Angela Davis at the University of Vienna: The Tyranny of the Universal

On October 5th, activist, author and scholar Angela Davis gave a talk at the University of Vienna on the occasion of its 650th anniversary. The initiative "FrauenUniJubel" (roughly translates as "WomenUniversityJubilance"), dedicated to introducing a feminist perspective into the celebrations, heightening the visibility of female scientists, and presenting contributions from women and gender studies for a sustainable societal development, invited Davis to talk about her life and work. The lecture entitled "Life between Politics and Academia" tackled a dazzling diversity of periods, issues and concepts, all held together by Davis's incomparable rhetoric and exceptional energy. 

Photo: Angela Davis,  FrauenUniJubel website

Davis is one of the very few people, especially among those cultural icons still alive and thriving, who deserve the epithet "inspiring". After decades spent in political struggle (and several years on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List), she has lost nothing of her fervor and passion. While others would have grown cynical, disillusioned or merely disinterested with progressing age, Davis is as radical in 2015 as she must have been in the late 1960s and early 70s. Her talk in Vienna is nestled safely somewhere between academic lecture and political propaganda speech, a position she is more than comfortable with: To accomplish their respective work, politics and academia require each other, as Davis reminds her audience by way of introduction.

Hence, we are well advised to trouble the established divergence between academic and political discourse. As Frederick Douglass' narrative already showed, liberation acutely requires education. Just like Douglass became a self-pronounced 'knowledge thief' to learn how to read, Davis remarks that many, if not most of the key figures in the struggle for political emancipation are teachers, by profession, vocation or both. One of those figures in Davis's life was her own mother, whose example not only taught her the power of negation, but also showed her the "natural kinship" of the civil rights movement with Marxism. 

A key principle in Davis's work, as she herself points out, was her notion of freedom as a collective rather than individual practice. In her own life, her opportunities for geographical movement were central to her conceptualizations of freedom, both personal and political. When she first traveled to Europe in the early 1960s, she landed, of all places, in France at the height of the Algerian War. Hence, as Davis reminisces in good humor, her quest for freedom only led her to another country engaged in exactly such a quest. The revolutionary solidarity she thus experienced - the French were quick to warn her that she might be "mistaken for an Algerian" - has inspired her political and academic productions ever since. 

While non-racist activism always came easy to Davis, as she herself confesses, it proved more difficult to incorporate gender in her work. There is a clear masculinist assumption in notions of freedom, which already emerges in Douglass's account: Black men must battle white men to assert themselves as men. Gender studies, then, challenge our ways to conceptualize freedom. A key concern of Davis's work was hence to re-articulate categories that have historically been set apart, especially those of "black" and "woman". Today, we attribute the buzz word 'intersectionality' to these issues, a then radically new field of women's studies, pioneered by Davis and her contemporaries. 

Live stream at the University of Vienna, broadcasting Davis's talk from the Grand Ceremonial Hall.

According to Davis, the contest over meaning and knowledge remains a central issue in women's studies. She reminds us, however, that the re-definitions of the field that was established in the early 1970s - from "gender studies" to "gender and sexuality studies" or "queer studies" - miss the fact that the theoretical and conceptual inadequacy of the term "woman", seemingly so arcane and analytically dissatisfying, is in fact an important critical achievement: The categorical woman is always impossible. What we should hence aim for is what Davis terms "accessible feminism", a feminism that invites all genders and categories, indeed goes beyond these very categories in seeking allies. A welcome 'side-effect' of such an inclusive notion of feminism is a thorough questioning, even indeed subversion, of categorical inscriptions.

After all, universals like "woman" are often racialized and classed: A "woman" is per default pictured as white and middle-class, in addition to able-bodied, heterosexual and feminine. What the joint discussion of race, gender and class (here Davis jokes that she keeps forgetting the exact title of her groundbreaking volume Women, Race, & Class due to mild dyslexia) hence reveals is how major systems of oppression are interlocking (or, in my words, why straight white males are the worst). "Black  woman is the mule of the world", Davis repeats several times, and calls for making black women "the measure of humanity". 

She then goes on to discuss the contemporary movement Black Lives Matter, in her words "both a movement and a hashtag", i.e. both a legitimate political cause and co-opted slogan for the liberal Twitteria. People frequently ask who the movement's leaders are, apparently looking for a strong iconic figure in the memory of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The answer given by Black Lives Matter is, of course, not one, but many. "We need not replicate the past!", Davis insists, and shows how Black Lives Matter gained important momentum by valuing collective leadership, leadership that is decidedly not male and appreciates the input of radical, queer, non-normative voices. 

At the same time, the counter-movement slash hashtag All Lives Matter once again proved how one must insist on inter-racist emphasis. Universal proclamations have always, as Davis is quite adamant in arguing, produced and maintained racism. This is what she terms "the tyranny of the universal", in the sense that the category "human" has always been the most exclusive of all: Humans are white, heterosexual, Protestant males. If all lives indeed mattered, no one would have to declare that black lives do, as the latter should clearly be subsumed under the umbrella term "all"?

Academic rock star Angela interacting with fans and admirers. 

Again, Davis calls to forge intellectual strategies to overturn hierarchies. This also includes, as the last item discussed in her talk, the current refugees crisis in Europe. For her, it is an obvious mark of Europe's colonial past. In Africa, it is the historical roots of the slave trade that have come to haunt the European Union today, while the consequences of the war on terror in the Middle East are palpable in the complete instabilization of the entire region, with Syria as its current hot spot. Davis summarizes these developments as instances of global racism, which is defined as "deeply embedded structural racism". Local issues, as she relates with regards to the Palestinian involvement in the Ferguson protests, have global ramifications, now more so than ever before. What we should hence forge is political kinship and solidarity, just like Davis did back in her days in France with the Algerian independence movement. To re-imagine security, both in the case of African and Middle Eastern refugees' passage to and plight in Europe and the racially motivated incarcerations and killings of the African-American population in the United States, a new abolitionist movement is required, one that demands, among others, the abolition of policing and militarization. And this is a fight, Davis emphatically concludes, that we have only just begun.