Articles & Essays

The racialization central to modernity orients otherness in terms of what is human, and what is, in some iteration, humanity’s “other”.

In his essay, Dann J. Broyld offers the Underground Railroad…as a model for “untangling the threads of the Middle Passage from black world-making in the New World.” My focus, here, are on the geographies that are conducive to those practices of “untangling” (of dis-entangling).

What does it mean to be linked to and intimately shaped through the Western Hemisphere’s history of anti-blackness? We find an answer to this question in the pivotal chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes being weighed down by the anti-black stereotypes of a white imaginary, most notably, in a way that escapes the theoretical boundaries of Merleau-Ponty’s body-schema.

The minutes leading up to the jury’s verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial were harrowing, in a historical sense. They are minutes that many of us will always remember. We’ll always be able to recall what we were doing and who we were with as they slowly ticked away.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the Summer of 2020, Kris Sealey reflects upon the intractable and totalizing logic of anti-blackness. Working through thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, her piece aims to stitch together both the impossible nature of articulating an ‘elsewhere’ untouched by anti-black violence, and the ways in these ‘elsewheres’ are always given life in the generative spaces of lived blackness. From this tension, Sealey invites readers problematize easily digestible prescriptions for making worlds in which black lives do, indeed, matter.

One might ask of this proposal to decolonize dialectics: Why work within the frame of dialectics at all? Could the radicalization of the dialectical question by decolonization take us radically Outside of dialectics altogether?

Given the plural histories and social locations from which we commit to the work of decolonization, how might we build conditions that are sufficiently attuned to the multiple ways in which our individual identities are always-already shaped in colonial power? And, perhaps most importantly, how might we foreground the ways in which these multiple identities position us as complicit in that colonial power?

I bring these two together (Fanon’s critique of a narrow nationalism, and Glissant’s vision for a composite community) because they ground themselves on alternative ways of thinking about human relationality. In these alternatives, I find a meaning of national community (and nationalism, more generally) that merits the attention of not only scholars of the human condition, but of citizens of a world that is, in the words of Paul Gilroy, “increasingly divided but also convergent”.

To be sure, as Betty Cannon writes, “I fall into bad faith if . . . I pretend . . . to be a fact in a world without freedom” (Cannon 1991, 46). While recognizing that this is the case, there is something to be said about insisting that one is “a fact” in a world predicated upon your remaining a fiction in a colonial fantasy.

In staging her argument, Tuvel notes that her claim does not rest on the assumption that “race and sex are equivalent, or historically constructed in the same way.” However, it is difficult to think of the differences between the historical constructions of race and sex without asking about their implications for allyship…Hence, I have crafted my response to her work with the specific intention of bringing the notion of transracialism to bear on conditions for the possibility of white allyship.

It’s easy enough for white women (like Hillary Clinton) to assume that their concerns are sufficiently representative of all women’s concerns, because the whiteness of their womanhood often serves to center not only their conceptions of what it means to be a woman, but also their understanding of gender oppression, and the content of their feminist program of liberation.

Insofar as the haunting of the whale hearkens to the legacy of colonial power, I read Melville’s novel as a critical reflection of a national community beholden to the logic of management and control. Said otherwise, it is a critique of what Glissant names the “onto-community,” given its inability to allow difference as such.

Central to Sealey's book is a provocation to the prevailing wisdom which says that one is either a Sartrean or a Levinasian - either for freedom or for ethics. She shows not only that these thinkers can be read together but that when they are so read the picture of Sartre's early work as offering little in the way of an account of ethical subjectivity must be significantly revised.

When white people engage their whiteness as a problem, the war against racism acquires new soldiers. We get more troops on the ground, committed to what David E. Owen describes as "a conscious strategy [of disrupting] the operations of the [social] field itself, and hence the racial system”.

Granted that the theological and ethical references found in Levinas is intentionally bracketed in Blanchot, Levinas’ formulation of the il y a is to precisely trouble the distinction between ‘positive goodness’ and ‘negative evil’ to which Critchley refers. To do what both he and I propose, which is to take seriously the site of impersonal existence (and to this through the lens provided by Blanchot) is to recognize, along with Levinas, an inevitable trauma (or horror) in an encounter with alterity.