© 2017 Duke University Press

“critique de la raison nègre” by Achille Mbembe

© Editions La Découverte, Paris, France, 2013.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Cover designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mbembe, Achille, [date] author. |
Dubois, Laurent, [date] translator.
Title: Critique of black reason / Achille Mbembe ;
translated by Laurent Dubois.
Other titles: Critique de la raison nègre. English
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. |
“A John Hope Franklin Center Book.” | Originally published
as “Critique de la raison nègre”: Paris : La Decouverte, [2013] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016043545 (print)
lccn 2016046043 (ebook)
isbn 9780822363323 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822363439 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373230 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Blacks—Race identity. | Whites—Race
identity. | Race—Philosophy. | Race—Social aspects. |
Race awareness—Moral and ethical aspects. | Slavery—Moral
and ethical aspects. | Racism. | Difference (Philosophy)
Classification: lcc ht1581 .m3313 2017 (print) |
lcc ht1581 (ebook) | ddc 305.8001—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043545
ONE
THE SUBJECT
OF RACE

The pages that follow deal with “Black reason.” By this ambiguous and
polemical term I mean to identify several things at once: forms of
knowledge; a model of extraction and depredation; a paradigm of sub-
jection, including the modalities governing its eradication; and, finally,
a psycho-oneiric complex. Like a kind of giant cage, Black reason is in
truth a complicated network of doubling, uncertainty, and equivocation,
built with race as its chassis.
We can speak of race (or racism) only in a fatally imperfect language,
gray and inadequate. Let it suffice to say, for now, that race is a form of
primal representation. Unable to distinguish between the outside and the
inside, between envelopes and their contents, it sends us, above all, back
to surface simulacra. Taken to its limit, race becomes a perverse complex,
a generator of fears and torments, of disturbed thoughts and terror, but
especially of infinite sufferings and, ultimately, catastrophe. In its phantas-
magoric dimensions, it is a sign of neurosis—phobic, obsessive, at times
hysterical. Other wise, it is what reassures itself by hating, deploying dread,
and practicing altruicide: the constitution of the Other not as similar to
oneself but as a menacing object from which one must be protected or
escape, or which must simply be destroyed if it cannot be subdued.1 As
Frantz Fanon has noted, “race” is also the name for bitter resentment and
the irrepressible desire for vengeance. “Race” is the name for the rage of
those who, constrained by subjection, suffer injuries, all manner of vio-
lations and humiliations, and bear countless wounds.2 We will therefore
ask, in this book, about the nature of this resentment. We will provide an
account of what race does, of its depth, at once real and fictive, and of the
relationships through which it expresses itself. And we will examine the
gesture of race that, notably in the case of people of African origin, consists
in dissolving human beings into things, objects, and merchandise.3

Fantasy and the Closing of the Spirit

It may seem surprising to resort to the concept of race, at least in the way
that it is sketched out here. In fact, race does not exist as a physical, an-
thropological, or genetic fact.4 But it is not just a useful fiction, a phantas-
magoric construction, or an ideological projection whose function is to
draw attention away from conflicts judged to be more real—the struggle
between classes or genders, for example. In many cases race is an autono-
mous figure of the real whose force and density can be explained by its
characteristic mobility, inconstancy, and capriciousness. It wasn’t all that
long ago, after all, that the world was founded on an inaugural dualism that
sought justification in the old myth of racial superiority.5 In its avid need
for myths through which to justify its power, the Western world consid-
ered itself the center of the earth and the birthplace of reason, universal
life, and the truth of humanity. The most “civilized” region of the world,
the West alone had invented the “rights of the people.” It alone had suc-
ceeded in constituting a civil society of nations understood as a public
space of legal reciprocity. It alone was at the origin of the idea that to be
human was to possess civil and political rights that allowed individuals to
develop private and public powers as citizens of the human race who, as
such, were shaped by all that was human. And it alone had codified a range
of customs accepted by different peoples that included diplomatic rituals,
the rules of engagement, the right of conquest, public morality and polite
behavior, and practices of business, religion, and government.
The Remainder—the ultimate sign of the dissimilar, of difference and
the pure power of the negative—constituted the manifestation of existence
as an object. Africa in general and Blackness in particular were presented as
accomplished symbols of a vegetative, limited state. The Black Man, a sign
in excess of all signs and therefore fundamentally unrepresentable, was the
ideal example of this other-being, powerfully possessed by emptiness, for
whom the negative had ended up penetrating all moments of existence—
the death of the day, destruction and peril, the unnameable night of the
world.6 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel described such figures as statues

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 11

without language or awareness of themselves, human entities incapable
of ridding themselves definitively of the animal presence with which they
were mixed. In fact, their nature was to contain what was already dead.
Such figures, he wrote, were the province of “a host of separate, antagonis-
tic national Spirits who hate and fight each other to the death,” dismember-
ing and destroying themselves like animals—a kind of humanity staggering
through life, confusing becoming-human and becoming-animal, and all along
“unconscious of their universality.”7 Others, more charitable, admitted that
such entities were not completely devoid of humanity. They were, rather,
in a state of slumber and had not yet become engaged in the adventure
of what Paul Valéry called the “leap of no return.” It was possible, they
claimed, to raise them up to our level, and shouldering that burden did not
grant the right to take advantage of their inferiority. On the contrary, it was
Europe’s duty to help and protect them.8 This made the colonial enterprise
a fundamentally “civilizing” and “humanitarian” enterprise. The violence
that was its corollary could only ever be moral.9
European discourse, both scholarly and popular, had a way of thinking,
of classifying and imagining distant worlds, that was often based on modes of
fantasizing. By presenting facts, often invented, as real, certain, and exact, it
evaded what it claimed to capture and maintained a relationship to other
worlds that was fundamentally imaginary, even as it sought to develop forms
of knowledge aimed at representing them objectively. The essential qualities
of the imaginary relationship remain to be elucidated, but the procedures
that enabled the work of fantasy to take shape, as well as the violence that
resulted from it, are now sufficiently well known. At this point, there are
very few things we can add. But if there is one space in which the imagi-
nary relationship and the fictional economy undergirding it existed in their
most brutal, distinct, and obvious form, it is in the sign that we call Blackness
and, as if by ricochet, in the seeming outer zone that we call Africa, both
of which are fated to be not common nouns, or even proper nouns, but
rather mere indicators of an absence of achievement.
Clearly, not all Blacks are Africans, and not all Africans are Blacks. But
it matters little where they are located. As objects of discourse and objects
of knowledge, Africa and Blackness have, since the beginning of the mod-
ern age, plunged the theory of the name as well as the status and function
of the sign and of representation into deep crisis. The same was true of the
relation between being and appearance, truth and falsehood, reason and

12 CHAPTER ONE
unreason, even language and life. Every time it confronted the question of
Blacks and Africa, reason found itself ruined and emptied, turning con-
stantly in on itself, shipwrecked in a seemingly inaccessible place where
language was destroyed and words themselves no longer had memory. Lan-
guage, its ordinary functions extinguished, became a fabulous machine
whose power resided in its vulgarity, in its remarkable capacity for viola-
tion, and in its indefinite proliferation. Still today, as soon as the subject of
Blacks and Africa is raised, words do not necessarily represent things; the
true and the false become inextricable; the signification of the sign is not
always adequate to what is being signified. It is not only that the sign is
substituted for the thing. Word and image often have little to say about the
objective world. The world of words and signs has become autonomous to
such a degree that it exists not only as a screen possessed by its subject, its
life, and the conditions of its production but as a force of its own, capable
of emancipating itself from all anchoring in reality. That this is the case must
be attributed, to a large extent, to the law of race.
It would be a mistake to believe that we have left behind the regime
that began with the slave trade and flourished in plantation and extraction
colonies. In these baptismal fonts of modernity, the principle of race and
the subject of the same name were put to work under the sign of capital.
This is what distinguishes the slave trade and its institutions from indig-
enous forms of servitude.10 Between the fourteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, the spatial horizon of Europe expanded considerably. The Atlantic
gradually became the epicenter of a new concatenation of worlds, the locus
of a new planetary consciousness. The shift into the Atlantic followed Eu-
ropean attempts at expansion in the Canaries, Madeira, the Azores, and
the islands of Cape Verde and culminated in the establishment of a planta-
tion economy dependent on African slave labor.11
The transformation of Spain and Portugal from peripheral colonies of
the Arab world into the driving forces of European expansion across the At-
lantic coincided with the flow of Africans into the Iberian Peninsula itself.
They contributed to the reconstruction of the Iberian principalities in the
wake of the Black Death and the Great Famine of the fourteenth century.
Most were slaves, but certainly not all. Among them were freemen. Slaves
had previously been supplied to the peninsula via trans-Saharan routes
controlled by the Moors. Around 1440 the Iberians opened up direct con-
tact with West and Central Africa via the Atlantic Ocean. The first public

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 13

sale of Black victims captured in a raid took place in Portugal in 1444. The
number of “captives” increased substantially between 1450 and 1500, and
the African presence grew as a consequence. Thousands of slaves disem-
barked in Portugal each year, destabilizing the demographic equilibrium
of certain Iberian cities. Such was the case in Lisbon, Seville, and Cádiz,
where nearly 10 percent of the population was African at the beginning of
the sixteenth century.12 Most were assigned to agricultural and domestic
work.13 Once the conquest of the Americas began, Afro-Iberians and Af-
rican slaves could be found among ship’s crews, at commercial outposts,
on plantations, and in the urban centers of the empire.14 They participated
in different military campaigns (in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Florida) and in
1519 were among Hernán Cortés’s regiments when they invaded Mexico.15
After 1492 the triangular trade transformed the Atlantic into an entangled
economy connecting Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe.
Relatively autonomous regions became interconnected, part of a vast
Oceanic-Continental formation. The new multi-hemispheric ensemble
engendered a series of transformations without parallel in the history of
the world. People of African origin were at the heart of new and frenzied
dynamics of coming and going, from one side to the other of the same
ocean, from the slave ports of West and Central Africa to those in the Amer-
icas and Europe. The economy on which the new structure of circulation
was based required colossal capital. It also involved the transfer of metals,
agricultural products, and manufactures, alongside the dissemination of
knowledge, the circulation of cultural practices that were previously un-
known, and the development of insurance, accounting, and finance. The
increasing traffic of religions, languages, technologies, and cultures set in
motion new processes of creolization. Black consciousness during early
capitalism emerged in part within this dynamic of movement and circu-
lation. It was the product of a tradition of travel and displacement, one
rooted in a logic that denationalized the imagination. Such processes of
denationalization continued through the middle of the twentieth century
and marked most of the great movements of Black emancipation.16
Between 1630 and 1780, far more Africans than Europeans disembarked
in Great Britain’s Atlantic colonies.17 In this sense the height of Black pres-
ence within the British Empire was at the end of the eighteenth century.
Ships leaving the slave forts and ports of West Africa and the Bay of Biafra
with human cargoes deposited their wares in Jamaica and the United

14 CHAPTER ONE
States. But alongside the macabre commerce in slaves, whose only objec-
tive was profit, was the movement of free Africans, the new colonists—the
“black poor” in England, or refugees from the War of Independence in
the United States who left Newfoundland, Virginia, or Carolina to settle
in the new colonies of Africa itself, such as Sierra Leone.18
The transnationalization of the Black condition was therefore a con-
stitutive moment for modernity, with the Atlantic serving as its incuba-
tor. The Black condition incorporated a range of contrasting states and
statuses: those sold through the transatlantic slave trade, convict laborers,
subsistence slaves (whose lives were spent as domestics), feudal slaves,
house slaves, those who were emancipated, and those who were born
slaves. Between 1776 and 1825, Europe lost most of its American colonies
as a result of revolutions, independence movements, and rebellions. Afro-
Latins played an eminent role in the constitution of the Iberian-Hispanic
empires. They served not only as servile laborers but also as ship’s crew-
men, explorers, officers, settlers, property owners, and, in some cases, free-
men who owned slaves.19 In the anticolonial uprisings of the nineteenth
century that resulted in the dissolution of empire, they played diverse
roles as soldiers and leaders of political movements. The collapse of
the imperial structures of the Atlantic world and the rise of new nation-
states transformed the relationships between metropoles and colonies. A
class of Creole Whites asserted and consolidated their influence.20 Old
questions of heterogeneity, difference, and liberty were once again posed,
with new elites using the ideology of mestizaje to deny and disqualify the
racial question. The contribution of Afro-Latins and Black slaves to the
historical development of South America has been, if not erased, at least
severely obscured.21
The case of Haiti was crucial from this standpoint. The country’s dec-
laration of independence came in 1804, only twenty years after that of
the United States, and it marked a turning point in the modern history
of human emancipation. Over the course of the eighteenth century—the
age of Enlightenment—the colony of Saint-Domingue was the classic ex-
ample of a plantocracy, a hierarchical social, political, and economic order
led by a relatively small number of rival White groups ruling in the midst
of freemen of color and those of mixed heritage and over a large majority
of slaves, more than half of them born in Africa.22 In contrast to other
independence movements, the Haitian Revolution was the result of an

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 15

insurrection of the enslaved. It resulted, in 1805, in one of the most radical
constitutions of the New World. It outlawed nobility, instituted freedom
of religion, and attacked the two concepts of property and slavery, some-
thing that the American Revolution had not dared to do. Not only did the
new Haitian Constitution abolish slavery. It also authorized the confisca-
tion of lands belonging to French settlers, decapitating most of the domi-
nant class along the way. It abolished the distinction between legitimate
and illegitimate birth and pushed then-revolutionary ideas of racial equal-
ity and universal liberty to their ultimate conclusion.23
In the United States, the first Black slaves disembarked in 1619. On the
eve of the revolution against the English, there were more than 500,000
slaves in the rebel colonies. In 1776 about five thousand enlisted as soldiers
on the side of the Patriots, even though most of them were not considered
citizens. The struggle against British domination and the fight against the
slave system went hand in hand for most. Yet nearly ten thousand slaves
in Georgia and South Carolina deserted plantations to join the English
troops. Others fought for their own liberation by escaping into swamps
and forest. At the end of the war, roughly fourteen thousand Blacks, some
of them now free, were evacuated from Savannah, Charleston, and New
York and transported to Florida, Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and, later, Africa.24
The anticolonial revolution against the English gave rise to a paradox:
on the one hand, the expansion of the spheres of liberty for Whites and, on
the other, an unprecedented consolidation of the slave system. To a large
extent, the planters of the South had bought their freedom with the labor
of slaves. Because of the existence of servile labor, the United States largely
avoided class divisions within the White population, divisions that would
have led to internal power struggles with incalculable consequences.25
Over the course of the Atlantic period briefly described here, the small
province of the planet that is Europe gradually gained control over the rest
of the world. In parallel, particularly during the eighteenth century, there
emerged discourses of truth relating to nature, the specificity and forms
of the living, and the qualities, traits, and characteristics of human beings.
Entire populations were categorized as species, kinds, or races, classified
along vertical lines.26
Paradoxically, it was also during this period that people and cultures
were increasingly conceptualized as individualities closed in upon them-
selves. Each community—and even each people—was considered a unique

16 CHAPTER ONE
collective body endowed with its own power. The collective also became
the foundation for a history shaped, it was thought, by forces that emerged
only to destroy other forces, and by struggle that could result only in liberty
or servitude.27 The expansion of the European spatial horizon, then, went
hand in hand with a division and shrinking of the historical and cultural
imagination and, in certain cases, a relative closing of the mind. In sum,
once genders, species, and races were identified and classified, nothing re-
mained but to enumerate the differences between them. The closing off
of the mind did not signify the extinction of curiosity itself. But from the
High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, curiosity as a mode of inquiry and
a cultural sensibility was inseparable from the work of fantasy, which,
when focused on other worlds, constantly blurred the lines between the
believable and the unbelievable, the factual and the marvelous.28
By the time Georges-Louis Buffon attempted the first great racial clas-
sification, the language on other worlds was suffused with naive and sen-
sualist prejudices. Extremely complex forms of life had been reduced to
mere epithets.29 We can call this the gregarious phase of Western thinking.
The period represented the Black Man as the prototype of a prehuman
figure incapable of emancipating itself from its bestiality, of reproducing
itself, or of raising itself up to the level of its god. Locked within sensation,
the Black Man struggled to break the chains of biological necessity and
for that reason was unable to take a truly human form and shape his own
world. He therefore stood apart from the normal existence of the human
race. During this gregarious moment of Western thinking, and propelled
by imperialist impulse, the act of capturing and grasping ideas became
gradually detached from the effort to know deeply and intimately. Hegel’s
Reason in History represents the culmination of the gregarious period.30 For
several centuries the concept of race—which we know referred initially to
the animal sphere—served to name non-European human groups.31 What
was then called the “state of race” corresponded, it was thought, to a state
of degradation and defect of an ontological nature. The notion of race
made it possible to represent non-European human groups as trapped in
a lesser form of being. They were the impoverished reflection of the ideal
man, separated from him by an insurmountable temporal divide, a differ-
ence nearly impossible to overcome. To talk of them was, most of all, to
point to absence—the absence of the same—or, rather, to a second pres-
ence, that of monsters and fossils. If the fossil, as Michel Foucault writes,

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 17

is “what permits resemblances to subsist throughout all the deviations tra-
versed by nature,” and functions primarily “as a distant and approximative
form of identity,” the monster, in contrast “provides an account, as though
in caricature, of the genesis of differences.”32 On the great chart of species,
genders, races, and classes, Blackness, in its magnificent obscurity, rep-
resented the synthesis of these two figures. But Blackness does not exist
as such. It is constantly produced. To produce Blackness is to produce a
social link of subjection and a body of extraction, that is, a body entirely
exposed to the will of the master, a body from which great effort is made
to extract maximum profit. An exploitable object, the Black Man is also
the name of a wound, the symbol of a person at the mercy of the whip and
suffering in a field of struggle that opposes socioracially segmented groups
and factions. Such was the case for most of the insular plantocracies of the
Caribbean, those segmented universes in which the law of race depended
as much on conflict between White planters and Black slaves as between
Blacks and “free people of color” (often manumitted mulattoes), some of
whom owned slaves themselves.
The Blacks on the plantation were, furthermore, diverse. They were hunt-
ers of maroons and fugitives, executioners and executioners’ assistants,
skilled slaves, informants, domestics, cooks, emancipated slaves who were
still subjugated, concubines, field-workers assigned to cutting cane, work-
ers in factories, machine operators, masters’ companions, and occasion-
ally soldiers. Their positions were far from stable. Circumstances could
change, and one position could become another. Today’s victim could
tomorrow become an executioner in the ser vice of the master. It was not
uncommon for a slave, once freed, to become a slave owner and hunter of
fugitive slaves.
Moreover, Blacks of the plantation were socialized into the hatred of
others, particularly of other Blacks. The plantation was characterized by
its segmented forms of subjection, distrust, intrigue, rivalry, and jealousy,
ambivalent tactics born out of complicity, arrangements of all kinds, and
practices of differentiation carried out against a backdrop of the reversibil-
ity of positions. But it was also defined by the fact that the social links de-
fined by exploitation were never stable. They were constantly challenged
and had to be produced and reproduced through violence of a molecular
kind that sutured and saturated the master–slave relationship.

18 CHAPTER ONE
 From time to time that relationship exploded in uprisings, insurrec-
tions, and slave plots. A paranoid institution, the plantation lived under
a perpetual regime of fear. It combined aspects of a camp, a pen, and a
paramilitary society. The slave master could deploy one form of coercion
after another, create chains of dependence between him and his slaves,
and alternate between terror and generosity, but his existence was always
haunted by the specter of extermination. The Black slave, on the other hand,
was constantly on the threshold of revolt, tempted to respond to the in-
sistent call of liberty or vengeance, or else pulled into a form of maximum
degradation and radical self-abdication that consisted in protecting his life
by participating in the project of subjection.
Furthermore, between 1620 and 1640, the forms of servitude remained
relatively fluid, particularly in the United States. Free labor coexisted with
indentured labor (a form of impermanent servitude, or servitude of a
predetermined length) and slavery (both hereditary and nonhereditary).
There were profound class divisions within the settler population as well
as between settlers and the mass of the enslaved. Slaves were furthermore
a multiracial group. Between 1630 and 1680, a bifurcation took place that
gave birth to plantation society as such. The principle of lifelong servitude
for people of African origin stigmatized because of their color gradually
became the rule. Africans and their children became slaves for life. The dis-
tinctions between White servants and Black slaves became much sharper.
The plantation gradually took shape as an economic, disciplinary, and penal
institution in which Blacks and their descendants could be bought for life.
Throughout the seventeenth century a massive legislative effort sealed
their fate. The construction of subjects of race on the American continent
began with their civic destitution and therefore their exclusion from the
privileges and rights guaranteed to the other inhabitants of the colonies.
From then on they were no longer humans like all others. The process
continued with the extension of lifetime slavery to their children and
their descendants. This first phase marked the completion of a long pro-
cess aimed at establishing their legal incapacity. The loss of the right to
appear in court turned the Black individual into a nonperson from a ju-
ridical standpoint. To this judicial mechanism was added a series of slave
codes, often developed in the aftermaths of slave uprisings. Around 1720,
with legal codification complete, what we might call the Black structure of

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 19

the world, which already existed in the West Indies, officially appeared
in the United States, with the plantation as its core structure. As for Blacks,
they were nothing more than pieces of property, at least from a strict legal
perspective. The pressing question from 1670 on was how to deploy large
numbers of laborers within a commercial enterprise that spanned great
distances. The answer was the invention of Blackness. It was the cog that
made possible the creation of the plantation—one of the period’s most ef-
fective forms of wealth accumulation—and accelerated the integration of
merchant capitalism with technology and the control of subordinated labor.
The plantation developed over this period represented an innovation in
scale, through the denial of liberty, the control of worker mobility, and the
unlimited deployment of violence. The invention of Blackness also opened
the way for crucial innovations in the areas of transportation, production,
commerce, and insurance.
Not all of the Blacks in the Caribbean or the United States were slaves,
however. The racialization of servitude in the United States pushed Whites,
and especially the “poor Whites” who did all kinds of labor, to distinguish
themselves as much as possible from the Africans reduced to the state of
slavery. Freemen had one great fear: that the wall separating them from
the slaves was not sturdy enough. At one point or another, societies across
the hemisphere included freemen of color, some of whom were owners
of slaves and land, in addition to indentured Whites. The population of
free people of color gradually grew as a result of waves of manumission
and mixed unions between Black slaves and free Whites or between White
women and Blacks. In the Caribbean in particular, the phenomenon of
Whites with Black concubines became relatively widespread. Even with
racial segregation officially in place, interracial libertinage and concubinage
with women of color, whether free or enslaved, were commonplace among
White elites.33

Recalibration

The twenty-first century is, of course, not the nineteenth century. That pe-
riod was marked by the linked processes of colonial expansion in Africa and
the deliberate biologization of race in the West. It was also, with the help of
Darwinian and post-Darwinian evolutionary thought, the period that saw
the spread of eugenicist strategies in many countries and rising obsessions

20 CHAPTER ONE
with degeneration and suicide.34 Yet, encouraged by processes of global-
ization and the contradictory effects they provoke, the problematic of race
has once again burst into contemporary consciousness.35 The fabrication
of racial subjects has been reinvigorated nearly everywhere.36 Alongside
anti-Semitic racism, the colonial model of comparing humans to animals,
and color prejudice inherited from the slave trade and translated through
institutions of segregation (as with Jim Crow laws in the United States
and the apartheid regime in South Africa), new patterns of racism have
emerged that reconstruct the figure of the intimate enemy within mutated
structures of hate.37 After a brief intermission, the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first have witnessed the return
to biological understandings of the distinctions between human groups.38
Genomics, rather than marking the end of racism, has instead authorized
a new deployment of race.39 Whether through the exploration of the ge-
nomic bases of illnesses within certain groups or genealogical efforts to
trace roots or geographic origins, recourse to genetics tends to confirm
the racial typologies of the nineteenth century (White Caucasians, Black
Africans, Yellow Asiatics).40 The same racial syntax is present in discourses
on reproductive technologies involving the manipulation of ovaries and
sperm and in those concerning reproductive choice through the selection
of embryos, or in languages related to the planning of life in general.41
The same is true of the different ways in which living things can be
manipulated, including the hybridization of organic, animal, and artificial
elements. In fact, there is good reason to believe that in a more or less dis-
tant future genetic techniques will be used to manage the characteristics of
populations to eliminate races judged “undesirable” through the selection
of trisomic embryos, or through theriomorphism (hybridization with
animal elements) or “cyborgization” (hybridization with artificial ele-
ments). Nor is it impossible to believe that we will arrive at a point where
the fundamental role of medicine will be not only to bring a sick organ-
ism back to health but to use medical techniques of molecular engineering
to refashion life itself along lines defined by racial determinism. Race and
racism, then, do not only have a past. They also have a future, particularly
in a context where the possibility of transforming life and creating mutant
species no longer belongs to the realm of fiction.
Taken on their own, the transformations of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction during the second half of the twentieth century cannot explain

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 21

the reappearance and various metamorphoses of the Beast. But they—
along with major discoveries in technology, biology, and genetics—do
undeniably constitute its background.42 A new political economy of life
is emerging, one irrigated by international flows of knowledge about cells,
tissues, organs, pathologies, and therapies as well as about intellectual prop-
erty.43 The reactivation of the logic of race also goes hand in hand with the
increasing power of the ideology of security and the installation of mecha-
nisms aimed at calculating and minimizing risk and turning protection
into the currency of citizenship.
This is notably the case in regard to the management of migration and
mobility in a context in which terrorist threats are believed to increasingly
emanate from individuals organized in cells and networks that span the
surface of the planet. In such conditions the protection and policing of
territory becomes a structural condition for securing the population. To
be effective, such protection requires that everyone remain at home, that
those living and moving within a given national territory be capable of
proving their identities at any given moment, that the most exhaustive in-
formation possible be gathered on each individual, and that the control of
foreigners’ mobility be carried out not only along borders but also from
a distance, preferably within their countries of departure.44 The massive
expansion of digitization under way nearly everywhere in the world partly
adheres to this logic, with the idea that optimal forms of securitization
necessarily require the creation of global systems of control over individu-
als conceived of as biological bodies that are both multiple and in motion.
Protection itself is no longer based solely on the legal order. It has become
a question of biopolitics. The new systems of security build on various
elements of prior regimes (the forms of punishment used within slavery,
aspects of the colonial wars of conquest and occupation, legal-juridical tech-
niques used in the creation of states of exception) and incorporate them,
on a nanocellular level, into the techniques of the age of genomics and
the war on terror. But they also draw on techniques elaborated during the
counterinsurgency wars of the period of decolonization and the “dirty
wars” of the Cold War (in Algeria, Vietnam, Southern Africa, Burma, and
Nicaragua), as well as the experiences of predatory dictatorships put into
power throughout the world with the direct encouragement, or at least
complicity, of the intelligence agencies of the West.

22 CHAPTER ONE
 The increasing power of the security state in the contemporary context
is, furthermore, accompanied by a remodeling of the world through tech-
nology and an exacerbation of forms of racial categorization.45 Facing the
transformation of the economy of violence throughout the world, liberal
democratic regimes now consider themselves to be in a nearly constant
state of war against new enemies who are in flight, both mobile and re-
ticular. The theater of this new form of war is both external and internal.
It requires a “total” conception of defense, along with greater tolerance for
legal exceptions and special dispensations. The conduct of this type of war
depends on the creation of tight, panoptic systems that enable increasing
control of individuals, preferably from a distance, via the traces they leave
behind.46 In place of the classic paradigm of war, in which opposing sides
meet on a well-defined battlefield and the risk of death is reciprocal, the
logic is now vertical. There are two protagonists: prey and predator.47 The
predator, with nearly complete control of the airspace, selects the targets,
locations, times, and nature of the strikes.48 The increasingly vertical char-
acter of war and the more frequent use of unpiloted drones means that
killing the enemy looks more and more like a video game, an experience
of sadism, spectacle, and entertainment.49 And, even more impor tant,
these new forms of warfare carried out from a distance require an unpre-
cedented merging of the civil, police, and military spheres with those of
surveillance.
The spheres of surveillance, meanwhile, are also being reconfigured.
No longer mere state structures, and operating as chains linked in form
only, they function by cultivating private-sector influence, by expanding
into those corporate entities responsible for gathering the data necessary
for mass surveillance. As a result, the objects of surveillance become daily
life, the space of relationships, communication (notably through electronic
technologies), and transactions. There is not, of course, a total concatenation
of the mechanisms of the market and those of the state. But in our con-
temporary world the liberal state is transformed into a war power at a time
when, we now realize, capital not only remains fixed in a phase of primitive
accumulation but also still leverages racial subsidies in its pursuit of profit.
In this context the citizen is redefined as both the subject and the ben-
eficiary of surveillance, which now privileges the transcription of biologi-
cal, genetic, and behavioral characteristics through digital imprints. In a new

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 23

technetronic regime characterized by miniaturization, dematerialization,
and the fluid administration of state violence, imprints (fingerprints, scans
of the iris and retina, forms of vocal and facial recognition) make it possible
to measure and archive the uniqueness of individuals. The distinguishing
parts of the human body become the foundations for new systems of identi-
fication, surveillance, and repression.50 The security state conceives of iden-
tity and the movement of individuals (including its own citizens) as sources
of danger and risk. But the generalized use of biometric data as a source of
identification and for the automation of facial recognition constitutes a new
type of populace, one predisposed toward distancing and imprisonment.51
So it is that, in the context of the anti-immigration push in Europe, entire
categories of the population are indexed and subjected to various forms of
racial categorization that transform the immigrant (legal or illegal) into an
essential category of difference.52 This difference can be perceived as cultural
or religious or linguistic. It is seen as inscribed in the very body of the mi-
grant subject, visible on somatic, physiognomic, and even genetic levels.53
War and race have meanwhile become resurgent problems at the heart
of the international order. The same is true of torture and the phenomenon
of mass incarceration. It is not only that the line between war and peace has
been blurred. War has become a “gigantic process of labor,” while the mili-
tary regime seeks to impose its own model on the “public order of the peace
state.”54 While some citadels have collapsed, other walls have been strength-
ened.55 As has long been the case, the contemporary world is deeply shaped
and conditioned by the ancestral forms of religious, legal, and political life
built around fences, enclosures, walls, camps, circles, and, above all,
borders.56 Procedures of differentiation, classification, and hierarchization
aimed at exclusion, expulsion, and even eradication have been reinvigorated
everywhere. New voices have emerged proclaiming, on the one hand, that
there is no such thing as a universal human being or, on the other, that the
universal is common to some human beings but not to all. Others empha-
size the necessity for all to guarantee the safety of their own lives and homes
by devoting themselves—and their ancestors and their memories, in one
way or another—to the divine, a process that only subtracts them from his-
torical interrogation and secures them completely and permanently within
the walls of theology. Like the beginning of the nineteenth century, the be-
ginning of the twenty-first constitutes, from this perspective, a significant
moment of division, universal differentiation, and identity seeking.

24 CHAPTER ONE
The Noun “Black”

In these conditions the noun “Black”—which serves as the anchor for this
book—is less polemical than it seems. In resuscitating a term that belongs
to another era, that of early capitalism, I mean to question the fiction of
unity that it carries within it. Already in his own time, James Baldwin had
suggested that the Black Man (what he and other writers of his day called
the Negro) was not at all easy to define in the abstract. Beyond ancestral
links, there was very little evidence of an automatic unity between the
Blacks of the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The presence of
Blacks from the Caribbean in the United States, for example, dates from as
early as the seventeenth century. During that period slaves arriving from
Barbados represented a significant portion of the population of Virginia.
Likewise, South Carolina was in many ways a subcolony of Barbados until
the beginning of the eighteenth century. The number of Blacks from the
Caribbean increased significantly after the Civil War, from 4,067 to 20,236
between 1850 and 1900. Most of the new arrivals were artisans, teachers, and
preachers, but they also included lawyers and doctors.57 Afro-Caribbeans
made a key contribution to Black internationalism and the rise of radicalism
in the United States and Africa. But the various conflicts that accompanied
these processes laid bare the distance that often separated the Blacks of
North America and those of the islands.58
The Blacks of North America and the Caribbean came to know Af-
rica first as a form of difference.59 Most of the Black thinkers of the
period claimed both their Africanness and their Americanness. There
were very few separatists.60 Even though they constituted an undesir-
able minority in the country of their birth, the Blacks of the United
States belonged to an American “we,” to a subculture that was at once
fundamentally American and lumpen-Atlantic. This led to the develop-
ment of the motif of double consciousness, which among authors like
Ralph Ellison could lead to a refusal to recognize any filiation with Africa.61
Africa was a drypoint print of a reality that was unknowable—a hy-
phen, a suspension, a discontinuity. And those who traveled to Africa
or chose to live there never felt at home, assailed as they were by the
continent’s strangeness, by its devouring character.62 Their encounters
with the Blacks of Africa from the first constituted an encounter with
another’s other.63

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 25

 That said, a long tradition of coidentification and of mutual concern
characterized the relationship of Blacks beyond their dispersion.64 In his
“letter” concerning “the Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in
America to Africa,” Alexander Crummell started from the principle of a
community of kinship linking Africa to its “children” and “sons” living in
“foreign lands.” By virtue of a relationship of kinship and filiation, he called
on them to take advantage of their rights as inheritors. In his eyes at least,
the right to inherit the cradle of their ancestors in no way contradicted
their desire to belong fully to the “land of their birth,” the United States.
Claiming kinship with Africa and contributing to its regeneration was an
act of self-love and self-respect. It was, he said, a way to get rid of the shroud
that Blacks had carried from the depths of the tomb of slavery. Crummell’s
Africa had two characteristics. On the one hand, it was an amputated
member of humanity. Prostrated in idolatry and darkness, it lived await-
ing revelation. On the other hand, Africa was the land of unfathomable
natural riches. Its mineral riches were colossal. With the race to capture its
treasures under way, its faraway sons should not exclude themselves from
sharing in the spoils. Africa would emerge from its cave, out into the light
of the world, through trade and evangelization. Its salvation would come
from outside, through its transformation into a Christian state.65
Because of this mutual concern, the encounter between the Blacks of
the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa was not only an encounter
with another’s other but also, in many cases, an encounter with others of
my kind—a castrated humanity, a life that must at all costs be pulled out
of the dungeon and that needed to be healed. In this encounter Africa was
a transformative force, almost mythico-poetic—a force that referred con-
stantly to a “time before” (that of subjection), a force that, it was hoped,
would make it possible to transform and assimilate the past, heal the worst
wounds, repair losses, make a new history out of old events, and, according
to the words of Friedrich Nietzsche on another topic, “[rebuild] shattered
forms out of one’s self.”66
But just beneath the surface of this constellation there was always an-
other, carried by those who believed that Blacks would never find peace,
rest, or liberty in America. For their own genius to flourish, they had to
emigrate.67 This constellation saw liberty and territory as indivisible. It was
not enough to build one’s own institutions in the context of worsening
segregation, to acquire expertise and gain respectability, when the right

26 CHAPTER ONE
to citizenship was fundamentally contested, fragile, and reversible. It was
necessary to have one’s own state and to be able to defend it.68 The vision
of exodus was consolidated in particular between 1877 and 1900, within
three different projects. The first was that of colonization, which had a rac-
ist dimension to the extent that it aimed, largely through the American
Colonization Society, to rid America of its Black population by deporting
Blacks to Africa. The second consisted of free emigration, spurred by the
rise in violence and racial terrorism, particularly in the South. The third
developed in the context of American expansionism between 1850 and 1900.
Henry Blanton Parks, for example, considered that American Blacks and
Africans formed two distinct races. As a result of their prolonged contact
with civilization, American Blacks were more evolved than the natives of
Africa.69 The latter had, on the other hand, preserved a primal power. Com-
bined with what American Blacks brought home to Africa from their cen-
turies of accommodation with civilization, this power would reanimate
the virility of the Black race as a whole.70
On one level, then, Black reason consists of a collection of voices, pro-
nouncements, discourses, forms of knowledge, commentary, and non-
sense, whose object is things or people “of African origin.” It is affirmed
as their name and their truth (their attributes and qualities, their destiny
and its significance as an empirical portion of the world). Composed of
multiple strata, this form of reason dates at least from the time of antiquity.
Numerous works have focused on its Greek, Arab, Egyptian, and even
Chinese roots.71 From the beginning, its primary activity was fantasizing.
It consisted essentially in gathering real or attributed traits, weaving them
into histories, and creating images. The modern age, however, was a de-
cisively formative moment for Black reason, owing, on the one hand, to
the accounts of travelers, explorers, soldiers, adventurers, merchants, mis-
sionaries, and settlers and, on the other, to the constitution of a “colonial
science” of which “Africanism” is the last avatar. A range of intermediar-
ies and institutions—scholarly societies, universal exhibitions, museums,
amateur collections of “primitive art”—contributed to the development
of this reason and its transformation into common sense and a habitus.
Black reason was not only a system of narratives and discourses with ac-
ademic pretensions but also the reservoir that provided the justifications
for the arithmetic of racial domination. It was, admittedly, not completely
devoid of a concern for the truth. But its function was first and foremost

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 27

to codify the conditions for the appearance and the manifestation of a
racial subject that would be called the Black Man and, later, within colo-
nialism, the Native (L’indigène). (“Who is he?” “How does one recognize
him?” “What differentiates him from us?” “Can he become like us?” “How
should we govern him and to what end?”)72 In this context “Black reason”
names not only a collection of discourses but also practices—the daily
work that consisted in inventing, telling, repeating, and creating variations
on the formulas, texts, and rituals whose goal was to produce the Black
Man as a racial subject and site of savage exteriority, who was therefore
set up for moral disqualification and practical instrumentalization. We can
call this founding narrative the Western consciousness of Blackness. In seek-
ing to answer the question “Who is he?” the narrative seeks to name a real-
ity exterior to it and to situate that reality in relationship to an I considered
to be the center of all meaning. From this perspective, anything that is not
identical to that I is abnormal.
This founding narrative was in reality a constellation in perpetual re-
configuration over time. It always took on multiple, contradictory, and
divergent forms. In response came a second narrative, one that saw itself
as a gesture of self-determination, a way of being present to oneself and
looking inward, and as a form of utopian critique. The second narrative an-
swered a series of questions of a new kind, again posed in the first person
singular: “Who am I?” “Am I, in truth, what people say I am?” “Is it true
that I am nothing more than that—what I appear to be, what people see
me as and say of me?” “What is my real social status, my real history?”73 If
the Western consciousness of the Black Man is an identity judgment, this
second narrative is, in contrast, a declaration of identity. Through it the
Black Man affirms of himself that he is that which cannot be captured or
controlled; the one who is not where they say he is, and even less where
they are looking for him. Rather, he exists where he is not thought.74
The written work of the second narrative had a series of distinctive traits
that are worth briefly recalling. It sought, above all, to create an archive.
If Blacks were to reclaim their history, the foundation of an archive was
the first step. The historical experiences of Blacks did not necessarily leave
traces, and where they were produced, they were not always preserved.
How could one write history in the absence of the kinds of traces that
serve as sources for historiographical fact? Very early, it became clear that the
history of Blacks could be written only from fragments brought together

28 CHAPTER ONE
to give an account of an experience that itself was fragmented, that of a
pointillist people struggling to define itself not as a disparate composite
but as a community whose blood stains the entire surface of modernity.
Such writing sought, furthermore, to create community, one forged
out of debris from the four corners of the world. In the Western Hemi-
sphere, the reality was that a group of slaves and free people of color lived
for the most part in the gray zones of a nominal citizenship, within states
that celebrated liberty and democracy but remained foundationally slave
states. Across the period, the writing of history had a performative dimen-
sion. The structure of the performance was in many ways theological. The
goal was, in effect, to write a history for the descendants of slaves that re-
opened the possibility for them to become agents of history itself.75 Dur-
ing the period of Emancipation and Reconstruction, the act of writing
history was conceived more than ever as an act of moral imagination. The
ultimate historical gesture consisted in enacting the journey from the sta-
tus of a slave to that of a citizen like all others. The new community of freed
peoples saw itself as linked by common faith and certain ideas of work and
respectability, by moral duty, solidarity, and obligation.76 Yet this moral
identity took shape in the context of segregation, extreme violence, and
racial terror.77
The declaration of identity that is characteristic of the second narrative
was, however, based on profound ambiguity. Although its authors wrote in
the first person and in a mode of self-possession, they, as subjects, were
haunted by the idea that they had become strangers to themselves. They
nevertheless sought to assume their responsibility to the world by creat-
ing a foundation for themselves.78 On the horizon was full and complete
participation in the empirical history of liberty, an indivisible liberty at
the heart of “global humanity.”79 That is the other side of Black reason—
the place where writing seeks to exorcise the demon of the first narrative
and the structure of subjection within it, the place where writing struggles
to evoke, save, activate, and reactualize original experience (tradition) and
find the truth of the self no longer outside of the self but standing on its
own ground.
There are profound disjunctures but also undeniable solidarities between
the second narrative and the first narrative it sought to refute. The second
was traversed by the traces, marks, and incessant buzzing of the first and,
in certain cases, its dull injunction and its myopia, even where the claim

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 29

of rupture was most forceful. Let us call this second narrative the Black
consciousness of Blackness. It nevertheless had its own characteristics. Liter-
ary, biographical, historical, and political, it was the product of a polyglot
internationalism.80 It was born in the great cities of the United States and
the Caribbean, then in Europe, and later in Africa. Ideas circulated within
a vast global network, producing the modern Black imaginary.81 The cre-
ators of the imaginary were often people in motion, crossing constantly
from one continent to another. At times involved in American and Euro-
pean cultural and political life, they participated in the intellectual global-
ization of their epoch.82
Black consciousness of Blackness was also the fruit of a long history of rad-
icalism, nourished by struggles for abolition and against capitalism.83 Over
the course of the nineteenth century in particular, this resistance was to a
large extent driven by international anarchism, the principal vehicle for
opposition movements against capitalism, slavery, and imperialism. But it
was also carried forward by a number of humanitarian and philanthropic cur-
rents in whose struggles, as Paul Gilroy reminds us, lay the foundation for an
alternative genealogy of human rights.84 The content of the second narrative
was most of all marked by the efforts of people subjected to colonization
and segregation who sought to free themselves from racial hierarchy. The
intelligentsia among them developed forms of collective consciousness that,
even as they embraced the epistemology of class struggle itself, attacked
the ontological assumptions that resulted from the production of racial
subjects.85
The notion of Black reason, then, refers to different sides of the same
framework, the same constellation. It refers, moreover, to a dispute or a
conflict. Historically, the conflict over blackness has been inseparable from
the question of our modernity. The name raises a question that has to do,
first of all, with the relationship of what we call “man” with animals, and
therefore the relationship of reason to instinct. The expression “Black Rea-
son” refers to a collection of deliberations concerning the distinction be-
tween the impulse of the animal and the ratio of man, the Black Man being
living proof of the impossibility of such a separation. For, if we follow a
certain tradition of Western metaphysics, the Black Man is a “man” who
is not really one of us, or at least not like us. Man distinguishes himself
from animality, but this is not the case for the Black Man, who maintains
within himself, albeit with a certain degree of ambiguity, animal possi-

30 CHAPTER ONE
bility. A foreign body in our world, he is inhabited—under cover—by
the animal. To debate Black reason is therefore to return to the collection
of debates regarding the rules of how to define the Black Man: how he is
recognized, how one identifies the animal spirit that possesses him, under
which conditions the ratio penetrates and governs the animalitas.
Second, the expression “Black Reason” turns our attention to the tech-
nologies (laws, regulations, rituals) that are deployed—as well as the devices
that are put in place—with the goal of submitting animality to measurement.
Such calculation aims ultimately to inscribe the animal within the circle of
extraction. Yet the attempt at inscription is inevitably paradoxical. On the
one hand, it requires that the price of that which simply is (facticity)—
but which carries no price, or only ever a potential price, since it has been
emptied of value—be measured and calculated. On the other hand, the
operation makes clear how difficult it is to measure the incalculable. The
difficulty flows partly from the fact that the thing that must be calculated
is part of the ontological—what thought itself cannot think, even as it de-
mands to be thought, as if in a vacuum. Finally, the term refers to what, in
principle, requires no explanation because it is off the books, unaccountable,
part of an antieconomy. There is no need to justify it because it creates
nothing. Moreover, there is no need to offer an account of it since, strictly
speaking, it is not based on law, and no calculation as such can ever guar-
antee its exact price or value.

Appearances, Truth, and Simulacrum

When we say the word “race,” what do we really mean? It is not enough to
say that race itself has no essence; that it is nothing more than “the ef-
fect, profile, or cut” of a perpetual process of power, of “incessant transac-
tions” that modify, displace, and shift its meaning; or that, having no guts
because it has no insides, it consists only of the practices that constitute
it as such.86 It is not enough, furthermore, to affirm that it is a complex
of microdeterminations, an internalized effect of the Other’s gaze and a
manifestation of secret, unfulfilled beliefs and desires.87 On the one hand,
race and racism are part of the fundamental process of the unconscious. In
that respect they relate to the impasses of human desire—to appetites, af-
fects, passions, fears. They symbolize above all the memory of a lost origi-
nal desire, or of a trauma whose causes often have nothing to do with the

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 31

person who is the victim of racism. On the other hand, race is not only the
result of an optical effect. It is not only a part of the world of the senses. It is
also a way of anchoring and affirming power. It is above all a specular reality
and impulsive force. For it to operate as affect, impulse, and speculum, race
must become image, form, surface, figure, and—especially—a structure
of the imagination. And it is as a structure of the imagination that it es-
capes the limitations of the concrete, of what is sensed, of the finite, even
as it participates within and manifests itself most immediately through the
senses. Its power comes from its capacity to produce schizophrenic ob-
jects constantly, peopling and repeopling the world with substitutes, be-
ings to point to, to break, in a hopeless attempt to support a failing I.
Race and racism also have the fundamental characteristic of always
inciting and engendering a double, a substitute, an equivalent, a mask, a
simulacrum. A real human face comes into view. The work of racism con-
sists in relegating it to the background or covering it with a veil. It replaces
this face by calling up, from the depths of the imagination, a ghost of a
face, a simulacrum of a face, a silhouette that replaces the body and face of
a human being. Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with
something else, with another reality. It has the power to distort the real
and to fix affect, but it is also a form of psychic derangement, the mecha-
nism through which the repressed suddenly surfaces. When the racist sees
a Black person, he does not see that the Black person is not there, does
not exist, and is just a sign of a pathological fixation on the absence of a
relationship. We must therefore consider race as being both beside and
beyond being. It is an operation of the imagination, the site of an encoun-
ter with the shadows and hidden zones of the unconscious.
I have emphasized that racism is a site of reality and truth—the truth of
appearances. But it is also a site of rupture, of effervescence and effusion.
The truth of individuals who are assigned a race is at once elsewhere and
within the appearances assigned to them. They exist behind appearance,
underneath what is perceived. But they are also constituted by the very
act of assigning, the process through which certain forms of infralife are
produced and institutionalized, indifference and abandonment justified,
the part that is human in the other violated or occulted through forms
of internment, even murder, that have been made acceptable. Foucault,
dealing with racism and its inscription in the mechanisms of the state and
power, noted in this regard that “the modern State can scarcely function

32 CHAPTER ONE
without becoming involved with racism at some point, within certain lim-
its and subject to certain conditions.” Race or racism, “in a normalizing
society,” he noted, “is the precondition that makes killing acceptable.” He
concludes, “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone
can justify the murderous functions of the State.”88
The people to whom race is assigned are not passive. Imprisoned in
a silhouette, they are separated from their essence. According to Fanon,
one of the reasons for their unhappiness is that their existence consists
in inhabiting the separation as if it were their real being, in hating what they
are and seeking to be what they are not. The critique of race is, from this
perspective, more than a simple critique of separation. The racial theater is
a space of systematic stigmatization. The call to race or the invocation of
race, notably on the part of the oppressed, is the emblem of an essentially
obscure, shadowy, and paradoxical desire—the desire for community.89
Such a desire is obscure, shadowy, and paradoxical because it is doubly
inhabited by melancholia and mourning, and by a nostalgia for an archaic
that which is always doomed to disappear. The desire is at once worry and
anxiety—linked to the possibility of extinction—and a project. Moreover,
it is the language of bemoaning, and of a mourning that rebels in its own
name. It articulates itself around, and creates itself by circumventing, a ter-
rible memory, the memory of a body, a voice, a face, and a name that, if not
completely lost, have at least been violated and dirtied, and that must at all
costs be rescued and rehabilitated.90
For Blacks confronted with the reality of slavery, loss is first of a ge-
nealogical order. In the New World, the Black slave is legally stripped of
all kinship. Slaves are, in consequence, “without parents.” The condition
of kinlessness is imposed on them through law and power. And eviction
from the world of legal kinship is an inherited condition. Birth and de-
scent afford them no right to any form of social relationship or belong-
ing as such.91 In such conditions the invocation of race or the attempt to
constitute a racial community aims first to forge ties and open up space
in which to stand, to respond to a long history of subjugation and bio-
political fracturing. Aimé Césaire and the poets of Negritude, for example,
made the exaltation of the “Black race” a tremendous cry whose function
was to save from total decay what had been condemned to insignificance.92
As conjuration, announcement, and protest, the cry expressed the will of
the enslaved and the colonized to escape resignation, to form a body, to

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 33

produce themselves as a free and sovereign community, ideally through
their own work and achievements. They sought to make themselves their
own points of origin, their own certainty, and their own destination in the
world.93
We can therefore say of the invocation of race that it is born from a
feeling of loss, from the idea that the community has suffered a separa-
tion, that it is threatened with extermination, and that it must at all costs
be rebuilt by reconstituting a thread of continuity beyond time, space,
and dislocation.94 From this perspective, the call to race (which is differ-
ent from racial assignation) is a way of resurrecting the immolated corpse
that had been buried and severed from the links of blood, soil, institutions,
rites, and symbols that made it a living being. During the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, this was the meaning of the call to race in Black
discourse. At times the call became a search for original purity or a desire for
absolute separation. Such was the case for Marcus Garvey, for example. At
other times it was more the expression of a will to escape the principle of
immolation and sacrifice. And in other cases it was a response to a desire
for protection in the face of the threat of disappearance, an instinct for
survival and preservation. The goal was to imagine and create a different
space, where isolation would guarantee protection. Safety would require
a redistribution of feeling and affect, of perception and speech. Whatever
the case, the racial community was a community founded on the memory
of a loss—a community of the kinless. It was a “community of loss” in the
way that Jean-Luc Nancy, dealing with community in general, has defined
it: a space inseparable from death, since it is precisely through death that
community reveals itself.95
Finally, race is one of the raw materials from which difference and
surplus—a kind of life that can be wasted and spent without limit—are
produced. It does not matter that race does not actually exist as such, and
not only because of the extraordinary genetic homogeneity of human be-
ings. It continues to produce its effects of mutilation because from the
beginning it is, and always will be, that for which and in whose name the
hyphens at the center of society are created, warlike relationships estab-
lished, colonial relationships regulated, and people distributed and locked
up. The lives and presence of such people are considered symptoms of a
delimited condition. Their belonging is contested because, according to
the classifications in place, they represent a surplus. Race is an instrumen-

34 CHAPTER ONE
tality that makes it possible both to name the surplus and to commit it to
waste and unlimited spending. It is what makes it acceptable to categorize
abstractly in order to stigmatize, disqualify morally, and eventually im-
prison or expel. It is the mechanism through which a group is reified. On
the basis of this reification, someone becomes their master, determining
their fate in a way that requires neither explanation nor justification. We
can therefore compare the work of race to a sacrificial cut, the kind of act
for which one does not have to answer. A dead-letter address—this is pre-
cisely what in our modern world the principle of race oversees, producing
its targets as complete signs of radical exteriority.

The Logic of Enclosure

Historically, race has always been a more or less coded way of dividing
and organizing a multiplicity, of fixing and distributing it according to a
hierarchy, of allocating it to more or less impermeable spaces according to
a logic of enclosure. Such was the case under the regimes of segregation. It
does not much matter that, in the age of security, race is expressed through
the sign of religion or culture. Race is what makes it possible to identify
and define population groups in a way that makes each of them carriers of
differentiated and more or less shifting risk.
In this context the processes of racialization aim to mark population
groups, to fix as precisely as possible the limits within which they can
circulate, and to determine as exactly as possible which sites they can
occupy—in sum, to limit circulation in a way that diminishes threats and
secures general safety. The goal is to sort population groups, to mark them
simultaneously as “species,” “classes,” and “cases” through a generalized
calculation of risk, chance, and probability. It is all to prevent the dangers
inherent in their circulation and, if possible, to neutralize them in advance
through immobilization, incarceration, or deportation. Race, from this per-
spective, functions as a security device based on what we can call the princi-
ple of the biological rootedness of the species. The latter is at once an
ideology and a technology of governance.
This was the case under the regime of the plantation, at the time of
apartheid, and in the colony. In each case, race served to assign living be-
ings characteristics that permitted their distribution into such and such
a box on the great chart of human species. But it also participated in a

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 35

bioeconomy. Race reconciled masses, classes, and populations, respectively
the legacies of natural history, biology, and political economy. Work and
the production of wealth were inseparable from the problems specific to
life and population, the regulation of movement and displacement—in
short, the processes of circulation and capture. And the processes of circu-
lation and capture constituted a central dimension of both the technologies
of security and the mechanisms that inscribed people within differentiated
juridical systems.
As phenomena, racism and the phobia of others share a great deal.
Racist logic supports a high degree of baseness and stupidity. As Georges
Bataille noted, it implies a form of cowardice—that of the man who “attri-
butes to some external sign a value that has no meaning other than his own
fears, his guilty conscience and his need to burden others, through hatred,
with the deadweight of horror inherent in our condition”; he added that
men “hate, it would seem, to the same extent that they are themselves to
be hated.”96 It is false to think that racist logic is only a symptom of class
warfare, or that class struggle is the final word regarding the “social ques-
tion.” Race and racism are certainly linked to antagonisms based on the
economic structure of society. But it is not true that the transformation of
the structure leads ineluctably to the disappearance of racism. For a large
part of modern history, race and class have coconstituted one another.
The plantation and colonial systems were the factories par excellence of
race and racism. The “poor Whites” in particular depended on cultivating
differences that separated them from Blacks to give themselves the sense
of being human. The racist subject sees the humanity in himself not by ac-
counting for what makes him similar to others but by accounting for what
makes him different. The logic of race in the modern world cuts across
social and economic structures, impacts the movements within them, and
constantly metamorphoses.
As a slave, the Black Man represents one of the troubling figures of our
modernity, and in fact constitutes its realm of shadow, of mystery, of scan-
dal. As a human whose name is disdained, whose power of descent and
generation has been foiled, whose face is disfigured, and whose work is
stolen, he bears witness to a mutilated humanity, one deeply scarred by
iron and alienation. But precisely through the damnation to which he is
condemned, and because of the possibilities for radical insurgency that he
nevertheless contains and that are never fully annihilated by the mecha-

36 CHAPTER ONE
nisms of servitude, he represents a kind of silt of the earth, a silt deposited
at the confluence of half-worlds produced by the dual violence of race and
capital. The enslaved, fertilizers of history and subjects beyond subjection,
authored a world that reflects this dark contradiction. Operating in the
bottoms of slave ships, they were the first coal shovelers of our modernity.
And if there is one thing that haunts modernity from beginning to end, it
is the possibility of that singular event, the “revolt of the slaves.” A slave
uprising signals not only liberation but also radical transformation, if not
of the system of property and labor itself, then at least of the mechanisms
of its redistribution and so of the foundations for the reproduction of life
itself.

THE SUBJECT OF RACE 37

18 See Stephen Graham, Cities ­under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London:
Verso, 2010); Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and the Late
Modern War,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 188–215; Ben
Anderson, “Facing the ­Future ­Enemy: U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine and
the Pre-­insurgent,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): 216–40; and
Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso,
2007).
19 Alain Badiou, “La Grèce, les nouvelles pratiques impériales et la ré-­invention
de la politique,” Lignes, n. 39 (2012): 39–47; see also Achille Mbembe,
“Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; Naomi Klein, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2007); Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Ḥanafi, The Power of Inclusive Exclu-
sion: Anatomy of ­Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (New York:
Zone Books, 2009); and Weizman, Hollow Land.
20 David H. Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military
for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009); Jer-
emy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Power­ful Mercenary Army
(New York: Nation Books, 2007); John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a
Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2005); and Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone (Paris:
La Fabrique, 2013).
21 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal
Condition, trans. J. D. Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012).
22 Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
23 See in par­tic­u­lar the poetry of Aimé Césaire. On the thematic of the salt of the
earth, see Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, L’intraitable beauté du
monde: Adresse à Barack Obama (Paris: Galaade, 2009).
24 Éric Fassin, Démocratie précaire: Chroniques de la déraison d’état (Paris: La
Découverte, 2012); and Didier Fassin, ed., Les nouvelles frontières de la société
française (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).

One ​The Subject of Race

1 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: First Vintage Interna-
tional, 1993).
2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York:
Grove Press, 2008). See also Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper
and ­Brothers, 1940).
3 Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave
Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
4 Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields offer a useful distinction between
“race” (the idea that nature has produced distinct groups of ­humans recogniz-
able through inherent traits and specific characteristics that consecrate their

NOTES TO Chapter One 187

 difference while placing them on a hierarchical ladder), “racism” (the complex
of social, juridical, po­liti­cal, institutional, and other practices founded on
the refusal of the presumption of equality between ­humans), and what they
call “racecraft” (the repertoire of maneuvers that aim to place ­human beings
­differentiated in this way within an operational grid). Fields and Fields, Race-
craft: The Soul of In­e­qual­ity in American Life (London: Verso, 2012); see also
W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012).
5 On this topic, see Josiah C. Nott, Types of Mankind (London: Trubner, 1854);
and the three volumes by James Bryce: The American Commonwealth (New
York: Macmillan, 1888), The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of
Mankind (London: Clarendon, 1902), and Impressions of South Africa (London:
Macmillan, 1897). See also Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character:
A Forecast (London: Macmillan, 1893); and Lowe Kong Meng, Cheok Hong
Cheong, and Louis Ah Mouy, eds., The Chinese Question in Australia, 1878–79
(Melbourne: F. F. Bailliere, 1879).
6 Pierre Larousse, Nègre, négrier, traite des nègres: Trois articles du “­Grand diction-
naire universel du XIXe siècle” (Paris: Bleu Autour, 2007), 47.
7 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, foreword by J. N.
Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 420.
8 Larousse, Nègre, négrier, traite des nègres, 68.
9 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
10 See Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and
Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979).
11 On ­these developments, see Thomas Benjamin, Timothy Hall, and David
Rutherford, eds., The Atlantic World in the Age of Empire (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 2001); and Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic
World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Upper ­Saddle River, NJ:
­Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005).
12 Jorge Fonseca, “Black Africans in Portugal during Cleynaert’s Visit (1533–
1538),” in Black Africans in Re­nais­sance Eu­rope, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P.
Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 113–21; see also C. M.
Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
13 Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: sevepen, 1960).
14 Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The ­Free-­Colored Militia in Colonial
Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
15 Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish
Amer­i­ca,” The Amer­i­cas 57, no. 2 (2000): 171–205.
16 Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Ca­rib­
bean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).

188 NOTES TO Chapter One

17 David Eltis, ed., Coerced and ­Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002).
18 Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Mi­grants across the Eighteenth-­
Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2008); Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-­
Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of
the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, 157–219 (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Stephen J. Braidwood, Black
Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra
Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994); and
Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976).
19 Restall, “Black Consquistadors.”
20 Lester D. Langley, The Amer­ic­ as in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1996); John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolu-
tions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1986); and J. H. Elliott, Empires
of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in Amer­i­ca, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006).
21 Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-­Brazilians in Post-­abolition
São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Colin A. Palmer, Slaves
of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1976).
22 John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of
­Ca­rib­bean History 25, nos. 1–2 (1991): 58–80.
23 David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
(Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2001); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of
Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Ca­rib­bean, 1787–1804
(Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture, Williamsburg, ­Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press,
2004); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London:
Verso, 2011); and Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Demo­cratic
Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63, no. 4 (2006): 643–74.
24 Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the
American Revolution (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1989).
25 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
­Colonial ­Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).
26 See Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines
(Paris: Gallimard, 1966), especially chap. 5.
27 Éric Vogelin, Race et état (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 265.
28 On the development of the spirit of curiosity despite this closing of the mind,
see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Won­ders and the Order of Nature,
1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

NOTES TO Chapter One 189

29 Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, “Variétés dans l’espèce humaine,” in
Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy
(Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1798), 3:371–530.
30 Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­
Merrill, 1953).
31 Friedrich W. Schelling, Introduction à la philosophie de la mythologie (Paris:
Aubier, 1945).
32 Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things: An Archaeology of the H ­ uman Sciences, ed.
and trans. R. D. Laing (New York: Random House, 1973), 156–57.
33 On the dilemmas resulting from this mixing, see Doris Lorraine Garraway,
The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Ca­rib­be­an (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005), particularly chaps. 4 and 5. On the United
States, see Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The ­Free Negro in the Antebellum
South (New York: ­Free Press, 2007), xiii–­x xiv; and Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolu-
tion, ­Romanticism, and the Afro-­Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
34 Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and Amer­ic­ a’s Campaign to Create
a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003).
35 Étienne Balibar writes on “the return of race.” “Le retour de la race,” March 29,
2007, originally published in the online journal Mouvements des idées et des
luttes, http://­www​.m ­ ouvements​.­info. Available at http://­1libertaire​.­free​.f­ r​
/­RetourRaceBalibar​.­html (consulted June 26, 2016).
36 Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colom-
bia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); France Winddance Twine,
Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Livio Sansone, Blackness with-
out Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
37 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
38 Troy Duster, “Lessons from History: Why Race and Ethnicity Have Played a
Major Role in Biomedical Research,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34,
no. 3 (2006), 2–11.
39 Richard S. Cooper, Jay S. Kaufman, and Ryk Ward, “Race and Genomics,” New
­Eng­land Journal of Medicine 348, no. 12 (2003): 1166–70.
40 Alondra Nelson, “Bioscience: Ge­ne­tic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of
African Ancestry,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 759–83; and Ricardo
Ventura Santos and Marcos Chor Maio, “Race, Genomics, Identities and Poli-
tics in Con­temporary Brazil,” Critique of Anthropology 24, no. 4 (2004): 347–78.
41 Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-­Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, Revisiting
Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008);
Nikolas S. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity
in the Twenty-­First ­Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007);
Michal Nahman, “Materializing Israeliness: Difference and Mixture in Trans­
national Ova Donation,” Science as Culture 15, no. 3 (2006): 199–213.

190 NOTES TO Chapter One

42 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
(Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009).
43 On ­these discussions, see Amade M’charek, The ­Human Genome Diversity
­Proj­ect: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance
in an Age of Genomics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005); and
Sarah Franklin, Embodied Pro­gress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception
(London: Routledge, 1997).
44 On ­these mutations, see Tamara Vukov and Mimi Sheller, “Border Work:
Surveillant Assemblages, Virtual Fences, and Tactical ­Counter-­media,” Social
Semiotics 23, no. 2 (2013): 225–41.
45 Michael Crutcher and Matthew Zook, “Placemarks and Waterlines: Racial-
ized Cyberscapes in Post-­Katrina Google Earth,” Geoforum 40, no. 4 (2009):
523–34.
46 See Louise Amoore, “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on
Terror,” Po­liti­cal Geography 25 (2006): 336–51; and Chad Harris, “The Omni-
scient Eye: Satellite Imagery, ‘Battlespace Awareness,’ and the Structures of the
Imperial Gaze,” Surveillance and Society 4, nos. 1–2 (2006): 101–22.
47 Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013).
48 Caren Kaplan and Raegan Kelly, “Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the
Social Construction of Targets,” Vectors Journal 2, no. 2 (2006).
49 Peter M. Asaro, “The L ­ abor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New
Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 2 (2013):
196–224.
50 Ayse Ceyhan, “Technologie et securité: Une gouvernance libérale dans un
context d’incertitudes,” Cultures et Conflits 64 (winter 2006).
51 Lara Palombo, “Mutations of the Australian Camp,” Continuum: Journal of
Media and Cultural Studies 23, no. 5 (2009): 613–27.
52 Paul Silverstein, “Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot:
Race, ­Migration, and Immigration in the New Eu­rope,” Annual Review of
­Anthropology 34 (2005): 363–84.
53 Carolyn Sargent and Stephanie Larchanche, “The Muslim Body and the
Politics of Immigration in France: Pop­ul­ ar and Biomedical Repre­sen­ta­tions of
Malian Mi­grant W ­ omen,” Body and Society 13, no. 3 (2007): 79–102.
54 Ernst Junger, L’état universel suivi de La Mobilisation Totale (Paris: Gallimard,
1962), 107–10.
55 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books,
2010).
56 Balibar, “Le retour de la race”; and Federico Rahola, “La forme-­camp: Pour une
généalogie des lieux de transit et d’internement du présent,” Cultures et Conflits
68 (winter 2007): 31–50.
57 Ira Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics, and Social
­Adjustment, 1899–1937 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).

NOTES TO Chapter One 191

58 See Winston James, Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Ca­rib­bean Radicalism
in Early Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (London: Verso, 1998).
59 See Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 13–55; as well as Kwame Anthony
Appiah, In My ­Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992); see also Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs.
60 Martin Robison Delany and Robert Campbell, Search for a Place: Black Sepa-
ratism and Africa, 1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
61 The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern
Library, 2003); Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert
Murray, ed. Albert Murray and John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library,
2000); and Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 2002).
62 Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil
Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Ibrahim
Sundiata, ­Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003); more recently, Maryse Condé, La vie sans
fards (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2012); and Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your ­Mother:
A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2007).
63 Richard Wright, Black Power: A Rec­ord of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New
York: Harper, 1954); Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A
Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (New York: Warner Books,
1988); Kwame Anthony Appiah, “A Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold
Coast,” in Richard Wright: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1987), 173–90; and Jack B. Moore, “Black Power Revisited: In
Search of Richard Wright,” Mississippi Quarterly 41 (1988): 161–86.
64 On the ambiguities of this pro­cess, see James Sidbury, Becoming African in
Amer­ic­ a: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007); and Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black
Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009).
65 Crummell, The ­Future of Africa, Being Addresses, Sermons, etc., etc., Delivered in
the Republic of Liberia (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), especially chaps.
2 and 7.
66 Nietz­sche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, trans. Ian Johnston (Arling-
ton, VA: Richer Resources, 2010), 8.
67 Mary Ann Shadd Cary, A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West in Its
Moral, Social, and Po­liti­cal Aspect: With Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies
and Vancouver’s Island (Detroit: George W. Pattison, 1852); and Martin Robison
Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored ­People of
the United States: Po­liti­cally Considered (Philadelphia, 1852).
68 On the complexity of what was at stake, see Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany,
Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1997).

192 NOTES TO Chapter One

69 Henry Blanton Parks, Africa: The Prob­lem of the New ­Century; The Part the
African Methodist Episcopal Church Is to Have in Its Solution (New York: a.m.e.
Church, 1899).
70 Michele Mitchell, Righ­teous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of
Racial Destiny ­after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004).
71 Engelbert Mveng, Les sources grecques de l’histoire négro-­africaine (Paris: Présence
Africaine, 1995); Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Présence
Africaine, 1954); Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or
Real­ity, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: L. Hill, 1974); and Theophile Obenga,
Africa in Antiquity: Pharaonic Egypt—­Black Africa (London: Karnak House,
1997).
72 For examples of this kind of discourse, see Evelyn Baring Cromer, “The Gov-
ernment of Subject Races,” Edinburg Review, January 1908, 1–27; and Evelyn
Baring Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan, 1915).
73 On the vari­ous formulations of ­these questions in African-­American historiog-
raphy, see Stephen G. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American His-
torical Writing in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2009); on the African side, see Diop, Nations nègres et culture.
74 Alain Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation (New
York: Arno, 1968); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Library
of Amer­i­ca, 1990); Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black ­Music: Interpreting
Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Paul Gilroy, Darker
Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River:
­Music and Memory in Harlem Re­nais­sance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001).
75 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble,
to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Par­tic­u­lar, and Very Expressly, to
­Those of the United States of Amer­i­ca (Boston, 1830); James W. Pennington, Text
Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored ­People (Hartford, CT: L.
Skinner, 1841); Robert Benjamin Lewis, Light and Truth; Collected from the
Bible and Ancient and Modern History (Boston, 1844); and Maria W. Stewart,
“Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, 1835,” in Spiritual Narratives, ed. Sue E.
Houtchins, 51–56 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
76 Alexander Crummell, Civilization and Black Pro­gress: Selected Writings of
Alexander Crummell on the South, ed. J. R. Oldfield (Charlottesville: University
Press of ­Virginia, 1995).
77 Certain aspects of this terror are analyzed in detail in W. E. B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in Amer­ic­ a: An Essay ­toward a History of the Part Which Black
Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in Amer­i­ca, 1860–1880 (New

NOTES TO Chapter One 193

 York: Oxford University Press, 2007); see also Steven Hahn, A Nation ­under
Our Feet: Black Po­liti­cal Strug­gles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the G
­ reat
Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Crystal
Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: ­Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
78 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
79 Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, La crise du Muntu: Authenticité africaine et philosophie
(Paris: Présence Africaine, 1977), 184.
80 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Lit­er­a­ture, Translation, and
the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003); and Roderick D. Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Inter-
nationalism and the Prob­lem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: ­Temple University
Press, 2009).
81 Gilroy, Black Atlantic.
82 Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003).
83 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon,
2000); Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (New York: Harpers,
1929); and Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
(Boston: Beacon, 2002).
84 Gilroy, Black Atlantic.
85 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
86 See, in reference to the state, Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours
au Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 79.
87 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
88 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76,
trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254–56.
89 Vogelin, Race et état.
90 On this, see John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers
and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2004), especially chaps. 1–4.
91 This is explained well by Frederick Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom, in
Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1994), 149;
see also Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Gram-
mar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); a synthesis is provided
by Nancy Bentley, “The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American
Narrative,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 270–92.
92 Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2008).
93 See in par­tic­u­lar Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey; or,
Africa for the Africans (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1986).

194 NOTES TO Chapter One

94 This thematic infuses many of the major texts of the nineteenth ­century. See in
par­tic­u­lar Edward W. Blyden, Liberia’s Offering (New York, 1862).
95 Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1986), 39.
96 Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, Correspondence, ed. Louis Yvert, trans. Liz
Heron (London: Seagull Books, 2008), 73.

Two ​The Well of Fantasies

1 Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française: Et de tous ses

dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 1902), vol. 10; Dictionnaire de
Trévoux, 1728; and Simone Delesalle and Lucette Valensi, “Le mot ‘nègre’ dans les
dictionnaires de l’Ancien Régime: Histoire et lexicographie,” Langue Française 15
(September 1972): 79–104.
2 See the remarks of Pliny the Elder, Histoire Naturelle, vol. 6-2 (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1980); and Al-­Mas’udi, Les prairies d’or, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie
­Impériale, 1861).
3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1953).
4 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove,
2008), 93.
5 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy
of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
6 Georges Hardy, L’art nègre: L’art animiste des noirs d’Afrique (Paris: H. Laurens,
1927).
7 Pablo Picasso quoted in William Rubin, Le primitivisme dans l’art du XXe siècle:
Les artistes modernes devant le tribal (Paris: Flammarion, 1992).
8 Breton, Entretiens, 1913–1952 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 237.
9 Jean-­Claude Blachère, Le modèle nègre: Aspects littéraires du mythe primitiviste au XXe
siècle chez Apollinaire, Cendrars, Tzara (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1981).
10 See, for instance, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African
Novel (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998); and Clément Pansaers,
Le pan pan au cul du nu nègre (Brussels: Alde, Collection Aio, 1920).
11 See Carole Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 1919–1969 (Paris:
cnrs, 1995).
12 Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris:
F. Alcan, 1910). See also Lévy-­Bruhl, La mentalité primitive (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1922); and Lévy-­Bruhl, L’âme primitive (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1928).
13 Arthur Gobineau, “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines,” in Œuvres complètes,
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1:623, 1146.
14 Gobineau, “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines,” 472–74.
15 See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-­Garde in France,
1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968).

NOTES TO Chapter Two 195