Comparative Racisms: Special issue of The Comparatist
Comparative Racisms: Special issue of The Comparatist:
Afropessimist Frank Wilderson warns against what he calls “the ruse of analogy,” urging us to learn to differentiate between antiblackness and all other forms of racism. This volume takes up the challenge of thinking racism comparatively. It acknowledges from the start that any parallel between racisms must be drawn with interpretive nuance so as to avoid overgeneralizations about racial arrangements and socio-economic conditions that are by no means identical. With an eye for racial capitalism and its effects on violence and health, an anti-racist intervention declines to treat race in isolation, to produce analogies that remain too abstract to have any purchase on the world. In its neoliberal mode, capitalism is responsible for the “Becoming Black of the world,” as Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe puts it. Only the obscenely wealthy are spared from blackening—from instrumentalization and animalization under a capitalist logic that bestows luxury to the one percent and dishes out misery to the rest, producing a never-ending stock of new slaves. We welcome contributions that examine the incommensurability of racial subjugations, the intersection of race with other interlocking forms of oppression, along with the possibilities for cross-racial solidarity. Topics of interest could include:
Racial capitalism
Racial assemblages
Fanonism
Settler colonialism
The afterlife of slavery
Neocolonialism
Necropower
racial caste systems
Orientalism
The Undercommons
Interested contributors should submit a 1-page abstract by April 1, 2021 to zallouz@whitman.edu. Deadline for completed articles will be December 1, 2021.