A2 Afro-Pessimism

A2 Liberal Progress
Wilderson’s ontological claims are premised on the permanence of the libidinal
economy – that’s wrong.
Johnston ‘5:
Adrian Johnston, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, in Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, in 2005 ["Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Drive on JSTOR", https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv47w279, pg. 340-341, 8-2-2019] AR

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner
antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially
dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of
gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a
strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent,
unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural
void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications,
just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior. The contradictions
the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom
arising from
transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in
the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and
sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing
mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a
internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous
malfunctioning,
subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of
anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational
beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this
discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As
Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter
dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its
enjoyment is never absolute.

A2 No Progress—Climate
The narrative of “no progress” is affectively appealing but historically inaccurate –
Major achievements in racial environmental justice have been made. They may be
imperfect but have materially bettered the lives of black folk. Giving up on legal and
hopeful solutions threatens to discard a less violent future.
Wilkin ’19:
Holley A. Wilkin, Professor of Communication @ Georgia State University, in LSU Press, in 2019 [“How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality: Public Policies Designed to Increase Health Equity”, pg. 84-88,
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/how-public-policy-impacts-racial-inequality/]//AR

CREATING HEALTHIER ENVIRONMENTS Environmental health risk factors (for example, noise pollution, air pol- lution, and lack of green space) tend to cluster
together in lower-income neighborhoods. “Lower-income, racial-minority neighborhoods have higher exposure risk to both
indoor and outdoor environmental haz- ards that are linked to increased rates of cancer and respiratory dis- eases.” Indoor pollutants are more
prevalent in low-income housing (such as lead-based paint and pipes, the presence of cockroaches, and black mold) and contribute to disparities related to the
mental and physical health problems associated with lead poisoning and respiratory illnesses associated with increased allergens.” Poor housing conditions may also
include a lack of hot water needed to dean and sanitize dishes, which increases the spread of diseases. “Outdoor pollutants (the pres- ence of factories, power
plants, and highways contributing to increased air pollution and illegal dumping of environmental waste contributing to ground and water pollution) increase
respiratory and cancer risk.” Green space—parks. trees, trails—can help reduce environmental tox- ins and are also important for improved mental health
outcomes.“ "The built environment refers to the human—made aspects of neigh- borhood, including commercial and residential buildings, factories, signs,
roadways, parking lots, and public spaces like plazas, parks, and recre- ation areas. Built environment features are associated with disparities in physical health and
mental health.” For example, “walkable neigh- borhoods'—those with connected streets, sidewalks, and pedestrian- orientecl retail—are associated with more
physical activity, lower lev- els of obesity, and less air pollution due to few people driving on the streets.” Neighborhood blight, as represented by a high percentage
of unsafe and vacant properties in various stages of disrepair, contribute to poor levels of mental health." A community-based participatory research project found
that 42 percent of houses in southeast Atlanta were va- cant. Residents participated in a survey during listening sessions and reported poor mental health at a rate
2.5 times the national average (26 percent reported fourteen or more days of poor mental health in the past thirty days). The project worked to improve access to
mental health services and created the Dirty Truth Campaign (now a nonprofit organi- zation) to address built-environmental issues affecting mental health.”
Participants used Photovoice. a method that uses photos taken by mem- bers of marginalized communities to help tell their stories and influence policy." The City of
Atlanta agreed to policy changes enabling nonprofit organizations to acquire and renovate the vacant properties closest to schools and parks.“ In 2016, the first of
these houses went on the mar- ket with incentives for police and schoolteachers to buy and live in the neighborhoods. The long-tenn impact of this project is yet to
be realized. There are several larger-scale policy changes in the United States that impact indoor and outdoor
environmental risks, including federal policies designed to improve air and water quality and to reduce expo- sure to lead. It should be noted that, at the time this
chapter was writ- ten, the current administration was taking various action to reduce environmental protection regulations."' The 1970 Clean Air Act
(CAA) is a federal law designed to regulate air quality by allowing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards {NAAQS}
that are in the interest of public health and wellness and to regulate hazardous air emissions. Each state was required to develop its own implementation plans that
considered the unique aspects of industry and production and other sources of air pollution in the states. The CAA was amended in 19?‘? and 1990 to set new goals
since NAAQS had not been met. The 1990 amendment (section 112) requires technology—based standards to reduce emissions
from major sources of hazardous pollutanm.“ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that, while air quality has improved, “during
2006-2008, a total of 53 counties did not meet the standard for fine particulate matter and during 2007-2009. a total of 201 counties did not meet the standard for
ozone. . . . Minority groups, including Asians and Hispanics, were more liltely to reside in these counties in comparison with non—Hispanic whites. Pollution sources
(for example, heavy traffic) and other environmental hazards often affect these areas."’“ The CDC recommends efforts at the local level in these areas to educate
the public, increase public transportation options and use, and to influence state industry regulations. The 1948
Federal Water Pollution
Control Act went through major amendments in 1971 and became known as the Clean Water Act (CWA). The CWA gives the EPA authority over pollution-
control programs and setting industry wastewater standards; made it illegal to dump pollut- ants into navigable waters without permit;
established a structure to regulate pollutant discharges into U.5. waters; funded the construction of sewage-treatment plants; and maintained existing standards
regard- ing water-surface contaminants. Revisions in 1981. and 1987 changed the structure of the treatment-plant construction programs. The latter replaced it
with the State Water Pollution Control Revolving Fund, more commonly known as the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, leveraging established partnerships
between states and the EPA. The 191:8 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canada required the "EPA to establish water quality
criteria for the Great Lal-res addressing 29 toxic pollutants with maximum levels that are safe for humans, wildlife, and aquatic life. It also required EPA to help the
States implement the criteria on a specific schedule."’“ The United States has made significant gains in improving water quality and
sanitation. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recognize areas for concern.” Over 13 million house- holds obtain water from
unregulated sources (such as wells, local springs, rainwater, livestock water tanks). Access to “healthy water is, or may soon be, limited by the presence of
environmental pollutants in local water sources, drought and aquifer depletion dial: limits water availability. flooding events that overwhelm local treatment
capacity, local weather changes associated with climate change, new and more stringent regulations, or failures in water—related infrastructure.”'“’ The Flint water
crisis highlights how regulated water sources can become contaminated, despite various policies aimed to reduce lead exposure. The 1971 Lead-Based Paint
Poisoning Prevention Act (LBPPPA) and its various amendments restrict the use of lead in all residential properties, including public housing. Amendments to the
LBPPPA also required the U.S. Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to develop a plan for cost—effective inspection and lead-based abatement
plans. The Consumer Product Safety Commission limited the amount of lead allowed in residential paint to .06 percent in 1973 and to .009 percent in 2008. in 1992,
Title X made changes that shifted HUD’s focus from reacting to lead-based paint poisoning to being proactive in reducing children's lead—based poisoning risks."
Other policies have also reduced lead-exposure risk. For example, the phasing out of leaded gasoline started in 1973, the ban on lead used in food cans in 1995, and
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Lead and Copper Rule re- quires the testing and treatment of consumer water to prevent high levels of lead or copper.
Collectively, these policies have contributed to a dramatic reduction in blood lead concentrations in children
since the 1970s." Between 2001 and 2010 about 2.6 percent or 535,000 U.S. children aged one to five still had blood lead levels that were too high, indicating that
more work needs to be done.” The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which changed from using Lake Huron water to Flint River water without adding a required
anticorrosive treatment, caused lead pipes to corrode and thereby poison the drinking water. Flint is a lower-income city with a high percentage of African
Americans. The Flint crisis drew attention to the existence of neighborhoods throughout the United States— often in lower-income neighborhoods
with crumbling infrastructures that include lead—based pipes, industry waste, and paint—where blood lead levels in children are dangerously high. ln fact, a study
found three thousand areas that had rates of blood lead poisoning that were double or even as much as Four times the rates found in Flint at the peak of the water
crisis.” Various policies have drastically reduced lead poisoning in the United States, but there is still work needed in
both rural and urban neighborhoods to create health equity. CONCLUSIONS Health inequities are caused by a number of factors, including access to
health care. access to healthy foods. and the nature of people’s en- vironments. A number of different policies have been enacted over the years to reduce health
disparities. For example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has reduced the numbers of Americans who are uninsured, increased the use of primary
health care, and increased chronic illness diagnosis and treatment.“ Numerous tobacco policies have been credited with reducing the rates of smoking and exposure
to secondhand smoke.” The School Breakfast and Lunch program has provided more than 224 billion lunches since its conception, enabling access to food for
children who attend public and nonprofit schools and childcare facilities. The Clean Air and Clean Water acts have sig- nificantly reduced environmental health
risks, and various lead-related policies have reduced lead-based toxicity in children. Despite the rela- tive successes of these programs, health inequities persist in
the United States. In some cases, the health policies meant to reduce health dis- parities actually increase them as they do not benefit every socioeco- nomic groups
evenly or at the same rate. For example, workplace to- bacco bans have been shown to be less effective at reducing workplace exposure for the predominantly
female, racial minorities who work in lower-income service-industry professions.“ New policies that consider the contextual factors involved in creating health
inequities are needed. Additionally, policies need to address health issues at a local level. For example, excessive lead blood levels in neighborhoods with crumbling
infrastructures as well as loopholes in tobacco or clean-air policies must be tackled.

A2 No Progress—Generic
The narrative of “no progress” is affectively appealing but historically imprecise –
major gains have been achieved and the political implications of their ethics risks
throwing out the possibility of a less violence, less dehumanizing future around the
world.
Winant ’14:
Howard Winant, American sociologist and race theorist, in Critical Sociology, 2014 ["The Dark Matter: Race and Racism in the 21st Century", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920513501353?journalCode=crsb, 8-
21-2018] AR

The World-Historical Shitpile of Race Structural racism – an odious stinkpile of shit left over from the past and still being augmented in the present – has been accumulated by ‘slavery unwilling to die’,4 by empire, and indeed by the entire racialized modern
world system. The immense waste (Feagin et al., 2001, drawing on Bataille) of human life and labor by these historically entrenched social structures and practices still confronts us today, in the aftermath of the post-Second World War racial ‘break’. Our antiracist accomplishments have

a massive amount still remains.

reduced the size of the pile; we have lessened the stink. But of waste So much racial waste is left over from the practice of racial domination in the early days of empire and conquest, to the present

it often seems that this enormous

combination of police state and liberalism! Indeed waste and odious pinions the social system under an
immovable burden . How often have despair and hopelessness overcome those who bore this sorrow? How often have slave and native, peon and maquiladora, servant and ghetto-dweller, felt just plain ‘sick and tired’ (Nappy Roots, 2003), encumbered by
this deadening inertia composed of a racial injustice that could seemingly never be budged? How often, too, have whites felt weighed down by the waste, the guilt and self-destruction built into racism and the ‘psychological wage’? Yet racial politics is always unstable and contradictory.
Racial despotism can never be fully stabilized or consolidated. Thus at key historical moments, perhaps rare but also inevitable, the sheer weight of racial oppression – qua social structure – becomes insupportable. The built-up rage and inequity, the irrationality and inutility, and the

Yet
explosive force of dreams denied, are mobilized politically in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable earlier. Racism remains formidable, entrenched as a structuring feature of both US and global society and politics. Indeed it often seems impossible to overcome.

That’s Not the Whole Story Large-scale demographic and political

We are so used to losing! We can’t see that the racial system is in crisis both in the US and globally.

shifts have overtaken the modern racial system undermining and rearticulating it
world ( ) , . During and after the Second World War a tremendous
racial ‘break’ occurred, a seismic shift that swept much of the world (Winant, 2001). The US was but one national ‘case’ of this rupture, which was experienced very profoundly: racial transformations occurred that were unparalleled since at least the changes brought about by the US Civil

War. Omi and I (1994) – and many, many others – have proposed that the terrain of racial politics was tremendously broadened and deepened after the War. The increased importance of race in larger political life not only grounded the modern
civil rights movement a whole range of ‘new social movements’
but shaped that we take for granted today as central axes of political conflict. In earlier stages of US history it

From the explicit racial despotism of the Jim Crow era to the ‘racial
had not been so evident that ‘the personal is political’ – at least not since the end of Reconstruction.

democracy’ of course still very partial and truncated of the present period … : that is a big leap
( ) , people. In the modern
world there were always black movements, always movements for racial justice and racial freedom. The experience of injustice, concrete grievances, lived oppression, and resistance, both large and small, always exists. It can be articulated or not, politicized or not. These movements,
these demands, were largely excluded from mainstream politics before the rise of the civil rights movement after the War. Indeed, after the Second World War, in a huge ‘break’ that was racially framed in crucial ways, this ‘politicization of the social’ swept over the world. It ignited (or
reignited) major democratic upsurges. This included the explicitly anti-racist movements: the modern civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the anti-colonial movement (India, Algeria, Vietnam, etc.). It also included parallel, and more-or-less allied, movements like
‘secondwave’ feminism, LGBTQ (née gay liberation) movements, and others. In short, the world-historical upheaval of the Second World War and its aftermath were racial upheavals in significant ways: the periphery against the center, the colored ‘others’ against ‘The Lords of Human
Kind’ (Kiernan, 1995). These movements produced: • Demographic, economic, political, and cultural shifts across the planet • The destruction of the old European empires • The coming and going of the Cold War • The rise of the ‘new social movements’, led by the black movement in the

US And this is only the start of what could be a much bigger list . A Crisis of Race and Racism? ‘[C]risis’, Gramsci famously wrote, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this
interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Using the Gramscian formula, I suggest that there is such a crisis of race and racism. On the one hand, the old verities of established racism and white supremacy have been officially discredited,
not only in the US but fairly comprehensively around the world. On the other hand, racially-informed action and social organization, racial identity and race consciousness, continue unchecked in nearly every aspect of social life! On the one hand, the state (many states around the world)
now claims to be colorblind, non-racialist, racially democratic; while on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states need race to rule. Consider in the US alone: race and electoral politics, race and social control, race and legal order … Why don’t our heads explode under the
pressures of such cognitive dissonance? Why doesn’t manifest racial contradiction provoke as much uncertainty and confusion in public life and political activity as it does in everyday experience? Are we just supposed to pretend that none of this is happening? Can anyone really sustain
the view that they are operating in a nonracial, ‘colorblind’ society? The ‘colorblind’ claim is that one should not ‘notice’ race. For if one ‘sees’ race, one wouldn’t be ‘blind’ to it, after all.5 But what happens to race-consciousness under the pressure (now rather intense in the US, anyway)
to be ‘colorblind’? Quite clearly, racial awareness does not dry up like a raisin in the sun. Not only does it continue as a matter of course in everyday life, but in intellectual, artistic and scientific (both social and natural) life race continues to command attention.6 ‘Colorblind’ ideologies of
race today serve to impede the recognition of racial difference or racial inequality based on claims that race is an archaic concept, that racial inclusion is already an accomplished fact, and so on. Just so, persistent race-consciousness highlights racial differences and particularities.
‘Noticing’ race can be linked to despotic or democratic motives, framed either in defense of coercion, privilege, and undeserved advantage, or invoked to support inclusion, human rights, and social justice (Carbado and Harris, 2008; see also Brown et al., 2003). Obama Is he a mere token,
a shill for Wall Street? Or is he Neo, ‘the one’? If neither alternative is plausible, then we are in the realm of everyday 21st-century US politics. This is the territory in which, as Sam Rayburn famously said, ‘There comes a time in the life of every politician when he [sic] must rise above
principle.’ Yet Barack Obama has transformed the US presidency in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. Obama is not simply the first nonwhite (that we know of) to occupy the office. He is the first to have lived in the global South, the first to be a direct descendent of colonized people,
the first to have a genuine movement background. Consider: How many community meetings, how many movement meetings did Obama attend before entering electoral politics? But he is no more powerful than any of his predecessors; he is constrained as they were by the US system
of rule, by the US racial regime, by structural racism. In addition he is constrained by racism as no other US president has ever been. No other president has experienced racism directly: Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience – and although,
largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure – I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing
me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter
swill of swallowed back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb – from TV and music and friends and the streets – about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines
they should be. (Obama, 2006: 233) On the other hand: he has a ‘kill list’. All presidents kill people, but Obama is the first systematically and publicly to take charge of these egregious and unconstitutional uses of exceptional powers. In this he echoes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political
theorist, whose famous dictum is ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (2004 [1922]). The drones, the surveillance, and the numerous right turns of his administration all stand in sharp contradiction not only to his campaign rhetoric, but to the anti-racist legacy of the civil rights
movement that arguably put him in office. Obama has not interceded for blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in US history, the ‘great recession’ of 2008. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts
over workers’ rights – particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of color are concentrated. Obama himself largely deploys colorblind racial ideology, although he occasionally critiques it as well. Beneath this ostensibly postracial view the palpable and quite
ubiquitous system of racial distinction and inequality remains entrenched. Though modernized and ‘moderated’, structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform; Obama is not challenging it, at least not directly. Reframing the Discussion What should we be

the ‘dark matter’ of race

studying and teaching now? The list of themes I have highlighted here is partial of course, and perhaps impressionistic as well. If the argument I have proposed has any validity, then , which is even more invisible now than

it was in the past – in its present ‘post-civil rights’, ‘colorblind’, and even ‘presidential’ forms – continues to exercise its gravitational pull on our politics . It continues to shape what is called
(and improperly deprecated as) ‘identity politics’. The ‘dark matter’ takes on new significance as a central feature of neoliberalism, which is enacted today through the deployment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, ‘states of exception’, state violence, and exclusionary politics – all

Yet the legacy of centuries of resistance to these depredations the undeniable

political practices that rely on racism. ,

achievements of anti-racist and ant-imperialist struggles the extension of democracy to , – often tortuous and always incomplete –

peoples of color also exerts a significant political force Race-based ‘freedom dreams’
, sustain the . (Kelley again)

hope of democracy, inclusion, equality, and justice in the US and elsewhere .

A2 Post-Humanism
Post-Humanism is neither necessary nor sufficient for an anti-oppressive politics.
Lester ’11:
Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography @ U of Sussex, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, in 2011 ["Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers",
https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00450.x, 8-23-2018] AR

Anderson argues that it is not an issue of extending humanity to … negatively racialised people, but of putting into question that from which such people have been
excluded – that which, for liberal discourse, remains unproblematised. (2007, 199) I fear, however, that if we direct attention away from histories of humanism’s
failure to deal with difference and to render that difference compatible with its fundamental universalism, and if we overlook its proponents’ failed attempts to
combat dispossession, murder and oppression; if our history of race is instead understood
through a critique of humanity’s conceptual
Historically, it was not humanism that gave rise to racial innatism, it
separation from nature, we dilute the political potency of universalism.
was the specifically anti-humanist politics of settlers forging new social assemblages through relations of
violence on colonial frontiers. Settler communities became established social assemblages in their own right specifically through the
rejection of humanist interventions. Perhaps, as Edward Said suggested, we can learn from the implementation of
humanist universalism in practice, and insist on its potential to combat racism, and perhaps we can insist on the
contemporary conceptual hybridisation of human–non-human entities too, without necessarily abandoning all the precepts of humanism (Said 2004; Todorov
2002). We do not necessarily need to accord a specific value to the human, separate from and above nature, in order to make a moral and political case for a
fundamental human universalism that can be wielded strategically against racial violence. Nineteenth century humanitarians’ universalism was fundamentally
conditioned by their belief that British culture stood at the apex of a hierarchical order of civilisations. From the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-
twentieth century, this ethnocentrism produced what Lyotard describes as ‘the flattening of differences, or the demand for a norm (“human nature”)’, that ‘carries
with it its own forms of terror’ (cited Braun 2004, 1352). The intervention of Aboriginal Protection demonstrates that humanist universalism has the potential to
inflict such terror (it was the Protectorate of Aborigines Office reincarnated that was responsible, later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for Aboriginal
Australia’s Stolen Generation, and it was the assimilationist vision of the Protectors’ equivalents in Canada that led to the abuses of the Residential Schools system).
humanism’s alternatives, founded upon principles of difference rather than
But we must not forget that
commonality, have the potential to do the same and even worse. In the nineteenth century, Caribbean planters and then
emigrant British settlers emphasised the multiplicity of the human species, the absence of any universal ‘human nature’ ,
the incorrigibility of difference, in their upholding of biological determinism. Their assault on any notion
of a fundamental commonality among human beings has disconcerting points of intersection with the
radical critique of humanism today. The scientific argument of the nineteenth century that came closest to post-humanism’s insistence on the
hybridity of humanity, promising to ‘close the ontological gap between human and non-human animals’ (Day 2008, 49), was the evolutionary theory of biological
descent associated with Darwin, and yet this theory was adopted in Aotearoa New Zealand and other colonial sites precisely to legitimate the potential extinction
of other, ‘weaker’ races in the face of British colonisation on the grounds of the natural law of a struggle for survival (Stenhouse 1999). Both the upholding and
the rejection of human–nature binaries can thus result in racially oppressive actions, depending on the
contingent politics of specific social assemblages. Nineteenth century colonial humanitarians, inspired as they were by an irredeemably
ethnocentric and religiously exclusive form of universalism, at least combatted exterminatory settler discourses and practices at multiple sites of empire, and
provided spaces on mission and protectorate stations in which indigenous peoples could be shielded to a very limited extent from dispossession and murder. They
also, unintentionally, reproduced discourses of a civilising mission and of a universal humanity that could be deployed by anticolonial nationalists in other sites of
empire that were never invaded to the same extent by settlers, in independence struggles from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, as Whatmore’s (2002) analysis of
the Select Committee on Aborigines reveals, they provided juridical narratives that are part of the arsenal of weapons that indigenous peoples can wield in attempts
to claim redress and recompense in a postcolonial world. The politics of humanism in practice, then, was riddled with contradiction, fraught with particularity and
latent with varying possibilities. It could be relatively progressive and liberatory; it could be dispossessive and culturally genocidal. Within its repertoire lay potential
to combat environmental and biological determinism and innatism, however, and this
should not be forgotten in a rush to condemn
humanism’s universalism as well as its anthropocentrism. It is in the tensions within universalism that the ongoing potential of an always provisional,
self-conscious, flexible and strategic humanism – one that now recognises the continuity between the human and the non-human as well as the power-laden
particularities of the male, middle class, Western human subject – resides.

A2 Social Death Intra-Onto

Their use of social death delegitimizes intra-ontological black affectual politics,
ontologies of the slave within social death - The affirmation of social death to the
neglect of intro-ontological black politics, produces a cycle of endless internal psychic
violence
Barlow ’16:
Michael Barlow Jr. graduated in 2016 with a Bachelors degree in Sociology from United States Military Academy at West Point Inquiries Journal 2016 [“FEATURED ARTICLE: Addressing Shortcomings in Afro-Pessimism” VOL. 8 NO.
09 | PG. 2/2 available online at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1435/2/addressing-shortcomings-in-afro-pessimism accessed 10-15-2016]cdm

Afro-Pessimists scholars like Wilderson conceptualize Black resistance as a singular

The distinction here is important because too often

orientation toward society. Indeed their work is important to understand the manner in which society operates upon Black subjects, but it is insufficient to
describe an ethic that allows for the pursuit of meaning within Blackness itself. In this regard, scholars should
understand Black resistance as occurring on two different levels: the ontological and the intra-ontological. The distinction being
made is between the ontological state of Blackness as determined outside of humanity proper versus the life within the ontological state of Blackness as understood through social death. If
social death is the state of the Black, what then speaks to the state of the Black amongst Blacks? It would be a mistake on the part of any scholar to concern themselves with one and not the

other. This paper uses the term intra-ontology in reference to the varying ontologies within social death. This is the Black among Blacks.
These are those spaces within Blackness that only the Black can ever understand or occupy. Though they exist outside of the production of the
human (within the category of social death), there are Black affektual politics that have been with the slave since the ship. These are
the emotional and spiritual ontologies within Blackness that connected slaves of different lands, languages, and religions into one community. Black intra-

ontology can never achieve the plane of recognition because it can only be understood within Blackness, which by definition is the position of social death,
but those affektual spirits and emotions ought not be neglected. Social death should guide Black resistance strategy in understanding the position of the Black within civil
society, but it speaks not to the arrangement of Black intra-ontological questions. If this is measured by social death it only produces a cycle of
endless internal psychic violence because the Black would only be met with the discovery of a violent
reality of its existence through affirmations of social death.

A2 Social Death
The social death thesis is Eurocentric and moralizes civil society.
Okoth ’20:
Okoth 20 - Kevin Ochieng Okoth, independent writer and researcher, Salvage, January 16th 2020 “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought” [https://salvage.zone/issue-seven/the-
flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/] Accessed 7/15/21 SAO

For both Afro-pessimists and Black Optimists, the afterlife of slavery is characterised by the social death
of the Black/Slave and a heavily distorted version of Fanon’s concept of the ‘fact of blackness’. This assumption, however, precludes the
participation of Black Ops in radical politics and confines resistance to spaces of Black performance art. By
confining Black resistance to spaces outside of the anti-Black structures of civil society, and by
undercutting the possibility for anti-imperialist solidarity between racialised people across the world,
the AP™ theories have opened up a space for the corporate capture of Blackness. We need only recall
last year’s Nike campaign, prominently featuring the face of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been blackballed
by the league for kneeling during the national anthem. Since the incident, he has taken on the role of radical Black activist, complete with Panther-esque leather
jackets, an afro and Afrocentric jewellery. While Kaepernick’s struggle against the racist and exploitative NFL owners and executives is, of course, legitimate and
necessary, the co-optation of his struggle by a large corporation is certainly a cause for concern. Nike
is notorious for its use of sweatshop
labour (including both forced and child labour), and its history of exploitative labour practices has been well-
documented throughout the years. By detaching the struggles of African-Americans from those of
racialised workers in the Global South, Nike can present itself as a progressive vehicle for Black
emancipatory politics, while completely sidelining the plight of non-white workers outside of the US. Here
we might recall a powerful statement by Fred Hampton to illustrate just how far from revolutionary Black politics we find ourselves: We don’t think you fight fire
with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re
not
going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism […] We’re going
to fight […] with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.
Wilderson and Sexton have been captured by corporate interests in much the same way. In their case, however, it is not a large
corporation that co-opts Blackness, but rather the neoliberal university. Is it at all surprising that two professors working
within the prestigious University of California system promote a theoretical framework that requires no
political action from Black writers and activists other than simply being Black? Not only is AP™ a product of the
neoliberal university, it also promotes its authors survival and flourishing within the corporate structures of higher
education. When asked about his framework for psychological and physical resistance by the hosts of iMiXWHATiLiKE, Wilderson neatly dodges
any commitment to radical politics with the excuse that it could cost him his academic job. This is so much a part
of what it means to be a professor. I feel like cussing people out all the time. But if I do, I violate University of California’s civility laws, tenure or not I’m out the
door, right? And that tempers my speech. So, I think that what I have to offer is not a way out. What I have to offer is an analysis of the problem. And I don’t trust
me as much as I trust Black people on the ground. Wilderson is aware that the AP™ rely on their activist supporters and social media following to maintain their
privileged position within the university – without the activists and organisers on the ground, the AP™ could not prove the market value of its work to the neoliberal
institution. By
creating a framework for the analysis of race that lends itself to co-optation by corporate
interests, the AP™ has certainly demonstrated that it can convert Blackness into profit. All the while, these
theorists delude themselves that they are spearheading a truly radical Black movement. In the introduction to a collection of essays on AP™, the editors (who
presumably include Sexton and Wilderson) even have the audacity to claim that they are ‘motivated by a desire to contribute to […] bringing these writings out of
the ivory towers of the academy’ and that they wish to ‘remove the materials from this sitting place and see them proliferate among those in the streets and
prisons’. True,
they have succeeded in disseminating a watered-down version of their musings to activists
and organisers; but what they have passed on is nothing short of anti-Black, in the sense that it works
against the true liberation of Black people of all classes. Today, such Blackness (and the pseudo-politics that is attached to it) is more
useful for academic promotions, Instagram hashtags, and Nike adverts than for any revolutionary or emancipatory politics worthy of the name. The people who
truly benefit – or rather profit – from the AP™ brand are the academics and the various university presses and journals who jump at every opportunity to unleash a
plethora of AP™ books and articles onto the academic book market. While the AP™ may seem like a niche theoretical discourse, its influence extends far beyond the
university: as Olaloku-Teriba argues, the AP™’s theoretical framework provides ‘the structuring logic of various political formations in the era of #BlackLivesMatter’.
What is at stake in the debate, therefore, is nothing less than the possibility of a revolutionary Black
politics. Maybe African-Americans on the streets or in prison would do well to reach for George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and steer clear of the AP™ and Black
Ops. III. The Afterlives of Slavery The
retreat of the AP™ and Black Ops from politics poses a problem for activists and
scholars looking to engage in struggles that take seriously the political economy of race and the need for
cross-racial solidarity. But how have these key themes of radical Black movements from the 1960s and
70s – from the Black Panthers to African anti-colonial struggles – disappeared in the AP™’s theories? The
erasure of radical Black and anti-colonial struggles rests almost entirely on misreading – or in some cases
not reading – Marxist contributions to the study of race, colonialism and slavery. And this unfounded
dismissal of the entire Marxist tradition allows the AP™ to kill two birds with one stone: on the one
hand, it can position itself as a radical critique of Eurocentric left discourses. On the other hand, it allows
the AP™ to disregard a vast body of Marxist scholarship that has ‘raced’ the history of capitalism and
developed a nuanced analysis of the relationship between New World Slavery and capitalist
accumulation on a global scale. Thus, the AP™ can ignore the specificities of how different Black
populations are racialised and displace the study of political economy (and particularly of imperialism) in
favour of ontological questions. In the interview ‘We’re trying to destroy the world: Anti-Blackness & Police Violence after Ferguson’
Wilderson makes the bizarre claim that ‘slaveness is something that has consumed Blackness and
Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness’. If this assumption sounds familiar,
look no further than the Afro-pessimism of old, with its conflation of Africanness and Blackness and its
disregard for the African continent and its inhabitants. But how has an approach that attempts to grapple
with the complexities of Black being ended up rehashing the same assumptions and prejudices of
Eurocentric discourse designed to dehumanise Black people on the African continent in the first place?
The AP™’s theoretical position is riddled with contradictions: how can Blackness be separated from
white supremacy, neocolonialism or imperialism and women’s reproductive labour, when these are the
mechanisms that structure the quotidien experience of most people racialised as Black on a global
scale? Moreover, if the Black/Slave exists in a state of powerlessness and natal alienation – characterised by
the loss of ties of birth in ascending and descending generations – how do we theorise the Blackness of
those whose ancestors remained in Africa throughout the translatlantic slave trade?

A2 Mid Passage Fails

Turn: Middle passage focus fails
Wright ‘4
Wright 4 - Michelle M. Wright, in the book Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century, January 1st 2004 “Middle Passage Blackness and its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War
Epistemology” [https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/middle-passage-blackness-and-its-diasporic-discontents-the-case-f-2] Accessed 1/24/19 SAO

Just a quick glance at the table of contents of this volume, Africa in Europe, points to a significant and welcome difference from most of the other volumes on the Black/African diaspora that have preceded it: it is not framed by

what I term the ‘Middle Passage epistemology’, or MPE.1 While academe is often derided as the ‘Ivory Tower’, cut off from the exigencies of the ‘real world’, academic production in fact
reflects the cold economic realities of the postwar era so that those who make up the majority of the African diaspora in fact are not represented. Simply put,
this is because the United States, even in what many including myself would consider its last gasps of empire, still dominates the world in terms of well-paid

scholars, relatively wealthy universities and colleges, not to mention academic presses and academic publications. As a result, the majority of publications on the
Black/African diaspora tend to reflect the ancestral experience of many African Americans despite the fact that
African Americans, numerically speaking, comprise only 30 million of the some one billion Africans and peoples of African descent that are
the African diaspora. This is the result, I would argue, of implicitly interpellating ‘blackness’ as a collective group identity through
the MPE. The MPE is a necessary epistemology, not the least because it lastingly marks a horrific journey and equally horrific enslaved survival that at least gives pause to those steeped in the rather insistent myth that the

in mapping
Enlightenment was only an age in which reason dominated and human suffrage was wholly embraced by our most eminent thinkers. Yet more often than not the MPE does not do all it claims to do, and

or narrating the African diaspora many are left behind and this most likely begins with its central myth of a homogenous Black identity that in turn produces a very
fixed notion of time. Although the MPE supposedly operates as an epistemology for all blacks in the West who arrived through European and American slave ships, its focus tends to be on American blacks. Even in his celebrated
analysis of the ‘routes and roots’ of Black diasporic identity that forms the ‘single complex unit’ of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy largely ignores Black Caribbean and UK literary, intellectual and philosophical contributions. Although
the Atlantic Ocean of course borders the east coast of the South American continent and the West coast of the Eurasian continent, The Black Atlantic ignores those Atlantic populations to focus on the elite majority within that
minority: heterosexual bourgeois American black men. Gilroy is not an isolated example: in a stunning interview given some years ago to the New York Times by our most prominent American Black scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr,
Gates opined that ‘Middle Passage’ blacks should be given preferential treatment in admissions over black Caribbean immigrants – suggesting that he does not consider black Caribbeans part of the Middle Passage: ‘This is about
the kids of recent arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class kids.’2 Most recently, as Laura Chrisman has pointed out, in his widely acclaimed book The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Edwards asserts the need to honour
the different spacetimes of different black diasporic communities, yet ignores the ways in which prominent African Americans who travelled to Paris preferred to celebrate their acceptance and ignore that their ‘City of Light’ was
 As in most social sciences and humanities, the categories of gender
also the heart of an empire that practised racism and brutality in Africa and Asia.3

and sexuality are deployed but not acknowledged in most renderings of the MPE, beginning with our mourning the loss of
a non-existent past: the heteropatriarchal nuclear family unit in which all Africans flourished before
being enslaved by whites. The MPE structures itself as a progress narrative, moving from enslavement towards freedom, but its focus is again on the heterosexual black male. American black men and
women together are enjoined to celebrate the masculine leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers, and yet both groups excluded the black female from the full privileges they sought for black men.4 While

most Introductions to (US) Black Studies classes celebrate these moments in history, the Combahee River Collective and the black queer movements are deliberately
neglected, as if they are somehow too corrupt, perhaps too similar to the American white women’s movement and queer movements to be acceptable.5 In the seminal The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African
American Literary Criticism, in which the West African oral traditions are linked to contemporary American black oral culture featuring monkey tales and the ‘dirty dozens’, Henry Louis Gates Jr ignores the misogyny that is the
hallmark of the ‘dirty dozens’ (in which young black men trade insults about each other’s mother, usually in terms of how ugly, fat, stupid, poor she is), asking us instead to celebrate this ‘African’ cultural artefact. In like kind, he
blithely ignores the misandrist cast of abusive black male characters in Alice Walker’s multi-million-dollar best-seller The Color Purple, choosing instead to pretend that Walker is in fact indicting white men’s racism as the origin of
black misogyny. Just as American Indians are enjoined to celebrate the day (Columbus Day) that signals the beginning of their near-extermination, and black Americans are enjoined to celebrate the victory of white slave owners

these failures are not

and merchants over British slave-owning monarchists (4 July), so are black women and queers pushed to celebrate their marginalisation and erasure from black history in the MPE. Yet

structural, directly due to assumptions of a concrete origin for that group, an erasure of
unique to the MPE, but rather are

intra-group bigotries, and an insistence that all members of that group benefit equally. The most obvious problem with
origins, of course, is that as badly as we want them, they can only be sustained through the endless reproduction of myths, mostly about discretely bounded identity categories. Just as Britons are a mix of ancestries that long pre-
date and long post-date the ‘founding moment’ of Magna Carta in 1215, so are American whites and American blacks the complex, differentiated products of a broad array of invasions and amalgamations both forced and
voluntary. In order for a group’s origin to retain its symbolic meaning, the collective seeking to interpellate itself through an epistemology must imagine itself as fixed and unchanged from its origin – intermixing, emigration out
from and immigration into the collective must be erased. This notion of a fixed temporal identity (i.e., the definitive origin of a group from which anyone who wishes to be recognised as more than an ‘honorary’ member of the
collective must trace an ancestry) is usually not much of a problem for a dominant group. As a dominant group, their goal will be exclusivity, in which case ‘fixity’ and absolute origins can only add to the prestige: all traits attached

For a subaltern group, however, fixity is a problem because it is often

to the superior group are superior because they belong to this group.

deployed as a marker of inferiority by dominant groups in the West: to be of fixed origin suggests one is incapable of progress and therefore ‘backward’ and out of
step with the dominant timeline. In the MPE, Africa becomes a fixed origin to which we must return – if not physically, then spiritually, socially, politically and economically. Yet the ‘Africa’ of our origins is roughly 400-some years
old – it no longer exists; ‘Africa’ therefore remains in what Dagmawi Woubshet has referred to as ‘romantic arrest’.6 We imagine this complex post-war continent as homogenous and pristine, uninterrupted by the infamous

As such, the continent

Scramble for Africa, a century of colonialism, two World Wars, and the endless upheavals of nations still viewed as promising fodder for the coffers of multinational corporations.

of Africa begins to resemble the image accorded to it by anti-black racists: outside of time, peopled with
one group who speak in one language and enjoy a life of peaceful existence, untroubled by the complex
conditions demanded by the civilised world. Rooted in the past, the MPE often fails to take into account the ways in which ‘African Americans’ have changed and, if forced to look
those changes in the face, falls back on racial stereotypes. The MPE cannot account for black conservatism because it defines ‘blackness’ through slavery and the determination for freedom in spite of a racist nation and state
apparatus, the latter of which black conservatism rejects as irrelevant. The MPE cannot account for recent African immigration to the United States because Africa is meant to be the promised land to which all United States-bound

it
blacks would flee if able, not the other way around. The MPE fails to account for the wide range of economic classes that blacks around the globe inhabit, from the utterly destitute to the ridiculously wealthy. Because

understands all Africans and peoples of African descent as victims of slavery and/or racism, it cannot
explain disparities in black wealth as opposed to a sharing of wealth. The MPE cannot imagine black-on-black violence unless it can imagine a white
malefactor (or institution, such as the state) behind the machinations. In these ways the MPE rejects all forms of black agency and, of course,

black difference. Conservative blacks are ‘traitors’ or naively misled; wealthy blacks are also such, the puppets of white power.7

A2 Mid Passage Colonial

Middle passage focus reifies fixed colonial categories and flattens distinctions in
identity
Okoth ’20:
Okoth 20 - Kevin Ochieng Okoth, independent writer and researcher, Salvage, January 16th 2020 “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought” [https://salvage.zone/issue-seven/the-
flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/] Accessed 7/15/21 SAO

Skimming the AP™’s bibliographies, one can be forgiven for thinking that the sheer number of references to radical scholarship reflects a close reading and consideration of the texts and arguments in question. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In ‘The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy’,
Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton claim that Marxist approaches treat racism as merely a divide-and-conquer strategy for class struggle and super exploitation, and that Marxists fail to understand that racism – and anti-Blackness in particular – is not an ideology that can be refuted but is
rather ‘fundamental to class relations themselves’. Wilderson’s ‘Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society’ advances a similar critique, arguing that the Black/Slave poses an insoluble problem for the Gramscian discourse on race, since it is not wage labour exploitation but
‘the despotism of the unwaged relation’ that drives anti-Black racism. For Wilderson, this discourse fails to think anything other than capitalism as the ‘base’ structure, from which other superstructural phenomena such as racism emerge. Marxists have thus failed to recognise that
‘Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent’ and that it is ‘as close to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation’. The Black/Slave blows apart key assumptions in Marxist thought, which renders it useless to for the analysis of the afterlife of slavery; this is the ‘scandal of

Wilderson’s and Sexton’s critique of Marxism is shallow at best.

historical materialism’. But Marx clearly states In volume one of Capital,

that ‘the turning of Africa into a commercial hunting of black skins’ signalled ‘the dawn of
warren for the rosy the era of

capitalist production’ . In a letter to Russian literary critic Pavel Vasilyyevich Annenkov, Marx also writes that: We are not dealing here with indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat, we are dealing with direct slavery, the slavery of Blacks in

Marx makes a clear distinction between slave labour and wage labour, refusing to
Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern states of North America

conflate both he writes

in the category of the proletarian. In the specific case of the United States, he believed that the worker’s movements had been paralysed by the existence of slave labour and their inability to adequately address it. In Capital, ,

‘ a revolution relies on the abolition of slavery.

labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’ The possibility of unified proletarian thus While this may sound as if Marx’
is theorising race as merely a divide and conquer strategy, as many critics have accused him of doing, there is an entire discourse within Marxism that has taken seriously the role that the racial plays in structuring social formations in the Americas. Instead of going back to what Marx did

historical studies of the

or didn’t say about slavery, however, it may be more constructive to ask in what ways transatlantic slavery forces us to rethink the fundamental categories of Marxist political economy. Robin Blackburn’s

transatlantic slave trade offer a more nuanced perspective that is entirely at odds with the strawman Marxism

New World slavery

of the AP™. Blackburn acknowledges that represented an intensification and racialisation of
was more than just a divide and conquer strategy; it

prior forms of slavery . Like early African or Roman slavery, chattel slavery was based on the idea that a person could be bought and sold. But unlike previous techniques, the New World version institutionalised slavery and made it hereditary. Once a
person had been enslaved, it was highly likely that their descendants would continue to exist in a relation of bondage. Where Blackburn’s analysis diverges from the AP™ is in his emphasis on the interrelation between slavery, colonialism and capitalism, and his efforts to understand how
 New World slavery was a central product of the rise of capitalism, not of an
the racial structures the mode of production in each instance. For Blackburn,

a priori anti-Blackness, and therefore cannot be neatly be separated from the early stages of capitalist
accumulation and the violent expansion of European colonialism in Africa, Asia and (early Spanish and Portuguese as well as later British)

the Americas . As Greg Thomas argues in ‘Afro-Blue Notes’, Walter Rodney already recognised this, in ‘Slavery and Underdevelopment’ and ‘Plantation Society in Guyana’, when he showed that plantation slavery in America is colonial slavery. In short, ‘there is no

racial
system of slavery in any part of these Americas that is not still settler colonial slavery; no settler colonialism without chattel slavery or racial slavery and their neo-slaveries’, Blackburn and other radical historians of slavery draw on Cedric Robinson’s concept of ‘

capitalism’ can be used to refute the claim that slaveness and Africanness are one and the same
, which . In Black Marxism

capitalism and racism grew together from the old order to

Robinson argues that racism was already present in Western civilisation prior to the flourishing of capitalism. Thus,

produce the ‘racial capitalism’ characteristic of the modern world; a new world system relying on
slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide for its continued expansion . The value of Robinson’s work lies in its ability to uncover the contingent relationship

early European proletarians were racialised subjects from oppressed groups, such as
between slavery and Blackness: he argues that

the Irish, Jews, Roma or Slavs, who were victims of dispossession, colonialism and slavery within Europe .

With the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade, new notions of difference emerged, based on more
aggressively racialised conceptions, that were used to justify the political economy of slavery white . For Robinson,

supremacy masked itself as an economic rationale, which in turn organised racial hierarchies, with the
production of cotton at its core . As Chris Chen writes in ‘The Limit Points of Capitalist Equality’, the colonial and racial genealogy of European capitalism’ were ‘encoded directly into the economic “base” through an ongoing history of

There are also several surprising omissions in the AP™ account of slavery that
racial violence which […] binds surplus populations to capitalist markets.

point towards its entrenched African-American exceptionalism, most notably that of the slave trade in
the Americas more broadly Although the African-American experience of chattel slavery is
.

overrepresented in the AP™ narrative, only about 4 per cent of all enslaved Africans, out of over 10
million that were taken to the Americas North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were carried to . Close to five million enslaved Africans were taken to Portuguese

While the AP™ continue to

America (Brazil) alone between 1501 and 1866, and whose labour became the driving force for the sugar economy in the early 1600s, and gold and diamond mining from about 1690 onwards.

structure their analysis of Blackness and slaveness around the official abolition of slavery in the United
States in 1865, slavery wasn’t abolished in Brazil until 1888
they seem to forget that The . But in the AP™’s ‘afterlife of slavery’, these histories don’t play any role.

legacy of US chattel slavery consumes all Black experience, both historical and contemporary. If the AP™ were to pay

In Nigeria, the country

attention to the peculiarities of Brazilian slavery, it would have to adapt its concept of Blackness to develop an account of how race has structured a social formation with the second largest Black population in the world.

with the world’s largest Black population, the ‘afterlife of slavery’ takes on a completely different
meaning than in the US. While slavery had existed in Igbo society before colonisation, it accelerated with the increasing demand for slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. When slavery was officially abolished in many parts of the West, Adiele
Afigbo writes in The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950, Igbo slave markets were flooded with ohu and osu slaves, whose descendants to this day retain the stigma of their ancestors – they cannot intermarry with freeborn and are excluded from important

Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani argues that: Igbo discrimination is not
community organisations. In a recent New Yorker article

based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn.
Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality . Discrimination of slave descendants is thus based on their role as outsiders, since the ohu have never really
lost their outsider status in a society where community ties are extremely important. Afigbo’s periodisation also points to another important aspect of slavery in Nigeria: it was only officially abolished by the British in the early 1900s but continued informally for at least another forty to

What this means is that we cannot understand slavery in Nigeria within the Igbo system with
fifty years.

reference to an African-American concept of race, conditioned entirely by the experiences of US chattel

slavery the afterlife of slavery is not characterised by the condition of the Black/Slave but
. For the descendants of ohu slaves,

rather by something quite different. In this case, the equation of the Black/Slave with the African does not hold. So what can we learn from these different histories of slavery and racialisation? Brazilian academic Denise

shared blackness has been traversed by the

Ferreira da Silva draws the following conclusion in ‘Facts of Blackness’, her comparative study of race in the US and Brazil, I was convinced that our

particular effects of specific nation, gender and class conditions . Slavery and colonialism composed the historical ground upon which race, gender and nationess have written the

[…] That instrinsically multiple quality of black subjectivity demands attention to the
various versions of black subjectivity

specific historical and discursive developments informing a society’s strategies of racial subordination . In her

we cannot comprehend the ‘present global configuration’ unless we ‘unpack

more recent book Toward a Global Idea of Race, Silva further contends that

how the racial, the cultural and the nation institute the modern subject’ and analyse the context in which the modern subject emerged and was produced. For

even
Silva, racial difference is not an ideological or cultural construction but rather a real category and is responsible for structuring the contemporary global configuration. And precisely because race supplies the discursive basis for the subordination of non-white people,

specific studies of Blackness must be placed in the global historical context in which racialised subjects
emerged In this way, we can avoid US-centric ontological (supposedly universal) conceptions of
.

Blackness while simultaneously emphasising the histories of interconnection between Black populations
across the world these exist within a global system
. In short, the object of analysis is not the afterlife of slavery but the multiplicity of afterlives of slavery and colonisation; the aim is to study how

structured by imperialism. This is not to say that there aren’t glimmers of hope in the US literary and academic scene. John Keene’s part-historical, part-fictional (and undoubtedly political) retelling of the slave experience in
Counternarratives, gives equal weight to the specificities of slavery in Brazil under Portuguese rule and in North America in the pre-Civil War era. Counternarratives weaves together these diverging but interconnected histories to draw out the underlying logic structuring gender, race and
class under different forms of slavery and colonisation. Most importantly, however, Keene plays with the engrained Eurocentric prejudices that colonisers used to belittle and ‘other’ colonial subjects. Irrationality and spirituality become sources of power: Keene’s characters actually
possess the magical powers that have been attributed to them by the colonisers – these are in turn transformed into a basis for Black insurgency. While Keene opens the collection with a quote from Fred Moten on the relationship between philosophy and slavery (‘The social situation of
 moves beyond
philosophy is slavery’), his exposition of the lived histories of enslaved peoples in various social formations, the realm of simple African-American exceptionalism, and his deconstruction of Eurocentric prejudices more in line with the ‘thin’ and

strategic deployment of essentialism than the ‘thick’ ontological essentialism of the AP™.