In this series, we ask acclaimed writers about their work. This week’s featured author is Tapji Garba. Garba is a graduate student based in Toronto, focusing on Critical Black studies and political theology. She recently published a chapter in the book, Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion. In this interview, we ask Tapji about her contribution to the volume, as well as her broader scholarship and research interests.
Roberto Sirvent: You contributed an essay for the recently-published book, Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion. How might your piece be of interest to BAR readers who are already deeply familiar with Wynter’s writings, and how could it serve as a useful introduction to those who have not yet engaged her work?
Tapji Garba: For those who don’t know her work, Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican novelist and theorist who is known for her essays on the development of western humanism as a system of racial hierarchy. Although she has written many works on Caribbean cultural production, her genealogy of humanism has been a major focus since her 1984 essay The Ceremony Must be Found. In the articles published between 1984-2015 what she was really trying to highlight was the way that the concept of the human emerged in Early modern Europe as a way to resolve various crises of legitimacy spawned by the colonial encounter has since been naturalized and now saturates our immediate experience of the world. What might be most interesting about my contribution for those who are already familiar with her work is the way that I place her genealogy of Man in conversation with contemporary work in political theology, specifically work being done on the theological genealogy of economics. There are a number of people doing really interesting work that tries to build on her work and take it in new directions and I hope my essay can be a useful contribution to those conversations. At the same time, a lot of work on Wynter focuses on either her genealogy or her proposal for a science of the Word and the reinvention of the human. In the essay, I try to show how the specifics of her genealogy are in fact related to her constructive ethical and political commitments. Secondary scholarship on Wynter is at its best when it doesn’t treat her work on medieval and early modern Europe as an afterthought or preface to ‘the real thing’, and what I try to stress in my contribution is the fact that the project of reinventing of the human after Man is conditioned by our formation within the modern episteme.
You wrote an essay in 2023 about police abolition. Now, more than two years after that article was published, what changes or developments have you noticed in the manner in which leftist movements talk about the abolition or “defunding” of police? What are some causes for concern about the ways Zohran Mamdani and his followers are approaching the issue?
Abolition becoming something of a political common sense in a few corners of the world made more sense within the political culture that existed from 2009-2020 (i.e., Oscar Grant to George Floyd rebellions). Right now, there isn’t really an organized left and the cycles of rebellion that put abolition on the table failed to cohere into a sustained movement against the police. On top of this the police have responded by expanding their counterinsurgency toolkit and our political landscape has shifted even further to the right over the years. Mamdani’s “public safety” angle is a symptom of weakness. At the same time, I don’t think it’s inconsistent with the “defund the police” angle from a few years ago insofar as both describe the police as public servants who are doing a bad job and who should be (partially, in Mamdani’s case) replaced by social services. I criticized this line of reasoning in my original article and I still believe that it is a complete non-starter, and frankly, I have less patience with this kind of thinking today than I did in 2023. The police are an armed force set on subduing enemy populations and chasing down “terrorists”. They cannot be trojan horsed. In the earlier article I remarked that abolition cannot happen without going through civil war. I think that remains the case. We are not dealing with “public safety”; we are dealing with the legitimacy of the social order. A serious understanding of the composition of the state is the only sound point of departure. Any position that won’t even deal with the way that the expansion of ICE provides an avenue for merging the MAGA base with state power is simply not worth our time. We have to move on from this.
A lot of Black liberation and anti-imperial groups have been critical of the democratic socialist movement in the United States. In your opinion, what are some ideological and organizing challenges faced by groups like the DSA?
“Building power one social democrat at a time” is not going to happen. The DSA is a big tent multi-tendency organization and from my understanding has tremendous difficulty arriving at a unified position on the U.S. state, and its ring-wing factions leads the pack towards electoral strategies centered on backing “socialist” candidates running for office in the Democratic party. There are two problems here. The first is that this cannot be a road to power (by the way, there is lots of “building power” talk these days but I have to confess I don’t know what people mean by ‘power’ here; some enlightenment would be greatly appreciated!) because the Democratic party is structurally opposed to extra parliamentary organizing of any kind and therefore cannot be an avenue for left-wing movements assuming power, because they will never fuse themselves with a mass base the way Republicans do (e.g., the New Right succeeded by effectively turning right-wing Catholic and evangelical churches into a mass base, merging that with the Republican party, and using their mass base as a reliable lever for restructuring the U.S. state; Rosalind Petchesky and Mike Davis have a lot of insightful things to say about this). The second is that many seem to fall back on an instrumentalist view of state power rather than looking at the composition of the state at this moment of time and deriving a strategy from there. Put differently, the Black liberationist and anti-imperial objection is that there is a crucial difference between starting with the assumption that the United States of America is Babylon and holding out hope that it can be transformed. The former is obviously correct and we need to deal with the consequences.
Given your research interests in religion and politics, what worries you the most right now in terms of the political mobilization among conservative evangelicals in the U.S.? In what ways is the movement’s anti-Blackness different than it was under previous Presidential administrations, and in what ways is it just more of the same?
What’s new with the Evangelicals is the fact that they’ve made more inroads with the project of building a Christian White Nationalist regime (it’s important to note that this project wouldn’t be possible without their alliances with conservative Catholics). Otherwise, I can’t say I’ve noticed much that’s new in terms of how Evangelicals are operating. I tend to think that American (which is also global) evangelicalism is a project that emerged as part of the restructuring of the world economy in the early 1970’s. It is a theological-political reaction to the global sixties (the role played by Evangelicals in the suppression of liberation theology attests to this), and I don’t think their anti-blackness is any different today insofar as the semantic field in which they operate remains largely the same. This is a fundamentally anti-black project and the centrality of the family is actually one of the clearest signs of this. The basic claim here goes something like this: the moral depravity of the welfare queen and her offspring underscore the necessity of patriarchal authority, because without it she and all her sinful children will use the state to take our property away from us. So, it’s different than the past because it’s doing an even better job at gaining ground and it’s the same as the past because its content is largely the same as it was before.
Since you’re based in Toronto, can you provide insight on how anti-trans moral panics, attitudes, and legislation in Canada compare to what we see going on in countries like the U.S. and the U.K.?
While the anti-trans discourses in the U.K. have their own bizarre ecosystem, I think the Canadian context is straightforwardly continuous with the American one. The concept of “parental rights” is all over the place and demonstrates how the politics of the household (like the kind alluded to in my answer to the previous question) are at stake in the current conjuncture, especially when it comes to trans children. I would even say that anti-trans legislation is a component of the restructuring of the state that’s currently taking place as there is a very close connection between aspects of anti-trans rhetoric and cycles of organized abandonment. We can see this playing out in discussions around trans healthcare and the way they’re structured around three axioms: 1) That it doesn’t really work; 2) that it does “permanent damage”; and 3) That it is purely cosmetic (“I don’t care if you get osteoporosis, I’m underdosing you.”) Putting these points together, critics of medical transition ask “why should my tax dollars cover this?” and “why should my children be handed over to this?” The post-1973 global political-economic restructuring that I mentioned earlier placed private households front and center as the primary institution for bearing the costs of social reproduction and the inter-generational transmission of wealth, and as a result they reinforced the mastery of parents over children, hence so-called parental rights. Anti-trans legislation — and its corresponding fantasies about “the trans lobby” and a tyrannical Woke state using their hard-earned dollars to mutilate their children’s bodies in the name of “gender ideology” — is animated by anxieties about losing control over children and the consequent devaluation of accumulated wealth because of the failure to secure an apparatus that can securely promise its transmission to future generations. This is why I like to say that trans people are “feminazis” of the 21st century as anti-trans rhetoric bears much in common with the anti-feminism that circulated as the New Right was still in the process of congealing.
A lot of your current research is on Cold War history. How has this research informed some of your views on Marxist-Leninist thought? Relatedly, how does your view of Lenin (and Leninism) challenge some of the more conventional understandings found in Marxist-Leninist circles today?
I have to be honest and say that I really don’t care about contemporary Marxism-Leninist circles. I have a great deal of admiration for what self-described Marxist-Leninist regimes accomplished in the 20th century but I think the collapse of the Soviet Union effectively ended Marxism-Leninism as the proper name for the problematic of socialist transition. Having said that, the history of state socialism has much to teach us in the present. What I have found most interesting in my research is the way that socialist states tried to deal with their marginal position within the U.S.-led world-system, especially when it came to financial markets. While some impressive gains were made along the road of national development their limitations revolve around the failure to depart from capital investment structures and create a sustainable form of ex-ante socialist planning. Kristy Ironside and Oscar Sanchez-Sibony’s excellent scholarship on the Soviet Union, planning, and global political economy has proved essential for whatever comes out of all the research I’ve been doing. The other reason for my interest in Cold War history has to do with the fact that we are currently experiencing the breakdown of the post-1945 international order, and the Fascist International taking shape in its wake has me (along with many others) look back at the history of the Soviet Union, not because it was the solution but because its absence has much to do with our inability to effectively intervene in the horrors of the present. Revisiting the history of the Soviet Union is not about nostalgia nor is it only about posing questions about the decline of U.S. hegemony, but it's about articulating our political desires in the present by working through the conditions of our dissatisfaction.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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