Perhaps this is also a conceptual foundation for one definition of the Black Radical tradition found in the work of Cedric James Robinson. In the 2000 preface to his bestknown text, Black Marxism, he describes that tradition as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.”3 Enslavement, inasmuch as it provided the occasion for struggle over and within a particular kind of existence, was ultimately a challenge that required Africans to remain connected, to create the records – the collective intelligence – of those struggles and prior knowledges in order to continuously apply them to the realization of an otherwise to that existence and a more familiar mode of being à la Bakongo. Cedric’s conception of the Black Radical tradition as that accretion, then, is consistent with the worldviews of our enslaved African ancestors. And we might easily find direct familial and ancestral ties between Cedric, an African with roots in Alabama, and the peoples of the region who conceived of the tendwa nza Kongo, who later found themselves in the western hemisphere in large numbers, helping to produce the artistic and spiritual cultures that have been collected under the designation, “black Atlantic.”4
But, while interesting, an immediate genealogical relation is not required to reveal the greater insight: that these ways of seeing and imagining connections to each other across time and space were shared across Africana cultures. And so much so that what became the “deep thought” of the Bakongo might also be perceived as part of the tuzingu of countless other African intellectual traditions.5 That it appeared among Africans in a space called “the Americas” at a particular point in time is, however, also deeply significant and consequential in its own right. For it was in this context, this moment of the sun, that the foundation for that accretion of intelligence – of which the genius of significant Black thinkers was derivative, of which the thought of Cedric Robinson was derivative – was necessarily realized.6 This is to say, Cedric’s time occasioned a unique vantage point for comprehending reality and questions of existence that were both exceptional and constitutive of the very traditions he named and narrated.
The construct of time is useful – as any among a range of possibilities, such as space, geography, race, class, sociality, or systems – for thinking the life of Cedric Robinson. If the method of his work is, as Erica R. Edwards describes it, “to carefully excavate the mechanisms of power and to just as meticulously, and with a singular determination that I think can only be called faith, detail the radical epistemologies and ontologies that those mechanisms have been erected to restrain,” then we might use constructions of time as a route to understanding the ordering logic of those forces of restraint.7 This is indeed the aim of Damien M. Sojoyner, who writes in Futures of Black Radicalism that time, as a mechanism of restraint, structures and utilizes difference while imposing ideological adherence to the regimes that require that structuration by instituting the “disciplinary mechanisms aimed at ideological positions that counter western notions of law and order.” Resistance, then, if it is to be truly effective, requires us to initiate a “Black Radical time” – a time against the practices of difference making and othering.8 And within such alternatives to time as imposition, we would also develop alternative modes of relating to each other and to the past. Cedric himself perhaps sums up the importance of this framing most effectively in Black Marxism, where at a pivotal point in the text he states:
The point is that the construction of periods of time is only a sort of catchment for events. Their limited utility, though, is often abused when we turn from the ordering of things, that is chronological sequencings, to the order of things, that is the arrangement of their significances, meanings, and relations. Increments of time contoured to abstract measure rarely match the rhythms of human action.9
“Significances, meanings, and relations” are deeper than the order of time and are the points of departure that this text will take in thinking with the life of Cedric Robinson. As an intellectual biography, it speaks to and with the larger themes and considerations of his work, while thinking through the contexts that made the work, the moments that made the worker. It is chronological but also thematic. The first few chapters look at the foundation of Cedric’s relations. They are followed by chapters that consider the meanings of his work. And a final chapter considers the significance of it all. This book is imagined as a contribution to the larger constellation of that work, an offering to future workers, an entry into Cedric’s roll of life.
Western time was constructed to do more than serve as a “catchment” for events – it was an attempt to impose order on the rhythms of human action, rather than simply understand them. And, as such, intellectuals operating under these assumptions have maintained the useful fiction that Black Radicalism is at best derivative of western thought or western temporal systems. This is, as Cedric has maintained, an ordering conceit that made liberation from the terms of order unimaginable. But it had been imagined. As a tradition of seeking otherwise than what is assumed to be attainable or even desired – indeed as a tradition that calls into question normative assumptions around what liberation even entails – the Black Radical tradition emanates from thought that is “unthinkable.”10
What is “thinkable” is that which is reasonable. The meaning of time as “measurable movement” in western civilization is a product of the conceptual architecture of Enlightenment, premised as it was on knowledge as the preserve of Man.11 Though borrowing from such “classical” sources as Aristotle and St Augustine, much of what enters the western intellectual tradition owes its birth to the need to develop a form of measuring time that is ultimately about how patterns of human relationships with the natural environment can be understood. After all, if knowing through reason is a specifically human practice, then any attempt to naturalize humanity would have to also naturalize the environment in which such reasoning occurs. It is through a conception of human nature as naturally occurring that time as mathematical precision is assumed. But none of this is actually natural; it, too, is a conceit. Time’s meaning is not given in nature, it is given in the human understanding of nature. It is a social affair. The attempt to naturalize time is the practice of “temporalizing,” which requires also that human relationships to the past be imagined and narrated. And thus came the emergence of history as a conception for measuring and living with change.12
In order to understand what made human experiences significant, conceptions of change that had existed prior to the elevation of reason as the foundation of knowing had to be extinguished. Cedric’s work shows how incomplete this transition was, while also revealing that western thought attempted to achieve such a hegemonic disruption by imposing a logic of time, a historiographical tradition that imposed order on imagination, on the fantastic. The result was not only a theory of history but a theory of politics – a theory of reality that rendered the temporal scope of western civilization as the very meaning of what it is to be on and in time. From such distillations, notions of progress, momentum, and potential emanated to mark the physics and state of being. And it was this very arrangement of consciousness that could not incorporate “others”