Embracing a Sankofic Approach to Enduring Political Crisis

Abstract

Embracing a Sankofic method as outlined by Nkiru Nzegwu, this article begins in the U.S. to argue that crises should be understood as a permanent and inevitable feature of human life and freedom. It then considers why the permanence of crisis might seem too overwhelming a prospect to bear by recounting how Antonio Gramsci’s account of crises of political legitimacy has been read as pitting moments of radically open possibility (marked by profound existential uncertainty and heightened violence) against those of political stability (marked by relative cooperation, routine, compromise, surrender, and resignation). It then turns to the way that Grace Lee Boggs critically engages with this shared Marxist legacy by responding to Immanuel Wallerstein’s outlining of how what was considered axiomatic in revolutionary politics prior to 1968 had to be rethought after it. For Lee Boggs this entailed calling for and enacting what many call “prefigurative politics”—or of living now as if in the world one seeks to build—and of deliberately constructing alternative possibilities from sites of indisputable crisis, such as Detroit, Michigan. In an effort to offer existential resources that might enable us to manage the profound fear unleashed by the radical uncertainty of crisis, it seeks to rethink the individualistic underpinning of contemporary Euromodern political structures. It therefore concludes, in the spirit of the meeting at which these remarks were delivered, by turning to what Nzegwu elaborates as Sankofic epistemology and what Rebecca Pointer and Darlene Miller describe as the Green Leadership School’s idea of “becoming octopus.” It does so to consider how distinct understandings of the relationships of space and time and models of how we might educate our affective as well as intellectual capacities may introduce the requisite values to facilitate our accepting crisis as a permanent feature of shared self-determining practices so that other modes of political action and ways of being might be engendered.