Dance with Death 1AC

That was the evening we created a memorial on Canfield Drive. Neighbors,

friends, comrades brought flowers and lit candles. Our community could not fix
what had been broken, but we tried to hold space for the life that was so much
more than this death. Mike’s grandmother had seen him just minutes before it
went down, just two blocks away from her house. The pigs wouldn’t tell her
nothing. Mike’s momma was in shock. Mike’s pops was blocked by police as
he tried to get close. His uncle ducked under the tape. He pleaded for
information as the police pounced, “A cop did this?”

Confusion, sorrow, anger traveled through the crowd. Mike had been left in
the street under the hot summer sun for four hours before they took him. We
saw it. Heard it. The pigs moved in, then the K-9s, then county, then SWAT.
Word spread and we grew. Some shouted: “Cover him up!” “Fuck the police!”
And then, the sound of gunshots in the distance. Police swarmed us. We
wondered if we would be next. Now Mike’s pops held a sign that said:
“Ferguson police just executed my son!”

Grief, outrage, disgust overwhelmed us. Some brought photos, stuffed animals,
and others just themselves. That night, the police let a K-9 urinate on the
memorial. That night, a cop car drove over this now sacred space, leaving
behind crushed remnants of our ceremony. It’s not that we ever expected the
police to give a damn about niggas in Ferguson, but you don’t disrespect the
dead like that.
They thought we’d disperse. We would not. The next morning, we began our
memorials anew. That night, the pigs were out in force. That night, we were
too. Ghetto birds flew overhead. Police blocked the streets. Soon, there
would be tear gas, the national guard, and media. The city had always been an
occupied zone, but we had them surrounded. A pig said, “Bring it, you fucking
animals, bring it.” We brought rocks and Molotov cocktails and rage. We
brought care and shame and clarifying indignation. They brought curfew. So
we brought “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” They brought authority, tanks, and
overwhelming force. We brought rebellion.
Ransby 18 [Barbara, John D. MacArthur University Chair, and Distinguished Professor, in the
Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at Univ. Illinois-
Chicago, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, pp.
47-51//ak47]
Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black youth, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left in the street for hours. That simple horrific incident, and the sustained protests that followed, would change lives, attitudes, careers, and the direction of Black politics in the
United States.

Walking down the street with a friend hours after a minor altercation at a local convenience store, Michael Brown was not in the mood to be told what to do. And the white cop who stopped him, Darren Wilson, riding alone in a patrol car, was not in the mood to have his orders disobeyed. Wilson told Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson not to walk in
the street. They talked back to him, telling Wilson they were almost at their destination and would be on the sidewalk soon enough. At that point, they were just two young Black men, who presumably, in the mind of the offi cer, needed to be “checked.” He then allegedly realized that Brown fi t the description of a person involved in a shoving and
shoplifting incident at a local convenience store; things escalated from there.1

Wilson later testified that Brown “looked like a demon” . he was not on the day the confrontation and killing occurred In other words,

afforded the status of human He was not a kid who —not because of what he had done but because of who he was. He was not just a husky teenager with a cocky attitude.

loved video games ; he was not a son whose mother had struggled to put food on the
or had struggled in high school

table . Wilson’s view was consistent with

and was planning to go to college 2 He was not an unarmed local kid simply refusing to follow instructions. He was a “demon.” , as it turns out, not so in that of

a damning Department of Justice report that documented a

other white Ferguson police officers regarding local Black youth, as demonstrated in

pattern of consistent racial profiling, harassment, and strong-arm tactics by the Ferguson police. 3

There was no videotape of Brown’s murder, and the victim obviously could not tell his side of the story. Darren Wilson described an implausible set of events that conveniently absolved him of any wrongdoing in this case. According to him, he simply told Brown and his friend to walk on the sidewalk, not in the street. They refused, and a heated
exchange ensued. Brown allegedly reached into the police car (knowing full well that Wilson was armed), threatened Wilson, and “forced” him to fatally shoot the teen. Any reasonable person would question the veracity of such an account. What is uncontested, however, is that at the end of a brief exchange, an unarmed young Black teenager was dead
in the street. What happened next probably triggered rebellion as much as the shooting itself. Michael Brown’s lifeless body was left in the middle of Canfi eld Avenue as crowds gathered and news of the latest murder spread by cell phone, texts, and Twitter. This callous disregard for Brown’s basic humanity had “Black Lives DON’T Matter” written all
over it.

Ferguson’s Black community was outraged at Brown’s murder. I tell the story of Brown talking back to Darren Wilson, and the alleged
convenience store incident, to make a point. By all indications, Michael Brown was not a saint. However, in the resistance that followed his death, organizers insisted he did not have to be. There did not have to be

Brown did not have to be

a correlation between “sainthood” and Black citizenship. This was an important shift in the discourse about who is or is not a sympathetic victim of injustice.

a church-going, law-abiding, proper-speaking embodiment of respectability in order for his life

to matter, protesters insisted. And they insisted loudly.
After the shooting, neighbors initially stood around in disgust, witnessing the grizzly spectacle and demanding answers. After the body was removed, protests and vigils sprang up spontaneously. A memorial with fl
owers, photos, and stuff ed animals was fi rst set up at the site of the shooting. A police car reportedly drove over the makeshift memorial and destroyed it, which many saw as another gesture of callous disregard
for Black suff ering and mourning. The second night, hundreds of Ferguson residents poured into the streets. They marched, chanted, sang, and refused to disperse when police demanded that they do so. They
were fed up. This would not be just another routine police murder. Not this time. What had been routine would become unacceptable.

chants
Many including “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” evoked reports that Brown was
reverberated throughout the Ferguson uprising, which

in a surrendering posture when he was gunned down. “Black lives matter” However, it is the powerful and far-reaching slogan that

struck a
finally took hold as the rubric under which a larger movement would ultimately rally. Some have argued that the term was imposed upon the movement by media, who latched onto it. But whatever propelled it into the public square, it

chord with Black people . Understanding that the systemic criminalization and devaluation of
and others

Black life is part of the current regime of racial capitalism is crucial to understanding Brown’s
murder and why “Black lives matter” as a slogan has had such a deep resonance. It is a counternarrative to the barrage of
messages that insist the lives of the Black urban poor do not matter.4

the Michael Browns of the world have been relegated by the

Scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill makes the compelling and provocative assertion that

state and dominant society to the status of “nobody.” To be Nobody is to be considered In his words, “

disposable. . . . Underneath each case of state violence is a more fundamental set of economic ( )

conditions, political arrangements, and power relations that transform everyday citizens into
casualties of an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable. underfunded schools, lack of ”5 He cites

access to affordable housing and jobs, as well as policing and prison heavy-handed a behemoth industry as some of the weapons

amassed against young Black men like Brown, who have become “excesses” to the current
formal economy. The Ferguson uprising insisted that Michael Brown was indeed “somebody.”

At the outset, the Ferguson protests included an assortment of forces: religious leaders held candles and knelt in prayer; Black civic leaders and elected offi cials from St. Louis, like Antonio French, who became
ubiquitous on Twitter and CNN, gave speeches and interviews. But there was another group that took to the streets and held the streets. It was their bold actions that engendered the slogan “Whose Streets? Our
Streets,” also the title of a powerful 2017 documentary about Ferguson. They were angry and fed-up Black youth—Michael Brown’s peers—who were tired of being harassed by the local white police force. They
were young people who would eventually read the whole system of injustice into Brown’s untimely death, and disrespected corpse. Some protested peacefully but defi antly, while a small number took out their
anger on parked cars and, eventually, on local businesses. There was looting. Windows were smashed, cars and trashcans were torched, and a few cars were overturned in the course of the uprising. However, for
the most part protests were both militant and nonviolent at the same time.

in a few short days, after a series of incendiary actions by local authorities, Ferguson’s
The bottom line was that

Black population had become ungovernable. police had little Those who sought to govern had lost all credibility with a key sector of the population. Local

influence on the crowds, and curfews were ignored. On August 18, Missouri governor Jay Nixon called in the National Guard, which only added to the tensions.

From the very beginning, a key factor fueling the historic Ferguson rebellion was the hyperbolic and
militaristic response of the local and state authorities. Ferguson’s police officers (and St. Louis– area backup teams)
showed up heavily armed with combat weapons and tanks—surplus from the US military.6 Local
cops took a hostile approach from the start. There were numerous accounts of cops taunting the
protesters, rough-handling reporters, and using a level of force seemingly designed to be provocative.7

The Lynching of Michael Brown demonstrates that the spectacle of anti-black

violence is constitutive of American jurisprudence, not exceptional to it.
Materially and rhetorically, lynching secures the racial contract of white rule by
nullifying the rights and protections of legal personhood for Black people.
Tropes of beastly criminality like when Wilson called Mike Brown a “demon,”
positions lynching as civic virtue and white masculine violence as self-defense
against “enemies within.” Only considering lynching through function and
motive rather than form can reveal the underside of American democracy.
Ore 19 [Ersula, Lincoln Professor of Ethics at Lincoln Center Applied Ethics and Assoc. Prof. of
SST African & African American Studies at Arizona State University, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric,
and American Identity, ebook//ak47]

the Assembly’s ruling rendered lynching exemplary citizenly etiquette and situated it as
Third,

necessary and acceptable action taken by those guided by a resounding sense of civic
responsibility and national identity. This logic reasoned that those who lynched did so out of
service to the nation and for the good of the American people. Such logic cast Lynch and his posse as “leading citizens” of America’s

rendered the patriot synonymous with the lyncher, and the lyncher synonymous
burgeoning national community and

with the ultimate faithful citizen. Lynch’s later appointment to the court solidified the of uncommon pleas

synonymous relationship between the lyncher and exemplary citizen, while his acquittal, the “leading” or

praise, and subsequent promotion to the highest court within the colonial juridical system
rendered lynching a species of American jurisprudence. Lynching, then, does while a performance of exceptional citizenship,

not constitute a state of exception but rather represents an instance

in that it embodies an instance in which the law is momentarily suspended,

in which the logic and spirit of American democracy are enacted. As such, lynching shares a
relationship of interiority with American law, the formation of the nation, and the constitution
of “the people.”
Prior to Reconstruction, an anxious and fretful slave society used lynching as a way of enforcing adherence to a racialized democratic ideal. Accounts of lynchings during slavery are sparse but have been noted
during instances in which slaves transgressed boundaries between property and personhood. Insurrectionist acts such as murdering masters, raping mistresses, and planning rebellions warranted lynching because
they threatened the generational perpetuation of white supremacy while at the same time redefining the subhuman slave as the fully human master. 37 Lynchings that occurred in this context were violent
performances of reclamation that reaffirmed white supremacy through the disavowal of black humanity. Lynchings after Reconstruction continued this trend in the way they differentiated America’s white “us”

Democratic citizenship during the antebellum period conceived “the people” as a

from its black “them.”

“whites only” collective, and citizenship as the right to enforce white dominance. These changes,
which included transforming the black slave into the black citizen, “triggered more intense
cultural differentiation of blackness and whiteness as whites strove to fortify the color line and
consolidate white identity in order to protect white supremacy.” 38 Harsh codes like the black
codes of 1865–1866, which restricted a variety of civil liberties for blacks following
emancipation, were the first line of defense against black citizenship. Lynching was the second.

From the postbellum period to our contemporary time, lynching as both a material practice and
a rhetorical performance has exhibited an ideological belief regarding black inferiority, white
superiority, and the need to keep blacks in their racially prescribed place. This need, I argue, is a condition of the
color-line logic underwriting legislation that codified antiblack sentiment and antiblack violence as
etiquettes of American identity. Color-line logic adopts W. E. B. Du Bois’s oft-quoted observation about race in America for the purpose of highlighting how lynching and other
forms of antiblack violence reflect the racial-spatial order of the racial contract. What political philosopher Charles Mills defines as the racial contract denotes the white racist logic of classic contractarianism,

the racial contract unveils this transcript to illustrate how the social contract—
which espouses a race-neutral theory of politics via a hidden transcript of white supremacy. Mills’s theory of

is not in actuality “a contract between

that tacit agreement among men to leave the state of nature and enter into the reason-governed space of civic life—

everybody (‘we the people’), but between just the people who count, the people who really are
(‘we the white people’).”39 The racial contract, then, is a “contract between those categorized as
white over the nonwhites, who are thus the objects rather than subjects of the agreement” to
maintain a “racial polity, a racial state, and a racial judicial system.”40 To be a subject of the racial contract is to be vulnerable to its
subsidiary agreements such as the expropriation contract, which permitted white settlers to claim sovereign power over native lands, the slavery contract, which “gave Europeans the right to enslave Native
Americans and Africans at a time when slavery was dead or dying in Europe,” and the colonial contract, which “legitimated European rule over the nations in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.”41

Spatializing DuBois ’s theory, Mills asserts that “[p]art of the purpose of the color bar; the color line/apartheid/jim crow is to maintain” the space of “the people”—that is, civic space—as space for “whites only,” so as to keep them—blacks (those “anticitizens” and enemies of the social contract42)—“in their place.”43 This study of lynching, violence , rhetoric, and American identity, then, acknowledges the historical truth of the racial contract as an agreement among whites—tacit or otherwise—to “maintain and reproduce [a] racial order”44 through laws and customs that preserve a racial hierarchy that privileges whiteness and that rhetorically and ontologically excludes nonwhites “from the promise of ‘the liberal proje ct of modernity.’”45 Consequently, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity reads lynching as a violent rhetorical performance that enacts the color-line logic of the racial contract.

Ida B. Wells’s formulation of lynching as an agreement among whites to maintain a white

Here I echo

racial order, as it lays the foundation for my interpretation of lynching as a performance of American
identity. The investigative journalist, businesswoman, and spearhead of the anti-lynching movement
exposed the underpinnings of lynching to reveal that lynching had nothing to do with regulating
black criminality or safeguarding the honor of white women from lascivious black beasts. The
singular focus of lynching, explained Wells, was to nullify the constitutional rights of black
citizens—more specifically, of black men—through raced and gendered codes that framed white women as worthy of
protection from rape and black women as “wonton, licentious,” and “promiscuous” women who could not be raped on account that they were already “‘bad’ women.”46 Asserting that lynching enacted white

antiblack violence was not aberrant to America’s

rejection to the civic prosperity of blacks exposed what blacks had long understood, namely, that

ways but a constitutive practice of them and its people. Following this framework, when Wells asserted that
lynching was America’s “national crime,” she was in part arguing that lynching was proof that
democracy wasn’t about maintaining equality among “the people,” but instead about
maintaining equality among the only people who counted—that is, white people.
Government indifference to the plight of black citizens and failure to pass anti-lynching legislation further corroborated Wells’s contention that lynching was a manifestation of the racial contract. America was
“active and outspoken in its endeavors to right the wrongs” committed against humans abroad, she noted, yet conveniently failed to enact such compassion when similar atrocities impacted citizens of color.47
Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity builds on Wells’s insights to examine the interpretive and symbolic work of lynching from the 1880s onward, and the ways the lynched black body has indexed
and continues to index the ongoing struggle over the meanings and boundaries of American identity in the United States.

Citizenship and Belonging Citizenship is commonly thought of as the active participation of social actors in civic life. Exercising the right to vote, the right to freedom of speech, and the right to assembly are a

performance of citizenship that mark individuals as members of the polity. Such performances
customary

are ideologically bound ways of enacting our sense of “place” and belonging within an imagined community48 and, at the same time, performances of how
we as social actors imagine our political world. Although congressional Reconstruction legally
marked blacks as citizens endowed with the same rights and protections as their white counterparts, the
successful performance of whiteness, which coincided with the continuance of a white civic
order, remained grounded in the racial expectation of black acquiescence to white dominance .49
Such performative expectations reproduced and sustained whiteness as the epitome of
Americanness by wielding lynching as a constitutive performance of American identity.

following Reconstruction
Scholars generally discuss lynching as a mark of civic exclusion, noting in particular how it thrived because emancipated slaves remained unprotected by citizenship laws at the end of the

Lynching was a form of social control that maintained the racial status quo through its
nineteenth century.50

denial of due process of law. By denying black victims the right to due process, lynchers were in fact arguing that the protections and privileges of American citizenship were the exclusive rights of the white men and

rhetorically American civic identity was

women who lynched them. These “drama[s] of intrusion by and protection from external enemies,”51 then, became constitutive occasions in which

affirmed through antiblack violence , violence informed by an ideological belief that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”52 Cynthia Skove Nevels’s examination of lynching
culture in Brazos County, Texas, at the beginning of the twentieth century examines how eastern and southern European immigrants socially and politically transcended their marginalization by participating in collective acts of antiblack oppression and violence.

“Lynching to belong,” permitted immigrants to secure their social and political welfare
as she called it, Brazos County

by participating in the further marginalization of black citizens. 53 Such collective action delineated citizenship in the way it united immigrants and white
Texans along a shared spectrum of intelligibility that marked immigrants as citizens of Brazos County’s white community, blacks as those who did not belong, and lynching as a constitutive performance of white identity and civic belonging.

feminine constructions of the nation inform lynching’s civic character.

Scholars have also given attention to how As Dora Apel explains, racism

Such logic asserted that citizenship

“produced a conflation of political and sexual fears that regarded the political enfranchisement of black men as a catalyst to the ‘rape’ of white women.”54

emboldened black depravity, which in turn contributed to white vulnerability. Sandy Alexandre, echoing insights from scholars

discourse of the black beast rapist and the fair white maiden
such as Elizabeth Hale White and Jacqueline Goldsby, likewise noted how

metonymically constructed the white female body as the physical embodiment of the nation.
Tropes determining the bodies and sexuality of white women “to be vulnerable to (black)
attack,” came to “presage the very vulnerability of the nation itself,” Metonymically explains Alexandre.55

constructing white women as America’s national body, then, figured white men as the ultimate
citizen-savior while at the same time casting lynching as a performance of virtuous citizenship. The

similar figurations permeate the discourse and logic used to acquit George Zimmerman
fact that is yet another

The fact that similar figurations continue to permeate the

reverberation of the past that makes it difficult to interpret Trayvon’s lynching as a “shooting death.”

discourse and logic used to acquit police officers and private citizens of racially motivated
violence illustrates a continued indifference to black humanity in the twenty-first century.

Lynching was a call to communion, a performance of political affiliation akin to citizenship in the
way it distinguished those who belonged from those who did not. Literally and symbolically rescinding the civic rights of African Americans so as to

lynching evidenced that the

return them to their “rightful place” outside the polity nurtured a democracy in which overtly legal protections around racial oppression were the norm. This is to say, then, that

particular suit of rights and privileges associated with American identity were the exclusive
rights and privileges of “whites only.” As an open and public display of power, lynchings united audience members along a shared experience of spectatorship that made them complicit in the act as
they looked on, chanted, and cheered alongside the cries of their victims. The sheer volume of the crowd, the push and pull of closely packed bodies along a jailhouse yard, town square, or courthouse lawn further enhanced the constitutive power of lynching by not
only creating a sense of “belonging and commonality that sustained the violence”56 but also producing an image of solidarity and belonging that simultaneously functioned as an epideictic text.

Epideictic rhetoric is known as a rhetoric of

Epideictic rhetoric denotes discourse that persuades through modes of display, exhibition, and demonstration.

display and might best be described as a “species of pedagogy” 57 that instructs those addressed
in the ways of the community through modes of exhibition and demonstration. Both the
lynching spectacle and the lynched black body functioned epideictically as displays of American
identity. While the lynching spectacle modeled attitudes and practices deemed fundamentally
“American,”58 the lynched black body instructed citizens across the color line in modes of engagement that rendered “white”
synonymous with “American” while simultaneously maintaining and reproducing white
supremacy as the democratic norm. Lynching photographs, lynching postcards, and corporeal
keepsakes such as burned hair and fingers from lynching victims allowed those unable to attend
the spectacle the opportunity to be equally inculcated as a member of a larger imagined community. Such models helped individuals locate
themselves within America’s prophetic grand narrative and, in so doing, mark themselves as those who belonged. My exploration of lynching as a violent rhetoric of

American identity, then, attends to the ways the discourse and practice of lynching imparted vital lessons about civics to citizens
along the color line, and the ways those lessons continue to reverberate in the present .
 Lynching is largely thought to be
Why Lynching? Why Now? past due to the culture a part of America’s long-ago as opposed to its immediate present. This is in part

of silence and shame that contributed to the decline of American lynching during the 1930s and in

1940s.
part to the advent of “end-of-lynching discourse in the 59 Prior to the 1930s, anti-lynching advocates defined lynching through focused attention to questions around guilt, complicity, and social responsibility. While advocates agreed that lynching

early debates over the definition of lynching exhibited a

must be stopped, they had difficulty agreeing on what constituted a lynching. As Rushdy explains,

distinction between form and motive—advocates focused on form defined lynching as a practice

comprising narrow guilty actors

“a ,” while advocates focused on motive proposed
ambit [sic] of (the Samaritan model)

“an expanded range of responsibility” that rendered spectators equally complicit with lynchers
in the act. form over motive reflected greater investment in recuperating a damaged
60 Focused attention on

national ethos than safeguarding the lives of black citizens.

Because lynching had for so long been a barometer of race relations, the decline of lynching had come to be desired primarily for what that decline would indicate about the state of the nation. A lynch-free year …
meant a year that America had become better and less racist … that we lived in a new era, or at least not in a past or bygone one.61

It is partly because of this rhetorical campaign to save face that the killings of Amadou Diallo
(1999), Patrick Dorismond (2000), Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Michael Brown
(2014), Tamir Rice (2014), Samuel DuBose (2015), Walter Scott (2015), Keith Scott (2016),
Philando Castile (2017), and Stephon Clark (2018), among others, are defined as instances of
“self-defense,” “legal shooting,” or “benign” policing as opposed to lynchings.

In its 2016 report, the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent declared
antiblack police brutality to be part of America’s tradition of lynching. Defining lynching as “a
form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the US must address,” the panel concluded that
“contemporary killings and the trauma it creates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynchings of
the past. Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.”62 The panel’s conclusions reinforced findings from a similar report
issued by Montgomery, Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a research and advocacy group that challenges racial injustice through its work to eradicate mass incarceration and excessive punishment, and its

America’s history of lynching

activism on behalf of marginalized and impoverished communities.63 Chief to its mission is educating policy makers on the ways

continues to impact African Americans. In “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the EJI detailed the ways lynching
“shaped the contemporary geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African
Americans” and how “[m]ass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities,” and antiblack policing reveal how
contemporary race relations have been “shaped by the terror era.”64

proponents of end-of-lynching discourse focus on form as opposed to motive

Like those of the past, contemporary

as a means of disrupting the continuity between America’s “terror era” and the forms such
terrorism takes today. The May 2017 killing of Richard Collins III at the University of Maryland exhibits this interpretative practice. Collins was standing at a campus bus stop with friends
when Sean Urbanski, a University of Maryland student and white supremacist, stabbed him. Collins, a soon-to-be graduate of Bowie State University, was to start his commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S.

When The Nation’s Dave Zirin referred to Collins’s death as a lynching, he was
Army later that May.

summarily challenged. According to critics, Collins’s death wasn’t a lynching because Urbanski
didn’t use a rope to kill him; he used a knife. 65 Historical ignorance aside (lynchings consisted of
shootings, stabbings, and burnings as well as hangings), the preoccupation with form evidenced
in the “knife over rope” rationale, dismisses the motive that links Collins’s killing to the historical and systemic
practice of lynching and that practice to a tradition of American identity.

The August 2017 “wounding” of a biracial eight-year-old in Claremont, New Hampshire, offers another iteration of this discourse. Quincy and his eleven-
year old sister, Ayanna, were playing with four white boys when the boys decided to enact a
lynching. Parents of a white teen accused of lynching Quincy said their son never encouraged the fourth-grader to get on
the table and put his head in the noose, and that once it was around his head, never pushed the boy and let him hang. They also denied

that their son, along with others, used racial slurs and threw rocks and sticks at Quincy days
prior to the incident.66 According to thirty-three-year-old Rhianna Larkin and thirty-two-year-old Eric Sullivan, their eleven-year-old-son was
innocent because they had not raised him to hold racist views or to treat black members of their family differently. Larkin cited her
 As she explained, it was a “complete backyard accident,” there was no racial
father’s half-sisters and her boyfriend’s sister-in-law as proof that her son wasn’t racist.67

animus involved.68 Here, preoccupation with form—“this is not a lynching, but rather just boys
playing”—manifests as a semantic move to save face. Rhianna Larkin’s “we can’t be racist because we have black family” rationale—which is offered
as proof of her son’s good moral character—dismisses the perception that race had any bearing on his actions. As Rhianna explained, this couldn’t be a lynching because her son doesn’t see race.69

Like those of the past, contemporary opponents of end-of-lynching discourse contended that lynching merely changed as opposed to ended. In an
opinion piece on the hanging of eight-year-old Quincy, interracial parents Sindiso Minsi Weeks and Dan Weeks of New Hampshire highlighted how mainstream news outlets avoided calling the event “by its name”
despite reports of taunting by the boys who allegedly hanged Quincy, despite the ways these alleged tormentors enacted white solidarity and belonging in their shared act of racially motivated violence against
Quincy, and despite the ways police indifference to the pursuit of justice for Quincy mimicked the past.70 According to the Weekses, what happened in Claremont was not a wounding or a hanging; it was an
“attempted lynching.”71

Reporter Dave Zirin, in “Why I Called the Murder of Richard Collins III a Lynching,” asserted that
calling Collins’s death by name was important both definitionally and politically If we don’t see ….

the centuries-old continuum of lynchings, we are helping whitewash what took place.
Richard Collins III in

We obscure the fact that this living tradition of

are categorizing what happened as an aberration in the “post-racial” 21st-century United States…. To say otherwise s

violent white supremacy is currently being nurtured from the campus to cable news to the
White House.” 72

While the trial against Sean Urbanski in the killing of Richard Collins III is scheduled to begin later this year, the verdicts of so many other trials featuring the killing of innocent black men have already been delivered. The general consensus regarding the precepts of
American democracy is that they were deficient in practice but perfect in notion—impacted most ardently by human imperfection as opposed to human conceptualization. The experienced reality of democracy, however, is not that it is imperfect, but that its

lynching as a material and

imperfections strategically target members of the polity not originally conceived as members of the polity. My purpose in Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity, then, is to center

rhetorical performance illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between democracy

that

and antiblack violence. In doing so I aim to demonstrate the ways lynching and its rhetorics have been and remain interwoven both with the formation of America’s national identity and with the nation’s need to continually
renew that identity.

Like lynchings in the past, lynchings at the turn of the twenty-first century continue to
characterize American identity and citizenship belonging as the ability to kill blacks with
impunity.73 While officers and civilians responsible for the “shooting deaths” of Amadou Diallo
(1999), Patrick Dorismond (2000), Trayvon Martin (2012), Mike Brown (2014), Tamir Rice (2014),
and Philando Castile (2016) saw time in court, they were neither found guilty nor decertified as
policemen.74 Instead they were promoted or transferred; even those who had been terminated were allowed to continue working as officers in other counties. The trials that did go forward did more
to prosecute victims than perpetrators, while the wrongful death suits that followed —which for many was the most readily available means of compelling

accountability—simply quantified black life in ways reminiscent of the auction block. 75 The historical and successive nature of

lynching belies lofty narratives of racial progress to illustrate how antiblack violence shares a
relationship of interiority with the making and maintenance of the nation and its people.

a common misreading of our contemporary moment , as it implies that

The question “Why lynching, why now?” then, reflects

lynching is over, that it is a thing of the past, and that this past has no material or symbolic
bearing on the present. This book disturbs such thinking by illustrating how lynching continues to function rhetorically as a
performance of American identity, constitutively as a practice of civic supremacy and citizenship
belonging, and epideictically as a kind of racialized civic pedagogy and a blueprint for civic life. The
structure of the book seeks to aid this effort. Chapter 1 demonstrates how lynching gained its civic resonance. In this chapter I analyze the rhetoric of governing and landmark legislation in an effort to trace how
laws rhetorically constituting “the people” rendered blacks “political enemies” as opposed to “political friends,” coded “citizen” and “citizenship” as the sole purview of those with white racial standing, and
defined black life as expendable life in ways that configured antiblack violence—specifically, lynching—as a customary performance of white citizenship identity. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how the
rhetorical construction of the “citizen” was “underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness”76 that both informed lynching as a performance of American identity and citizenship belonging.
There can be no legal remedy to the racial terror of the lynch mob because
what appears as privatized, extra-legal violence is already installed in the state
as the national mythos of the racial contract. Post-emancipation legal
personhood for black people did not eliminate slaveness but rather
consolidated both terms in criminal personhood which positioned Black people
as the slaves of the state. The lynch mob was mirrored in the hyper expansion
of the carceral state. We are the inheritors of the carceral afterlife of slavery.
DeLombard 19 [Jeannine Marie, “Dehumanizing Slave Personhood,” American Literature,
Volume 91, Number 3, September 2019, pp. 491-99, DOI 10.1215/00029831-7722104//ak47]

** Maybe this is where we say the thing I wrote about falling etc etc. Thinking humanity beyond
the liberal humanist subject – we have to love our refusal kind of stuff – I think this is a debate
about debate argument kind of lol – idk I kind of feel like its saying the shit about how black
people have humanity and that’s why white people treat them bad and is thus why we need to
give them personhood as opposed to saying that the human is a TECHNIQUE OF VIOLENCE

Today, the carceral afterlives of slavery make themselves manifest in racist profiling, police
misconduct, and mass incarceration. Activists, public intellectuals, and scholars often protest 1

this state of affairs with humanitarian appeals. “Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; . . . today we put them in cages,” observes
Michelle Alexander (2012: 141) in her indispensable The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. “This is the dehumanization of African-American people,” sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson (in Goodman 2014) insisted of the St. Louis
County grand jury’s failure to indict white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of African American teenager Michael Brown. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged as a “space for the celebration and humanization of Black
lives” (Garza 2014) in response to the un-redressed killings of Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and the increasingly visible number of African Americans caught in the crosshairs of racism and police power. Ava DuVernay’s powerful 2016 documentary on race and
criminalization after slavery, 13th, closes with CNN political commentator Van Jones intoning, “the opposite of criminalization is humanization,” and activist critic Malkia Cyril insisting, “it’s about rehumanizing us as a people.”

This commentary appears against the backdrop of a resurgent Afrohumanism in the academy.
Building on the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Alexander G. Weheliye (2014: 19) speaks
of the necessity of making “the human . . . a central object of knowledge in black studies.” To this end,
he suggests, “If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a

conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-
humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power
structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and
which cannot” (3). Such a critical prioritizing of the human is consistent with Wynter’s (2003: 260) insight that “our present
ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” threatens “the full cognitive and behavioral

mounts an important challenge to poststructuralist -cum-

autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.” This endeavor thus

posthumanist discourses whose efforts to dispense with the human often serve to entrench further

its overrepresentation as Western, bourgeois “Man,” on the one hand, while identifying a
more diverse humanity with nonhuman animals, on the other (Weheliye 2014: 9–10).

Afrohumanism is crucial to the forward-looking “project of thinking humanity from

Clearly,

perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man” (8). It is another question, however, whether such an approach provides the best historical analytic for

Hartman demonstrated that “the recognition of

understanding slavery and its afterlives in American culture.2 More than twenty years ago, Saidiya V. (1997: 5)

humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress” the black subject both during and
after slavery. Whether we think of the slave girl Phillis’s forced, unpaid secretarial work for the Wheatley family in colonial Boston or the practice of leaving traveling slaves’ children behind as hostages during sojourns in free jurisdictions, it is
clear that enslaved African Americans were valued for and controlled through the cognitive capacity and affective qualities that distinguished them as fellow human beings (see Wong 2009: 77–182). Unquestionably, slaveholders maintained social control over and
extracted profits from enslaved people through myriad dehumanizing practices. That brutal treatment did not, however, mean that whites thought slaves and other people of African descent were not human.3 Quite the contrary, as Christopher Freeburg (2017: 89)

“white subjects need to strip blacks of their personhood because of their humanity and
contends,

not in spite of it” Accordingly, the liberal rhetoric of dehumanization

(see also Cassuto 1997: xiii). historian Walter Johnson (2016) concludes,

is “misleading, harmful, and worth resisting.” An inhuman practice, slavery actively exploited a recognized black humanity. Moby- Dick’s Ishmael acknowledges as much when he
alludes to “that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right” (Melville 2002: 202).
 we are heirs to an abolitionist discourse that
Unlike Ishmael, influentially, albeit problematically, constructed slavery
as a process of dehumanization and animalization. One of the most effective, influential, and underappreciated rhetorical tactics of the transatlantic antislavery movement was to transform enslavers’
conscious economic exploitation of the human capacities of those targeted for enslavement into an unchristian denial of black humanity. British pottery manufacturer and reformer Josiah Wedgwood’s medallion of a nearly naked kneeling slave mutely imploring,
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (1787), became a durable abolitionist meme. Featured on everything from stationery to handkerchiefs, the icon solicited assent to the widely accepted fact that slaves were human beings by calling that very fact into question. This
problematic tactic achieved the laudable goal of inserting a “metaphysical opposition” into the ancient concept of human property (Mussawir and Parsley 2017: 49). The product of a broader nineteenth-century evangelical reform movement, this sentimental
abolitionist rhetoric shaped the humanitarian discourse that surfaced in the wake ofWorldWar II (Hunt 2007: 116). Combined with the contemporaneous rise of the human sciences, this discursive background ensured that, as Weheliye (2014: 21) observes, the
emergent “interdiscipline” of black studies “made humanity an avowed ideological and ontological battleground.” To impose this presentist humanist perspective on slavery retrospectively, however, risks dangerously misunderstanding the legal-cultural logics of
racism.

the through-line connecting slavery to mass incarceration is not the

Focusing on imputations of black criminality, this article contends that

denial but the exploitative recognition of black humanity. Today’s prison-industrial complex, like the

American slaveholder of the past, extracts profits by strategically commodifying the humanity of
its captive black and brown subjects. To speak of the carceral afterlives of slavery in this way is to succumb, Stephen Best (2012: 453) would caution, to the critical
fallacy “that the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present”—and thus to fail to appreciate the “radical alterity of the past” (455). The figure is a suggestive one. Consider the

Rather than dispensing with the slave past as a lens through which to view the
simultaneously clarifying and distorting effects of a prism on a beam of light.

political present, we might better attend to its refracting effect. Viewed through the prism of the slave past, the seemingly linear history of racist
dehumanization bends sharply to follow an oblique trajectory. The line is still there, of course, but it takes us in a radically divergent discursive direction—that of legal personhood.

As Best’s own work illuminates (2004), one of the most alien aspects of the slave past is a concept of humanness that did not exclude property status. If, then, we shareWeheliye’s understanding of “racialization”
as “a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations” and “blackness” as designating “a changing system of unequal power structures,” then the “status” to which we need to direct our attention is not that of the human
but of the person. Like nineteenth-century Americans, we tend to use these words interchangeably in everyday speech; indeed, they are often confused in the relevant scholarship (see, for example, Hunt 2007:

21).As John Bouvier explains in the nation’s first legal lexicon, A Law Dictionary Adapted to the
Constitution and Laws of the United States of America, “in law, man and person are not exactly
synonymous terms.”4 Whereas “any human being is a man, whether he be a member of society or not, whatever may be the rank he holds, or whatever may be his age, sex, &c.,” Bouvier
elaborates, legally, “a person is a man considered according to the rank he holds in society, with all the rights to which the place he holds entitles him, and the duties which it imposes.” A human

being is a particular bundle of fluids and tissues; legal persons, by contrast, are varying
bundles of rights and duties, powers and obligations. Perversely, it is the very naturalization—
the humanization and thus racialization—of the artificial slave person that leads us , obliquely,
to the carceral present.
To illustrate these claims, this article examines a seldom-discussed slave case, United States v. Amy (1859). The case was tried in Richmond, Virginia, before a circuit-riding Supreme Court chief justice Roger B.
Taney two years after his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393 [1857]). United States v. Amy demonstrates that in the antebellum period it was not only insightful black and brown critics of
American racism who took “the humanness of African Americans as a given” (Pratt 2016: 2). Rather, the case reminds us, slavery was premised on that assumption. Centering on the figure of the legal person
rather than the human or the citizen, United States v. Amy alerts us to the lethal legacy of slave personhood as a debilitating mixture of civil death and criminal culpability.

Nowhere, perhaps, is that legacy more evident than in viral videos of police misconduct. And nowhere, I suggest, do we see a more vivid counterassertion of black civility than in the dash cam video of the late
Sandra Bland’s principled, outraged response to her pretextual traffic stop and subsequent arrest by State Trooper Brian Encinia in Waller County, Texas. The article closes, then, by considering Bland’s arrest and
death in custody in the context of her own and other African Americans’ efforts to achieve and maintain a civil presence in an American law and culture where black personhood remains legible primarily as
criminality. For too many African Americans, this Ellisonian dilemma of being caught between a “hypervisible” criminal culpability and an invisible civil capacity is, poet Claudia Rankine (2014: 49) suggests in her
“American lyric,” what it means to be a Citizen.

--

Amy was enslaved by Samuel W. Hairston, of Patrick County, Virginia (Quarterly Law Journal 1859: 163). She was indicted under a federal statute against mail theft for stealing “letters” (apparently “with . . .
money in them”) from that county’s post office (202). Beyond this brief, mysterious, and almost certainly misleading glimpse, the case tells us nothing about Amy or her experiences. It does, however, provide a
great deal of insight into the intertwined cultural and legal logics of slavery at the moment of its fullest doctrinal development in the United States. Specifically, the case illustrates that slaveholders recognized and
consciously exploited the humanity of the enslaved, even as it suggests how criminality, the attribute that enabled law to recognize the enslaved person as a responsible legal agent, became attributed to the
African American collective, free and enslaved, before and long after the CivilWar.

United States v. Amy provides the rare opportunity to observe a group of white male southern legal professionals, all of whom represent slaveholding interests, as they debate not only the contours of slave
personhood but, remarkably, the relationship of that legal artifice to humanness. John Howard, speaking “for the owner of the defendant,” sought to protect Hairston’s property interest in Amy by mounting the
defense that “a slave is not a ‘person’ amenable to the act” (Quarterly Law Journal 1859: 164). (The case report paraphrased the March 3, 1825, federal statute thus: if “any person shall steal a letter from the mail,
the offender shall, upon conviction, be imprisoned no less than two nor more than ten years”; quoted at 163). In other words, Howard argued that Amy’s enslaved status should shield her from criminal
prosecution as a responsible legal person. James D. Halyburton, the presiding judge, convicted Amy of the theft but purposely overruled this point of law so as to enable review by Chief Justice Taney. Taney, of
course, had provoked national controversy with his gratuitous observation in Dred Scott that by the time of the nation’s founding, Americans of African descent had “been regarded as . . . so far inferior, that they
had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 [1857], at 407). Taney’s obiter dictum ignored, but by no means ended, what a growing cohort of legal historians have
shown to be pervasive everyday legal activity by both enslaved and free African Americans throughout the United States (Welch 2018; Jones 2018). Indeed, Amy’s very appearance at the Fourth Circuit Court in
Richmond spoke to the juridical “respect” occasionally accorded to the procedural “rights” of enslaved defendants. Taney upheld Amy’s conviction, ruling that, in keeping with the language of the US Constitution,
the federal statute’s use of the word “person . . . may be construed as including slaves” (Quarterly Law Journal 1859: 163). As Taney noted, the case hinged on “the two-fold character which belongs to the slave”
as “person and also property” (199). What was not in dispute was Amy’s humanness, which each of the participants not only took for granted but expressly affirmed over the course of the proceedings.

In taking up the question of slave personhood, Richmond’s Fourth Circuit addressed itself to one of the foundational categories of Western law. Under Roman law, slave and other forms of personhood were not
“metaphysical” but “purely technical and functional” categories (Mussawir and Parsley 2017: 48). Thus, although “slaves” constituted one of the two main divisions of the law of persons in Gaius’s Institutes (c. 161
CE), slaves could also be treated as “things” (1.9–12, 2.1, 2.13). Persona was literally a term of art, purportedly deriving from the ancient Greek prosopon, the mask an actor used to indicate a particular character

Personhood, Alain Pottage (2002: 275) and other legal theorists insist, remains the product of “legal rhetoric as
or role.

techne; that is, as an art, technique, craft, or strategy.” For Edward Mussawir and Connal Parsley (2017: 46), this origin story “expresses a
fundamental element crucial to an emergent legal science: the difference that is necessary in law in order to separate the identity of a real living subject from that of a purely artificial, fabricated role that is
reserved and instituted at the level of juridical existence.” Prior to the medieval insertion of the person into a “transcendent, theological, metaphysical, or meta-juridical frame” (47) they note, “the Roman law did
not mould its persons on a pre-existing biological human substrate” (49).5

At the current moment, when it is the artifice of legal personhood that provokes outrage—
typically, in the form of the corporation—it feels counterintuitive to suggest “calls , as Mussawir and Parsley do, that
for an outdated law to ‘better reflect life’” may “have limitations both as jurisprudence and as political action” (57). Analysis of United States v. Amy addresses this seeming contradiction by

the definitive African descent of the slave

examining the legal, political, and cultural effects of naturalizing the particular form of legal personhood assigned to the slave. As we shall see,

person in American law and culture encouraged the ongoing identification of African Americans
with a civilly incapacitated legal agency primarily legible as criminality.
Like other antebellum legal thinkers, Timothy Walker, author of the first US legal textbook, saw the growing abstraction of legal personhood as directly proportionate to the increasing democratization of American
law. Unlike in England, Walker noted in his Introduction to American Law: Designed as a First Book for Students (1846: 205), the American law of persons had achieved an exemplary democratic simplicity “in
consequence of our entire abolition of privileged orders.” The American “doctrine of equality” assumes that “in theory at least, all men start equally; they are born with equal rights; and their distinctions in after
life, are mainly made by themselves” (205). The exceptions that he would go on to enumerate—wives, slaves, Indians—confirm legal historian Susanna L. Blumenthal’s (2016: 55) observation that, in fact, the
nineteenth-century American “legal model never entirely displaced the traditional English law of persons. American jurists continued to speak in terms of status relations.” The difference was that instead of
artificial distinctions, status now derived from “what were regarded as natural differences in people’s mental and physical attributes” (7). In this way Americans’ “gradual dismantlement of a ‘law of persons’ with

their creation of a “default legal person” (7). Abstracted as it was, this model of a “free and independent man” was presumed to be
roots in feudal society” enabled

stood in contrast to his variously incapacitated and

male, white, able-bodied, and of sound mind (7). This default legal person

subordinated counterparts such as the wife, the slave, and the child—each of which, of course, represented a form of
legal personhood.
Under Roman law, natural attributes such as age and sex could determine slave status for the purpose of manumission or under the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem (the condition of the child follows that of the mother). But, as Thomas Jefferson claims in Notes on the State of Virginia (1788), Roman slaves were distinguished from the master class only by “condition,” not “nature” (152). Whereas Roman slavery was, for Jefferson and others of like mind, merely a matter of formal status, American slavery grounded that status in natural difference. “Among the Romans, . . . [t]he slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master,” explains the likely father of Sally Hemings’s childre n (154). “But with us,” Jefferson continues, the emancipated slave, ideally, “is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture” (154). As the legal artifice of slave personhood became naturalized, it became increasingly identified with “the blacks on the continent of America,” whether enslaved or free (151).

We can observe this naturalization-cum-racialization in the bestknown summary of the doctrine Taney alludes to in United States v. Amy as “two-fold character.” In number 54 of the Federalist Papers (1788), Virginian JamesMadison, in the persona of “Publius,” addresses the US Constitution’s already controvers ial three- fifths clause, which counted a state’s slave population at that fraction of the free population in the apportionment of taxation and representation. Publius rejects the assumption that “slaves are considered merely as prope rty, and in no respect whatever as persons” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1988: 332). Because “they partake of both these qualities,” he maintains, the “federal Constitution” correctly follows state and local law in viewing slaves “in the mixed character of persons and of property” (332). He goes on to explain, “in being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and chastised in his body, by the
capricious will of another—the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property” (332; emphasis added).

Criminality resuscitated slave personhood from this civil death. As Publius goes on to clarify, “in being protected . . . against the violence of all
others, even the master of his labor and his liberty; and in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others—the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society, not as a
part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property” (332). In practice, the formal protection of slaves against violence spoke more to their value as property than their status as

Reanimated
persons (Wahl 1998: 126–320). In any case, slaves’ potential to become perpetrators of unlawful violence necessitated punitive recognition of their responsibility to the rule of law.

as a criminally responsible defendant, the civilly dead slave is no longer to be seen “as a part of
the irrational creation” or “a mere article of property” but “as a member of the society” and “as
a moral [i.e., social] person.” Because legal personhood comprises duties as well as rights, the
officially administered punishment of enslaved offenders amounted to punitive recognition of
their accountability to the political community of which they, in the breach, were retroactively
acknowledged to be members (DeLombard 2012).

The self and property owning legal person triangulates racial capitalism and
carceral spatial politics against the Black person who is burdened with
responsibility for her own oppression. Ferguson shows that Brown’s encounter
with Darren Wilson was already anticipated by the racialized accumulation by
dispossession that turns Black personhood inside out.
Munshi 22 [Sherally Munshi, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center,
“Dispossession: An American Property Law Tradition” THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL Vol.
110:1021] <kenkashi>

This legal construction of Black personhood—“a debilitating mixture of civil death and
criminal culpability,” —remains remarkably constant over a long arc of American in DeLombard’s synthesis

history as an afterlife of slavery. It survives the Reconstruction Era, as Hartman 258

demonstrates, and it underscores the continuities between the slave economy and the rise of
“neoliberal penality,” a contemporary form of rationality that promotes market
what Bernard Harcourt calls

interests by dismantling forms of social protection and managing crises through policing and
punishment. 259 These strategies have been buttressed by ide- ological shifts, reassigning certain forms of social responsibility from govern- ment to individuals.260 As Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore, Lo ̈ıc Wacquant, and others have argued,

the intensification of policing and punishment has less to do with rising crime than with
managing the economic and social displacements produced by neoliberal restructuring.261
These contradictory forces have been felt most acutely in post-industrial cities, to which Black
Americans migrated in the early twentieth century, fleeing the humiliations of the Jim Crow
South only to find themselves confined to ghettos and subject to over-policing.262 Many of
these same cities have become sites of protest in the wake of police killings— Ferguson,
Baltimore, and Cincinnati, to name a few. 263

Scholars have written meticulous histories demonstrating that violent encounters between police officers and Black Americans have been at least a century in the making. Colin Gordon, Walter Johnson, and Richard Rothstein have all dem- onstrated, for instance,

the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson has been shaped by a continuous history of public
that

and private segregation, exclusionary zoning, financial redlining and reverse redlining, urban
redevelopment, and predatory policing. 264 While some of these accounts may be familiar to students of property law, I revisit them here to emphasize that property law is implicated in

Beyond separating white from non-white Americans, policies and

structuring not just racial segregation but racialized dispossession.

practices governing the use of property maintain a political economic system that has allowed
white Americans to accumulate wealth and opportunities in zones of relative comfort and
security, while depriving their non-white counterparts of the same wealth and opportunities,
consigning them to zones of immiseration and insecurity, “waste” places eventually targeted for
destruction and “renewal.” This dialectical relation between white ownership and Black
deprivation is often obscured by the ahistorical and decontextualized presentation of the
property form in legal discourse but is sustained by a cultural logic that ascribes value and risk,
welfare and blight to racialized bodies, spaces, and practices.

Hartman describes “burdened individuality” of Black freedom can trace in the life and
What as the , we

death of Michael Brown 265 Long before his life was cut short by a police officer’s bullets Brown . ,

was born into the chokehold of racial capitalism, burdened by histories of exclusion and
deprivation, his future foreclosed by underfunded and predatory schooling whose exercise of ,

freedom was bound to criminalization by a municipality that built no sidewalks for him but
outlawed his “manner of walking in roadway. The burdened individuality of Brown is mirrored
in the possessive individualism of white Americans beneficiaries of who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have been the

federal and local policies intended to promote access to home ownership and wealth
accumulation . While a moral culture of individual responsibility renders members of the dispos-sessed and abandoned class responsible for their material deprivation, it has also convinced many white Americans that they have earned the

it renders Black Americans

advantages they enjoy, obscuring the role that the government has played in distributing advant-age, while elevating the pursuit of property interests to a civic virtue. And by the same token,

responsible for poverty and policing.

1. Exclusiona ry Zoning and Restrictive Covenants

Modern city planning in the United States begins with the Great Migration. As Black Americans, fleeing the terror and humiliation of living in the Jim Crow South, began to make their way to the manufacturing centers of the North and Midwest, white Americans began to carve up their cities.267 In 1916, St. Louis became the first city in the United States to enact a segregation ordinance by voter referendum.268 It was approved by a two-thirds majority.269 The ordinance was effectively struck down the following year, when the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley held a similar ordinance unconstitutional, but, by then, the city had already established the blueprint for segregation that would be main- tained by exclusionary zoning and racially restrictive covenants, among other forms of intimidation and violence.270

St. Louis adopted its first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1919.271 Though race neutral on its face, the goal of the plan, according to the city’s planning engi- neer, was to preserve existing patterns of segregation, to prevent “colore d people” from moving into the “finer residential districts.”272 White neighborhoods that had adopted racially restrictive covenants were zoned for the most restrictive use— single-family residential.273 Lands adjacent to Black neighborhoods were zoned for the most permissive use—vice and industry.274

The St. Louis plan not only segregated Black and white communities, but it also established a regime of racial capital, a self-replicating structure within which wealth would accrue to white residents who defended their neighborhoods against Black “encroachment.”275 Observing that where property “values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people,” city planners all but fixed a relationship between the value of property and the race of its occupants, marking Black bodies, in turn, with the threat of containme nt and loss.276 Local and federal policies played a critical role in establishing this re- gime, but, to work, it had to be maintained by its white beneficiaries. Government policies guaranteed white homeowners the value of their investments by enlisting them in the work of policing racial boundaries. They were rewarded for racial vigilance.

Black residents of St. Louis, in turn, were not just denied the same privileges and resources
that flowed to white Americans living in “finer residential districts”—better schools, services,
and the appreciation of property values— they were consigned to live in crowded
neighborhoods where they were bound to overpay for substandard housing—the effect of an
artificial scarcity created by zoning and restrictive covenants, among other formal and
informal means of exclusion.277 Because zoning regulations allowed landlords to subdivide proper- ties, Black renters found themselves squeezed into
crowded and dilapidated hous- ing. Because Black renters had nowhere else to go, landlords were able to extract exorbitant rents from them.278 Segregation was profitable.279

Exclusionary zoning was intended not only to extract wealth from Black com- munities but to
prepare for their eventual expulsion. 280 As Yale Rabin observes, zoning patterns established in the early twentieth century were intended not only to exclude Black people from white neighborhoods
but “to permit—even pro- mote—the intrusion into black neighborhoods” of noxious uses.281 These included not just polluting industries but liquor stores and brothels, perceived sources of social contamination and contagion, banished from other parts of the
city.282 Rabin describes this practice as “expulsive zoning” because it plainly anticipated the displacement of Black residents, who would eventually leave one way or another.283 In 1936, the St. Louis planning commission recognized that the existing land use

By the 1950s, the deterioration

pattern, confining too many to the inner city, amounted to a “deliberate creation of slums” which would inevitably “reduce our total popula- tion [by thirty-seven percent].”284

of housing con- ditions, the introduction of polluting industries, and other harm would qualify
Black neighborhoods for urban renewal, or as one St. Louis activist put it, “black removal with
white approval.” 285

In this sense, expulsive zoning in the early twentieth century replicated practices used to displace Indigenous Americans through the nineteenth century. As the federal government opened Indian lands to white settlement, it did so in a manner that would “crowd” Indians, encouraging them to “consent” to leave.286 And just as earlier philosophers and judges justified their appropriation by charac- terizing Indian land as uncultivated “waste,” city planners would justify their appropriation of Black neighborhoods, having turned them into waste places, overwhelmed by noxious uses conside red incompatible with the standards of white middle- class respectability.287

In 1926, in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., the Supreme Court consid- ered whether a zoning ordinance like the one adopted in St. Louis violated the rights of property owners by limiting their property’s use and value.288 At the time, it was hardly obvious that the Lochner Court would uphold such a sweeping ordinance. The Court had taken a consistently narrow view of state police powers and a correspondingly expansive view of private property and contractual rights, routinely striking down laws intended to protect health, safety, and welfare. The district court struck down Euclid’s zoning ordinance for precisely this reason, explaining that the ordinance bound “all the property in an undeveloped area . . . in a strait- jacket.” 289 Its overwhelming purpose was “to regulate the mode of liv- ing of persons who may hereafter inhabit it” to “classify the population and segre- gate them” even before they arrived.290
Justice Sutherland, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court, made no mention of the segregation of populations but instead recognized the wisdom of segregating certain “uses.”291 Zoning away potential nuisance—the sort of nuisance that a new factory might introduce to residential neighborhood—Justice Sutherland explained, was well within the state’s police powers. But his analysis went further. The regulation of anticipated nuisance not only justified the separa- tion of industrial from residential uses, it also justified the segregation of apart- ment buildings from single-family homes. Justice Sutherland wrote of the “parasit[ic]” character of apartment buildings, which “take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings,” “monopolizing the rays of the sun,” while introducing “disturbing noises” and traffic, “depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play.”292 Justice Sutherland says nothing about race in Euclid, but his racial meaning is clear, for instance, when he explains that “[a] nuisance may be merely a
right thing in the wrong place,—like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”293

The lasting significance of Euclid is not only that it granted local governments broad discretion to segregate “uses,” but it also gave them a race-neutral rhetoric and rationale with which they could defend and deny their racial designs. Euclid offered a durable model for translating the crude racism of segregation into the more discreet language of bourgeois white liberalism, with its emphasis on resi- dential character, quiet and enjoyment, low traffic and low density, and the safety of childre n—some children, at least. Moreover, Euclid recognized that state police powers—conventionally limited to promoting the health, safety, and wel- fare of the community—extende d unequivocally to protecting property values. Thus, Euclid would allow members of the propertied class to advance their material interests over and against the well-being of others by conflating their pri- vate interests with the public good.

The racial asymmetries established by restrictive covenants and exclusionary zoning in the 1920s
were further amplified by New Deal Era policies intended to promote white homeownership
during a period of suburban expansion. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934, guaranteed loans to applicants buying homes in white neighborhoods, but not in Black
neighbor- hoods, equating property value and stability to white exclusivity. The FHA con- sidered neighborhoods that were covered by “zoning regulations and appropriate deed restrictions”—racially restrictive covenants—to be safer investments than those left

The FHA ’ s first underwriting manual, distributed to appraisers in

vulnerable to “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.”294

1935, advised underwriters that for a neighborhood to “retain stability it is necessary that
properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” A few years 295

later, to simplify underwriting decisions, the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation
promulgated its notorious color-coded maps of American cities, “redlining” neighborhoods
considered high-risk or “hazardous,” ensuring that they would be starved of the same
resources extended to white neighborhoods. 296

The FHA encouraged white flight not only by insuring the mortgages of indi- vidual home
buyers but by subsidizing highway construction and insuring the construction of entire
subdivisions. Richard Rothstein illustrates this phenom- enon by contrasting the development of two subdivisions in St. Louis County: St. Ann and De Porres. In 1943, Charles Vatterott, a relatively
progressive builder, obtained FHA guarantees to create St. Ann, a subdivision of single-family homes for working-class Americans.297 But to obtain FHA funding, he was required to restrict ownership to white
families. Still committed to offering a comparable op- portunity to potential Black buyers, he built another subdivision for Black resi- dents, called De Porres. Vatterott intended to sell De Porres homes to Black
families with income comparable to white families in St. Ann, but because he could not obtain FHA funding for the project, homes in De Porres were not as nice as those in St. Ann. De Porres had none of the same
parks and playgrounds. Because potential buyers themselves were denied FHA-guaranteed loans, Black residents of De Porres tended to rent rather than own their homes.298

Exclusionary zoning practices adopted in urban centers established a pattern that would radiate outward into the suburbs. After Euclid established that local governments had broad authority to regulate land use, the federal government promulgated model zoning legislation which was quickly adopted by cities and suburbs across the United States. In the St. Louis area, even tiny white subdivisions like St. Ann incorporated themselves into what Colin Gordon has called “postage-stamp municipalities.”299 Between 1930 and 1970, more than seventy new municipa lities were carved out of St. Louis County. Some, like Champ, were home to only a dozen people; others, like Ladue, required absurdly large lot sizes.300

Often, the first order of business in these tiny enclaves was to enact a zoning or- dinance to limit all future development to single-family residential housing, pre- venting the construction of public or affordable

Municipal boundary lines would harden emerging patterns of racial and economic
housing.301

segregation, blocking the flow of resources and tax revenues from one municipality to the
next, allowing white suburbanites to engage in what Charles Tilly has called “opportunity
hoarding.”302 Some municipal boundaries, like the one dividing all-white Ferguson from mostly-
Black Kinloch, had been fortified with chains and barricades. 303 A sundown town for the first
half of the twentieth century, Ferguson allowed Black nannies and gardeners from
neighboring Kinloch to work in the homes of white families but expected them to leave by
nightfall. In the 1930s, as white families began moving into neighborhoods surrounding Kinloch, they cleaved themselves into the town of Berkeley, supporting better schools with a higher tax base, as
Kinloch became a “dilapidated ghetto.”304

Colin Gordon explains that “[b]y the early 1970s, Ferguson occupied a precari- ous spot in St[.] Louis’s spatial hierarchy.”305 One of few municipalities incorpo- rated in the late-nineteenth century, before the era of exclusiona ry zoning, Ferguson allowed for the construction of apartment buildings. For that reason, it was accessible to white working-class families fleeing the city. Like many inner- ring suburbs, through the 1960s, Ferguson defended its racial exclusivity with re- strictive covenants, steering practices, and intimidation. But after Shelley v. Kraemer, as Black families began moving in, white families began moving out.306

In the property law canon as in the public imaginary, Shelley v. Kraemer marks a
2. After Shelley: Divestment and Predation

high point in the evolution of American property law. In Shelley, the Supreme Court held that
judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants was uncon- stitutional. 307 As such, it is often represented as one of the
achievements of the Civil Rights Era. But by the time Shelley was decided, in 1948, Black commun- ities across the country had already been shut out of huge swaths of suburban de- velopment. Exclusionary zoning and restrictive covenants had left a permanent mark
on the American landscape, carving it up into zones of white privilege and Black deprivation, ascribing value to certain bodies, family arrangements, and aesthetic preferences while ascribing risk to other non-conforming bodies, fami- lies, and tastes.308

While the crude racism of restrictive covenants could not sur- vive the kind of scrutiny brought
to racist expression during the Civil Rights Era, the more discreet, colorblind racism of
exclusionary zoning had become entirely commonplace, saturating the culture of —sanctioned by the Court in Euclid—

real estate investment and consumption.

The achievements of the Civil Rights Era also precipitated a shift in political culture. In Heather McGhee’s
summary of the phenomenon, “racism drained the pool.”309 “In the 1920s,” she writes, “towns and cities tried to outdo one another by building the most elaborate pools; in the 1930s, the Works Progress

Municipal pools, schools, libraries, bridges, and highways had

Administration put people to work building hundreds more.”310

come to symbolize what government could do for people. But by the 1950s, rather than
integrate what were now considered essential public goods and services, white Americans
began to with- draw their material and ideological investment from “big government” and
reinvest in private rights.311
 the achievements of the Civil Rights Era were undermined by neoliberal policies of the
In other words,

1970s, which, among other things, cut public spending, lowered property taxes, and
criminalized the dispossessed. Critical to the study of property law, this meant restricting the flow of government
resources that, until then, had subsidized white ownership—for instance, by seizing and
redistributing Indian lands through the nineteenth century and by underwriting the creation
of segregated suburbs in the 1930s. We cannot understand the failed promise of a civil rights
victory like Shelley without also understanding the backlash it generated— the
counterrevolution of property it instigated. 312

During the New Deal Era, federal and state resources flowed
Desegregation in the 1960s was followed by disinvestment in the 1970s.

generously to white suburbanites, who were given access to quality housing, public education,
and the opportunity to accumulate wealth. But the 1970s ushered in a new era of fiscal
austerity, which plunged inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson into crisis. 313 In the more affluent post-war suburbs of St. Louis, where property

in older sub- urbs like Ferguson, things

values were high and the cost of services relatively low, revenue from property taxes was sufficient to cover the cost of providing services. But

were falling apart. Population and property val- ues were declining, while the cost of
maintaining aging infrastructure and addressing social need was increasing. No longer able to
rely on federal and state subsidy, declining municipalities were forced to search for alternative
sources of revenue.
In Ferguson, and throughout Missouri, local officials were further constrained in their ability to raise tax revenue because, in 1980, the Missouri legislature amended the state constitution to require voter approval for most tax increases.314 The primary effect of the

Ferguson cut spending on schools, infrastructure,

amendment was to prevent municipalities like Ferguson from taxing property owners to pay for needed services.315

and social services. Unable to raise property taxes, Ferguson had come to rely on the revenue
generated by regressive sales and use taxes, which, as Walter Johnson explains, allowed the
city to extract more reve- nue from Black renters heating their homes and paying phone bills
than from their landlords. 316 Meanwhile, “[t]he vast wealth of the city, scarcely taxed at all, is locked up in property that African Americans were prevented from buying for most of its history.”317

In St.
Deprived of government subsidy and unable to raise property taxes, places like Ferguson are forced to compete with one another to attract new sources of reve- nue, compounding inequalities and inefficiencies produced by hyper-fragmenta- tion.

Louis County, white suburbs have cannibalized Black neighborhoods, annexing communities
with promises of integration and sharing resources, only to force annexed residents out
through tax foreclosures and redevelopment schemes a few years later. Neighboring 318

municipalities have waged annexation battles over parcels of land with the vague hope that
new development will generate revenue and increase property values. 319 Places like Ferguson can compete with more affluent

Ferguson has done both,

municipalities only by offering massive tax breaks to prospec- tive investors or by going into debt, selling municipal bonds, to pay for the sorts of amenities that would attract new businesses.320

spend- ing millions—at the expense of local residents—to attract big-box stores and bil- lion-
dollar corporations, and forgoing millions more in the form of low property assessments and tax
abatements. 321

In 1997, Ferguson managed to lure new development to West Florissant Avenue, the site of
protest two decades later, by offering what is known as tax incremental financing (TIF). 322 TIFs
allow municipalities to subsidize private development by deferring the payment of property
taxes on the development. In theory, TIF projects pay for themselves: the increase in property values and taxes
generated by new development is supposed to cover the costs of the initial improvements. But
if they do not, then local residents are often forced to pay for foregone revenue as well as the
debt incurred by selling municipal bonds. 323

TIFs often fail, but a TIF used to revitalize part of Ferguson’s downtown has succeeded in
attracting new restaurants and shops. The redevelopment project was designed That success, however, has not been shared.
to lure business from other, more affluent parts of St. Louis, while excluding the local residents
of Ferguson. There was no easy road, for instance, for Michael Brown to travel from Canfield Drive, where his body lay for hours, to Ferguson’s downtown redevelopment. If he had a car, he would have had to drive along an undeveloped

Because the city built no sidewalks along the way, he would have to walk along
stretch of Ferguson Avenue and make a U-turn.

the shoulder, hazarding a stop or citation for “manner of walking in the roadway.” Since 324

Brown’s death, numerous corporations have made commitments to invest in the rebuilding of
Ferguson, but almost all of this new development has been concentrated in the whiter, more
affluent parts of Ferguson, bypassing the neighborhoods that went up in flames, exacerbating
inequality. 325

Contrast the way in which the law assigns criminality to Brown’s “manner of walking” but not
the century of opportunity hoarding that left Brown with nowhere to go. Police officials and
others have insistently argued that Brown was somehow responsible for his own killing—
because he allegedly shoplifted a bag of cigarillos. 326 But those who have benefited from a local
regime of racial confinement, expropriation, and over-policing remain blameless. 327 Breonna
Taylor’s dating history brought her within the scope of police surveillance and collective
scrutiny, while Louisville’s aggressive redevelopment plan, which contemplated the destruction
of her ex-boyfriend’s neighborhood, largely escapes judgment—or is celebrated as
“renewal.”328 Behind the killing of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and others, there are similar
stories to tell about the relation between property and policing, and a white investment in real
estate that over- whelms concern for Black life. 329

On a day, like any other day, jurisgenerative black social life got caught walking.
Walking while Black, Driving while Black, Debating while Black. Nevermind that
before the crime of jaywalking in the street was the unrecognized crime of the
lack of sidewalks, and the unrecognized crime of state negligence, and the
unrecognized crime of municipal plunder, and the unrecognized crime of Lynch
Law.

The law of the state is always lynch law, and we extend it in our appeals to it.
So instead of possessing Mike Brown’s memory for a vampiric fantasy of
standing and self-possession, we turn the gaze away from the spectacle of Black
mutilation to the ceremonies of Black life loving and living in falleness.
Harney and Moten 17 [Stefano, Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University and
co-founder of the School for Study, an ensemble teaching project. He employs autonomist and postcolonial theory in looking into
issues associated with race, work, and social organization; and Fred, Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside,
where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory, “Leave our Mikes
Alone,” pp. 15-23, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53a0503be4b0a429a2614e8b/t/59d81c2eedaed84653048f0d/
1507335215476/Harney-Moten.pdf//ak47]

2. MICHAEL BROWN (A WYNTER’S TALE) How can we survive genocide? We can only address this question by studying
how we have survived genocide. In the interest of imagining what exists there is an image of Michael Brown we must
refuse in favor of another image we don’t have. One is a lie, the other unavailable. If we refuse to show the image of a lonely body, of the outline of
the space that body simultaneously took and left, we do so in order to imagine jurisgenerative black social life walking down the
middle of the street—for a minute, but only for a minute, unpoliced, another city gathers,
dancing. We know it’s there, and here, and real; we know what we can’t have happens all the
time. When my brother fell/ I picked up his weapons./ I didn’t question/ whether I could aim or
be as precise as he. /A needle and thread/ were not among/ his things/ I found. Essex Hemphill,
“When My Brother Fell” When we walk down the street/ We don’t care who we see or who we meet/ Don’t need to run, don’t need to hide/ ‘cause we got something burning inside/
we’ve got love power/ it’s the greatest power of them all/ we’ve got love power/ and together we can’t fall. Luther Vandross, “Power of Love/Love Power” At times, this land will shake your understanding/ of the

These passages bear an analytic of

world/ and confusion will eat away at your sense/ of humanity/ but at least you will feel normal. Vernon Ah Kee, from Whitefellanormal

the lost and found, of fallenness and ascension, that comes burning to mind in and as the name of Michael
Brown. First, that there is a social erotics of the lost and found in fallenness’ refusal of standing.
We fall so we can fall again, which is what ascension really means to us. To fall is to lose one’s place, to lose the place that makes
one, to relinquish the locus of being, which is to say of being single. This radical homelessness— its kinetic
indigeneity, its irreducible queerness—is the essence of blackness. This refusal to take place is given in what it is to occur.
Michael Brown is the latest name of the ongoing event of resistance to, and resistance before,
socioecological disaster. Modernity’s constitution in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, settler
colonialism and capital’s emergence in and with the state, is The Socioecological Disaster.
Michael Brown gives us occasion once again to consider what it is to endure the disaster, to survive (in)
genocide, to navigate unmappable differences as a range of localities that, in the end—either all the way to the end or as our ongoing refusal of beginnings and ends—will always refuse to have been
taken. The fall is anacatastrophic refusal of the case and, therefore, of the world , which is the earth’s capture insofar as it was always a picture frozen and

extracted from imaginal movement. At stake is the power of love, which is given , in walking down the street, as

defiance to the (racial capitalist, settler colonial) state and its seizures, especially its seizure of
the capacity to make (and break) law. Against the grain of the state’s monopolization of ceremony,
ceremonies are small and profligate; if they weren’t everywhere and all the time we’d be dead.
The ruins, which are small rituals, aren’t absent but surreptitious, a range of songful scarring,
when people give a sign, shake a hand. But what if together we can fall, because we’re fallen, because we need to fall again, to continue in our common fallenness,
remembering that falling is in apposition to rising, their combination given in lingering, as the giving of pause, recess, vestibular remain,
custodial remand, hold, holding in the interest of rub, dap’s reflex and reflection of maternal touch, a maternal ecology of laid hands, of being handled,

handed, handed down, nurture’s supernatural dispersion. Hemphill emphatically announces the sociality that Luther shelters. Fallen, risen, mo(u)rnful survival. When black
men die it’s usually because we love each other, whether we run, or fight or surrender. Consider Michael
Brown’s generative occurrence and recurrence as refusal of the case, as refusal of standing. You can do this but only if you wish to insert yourself, and now I must abuse a phrase of Ah Kee’s, into black

worldlessness.9 Our homelessness. Our selflessness. None of which are or can be ours.The state can’t live with us and it can’t live without us.
Its violence is a reaction to that condition. The state is nothing other than a war against its
own condition. The state is at war against its own (re)sources, in violent reaction to its own
condition of im/possibility, which is living itself, which is the earth itself, which blackness
doesn’t so much stand in for as name , as a name among others that is not just another name among others. That we survive is beauty and testament; it is neither to
be dismissed nor overlooked nor devalued by or within whatever ascription of value; that we survive is invaluable. It is, at the same time,

insufficient. We have to recognize that a state— the racial capitalist/settler colonial state—of
war has long existed. Its brutalities and militarizations, its regulative mundanities, are
continually updated and revised, but they are not new. If anything, we need to think more
strategically about our own innovations, recognizing that the state of war is a reactive state, a
machine for regulating and capitalizing upon our innovations in/for survival. This is why what’s
most disturbing about Michael Brown (aka Eric Garner, aka Renisha McBride, aka Trayvon
Martin, aka Eleanor Bumpurs, aka Emmitt Till, aka an endless streams of names and absent
names) is our reaction to him, our misunderstanding of him, and the sources of that misunderstanding that manifest and reify a
desire for standing, for stasis, within the state war machine which, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t
confer citizenship upon its subjects at birth but, rather, at death, which is the proper name for
entrance into its properly political confines. The prosecution of Michael Brown, which is the
proper technical name for the grand jury investigation of Darren Wilson, the drone, is what our
day in court looks like and always has. The prone, exposed, unburied body—the body that is given, in death, its status as
body precisely through and by way of the withholding of fleshly ceremony— is what political standing looks like. That’s the form it takes and keeps. This is a Sophoclean

formulation. The law of the state is what Ida B. Wells rightly calls lynch law. And we extend it in our

appeals to it. We need to stop worrying so much about how it kills, regulates and accumulates
us and worry more about how we kill, deregulate and disperse it. We have to love and revere
our survival, which is (in) our resistance. We have to love our refusal of what has been refused.
But insofar as this refusal2 has begun to stand, insofar as it has begun to seek standing, it stands in need of renewal, now, even as the sources and conditions of that renewal become

more and more obscure, more and more entangled with the regulatory apparatuses that are deployed in
order to suppress them. At moments like this we have to tell the truth with a kind of viciousness and, even,
a kind of cruelty. Black lives don’t matter, which is an empirical statement not only about
black lives in this state of war but also about lives. This is to say that lives don’t matter; nor
should they. It’s the metaphysics of the individual life in all its immateriality that’s got us in this
situation in the first place. Michael Brown lived and moved within a deep and evolving understanding of this: if i leave this earth today atleast youll know i care about others more
then i cared about my damn self.”... But we have to consider how, and what it means that, his testament is transformed into an expression of mourning and outrage such as this upon the non-occasion of the non-

indictment: Go on call me "demon" but I WILL love my damn self. We suffer with but also through this expression of our suffering. For this
expression of our disavowal of the demonic—however brutally the police and/or the polis , in their soullessness, ascribe it to or inscribe it upon us—is erstwhile

respectability’s voluntary laying down of arms , its elective demobilization of jurisgenerative force. Meanwhile, Michael Brown is like
another fall and rise through man—come and gone, as irruption and rupture, to remind us not that black lives matter but that black life

matters; that the absolute and undeniable blackness of life matters; that this is not a judgment
of value but a description of a field of activity. The innovation of our survival is given in embrace of this daimonic, richly internally differentiated
choreography, its lumpen improvisation of contact , which is obscured when class struggle in black studies

threatens to suppress black study as class struggle. 22 How much has black studies, as a bourgeois institutionalization of black study, determined the
way we understand and fight the state of war within which we try to live? How has it determined how we understand the complex non-singularity that we know now as Michael Brown? It would be wrong to say
that Michael Brown has become, in death, more than himself. He already was that, as he said himself, in echo of so much more than himself. He was already more than that in being less than that, in being the

least of these.To reduce Michael Brown to a cypher for our unfulfilled desire to be more than that, for our serially
unachieved and constitutionally unachievable citizenship, is to do a kind of counter-
revolutionary violence; it is to partake in the ghoulish, vampiric consumption of his body, of the body that
became his, though it did not become him, in death, in the reductive stasis to which his flesh was subjected. Michael Brown’s flesh is our flesh; he is flesh of our flesh of flames.10 On August 9,

like every day, like any other day, black life , in its irreducible sociality, having consented not to be single, got caught walking— with
jurisgenerative fecundity—down the middle of the street. Michael Brown and his boys: black life breaking and making law,

against and underneath the state, surrounding it . They had foregone the melancholic appeal, to which we now reduce them, for
citizenship, and subjectivity, and humanness. That they had done so is the source of Darren Wilson’s genocidal instrumentalization in the state’s defense.
They were in a state of war and they knew it. Moreover, they were warriors in insurgent, if
imperfect, beauty. What’s left for us to consider is the difference between the way of Michael Brown’s dance, his fall and rise, his ongoing demon/stration and the well-meaning protests of
mere petitioners, fruitlessly seeking energy in the pitiful, minimal, temporary shutdown of this or that freeway, as if mere occupation were something other than retrenchment (in reverse) of the demand for

Rather than dissipate our preoccupation with how we live and breathe,
recognition that actually constitutes business as usual.

we need to defend our ways in our persistent practice of them. It’s not about taking the
streets; it’s about how, and about what, we take to the streets. What would it be and what
would it mean for us jurisgeneratively to take to the streets, to live in the streets, to gather
together another city right here, right now? Meanwhile, against the dead citizenship that was imposed upon him, the body the state tried to make him be, and
in lieu of the images we refuse and can’t have, here is an image of our imagination. This is Michael Brown, his descent, his ascension, his ceremony, his flesh, his animation in and of the maternal ecology—Michael

Brown’s innovation, as contact, in improvisation. Contact improvisation is how we survive genocide.

Thus, we affirm fallenness as a vestment of the duty to our dead to interrupt
the hegemony of self-possession.

To the ones who can fall, the dead and dying of the past present and the future,
if you read this, you will hear the things that we heard. The ritual of death
amidst ongoing lynch law imagines blackness into an undeserving world that
can only benefit the living expected to perform the binary between life/death,
innocence and guilt, what is lawful and lawlessness. This does nothing for the
dead. Dealing in death improperly - conjuring up the images of those you kill, I
promise, it will cost you.

To honor our dead, we examine closely what we have forgotten. Our poetic
revolt points to something else/a new and different world/one that does not
require individual standing. We fall together, because we are already fallen and
because the world requires that we fall again. The carcerality of whiteness
makes us complicit in the ways we’ve allowed the world to warp our spirits to
the extent that we invade the privacy of our dead and stop defending them.
But, we owe them more than that. We have a duty to our dead to invent
practices that organize away from standing alone. That falls together.
Odysseos 19 [Louiza, gets the goods and likes a good mandingo fight, “Stolen Life’s Poetic
Revolt,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2019, Vol. 47(3), pp. 344 –358//ak47]
But what is the meditation on the ‘open boat’, a meditation of and for a poetics of Relation, if not an endeavour to think the ‘abyss’ as inseparable from an ‘impossible generativity’ for poetic revolt?7 For Glissant,
the reverberations of slavery are inextricable from flight from, and resistance to, dispossession and suffering, such that poetic intention ‘expresses, reveals…[what] the people have not ceased to live in reality’.8

The historical lifetimes of ‘New World’ slavery were co-emergent with practices of petit and
grand marronage, 9 anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles, including slave rebellions, and the Haitian Revolution which was all three.10 More than that,
poetic uprising also aimed at the destabilisation of the modern-colonial episteme that, as Sylvia
Wynter has shown, ascribed rational, historical, moral and responsible agency to the
‘overrepresented’ figure of ‘Man’ as if it were the human itself.11 Such overrepresentation constituted the
racialised other12 through ‘ontological lack’ – an ‘unbearable wrongness of being’ – legitimating enslavement, territorial
conquest and colonial settlement.13 Scholarship on black cultural production, performance, aesthetics –
the black radical tradition more broadly – has attended to the inseparability of dispossession
and revolt in the afterlives of slavery, what Robin Kelley identifies as the ‘black radical imagination’ and Fred Moten calls
the ‘resistance of the object’, or more recently, ‘[l]ife which has been stolen steals away…’, which reverberates in the title
of this piece.14

Poetics has been thought of as ‘an anti-colonial politics itself’;15 here poetic revolt, too, has a wider socio-political meaning,
as in Aimé Césaire’s ‘new science of the word’ and Wynter’s ‘renarration’.16 Poetic revolt ‘responds to the need for replenished social and

political imaginations adequate to what in a previous generation would have been called the
demand for freedom’.17 It entails what Kelley calls, after C.L.R. James, ‘the effort to see the future in the present’, to dream ‘freedom dreams’.18 In this
sense, poetics, like poetry itself, is not a ‘luxury’; on the contrary, it bears directly upon the act of

‘illumination’, inflecting the ‘quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives’, from which flow not only thoughts, concepts, and ideas, but
also the very possibility of hermeneutic engagement: understanding. 19 And yet, stolen life’s
poetic revolt does not adhere to modernity’s confined constitution of understanding through
instrumentality alone, but ‘improvisationally passeth understanding…forever in anticipation of modernity and its exhaustion’.20 Poetic revolt, I argue,
is part of ongoing efforts to destabilise the modern-colonial episteme and is intimately
connected with the possibility and imagination of radical social transformation, indeed, of the
shape and time of futurity. It reimagines the present that excludes others as non-human
according to the figure of Man, aiming to make thinkable and inhabitable a single, other, world, or a world
otherwise, whilst ‘hold[ing] multiple worlds’.21 Importantly, poetic revolt pertains to ‘the demand…for a share of the future, and a future conceived on different terms’ and is both a ‘historical and
future oriented’ endeavour.22

Joining the discussion of revolution and resistance in world politics that this special issue convenes, the article, first, puts forward poetic revolt as a necessary companion to these ‘keywords’, a contiguous or even
prior term, which centres the ‘asterisked histories of slavery, of property, of thingification, and their afterlives’,23 benefitting from and intersecting with ongoing work in International Relations on slavery’s
structurations – its ‘remains’ – in the present.24 In section one, therefore, it engages with the work of Saidiya Hartman, Hortense J. Spillers and Christina Sharpe, aiming not at an exhaustive account, but rather at
developing a theoretical orientation of the ‘ongoingness’ of slavery as a ‘grammar of captivity’ that nevertheless illuminates the simultaneity and entanglement of structuring violence and poetic revolt.25 Such
simultaneity, it argues additionally, is best illuminated when we attend to the sociopoetic practices of enslaved and post-Emancipation populations: the living ‘socialities’ of stolen life, those fugitive and ‘wayward’
arts and acts of ‘black social living’.26 Second, the article discusses an example of such sociopoetic revolt drawn from Spillers’ often overlooked scholarship on homiletics, a term which refers to the study of, and

key aspects of poetic revolt, such as critical practices of

participation in, homilies or sermons;27 it identifies and discusses

‘fabulation’, world-making otherwise, and processes of resignification and self-representation, through which
enslaved and legally emancipated communities developed a posture of ‘critical insurgency’ that
aimed at rupturing the grammar of captivity and at forging critical, futurally-oriented
sociabilities.28 In both of these objectives the article acknowledges concerns to avoid voyeuristic and ‘piratic’ use of such practices and histories which ‘make continuous the colonial project of
violence’.29 The risk remains however that discussing these sociopoetic practices appropriates them as objects to be known.30 Third, the article discusses the links of poetic revolt,
in its specificity in the afterlives of Atlantic slavery, to wider systemic and futural reflections without claiming, at the same time, that the experience of the ‘abyss’ is generalisable or universal.31 It reflects on how

poetic revolt emerges within, and further reinforces, an interstitial, Afro-diasporic relational and
critical positionality, which Spillers probes through ‘the idea of Black Culture’ and Glissant reads as ‘Relation’.32 Such a critical
and futural positionality does not take the modern-colonial order as presupposed ,33 but engenders a ‘counter-
statement’ to modernity that is central to modernity itself.34 Pluralising our thinking on revolution and resistance, poetic revolt, then, is best seen as a critical meditation on futurity.

‘Afterlives of Slavery’ and Poetic Revolt To probe the contours of poetic revolt, in the sense intimated above, requires us to reflect on the notion of ‘afterlives’ arising in the United States’ academic context,
without losing sight, at the same time, of the plural post-slavery Afro-diasporic contexts, which cannot be reduced to a single national frame or set of experiences.35 Below I engage with Hartman’s, Spillers’ and
Sharpe’s historical and analytical work in an attempt to assemble a conceptualisation of ‘afterlives’ that discloses both their structuring violence and also their generativity of poetic revolt. I also draw on Wynter’s
probing of sociopoetics to locate the methodological contours of the discussion.

Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection showed how the focus on legal emancipation and its narrating as freedom distracted from a concerted analysis of the elusive character of freedom for the formerly enslaved and their descendants, those who are the ‘afterlives of
property’. 36 Her analyses of the ‘non-event of Emancipation’ provided an incisive critique of how formal emancipation and the accrual of rights and freedoms ‘conferred sovereignty as it engendered subjection’, both in the actual elusiveness of freedom and in the
gifting of it as debt.37 Hartman reads historically the distinction between emancipation as a ‘legal, legislative, and juridical term’ and freedom as a ‘condition that is radically different’.38 For Hartman, slavery’s afterlife ‘encompasses the fungible and disposable life of
the captive/ slave’ and extends into the post-Emancipation and contemporary eras to produce an ‘uneven distribution of death and harm’, which includes ‘premature death, social precarity, and incarceration’ and ‘produces a caesura in human populations…a huge
pile of corpses’; in other words, the experience of the Middle Passage reverberates in present-day ‘post-racial’ US society: ‘[t]he [slave ship] hold continues to shape how we live’.39 Hartman’s aim is not to ‘efface the discontinuities and transformations inaugurated
by the abolition of slavery’ but, rather, to mark the ‘entanglements of slavery and freedom’, which ‘trouble facile notions of progress that endeavor to erect absolute distinctions between’ them.40 Hence, her historical aim is undergirded by an urgent concurrent call
to attend to the temporal entanglement of the centuries-long transformation of enslaved Africans (and later African- Americans) into fungible commodities and the ongoing disposability of racialised black populations contoured by social norms that normalise ‘the
deaths we are expected to live’.41 Such temporal entanglement suggests that, for post-slavery subjects, ‘time is lived in multiple and simultaneous registers that trouble…the before or after of slavery’, illuminating their inhabitation of ‘the simultaneity of that
entanglement’.42

Subsequent scholarship in a wide range of fields continues to explore the ‘revenant’ legacies of slavery, even though such contributions do not always use the term ‘afterlives’. 43 For example, in sociology Loïc Wacquant examines the serial emergence of

‘functional analogue’ institutions in post-Emancipation United States, such as Jim Crow, the
ghetto and mass incarceration, which were ‘genealogically linked’ to the system of slavery, showing how

these developed to manage the transition from formal slavery to ‘racial domination’. 44 In law, Colin

Dayan discusses the legal rituals through which ‘slaves were reborn as criminals and translated
into “slaves of the state”’ .45 In Science and Technology Studies, moreover, Ruha Benjamin analyses afterlives of whiteness and examines racist systems as ‘reproductive systems’, ‘resurrecting white lives’ while
‘snuff[ing] out black ones’.46 In the invocation – actual or not – of ‘afterlives’, such violence should be thought of as temporally entangled, that is, to have ‘occurred before it had occurred’ and to illuminate the ‘inscribing [of] black death within the texture of the
quotidian’.47

Over the past decade, what has been called ‘Afro-pessimist’ scholarship has sutured ‘afterlives of slavery’ to the notion of ‘social death’, as initially delineated in Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.48 Patterson’s ‘transhistorical’ account of slavery produced
a ‘distillation’ of slave experience through ‘nomothetic’ social science, that is, on the basis of a comparative historical-sociological analysis of tens of slaveholding societies across the ages.49 Alexander Weheliye notes that such an account ‘emphasizes mortality at
the cost of sociality’, which obscures the ‘messy corporeality of bare life’,50 as seen in the claim that ‘black life is lived in social death’.51 As Moten argues, reading the afterlives of slavery as overdetermined by social death and ‘dereliction’52 tends to presume an
‘incapacity for ontological resistance’;53 for Spillers, too, if a theoretical posture ‘governed by a diasporic view of black history from which to commence its narrative reifies slavery and colonization as inherent properties in a subject, then the theoretical posture no
longer serves as an intellectual technology, or a heuristic device, but, rather, comes to advance an ontological valence’.54 This tends to ‘confuse a conceptual narrative, or a position in discourse, with an actual narrative that will always exceed it’55 and risks
occluding the incessant ‘black op’ of black social life – that pronounced ‘resistance of the object’ in the fights against, flights from, and refusals of, the ongoing lived structurations of slavery.56 Moten’s work on black cultural and aesthetic practice, for example,

black social life unsettles its regulation

probes the ways in which , being ‘reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression’.57 Slavery’s afterlives, then, may be best thought in relation

‘stolen life’s’ multivalence as ‘stolen’ and ‘stealing’ itself away, that

to makes is, as also marked by ‘fugitive movement…[that]…

black social life ungovernable’ or ‘wayward’. stolen life’s 58 Indeed, it may be necessary to think more concertedly, initiated in the final section, on how

poetic revolt contributes to a posture of ‘fugitivity’ and ‘critical insurgency’ that destabilises
the ontological assumptions of the modern-colonial episteme. 59

Taking fungibility and injurability as central to slavery’s ‘afterlives’ whilst remaining attentive to poetic disruption within them, requires an engagement with Spillers’ discussion of a ‘grammar of captivity’ as this unfolds in post-Emancipation United States. Her enquiry
offers a conceptual topology of ‘afterlives’ as a symbolic order, which illuminates their radical ‘dis/continuity’ as a complex entanglement of temporality, marking both their longevity and permutations whilst attentive of their generativity for poetic revolt. Spillers’

famous essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ interrogated how public policy and discourse tend toward an analysis of ed
African-American social ills that, even when acknowledging the history of slavery, occluded the
ongoing operations of a ‘grammar of captivity’ the 1965 Moynihan Report .60 Spillers’ critique of on The Negro Family: The Case for

apportioned blame for black male ‘underachievement’

National Action, showed how it to the in education, employment, life chances, etc.,

female-headed black family, whose assumed structure of matriarchy ‘reversed roles of husband
and wife’. 61 The Report claimed that such divergence from the family model of ‘male leadership’ of whites – and recent immigrant communities – in American society disintegrated the ‘social fabric’ of ‘lower class Negroes’, placing them at a
‘distinct disadvantage’.62 Such a reading ‘inscribe[d] “ethnicity” as a scene of negation’, discursively weaving ‘underachievement’ to a ‘tangle of pathology’; it echoed what had become a naturalised common sense amongst different segments of society, ‘both black
and white, oddly enough’: namely, that the ‘African-American female’s “dominance” and “strength”’ was a pathological ‘instrument of castration’.63

Interested in ‘gaining the insurgent ground’ for this ‘female social subject’, Spillers interrogated the ways in which the ‘New-World, diasporic plight’ of the enslaved had marked ‘a theft of the body – a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing
of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire’; such a context not only results in ‘ungendering’ – that ‘loss of gender’ in the enslaving dispossession that ‘turned personality into property’64 – but also in the historical ‘rigidified disorganisation’ of the slave
family through the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby children born to enslaved mothers were themselves commodified and enslaved.65 Ungendering and the heredity of slave status entrenched a grammar through which enslaved mothers and fathers
were ‘robbed of the parental right, the parental function’.66 Enslaved men became removed ‘from sight’ and ‘from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father’s name, the Father’s law’ – which the Report proclaims to be the norm of
American society – whilst the enslaved mother became ‘both mother and mother dispossessed’:67 ‘enslaveability displaces maternity’.68 Spillers’ analysis of the ‘grammar of captivity’ contests the Report’s account of matriarchy and its fixing as pathological, to
which African-American male ‘underachievement’ and the assumed crumbling of social fabric were being traced. She illuminates the specificity of the material and psycho-social fortunes of African-American communities, furnishing us with a conceptual topology for
understanding ‘afterlives’ as a ‘symbolic order’ that begins with the ‘rupture’ of captivity and fosters a ‘radically different kind of cultural continuation’ through which black lives are syntactically composed.69 Spillers’ discussion centres on the captives’ ‘body’ in
which, ‘biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join’; it is this ‘profound’ and complex ‘intimacy’ of the flesh that the symbolic order attempts to capture and fix with its ‘externally imposed meanings and uses’, turning flesh
into a fungible ‘body’, into property.70

in this grammatical unfolding poetic revolt itself

Yet, central to Spillers’ conceptual topology are incessant attempts to rupture this very grammar. It is of black life that

unfurls taking shape alongside and within other practices of sociopolitical resistance,
, I argue with Glissant in mind,

fugitive and maroon movements, as well as cultural production and sociopoetic practice. For
Audre Lorde, poetry and poetic revolt are not only ‘dream and vision; it is the skeleton
architecture , a ‘beachhead’ that remains when forms regarded as ‘real resistance’ to of our [black women’s] lives’

dispossession and normalised disposability are thwarted. 71 For Spillers, ‘the project of liberation for African-Americans found urgency in two passionate
motivations’:

1) to break apart, to rupture violently the laws of American behavior that make such syntax possible; 2) to introduce a new semantic field/fold more appropriate to his/her own historic movement.72

Such destabilising of grammar and imagining futurity otherwise encompasses multiform

practices, which Christina Sharpe has recently termed ‘wake work’ unfolding , a term whose Glissantian echoes aim to grasp their

within the ongoing reverberations of the ‘wake’ of slave ships. 73

Sharpe pluralises Glissant’s conception and visualisation of the wake as a fibril, mobilising the inherent polysemy of ‘the wake’ to develop an analytic frame for understanding the entanglement of past, present and future, and inter-articulation of dying and/within living, dispossession and/within revolt:

the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved in water;…the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; … the state of wakefulness; consciousness; … in the line of recoil of (a gun); … a watch or vigil held beside the body of someone who has died, sometimes accompanied by ritual observances including eating and drinking; … grief, celebration, memory, and those among the living who, through ritual, mourn their passing and celebrate their life…74

Sharpe’s compound term ‘wake work’ thinks together Spillers ’ conceptual topology regarding the operations of a grammar of captivity with Hartman’s concern with temporal entanglement and injurability, whilst also conjuring Glissant’s insistence on the simultaneity and interarticulation of dispossession and poetic upris ing. Grasping the wake as the tracks left by sailing ships through water and as watchful sitting with the dead centres the reverberations of the transatlantic slave trade and the millions of African deaths in the Middle Passage;75 whilst the wake as the line of recoil of a gun recalls not only contemporary carceral logics of containment but, importantly, the ‘fatal way of being alive…the constant and perilous exposure of life to injury’.76 Sharpe analyses how living in the wake has its own, historically dictated, ‘orthography’:77 its own symbolic, often unspoken, rules through which black lives are ‘spelled out’ according to ‘accepted usage’ and in coherence with social signs.78

Importantly, however, Sharpe speaks of the urgency in attending to the disturbances of ‘flow’ – recall that ‘wake’ also connotes the disruption of air caused by bird flight – because such disturbances are crucial to the task to ‘imagine otherwise’; they signal towards ‘anagrammatical’ modes of living – that is, in disruption of the grammar – and help grasp more adequately ‘new modes of making sensible’:79

wake work as a theory and praxis of the wake…I am trying to find the language for this work, find the form for this work. Language and form fracture more every day…I want to sound this language anew, sound a new language…Think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold…80

‘Wake work’ invokes, I argue, a praxis of poetic disruption and futural imagination that insists on
afterlives as afterlives, adjoining the slave ship and bird flight in an attempt to interarticulate
ongoing dispossession and poetic revolt: ‘I mean wake work’, Sharpe clarifies, ‘to be a mode of
inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/ imaginable lives’. 81 However, I suggest
that examining these wakeful inhabitations, these interventions in the grammar of captivity, as ‘sociopoetics’ better illuminates their linkages to poetic revolt. Far from purely reflective or avant-garde quests,
practices of wake work are forged in interstices of social living and vernacular and cultural production that concretise fugitive and futural lived reflection on the present and the ‘past that is not past’.82

Wynter called for reversing the neglect of Afro-diasporic sociopoetics within studies of tribal poetry focused on ‘ethnopoetics’.83 Black Metamorphosis, her 1970s unpublished manuscript, also examines the emergence of ‘a sociopoetic force that persists despite the
imposition of nothingness’, highlighting in the lifetimes of slavery ‘a recalcitrant form of life that fails to assimilate within either normative conceptions of the human subject or the critique of Western humanism and its invention of man’.84 Sociopoetics, as Wynter
understood it, was the attempt to grasp concretely and historically the generativity of social life in conditions of enslavement and abjection. Practices that emerged in the ‘underlife of the slave’s life’ illuminated the vital sociality of ‘man as generator, both of his

a regenerative vitality that is irreducible to the abstract form of life

material and of his social life’; as Nijah Cunningham suggests, ‘Wynter describes

that the figure of the slave represented from the standpoint of capital’ (a pieza) .85 Wynter identifies important dis/continuities in slavery’s

the ‘sociopoetic force’ that weaves through ‘the lived experience of those relegated
afterlives by probing

outside the epistemological constraints that define human life’, and which entails ‘ the practices,
sensibilities, affects, attachments, capacities, aspirations, and general rhythms of social life’. 86 Examining
both the significance of plantation provision grounds [the ‘plots’], in which slaves cultivated food for subsistence, as well as the syncretic rebellion of rhythm – ‘dance and song and music’ – sociopoetics gleans ‘[w]hat dwells in the underlife’, in the escape into

sociopoetics bespeaks ‘something that is danced, lived, participated in, and

sociality; as Cunningham notes,

experientially practiced that we might call black social living’. 87 Here ‘living’ ordains not only being physically alive but also those innately relational and
improvisational moves that ‘attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply’.88 Amongst these, Wynter speaks of ‘species of maroonage, a multiplex of marooning actions, practices, or activity’89 in which one finds a ‘“complex attitude” that survived the Middle
Passage and a concept of life in which “death was the ground of the regeneration of life”’.90

Methodological attentiveness to sociopoetics reveals how ‘[t]he body is never an empty vessel, or completely open to being named and claimed in toto’.91 Living socialities within injurious abjection in the
plantations and wider ‘black minority experience’92 post-Emancipation provide, as Hartman says of another historical context, ‘an intimate chronicle of black radicalism’.93 Examining the early 20th century ghetto
as a context dis/continuous with the plantation and entailing new forms of ‘racial enclosure’, Hartman creatively reconstructs, on the basis of official records, statistics and printed news, refashionings of self,
mutuality and community by ‘colored girls’ as ‘an art of survival’, a kind of ‘social poesis’ that pertains at one and the same time to internal life, self-representation and the development of creative and fugitive
forms of sociality.94 Both Wynter and Hartman, I argue, attend, albeit differently, to the need to examine poetic revolt in practices of social living across different spatial and historical contexts of the afterlives of

sociopoetics constituted a living and embodied contestation of ‘an initial

slavery; their work probes how such

negation of this humanness’, brought about by racial and chattel slavery’s transformation of
humans into property.95 Importantly, poetic revolts intervened against ‘the objectification of the life of
the enslaved’96 and post-slavery subjects whilst predicated on a contestation of modernity’s ‘freedom discourse’, poetically reimagining the future, selfhood
and sociality from ‘out-from-outside’ of modernity’s ‘terms of salvation’ and the hegemony of
its self-possessed subject.97

Debate is a key space for the rhetorical production of the white racial order
known as lynch law. The question is what kinds of portable skills do we want
debate to produce? Framework is an attempt to foreclose law making by
rejecting the negotiation of the terms. Declaring legal meaning to be an already
settled matter is a dry snitch that only some people have already tacitly and
actively agreed on who counts here. Fallenness is a jurisgenerative act of
political imagination that challenges the hegemony of state-sanctioned
interpretation and its protocols of policing.
- NOTE: For the epistemologically ignorant (read: white), you can learn the definition of
dry snitching here. Note: look at the third definition, the first two were clearly made by
white people who need to stay in their lane.

Moten 14 [Fred, Prof. English @ UC-Riverside, “Jurisgenerative Grammar (for alto),” The Oxford Handbook of Critical
Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut,
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/1/2391/files/2017/12/06-Moten-Jurisgenerative-Grammar-
2fznrrv.pdf//ak47]

IN his celebrated essay "Nomos and Narrative;' legal scholar Robert Cover describes it as
"remarkable that in myth and history the origin of and justification for a court is rarely
understood to be the need for law. Rather, it is understood to be the need to suppress law, to
choose between two or more laws, to impose upon laws a hierarchy. It is the multiplicity of
laws, the fecundity of the jurisgenerative principle, that creates the problem to which the court
and the state are the solution:'1 Though Cover is ambivalent regarding the abolition of this solution, which he understands to be violent, of necessity, his advocacy of a certain
resistance to the very apparatuses whose necessity he denaturalizes makes it possible for us to ask some questions that the state and the understanding find not only inappropriate but also inappropriable.

What if the imagination is not lawless but lawful? What if it is, in fact, so full of laws that, moreover, are in such fugitive excess of themselves that the
imagination, of necessity, is constantly, fugitively in excess of itself as well? Will law have then been manifest paralegally, criminally, fugitively, as a kind of ongoing antisystemic break or breaking; as sociality's

In response to this
disruptive avoidance of mere civility which takes form in and as a contemporaneity of different times and the inhabitation of multiple, possible worlds and personalities?

anoriginal priority of the differential set, the courts and the state (as well as critics of every
stripe) will have insisted upon the necessity of policing such collaboration. Meanwhile, relations between worlds will have
been given in and as a principle of non-exclusion. The line of questioning that Cover requires and enables brings the jurisgenerative principle to bear on a burden that it must bear: the narrative that begins with

an original criminality (which Western civilization and its critique

the criminalization of that principle. In studying the criminalization of

requires us to understand as the epidermalization of the alternative, but which we'll come more rigorously and precisely to
imagine as the animaterialization of the fantastic in chromatic saturation) one recognizes that the jurisgenerative principle is a runaway .

Gone underground, it remains, nevertheless, our own anarchic ground. Cover reveals the
constituted indispensability of the legal system as an institutional analog of the understanding
designed to curtail the lawless freedom with which laws are generated and subsequently argues
for the duty to resist legal system, even if from within it, in its materialization in and as the state. In the concluding
paragraph of his unfinished final article "The Bonds of Constitutional Interpretation: Of the Word, the Deed, and the Role;' he argues that " in law to be an

interpreter is to be a force, an actor who creates effects even through or in the face of violence.
To stop short of suffering or imposing violence is to give law up to those who are willing to so act. The state is organized to overcome scruple and fear. Its officials will so act. All others are
merely petitioners if they will not fight back :'2 But insofar as some of us cling to Samuel Beckett's notion that "the thing to avoid ... is the spirit of system;' we
are left to wonder how else and where else the resistance of the jurisgenerative multitude is constituted. 3 Moreover, we are required to consider an interarticulate relationship between flight and fight that
American jurisprudence can hardly fathom. That man was not meant to run away is, for Oliver Wendell Holmes, sufficient argument for a combat whose true outcome will have become, finally, eugenic rather than
abolitionist. To assert a duty to resist, enacted in and by way of the vast range of principled fugitivity as opposed to the absence of a duty to retreat, is a reading against the grain of Holmes's interpretive insistence
on honor, on a certain manhood severely husbanding generativity, a patrimonial heritage manifest as good breeding and as legal violence against bad breeding, given in the prolific but inferior productivity of the
unintelligent, whether black or (merely optically) white. 4 Reading Cover, always against the backdrop of a certain multiply-lined, multi-matrilinear music, requires re-generalizing fighting back, recalibrating it as

inaugurative, improvisational, radical interpretation-a fundamental and anticipatory disruption

of the standard whose cut origin and extended destination are way outside. This implies a kind of open access to interpretation that in turn implies the failure of
state-sanctioned institutions of interpretation insofar as they could never survive such openness. One must still consider interpretations relation to force, as
Cover understands it, but also by way of a massive discourse of force in which, on the one hand, the state monolith is pitted against the so much more than single speaker and, on the other hand, in which the

criminality, militancy, improvisatory

state, as a kind of degraded representation of commonness, is submitted to an illegitimate and disruptive univocality. Meanwhile,

literacy, and flight collaborate in jurisgenerative assertion, ordinary transportation, corrosive,

caressive (non)violence directed toward the force of state interpretation and its institutional and
philosophical scaffolding. It's a refusal in interpretation of interpretation's reparative and
representational imperatives, the mystical and metaphysical foundations of its logics of
accountability and abstract equivalence, by the ones who are refused the right to interpret at
the militarized junction of politics and taste, where things enter into an objecthood already
compromised by the drama of subjection. In the end, state interpretation-or whatever we would
call the exclusionary protocols of whatever interpretive community -tries to usurp the general,
generative role of study, which is an open admissions kind of thing.

This is a plan for the proliferation of epistemic and embodied rebellion.

Disobedience to the protocols of lynch law is the only possibility for a
transformative justice. May those who don’t know learn. May those who do
their best to dishonor our dead remain haunted. May their living never feel
complete.1
De Silva 17 [Denise, Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social
Justice) at the University of British Columbia. Before joining UBC, she was an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, at the University
of California, San Diego and, from 2010 to 2015, she held the inaugural chair in Ethics, at the School of Business and Management
and the directorship of the Centre for Ethics and Politics, at Queen Mary University of London., “Speculations on a Transformative
Theory of Justice,” The Online Journal of CONTOUR BIENNALE April 2017, http://hearings.contour8.be/2017/04/11/speculations-
transformative-theory-justice/ //ak47]

My contribution to the preparation of a plan for decolonization, that is the realization of the
Praxis

only possible transformative theory of justice—namely, a global justice—is a Black Feminist poethical
practice, whose method consists in a compositional practice that involves at least three figuring
movements—decomposition, composition, and recomposition—which are designed to identify
and unravel the workings of separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. 1111 but here I focus on
decomposition or the confrontational movement. Engaging black radical praxis, in a mode of
knowing and doing that targets the very underground of modern thought, is a first and crucial
decompositional step in the preparation of a plan for the realization of justice that aims at
decolonization.] I come to it, as I present elsewhere,1313 through an exploration of the work of Black Radical and Black Feminist scholars. My path begins with the
equation of racial violence in reading the category of Blackness as Racial Body = Value (Form +

1
Butts 20 [Amber, writer, organizer and educator who believes that Black folk are already whole.
Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions
about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while
living in a world reliant on our terror, “We are no good to the dead, and yet we believe the grieving
owe us their tears,” BlackYouthProject.com, https://blackyouthproject.com/we-are-no-good-to-the-
dead-and-yet-we-believe-the-grieving-owe-us-their-tears///Iyana]
Force) + Excess, and ends with the dissembling Excess = Form + Force + (Racial) Violence. For
Black Feminists, radical praxis refers to the decompositional (confrontational) moment of
seizure of this very Excess to use it as a tool for dismantling the determining gestures in the
scenes of economic and ethic value, out of which the form of justice emerges and in which it
guides administrative and executive decisions and plans for the realization of justice . Such
dissolution is crucial for reassembling the scene of ethical value without the Subject (the thing
of determinacy) and its formalizations. For instance, it is only after the racial category of blackness is fractured that it is possible to even begin to consider the
wherefrom of the violence it never fails to signify, which is that which provides justification for otherwise ethically untenable and illegal deployments of lethal force by law enforcement agents. It will

also allow for a refiguring of the scene of economic value, after the recognition that the total
value created by slave labor is not included in the classic historical materialist theory of value
because it was appropriated through the deployment of total violence. A decomposition of the
theory of value exposes how the total value created by slave labor is obscured in classic
accounts of capital accumulation and forces a redesign of the scene of economic value, which
will then have to consider global capital as the congealment of the total value expropriated from
slave labor and native lands—including expropriations taking place right now by mining, drug,
and mega-agricultural corporations. As a contribution for a transformative theory of justice, this Black Feminist poethical mode
of intervention, which I call a radical praxis, among other things, offers a guide for descriptions
and a method of intervention toward global justice. For instance, most accounts of justice focus on its formal (abstract) nature, such as the
characterizations of social justice as doomed precisely because its realization requires substantive social reforms and not only an extension of formal (legal) protection, as in the case of civil rights claims. A

transformative theory of justice that begins by fracturing the forms of modern thought (and
with this releasing the mind from the rules of understanding) welcomes imagings of existents
and events that do not need ontological pillars (separability, determinacy, and sequentiality). Such a
transformative theory of justice envisions global justice as a radical material transformation, that is, the aftermath of decolonization or what the world will have become after it has been known anew.