Black Power – by any means necessary

In a speech made in the final year of his life, Malcolm X addressed his crowd with these now famous words:

We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. ¹

(Malcolm X 1992) Aboriginal Black Power activists carried Malcolm X’s message – they would work to bring about justice by any means necessary. Such declaration was to transgress, to stand in the place of fear, in mimesis of the colonial image of the other. This chapter examines the Aboriginal Embassy as part of the broader phenomenon of the Black Power movement that developed in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a push for Aboriginal Land Rights and self-determination. To begin I examine the Black Power movement’s philosophy on violence as a means to achieve social change and through this come to consider performance as a strategic aspect of Black Power activism. Following this thread, the second half of the chapter considers Black Power activism in the case of the Aboriginal Embassy and traces how the Embassy ‘bears the cruel and often cleaver cuttings’ of anthropologist Michael Taussig’s (1999: 55) theory of defacement. Finally I suggest that the Embassy as an act of defacement embodies the necessary features of a method that might interrupt what Taussig (1992) describes as the Nervous System, the pervading disorder of hegemony, the ‘ordered disorder’ that orchestrates a ‘culture of terror as usual’. Inspiration to Taussig, Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1999: 248) in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, written on the eve of the Second World War, observed that ‘The tradition of the 68oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’. It is from this position that I begin.