In What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (University of Minnesota Press), Grant Farred extends the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual to include cultural icons Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley and cultural studies giants Stuart Hall and CLR James. In the conversation that follows, Farred, associate professor of literature at Duke University, explores the black vernacular intellectual tradition from Bob Marley to Kanye West. Sean Jacobs: At first the combination of figures profiled here seems odd: Stuart Hall and CLR James — more traditional intellectuals with mass ambitions, maybe — along with popular cultural figures Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley. What made you begin to think about all of these figures as one category of intellectual?

Grant Farred: It is precisely the apparent disjuncture, the pairing of James and Hall, the conventionally recognized intellectuals, with Ali and Marley, icons both, that interested me in this project: the thinking together of figures who, while each in their own way prominent – James and Hall as renowned theorists of Marxism and Ali and Marley for their interventions in the public sphere around race and class – and invested in the popular, have not been conceived in the same paradigm as intellectuals. What’s My Name? is as much as anything, a conversation with and an extension of Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the intellectual. As Gramsci reminds us, “All men are intellectuals,” it is simply that the tasks they perform is not recognized for its cognitive capacities. What’s My Name? is both an attempt to take Gramsci seriously — what happens if we think of all human beings as intellectuals? — and to combine the Italian’s politics with my interrogation of the popular. The book moreover, represents my critique of how intellectuals are understood, which figures are named “intellectual,” what kind of cerebral work is considered intellectual. I needed to produce a term that could accommodate these four figures, as well as take cognizance of the differences amongst them. They are all, in their different ways, committed to at least a couple of things: a rootedness in the popular, a respect for the political capacities and potentialities of the subaltern, and a deep desire to re-imagine the world in which they found themselves. The book is in this way, a critique of both postcolonial theory and Cultural Studies: the former for its too infrequent recognition of and engagement with the popular, the latter for not taking seriously enough the intellectuality of the producers of popular culture. Mainly, however, What’s My Name? is also about demonstrating how crucial the popular is to “conventional” intellectuals. For James and Hall the turn to the popular is what gives their work its salience, its sharpest critical edge, and — for want of a better term — its “political relevance.” “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it,” James writes in Beyond A Boundary. “When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.” It is the vernacular that distinguishes Hall’s and James’ work and the recognition of the profoundly political nature of the popular that marks James and Hall as intellectuals who speak in the moment of political crisis, whose work enable us to think more precisely and strategically about our political modality.

SJ: The title comes from Muhammad Ali’s taunt to Ernie Terrell in the ring: “What’s my name?” At the same time, you offer a basically negative assessment of Ali’s politics. For you, of the two it seems to be Marley who is the quintessential vernacular intellectual. Why is that?

GF: I don’t think that my reading of Ali is essentially negative. But, it certainly is complicated. I think that Ali can be understood as the emblematic figure: it is his capacity to voice the vernacular, his capacity to locate the political (the anti-colonial, the anti-imperial, the anti-hegemonic, his critique of race and racism, his understanding of the US’s role in the Cold War world) in distinctly African-American witticisms that makes Ali such a distinct figure of the vernacular. Where else would one encounter such a declaration of black pride, of a confidence in the black body, in its visage (“I’m so pretty”) than in Ali? To celebrate the texture of black hair? In so many ways the project turned on Ali, on how he reconciled — with such poetic fluidity and, even, in moments, grace — the political and the popular. There is, however, also in Ali a distinctly conservative edge; and, moreover, a troubling tendency to deploy racist stereotypes against his keenest opponents. Ali routinely called Joe Frazier “ugly” and, worse, a “field nigger.” This designation, when applied to the youngest, of nine children and the son of a South Carolina sharecropper, reveals the problematic side of the vernacular. When it does not understand what we might term the issue of “translation,” the “boundaries,” if you will, of racially-inflected insult. Ali played to the crowd, and most often he played the American and international public like a maestro. But, in relation to Frazier if not to George Foreman (whom he called an “Uncle Tom” for his waving of the American flag after the Tommy Smith/John Carlos black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics), I would argue that Ali “transgressed,” that he could not produce another language of critique, another set of witticisms that did not rely on the racist tropes of American speech.

Furthermore, Ali was an infinitely more steadfast and informed critic of US foreign policy — and, domestic politics — than he was a Third World figure of or for the vernacular. His dalliances with leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko of the erstwhile Zaire and Mohammed Suharto of Indonesia point to a certain suspension of his critical faculties when abroad.

It is for this reason that Marley strikes me as [a] more astute, more historically aware vernacular intellectual. In part, no doubt, due to Marley’s Rastafarianism that required an entirely different familiarity with African history, politics and culture. Marley thought about places such as Ethiopia, obviously, and Zimbabwe, Gabon, and the exploitation of the black African masses by the elite enabled the Jamaican reggae star to develop a set of critiques that Ali never approximates. Marley, unlike Ali, was able to see the “Trenchtowns” in Gabon, he was prescient in his ability to anticipate what Robert Mugabe would become. Unlike Ali, Marley was unrelenting, but never unpoetic, or unsubtle, in his critiques of black elites, from Kingston to Harare. Only Haile Selassie was spared, and even then with a sense of unease, failure, regret, and no small amount of foreboding.

But, to add a rider, even if Ali provided the telling inquiry, it was with James, my love of cricket, and my even deeper love of Beyond A Boundary that this project first began. In the original writing of the project, it was with James, “The Maple Man,” and not Ali that I began. Which is not to say, of course, that my love for boxing is any less. But it was James, and Hall’s, turn to the vernacular that, even if it did not instigate the project, gave it an impetus. I wrote the James and Hall chapters first. James and Hall, if I might phrase it this way, made Ali and Marley possible.

SJ: All four figures profiled here had an uneasy relationship with party politics or state structures. Does that imply that the vernacular has a better chance at an emancipatory politics?

GF: Of these figures, James is the only one who was really active in a party – if by that we understand his various Trotskyist movements, the Independent Labour Party, the Johnson-Forrest Tendency in the U.S., as a “party.” Hall has always had a complicated, “one foot in, out foot out,” relationship to the Labour Party in Britain.The vernacular, in and of itself, simply by virtue of itself, is not a a guarantee of a more emancipatory, or successfully emancipatory, politics. However, I do think that a vernacular politics offers possibilities that a conventional party might not. The vernacular is rooted, it is grounded in a particular, historic way of being political and that enables a political discourse that is seen as autochthonous rather than imposed, “of the people” rather than imposed.

But, that does not mean that the vernacular is guaranteed its radicalness. The commitment to transformation, to rethinking, re-imagining the political, is an ongoing business and that is why the adoption of the vernacular must be perpetually struggled for – especially as the conditions of struggle change, political contexts alter, and so on. The invocation of the vernacular is, as Ali’s increasing conservatism demonstrates, a conversatism, I would add, that was already evident early on in his relationship with the Nation of Islam, no guarantee of a radically emancipated society. But, more attention should be paid to the vernacular, and those who speak it as a political discourse.

SJ: Where can we find ‘vernacular intellectuals’ today? For example, is hip hop producing any?

GF: From the Five Percenters, Talib Kwali, Mos Def, David Chappelle (who is funnier, politically smarter, and more politically agile than David Chappelle?), to Immortal Technique (who offers, from his Latino-American position, a serious indictment of the US’s status quo although his gender politics sometimes verge on the horrendous), Eminem (who was, for a moment, the angriest black man in America), to Kanye West (who adds a certain soulful, R&B quality to his hip-hop/funk, and understands the aspirations of the black bourgeoisie as well as anyone): these are all artists who think seriously about the society in which they live. And, they have a certain joie de vivre about it too, which is what makes us listen to them. So, I think hip-hop is well served, and, because of how the genre understands its own political history, hip-hop will always be a site from which the vernacular rearticulates and regenerates itself.

There are other vernacular figures. Marley remains influential, and the Caribbean is always, with its rude-bwoy tradition — Buju Banton, Bounty Killah — makes, as a matter of course, interventions into the political. In other traditions, we might think of the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the pulp novels of Victor Headley, the poetic fiction of Shani Mootoo (one of the few Caribbean authors courageous enough to confront her society with the issue of a lesbian sexuality), and the activism and beautifully crafted caste indictments of Arundhati Roy, and the angry, anti-Scottish nationalism protagonists of Irvine Welsh.

While lots of folks bemoan the post-Ali, post-Jim Brown (the great running back for the Cleveland Browns gridiron team in the 1960s) in sport, I am not as pessimistic. I find Tiger Woods fascinating. Initially, it was his first great “black” act, symbolically “raising the roof” – the act of pointing your palms skyward, making as if to push up to the sky – and acknowledging the African-American golfers who preceded, and, for that reason, made possible his accomplishment. Now I am intrigued by how he counters the dominant notion of what a black athlete should be, how a black athlete is expected to behave. Of course, the problem is that Woods becomes, both because of his success and in spite of himself, a sort of simultaneously post-racial, de-racialized, and intensely black athlete – in part because he does not allow for the speaking of race in a historically white sport. I can’t wait for Tiger to win Major Number Nineteen.

SJ: Finally, you were born in South Africa. Is there anyone now from Africa who would qualify as a ‘vernacular intellectual’?

GF: I think there are many incarnations of the vernacular in South Africa. The activists who work in Soweto and elsewhere to counter the state’s punitive actions against the unemployed, the unemployable, and the perpetually poor – those who struggle to keep electricity and water supplied, those who campaign for better living conditions and a living wage, those who march against evictions. And, of course, those who struggle around issues such as rape, child abuse, and the horror that is the pandemic HIV/AIDS. These folks all, in one way or another, keep alive the tradition of Sharpeville, Soweto and the insurrections of the mid-1980s, all the while recognizing the particular demands of their conjuncture.

In literary terms, I remain taken with the thinking of JM Coetzee. I read Slow Man over the Christmas vacation last year and was impressed with how Coetzee undertook a critique of the current fascination in European philosophy, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and, to a lesser extent, Giorgio Agamben, with a neo-Pauline politics, this insistent call for a return to “universalism,” which is nothing but a code word for a return to white, masculinist if not outrightly patriarchal, European philosophy, this argument against the particular struggles we might recognize as “identity politics,” in one form or another. Slow Man, whose main protagonist is named “Paul,” argues against this neo-Pauline tendency and for a much more complicated notion of the diaspora, and the African diaspora in particular. I am intrigued, but not surprised, that JM Coetzee produces this kind of thinking about the diaspora, about a continent he clearly remains deeply invested in, from his perch in Adelaide, a city he has fallen in love with. I like the thought of that, the African diaspora, in its vernacular articulation, unsettling a society, Australia, grappling with its own history of near-genocidal treatment of the natives, a society unclear as to what to make of the fact that is now no longer an outpost – perhaps the “last outpost” – of Europe but an Asian country, a society grappling with “terrorism” in neighboring Bali, and angry Christian Lebanese youth on the very outskirts of Sydney who took over the beaches in Cronulla in December 2005. I like to imagine a conversation between the ex-pat South African John Coetzee and David Malouf, the Australian author writing the history of the Aboriginal peoples, and their ghostly remainders, from somewhere in Italy. What might these two diasporic figures say to each other? There is, at the core of the vernacular, an injunction to think the diaspora. How else could Coetzee have fashioned Slow Man? Which is simply another way of saying: without the diaspora, without a knowledge of the diaspora, without being introduced to, in part by sport but also by politics, literature and philosophy, to the world beyond that which apartheid permitted, without the experience of being encouraged to read CLR James in my teenage years on the Cape Flats by teachers who had ventured outside that criminally restricted society, how could I have written What’s My Name?

Sean Jacobs is co-editor of Chimurenga Online.