Notes

1. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 119; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 73.

2. E.g., Biko Agozino, Counter-colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason (London: Pluto Press, 2003); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012); Mike Brodgen, “The Emergence of the Police—the Colonial Dimension,” British Journal of Criminology 27, no. 1 (1987): 4–14; Mark Brown, Penal Power and Colonial Rule (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2014); Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Bankole A. Cole, “Post-colonial Systems,” in Policing across the World: Issues for the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. I. Mawby, 88–108 (London: UCL Press, 1999); J. M. Moore, “Is the Empire Coming Home? Liberalism, Exclusion and the Punitiveness of the British State,” Papers from the British Criminology Conference 14 (2014): 31–48; Dylan Rodríguez, “Tyranny of the Task Force: Police Abolition and the Counterinsurgent Campus,” Connecticut Law Review 506 (2021); Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Georgina Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame 1945–80 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2006).

3. Following Saidiya Hartman (and many of the writers discussed later), I tend to use slave rather than enslaved person—as a term that encapsulates the position and logics of subjection. Hartman, Scenes. Where necessary, I also leave intact quotations containing words that are now considered slurs, both for historical accuracy and to ensure that the conceptual distinctions in their use are not blurred.

4. E.g., Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Angela Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James, 74–95 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998); Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007).

5. See Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Whiteness of Police,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1092; Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (London: Verso Books, 2017), 32.

6. This follows and expands on Wilderson’s thought that “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.” Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30. no. 2 (2003): 18–27.

7. Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021).

8. Hartman, Scenes, 72; Jared Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness,” Cultural Critique 90 (2015): 166.

9. Walcott, Long, 15.

10. José Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

11. Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

12. Walcott, Long, 19.

13. Tyrone S. Palmer, “Otherwise Than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 29, no. 2 (2020): 253.

14. This is practically endemic to liberal political philosophy, but see, e.g., Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (2007): 643–63; Charles W. Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Time and Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).

15. Tyler Wall, “The Police Invention of Humanity: Notes on the ‘Thin Blue Line,’” Crime, Media, Culture 16, no. 3 (2020): 319–36.

16. Frank B. Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities 9. no. 2 (2003): 225–40.

17. David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018).

18. Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2018).

19. Hilary Beckles, “On Barbados, the First Black Slave Society,” Black Perspectives, April 8, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/on-barbados-the-first-Black-slave-society/.

1. Biko Mandela Gray, “Frank Wilderson III,” Political Theology Network, September 21, 2021, https://politicaltheology.com/frank-wilderson-iii/.

2. Frank B. Wilderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson,” November 2014, https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/Wilderson-We-Are-Trying-to-Destroy-the-World-READ.pdf.

3. Annie Olaloku-Teriba, “Afro-pessimism and the Logic of Anti-Blackness,” Historical Materialism 26, no. 2 (2018): 96–122.

4. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” in Postcoloniality–Decoloniality–Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Berlin: Campus, 2014), 204.

5. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019). See Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 112, on Black fungibility as condition of possibility for Kant.

6. Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1–15.

7. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 764–82, citing D. Scott and S. Wynter, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe 8, no. 2 (2000): 119–207.

8. Garba and Sorentino.

9. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10. Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 39. See G. Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

11. Keguro Macharia, “Belated: Interruption,” GLQ 26, no. 3 (2020): 561–73.

12. While Kant’s supposed anticolonialism has largely been practically orthodoxy, I am interested primarily in reading Kant’s work in the context of attempted breach and suture (see note 66).

13. This conception of the world develops from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Base Faith,” E-Flux Journal 86 (2017); Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Palmer, “Otherwise”; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

14. See Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015); George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1972); Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

15. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating, 70.

16. Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 438. See also Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labour: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

17. See Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness”; Wilderson, “Prison Slave.”

18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2004).

19. See Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). An overview of scholarship on Kant and race is Robert Bernasconi, “Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 117 (2003): 13–22.

20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); Gary Banham, Kant’s Transcendental Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Geoffrey Bennington, Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell and Michael Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2016).

21. Kant, Critique, A158/B197.

22. That this characterizes the entire critical and phenomenological tradition since; see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

23. Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 116–17.

24. Kant, Critique, A235/B294.

25. Quill Kukla (writing as Rebecca), “The Antinomies of Impure Reason: Rousseau and Kant on the Metaphysics of Truth-Telling,” Inquiry 48, no. 3 (2005): 226.

26. Crawley, Blackpentecostal, 121.

27. See Jackson, Becoming; Robbie Shilliam, “Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry: A Dialogue between Kant, Foucault and Glissant,” Millennium 39, no. 3 (2011): 649–65.

28. Hilary Beckles, “From Land to Sea: Runaway Barbados Slaves and Servants, 1630–1700,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 3 (1985): 79–94; Hadden, Slave Patrols; Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (New York: Anchor Books, 1974).

29. In Rugemer, “Development.”

30. See also the discussion in Derica Shields, “In the Aftermath of Slavery, British Police Still Know Whom to Target,” Frieze, September 2020.

31. Nikil Pal Singh points to how relationships between policing and security were instrumental to how “whiteness coalesced as a political subjectivity.” Singh, “Whiteness,” 1092.

32. Selamawit D. Terrefe, “On Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III,” Georgia Review, Winter 2020, https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/on-afropessimism-by-frank-b-wilderson-iii/.

33. We should be careful to distinguish this claim from a broader point that the formation of liberal order has required the legitimation of violence as within the nation-state. See Derrida, “Force.”

34. Tea Troutman, “The Border Crisis of the Migrant-Slave,” Wear Your Voice, September 28, 2021, https://wyvarchive.com/the-border-crisis-of-the-migrant-slave/.

35. Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.

36. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5:21.

37. Paul Guyer, “Freedom: Will, Autonomy,” in Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts—a Philosophical Introduction, ed. W. Dudley, 85–102 (Stocksfield, U.K.: Acumen, 2010).

38. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Donna Brinton and Janet Goodwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73.

39. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

40. In part, Kant’s concern in conjoining freedom with mastery is due to what remains from Hobbes in that the state of nature is spectral—it is omnipresent in its possible return and “threatened regression.” Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 260.

41. Scott, Conscripts, 13.

42. Kant, Political, 45–49.

43. Anthony P. Farley, “Accumulation,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 11 (2005): 60; see James Trafford, “Re-engineering Commonsense,” Glass Bead, 2017, https://www.glass-bead.org/article/re-engineering-commonsense/.

44. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Penguin, 2004), 38.

45. See Melayna Lamb, A Philosophical History of Police Power (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

46. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

47. Weheliye, 59.

48. Kant, as cited in Mark Larrimore, “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races,’” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29, no. 1 (1999): 99–125.

49. Kant, Anthropology, 2:253.

50. Ronald Judy, “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces 1 (1991).

51. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 790.

52. Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

53. Anthony Paul Farley, “Reason’s Lure: The Enchantment of Subordination: The Dream of Interpretation,” University of Miami Law Review 57 (2003): 696.

54. See Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

55. G. Binder, “The Slavery of Emancipation,” Cardozo Law Review 17 (1995): 2063.

56. Caree Banton, “More Auspicious Shores: Post-emancipation Barbadian Emigrants in Pursuit of Freedom, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Liberia, 1834–1912” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2013), https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/12772/BANTON.pdf.

57. Bruce M. Taylor, “Black Labor and White Power in Post-emancipation Barbados: A Study of Changing Relationships,” A Current Bibliography on African Affairs 6, no. 2 (1973): 186.

58. Beckles, cited in Dawn P. Harris, Punishing the Black Body: Marking Social and Racial Structures in Barbados and Jamaica (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 100.

59. Minutes of the Legislative Council, March 3, 1840, cited in Taylor, “Black,” 184.

60. Taylor, 95.

61. Harris, Punishing, 102.

62. Taylor, “Black,” 183.

63. Walcott, Long, 37.

64. Hartman, Scenes, 80.

65. Anthony P. Farley, “Perfecting Slavery,” Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 36 (2004): 222.

66. I return to these issues in chapter 3, but, e.g., see Sankar Muthu’s sweeping attempt to rehabilitate Kantian cosmopolitanism as cohering with anticolonial movements. Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). This suggests that Kant desired equal worth for all people even against evidence that this is never applied to subjugated people. Pauline Kleingeld famously suggests that Kant’s later work exonerates his earlier statements on the basis that he moved away from racial hierarchy. Kleingeld, “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 229 (2007): 573–92. See also Oliver Eberl, “Kant on Race and Barbarism: Towards a More Complex View on Racism and Anti-colonialism in Kant,” Kantian Review 24, no. 3 (2019): 385–413. See Alan J. Kellner, “States of Nature in Immanuel Kant’s Doctrine of Right,” Political Research Quarterly 73 (2019): 727–39, for a position that shows Kant’s argument regarding the rights of possession to provide colonialist justification, while suggesting that this may be accommodated within a Kantian framework. Charles W. Mills suggests that these seemingly contradictory positions within Kant’s work can be reconciled if we understand Kant as regarding Black people as subhuman. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” in Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, 91–112 (New York: Oxford Academic, 2017). A collection of essays providing a thorough overview of this scholarship is Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi, eds., Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In practically all of this work, there is little to no reflection of the ramifications of Kant’s belief that Black people are incapable of autonomy and self-governance, ensuring both the justification of colonialism and the impossibility of their inclusion in the category of universal humanity.

67. Kukla, “Antinomies,” 227.

68. Wilderson, Red, 80. The phrase “conquistador-settler” is from Lethabo King, Black.

69. See Sara-Maria Sorentino, “The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx’s Method,” International Labor and Working-Class History 96 (2019): 17–37; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

70. David Marriott, Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 122.

71. Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989).

72. Palmer, “Otherwise,” 253.

73. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier and A. Gilly (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

74. See Da Silva, “Toward.”

75. Jackson, Becoming, 112.

76. Jackson, 225.

77. Hartman, Scenes, 24.

78. Sean Gaston, The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 115.

79. Marriott, Lacan, 147.

80. Marriott, 151.

1. Farley, “Perfecting.” See also McKittrick, “Plantation.”

2. Farley, “Accumulation,” 69.

3. Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020), 17; Singh, “Whiteness”; Alex Vitale, “The Best Way to ‘Reform’ the Police Is to Defund the Police,” Jacobin, June 3, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/defund-police-reform-alex-vitale.

4. Marlese Durr, “What Is the Difference between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 6 (2015): 875; Philip McHarris, “Disrupting Order: Race, Class, and the Roots of Policing,” in Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police, ed. David Correia and Tyler Wall, 31–52 (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2021).

5. I did not have a chance to think with it before finalizing this book, but Denise Ferreira Da Silva navigates adjacent ground in Unpayable Debt (New York: Sternberg Press, 2022).

6. Fanon, Wretched, 81.

7. Jerome Handler, “Custom and Law: The Status of Enslaved Africans in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 37, no. 2 (2016): 240.

8. Handler, 236.

9. Barbados heralded the “breakdown of the ancient distinction between real and chattel property during the colonial period.” K-Sue Park, “Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to Property Law,” Georgetown Law Faculty Publications, 2021, 47.

10. Handler, “Custom,” 16.

11. Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters, Economic History Review Supplement 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

12. John Locke, Two Treatises (1689), V §27.

13. Locke, V §32.

14. Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020). See also Laura Brace, The Politics of Property: Labor, Freedom, and Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

15. Locke, Two Treatises, II §34. See also Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree N. Reddy, “The Afterlives of ‘Waste’: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus,” Antipode 43, no. 5 (2011): 1625–58; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2003).

16. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 8. See also Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91; Eva Mackey, Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2016); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

17. Frantz Fanon, “Why We Use Violence,” in Alienation and Freedom, ed. Robert Young and Jean Khalfa (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 654.

18. Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?,” Boston Review, January 12, 2017, https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/.

19. Sabine Broeck, “Never Shall We Be Slaves: Locke’s Treatises, Slavery, and Early European Modernity,” in Blackening Europe, 257–70 (New York: Routledge, 2012).

20. John Locke, Of Political or Civil Society: The Second Treatise of Government, with an introduction by Joseph Carrig (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004).

21. Garba and Sorentino, “Slavery.”

22. Garba and Sorentino, 786.

23. See Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56; Wilderson, Red; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

24. Orlando Patterson, “On Slavery and Slave Formations,” Review of Sociology 3 (1977): 413.

25. Harris, “Whiteness.” See also Kevin Gray, who claims that “‘property’ is the name given to a legally (because socially) endorsed constellation of power over things and resources. Property is not a thing at all, but a socially approved power-relationship in respect of socially valued assets.” Gray, “Equitable Property,” Current Legal Problems 47 (1994): 160.

26. Nichols, Theft, 130.

27. See Broeck, “Never.”

28. Broeck.

29. Binder, “Slavery,” 2100–2101.

30. Rinaldo Walcott, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Windsor, Ont.: Biblioasis, 2021), 7.

31. Patterson, “On Slavery,” 39.

32. Broeck, “Never,” 244.

33. Broeck, 239.

34. E.g., Wilderson draws attention to the argument made by David Eltis that it was inconceivable that “prisoners of war, or vagrants—could have been converted into chattel slaves. The barrier to European slaves in the Americas lay not only beyond shipping and enslavement costs but beyond any strictly economic sphere.” Eltis, “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery in the Americas: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993): 1399–1423.

35. Marriott, Whither, 143.

36. Sorentino, “Abstract,” 32.

37. Broeck, “Never,” 239.

38. William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions and Illustrative Facts (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1858), 125.

39. Locke, Political. See also Roy W. Copeland, “In the Beginning: Origins of African American Real Property Ownership in the United States,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 6 (2013): 646–64.

40. Broeck, “Never,” 243.

41. Walcott, On Property, 11.

42. Anthony D. Phillips, “Emancipation Betrayed: Social Control Legislation in the British Caribbean (with Special Reference to Barbados), 1834–1876—Freedom: Beyond the United States,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 (1995): 1349.

43. Taija Mars McDougall, “Blackness, Terminable and Interminable” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2022).

44. Taylor, “Black,” 183.

45. Jerome S. Handler, “Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids/New West Indian Guide 56, no. 1/2 (1982): 17.

46. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

47. Harris, “Whiteness,” 96.

48. Patterson, “On Slavery,” 38.

49. See, e.g., Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104 (1977): 25–92; Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso Books, 2002).

50. Sorentino, “Abstract,” 22.

51. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

52. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso Books, 1997); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1985); Guy Emerson Mount, “Capitalism and Slavery: Reflections on the Williams Thesis,” Black Perspectives, November 21, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/capitalism-and-slavery-reflections-on-the-williams-thesis/; Charles Post, “Capitalist Slavery in the Great Caribbean?,” Almanack, no. 19 (2018): 321–30.

53. I discuss this further in the following chapter.

54. Jason Read, The Micro-politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 84, discussed in Sorentino, “Abstract.”

55. Walcott, Long, 36. See also Kathleen Mary Butler, The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica and Barbados, 1823–1843 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

56. Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 95.

57. United Coloured People’s Association, cited in J. Narayan, “British Black Power: The Anti-imperialism of Political Blackness and the Problem of Nativist Socialism,” Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (2019): 957.

58. A. Sivanandan, “From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain,” Race and Class 23, no. 2–3 (1981): 112.

59. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). The framework of superexploitation here calls attention to the nonuniformity of labor value, suggesting that labor time and economic value are nonlinear where the value of labor is set under conditions of unequal exchange. For the superexploited, wages are set below the value of labor power because of a differential ability to enforce the rule of exchange. See John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

60. Christopher Moores, “Thatcher’s Troops? Neighbourhood Watch Schemes and the Search for ‘Ordinary’ Thatcherism in 1980s Britain,” Contemporary British History 31, no. 2 (2017): 230–55.

61. Sorentino, “Abstract,” 32.

62. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

63. Lowe, Intimacies, 150.

64. David Cameron, “Estate Regeneration,” Sunday Times, January 10, 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/estate-regeneration-article-by-david-cameron.

65. “Land and Liberty,” Research and Destroy (blog), April 15, 2014, https://researchanddestroy.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/land-and-liberty/.

66. Cedric Parizot, “Temporalities and Perceptions of the Separation between Israelis and Palestinians,” Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem 20 (2009).

1. But see also Walcott, Long.

2. See Evan Smith, “Unravelling the Thatcherite Narrative: The 1981 Riots and Thatcher’s ‘Crisis Years,’” New Historical Express (blog), 2013, https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/unravelling-the-thatcherite-narrative-the-1981-riots-and-thatchers-crisis-years/.

3. Imogen Braddick, “Met Is Not Institutionally Racist, Says Commissioner Cressida Dick,” Evening Standard, August 13, 2020, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/cressida-dick-met-not-institutionally-racist-a4524421.html.

4. Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, AntiBlackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.

5. Mills, “Chronopolitics”; Hesse, “Racialized.”

6. Mignolo, Darker, 151.

7. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 245–68.

8. Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” American Studies 45, no. 4 (2000): 485.

9. Robert Bernasconi, “With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin? On the Racial Basis of Hegel’s Eurocentrism,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 22 (2000): 183–84.

10. See Jackson, Becoming.

11. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Bennington, Kant, 153.

12. Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

13. Kant, cited in Bernasconi, “Will.”

14. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1983), 98.

15. M. A. R. Habib, Hegel and Empire: From Postcolonialism to Globalism (Berlin: Springer, 2017), 6.

16. Iain Hamilton Grant, “‘At the Mountains of Madness’: The Demonology of the New Earth and the Politics of Becoming,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 103–24 (London: Routledge, 2002).

17. See also Derrida, “Force.”

18. Andrea Long Chu, “Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel’s Africa,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 416.

19. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 2015), S246. See Albert O. Hirshman, “On Hegel, Imperialism, and Structural Stagnation,” Journal of Development Economics 3 (1976): 1–8.

20. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller, rev. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47.

21. Cited in Alison Laura Stone, “Hegel and Colonialism,” Hegel Bulletin 41, no. 2 (2020): 247–70. 

22. See J. T. Gilmore, “The Rev. William Harte and Attitudes to Slavery in Early Nineteenth-Century Barbados,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, no. 4 (1979): 461–74.

23. Taylor, “Black,” 192.

24. Harris, Punishing, 101.

25. Harris, 108.

26. Harris, 108.

27. Sir Charles Grey, 1842, cited in Taylor, “Black,” 186.

28. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Press, 1935), 54.

29. Du Bois.

30. See Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

31. Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 194–95.

32. Taylor, “Black,” 184.

33. Binder, “Slavery,” 2072.

34. Patrice D. Douglas, “Belle’s Beloved: Hauntings, Feminized Slave Ships, and the (Im)possible of Writing Black Women,” talk delivered at Black Feminism beyond the Human, Duke University, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlyq3itFSM.

35. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 111.

36. P. J. Brendese, Segregated Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

37. See Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Homi K. Bhabha, “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1 (1991): 193–219.

38. Chu, “Black,” 417.

39. Fanon, Wretched.

40. Kant, cited in Bernasconi, “Will.”

41. Bernasconi, “Will.” See Kant’s essay “Of the Different Races of Human Beings” (1775).

42. See John Harfouch, Another Mind–Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-being (Berlin: Global Academic, 2018).

43. Kant, Anthropology, note 1520.

44. Kant.

45. Kant, VIII, XXV. See also Flikschuh and Ypi, Kant; Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 60; Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 72.

46. Huaping Lu-Adler, “Kant and Slavery; or, Why He Never Became a Racial Egalitarian,” Critical Philosophy of Race 10, no. 2 (2022): 263–94.

47. Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, ed. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1:S67.

48. Georg W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), S190.

49. Habib, Hegel, 81.

50. Fanon, Black, 191.

51. See Gavin Arnall, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 15ff.

52. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), S182.

53. Fanon, Black, 39.

54. Fanon, 192.

55. Habib, Hegel, 68.

56. In particular, see arguments made in Arnall, Subterranean; Marriott, Whither.

57. Habib, Hegel, 80.

58. Mario Gooden, Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

59. Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian, eds., Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (New York: Routledge, 2016); Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

60. Habib, Hegel, 68.

61. David Marriott, “Judging Fanon,” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016): S12. I am thinking with Felicia Denaud’s incisive concept of the “unnameable war.” Denaud, “At the Vanishing Point of the Word: Blackness, Imperium, and the Unnameable War” (PhD diss., Brown University, forthcoming).

62. Marriott, “Judging,” S13.

63. David Marriott, “Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life,” Cultural Critique, no. 94 (Fall 2016).

64. I am interested in the reverberations of plantation and colonial policing to the metropole here—primarily because they remain less theorised than U.S. policing, but a similar account of the latter is in Schrader, Badges.

65. Gerry Northam, Shooting in the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 135.

66. Salman Rushdie, “The New Empire within Britain,” New Society 9 (1982): 417–21.

67. Hartman, Scenes.

68. Hartman and Wilderson, “Position.”

69. David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), xxi.

70. N. Shalhoub, Roundtable on Anti-Blackness and Black-Palestinian Solidarity, Jadaliyya, June 3, 2015, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32145.

71. BBC News, “George Floyd: Boris Johnson Urges Peaceful Struggle against Racism,” June 9, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52973338.

72. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, The Report (2020), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/conclusion-and-appendices.

73. Home Affairs Committee, The Macpherson Report: Twenty-Two Years on Home Affairs Committee (2021), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmhaff/139/13902.htm.

74. Nadine White, “‘Racism in Policing Remains an Issue, 20 Years after Macpherson Report,’ Say MPs,” Independent, July 30, 2021, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/racism-policing-home-affairs-committee-b1893324.html.

75. Agathangelou and Killian, Time.

76. Hegel in Habib, Hegel, 73.

77. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 39.

78. Damian Gayle, “Home Secretary Priti Patel Criticised over Wish for Criminals ‘to Feel Terror,’” Guardian, August 3, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/03/priti-patel-home-secretary-wants-criminals-to-literally-feel-terror.

79. Jacob Jarvis, “Boris Johnson Extends Stop and Search Measures to Make ‘Criminals Afraid—Not the Public,’” Evening Standard, August 10, 2019, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-extends-stop-and-search-measures-to-make-criminals-afraid-not-the-public-a4210551.html.

80. Home Office, “The Serious Violence Strategy,” October 21, 2019, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/preventing-serious-violence-a-multi-agency-approach/preventing-serious-violence-summary.

81. Tom Davies, Lynne Grossmith, and Paul Dawson, “Group Violence Intervention London: An Evaluation of the Shield Pilot,” December 2016, https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/gvi_london_evaluation270117.pdf.

82. Dylan Rodriguez, “Reformism Isn’t Liberation, It’s Counterinsurgency,” 2020, https://level.medium.com/reformism-isnt-liberation-it-s-counterinsurgency-7ea0a1ce11eb.

83. Thomas Kingsley, “Criminologists Slam ‘Misleading’ Policy Exchange Report Linking Drill Music to Youth Violence,” Independent, November 13, 2021, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/policy-exchange-report-youth-violence-b1955691.html.

84. C. Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness,” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 59. See also Saidiya V. Hartman, The Time of Slavery (Delhi: Routledge, 2012), 447–68.

85. Marriott, “Judging,” S13.

86. Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” offshoot, March 1, 2021, https://offshootjournal.org/the-interminable-catastrophe/.

1. Jemma Crew, “Black Schoolgirl Strip Searched by Police While on Her Period—Report,” Evening Standard, March 16, 2022, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/department-for-education-metropolitan-police-services-scotland-yard-hackney-b988292.html.

2. Seren Hughes, “Black Schoolgirl, 15, from Hackney ‘Traumatised’ after Strip Search by Police While on Her Period,” My London, March 15, 2022, https://www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/black-schoolgirl-15-hackney-traumatised-23400186.

3. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 169–81.

4. Harriet Brewis and John Dunne, “Brixton Street Party Descends into Violence and Chaos with Police Car Smashed and 22 Officers Injured,” Evening Standard, June 25, 2020, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/car-smash-brixton-street-party-chaos-a4479556.html.

5. ITV, “Downing St Condemns Violence as at Least 22 Police Officers Injured at Street Party in Brixton,” June 25, 2020, https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-06-25/police-car-smashed-as-brixton-street-party-descends-into-chaos.

6. Quoted in Ed Sheridan, “Youth Worker Stopped by Police for Having His Hands in His Pockets in ‘Racial Profiling’ Incident,” My London, March 12, 2021, https://www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/youth-worker-stopped-police-having-20115697.

7. Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia), “next time someone tells you we can’t get cops out of schools,” Twitter, October 23, 2021, 8:19 PM, https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia/status/1452067300484403203.

8. Fanon, Black, 229.

9. Axellle Karera, “The Racial Epidermal Schema,” in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, 289–94 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2019).

10. See also Palmer, “Otherwise.”

11. Marriott, Lacan, 138.

12. Binder, “Slavery,” 2073.

13. Many of the ideas here were developed in conversation with Petero Kalulé; see, e.g., Petero Kalulé and James Trafford, “Unforming Police: The Impossibility of abolition,” Critical Legal Thinking, December 1, 2020, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/12/01/unforming-police-the-impossibility-of-abolition/.

14. Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–5 (2016): 583–97.

15. Kara Keeling, “Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility and Poetry from the Future,” GLQ 15, no. 4 (2009): 565.