The present article is a sympathetic critique of the most prominent contemporary articulations of family abolitionism. It examines whether queer communist family abolitionism is successful in linking an account of reasons for abolition, with an account of the means of abolition, and finally with an account of the ends of abolition in the form of speculation on a possible world without families. Recent work by M.E. O’Brien has developed these connections in ways that have never been done so thoroughly before; (...) but the rejection of states as an institutional form of political power leaves it unclear what forms of equality we could expect in such a world, and why coercive power would be unnecessary there. Family abolition is a utopian political agenda; but that utopianism needs to be constrained by a realist concern with issues of power, resources, and human capacities. This will require confronting trade-offs and imperfections within possible worlds without families. The recognition that there are many paths to a world without families, and many possible such worlds, is the first step towards aligning reasons, means, and ends and confronting the social and political trade-offs that this entails. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of nineteenth-century philosophers of habit to understanding the rigidity of desire. Focusing on the work of Félix Ravaisson, I argue that Of Habit (1838) makes sense of something that much queer theory fails to address in its investment in the subversion of identity: the tendency of desire to return to known objects and follow well-worn paths, a tendency that does not always result in the affirmation of norms or the consolidation of power. Of Habit offers (...) a new set of terms—crystallization, patterning, and necessity, among others—for comprehending the limits of desire’s flexibility without naturalizing gender or sexuality as permanently fixed or inherent. In so doing, it offers an alternative to queer theories that, indebted to Judith Butler’s performativity thesis, attribute the rigidities of sexual life entirely to the productive power of cultural prohibitions and discursively constructed norms. (shrink)

In notes to Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie lectures, written around the time of Haiti's 1825 ‘ransom’—the 150 million francs demanded by France to indemnify former slave and plantation owners—we find an uncanny remark. Hegel appears to report on a different ransom, a compensated abolition of slavery in North America that never happened, anticipating an application of the Fifth Amendment's takings clause that US legal scholarship routinely fails to mention. In view of Alan Brudner's enlistment of Hegel as the philosopher ‘uniquely’ able to (...) understand the Fifth Amendment's requirement for compensation for expropriations—a ‘constitutional essential for liberalism’—this paper explores the meaning of these passages in the historical context of the legal abolitions of Hegel's time: feudalism and slavery. The slaveholder indemnities were clearly the unjust ‘dividends’ of the colour line, but their legal foundations and developments in US thought of the nineteenth century also usefully illustrate takings law's foreclosure of political and social transformation through the securitization of value. Reading these histories and Hegel's comments alongside the critical interventions of the black radical tradition, I suggest that Hegel's curious remarks on compensated takings suggest not only a critical divergence from Brudner's understanding of ‘dialogic community’, but a crucial limitation in his field of analysis which pivoted on the denigration of black sovereignty. This paper thus suggests an understanding of US takings law through the shifting understandings of the term ‘ransom’—which for abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass signified not a resolution of slavery, but rather the threat of its perpetuation—and Douglass's elaboration of the pathology of the colour line. (shrink)

I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon, instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). I show how he creates his own method through an anticolonial phenomenology of touch and affect (...) that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the center of most phenomenologies before him. I read Fanon's “toucher du doigt”—in contrastive relation to Edmund Husserl's touch‐sensings—to define a phenomenology that dwells with colonial wounding and holds the memory of a “burning” colonial duration. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description; rather, Fanon invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell. This method addresses the conditions of possibility for doing (critical) phenomenology. Fanonian phenomenology makes tangible the (de)structuring violence through which colonialism ontologizes itself, while providing tools to dwell with the wounding and critically mine it—to create possibilities for living otherwise than what colonialism makes of us. (shrink)

This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation treaties, the article treats loss as central to the manifold rehearsals of return. In AlSalah’s work, loss is understood not as becoming less, but rather as a proposition for becoming otherwise. Here, the practice (...) of loss is explored through the glitch as both a conceptual framework espousing opacity and a pragmatic tool engaging pixel breaks. Rather than reducing the glitch to a mere erroneous aesthetic, the article underscores the active capacity in encountering a glitch or deliberately engendering it by exploring the tensions between colonial imageries reproduced in digital maps, and, in contrast, montage as AlSalah’s tool for intervention. Finally, the article serves as a theoretical experimentation with what I call “dialectical poethics,” which reads the filmic return through loss as an attempt to go against linearity, intelligibility, and finality, yet insists on a materialist grounding of the glitch as a method that is historically situated rather than always-already emancipatory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted by (...) the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation. (shrink)

By attending to how people speak about their gender, we can find diverse answers to the question of what it is like to have a gender identity. To some, it is little more than having a body whereas others may report it as more attitudinal or dispositional—seemingly contradictory views. In this paper, I seek to reconcile these disparate answers by developing a theory of how individual gender identity comes about. In the simplest possible terms, I propose that gender identity is (...) how we make sense of our gender subjectivity, the totality of our gendered experiences of ourselves. Gender identity is constituted by gender subjectivity, but this constitutive relationship is underdetermined. While gender subjectivity may narrow the range of inhabitable gender identities, it is always compatible with more than one. To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. My theory helps us understand how different people offer seemingly incompatible accounts of their gender identity without questioning their authenticity or validity. They simply arrange similar building materials differently. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

Home care is one of the fastest‐growing industries in the United States, providing valuable opportunities for millions of older adults and people with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional settings. Home care workers assist clients with essential activities of daily living, but their wages and working conditions generally fail to reflect the importance of their work. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay and other care ethicists, we argue that good care involves attending to the needs (...) of another out of a concern for their well‐being. Such care should be standard in the home care system. Yet, because of the pervasive racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the home care industry perpetuates, home care workers and their clients cannot reasonably be expected to care about each other. We endorse reforms aimed at enabling home care workers and their clients to form and maintain professional relationships that cultivate care.. (shrink)

Was Derrida a mama’s boy? Was he not hiding or indeed manifesting, ostensibly displaying even, mommy issues? Let us posit that Derrida had a substantial, perhaps an inordinate amount of things to say about mothers in general, about surrogate mothers too, and about his own mother in particular. Derrida did confess having taken the side of his mother. Yet, what I really want to ask is whether, from Plato to Nancy and, more obviously, from Rousseau to Freud and beyond, mothers (...) can, in fact, be confined to bounded registers of life, of Derrida’s life and, more formally, to the biographical and autobiographical (as ‘Circumfession’ and before it Spurs and The Ear of the Other might suggest). Or even to the psychoanalytical (as The Post Card and, in it, the famous fort/da scene would certainly indicate). A concern — shall I already call it a solicitude — for mothers, on Derrida’s part, might raise a distinct set of questions. (shrink)

Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83 provides a helpful point of departure for this philosophical treatment of pan-African subjectivity. His meditations on music resonate with continental and diasporic accounts of the musicality of African social organization. This in turn provides an opening into a discussion around the tension between conceptions of African identity tied to heritage and continuity on one hand, and considerations of the rupture brought about by the Middle Passage and colonialism on the other. Drawing on African philosophy and Black (...) Studies more broadly, this article argues for a conception of African identity that, while taking seriously heritage and origins, ultimately emerges intersubjectively as a result of the movements and reverberations across the constellation of African worlds. Not only are these pan-African reverberations constitutive, the author argues that they are also key to our survival. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: (...) First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward. (shrink)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also to engage (...) in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

Trans and gender-nonconforming people sometimes say that certain gender norms are authentic for them. For example, a trans man might say that abiding by norms of masculinity tracks who he really is. Authenticity is sometimes taken to appeal to an essential, pre-social “inner self.” It is also sometimes understood as a moral notion. Authenticity claims about gender norms therefore appear inimical to two key commitments in feminist philosophy: that all gender norms are socially constructed, and that many domains of gender (...) norms are both morally and prudentially bad. I argue that that this apparent tension is illusory. Concordant with existing trans narratives of authenticity, I articulate an existentialist view that understands authenticity as a socially embedded, constructive project undertaken in a non-ideal social world, rather than a reflective uncovering of a pre-given, essential self. I then show that authenticity and morality can come apart; what is authentic for someone need not be either morally good or good for them. I conclude that the authenticity of gender norms does not cut against the feminist commitments that I identify. This conclusion enables a theoretical space that is both respectful of trans experience and critical of dominant gender norms, an important liberatory goal. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue was merely a numb object of the past. Fanon seems (...) to reiterate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological discovery in Ideas II that the hand that touches the surface of a table, as it moves across it, also feels itself touched. Fanon’s aim is not simply to calculate the destructive effects of colonization, against arguments for its partial “civilizing” benefits. (shrink)

This essay asks after the lateness that affectively structures Fanon's phenomenology of racialized temporality in Black Skin,White Masks. I broach this through the concepts of possibility, “affective ankylosis”, and by taking seriously the dismembered past that haunts Fanon's text. The colonization of the past involves a bifurcation of time and of memory. To the “burning past,” wherein colonized experience is stuck and to which we remain sensitive, is contrasted the colonial construction of white, western time as progressive and futural—a construction (...) that relies on the very indifference, ankylosis, and closure of this time to the multiple, lived temporalities of colonized others. (shrink)

In both popular culture and academic disciplines, feminism, especially feminisms of women of color, is increasing in popularity. But with that popularity comes certain challenges. It would seem that, due to its popularity, Black feminism has gained a nominal invite to professional philosophy’s (largely) white school social affair. But it has been invited by hosts who don’t quite know what to do with Black feminism once it’s arrived.

Though fatigue appears a constant of this pandemic year, I argue that we may not all be living the same pandemic. I highlight the non-belonging of most racialized and colonized peoples to a world where flourishing is taken for granted as norm. To think this, I use the term “weariness.” I want to evoke, wearing out, wearing down, as well as the medical concept of weathering. Drawing on Césaire, Fanon, Hartman, Scott, and Spillers, my concept of weariness articulates an exhausting (...) and enduring experience—the eroding, grating, and crumbling of racialized flesh—through repetitive colonial duration, not simply for a year, but over a longue durée. I read this as a wounding that needs to be thought not simply in terms of health outcomes and disease, but in terms of affective experience and dismembered possibility. (shrink)

This article critiques dominant feminist analyses of the “Hottentot Venus.” It argues that these analyses of the construction of Black women as “other,” which borrow heavily from poststructuralism, make race and gender transhistorical and metaphysical constructs. The article critiques what has become the theoretical orthodoxy on the “Hottentot Venus.” It takes issue with two presumptions in particular: first, that there was a core image of the Black woman in the nineteenth century, and second, that the fear of the anatomy of (...) the “other” is the source of negative representations of Black sexuality. The article proposes an alternative way of understanding the construction of Black women in colonial discourse. It argues that social relations, rather than psychological dispositions, determine how bodies are seen and perceived. (shrink)

Using the turn of the century blackface performer Bert Williams as a case study, this essay explores how we might think about black male performativity in the New World as a historical formation, one that extends both over the time of modernity and across the space of diaspora. I draw from contemporary theories of circum-atlantic performance and black feminist studies of the impact of slavery on black racial and gendered identities, to argue that performance affords a unique window into how (...) blackness is constructed in a space between the black male performer and his equally racialized New World audience. The essay theorizes a notion of key black male performances as ‘signature acts’, then explores discussions of minstrelsy by other black American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and the black British writer Caryl Phillips. Using Fanon's notions of triple-consciousness in tandem with Brechtian and Freudian theories of alienated performances and jokes, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the gendered significations in lyrics from Bert Williams’ first musical comedy and then also in a novel about the performer by Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

In this article, I link Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion1 to decolonial perspectives that also challenge this universality of affect in cross-cultural facial expressions. After first outlining some of the present-day political stakes of these questions, I turn to Sylvia Wynter on the "ethnoclass of Man" in Western modernity, where she asks: how were concepts of not only being, truth, power, and freedom but also affect—the intelligibility of one's feelings toward others—framed by histories of colonial violence and refusals (...) of imaginative identification?2 Wynter argues that the overrepresentation of the Western ethnoclass results in the naturalization of a limited and contingent mode of being as... (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with (...) Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon. Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such. (shrink)

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture (...) the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers. (shrink)

At the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet (...) gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today. (shrink)

We are haunted by the specter of civil war. Liberal and conservative politicians and commentators openly express anxiety about the possibility of outright hostilities and the "unravelling [of] our national fabric". Increasing polarization, identity politics that destroys persuasion, an atmosphere of conspiracy regarding the deep state or foreign puppet masters, apparent disenchantment with institutions, general mistrust in electoral politics, a gridlocked and weak congress, and open skirmishes between white nationalist and antifascists are put forth as signs of the end times. (...) The looming crisis of the end of politics that everywhere... (shrink)

This commentary focuses upon the ‘fetishism of persons’ in Marx which Balibar claims both mirrors and animates the better-known fetishism of things. Revisiting the chapter on exchange in which Balibar grounds his thesis, the essay attends to the theatrical metaphors by which Marx presents legal personhood as a pantomime of commodity fetishism. The essay demonstrates how the movable immobility of the commodity comes to life in its inverse, the mobile and immovable figure of the legal person; it then claims that (...) this inversion positions legal persons as animate props for property. But if legal persons, the essay asks, merely personify economic relations, by what means are they sufficiently distanced from commodities to be able to become their reflex and puppet? In other words, what vestibule keeps personal liberty’s analogy with economic relations from collapsing into identity? A significant historical answer, the essay asserts, is transatlantic chattel slavery—not only because this institution is both ideological foil to, and material basis for, liberal capital, but also because the slave herself, as animate property, undoes the distinction between persons and commodities. The essay concludes by insisting upon the significance of this neglected figure in philosophies of the transindividual, while also taking first steps toward a transindividual analysis of slavery. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In response to the sonic media and ludicrosity of her time, Hortense J. Spillers' paradigmatic essay ""All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother": Psychoanalysis and Race," transfigures Charles Mingus' melodic, cryptic, and most puzzling record title into a workable theoretical cacophony. Closely written within the contexts and outside the confines of "some vaguely defined territory between well established republics," Spillers is able to open up the sarcophagus of meaning(s) within the Black occupation (...) of the psychoanalytic discourse. Mingus' original assertion, "all the things you could be by now, if Sigmund Freud's wife was your mother," means absolutely nothing insofar as it means everything in the face of constructed openings and invitations into "extending the realm of possibility for what might be known." As such, this article asks a similar question relating to what might be known about the sensual convergence of media, violence, and representation ('all the things we could see by now') of international, political, and theoretical significance. If anything, Spillers and Mingus compel us toward locating some semblance of forgotten relationality between what appears to be abstract, distant, and unfamiliar. Given our contemporary era of violent post-colonial terror and desires for alternatives to the afterlife of slavery, this article endorses the free-floating investigation into the live survey of unprotected human flesh in the specific case of Boko Haram's explosion in modern media. Is it possible that such a study is able to uncover the motive behind the assembly of spectatorship? Through a Freudian reading of human nature into international political theory, this article indicates that narrative formation and transmission is an essential component to the development of both ethno-universalisms and global constructions of race and captivity. (shrink)

The binary between the figure of the child and the fully human being is invoked with regularity in analyses of race, yet its centrality to the conception of race has never been fully explored. For most commentators, the figure of the child operates as a metaphoric or rhetorical trope, a non-essential strategic tool in the perpetuation of White supremacy. As I show in the following, the child/human binary does not present a contingent or merely rhetorical construction but, rather, a central (...) feature of racialization. Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude. I proceed by offering a historical account of how Black peoples came to inherit the subordination and dehumanization of European childhood and how White youth were subsequently spared through their partial categorization as adults. (shrink)

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city (...) and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself. (shrink)

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

This is a paper about trauma and ineloquence, violence and banality, and the utopian conventions of self‐expression in liberal mass society: the U.S. is the scene of the case. The essay pursues relations among the post‐traumatic reparative contexts of the law, religion, therapy and popular culture, all under the sign of autobiography. These domains articulate generic conventions of self‐expressivity with the formalism of self‐reflective liberal personhood. They link norms of expressive denegation to genres that conventionalize, and make false equivalents among, (...) diverse traumatic consequences. When scenes of post‐traumatic ineloquence morph into modes of transformative‐style rhetoric, does the eloquent form distract from, become a mask for, or intensify the unreachable or inarticulable thought that wants to change the norms of negation? A short history of the soundtrack as a site that marks the centrality of ineloquence to traumatic expression condenses the paradox of the moment, where a post‐traumatic desire to become undefensive meets up with pop banality and therapeutic cliche. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Contemporary US discourse on reparations tends to focus on the suppression of Black economic interests, but the harms of slavery are not exhausted by the labor expropriation of slaves and its concomitant wealth accumulation for white people and the United States at large. Reproductive oppression was constitutive of the institution of slavery, and its harms continue to reverberate today. This article thus calls for reproductive reparations, or the transparent and sustained attention to the effects of racialized reproductive oppression as (...) they intersect with calls for reparations for slavery. Reconceiving reparations through histories and presents of reproductive harm is required to more fully account for the wrongs of slavery and provide a broader reach for radical societal transformation in our present. (shrink)

One of Octavia Butler’s common sites of exploration concerns the impact of parenting on her main characters. She appeared to locate reproduction and child-rearing as parts of human life with great potentials for transformed futures. From a perspective of intergenerational survival, that hope appears perfectly reasonable. In this letter to Butler, I put the goal of intergenerational survival into question as an existential mandate by querying its relationship to gestative capture. Gestative capture here refers to the ready capacity to reduce (...) an existent to immanence via their abilities to gestate ‘human’ or ‘human-like’ progeny. The conversation this letter stages with Butler and her work, which is only possible because of how clearly Butler understood gestative capture and how much she built it into her stories, asks the questions: What is ‘transcendence’ for Black women who can bear children? How ought we to imagine intergenerational survival? And when, if ever, should we put down ‘survival at all costs’ commitments? (shrink)

In arguing that slavery is not a relic of the past, but a relational dynamic undergirded by an ontology of anti-Blackness that prevents Blacks from ever being considered human beings, the self-described Afropessimist, Frank Wilderson III, argues that Black people occupy the position of social death in the present. Due to this anti-Black condition, Wilderson concludes that no form of redress is possible to assuage, liberate, and redeem Black people from this anti-Black condition other than the “End of the World.” (...) Drawing upon Fredrich Nietzsche’s understanding of the problem of nihilism and its existential consequences, I argue that while Afropessimism is useful for articulating the problem of anti-Blackness, it makes a nihilistic turn through Wilderson’s “End of the World” since there is no world where Blackness is experienced as anything other than social death. As a response to Wilderson, I conclude that the philosopher Jacqueline Scott’s life-affirming Nietzschean philosophy and her anti-racist activism in “Racial Nihilism as Racial Courage” is one adequate response to the nihilistic threat to Black America if Black people are condemned to a life of social death because of the enduring nature of anti-Black racism. (shrink)

This paper describes the stakes of ongoing conversations in areas of queer theory and black studies on the epistemological, ethical, and political role of unintelligibility. In line with longstanding philosophical questions about the value of aporia as gap or absence in our understanding, thinkers like Lee Edelman and Frank Wilderson III have articulated how black and queer people have regularly fallen into spaces of unintelligibility as they have run against given formations of the social world. These thinkers have theorized what (...) this unintelligibility – what they will call this queerness or blackness – is other than an impetus for integration. The paper describes the dichotomy between two key positions in this conversation, resistance and refusal, suggesting these positions offer challenges better addressed through a conception of estrangement. (shrink)

This article draws on the thought of Sylvia Wynter to argue that the development of frameworks of race in the early modern period played an essential, if as yet unconsidered, role in the development of modern skepticism. In formulating this history—and taking Stanley Cavell’s conceptualization of skepticism as an important point of reference—this article positions skepticism as both a historical and ongoing nexus for practices and experiences of racialization. Responding to this, I propose a variant of skepticism that I term (...) enforced skepticism, explored here through a reading of Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017). This is a form of skeptical experience that is born not from epistemological doubt but from the violent foreclosures of access to self-expression and a livable world. (shrink)

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years, killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like othe...

This article argues that Frank B. Wilderson's political ontology can be read as both a critique and a radicalization of Giorgio Agamben's formal political-ontological framework constructed around the two extreme poles of sovereignty and bare life. Wilderson critiques and expands Agamben's framework by locating the zero point of political abjection not within bare life, which is still implicated within the ontological zone of Human being by way of an included exclusion, but within Black social death, which is cut off absolutely (...) from Human being. While such a political ontological framework provides an extremely powerful optic for the absolute ontological abjection of Black existence in relation to all other racial positions in the modern West, its absolute prioritization limits the scope of an analysis of power relations that might offer an account of racial positioning that is both broader than and resistant to the political ontology of Western race relations. In conclusion, turning to Fred Moten's Black optimism and Deleuze's and Guattari's account of micropolitics and lines of flight, the article argues for a pragmatics of resistance that finds its practical condition of possibility within the micropolitical field of power relations that marks an excess to the anti-Black macropolitics of political ontology. (shrink)

Taking the Hagar story as the central biblical resource to address the particular plight of Black women—a plight that reckons with patriarchal and White supremacist forces that desire its enclosure—Delores Williams challenges both the traditional understanding of atonement theory which embraces the Cross as salvific and Black liberation theologies’ apocalyptical conceptions of a mighty liberating God. This article seeks to read Delores Williams closely to take seriously her theological development through literature more broadly and her soteriological critiques of the Cross (...) specifically. A rereading of Williams will provide the grounds for continuing the debate of the Cross’s significance within Black theological thought at large. Analyzing Williams’ soteriological critiques will allow me to offer a reading of the Cross that ultimately relies on Williams’ emphatic rejection. Such a rejection of the Cross is necessary for understanding how Black Christianity centers the Cross in order to reject it, as it is intended to be. (shrink)

Bioethics has increasingly become a standard part of medical school education and the training of healthcare professionals more generally. This is a promising development, as it has the potential to help future practitioners become more attentive to moral concerns and, perhaps, better moral reasoners. At the same time, there is growing recognition within bioethics that nonideal theory can play an important role in formulating normative recommendations. In this chapter we discuss what this shift toward nonideal theory means for ethical curricula (...) within healthcare education. In particular, we contend that more attention to the particularities of historical and social context needs to be incorporated into bioethics training. To make this argument, we focus on two examples: teaching units on race and medicine and those that focus on stigma and coercion in mental health. For both, we show how a pedagogical approach in which educators focus on social injustice could influence how practitioners engage in ethics in the clinic. This chapter, then, demonstrates what a commitment to nonideal theory can mean practically when it comes to bioethics education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A prerequisite for today’s most powerful social movements is not only to analyze the interwoven and mutually constitutive nature of different structures of power but also to discover the means to articulate in a coherent organizational project diverse struggles for liberation, including, among others, those focused on class, race, sexuality, and gender. This article focuses on the ways that activists and theorists in the 1970s framed and addressed the political problematic of multiplicity and articulation. In some respects, one can (...) trace back to that period the beginnings of contemporary practices and paradigms, but, in other ways, the theorizing and organizing of the 1970s were actually ahead of us, and our task is to catch up to those earlier projects for liberation. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential (...) for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. (shrink)