The Black Register : Essays on blackness and the politics of being

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How can thinkers grapple with the question of the human when they have been dehumanized? How can black thinkers confront and make sense of a world structured by antiblackness, a world that militates against the very existence of blacks? These are the questions that guide Tendayi Sithole's brilliant analyses of the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Mabogo P. More, and a critique of Giorgio Agamben. Through his careful interrogation of their writings Sithole shows how the black register represents a uniquely critical perspective from which to confront worlds that are systematically structured to dehumanize. The black register is the ways of thinking, knowing and doing that emerge from existential struggles against antiblackness and that dwell in the lived experience of being black in an antiblack world. The black register is the force of critique that comes from thinkers who are dehumanized, and who in turn question, define, and analyze the reality that they are in, in order to reframe it and unmask the forces that inform subjection. This book redefines the arc of critical black thought over the last seventy-five years and it will be an indispensable text for anyone concerned with the deep and enduring ways in which race structures our world and our thought. Cover Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction: The Black Register The Category of the Black Register The Category of the Unthought The Itinerary 1 Sylvia Wynter: Contra Imperial Man The Imperial Man Niggerization The Rebel Decolonial Scientia Practices of Freedom and the Politics of Being - After Man 2 Aimé Césaire and the Scandal of the Human Europe and its Other Humanism as the False The Return 3 Steve Biko as the Figure of the Outlawed On Blackness: The Problem of the Problem On the Mystique of the Martyr The Outlawed in the Racist State The Tyranny of the Paradigm of Policing White Liberals in Black Affairs The Politics of Black Solidarity Authority to Judge 4 The Prison Slave Narrative: Assata Shakur and George Jackson’s Captive Flesh The Prison Slave Narrative The Tyranny of Justice The Loving Subjectivity 5 For Mabogo P. More: A Meditation The Existential Struggle as Philosophy The Infrastructure of Antiblack Racism The Bad Faith of White Liberals For Black Solidarity Mandela’s House Mystique Sartre, Fanon, Manganyi, and Biko Against the Manichean Axis By Way of Fanon’s Prayer 6 Marikana: The Conceptual Anxiety of Bare Life Bare Life Qua Subject Erasure A Deathscape and the Zone of Non-Being On Structural Violence The Politics of Life: The Negation of Ontology Human Rights for Humans Only Ontological Density Conclusion: On the Reconfiguration of the Subject Shifting the Geography of Reason The World, Its End References Index EULA 1.pdf Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction: The Black Register The Category of the Black Register The Category of the Unthought The Itinerary 1 Sylvia Wynter: Contra Imperial Man The Imperial Man Niggerization The Rebel Decolonial Scientia Practices of Freedom and the Politics of Being - After Man 2 Aimé Césaire and the Scandal of the Human Europe and its Other Humanism as the False The Return 3 Steve Biko as the Figure of the Outlawed On Blackness: The Problem of the Problem On the Mystique of the Martyr The Outlawed in the Racist State The Tyranny of the Paradigm of Policing White Liberals in Black Affairs The Politics of Black Solidarity Authority to Judge 4 The Prison Slave Narrative: Assata Shakur and George Jackson’s Captive Flesh The Prison Slave Narrative The Tyranny of Justice The Loving Subjectivity 5 For Mabogo P. More: A Meditation The Existential Struggle as Philosophy The Infrastructure of Antiblack Racism The Bad Faith of White Liberals For Black Solidarity Mandela’s House Mystique Sartre, Fanon, Manganyi, and Biko Against the Manichean Axis By Way of Fanon’s Prayer 6 Marikana: The Conceptual Anxiety of Bare Life Bare Life Qua Subject Erasure A Deathscape and the Zone of Non-Being On Structural Violence The Politics of Life: The Negation of Ontology Human Rights for Humans Only Ontological Density Conclusion: On the Reconfiguration of the Subject Shifting the Geography of Reason The World, Its End References Index EULA