This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. The essays within this volume explore the fault lines of the racial formation concept, identify the power relations to which it inheres, and resolve the ethical coordinates for alternative ways of conceiving of racism and its correlations with sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, gender politics, empire, economic exploitation, and other valences of bodily construction, performance, and control in the twenty-first century. Collectively, the contributors advance the argument that contemporary racial theorizing remains mired in antiblackness. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess what we describe as the conceptual aphasia gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.

This book presents a metacritique of racial formation theory. Across a diversity of approaches and objects of analysis, the contributors assess the 'conceptual aphasia' gripping racial theorizing in our multicultural moment: analyses of racism struck dumb when confronted with the insatiable specter of black historical struggle.

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of “race” and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary “post-racial” culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement’s singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today’s critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power—from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.

In Black Interdictions, Philip Kretsedemas exposes the antiblack racism latent in the U.S. government’s Haitian refugee policies of the 1980s and 1990s which set the tone for the criminalization of migrants and refugees in the new millennium and lead to the migration and refugee policies of the Trump era and beyond. This type of radical exclusion is singular to the black experience and the black/nonblack binary must be factored into an analysis of the US migration regime. It is not possible to work together for equity and justice if we are not prepared to grapple with this divisive history and the instinct to avoid dealing with the singularity of the black experience. This book will be of interest to scholars of migration and refugee studies, black studies, legal studies, public policy and international relations, and many others.

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism presents a probing examination of the contemporary migrant “crisis” in the Mediterranean Basin. By centering our analysis on how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods reveal and confront how contemporary discourse on the migrant “crisis” displaces Black sovereign mobility. Their inquiry into the modern world’s culture of politics investigates “freedom of movement” discourse’s ostensible confrontation with border policing, the memorializing of Black migrant deaths by artists and advocates, and the visual imagery of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe as conceived by filmmakers in response to the migrant “crisis” as variants of a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This analysis allows the authors to formulate a new critical framework for analysis of both the problems of contemporary migration and borders and the leading prescriptions on offer from analysts, advocates, and policy makers in order to develop alternate ways of conceptualizing global society.

How can African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans from the former British colonies be so different in their approaches toward social mobility? Chrystal Y. Grey and Thomas Janoski state that this is because native blacks grow up as “strangers” in their own country and immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean are conversely part of “the dominant group.” Unlike previous research that compares highly educated Afro-Caribbeans to the broad range of African-Americans, this study holds social-class constant by looking only at successful blacks in the upper-middle-class from both groups. This book finds that African-Americans pursue overachievement strategies of working much harder than others do, while Afro-Caribbeans follow an optimistic job strategy expecting promotions and success. However, African-Americans are more likely to use confrontational strategies if their mobility is blocked. The main cause of these differences is that Afro-Caribbeans grow up in a system where they have many examples of black politicians and business leaders (35–90% of their countries are black) and African-Americans have fewer role models (12–14% of the United States are black). Further, the schooling system in Afro-Caribbean countries does not label blacks as underachievers because the schools are almost entirely black. A further problem that African-Americans face is the resentment of a small but significant number of blacks who have little social mobility. They accuse socially mobile African Americans of “acting white,” which is a phenomenon that Afro-Caribbeans almost never face and they call it “an African-American thing.” To demonstrate this difference, Strategies for Success among African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans does a historical-comparative analysis of the differences between the black experience after slavery in the United States and Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and St. Kitts-Nevis. The authors interview fifty-seven black people and find consistent differences between the US and Caribbean black citizens. Using theories of symbolic interaction and ressentiment, this work challenges previous studies that either claim that Afro-Caribbeans are more motivated than African-Americans, or studies that show that controlling for class, each group is more or less the same.

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.