“Winter in America” and Theorizing Black People’s Enduring Freedom Movement: Brian Purnell on Rinaldo Walcott’s *The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom*

“The problem of emancipation,” Rinaldo Walcott writes, “is central to the condition of Black life.”[1] This book provides a meditative essay, broken into twenty-two parts, on this argument. In Walcott’s lush, meandering, rich sentences, “emancipation” incorporates the legal, legislative processes that altered Black people’s enslaved conditions.  (Walcott refers often to Black people as “Black life-forms” because, “Euro-American definitions and practices of the human offer Black life no conceptual or actual space within the terrain of the human.”[2]) “Emancipation,” however, did not, produce freedom; it creates opportunities for Black people to be free, and for larger social and legal systems to restrict those ways of being Black and free. All of us, thus are living through, “the long emancipation” Walcott’s historical and philosophical framework that describe ongoing and changing contests over expressions and restrictions of Black people’s freedom.[3]

At the risk of reducing this provocative, theoretically dexterous, and pleasurable read, to a few condensed ideas, Walcott’s essay argues the following points. First, emancipation begins the process of defining the meaning of freedom. Second, the process of figuring out freedom affects the lives of formerly enslaved people; and since Black people represent the essence of non-humanity in Western thought and practice, the meaning, expression, and reality of freedom for “Black life-forms” is the realization of freedom for all human life. Third, we are not free. Indeed, no one is free; especially Black people; and certainly, in Walcott’s analysis, Black people in the physical and cultural and intellectual West. Freedom – true freedom – comes from movement: all types of movement – physical (the movement of individuals across space) and cultural (the movement of bodies through dance and comportment) and aesthetic (the movement of style and clothing in ways that express human individuality). Because Black people’s physical, cultural, and aesthetic movement is constantly regulated and policed, Black people are not free. Until Black people are free, no one is free.

Fourth, control of Black movement manifests most consistently throughout history in forms of death (both social and physical), violence, and destruction. Fifth, Black vernacular, expressed through culture and aesthetics offers keys toward unlocking the meaning and lived realization of freedom. Last, the lived reality and idea of freedom, legible to, and for, Black people, cannot reflect linear, modern notions of progress. Western freedom has always required Black (and Indigenous) subjugation, exploitation, bodily control, and death. The “long emancipation” ends, and freedom can begin, Walcott argues, with the ushering in of “a new humanism, beginning in the acknowledgement that our present conceptions of what it means to be human and a subject do not currently include Black people. Indeed, such conceptions of the human cannot contain them.”[4]

Given this capacious analysis and theorizing of freedom and emancipation, it is unclear what to make of all the expressions of Black humanity that emerged within the modernist, capitalist contexts that Walcott rightly argues objectified, exploited, dehumanized, and destroyed Black life as part of the entire racialized project of land acquisition, nation building, and corporate acquisitiveness and expansion. “The very institutionality of the Americas is a region of death for the Black life-forms”, Walcott writes.[5] But what Walcott (through Katherine McKittrick[6]) identifies as the “plantation zones,” the “death-dealing zone,” and the post-emancipation, pre-freedom “residue of the plantation as central to the formation of its afterlife and thus as a significant and reoccurring element of contemporary life”[7] are also where Black resistance occurs. Black culture and aesthetics give life to alternative forms of humanity, but only when they do not become coopted or monetized. Walcott argues that this rarely, if ever, happens. This warning Walcott issued about the difficult emergence of human freedom reminded me of the sentiments captured in the Gil-Scott Heron song: “The revolution will not be televised.” [8]

The history of the modern world, the explosion of a Black diaspora through Atlantic slavery, the attempted genocide of Indigenous people through land usurpation, violent extermination, and cultural domination, the continued persistence of the exploitative undergirding of “plantation” zones into and beyond life during the legislative era of emancipation, when Black life does not matter, when it is not even recognized as life, as human, when it is constantly wasted through death, imprisonment, and appropriation – Walcott’s meditation on Black people’s lack of humanity within these contexts affirms, for me, ideas and feelings expressed in another song by Heron. “Its winter in America,” Heron sang. “And ain’t nobody fighting because nobody knows what to say.”[9]

But for Walcott, freedom (from fighting; through knowing what to say, and do) comes in the form of inventiveness and aesthetics—especially, in Walcott’s experience, imagination, and cultural appreciation, through Black people’s creativity, captured, in one of Walcott’s favorite examples, by “saggin’ pants and their ethics.”[10] Black people’s dress, especially, for Walcott, “saggin’ pants,” shows defiance, individuality – humanity! – that evokes ire, surveillance, and control, sometimes of the state through city ordinances banning the practice. The winter of the long emancipation ends, and the summertime of freedom begins, through such acts of invention, creation, and life. “For what is Black life,” Walcott concludes, “if not constant, unceasing invention in the time of this long emancipation.”[11]

[1] Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 105.

[2] Walcott, 9.

[3] Walcott writes in the first short essay, “In fact, one must note that at every moment Black peoples have sought for themselves, to assert what freedom might mean and look like, those desires and acts toward freedom have been violently interdicted. It is this ongoing interdiction of a potential Black freedom that I have termed the long emancipation.” See Walcott, 1.

[4] Walcott, 7.

[5] Walcott., 19.

[6] Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17:3 (No. 42), (2013), 1-15.

[7] Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation, Opt. Cit., 20.

[8] Gil-Scott Heron, “The Revolution will not be Televised,” Pieces of Man (New York, NY: RCA Studios, 1971).

[9] Gil-Scott Heron, “Winter in American” The First Minute of a New Day (Silver Spring, MD: Arista Records, 1975).

[10] Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation, Op. Cit., 108.

[11] Walcott, 108.