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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book sets out to understand the ethical dimension of Black lives and deaths in the modern period. Recent events—from the brutal murder of George Floyd to the pervasive violence meted out daily on the streets of our cities—have demonstrated all too clearly the fundamental trait that shapes our contemporary moment: the Black condition is defined by indignity.
Ajari takes dignity as his starting point because dignity is what white people try to abolish in their violence toward Black people, and it is what they deprive themselves of in exerting this violence. Dignity is also what Black people collectively affirm when they rise up against white domination. When a young Black man or woman’s dignity is taken from them as the result of assault, rape, or assassination at the hands of the state, the roots of a long history of struggle, conquest, and affirmation of African humanity are exposed and shaken. Above all, dignity is the ability of the oppressed, trapped between life and death, to remain standing.
Dignity or Death offers an uncompromising critical analysis of the European philosophical tradition in order to recover the misunderstood history of radical thought in Black worlds. Slave uprisings, Negritude, radical Christian traditions in North America and South Africa, and political ontology are all steps on a long and troubled path of liberation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Toward an Afro-Decolonial Approach
An Ethic of Dignity
The bell hooks Dilemma
Chapter Summary
Notes
Part One: Dignity Re-embodied
Notes
1 Decolonizing Moral Philosophy
Premodern
Dignitas
Pico della Mirandola and the Deification of European Man
Kant: Dignity of Office and the Illusion of the Person
A Disembodied Ethics
From the Nationalization of Dignity to Ethical Conflicts
Notes
2 Indignity
Writing a Life of Indignity: An Epistemology
The Hidden Horror of Colonialism: A Memory
The Necropolitical Production of Indignity: A Critique of Power
Daily Indignity: An Existence
Notes
3 Our Dignity Is Older than Us
The Struggle of Dignity
Negritude’s Rational Core
Deep Historicity
The Indeconstructible Part of Ourselves
Notes
Part Two: Caliban the Political Theologian
4 The Universal by Accident
A Constantinian Secularism
Prospero: Political Theologian
Politics of the Particular
Dignity and Universality
Notes
5 A Theology of Black Dignity in North America
The Spirit of the Blues
The Church of Revolt
Afro-Prophetism
The Call of Dignity
Notes
6 Ubuntu: Philosophy, Religion, and Community in Black Africa
Paulin Hountondji: An Epistemological Critique of Ethnophilosophy
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga and the Hermeneutics of Muntu
Ubuntu and Loving Thy Neighbor
A Humanism Born from the Disaster
Postscript on an Irreconciled South Africa
Notes
Part Three: Forms-of-death in the European Necropolis
Notes
7 Recognition and Dignity in the Era of Global Apartheid
Recycling Disposable Lives
Fixation
The Asymmetry of Recognition
The Proposition of Sovereigndignity
Notes
Conclusion: Black Political Ontology and Black Dignity
To Be Born: Black Political Ontology
Shades of Dignity
Black Dignity
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dignity or Death
Ethics and Politics of Race
Norman Ajari
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as La dignité ou la mort. Ethique et politique de la race © Editions la Découverte, Paris, 2019
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4865-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4866-8 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936290
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
To Josiane, for the past.
To Nabile, for the present.
To Assata, for the future.
Epigraph
I looked at the moon, so full and so bright,
And then at the fireplace, with its flickering light,
And realized why this world will never be right
Then I threw another log on the fire.
The Watts Prophets, “What Is a Man” (1970)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is customary today in academic works to begin by paying tribute to one or more prestigious institutions that provided, in the form of stipends, grants, or sabbaticals, the funds, conditions, and time necessary to carry out the research for the book in the best possible conditions. This book can claim nothing of the sort. It was funded by a temporary teaching and research assistant position at the Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès and by governmental assistance in the form of unemployment compensation and, to a lesser extent, a family allowance. To aspire to the impossible profession of Black scholar or intellectual today is to all but condemn oneself to a life of precariousness and poverty. This is because, for many, this presents a contradiction in terms.
Despite these reasons for despair, I remain immensely grateful. I would like to thank Philippe Pignarre first and foremost for encouraging a young, unknown Afro-descendant to publish his first work and for his continued support throughout the various stages of bringing this unlikely endeavor to fruition. Throughout the writing process, his generosity and respect remained genuine and unwavering. It is a great honor not only to be published by La Découverte, but in their collection Les empêcheurs de penser en rond [Preventers of Stultified Thought], which, belying the colonial myth of modernity, has paved the path for new theories to emerge. I’d also like to thank the first readers of early drafts of various parts of this manuscript: Lou Hanna Baerenzung, Julien Hammann, Marianne Koplewicz, Isabelle Stengers, Gábor Tverdota. If, as the saying goes, any errors in this book are my sole responsibility, there is no question that the meticulous attention of these readers prevented what could have been many more.
One’s first work of philosophy is the achievement of a long intellectual journey. I would like to pay tribute to my teachers, mentors, and colleagues, as well as various collective bodies, who taught me valuable lessons when I had so much to learn, who guided my early research and enriched my journey with invaluable advice and much-needed objections: Étienne Balibar, Hourya Bentouhami, Alain Brossat, Grégory Cormann, Tommy J. Curry, Elsa Dorlin, Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga, Arnaud François, Tristan Garcia, Kelly Gillespie, Jean-Christophe Goddard, Benoît Goetz, Lewis R. Gordon, Cleber Daniel Lambert da Silva, Vincent Lloyd, Marc Maesschalck, Mehdi Meftah, Matthieu Renault, Jean-Paul Resweber, Camille Riquier, Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Lukas K. Sosoé, Joëlle Strauser, the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie, the Bruxelles Panthères, the Fondation Frantz Fanon, and the Parti des Indigènes de la République.
I would also like to thank those who hosted me or invited me to present early drafts of chapters of this book at various colloquia, conferences, and political or social events: Kader Attia, Manuela Bojadzijev, Claude Bourguignon, Fabio Bruschi, Florence Caeymaex, Maxime Cervulle, Philippe Colin, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, Paul Mvengu Cruz Merino, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Momchil Hristov, Katrin Klingan, Sébastien Laoureux, Sébastien Lefèvre, Lenita Perrier, Geoffrey Pleyers, Nordine Saidi, Enrique Sanchez Albarracín, Patricia Verdeau, Françoise Vergès, the association Toit du monde, the team at Paroles d’Honneur, the Société Toulousaine de Philosophie, the Toulouse chapter of La Ligue Panafricaine Umoja. I’d also like to thank the students at the Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès for their suggestions and interest in my work. They were the first to hear many of this book’s initial ideas.
During the time it took me to write this, I was supported by my family and friends in countless ways. A warm thanks to Henry Ajari, Azzédine Badis, Julienne Bonifacj, Stéphane Cato, Joëlle Greff, Lukas Held, Étienne Oriez, Jean-Michel Rongemaille, Josiane Rongemaille, Marguerite Rongemaille.
The family has been a familiar target of French philosophy over the past century. One thing that is often missed is that for those who are demeaned by a racist society and rejected by the job market—for days, weeks, months—one’s family becomes the only reason to continue living. This is why I owe my deepest gratitude to Nabila Hamici. I can’t put into words the joy she inspires, the value of her advice and unfailing moral and material support in face of the difficulties and injustices of this precarious life we share. As much as all the others combined, she made this book possible. Finally, for her existence, which now constitutes the essence of ours, I dedicate this work to our little baby Assata.
INTRODUCTION
Like everything born of the Black condition, this book is the progeny of love and despair: love for my own people and a despair bordering on recklessness. This division is present throughout the book, which is pulled in one direction by modernity’s pervasive anti-Blackness and in the other by the unbounded joy of my daughter’s laugh. Philosophy will likely never grasp on a conceptual level the intensity of this division. Frantz Fanon, who came as close as anyone to describing it in Black Skin, White Masks, struggled to settle on the right metaphor: “The Martinican is a crucified man. The milieu that shaped him (but which he didn’t shape) has brutally divided him, and he nurtures this cultural milieu with his blood and humors. The blood of a black man, however, is a fertilizer much appreciated by the experts.”1Dignity or Death sets out to understand, to the extent that understanding is possible, the ethical dimension of Black lives and deaths in the modern period. It is fueled by its political moment, defined by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States; the global mobilization against anti-Black racism in particular and state violence in general, as seen in the international response to George Floyd’s murder; the formation of a radical politics of antiracism and decolonization; the Global North’s increasingly vile treatment of exiles forced to flee the ravages of imperialism; and the widespread societal neglect of Black proletariats and lumpenproletariats. While this work doesn’t directly take on these overlapping issues, it arose from the same underlying urgency and diagnosis that shapes our contemporary moment: the Black condition is defined today by indignity.
The rise of identity politics and the politics of representation over the past few decades has hardly prepared us for the challenges we are confronting. Whether promoting integration into Western societies or re-embracing African identities, identity politics rose to prominence while neglecting central matters of life and death that are now impossible to ignore. A key argument of this book is that there is a Black condition and a Black history unique to the modern period that is common both to Africa and its diasporas. This condition and history are defined by the political and social violence that disproportionately affects Black people, and by the constant need, in response, to invent strategies of survival in face of this structural violence. Across a variety of cultures, national distinctions, and identity affiliations, there is a shared condition, which can be described as life contaminated by death. The re-emergence of the “Black question” coincides with the decline of a certain phase of critical theory propelled by a radical anti-essentialism. This position is best represented by postwar French philosophy (emblematized by the holy trinity of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). It was further developed by a variety of theoretical interventions categorized, within the globalized university, as “poststructuralism,” “deconstruction,” or “postmodernity.” This book springs from the conviction that this phase in philosophy, instrumental as it has been for contemporary thought, can no longer respond to the urgent need to rethink the concept of finitude posed by Black death.
In October 2016, Sébastien Chauvin, a sociologist who teaches at the University of Lausanne, sent me an email in which he characterized my work—while it was still in its early stages—as a “post-constructivist ontology.”2 I am reluctant to use this novel term myself. The prefix post- is, in my mind, too bound up with the philosophic tradition we should finally move past. And yet, perhaps no term gets to the heart of the matter better than this one does, which is why it has stuck with me. The notion of a post-constructivist ontology offers, in nuce, a lucid diagnosis of the present state of the human sciences. The academic posturing of radical philosophy or sociology is far too often mired in hackneyed banalities and flashy explanations concerning the social construction of race, focusing on the performativity of race or its problematic history. Against a backdrop of bodies beaten and battered, corpses washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean like abandoned rafts, and countless cases of rape and humiliation, the unabashed constructivism of this type of discourse betrays a form of magical thinking, at best, and, at worst, a perverse fetishization of a failed conceptual framework. Rather than offer a more precise understanding of our moment, this kind of theory stands between the world and thought, pointing to the smoke of the fire of violence raging before us to indicate what sparked it.
We have all grown weary of the endless reminders that there is no biological basis to race. The sociologists and activists who never cease to remind us of this believe they are conjuring away the demon of xenophobia. This mantra is at once inconsequential and misleading. Inconsequential, on the one hand, because those who promote this idea stake their political position on a biological science they know little about, except that the concept of race lacks biological proof. Meanwhile, studies are being conducted to create new taxonomies of human races. If these theories someday manage to garner a scientific consensus, what will become of an antiracism built solely on the blind faith of a poorly grasped science, especially if this antiracism remains devoid of an ethical and political framework? Instead of being at the whims of an unsound biological understanding of race and the temporary half-truths of any given science, a critical theory of race of any consequence won’t place at the center of its political program a discovery based on statistical patterns. A critical theory of race isn’t a matter of biological anthropology since it doesn’t concern facts. It is first and foremost a question of values. The mantra of race being a pure social construct—which culminates in the bizarre fetish of putting the words race, Black, or white in scare quotes—is also misleading in that, in spite of this incessant warning issued from French social scientists, these same scholars are no better equipped to fend off the pernicious effects of such dubious terms. Quite the opposite: the ostensible dismissal of these notions shows just how entrenched they remain in the public imaginary, especially in studies that cast themselves as objective and impartial. Never are such warnings issued around notions of gender, class, or even sex. Numerous scholars and activists act as though the words race, white, and Black were charged with a malevolent yet irresistible aura, which only the precautions they heed in their speech and writing can keep at bay. Their retreat into an anti-Black epistemology in which words are infused with illusory obscenities is thus understood as mere methodological prudence. The bad faith behind these avoidance strategies attests to an unspoken belief in Black abjection, which appears most pointedly in their very critiques of racism.
It is state violence and global structural inequality that produce race, not the discipline of sociology. It is death and dehumanization that produce Black people, not an “essentializing” discourse. Dignity or Death offers a philosophical approach to Black experience that breaks with this counterproductive posturing. I am striving for a theoretical approach that is sharp and solid, like the blade of a machete. This book is informed by two philosophical traditions: decolonial thought and politics, on the one hand, and, on the other, Africana philosophy (the intellectual traditions emerging out of Africa and its diaspora). Both of these perspectives spring from a renewed interest in the neglected but invaluable work of slaves, the oppressed, the colonized. I am calling this hybrid approach Afro-decolonial.
Toward an Afro-Decolonial Approach
Before being debated in academic institutions across the world, the notion of “the decolonial” was developed by an interdisciplinary group of critical theorists known as “Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality” (MCD) in 1998.3 The main argument advanced by this group of Latin American and Caribbean theorists was that colonial violence is not some negative externality of a modern project considered in its totality as emancipatory, but that it is integral to its very operation. Building on this argument, the principal contribution of the MCD group is its development of a new philosophy of history, whose central focus is modernity or, to be more precise, what many have called the dark side of modernity. According to the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, this didn’t begin with the Enlightenment or with the Industrial Revolution. It started in 1492 with the so-called discovery of the Americas. Dussel argues that this conquest marks the beginning of both European consciousness and of modernity. Viewed thus, the notion of modernity refers to Europe’s self-designation as the center, with the rest of the world its periphery. “In this violent relationship the conqueror was pitted against the conquered, advanced military technology against an underdeveloped one. At this beginning of modernity, the European ego experienced a quasi-divine superiority over the primitive, rustic, inferior Other.”4
Modern Europe’s supposed ontological superiority was reinforced and refined during the Valladolid debate of 1550, during which non-European and non-Christian modes of existence, forms of living, and manners of thinking were methodically delegitimized. It was here that the Aristotelian philosopher Juan Genés de Sepúlveda debated with the bishop and theologian Bartholomé de las Casas over the conditions of colonization in the Americas. Underlying this larger question was another one concerning the nature of American Indians.5 The positions of both parties are well known: Sepúlveda, a strong proponent for maintaining a strict hierarchy, held that there was an insurmountable division between the two peoples. Las Casas, for his part, anticipating the myth of the “Noble Savage” à la Diderot, advocated for a less aggressive conversion of the indigenous population, whose stable and frugal lifestyle he admired. Dussel holds up Las Casas as the apostle of persuasive reason, one that recognizes the dignity of indigenous cultures and is committed to the belief that a nonviolent model of integration is only possible through rational argument.
Another member of the MCD group, the Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Madonado Torres, approaches the Valladolid affair from a different angle, viewing it as a display of “misanthropic skepticism.”6 Indeed, criticizing Sepúlveda’s obsession with hierarchy by comparing it to Las Casas’s generous reasoning is misguided. The more pressing and problematic issue is the conceptual framework they both rely on. More than a mere doctrine, then, this concerns the very structure of an emergent modern thought, which is contingent upon the sovereign and supposedly neutral assessment of rational jurors. This is presented as a sort of subjective soliloquy where the testimony of “those concerned,” which is to say the Indians, is ignored, and where the grievances of the victims are dismissed if they aren’t expressed in the respectable idioms of the white man’s theology and philosophy. The notion of misanthropic skepticism argues then that the act of bracketing the Indians’ humanity is no less cruel than Sepúlveda’s explicit accusations of savagery. Instead, the two go hand in hand.
According to the MCD group, rationalization, secularization, and other synonyms of progress represent only one side of modernity. Its other side, its dark side, shows how these so-called advances are inextricably tied to the exploitation, expropriation, and dehumanization of non-Europeans. But the image modernists project of themselves neglects this reality. Denouncing savagery is integral to its value system, as can be seen in Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel.
Yet this notion of savagery rests on a fundamental ambivalence: it can at once refer to the arbitrary violence of an iniquitous sovereign and to foreign ways of living, which, seen as exotic and uncivilized, naturally elicit disdain. The ambiguous condemnation of savagery isn’t an accident or a regrettable excess of modernity, but a direct consequence of its emancipatory vision. Make no mistake, modernity harbors the potential for liberation, and the notions of freedom and individuality shouldn’t be entirely abandoned. But the use they have been put to raises many questions. Separating the wheat of liberation from the chaff of colonization within modern thought proves difficult. And let’s not forget that it was the work of slaves that gave their masters leisure time to devote to philosophy: the former makes the latter possible. Similarly, the European ideal of emancipation is defined against a denunciation of the savagery of Amerindians and Africans.
However, as Lewis Gordon has argued, if the decolonial perspective has brought to light the dark side of modernity, it has failed to acknowledge the position that Africa and Africans have occupied—and continue to occupy—in relation to it. Dussel’s panegyric of Las Casas is a telling case in point. His account makes no mention of the role the latter’s History of the Indies played as early as 1517 in encouraging the Spanish Crown to use the labor of Black slaves in its American colonies.7 A half a century before 1492, the date that supposedly ushered in modernity, Prince Henry the Navigator created the first market of Black slaves.8 Whereas the humanity—or lack thereof—of the Indians called for a so-called rational debate at Valladolid, the enslavement of Black people raised no moral scruples among European intellectuals before the eighteenth century. In their view, Black abjection seemed, all other things being equal, entirely natural.9 The Afro-decolonial perspective I am adopting here will place this long history of dehumanizing violence against Black humanity—a history that undergirds modernity—at the center of an ethical approach inspired by Africana philosophy.
The notion of internal colonialism exercised over the people of the African diaspora in the Americas is well known.10 It draws an explicit analogy between the fate of native populations conquered by European empires and the descendants of slaves subjected to racial segregation. But if we acknowledge that racial slavery predates the Conquest of the Americas and that it was a driving force in the emergence of modern Europe, we are forced to consider this the other way around. It may be that conquering, commodifying, exploiting, and dehumanizing the Black body constitute the fons et origo of coloniality. Kwame Ture’s and Charles Hamilton’s description of colonialism as the dispossession of political power and agency in their classic work on Black power is what has defined modernity at its outset and what has best withstood the vicissitudes of time.11 Indeed, 600 years after the Portuguese established the first slave market, Black life is still seen as without value on a global scale. This is why the Afro-decolonial approach I am advancing here hinges on the ontological question of Black being.12 This approach demonstrates that, in the modern period, as decolonial philosophy has shown, the definition of the human being is not self-evident.
An Ethic of Dignity
The ethical stance of Dignity or Death has been shaped by the experience and reality of dehumanization. In turning to the venerable notion of ethics, I am not referring to the observation of moral laws, as modern philosophy defined ethics,13 nor to the fashioning of one’s own subjectivity, as it is often construed by contemporary philosophy.14 Obeying laws and self-fashioning are only possible once the constant threat to one’s existence is contained. For an Afro-decolonial approach, acutely aware of modern history and its constant abuse of the bodies of slaves and the colonized, ethics confronts the deliberate division between humanity and its outcasts. As the theologian of Black liberation James H. Cone, whose work will be explored at length in a later chapter, has explained:
Resistance was the ability to create beauty and worth out of the ugliness of slave existence. Resistance made dignity more than just a word to be analyzed philosophically. Dignity was a reality that could only be dug out of the shit of the white environment; and it was based on the slaves’ relationship with their black brothers and sisters. White people achieved what they called dignity by their enslavement of black Africans; they measured their importance by the number of Africans they enslaved.15
In Cone’s argument, the term dignity, the cornerstone of ethics, takes on two distinct but related meanings. The first is the primordial notion of political ontology which draws a line between the human and the nonhuman. In this understanding, knowing who possesses dignity amounts to knowing who is taken to be authentically human. The second understanding, which is derived from the first, is made explicit by the politicized demands for dignity. These demands stem from the lived and embodied experience of one’s own humanity, as well as that of the marginalized group one is consigned to. Politics, in the sense of political engagement, is a constitutive part of a Black ethics. Dignity is part of the conceptual arsenal of an engaged politics. It is an expression of the radical demands such a politics makes bearing on the human condition itself. As the theologian Vincent Lloyd reminds us, dignity has played a major role in the history of Black social activism in the United States. It is at the center of the philosophy of figures as diverse as Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King Jr.16
Lloyd shows that the notion of Black dignity transcends the conventional boundaries of political thought and is taken up by movements widely perceived as moderate as well as by a more radical Black tradition. Indeed, it appears in the concluding remarks of an unsparing editorial published by the Black Panther Party’s leading press organ: “No! The Black Panther Black Community News Service, is not an ordinary newspaper. It is the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears of our people. It is a continuation of the story of the middle passage, of Denmark Vesey, of Nat Turner, of Harriet Tubman, of Malcolm X, and countless other oppressed people who put freedom and dignity beyond personal gain.”17 Here, the demand for dignity draws on a deeper history, rewritten by suffering and revolt, as proof of the possibility of freedom precisely where nothing seems to support it. In the manifesto that opens his work Revolutionary Suicide, the co-founder of the party, Huey Newton, even makes dignity the defining feature of every revolutionary, declaring that what matters is to live “with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have.”18 For Newton, dignity means taking action to dismantle the present order, and that action begins from the social death imposed on Black America. Dignity makes revolutionary action a natural extension of the widespread misery and despair that characterize Blackness. As Lloyd has shown, even today the notion of dignity is central to any mobilization in support of Black lives.19
The frequent appearance of the same term throughout a variety of distinct but similar circumstances seems more than just a lexical coincidence. It points to a shared existential sensibility, born of the necessity of confronting violence. The origin of this book springs from my conviction that when the word dignity resounds in the streets, chanted by protesters fed up with police violence, when it is wielded by activists moved to lift up a trampled humanity, it takes on a meaning that it has never held within traditional European philosophy and political discourse. Speaking from the margins of humanity, the Afro-decolonial point of view makes it possible to ask in radical terms what it means to be human. The meaning of dignity considered from this position stands in stark contrast to the definition given by European philosophers who never questioned their belonging to a glorious humanity. One of the principal objectives of Afro-decolonial thought is to make visible the limitations of European thought, ethics, and politics.
In the past decade, countless social movements throughout the world have used indignation as a rallying cry. “Indignation from the experience of these frustrations, from the lack of respect and from the feeling of not being heard has turned into an affirmation of dignity in many protests and uprisings. It is at once a personal affirmation, a demand to be acknowledged by institutional powers and to be heard by governments.”20 One of the goals of Dignity or Death is to show that dignity takes on a new urgency in the context of the history of dehumanization where the oppressed are routinely denied a voice. My aim is to complicate, and thereby complement, European genealogies of dignity, which have deemed it—despite its oppositional or paradoxical nature—constitutive of liberal democracy.
The bell hooks Dilemma
In today’s universities the most significant Black mass movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from both conceptual and organizational standpoints—are given marginal treatment, especially in philosophy departments.21 For all their differences, Black nationalism, Panafricanism, and the Back-to-Africa movement have mobilized millions of Black activists throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and beyond. But research affiliated with Black studies, Africana studies, and African American studies in no way reflects the centrality of these movements in the political and intellectual history of the African diaspora. These movements are confined to the periphery, while debates focus on the finer points of Black feminism, cultural studies, queer studies, and other trends heavily influenced by continental philosophy, most notably postwar French thought.
To understand the reason for this state of affairs, it is worth turning to a work that has done much to shape the field of Black studies. Bell hooks’s first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, opens with a dilemma posed by the cumulative pressure suffered under racial and gender oppression. The Black woman is presented as a victim of both sexism and anti-Blackness. This dilemma, which has afflicted Black women since the nineteenth century, is expressed by the following alternative: “to choose between a black movement that primarily served the interests of black male patriarchs and a women’s movement which primarily served the interests of racist white women.”22 This clear pathologizing of Black men, who are described as atavistic phallocrats, is not unlike other types of racist anthropology,23 but this is not my main point of contention. The bigger concern is that hooks’s parallel between sexist Black men and white racist women doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Indeed, while she rejects outright the political legacy of Black radicalism from the mid-twentieth century (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, etc.) for its inherent misogyny, she refrains from condemning feminist politics for its inherent racism, despite the overwhelming proof that early women’s rights activists didn’t directly target the patriarchy, nor did they resist taking part in the mission civilisatrice alongside white men as they subjugated Black, Native American, or Muslim “predators.”24 Hooks delegitimizes the political heritage of African Americans while absolving feminism of its racist history. Whereas the Black project was inherently misogynistic, the racism of the feminist project was merely incidental, which allows hooks to embrace it as the core of her political and social project: “Although the focus is on the black female, our struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.”25 While, from hooks’s perspective, an independent Black political movement seems to pose a threat to women, feminism is seen only as a positive force for the larger society.
Thus, the bell hooks dilemma, which pits a politics of Blackness against a feminist politics—a seemingly Cornellian position—manages to find an unambiguous solution: “Radical groups of women continue our commitment to building sisterhood, to making feminist political solidarity between women an ongoing reality. We continue the work of bonding across race and class.”26 For hooks, neither class nor race pose any obstacle to sisterhood or to the formation of a uniform feminine political subject. In the context of what I am trying to achieve here, the problem with this strategy is less a matter of making feminism and sisterhood the cornerstones of solidarity and of a larger political movement. The problem lies with the doubt it casts on any affirmative conception of race in general and of Blackness in particular. Forging solidarity through sisterhood at the expense of everything else assumes that race and class can be transcended, a dangerous illusion which the radical Black tradition has repeatedly cautioned against. Throughout hooks’s writing one finds the same refrain, namely, the idea that “black nationalism is more a gesture of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance.”27 This delegitimization of Black nationalism and, by extension, the major tenets of African and diasporic political thinking, has become the doxa in Africana studies. Not only is hooks’s false dilemma, which casts Black men as irremediably sexists and white women as only superficially racists, rarely criticized, but it is also always resolved in the same way: by minimizing the Black archive.
This intellectual attitude which unthinkingly accepts that racial subjugation is an inessential dimension of reality, a mere social construct that can be overcome, is also what allowed European philosophy to occupy a preponderant place in the study of Black life. As the political thinkers Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Harry Haywood, Kwame Nkrumah, or Patrice Lumumba have been all but forgotten, Foucault, Lacan or Derrida stand in place of Black voices or, for the more radically inclined, a superficial and tone-deaf Marxism is adopted over a century and a half of Black criticism. Our intellectual moment is so caught up in its own illusions that an attack leveled against Black nationalism such as that found in Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump can come across as an iconoclastic critique of identity politics. In reality, this book simply rehashes a fashionable post-structuralist identity constructivism, sprinkled with Marxism for good measure, whose heroes are Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, and Stuart Hall. The routine apology of hybridity, creolization, and anti-essentialism, which is the lingua franca of the progressive humanities and NGOs, is used to criticize of the heritage of Black nationalism, which is caricatured as an ideology for elites.28 As a result, organizing large masses of people around a common cause, which far exceeds any achievements made by the white left in the United States,29 is written off. Forgotten too is the repression of the Black liberation movement, which was proportionate to the threat it posed to America as well as Africa.
Not only is the archive of Black activism neglected, but fighting for its neglect is seen as a radical and audacious act. Attacking Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, even the Black radical tradition as sexist, backward, bourgeois, even racist, has become one of the most widespread, predictable, and unchallenged forms of iconoclasm in the Anglophone university. In response, the Afro-decolonial critique of dominant trends of social philosophy and contemporary political theory figures prominently in this book. I have tried to approach each work in good faith, seeking answers to questions that have plagued me from my position within the Black condition: racism, the history of colonialism and slavery, social death. I had to face the facts. It wasn’t a matter of white authors avoiding these problems. It was the fact that they spoke about them as if in spite of themselves, while grossly misrepresenting them in the process. The colonized, and especially Black life, are rarely studied in and of themselves in contemporary critical theory, and never without some ulterior motive. They are the collateral victims of arguments that treat them, at best, as supporting actors and, at worst, as mere extras meant to fill space in a historical narrative, appearing here and there in order to prove a minor point or provide local color. This is something I first lived, then considered on a conceptual level, and, finally, theorized.
Pan-Africanism, Black nationalism and the radical tradition tied to the African diaspora will, at some point, rise again to prominence in intellectual debates and political movements. But an indispensable first step will require what Frank Wilderson has described as metatheory: the questioning of “the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic.”30 The notion of dignity offers in this respect an exemplary arena for this questioning. Dignity of Death shows how this concept—one of the most universal in the history of European philosophy—has been used throughout Black history to provide a systematic justification of the specificity of Africans fighting against oppression. Throughout this work, key trends of contemporary continental philosophy will be examined from an avowedly Black perspective. Subjecting continental philosophy to this kind of scrutiny is the first act in freeing Africana thought from its yoke.
Frantz Fanon, like many writers from the radical Black tradition, had to fight for his place within the ranks of philosophy. In Black Skin, White Masks, he spars with Sartre and Hegel, takes on Octave Mannoni, René Maran, and Mayotte Capécia, tangles with Adler and Freud. This is because there is no place for Blacks in the realm of the intellect; they must force their way in. As much as I value the contributions of postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists and their use of post-Lacanian or deconstructionist philosophical paradigms, and as much as their work has inspired and made possible my own, my work sets out in a different direction. As Lewis Gordon has argued, to prove their theoretical value regarding the Black condition, one must first ask what relations these theories have with racism and coloniality, which is to say, these theories must first pass through the scrutiny of Black critical theory.31 It isn’t a matter here of ostracizing or dismissing European philosophy, but rather of learning to read it with our own eyes, our own bodies and intelligence. As Fanon wrote in his thesis in medicine: “philosophy [is] the risk that the mind takes to assume its dignity.”32
Chapter Summary
The first chapter, “Decolonizing Moral Philosophy,” seeks to identify the main tenets of the dominant understanding of dignity. To this end, a brief critical history of dignity in the thought of a few major figures in European philosophy—Pico della Mirandola, Kant, and Habermas—is sketched. My aim is to show how the problem of racial dehumanization is not only neglected in definitions of dignity but how, by their very design, these definitions can never directly confront this problem, thereby only further exacerbating it. Consider Pico della Mirandola, whose conception of human dignity, for example, is based on the complementary notions of autonomy (i.e., man’s ability to establish laws outside of all dependencies) and the power of appropriation. One won’t fail to recognize here the ego conquiro, the conquering mentality of a burgeoning colonial Europe.33 Kantian ethics can be understood as an attempt to rein in this approach by subjecting autonomous and appropriating individuals to the rational rules of morality in order to limit the reach of their power. However, a careful examination of Kant’s writing from the angle of race reveals that Black people are held as an exception to these rules. They are beings the moral law is incapable of protecting, those who force it to be re-evaluated. The chapter closes with a discussion of how this moral philosophy, unknowingly based on a colonial epistemology, gets inscribed and constitutionalized in the founding laws of European nation states. No matter how much one insists that dignity is what defines the human, the question remains as to whether these nation states, these institutions that police borders and citizenship, can be considered legitimate guardians of this supposed universal concept. History would suggest otherwise.
Starting from the premise that dignity is defined against negative social experiences, especially that of violence, the second chapter, “Indignity,” interrogates the lived experience of race and the politics that produce it. Arendt, Foucault, and their successors tied to “Italian theory,”34 analyzed racism’s role in the construction of modernity. In their influential accounts of this political history, they contend, more or less explicitly, that race is a construct founded on violence. Their argument takes the Nazi genocide as its paradigm. This decision has two major consequences: the first is that extreme racial dehumanization is shown to arrive late in European history; the second is that extermination appears as its most essential and characteristic form. The aim of this chapter is to show how shifting the paradigm to center on the slave trade and slavery has significant theoretical consequences for thinking through dehumanization. Indeed, these events, which ushered in modernity, represent a form of destruction of life that doesn’t take the form of genocide, but instead work by systematically depriving human life of what makes it worth living, in other words, by depriving it of its dignity. I am calling this destruction of life a form-of-death. In so doing, I am deliberately drawing on Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, whose understanding of state-sponsored death closely aligns with what Italian philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben or Roberto Esposito have called “thanatopolitics.” But it seems to me more apt to apply the term necropolitics to the blurring of the distinction between life and death. This results in a form-of-death, like the counterpart of the daily life of white people under capitalism, characterized by a seemingly endless series of setbacks, aggressions, and prohibitions that “necrose” existence and provoke a loss of faith in the world.
The third chapter, “Our Dignity Is Older than We Are,” frames dignity as a necessary response to the necropolitical attack on Black existence. However, although dignity is produced as a powerful negation, it isn’t empty of content. It isn’t what post-Lacanian political theorists call a “floating” or “empty” signifier. Rather, it is a product of history or, more accurately, an overlapping set of histories bound to the Afro-descendant condition. For the oppressed, dignity signifies entering the realm of politics on their own terms, which implies questioning the very livability of life. Dignity appears then as an effort to live an authentically human life, while recognizing and claiming as one’s own the history of this effort. A striking example of this will be discussed with the Negritude movement and its deliberate renewal of the intellectual, political, and artistic legacies of Africa and its diaspora. In contrast with the “outmoded” argument made by Sartre and Fanon about Negritude, I will discuss the importance of its theoretical gesture, which goes beyond simply reclaiming or forging a new identity; it consists rather in the critique it makes against the colonial West from an exterior position. In solidarity with this effort, I am reclaiming the much-disparaged idea of essentialism through what I am calling a deep historicity. To accomplish this, I draw a clear distinction between essence (understood as a memory and bundle of lived affiliations) and norms (the modalities of social and political constraints which make possible their implementation). This analysis calls attention to the political and ethical limits of an anti-essentialism obsessively advanced by deconstructivists: the dignity of the oppressed, as a historical phenomenon, will be defined as an indeconstructible part of their existence.
The fourth chapter, “Accidental Universalism,” offers a critique of contemporary universalist doctrines by examining their relation to political theology. For all their differences, we will see what philosophical discourses on secularism have in common, namely, a post-deconstructivist longing to restore the universal, as attested to by theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and, in less obvious ways, Étienne Balibar. These philosophical positions depend on a narrow understanding of the relation between politics and theology, summed up in the facile contrast between particular identity markers deemed by their very nature reactionary or regressive and the saving universality of a political subject. For some, the subject is figuratively embodied by the state; for others, by revolution. But all devalue the role of the particular. The main contention of this chapter is that critical theory would be better served if it stopped unquestioningly privileging the universal at the expense of the particular. A rich history of radical uses of Christianity in Black thought and action makes a compelling case for an alternative approach.
The fifth chapter, “A Theology of Black Dignity in North America,” presents an ethics of dignity as practiced by a politically active religious tradition. This ethics is shown through the prism of the work of the late James Cone. Contrary to popular opinion, Black people were not converted to Christianity through a brazen act of brainwashing. Their adoption of this religion wasn’t a passive endeavor at all. Nor did it fill a spiritual void. The Black church became a privileged site of assembly, action, and creation—rather than of pure and simple alienation—where critical thinking was fostered. At the end of the 1960s, when Cone put forth his new revolutionary theology, he was able to build on this legacy, which framed the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in a new perspective. This chapter gives special attention to the practice and thought of prophetism, understood as a radical democratic discourse and a privileged vector of Black dignity.
Debates over the existence of an “African philosophy” that animated the global Black agora of the mid–twentieth century35 set the stage for the sixth chapter, “Ubuntu: Philosophy, Religion, and Community in Black Africa.” Rather than dwell on the most pronounced matter of these debates, namely, the opposition between an ethnophilosophy that accorded an ontological dimension to African linguistic structures, and a critical school that lambasted this approach, the focus here will be on the quarrels that divided the critical school. This chapter will thus set the positivism at play in the work of the young Paulin Hountondji against the existential and hermeneutical approach of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga. I will show how Boulaga’s approach prefigured Desmond Tutu’s liberation theology and his reinterpretation of the Bantu concept of ubuntu, which, among other things, is synonymous with human dignity. This parallel provokes a shift in the meaning of dignity, as it ascribes it to a collective being rather an individual. And let’s not forget the role ubuntu played in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end of the 1990s during the post-apartheid transition, a point that will be explored further in this chapter. What emerges through this exploration of South African thought is a conception of dignity that foregrounds ethical reparation and is attentive to human finitude and vulnerability in the face of extreme conditions.
The seventh chapter, “Recognition and Dignity in the Era of Global Apartheid,” begins with a reflection on the so-called migrant crisis in contemporary Europe. I offer here an uncompromising assessment of the status quo, focusing in particular on the production of expendable lives that goes hand in hand with European immigration policies and the instrumentalization of state violence, which is deliberately intensified as a strategy of deterrence. But this chapter will also explore deeper issues at stake in this crisis, such as the multicultural politics of recognition, long held up by the liberal left as an effective way of combatting racist asylum policies. I will turn to the work of the German philosopher Axel Honneth to illustrate the latent coloniality in this ideal of recognition. Whereas Honneth never doubts the benefits of recognition, Frantz Fanon had a much more nuanced understanding of the problem, showing that there are, indeed, many shades of recognition. To be clear, recognition often does entail valuing the life of the individual; but, more frequently, it legitimizes the alienation and subjugation of the individual by making the end goal integration into a colonial society. Fanon saw recognition as a corollary to dignity. In other words, authentic recognition stems from the oppressed laying claim to dignity on their own terms, which forces the dominant society to break with its traditional models of recognition. This chapter will also call attention to the driving force of displacement, which is above all imperialism and the coloniality of power. Fanon sees a direct relation between dignity and sovereignty, revealing how a strict line drawn between humanity and inhumanity underlies dominant normative definitions of human dignity. Today’s migrant problem isn’t only a matter of an accelerating necropolitics within host countries; it reflects above all the long history of dismantling African sovereignties.
It is hardly surprising that the current of Black thought that has elicited the biggest international response—met at once with fervent interest and fierce resistance—goes by the name “Afropessimism.” Despite debates over the marketing of a school of thought with sometimes deliberately pithy and provocative claims,36 I am convinced that its success stems from its resonance with the lived experience of young Black people in the twenty-first century. “Afropessimism” provides a vocabulary to express our lack of trust in the world, our structural inability to project ourselves into the future, our endemic precariousness. The philosopher Calvin Warren sums it up clearly: the slave trade, its “violence, transport, and rituals of humiliation and terror,”37 is what transforms African existence into Black being, which is deprived of ontological status, negated. Henceforth, Black life becomes the abject pillar of a symbolic order against which all other identities will be defined, a sort of backdrop of absolute ontological ignominy serving solely as a point of contrast. “The world needed a being that would bear the unbearable and live the unlivable; a being that would exist within the interstice of death and life and straddle Nothing and Infinity. The being invented to embody black as nothing is the Negro.”38 The aim of the eighth and final chapter, “Black Political Ontology and Black Dignity,” which recapitulates the principal arguments of this book, is twofold. Despite some recent and relevant criticisms of the paradigm of Afropessimism, there remains a core concept, which has been immune from attack and which is worth spelling out: the idea of a Black political ontology. This is the first goal, which is directly related to a fundamental question concerning political ontology: namely, what does it mean to be born into a world of Black dehumanization? To answer this, Afropessimism’s use of the notion of “social death,” originating in Orlando Patterson—who in turn borrowed the term from Claude Meillassoux—must be re-examined. The concept of Black dignity, which expresses an ethical and political need to defy the negation of Black being, has been able to draw its strength from the form-of-death itself. I will illustrate this by defending the racial dimension—routinely left out or played down by the conventional left—of the riot, a political expression of necessity at its purest. Finally, Black dignity will be defined by its ability to occupy the space between death and life, which is to say, to welcome the obscure ghosts of the past. Afropessimism argues that Black life emerged out of the calamitous destruction of the African wrought by slavery and colonialism. This diagnosis of the “usurpation of subjectivity, of life, of being”39 is often countered by pointing to the persistence of certain singular traditions and practices surviving the diaspora and postcolonial Africa. My argument marks a departure from both of these positions. It is the relationship itself to this destruction that defines Africanness. This is what Black dignity implies. The Africanness of the Black diaspora is neither a treasure forever lost, nor what may have survived ontological obliteration. It resides in its unique and singular way of experiencing the catastrophe, of living and engaging with it.
As I make clear in the final chapter, I find the most flawed argument of Afropessimism to be its insistence on the absolute unity of Black suffering. I think it is misguided to speak of the abject structural position of Black people as representing an absolute singularity or unprecedented intensity in modern ontology and history. I hold the Black experience of violence to be absolutely comparable. In other words, Black life’s unceasing exposure to every order of social and political violence is precisely what makes it generalizable. It is what allows us to consider it in relation to a totality. A key argument of Dignity or Death is that only scrupulous attention to individual experience can lead to action or utterances that can be generalized. I hope this book will lead to multiple confrontations and encounters between singularities, for it is these encounters that serve as a prelude to ethical liberation and to the development of a new politics of necessity.
Notes
1
Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 190. Translation modified.
2
For him, this term refers above all to work done in the social sciences and to the “ontological turn” in contemporary anthropology, as can be seen in the work of Amade M’Charek, Annemarie Mol, or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
3
Walter D. Mignolo,
La Désobéissance épistémique. Rhétorique de la modernité, logique de la colonialité et grammaire de la décolonialité
, trans. Yasmine & Marc Maesschalck (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2015), 27.
4
Enrique Dussel,
The Invention of the Americas
, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), 41–42.
5
Tzvetan Todorov,
The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other
, trans. Richard Howard (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
6
Nelson Maldonado Torres,
Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
7
Lewis R. Gordon,
An Introduction to Africana Philosophy
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 29.
8
Joaquim Romero Magalhäes, “Africans, Indians, and Slavery in Portugal,”
Portuguese Studies
, vol. 13, 1997, 143.
9
Frank B. Wilderson,
Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
10
Charles Pinderhughes, “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism,”
Socialism and Democracy
, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, 235–256.
11
Kwame Ture & Charles Hamilton V.,
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
(New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
12
Calvin L. Warren,
Ontological Terror. Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 26–27.
13
Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” in
Practical Philosophy (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)
, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
14
Michel Foucault,
History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self
, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Judith Butler,
Giving an Account of Oneself
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
15
James H. Cone,
The Spirituals and the Blues
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 27–28. Cone’s emphasis.
16
Vincent Lloyd, “Black Dignity,”
Cross Currents
, vol. 28, no. 1, 2018, 78–79.
17
Landon Williams, “The Black Panther: Mirror of the People,”
Black Panther Black Community News Service
, Jan. 17, 1970, 10.
18
Huey P. Newton,
Revolutionary Suicide
(New York, Penguin Books), 2009, 3.
19
Vincent Lloyd, “Black Dignity,” 75.
20
Geoffrey Pleyers & Marlies Glasius, “La résonance des ‘mouvements des places’: connexions, émotions, valeurs,”
Socio
, n° 2, 2013, 69.
21
Tommy J. Curry, “Canonizing the Critical Race Artifice: An Analysis of Philosophy’s Gentrification of Critical Race Theory,” in
The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race
, eds. Paul Taylor, Linda Alcoff, & Luvell Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2017), 349–361.
22
bell hooks,
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(New York, London: Routledge, 2015), 9.
23
Tommy J. Curry, “Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and the Misandric Mischaracterization of Black Males in Theory.”
Res Philosophica
, vol. 95, no. 2 (April 2018), 235–272.
24
Tommy J. Curry,
The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 55.
25
hooks,
Ain’t I a Woman
, 13.
26
bell hooks,
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
(Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 17.
27
bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in
Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks
, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 375.
28
Asad Haider,
Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump
(London: Verso, 2018), 76.
29
Alphonso Pinkney,
Red, Black, and Green: Black Nationalism in the United States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
30
Frank B. Wilderson III,
Afropessimism
(New York: Liveright, 2020), 14.
31
Lewis R. Gordon, “La ‘Philosophie africaine’ doit se définir en termes de projet intellectuel,”
Critique
, n° 771–772, 2011, 626.
32
Frantz Fanon,
Alienation and Freedom
, ed. Jean Khalfa & Robert J.C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 204. Translation modified.
33
Luis Martinez Andrade, “
L’ego conquiro
comme fondement de la subjectivité moderne,”
La Revue nouvelle
, n° 1, 2018, 30–35.
34
Lorenzo Chiesa, “Biopolitics in Early Twenty-First-Century Italian Theory,”
Angelaki. Journal of the theoretical humanities
, vol. 16, n° 3, 2011, 1–5.
35
Nadia Yala Kisukidi, “Le ‘missionnaire désespéré’ ou de la différence africaine en philosophie,”
Rue Descartes
, n° 83, 2014, 77–96.
36
Jared Sexton, “Afro-pessimism: The Unclear Word,”
Rhizomes
, n° 26, 2016.
37
Warren,
Ontological terror
, 39.
38
Ibid., 37. In this passage, Warren is borrowing his terms from the closing paragraph of Fanon’s
Black Skin, White Masks
.
39
Frank B. Wilderson, “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation,” in Frank B. Wilderson et al.,
Afro-Pessimism: An introduction
(Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017), 25.
