Heeding the 2011 revolts in Britain, beyond social scientific and historic explanations that resolve such events either as expressions of a social or a political pathology, this paper explores the following question: what if, moving otherwise, the critique of racial violence, dismissing value and entertaining excess, stays with violence? What account of racial subjugation and liberation would emerge from it? For in Fanon’s description of the colonial space as a product of colonial (juridicoeconomic) violence, the distinction between the Native’s and the Settler’s positions refers to a valuation, named through the articulation of extreme moral signifiers, namely, good and evil. Following a staged conversation among three contemporary black intellectuals, I find a possible venue for a post-Fanonian radical black thought when they refuse to write violence — colonial/racial terror — in the racial table where (black) means suffering and (white) freedom or (black) means nonvalue and (white) value. Taking a shortcut with Fanon, foregrounding the exposition of the violence that constitutes the colonial space, this paper announces a praxis designed to clear the ethical-political grounds reaching beyond the becoming of a “new man,” the one which the colonial figurings of the Native, the Slave, and the Woman have always already signified.
In light of the recent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Social Text has made freely available Denise Ferreira da Silva’s 2013 article on the 2011 UK revolts. This article will be available here until March 1, 2015.
