Pearl Diving without Guarantees: Heresy and Salvage Work in the Black Atlantic

The only Marx worth celebrating then is the Marx who is interested in thinking and in struggling on an open terrain, the Marx who offers a marxism without guarantees, a marxism without answers.-Stuart Hall Unlike Marxism [where] victory is inevitable eventually, in Black radicalism it is not.Only when that radicalism is costumed : : : is there a certainty to it.Otherwise it is about a kind of resistance that does not promise triumph or victory at the end, only liberation.No nice package at the end, only that you would be free : : : .Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation! -Cedric Robinson Black Transatlantic Crossings In 1983, Stuart Hall crossed the Atlantic to attend the summer school and conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Just two years earlier, Cedric Robinson had traveled in the opposite direction, traversing the Atlantic to spend a year in the small English village of Radwinter.Hall and Robinson had both come of age in the era of decolonization and global black freedom struggle.Both sought to rethink the relationship between race and class by challenging reductionist forms of Marxism, and both drew inspiration from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. 1 Yet, while today they are widely regarded as the two titans of the concept of racial capitalism, they often traveled in opposite IDA DANEWID is associate professor in gender and global political economy at the University of Sussex.She is the author of