The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Meditations on Claudia Jones

• Author: Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920979107
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(1) 76 –88

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920979107

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920979107

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An Introduction

Liberation is an ongoing struggle. Its finality lies in its

activeness. Liberation demands of action a certain per-

petuity. This liberation is not only a push against but

also is, manifestly, a push for. In this sense, liberation

is agonal. Agonia, its Greek derivative, denotes “a

struggle for victory.” This partly explains Frantz

Fanon’s (2004, 51) clarion call: “The struggle, they

say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending

struggle.” Such a colorful canvas of struggle paints the

liberatory landscape (sometimes in a rich crimson red).

Action reconstitutes the political and relocates its mar-

gins. In so doing, the political act of doing necessitates

an agonal mooring—a push for freedom. It is here lib-

eration finds its ascendency. Its call echo in and

through accents of struggling, of doing, of laboring.

Claudia Jones, an Afro-Trinidadian who migrated to

the United States during the colonial epoch, became a

journalist and an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial-cum-

imperial activist. Her activism was not borne of a stud-

ied knowledge tethered to the academism of the

colonial world. Jones agonally lived her politics, real-

ized through her intersectional entry points into

oppression as a working-class, black immigrant

woman. Mundane interactions with the oppressed sedi-

mented her revolutionary program. For Jones, the

question of struggle raises, ineluctably, another: for

what do we struggle? Indeed, for whom?

In what follows, I contend Claudia Jones reimagines

the act of labor beyond conventional economic terms and

frames. Rather, in addition to its economic necessity, I

argue Jones also decolonizes labor in expressly existen-

tial, political, and epistemic terms to meet the demands of

a liberatory project. Moreover, labor, when redefined as a

collectivized struggle, does violence against existing

hegemonic holds, and through it, intersubjective, unified

spaces emerge. From there, I contend Jones’ recapturing

of radicalism shifts, implodes, and widens its epistemic

margins from merely a descriptive act of resistance, one

that only punctuates or interrupts modes of imperialism.

Instead, Jones’ radicalism stands as revolutionary ethos,

grounded in an (inter)national consciousness of self and

other that troubles and remaps the positionality of the

New World black subject. As such, radicalism is not writ-

ten in the signature of singularity (bounded by isolated

acts of transgression) but does the larger work of onto-

logical realignment—a re-articulation of relational com-

mitments. This realignment of radicality becomes

repositioned as truth discourse, one that implicates and

inflects core epistemic considerations. That is to say,

Jones’ radicality leads to a shift in epistemes, toward a

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1The University of Memphis, TN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, The University of Memphis.

Email: dkchvnns@memphis.edu

The Laboring of Black Politics:

Decolonial Meditations on

Claudia Jones

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes1

Abstract

This article examines the role of labor as a political concept within the work of Caribbean thinker and activist,

Claudia Jones. It argues for a reformulation of black labor politics. Specifically, it contends Jones’ formulation of

labor requires moving beyond its conventionally economic articulations, to consider, in tandem, labor’s expressly

political, existential (racial), and epistemic dimensions to actualize a coherent project of transnational liberation. Doing

so requires decolonizing labor, reimagining it anew—outside Eurocentric thought. Such a multilayered, imbricated

approach widens the philosophical margins of liberatory politics, interrogating, in the process, the Arendtian model of

labor, so as to speak meaningfully to the emancipatory possibilities that lie within the labor practices of the colonized.

As such, I theorize these added dimensions of labor from the position of the black subject—offering an explicit

discussion of black labor for the project of liberatory politics.

Keywords

black politics, Claudia Jones, black liberation, black labor, decolonizing labor

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