The Life of Paper by Luk Sharon;

Author:Luk, Sharon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

OF COLOR

If I am lingering on seemingly slight imprecisions, it is only because I share these common confusions, and even subtle theoretical readjustments can open up different directions for our understanding. In Manos’s reading, for example, “punishment creates a disposable population whose dispossession is racially distributed.”11 It may be more precise to say that capitalism is conditioned on the production and reproduction of disposable populations whose dispossession is racially distributed. Punishment, then, acts today as a primary mode of disposal. If we pursue this latter formulation, then at least two new problems present themselves for further consideration. First, we return to the original point that the core logic and function of the PIC may not refer back as much to money management and accumulation as to population management and extermination. It is likely at this register that slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration most strongly cohere: that is, not as homologous racialized labor regimes but as the historical continuity of anti-Black genocide enacted through processes of systematic social dismantling. This perspective recognizes the political-economic specificities of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration as different rather than the same, meaning that the evolution of human disposal represented by the latter correlates with changing rather than stagnant capitalist imperatives. New dimensions hence become available to account for how and why a system that specifically and disproportionately targets African Americans for policing and punishment can simultaneously incorporate other forms of racism and capitalist exploitation that helped articulate and maintain, and were or are also articulated and maintained alongside, anti-Blackness as a racial logic and slavery as a mode of production. Thus operating in a negative mode of hegemonic “colorblind” ideology attendant to late capitalism, the PIC can aggregate multiple racial logics and multiple expendable or redundant populations into an increasingly flexible and consolidated process of disposal, preserving U.S. imperialism, nativism, and anti-Blackness at its core even when—and precisely because—the racial logics or exigencies of these ideological systems come into conflict with each other.12

This raises the second problem, that of “race.” By pointing out the existence of multiple racial logics that mediate different historical articulations of dispossession throughout Western civilization, as well as their reconsolidations in a colorblind era, I do not mean that anti-Blackness is just one racism among the many that can all be somehow compared or rationalized through relations of equivalence.13 I mean that in a world structured by processes of racialized differentiation that both alienate and interconnect us in their contradictions, the urgency to understand the singularity of anti-Blackness (or any other racial regime, for that matter) cannot be thwarted by analytically misconstruing singularity for formal autonomy, which as Colleen Lye has argued,14 would only reproduce reification in the final instance. In the current moment, then, and in the context of mass incarceration, the assertion that dispossession is “racially” distributed hides deeper questions about the specificities of reproducing “race” as such, in each case of its instantiation. In this most basic sense, the question rather than assumption of what race

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.