Herbert Marcuse, “An Essay on Liberation,” 1969. Available at marxists.org →.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 6.
I am deliberately not using the English translation of “powerlessness” for the German word Ohnmacht, as in Ohn- (deriving from Ohne = without) and Macht (power), because the construction “in Ohnmacht fallen” is a phrase in German used to describe fainting, a somatic reaction to being overpowered by forces outside of one’s body. To wake up from Ohnmacht would be described in German as “zu sich kommen,” which means to come to oneself. Hence, the process of being Ohnmächtig is connected to a detachment of the self from the body.
Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 739.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 119.
Despite my fascination, I think it is always important to stress that Fanon’s writing was deeply heteropatriarchal. See T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
When I write “imperial” I am referring also to its aftermath, which Alexander Wehelyie has poignantly described as “the uneven global power structures defined by the intersections of neoliberal capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, immigration, and imperialism, which interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination; and dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation, and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence.” Alexander G. Wehelyie, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1.
Sara Ahmed, “Melancholic Universalism,” feministkilljoys.com, December 15 2015 →.
I am drawing on Glissant’s notion of totality, which he explains as follows: “At this point I need to explain what I mean by this totality I have made so much noise about. It is the idea itself of totality, as expressed so superbly in Western thought, that is threatened with immobility. We have suggested that Relation is an open totality evolving upon itself. That means that, thought of in this manner, it is the principle of unity that we subtract from this idea. In Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity. Let us say this again, opaquely: the idea of totality alone is an obstacle to totality.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 192.
See Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World, ed. Nikita Dhawan (Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2014).
Cornel West, “Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama,” The Guardian, January 9, 2017 →.
See Daniel Matlin, On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.