Critphilrace 4 2 0205 PDF

Assata Shakur, Mamphela Ramphele, and the Developing of Resistant Imaginations
Author(s): William Michael Paris

Source: Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 4, No. 2, SPECIAL ISSUE: SOUTH AFRICAN AND
U.S. CRITICAL PHILOSOPHIES OF RACE (2016), pp. 205-220
Published by: Penn State University Press
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assata shakur,
mamphela
ramphele, and
the developing
of resistant
imaginations
william michael paris

Pennsylvania State University critical philosophy of race,
vol. 4, no. 2, 2016
Copyright 2016 The Pennsylvania
State University, University Park, PA
Abstract
This article will continue Jose Medinas work on resistant imagina-
tions by developing the concepts of internal resistant imagination
and external resistant imagination through readings of Assata
Shakurs and Mamphela Rampheles autobiographies. By introduc-
ing the problem of location and its relation to race it will show that
ones geographical location affects their location in relation to hege-
monic imaginations. This in turn requires different strategies of
resistance. Using Medinas work this article will argue that Shakur
and Ramphele explore these two different avenues for undoing
harmful truths within racist and sexist hegemonic imaginaries.
Keywords: race, autobiography, social and political philosophy, Jose
Medina, epistemology
Introduction
The autobiographies of Assata Shakur and Mamphela Ramphele allow

the reader a glimpse into the experience of racial violence by state power.
206 critical philosophy of race
Shakur, a member of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, was a well-known

target of the FBI and the U.S. criminal justice system. She was even-
tually convicted of being an accomplice to the murder of a New Jersey
state trooper in a case where many believe that the evidence was, at
best, circumstantial. Shakur escaped prison after her conviction and
sought asylum in Cuba. Ramphele was a prominent figure in the Black
Consciousness movement of the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa along-
side figures such as Steve Biko. Throughout her time in this movement
she was subject to harassment and forced relocation by the apartheid
government which also sought to sever her ties with any anti-apartheid
politics.
It is my intention for this article to engage the autobiographical texts
of these two Black women by applying Jos Medinas concept of resistant
imaginations from his text The Epistemology of Resistance in order to show
how their voices engage in strategies of resistance against racist practices
and imaginaries. I will argue that Shakur and Ramphele can be seen as
engaging these injustices in the unique medium of autobiography which
combines testimony and hermeneutics in conjunction with their racial
experiences. I will apply these concepts to these two autobiographies in
order to show how Medinas analyses make it possible for us to under-
stand how the works of Shakur and Ramphele can challenge racial con-
ceptions within the social imaginary through their texts construction and
organization.
For Jos Medina resistant imaginations allow for the possibility of chang-
ing and undoing our social understanding of others. In order for a resistant
imagination to have the force of an intervention it will have to be attentive
to its relative location. My understanding of location is not exclusively geo-
graphical, but refers to how one is positioned within an hegemonic imagi-
nary. Thus location allows us to understand what possible strategies may
be deployed for particular embodied subjects. Before making sense of this
claim about location it is necessary to make clear how imagination and
the imaginary function for Medina. To begin Medina states, Imagination
is not a luxury or a privilege, but a necessity (2013, 268). The force of this
claim is lost if the imagination is taken as nothing more than an abstract
and frivolous activity that takes place purely in ones mind. But this is not
how Medina understands the imagination. Through the work of Moira
Gatens Medina argues that the imagination is embodied and thus enables
(or hinders) action and agency. For one to claim ones body as a subject,
207 william paris
as subjectivity, it must be possible to take, at least, the most minimal of

distances from ones own pure1 immanent corporeality.
So we have to understand how Assata Shakur and Mamphela
Ramphele write the experience of their bodies in such a way that they can
develop the most minimal of distances in order to develop subjectivity
in their prose. It is important to understand how Shakur and Ramphele
develop an embodied imagination. Medinas understanding of the embod-
ied imagination is as follows: The embodied imagination supplies us with
the required capacity to recognizes our experiences and actions as our own
in the present, past, and future. . . . The imagination supplies us with the
minimal cohesion required for identity and agency (2013, 268; emphasis
added). What we find in Medinas preceding statement is the intimation
that imagination makes possible identity and agency, but it is not coextensive
with them. Indeed, when he asks, How does a human body become an
ethical and political subject? (ibid.) we may argue that Medina does not
assume that we are always already subjects in the same way that I may say
that I have an identity. The imaginary, as social mediated, is what makes
possible an identity to share and represent itself to myself and other sub-
jects. So we can say that the autobiographical subject must be engaged as
a sort of imaginary construction in order for the identity of the author to
maintain cohesion before other subjects. So we can see what the stakes of
a racist and sexist hegemonic imaginary are: it affects what identities are
able to cohere as subjects (if we understand the subject as not purely pri-
vate, but also social) and how they are made intelligible. This requires us to
understand the location of the author in order to see how she is deploying
the imaginary construction of her subjectivity in the text. This will allow us
to read what histories (roots) she is drawing upon for the sake of what are
not yet present futures.
For instance Assata Shakur is geographically located outside the United
States and because of this her identity within the hegemonic imaginary
has been frozen into the caricature of a wanted criminal; she is thoroughly
folded into the hegemonic imaginary. Conversely, Mamphela Ramphele is
geographically located inside South Africa and continues to be engaged
with the political processes of her home country; she is able to be a party to
a South African history that is envisioning what it means to move beyond
the apartheid-era imaginary. The relation between these two understand-
ings of location change the strategies employed by these two women. I
will call Shakurs text an engagement of internal resistant imagination and
Rampheles as external resistant imagination and this will allow us to see how
imaginations may be deployed to construct new and resistant subjectivities.
Resistant Imaginations (External and Internal)
Throughout The Epistemology of Resistance, Medina argues for the virtues

of a polyphonic understanding (Medina 2013, 90). By this he means that
our discourses and understandings (our production of social meaning) are
better served when different voices from different spaces and perspectives
contribute to the conversation not in the name of unity, but instead to create
epistemic friction.2 Medinas basic point is that epistemic friction allows for
the mutual contestation of differently normatively structured knowledges
(ibid., 281) and in so doing creates space for speakers from different racial,
gender, geographic, etc. standpoints to engage and critique each other with-
out the goal of assimilation or unity.
With this in mind Medina introduces the concept of resistant
imaginations. He grounds this concept through his understanding of a
Foucaultian pluralistic framework in which epistemic frictions are no
more tools for learning than they are tools for unlearning (for undoing
power/knowledgese.g., for undoing ways of remembering and for-
getting, when it comes to knowledge of the past) (ibid., 283; empha-
sis mine). Medina takes the social imaginary and argues that we should
aim for a structure that does not seek to amass evermore knowledge
and content, but instead is capable of interrogating itself, disassembling
itself, creating different ways of seeing. He holds the premise that truths
are made and not given in the social imaginary, so we would do well to
continually remind ourselves of this (ibid., 284). The concept of resistant
imaginations is not meant to simply serve as a hammer that destroys
all of our practices which would leave nothing but pieces; there must
be some process of reconstruction to make our (epistemic) practices
livable (ibid., 297). Medina defines resistant imagination as an imagi-
nation that is ready to confront relational possibilities that have been
lost, ignored, or that remain to be discovered or invented (ibid., 299
emphasis mine).
At this point, I want to provide an amendment to Medinas argument
that he does not explicitly lay out. To better understand the autobiographies
of Shakur and Ramphele, I will argue that we must differentiate between an
209 william paris
internal resistant imagination and an external resistant imagination. Medinas

description of polyphony does not make clear that this imagination can
take place in different locations. I understand an internal resistant imagina-
tion as one that takes place within, and makes use of, the unjust resources
of the overarching social imagination (such as its language or images).
It seeks to challenge and unravel these structures in order to reveal their
unjust and artificial value. In other words Shakurs text will reveal the
mechanisms for generating (racist) meaning within the United States. To
take up Audre Lordes famous phrase it can be said that Shakur intends to
expose the tools the master uses within his house.
An external resistant imagination, as I will define it, does not see a use
for the current terms of the social imaginary. It reaches outside the cur-
rent social imaginary in order to develop its own terms of understanding.
This form of resistant imagination does not ignore the social imaginary
that it reaches beyond, but creates a field of contestation between the two
that upends the conventional understanding of the world. Ramphele shows
that another history and imagination has been operating concurrently with
the racist white South African imagination and aims to follow that history
into a different future.
The fundamental difference between the autobiographies of Assata
Shakur and Mamphela Ramphele is this: the comparative location from
which they write. Shakurs text is literally a text of exile, written from
Cuba while being about the United States. While Ramphele tells her
story about South Africa from within its borders. I believe this difference
will explain the different avenues they explore in order to produce epis-
temic frictions (Medina 2013, 284). Medina claims that truth requires
performativity; it must be enacted (ibid., 285). So what we will be looking
for here is how the autobiographies of Shakur and Ramphele enact the
unraveling of some taken for granted truths about race. Shakurs strategy
inheres in her aesthetic representation of language while Rampheles
taps into the untranslatable archive of her forebears. Both authors are
engaged in the resistant strategy of creating imaginary subjectivities that
are tapping into pasts and futures that do not cohere within the hege-
monic imaginary. Throughout this comparison we must not lose sight of
Medinas idea that the resistant imaginary ought to envision how it can
undo truths rather than simply create new ones to replace the old (ibid.,
283); both authors are searching for new models of cohesion for their
identities.
Assata Shakur, Broken Language, and Internal Resistant Imagination
Angela Davis, in her foreword for Assata Shakurs autobiography, notes

that Shakur once sent a letter to Pope John Paul II after the state of New
Jersey asked that he use his influence to convince Cuba to return Shakur to
the states. In her letter Shakur writes: Why, I wonder, do I warrant such
attention? What do I represent that is such a threat? (Shakur 2001, ix).
These two questions that track Shakur reveal that she understands how
the violence and surveillance that had been practiced upon her body was
not directed at an individual, but at a representation. Angela Davis follows
this statement by writing, We would all do well to seriously ponder her
questions. Why, indeed, was she constructed by the government and mass
media as a consummate enemy. . . . What has she been made to represent?
What ideological work has this representation performed? (ibid.). From
the very beginning of Shakurs autobiography it is made clear that there are
incredible powers of production that are at play upon the very rendering
and understanding of her life.
Shakurs autobiography has two beginnings as if to represent the ten-
sion she finds in trying to tell her own story. The resistant imagination that
Shakur is attempting to engage involves dramatizing her own fractured
subjectivity that has stolen a cohesive past, present, and future from her.
The first beginning is a poem she has titled Affirmation that contains the
final lines of I believe in living. / I believe in birth. / . . . And I believe that
a lost ship, / steered by tired, seasick sailors, / can still be guided home/ to
port (ibid., 1). The second beginning appears at the very start of the first
chapter in which she details the traumatic event that marked her in the
social imaginary as the frightening specter of the black, female criminal:
the night of her arrest for the shooting of a New Jersey state trooper. The
description begins in a haze of confusion and death: There were lights and
sirens. Zayd was dead. My mind knew that Zayd was dead (ibid., 2). Zayd
was a friend and passenger in the car with Shakur when the confrontation
with the state trooper, whose death led to her going to prison for murder,
occurred. What is powerful here is the tension Shakur calls forward in her
testimony. On the one hand we have a poem that takes place completely
in her imagination and declares her affirmation for life, birth, and return.
On the other hand, she begins the story she wishes to tell about herself
not with life, birth, or return, but with death and despair. It is as if Shakur,
though she wishes otherwise, cannot tell her story as she desires because
211 william paris
she knows the reader who will encounter her story are not open to receiving
her affirmation.
What can we make of Shakurs imaginary and poetic affirmation and
her choice to begin the story of her life not with her birth, childhood, or any
memory from the beginning of her life? One point seems clear: she means
to show that in order to testify to her own life she must start at another
beginning, a beginning steeped in trauma and violence, a beginning not
quite of her choosing, but of a society that would do her harm.
Throughout the first chapter Shakur describes her painful experiences
in the hospital as she recovers from her injuries and the violent tactics used
by the police in order to coerce her to tell them what they wanted to know,
but more importantly, to punish her for who she is. Her participation in
the Black Panther movement left her vulnerable to many violent practices
of the state. In one striking passage she remembers a police officer tortur-
ing her and all the while calling her all kind of nigger bitches (ibid., 8).
All of this is tightly bound to Shakurs attempt at testimony throughout
her autobiography. She begins with all of this not because it is the actual
start of her life, but because she knows that for many of her readers who
are immersed in the prevailing social imaginary it is the representative start
of her story.
Shakur is attempting to testify, amend the record, clear things up, but
she cannot testifyspeakin the manner that she would prefer because of
the way her identity as been constructed and distorted by the overarching
discourse. She finds herself testifying in and against the court of the social
imaginary in the United States. So her experience and the way she must
render it for the public finds itself molded by structures and agents that
have deflated her credibility. In Shakurs work there is a struggle between
opposing forces: life/death and generality/particularity. The trauma experi-
enced by Shakur was not only visited on her per se, but instead it was visited
upon the subject that she was constructed as within the hegemonic imagi-
nary. This allowed agents, in a position of power (and whiteness), to express
the rage, paranoia, and violence they felt towards the embodied female
black subject onto Shakurs individual body. Far from creating a sense of
communal space for Shakur, her experiences, as rendered, have the theme
and texture of isolation and vulnerability (ibid., 7). This comes through in
passages where she describes being shackled to a bed while pregnant with
her daughter (ibid., 141) or being kept in solitary confinement for more
than a year at a mens jail (ibid., 244). Shakurs autobiography attempts to
negotiate the isolation and vulnerability created by being an individual

social type that obscures (or distorts) her individual voice.
Shakur critiques and exposes this injustice by structuring her text so
as to make clear how she is not afforded the privilege of coherence and
humanity. Shakurs second chapter slides back into her childhood, but not
before prefacing this movement with: The FBI cannot find any evidence
that i was born. On my FBI Wanted poster, they list my birth date as July 16,
1947, and, in parentheses, not substantiated by birth records.. . . Anyway,
i was born (ibid., 18). It is important to note that the lack of capitalization
around Shakurs i is intentional. She is not allowed full capitalization;
she is seen as less-than. Indeed, she may not even be a full human subject
since it would seem that she does not have a past that precedes her crimi-
nal record.
The significance and brilliance of Shakurs construction here is that
she does not dispel the injustice done to her by ignoring it, but instead
she plays into it and then flips it in order to make a critical point: being
black in the United States has meant that she has had to live two lives, or
she has been denied the privilege of possessing a life that can be told in
unity. In the first chapter she gives the reader what they expect, how she
has been demonized, and then in conjunction with the second chapter she
takes the hermeneutical resources available to her to show that there has
been a concerted structural effort to erase her humanity and define her
entire life within the immediacy black criminality. Before she goes on to tell
the reader about her family and where she was born, she incorporates into
her life story how overarching racist structure of her society made murky
when and whether she was born (not substantiated by birth record) and
in so doing plays her into an interpretive caricature that makes her appear
less than humanshe was not born like the rest of us. Implicitly the hege-
monic imaginary posits that the only record of note is her criminal record.
Then she dismisses this with a nonchalant Anyway, I was born as if to
express that of course she was born, of course she is human. So the question
becomes Why is it so hard for you to believe this?
While Shakur may physically write from outside the United States this
does not mean that she produces an external resistant imaginary, for in
her engagement with the United States and its racist structures she ren-
ders her text in such a way that it re-inserts herself in the social imaginary
that has held the representation of her blackness and criminality in stasis.
What I mean by this is that once Shakur fled prison for Cuba she became
213 william paris
ossified in the social imaginaryespecially in the imaginary of the U.S.

justice system. When Shakur tells her story she does not seem to posit
that she escapes her representation by the United States. She begins the
story of her life with the event that has come to define her (the night she
was arrested for murder) before she attempts to return to her roots. She
chooses to take the resources the United States provided for her and tell
her story in a manner that produces a resistant imaginary from within that
undoes the epistemological and racial structures of the United States that
are often implicitly accepted.
How does she accomplish this? By claiming authorial power over how
she is able to represent the very language of her text whenever she is relay-
ing her experience with the U.S. court systemthe system that inflicted the
most lasting violence upon her life. Throughout her autobiography, when
she is talking about the U.S. court system of the courtroom she deploys
resistance spelling such as kourt, kourtroom, or amerika3 in order to
challenge the hegemonic imagination of these terms as equal and just and
develop a resistant imagination of these terms as having their roots in the
practices of the KKK. For example she writes later in her work, The hardest
thing in the world for me was to keep my mouth shut in the kourtroom, to
sit quietly and suffer silently (Shakur 2001, 16566). This spelling brings
to light the fundamental complicity between the language of justice in the
United States and its racist history. In short the language is broken.
When she recounts her experiences she creates friction by disallow-
ing us from accepting the concepts of court, courtroom, and America
as pure. When these concepts are read they are forced to become a stum-
bling block and we are able to recognize that something is off. Combine
this with her colorful descriptions of what happens within these descrip-
tions and Shakur creates an internal resistant imagination that takes the
structures she is caught within and exposes their violence and, perhaps
more importantly, their artificiality. The structures of the United States
have, through her race, created an image of her that is not only untrue, but
unreal. An image, though unreal, seems real enough to be instantiated into
the social imaginary.
Shakur seems to argue that the violence and artificiality of the kourt
and amerika has the potential to disrupt the rendering and understand-
ing of a human lifeits past and present. From the consequences of the
kourt Shakur underwent an erasure of her humanity, as a person who was
born, who led a life from past and into the present. The kourt disrupted
the telling of her life and in order to resist she had to take those structures
and reveal them for what they truly were to her. She seemingly plays by the
rules of how she has been represented by the kourt and amerika only
to turn them inside-out, undo them, while refusing to give us a new truth,
a new unity. Medinas conception of a resistant imagination that undoes
truths helps us here. Shakur does not instantiate new terms, but she calls
the old ones into question. If, as Medina believes (along with William James
and Michel Foucault), truths are made through practices, experiences, and
valuations (Medina 2013, 284) then we can see Shakur as engaging in a
practice that reveals the fashioned, rather than given, nature of truths.
These strategic moves by Shakur encapsulates what I identify as the
production of an internal resistant imaginary. She strategically takes up her
location of isolation and vulnerability within the prevailing social imagi-
nary and turns it back against itself. When Shakur alternates, from chap-
ter to chapter, between the chronology that leapt from the moment of her
shooting and arrest and the chronology that began with her childhood she
exposes the very real effects of an artificially rendered life. The two sets
of chapters never meet and Shakur makes no attempt at unifying the two
lives. She provides no clear resolution, but instead allows her autobiogra-
phy to be suspended between the two tensions she set out in the beginning
of her work: affirmation/denial or life/death. In a sense Shakur develops a
coherent subjectivity through a fundamental incoherence which resists the
hegemonic imaginary.
Mamphela Ramphele, the Praise Song, and the External Resistant Imaginary
Mamphela Rampheles autobiography arises out of a historical context in

South Africa in which there once was a concerted effort to not only ban, but
erase, black writing from the educational and cultural sphere (Mzamane
1991, 179). The intended consequence, of this suppression was to deprive
the black population of knowledge and understanding of themselves and
their history. In short to curtail how they may imagine themselves differ-
ently. Further compounding this injustice is the contemporary reality that
much of the black population in South Africa continues to suffer from
serious inequalities in economic and educational resources, thus illiteracy
remains a constant impediment to certain resources for constructing resis-
tant imaginations. All of this is to say that the injustices we find within the
215 william paris
text of Shakurs autobiography are also found in the historical context of

Rampheles society.
Understanding all of this we can more clearly understand what
Rampheles aims are when she writes her autobiography. She intends to
provide an epistemological resource that expresses the stories and praises
of those who came before her for the benefit of those who will come after-
wards. In an interview she laments the lack of focus and space for the
written word in the black community (especially for black women) which
has produced a lack of social visibility (Ramphele et al. 1998, 9495). As
a prominent member of the Black Consciousness movement in South
Africa, Ramphele realizes that a demoralized people with no confidence
or pride in their forebears capabilities or achievements could never carry
out a successful revolution (Mzamane 1991, 185). With her deep psychic
understanding of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a
Black person (Ramphele et al. 1998, 95) Ramphele set out to combine
her testimonial gifts with her hermeneutical resources in order to show
that one informs the other, and that neither are possible without the other.
Ramphele, like Shakur, begins her work in two places, but unlike
Shakur, these beginnings are not at odds with each other. The first begin-
ning, right before the start of the chapter called My Roots, includes
pictures of her ancestors and contemporaries and then concludes with a
pictorial representation of her family tree (Ramphele 1996). From here she
briefly describes the conditions of her birth, but rather than linger on the
story of how she arrived in the world she quickly moves to tell us about
her grandmother (with whom she shares her first name) and her extraor-
dinary memory [which] was an asset to the largely illiterate people among
whom she lived, for in those days births and deaths were not registered by
any authority. She was a mobile archive for the region (ibid., 2). The begin-
ning of Rampheles text presents her voice, her identity, her testimony, as
directly descending from a woman who had once used her own voice to
transmit the histories and identities of those that had come before. Her
identity as black, as South African, as a woman, etc. is not singularly rooted
in her particular time and space; it stretches backward and forward.
Using a similar strategy as Shakur, Ramphele uses her autobiography
in order to perform and reveal. She performs and reveals the solidarity that
can be found within the black identity of South Africa. Within the pages of
her autobiography, Ramphele recreates the praise song that her grand-
mother would sing to her family that would detail their communal and
individual stories. The praise song is a story recounting Rampheles lineage

and interconnectivity (Ramphele 1996, 911). Ramphele, immediately fol-
lowing the praise song, notes that African oral tradition in this form is able
to distil the essence of human experience and offer it in memorable form
to help shape future relations and action (ibid., 11). The praise song allows
Ramphele to illustrate an interconnectivity that runs through her identity,
an interconnectivity that is not general or abstract in nature, but is a spe-
cifically African interconnectivity. Ramphele is engaging a social imaginary
that brings cohesion to her African subjectivity and thus makes a place for
her particular identity to be recognized.
So here we find how testimony and hermeneutics converge within
Rampheles autobiography. She argues from the very start that how and
what she tells of her story can only be understood against the background of
her interconnectivity. In this way her autobiography initiates a polyphonic
context (ibid., 14). Rampeles autobiography seems to argue not for fitting
her social experience as black woman into the overarching hegemony, but
understanding her experience in a distinctively interconnected manner. By
situating her autobiography in such a way that it becomes a chorus of many
social experiences she contests the false choice between being completely
silenced or only being comprehensible, if subsumed, under the existing
structures of power.
On this note, it is worthwhile to mention, that the praise song of her
grandmother is not transcribed into English, but remains on the page in
the original language. She tells us that the praise song is near impossible to
translate (Ramphele 1996, 11). Ramphele informs us that she will provide
us with the substance of what her grandmother would sing to them, but in
doing so she seems to testify within her text that at least some of her social
experience will, necessarily, be left out. Far from arguing that her social
experience is completely inaccessible, she instead shows the reader that
there are social experiences that are no less profound then the ones made
immediately comprehensible within hegemonic imaginations.
When Ramphele notes that the praise song is impossible to completely
translate we may find a connection to Gabeba Baderoons idea of a privacy
that unsettles established narratives (Baderoon 2011, 75) because while
the praise song is made public in the text of Rampheles autobiography
there is a fundamental aspect of it that escapes the text. This strategy con-
sists in establishing that what has constituted her story is written out into
a fundamentally different space where South African blackness can be
217 william paris
rendered and understood differently. This is also a form of undoing truth

though it operates differently than Shakurs. It establishes a remainder of
her identity as a South African black woman that does not re-tell the world
as it is understood in the oppressive social imaginary.
Unlike Shakur, Ramphele remains rooted to the land about which
she writes. Rampheles continuing engagement with the social imagi-
nary of South Africa allows her a type of freedom that is not available to
Shakur in her autobiography. Ramphele is engaged in the continual pro-
cess of unfolding within the society that harmed her. Ramphele writes in
the preface to her autobiography, Story-telling is a historical imperative.
We cannot successfully navigate uncharted waters without some script
to guide us. This is particularly so for women, especially black women.
Women have to find a script, a narrative to live by, because all other
scripts are likely to depict them in roles that fit conventional stereotypes
(Ramphele 1996, xi). Ramphele, with her constant engagement with a
social imaginary is able to provide just this narrative that undoes the
kind of conventional stereotypes that have entrapped Shakur in her
absence from the U.S. Ramphele, towards the end of her preface, notes
that transcendence is the major theme of her narrative, and this is what
is required of herself and her society (ibid., xii). There is an opening, and
moving beyond, that Ramphele finds available to her that enjoins her to
explore her identity, her blackness, from outside the racist social imagi-
nary of South Africa.
Rampheles external resistant imaginary does not seek to re-appropriate
the terms and structures of what is left over from the racism of apartheid-
era South Africa, as if the White hegemonic imaginary only needed to be
reformed in order for blacks to find a home. Instead she imagines, along
the lines envisioned by Zo Wicomb in her essay concerning the colored in
South Africa, a space where people can resist received racial descriptions,
where they can make their own meanings . . . new discursive spaces in
which modalities of blackness can wipe out shame (Wicomb 1998, 106).
Ramphele seeks to inscribe these modalities of blackness into a transcen-
dence via a black South African interconnectivity it is a connection to his-
tories and narratives that may not have been written or recorded, but exist
in their very voices. If we understand that the self in the autobiography
is always, in some fundamental way, imagined (Driver 1991, 338) then we
can infer from Rampheles recurrent insistence on the interconnectivity of
stories and narratives that she constructs her transcending self by virtue
of myriad other voices. This polyphony creates the possibility of others

moving into this resistant imaginary space with her.
The external resistant imaginary at play in Rampheles autobiogra-
phy neither disowns the current society of South Africa nor claims to
know what the remade world will look like, but in the friction created
between the two imaginaries (the racist hegemonic South African imagi-
nary and the imaginary constructed by Ramphele) it seeks to find out
what will occur in such transcendence. Polyphony is essential here. As
more voices intervene, and speak from the outside, it is impossible to
tell how race may be recast and re-represented. Graham Pechey believes
this is necessary for post-apartheid South Africa: The literature which
South Africas post-apartheid condition both needs and can deliver is the
many-voiced discourse of an ekstasis which frees us from the future of
hopes and fears and admits us to a sphere of unexpectedness (Pechey
1998, 73). In this way we may understand Rampheles autobiography as
a polyphonic strategy of resistance that is continually being drawn out-
side hegemonic structures.
Concluding Remarks
Through my analysis of the autobiographies of Assata Shakur and

Mamphela Ramphele I have argued for how the resources of Medinas work
allows us to understand the underlying structures and strategies these two
women of color have employed in order for their voices to be heard and the
world re-understood. The autobiography is always a work of memory and
thus the past, but that does not mean that they lose their power to provide
us tools for resistance in the present. Medina observes that, The past is
constantly being recreated in our everyday practices, reimagined through
a plurality of heterogeneous interpretative activities, formal and informal,
conscious and unconscious (Medina 2013, 300). So when we analyze texts
such as these we may recover and uncover the structures that oppressed the
authors and become alive to possible changes of the relational networks
in which our identities are enmeshed (ibid.). The question of location has
been central throughout as a way of understanding what interventions in
the present may be most salient. While the strategy of an internal or exter-
nal resistant imaginary does not follow from the writers physical location
this does not mean they are unrelated. Ones physical location may have
219 william paris
an inverse relation to ones location within a hegemonic imaginary and

thus affect what strategies ought to be employed. But by reading along with
these two women, we may find new resources for critiquing the experi-
ences of race and location in order to undo representations and imagine
what may be possible.
william michael paris is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and

womens, gender, and sexuality studies at the Pennsylvania State University
with a focus on twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical philoso-
phy of race, and feminist philosophy. His dissertation will focus on the
relationship between race and gender and sovereignty in the United States.
He is attempting to construct an account of race and gender that is bound
to the theological and political heritage of the concept of sovereignty, and
thus will allow for a different understanding of the state and its relationship
to systemic racism and sexism.
notes
1. I put this word in quotations because it does not seem possible for any living body
to be confined to the pure immanence of itself without at the same time being a
corpsea body with no possibility of agency or action.
2. Medina draws this concept of friction from one of the famous passages from
Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigation: We want to walk: so we need
friction. Back to the rough ground! (Wittgenstein 1958, 107).
3. This was a common resistance spelling in the Black Panther organization in order
to challenge the racist and capitalistic history of America as noted in a congres-
sional report that investigated the newsletters of the Black Panthers: Committee on
Internal Security (House of Representative), Black Panther Party, Its Origin and
Development (Congressional Document, 1970), 43.
works cited
Baderoon, Gabeba. 2011. Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure That
Has Been Looked at Too Much? In Representation and Black Womanhood: The
Legacy of Sarah Baartman, edited by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan. 6583.
Committee on Internal Security (House of Representative). 1970. Black Panther Party,
Its Origin and Development. Congressional Document.
Driver, Dorothy. 1991. Imagined Selves, (Un)Imagined Marginalities. Review of A Far
Cry: The Making of a South African, by Mary Benson; Strikes Have Followed Me
All My Life: A South African Autobiography, by Emma Mashinini; and No Childs
Play: In Prison under Apartheid, by Caeserina Kona Makhoere. Journal of South

African Studies 17, no. 2: 33754.
Medina, Jose. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic
Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo. 1991. The Impact of Black Consciousness on Culture.
In Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, edited
by N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana, and Lindy
Wilson. New Jersey: Zed Books, 17994.
Pechey, Graham. 1998. The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary.
In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 19701995,
edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. New York: Cambridge University
Press. 5774.
Ramphele, Mamphela. 1996. Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman
Leader. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.
. 1991. The Dynamics of Gender Within Black Consciousness Organisations:
A Personal View. In Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black
Consciousness, edited by N. Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi
Mpumlwana, and Lindy Wilson. New Jersey: Zed Books. 21428.
Ramphele, Mamphela, Kimberly Yates, and Pumla Gqola. 1998. This Little Bit of
Madness: Mamphela Ramphele on Being Black and Transgressive. Agenda
37: 9095.
Shakur, Assata. 2001. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.
Wicomb, Zo. 1998. Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa. In
Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 19701995, edited
by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. New York: Cambridge University Press.
91107.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Assata Shakur, Mamphela Ramphele, and the Developing of Resistant Imaginations

Author(s): William Michael Paris

william michael paris

The autobiographies of Assata Shakur and Mamphela Ramphele allow

Shakur, a member of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, was a well-known

as subjectivity, it must be possible to take, at least, the most minimal of

Resistant Imaginations (External and Internal)

Throughout The Epistemology of Resistance, Medina argues for the virtues

internal resistant imagination and an external resistant imagination. Medinas

Assata Shakur, Broken Language, and Internal Resistant Imagination

Angela Davis, in her foreword for Assata Shakurs autobiography, notes

negotiate the isolation and vulnerability created by being an individual

ossified in the social imaginaryespecially in the imaginary of the U.S.

Mamphela Rampheles autobiography arises out of a historical context in

text of Shakurs autobiography are also found in the historical context of

individual stories. The praise song is a story recounting Rampheles lineage

rendered and understood differently. This is also a form of undoing truth

of myriad other voices. This polyphony creates the possibility of others

Through my analysis of the autobiographies of Assata Shakur and

an inverse relation to ones location within a hegemonic imaginary and

william michael paris is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and

Play: In Prison under Apartheid, by Caeserina Kona Makhoere. Journal of South

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