Orisanmi Burton On Black Masculine Care Work Within Zones Of War c/o Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Overview via MAKC:
“Orisanmi Burton is a social anthropologist, his research examines grassroots resistance and state repression. He is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. Currently, as he will discuss briefly in the episode, he is working on a book on prisoner organizing in the New York State prison system, and the Attica Rebellion.
In this episode we are talking about Burton’s recent essay, “Captivity, Kinship & Black Masculine Care Work Under Domestic Warfare.” It was published in the scholarly journal American Anthropologist so if listeners are unable to access a copy and would like to get their hands on one feel free to hit us up or reach out to Orisanmi directly. His twitter is @orisanmi.
In this discussion we talk about understanding prisons as a zone and technology of domestic warfare, about the Black radicals who have theorized this understanding and their place within current academic thought on the prison system. We also talk a bit about Joy James’s concept of the captive maternal, and how letter writing with prisoners has informed Burton’s own intellectual work, specifically around the role that care work or socially reproductive labor has among Black incarcerated men as a mode of resistance to the war waged against Black familial, kinship and communal structures.”
Highlights:
“A historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets black radical activism, social/familal life, and the interiority of black subjectivity” -quote by Orasanmi Burton from his essay, delivered by MAKC host Jared
“People who have done time often talk about how they inhabit war on different scales… Solitary confinment as engaging in a war against oneself…this war within oneself which is attempting to fight against being domesticated, being transformed into someone who is broken, as George Jackson, would call it, this war that’s in the every interiority of the subject, of the persons who is being attacked…historically, war against different forms of black collectivity. Which we can call, generally, the family. And I’m not thinking about the family in necessarily heteronormative terms, but in forms of collectivity, forms of being together, as functional and autonomous human beings.”
“I think all three of these scales are war are operating simulatenously. You can see these scales of war being invoked in COINTELPRO documents or other documents as a product of the state’s war apparatus… when hoover talks about these ideas from reaching black youth. i read that as a concerted effort to prevent the inter-genrerational transmission of knowledge…”
On Tenderness and Care-work:
“Obviously they have a tremendous amount of strength and fortitude, but what I’ve also noticed it that there’s a provide tenderness that they have that’s intact. And the tenderness, I think, is part of how they are able to survive. Because they are placed in a situation where frankly they are severed from the kinds of gendered labor that cis-gendered heterosexual men often get from women and other gender non-conforming people and so while they are in prison they perform that care-work for themselves out of necessity, for survival. They have to be, they learn how to be tender, to care for each other.”
“These are mundane forms of collective rebellion precisely because as black revolutionaries like George Jackson and many other s revolutionaries have explained to us, once f the functions of the prison is to break the captives, to turn them against each other, to actually dehumanize them.”
“There’s a quote in that article also from the Attica brothers where they theorize, during the rebellion, that one of the functions of the prison is to break them and turn them into animals so that perpetuate violence against people in their own communities. This is a sort of conspiratorial view of the function of the prison as that which reproduces anti-black violence inter-communally.”
“…so when incarcerated people or other people outside of the prison who are still subjected to domestic war perform acts of care and tenderness towards one another its actually resisting that strategy of auto-genocide, as joy James calls it. And is holding out the possibility of continuing to reproduce a kind of black humanity despite being under siege and subjected to these kinds of technologies.”
On social death and natal alienation:
“I don’t think the logic of there racial patriarchal structure that we inhabit should be allowed to define what family is for us. In other words we can say that we’re under siege in all of these different ways, which of course we are, but I think we need to also a knowledge what it means to be black and the creativity, the power that it entails. Part of why I use Cedric Robinson and his notion of the black radical tradition is precisely for this reason. It speaks to a longer genealogy of blackness the precedes the African holocaust or the Maafa or the middle passage… and if you’re actually situating black political development within that context then you can’t actually say that we are socially dead. I don’t think that we are actually natally alien.”
On Masculine Care work and it’s relation to feminist carework and Joy James’s Captive maternal:
“the kind of care work that I’m describing this kind of carework or this kind of reproductive labor describing has been discussed rigorously in other literatures, specifically literatures and focuses on black women and gender nonconforming people within and outside of prisons. And so talking about you know the different forms of care as being political —right there’s a Long trajectory of that within black feminist theory and queer theory, less so in studies that primarily men and particularly black men. so just in terms of citationally I wanted to alert readers to Isn’t a sort of a new concept, although it’s one that is woefully undertheorized as it relates to black men.”
“I wanted to acknowledge Joy James’s more recent work around the captive maternal, which I think is a huge intervention in the area of social reproduction, which is to say, the contradiction that she raises as, I say in the article, remains unresolved. Laying out that contradiction at a structural level. Which is to say or to oversimplified, perhaps that, yeah, all the social reproduction in the reproductive labor that we’re doing is great, it’s necessary, it’s important, but what is it mean that within the context of predatory white supremacy social reproduction keeps you alive so that this predatory system can continue to feast on you. That’s the question she’s asking if she doesn’t give us an answer to it. and I don’t have an answer to it either. and I think there’s a way in which the kind of care work that I’m describing in this article can be seen in that way. Which is to say that these black men are keeping each other alive through this care work, but they’re keeping each other alive which keeps the prison system alive. And so it’s just a contradiction there that’s unresolved.”
“I also wanted to pay homage to the way that masculinity was important to the people I was in dialogue with. The captive maternal is an ungendered framework. And I think it needs to be ungendered because it’s operating on structural level, but because I’m dealing with epistolary material with letters, my work was very much situated within the realm of experience, within the realm of community discourse and so I wanted Absolute and the others who I’m talking about to be able to recognize themselves. I want them to be able to read the text and recognize themselves in what they’re doing, and perhaps even to help them develop a language for the kinds of politics, but they’re enacting. so it was important for me to acknowledge that this is the kind of a gendered masculine labor of care work. it’s not feminist labor, They don’t see themselves as feminists. They see themselves very much as men. So I wanted to honor that as actually an under-theorized feature of black masculinity under racist patriarchy and capitalist warfare.”