Barcelona Metropolis

Angela Davis embodies the revolutionary fascination and the nostalgia for remote struggles. She has an innate ability to translate complex thoughts into slogans for the public at large and a magnetism that, far from waning over the years, has catapulted her into the limbo of revolutionaries, a place where there are hardly any women.

This year, at the height of the pandemic in the United States and in the midst of protests over the murder of African-American George Floyd, the Juneteenth – an unofficial celebration of the end of slavery in the United States – took on the appearance of resistance. In the Californian city of Oakland, it was commemorated with marches in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and its fight against racial violence. The day is encapsulated in a snapshot loaded with revolutionary symbolism: Angela Yvonne Davis, standing in the back of a semi-convertible, with her fist raised, a gesture known as the Black Power salute as a sign of solidarity and support for the demands. The image swept across the world like wildfire.

Angela Davis embodies the revolutionary fascination and the nostalgia for remote struggles. She has an innate ability to translate complex thoughts into slogans for the general public and a magnetism that, far from waning over the years, has catapulted her into the limbo of revolutionaries, a place where there are hardly any women. When the world thinks of her, it still sees the insurgent woman with afro hair, involved in the Black Panther Party and forever ready to lead the masses into the struggle. But her charismatic path goes beyond subversive symbolism and is part of the time-honoured American tradition of civil disobedience.

Today she is a professor emerita at the University of California (Santa Cruz) and one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. And although her activity has always centred on the progressive and politicised black community, as a Marxist thinker she believes that the black struggle must be linked to the working-class struggle, ever accompanied by cooperation and political solidarity between peoples and nations. For this reason, she embraces multiple causes, from the anti-racist struggle, feminisms and the abolition of the industrial-prison system to LGTBIQ struggles and the fight for the freedom of the Palestinian people.

Between iconography and myth

This year Time magazine recognised her as one of the 100 most influential people of 2020 on account of her social activism. And although she abandoned her natural hair years ago, The New York Times considers Angela Davis’ afro hairstyle one of the biggest influences on 20^th-century trends. Unsurprisingly, on her release from prison, at just 30 years old, the writer and literary editor of Random House, Toni Morrison, commissioned her autobiography, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974).

Over the years, she has earned intergenerational and interracial respect in academia, on the streets and in the media. Davis has been featured in the revolutionary motifs on walls, t-shirts and posters for more than half a century, a space that she shares with figures such as Mandela, Luther King and Gandhi. Although her radicalism has been absorbed by a system whose abolition she herself demands, neither her discourse nor, least of all, the symbolism of her afro, have lost a shred of appeal. Indeed, this double game of criticism and acceptance of the rules of the game has made her the object of reproach in the most radical sectors, which have long accused her of being a reformist and neo-capitalist paid by the system and wholly subject to the interests of the bourgeoisie and the white majority. Not even has this criticism been able to topple her, because few can move across political, activist and aesthetic frontiers as jubilantly as Miss Davis.

Although her iconographic representations have multiple contradictions and implications, most of them bother her. But she does not reject them, and she reflects on the meaning and power of images in a contemporaneity in which visual imaginaries hang over social narratives. In her text “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia” (1994), she analyses the visual stereotypes that her afro generates through the image theory legacies of John Berger and Susan Sontag. In it, she observes how her figure, in addition to being set in revolutionary fiction, is already integrated into African-American historical images. Moreover, she warns that reducing historic politics to a contemporary popular culture fad can make collective visual memory ahistorical and apolitical.

Her ideological underpinnings, however, lie in black and Marxist thinkers, those who represent what Robin D.G. Kelley called the “Black Radical Tradition” (1944), who explore the relationship between capital and racism, addressing the role of slavery and colonialism in the consolidation of capitalism. Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Cedric Robinson, James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois are among those who afforded her new ways of understanding a reality in which “white” represents the norm and universality.

Back in the United States, she became a member of the Communist Party and joined the fight for civil rights, the feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. This period in her life marked the course of an atypical and rebellious existence, perhaps sidelined by those who subscribed to normativity and could not comprehend how she could abandon a safe path towards the middle-class American dream in order to adhere to revolutionary activism. In a sense, these subjective appraisals did not affect her, and when she looks back she feels proud to have been a part of the historic time when collective black consciousness was crystallising. She does so with hardly any romanticism because she acknowledges the mistakes of the revolution and warns of the dangers of a nostalgic relationship with the Black Panthers.

Industrial-prison system

In the early 1970s, Angela Davis had very strained relations with the authorities; she was expelled from university and falsely accused of kidnapping, conspiracy and murder. Nonetheless, she ended up starring in one of the FBI’s most mediated search and arrest warrants. She was ultimately arrested and spent 18 months in jail. At that time, she went on hunger strike to protest against prison conditions and preferred to represent herself in court, an event that has been recorded in American history. In 1972, the jury found her innocent of all charges.