generate a theory of the material and ontological constraints that poor and working-class Black people occupy when living under the precarious auspices of domestic militarism. This dissertation examines watershed moments in U.S. American social life such as the Second World War, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the L.A. Riots of 1992 in order to illuminate the connection between the burgeoning warfare state and the increasing social and cultural permanence of mass incarceration, policing, and surveillance––i.e., the carceral state. Through examining carceral warfare and racial/gendered captivity as ideal structural features of postwar Los Angeles, this project situates Black working-class cultural production as a primary site for theorizing, navigating, and overcoming war at both the domestic and international scale. Key questions that drive this dissertation include: What can a place like Los Angeles say about the multiple discourses that allow logics of war to intersect with racialized and gendered captivity as logical conditions enabled through carcerality? Through Los Angeles’ expansion as a global, multi-ethnic metropolis, how is captivity understood as not only the condition that is produced by the carceral state, but also a condition that has always been transformed and depicted in Black arts and culture throughout the 20th century? At the core, “Dreams Eclipsed” deals with how Black people have not only constructed meanings of life and struggle in the city, but how Black culture in Los Angeles contributes to global narratives of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist struggles across the diaspora.