No abstract

This article addresses the relationship between anti-racism and decolonization in the North American context. It argues that the logic of decolonization movements for indigenous sovereignty and against the settler states of Canada and the USA overlap the discursive field of contemporary post-racialism in ways that circumvent the challenges and possibilities offered by black radicalism in the historic instance. After engaging recent theoretical literature on settler colonialism, it is suggested that the freedom drive that abolishes slavery unsettles both colonial and decolonial forms of sovereign determination.

You should raise your soul to the following idea: we are certain, absolutely certain of what we are saying (without this being certainty in the slightest, in the sense that you habitually understand it), and at the same time, at the same instant, completely deprived of all security...-Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy [1] Afro-Pessimism is a contemporary phenomenon, some may even scoff that it is trendy, but its political and intellectual evolution is considerably longer and its ethical bearings much broader than one might expect, and there is work yet to be done regarding a genealogy of its orientation and sensibility. No individual or collective effort, of course, springs forth whole cloth and yet the controversy that has accompanied the emergence of this discourse over the better part of the past decade has suffered greatly from a refusal-on the part of most critics and too many proponents as well-to follow the old Jamesonian edict to historicize the theoretical aim and object (Herman 2003). I only note the problem here, as the development of proper context would require far more space than available at present. The vacuum-packed controversy has been surprisingly pointed as a result, and it is easy to miss the true significance thereof between the epiphanic tone of recent acquaintance and the acrimony of recurrent denunciation. [2] Some part of the pace and extent of debate about Afro-Pessimism to date is no doubt due to the proliferation of social media platforms in the same moment when the professoriate groans under the intensified administrative command to turn research into output with eventual market value (including the market value of "civic engagement"); the subsequent migration of much previously refereed scholarly commentary to these less (or differently) regulated forums in search of greater and faster measurable impact and, for better or worse, readership beyond the ken of advanced higher education; and the increased if uneven porosity of deliberations among activists, artists, educators, journalists, non-profit workers, researchers, etc. afforded by the digitization of print culture and the growing access to recordings of conference panels, public lectures, radio interviews, and the like. It is no exaggeration to say that, as a result of this convergence of global economic restructuring and technological development, there are thousands of online conversations underway across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, especially among students and young scholars, adjudicating the relative merits of Afro-Pessimism.

In what is his finest role, but also his most distressing, the legendary Sidney Poitier plays one Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective in transit from an out-of-state visit to his mother’s residence, in Norman Jewison’s Academy Award-winning 1967 film, In the Heat of the Night. The indomitable Mr. Tibbs has been commandeered by the police chief of Sparta, Mississippi, to solve the murder of Philip Colbert, a Chicago industrialist whose business plan for the development of the local economy has now been jeopardized by his untimely death. Chief Gillespie has justice on his mind, to be sure, but also the rate of unemployment of his rural working-class white constituency. Closing the case to the satisfaction of the industrialist’s widow ensures the job creation essential to the maintenance of law and order on this side of the tracks. Identifying a black perpetrator (I was about to write “suspect” but use of that term would require a presumption of innocence not afforded here) ensures that individualized disorder stays on that side of the tracks. It’s a two-for-one deal that keeps everything on track and, more importantly, keeps in place the tracks themselves: the built environment of segregation and the mythos of Jim Crow.

The camp, which is now firmly settled inside [the city], is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet.-Giorgio AgambenIn the center of late capital is the ghetto. -Donald LoweIn Means without End, the theoretical précis of his Homo Sacer tetralogy, 1 Giorgio Agamben suggests that under present conditions "we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee." 2 The proposal derives from a paramount concern to counteract the increasing institutionalization of the state of exception throughout the political-juridical order of the modern nation-states, and it is premised on an understanding of the refugee as a limit-concept, a figure that "at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed." 3 This urgent renewal of categories is made possible by the conceptual crisis of the nation-state represented by the refugee insofar as she disarticulates "the trinity of state-nation-territory" and "the very principle of the inscription of nativity" upon which it is based. 4 The refugee is the contemporary political subject par excellence because she exposes to view "the originary fiction of sovereignty" and thereby renders it available to thought.