Speaker
Description
A sustained engagement with “crisis” as a key category for the knowledge of historical time, event, and change has been a distinctive characteristic of transatlantic Black thought in the contexts and the aftermaths of racial enslavement and colonialism. Theorists ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Sylvia Wynter have focused on crisis by questioning its conceptual prominence, reflecting Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Begriffsgeschichte approach, in the post-Enlightenment philosophy of history. My paper’s core contention is that Black theorizing on crisis has not primarily aimed at expanding that concept’s embrace by incorporating theorizations that diverge from modern Western intellectual traditions and mainstream scholarly canons. At stake is rather the historical eventfulness of crisis as a discernible turning point requiring the activation of human capacities for deliberation and action. As a concept, crisis owes much, therefore, to its powers of representation and imagination, but such powers require a differentiation between crisis as a “break” and the paradigmatic, uneventful persistence of anti-Black violence as essentially gratuitous, or not motivated by disruptions in historical time or social circumstances. To operate as a “crisis category”, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, the social must be able to name conditions—from environmental devastation to economic collapse—that are potentially harmful to human security. The violent excommunication of blackness from humanity has routinely operated not only to remove blackness from the terrain of crisis itself and from the actors called to reflect and act upon it but has in fact configured the specter of Black insurgency as a critical threat to the coherence of the social itself. The excision from crisis of Black suffering—unless analogized under terms like “worker”, “woman”, “colonized”, or “displaced”—secures therefore the concept’s productivity as a mode of managing underlying conflicts toward political resolutions.
| Keywords | blackness, antiblackness, history of concepts, black studies, critical theory. |
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| barchiesi.1@osu.edu |