Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

“…Instead—and this is where Moten’s engagement with Du Bois and Fanon must be closely read—Afro-pessimism situates political ontology as a reference point for understanding black social life, not as a thesis to be tested by inevitably faulty concepts (Moten 2008). It is on this point that opponents of Afro-pessimism all too often miss the nuance of its approach to the study of blackness as a prior historical and cultural racial construct by pointing out the empirical history of resistance, agency, and life of black peoples (Gordon 2018; Kauanui 2017; Thomas 2018). Indeed, Afro-pessimists would warn against conceptualizing blackness as solely the result of the actions and agency of black people.…”

Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”

“…Slavery‐as‐metaphor is the being‐of‐slavery, what Wilderson () calls its “political ontology”. Tuck and Yang’s mis‐reading of this ruse is replicated in J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s () critique of Afro‐pessimism. For Kauanui, the political‐ontological approach, which would make Blackness‐as‐slaveness immanent and essential to a violent political determination of being (rather than exogenous and contingent), is a symptom of what it means to critique: “to assert blackness as ontological is to recapitulate colonising thought, to take colonial ideology as truth” (2017:258) .…”

“…By identifying the contingency of racial slavery as “rooted in historicizing race” (2017:259), Kauanui searches for a non‐ontological Blackness. She finds it in a twist to the (by now much disputed) origin story ascribed to late 17 th century Virginia and Bacon’s Rebellion, arguing that slaves and indentured servants were not only equally (and economically) oppressed but also united in “efforts to commit genocide against indigenous peoples” (Kauanui :261) . This reading renders race an “additional pliant” (Kauanui :260) to the conquest of native lands, which is to say that slavery is internal to settler colonialism.…”

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

“…For instance, Sexton (2016) and King (2014) have both described the ways that antiblackness is "constitutive to settler colonialism" (King, 2014, p. 1) and that a critique of settler colonialism in the Americas must also critique Blackness as an abject position and antipode -specifically, one that served as a pre-condition both for settler colonialism and its ubiquitous logic of white supremacy. The historicity of such claims, as well as the ontological position of blackness expressed in some radical Black critique, has been contested (Kauanui, 2017). Regarding the notion that Black enslaved peoples constituted laborers (albeit forced ones), King (2014) has written that the notion of "fungibility," a condition particular to Black enslavement, means that the enslaved were "the conceptual and discursive fodder through which the Settler-Master could even begin to imagine or 'think' spatial expansion" (p. 3) and are thus always "outside the edge and boundary of laborer-ashuman" (p. 2).…”

“…The point here is not to "vie for exceptional status as the foundational violence of modernity," as JustinLeroy (2016) has written, but rather highlight those committed to examining the lingering antagonisms of history in our relations. 9 As a pointed example of this dynamic, seeKauanui (2017) for the danger in using a singular, historical snapshot to conclude that blackness cannot constitute an ontological position, and to undermineWilderson's (2010) claim that "Blackness is incapacity in its pure and unadulterated form" (p. 38).…”