Global Imperative for Emancipatory Praxis by A. Shahid Stover

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#8, JUNE-AUGUST/2013

As an ongoing ontological siege of human ‘being’ situated against western imperialist overdetermination-from-without, the struggle for Black liberation provides an exacting global context for potentialities of existential revolt and socio-historical emancipation for all of humanity. As such, it is precisely because Black liberation praxis is not globally prevalent, that the continued cultivation of Black liberation theory is a dialectic worldwide necessity.

To be serious about Black liberation however, and the extremely relevant human implications contained therein, does not require the resumption of some preexisting ‘race’ struggle boisterously lobbying for the extension of liberal-democratic tolerance and demanding unequivocal assimilation into an unjust socio-political order as the ultimate aim of our emancipatory struggle.

Nor does it necessitate the hasty appropriation of an archaio-nostalgic value system which must be mined from an essential locus of classical African tradition and culture. For though socially urgent and culturally necessary, the epistemological demands of research into historical truths which have been buried deep under the legitimizing shrouds of oppression, should not be regarded as possessing enough of an insurrectionary force from which to appease the emancipatory imperatives needed to confront Empire-as-western imperialist power.

Rather, such a confrontation with a western imperialist continuum entails an emancipatory project willed for by the relentless transcendence of our human subjectivity, fully cognizant and completely aware of the Real of human suffering which exists and the socio-historical horizons which maintain and preserve such specific suffering as an ahistorical constant of Empire.