Armond R. Towns explores the mechanics of revolutionary thought and the media of resistance

Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communication and Race, which will start publishing issues in 2024. In this conversation, we dwell with the sprawling, exciting claims of his new book On Black Media Philosophy. And one of the central theoretical problems in that book is the question of what is left unsaid in the influential work of Marshall McLuhan, a figure who still has a lingering impact within media studies especially, particularly in Canada. Towns talks about how encountering McLuhan’s thinking was “eye-opening”, and most of all because he was exposed first to media studies in the United States, where the primary focus tends to be on representation itself, the content of the text, rather than the medium. McLuhan’s work offered Towns a really interesting corrective to that tendency, but when he started to dig into McLuhan’s writing, he found some notable gaps, especially around race. So what was unsaid in McLuhan became in some ways more important than what was said—which often gets reduced to the phrases we’re all familiar with: “the medium is the message,” the “global village,” and so on. McLuhan has an impact on Towns’ thinking, but Towns is really trying to act back on McLuhan’s impact by asking why McLuhan is invested in notions of the “tribal” and “de-tribal.” Why is he citing who he is citing? Why is he writing letters to people like J. C. Carothers? So his book, through what he calls a “practice of reading” that is deeply historical, aims to complicate the legacy of people like McLuhan, and others too, like Charles Darwin, for which there is an already established history that may obscure more than it reveals. How do we “break that logic,” as Towns puts it? A logic that frames Africa as a purely “natural” place from which “objects are extracted”? And what are the implications of aiming to break that logic for politics? I was really struck, in reading his work and talking to him, by the way he approaches this through the radical concept of climate reparations, and the destruction of the natural environment. How, as he says, it goes hand in hand with the destruction of particular people. He pushes us, in framing these ideas, to approach reparations as more than just a financial question. Reparations means taking seriously how land, water, and space have been partitioned, poisoned and commodified, and realizing that the question “Where are people going to go?” is going to be central in a future where we see innumerable climate refugees fleeing the sacrifice zones. So much of what he’s writing about really comes from this emphasis on “historical situatedness in all of our thought.” He makes it clear that, “as a Black scholar, bringing in that historical context changes the theory” for him. Maybe my biggest takeaway here was this idea that there has been a systematic neutralizing of radical thought within institutional settings. He explains how there’s been a “neoliberal shift” since the 1970s toward inclusion in the “project of higher education” and at the state level, with elected officials. As a “Black middle class” emerged, he says we saw radical demands “replaced by a more liberal” institutional politics that enshrines “mastery” and the logic of the “expert.” This made “things that were once radical… profitable.” The challenge, then, I suppose, becomes figuring out a way to maintain real traction, a means of preserving “revolutionary thought,” without succumbing to what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has called “elite capture.”