If We Were Kin: Race, Identification, and Intimate Political Appeal

This study examines the politics of identification in antiracist struggles and asks how people begin and sustain social movement work across lines of difference. The project follows a series of activists and public intellectuals to sites of conflict in order to explore how actors confront failures in solidarity by summoning people to understand their freedom as bound to antiracist struggles. In work by James Baldwin from the 1960s and work by three contemporary social movement organizations—Black Lives Matter, antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG), and immigrant justice organization #Not1More—actors construct shared forms of identification across racial lines using kinship language and references to the body. Undergirding these rhetorical and organizing strategies is a concept—boundness—with a history in black political thought; a paradigm in which people’s lives are understood to be co-constituted and their freedom bound together. The first chapter traces the concept of boundness in James Baldwin’s political thought and explores how boundness offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence, and interracial solidarity. Chapter II examines interviews with James Baldwin in 1963 and #BlackLivesMatter activists in 2014-2015 to explore how their overlapping interventions reorient public discussions about racial violence. Chapters III and IV examine how contemporary activists in SONG and #Not1More generate shared forms of identification across racial lines. Drawing on archival research and ethnography, this study employs a close reading approach to specific moments in political discourse and organizing to theorize how people on the ground are crafting and contesting forms of identification. Ultimately, this project offers an account of the ways in which forms of political identification are structured by ethical and emotional orientations, and contends that contestations over these structures are a primary site of politics. This dissertation includes previously published material (Chapter I).10000-01-0