Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Meditations on Claudia Jones

This article examines the role of labor as a political concept within the work of Caribbean thinker and activist, Claudia Jones. It argues for a reformulation of black labor politics. Specifically, it contends Jones’ formulation of labor requires moving beyond its conventionally economic articulations, to consider, in tandem, labor’s expressly political, existential (racial), and epistemic dimensions to actualize a coherent project of transnational liberation. Doing so requires decolonizing labor, reimagining it anew—outside Eurocentric thought. Such a multilayered, imbricated approach widens the philosophical margins of liberatory politics, interrogating, in the process, the Arendtian model of labor, so as to speak meaningfully to the emancipatory possibilities that lie within the labor practices of the colonized. As such, I theorize these added dimensions of labor from the position of the black subject—offering an explicit discussion of black labor for the project of liberatory politics.

Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George and the Problem With Black Mozart

This article discourages the implementation and use of the term Black Mozart as a popular descriptor for, arguably, the most influential Black composer, violinist, and fencer in 18th-century France: Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George. By theorizing the term Black Mozart in the discursive frameworks of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Sartre’s Black Orpheus, and Ter Ellingson’s Myth of the Noble Savage, I reveal the epistemological and ontological problems that the term presents. I find that, while Black Mozart is a clever way of drawing attention to Saint-George’s music and, subsequently, his life, the term occludes the critical treatment of the Black subject to the point of erasure: Saint-George is replaced by a mythicized inferior of the status quo’s perfect symbol of 18th-century classical music. I conclude that by removing the yoke of Mozart’s influence on the reception of Saint-George, we expose him to the fullness of our critical reasoning and restore to him the name he earned for all his talents, trials, and triumphs.

Commodification

I explore the depiction of the Miracle of the Black Leg by Saints Cosmas and Damian. This narrates the miraculous cure of a white verger with a diseased leg after the grafting of a leg from a dead African man onto his amputated stump. I show how the Greek, Latin and Catalan legends of this miracle give rise to different conceptions of the black subject defined either as a ‘Moor’ or as an ‘Ethiopian’ and I look at the violent sixteenth-century image of the mutilated African man, worked up by Isidro de Villoldo in Valladolid (1547) and the ways in which it was interpreted by other sculptors in Castile, and show how it drastically departs from the original literary and visual sources examined. I believe that there is a reference to the mutilation of limbs or ears suffered by fugitive slaves and I construct an account of the treatment of slaves.

The Plantation Countermelodies of Dunbar and Du Bois: Writing Agropolitical Subjecthood in the Nadir

With attention to representations of the land and labor in the postslavery agricultural South of the nadir—a period when American apartheid was at its most violent—this essay uses Paul Laurence Dunbar’s plantation poems and W. E. B. Du Bois’s cotton novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), to explore counternarratives of black subjecthood. Agriculture’s focus on productive collaborations with the nonhuman, on cycles of decay and rebirth, and on the potential for self-determination provides a generative vocabulary for conceptualizing nadir-era experiences of the human. Under this model, literature provides a venue wherein the legacies of the plantation might be imaginatively transposed from a Jim Crow necropolitics of violent constraint and dispossession into vectors of agropolitical possibility. To that end, the essay uses Dunbar and Du Bois to propose potentially radical processes of black subject formation wherein physical and imaginative instances of reclamation give rise to fresh mergers of epistemic and embodied selfhood.

Beyond Understanding

This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.

“Have You Ever Seen the Crowd Goin’ Apeshit?”: Disrupting Representations of Animalistic Black Femininity in the French Imaginary

16 June 2018. London Stadium. Beyoncé and Jay–Z revealed the premiere of the music video Apeshit. Filmed inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, Beyoncé’s sexual desirability powerfully dialogues with Western canons of high art that have dehumanized or erased the black female body. Dominant tropes have historically associated the black female body with the realm of nature saddled with an animalistic hypersexuality. With this timely release, Apeshit engages with the growing current debate about the ethic of representation of the black subject in European museums. Here, I argue that Beyoncé transcends the tension between nature and culture into a syncretic language to subvert a dominant imperialistic gaze. Drawing on black feminist theories and art history, a formal analysis traces the genealogy and stylistic expression of this vocabulary to understand its political implications. Findings pinpoint how Beyoncé laces past and present, the regal nakedness of her African heritage and Western conventions of the nude to convey the complexity, sensuality, and humanity of black women—thus drawing a critical reimagining of museal practices and enriching the collective imaginary at large.