In its war on terror, the United States tortured and abused individuals in its custody over a decade. This article examines a specific sort of epistemic response by Americans to the use of torture by their government, the sort of response that enables Americans to operate with epistemic ignorance to maintain a favorable construction of their identity as Americans. I lay out the concept of American ignorance as the active production of false and/or incomplete beliefs about what it means to (...) be an American and explore the mechanism through which this ignorance operates in society. The article argues for accountability to create better epistemic environments necessary for any meaningful shift in how Americans perceive themselves qua Americans. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures—the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is “duly punished”—by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. (...) The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained “unrepresentable” in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. (shrink)

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s concern for remembrance in political life in light of contemporary discourses regarding the memory of slavery and colonization in the African diaspora. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. In this paper, I give further contour to these debates by considering Arendt’s discourse on revolution in light of an analysis of the Haitian Revolution. In (...) so doing, my aim is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s understanding of the revolutionary tradition that she believes we are responsible for remembering and appropriating anew in political life today. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This article proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address this legacy and, (...) to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body – the New World slave – with subjecthood. From this discussion, the article makes the case for developing a ‘poetics of slavery’ that could help to address the colonial strictures still residual in the concept of civilization. (shrink)