Browsing by Author "Lubiano, Wahneema H"

In spite of a host of early twenty-first century claims regarding the dawn of a "post-racial" or "anti-racial" era, race remains an important problem for understanding contemporary power. This dissertation provides a genealogical examination of the multiple forms and functions that comprise white raciality in the twenty-first century United States. Situating whiteness in relation to the social and financial circuitry of neoliberal globalization, I contend that it is an inextricable component of an emergent mode of governmentality. A critique of scholarly work in and around Whiteness Studies conditions the theoretical interventions of the project as a whole and grounds my argument for a new framework of analysis.

Following the work of Michel Foucault, I investigate the development of a novel form of whiteness whose undergirding logic functions not by differentiation but by way of similitude. Instead of emphasizing and enforcing exclusions upon difference, this `sympathetic' form of raciality works to neutralize and recuperate it. Finally, via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I discuss the necessity of reimagining race ontologically as well as epistemologically, and confronting its collusion with other forms of power in order to analyze the risks that the flexibilization of whiteness poses--to subjects living under its rule and to its own conditions of existence.

Big House: Women, Prison, and the Domestic, addresses the development of the contemporary US carceral state, foregrounding the confinement and control of women and the evolving ideological frameworks and disciplinary techniques that guided women’s incarceration beginning with the inception of state-run women’s prisons in the nineteenth century. These new prisons for women reproduced and refined modes of capture intrinsic to the modern domestic home and, in turn, served as a laboratory for the further development of domestic forms of discipline, making up what I term “the carceral domestic.” By focusing on the women’s prison, and on women’s confinement more generally as it relates to the home and housing, this project expands the critical archive that accompanies contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. The dissertation consists of three sections. The Birth of the Carceral Domestic, A Women’s Prison in Three Acts, and Home Economics, covering the early period of the sex-segregated women’s prison in the nineteenth century, the development of gendered forms of carceral control through practices of confinement and exclusion over the twentieth, and the contemporary women’s prison in the age of mass incarceration and neoliberal privatization. I draw on a broad range of materials and genres, including personal narratives, domestic homemaking manuals, TV shows, judicial opinions, prison policy codes, and acts of Congress. Through these varied accounts of the intersecting spheres of prison and home, Big House contests the fixity of the boundaries between them, and writes gender into conversations about mass incarceration.

This dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of "Blackness" and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the work of Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton in order to delineate a shift within Black Radicalism which, due to an intense de-linking of Black nationalism from the concept of territorial sovereignty throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led to the formation of a new subjectivity ("Blackness") oriented against and beyond the Western tradition of political sovereignty as a whole.

This dissertation begins by outlining the parameters of the concept of sovereignty as well as its relation to conquest, coloniality, and racialization more generally. I then examine the formation of Black Power as an expression of anti-colonial sentiments present within the United States and uncover there the influence of W.E.B. DuBois' concept of double-consciousness. I then further examine the concept of Black Power through the work of Amiri Baraka and his notion of "Blackness" as the proximity to "home." Each of these expositions of Black Power are undertaken in order to better understand the era of Black Power and its relation to both Black nationalism and the Western tradition of sovereignty.

Next, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, whom I claim prepares the way for the idea of "Blackness" as an ontological resistance beyond, not only the territorial imperative, but also the logic of sovereignty more generally. This notion of "Blackness" as an antidote to sovereign logic present within the work of Fanon allows me to turn to the work of Huey P. Newton in order to demonstrate his conceptualization of "Blackness" as an antagonistic subjectivity within a fully globalized society whose onset he had theorized and which he termed "empire." I conclude by drawing on each of the above theorists as well as the work of Angela Davis in order to build a retrospective summary of this alternative lineage of the Black Radical Tradition and its importance for the conceptualization of resistances to and life beyond our contemporary society.

This dissertation, Lumpen: Vagrancies of a Concept from Marx to Fanon (and on), tracks the concept of the lumpenproletariat from its coinage by Karl Marx through its reworking by Franz Fanon, the Black Panthers and others in the context of the colonial liberation and Black Power movements, and onwards into contemporary debates about populism, identity, politics, and the end of work. From its origins an unstable concept, the lumpenproletariat raises a series of interrelated questions about the relation of class to interest, interest to identity, and identity to politics. Succinctly, the dissertation asks: what happens to the Marxian project when the future of productive labor seems in doubt, both as a source of capital valorization and as a foundation for political action?

Contemporary engagement with the category of the lumpenproletariat has typically focused on the latter as a symbol of the irreducible autonomy of the political, ignoring the concept’s empirical referent. Separately, a growing body of literature has grappled with the increase of economically redundant surplus populations produced, in part, by technological automation, a phenomenon obliquely reflected in recent philosophical fascination with, for instance, bare life, necropolitics and the abject. Such work has however rarely considered the political ramifications of such transformations. What we would need, then, is a theoretical framework capable of grasping both aspects of this twofold problematic—the determinacy of dispossession, the indeterminacy of its political expression.

The beginnings of such a framework can be found, I argue, in the writings on the lumpenproletariat in the work of Frantz Fanon, James Boggs, and the Black Panthers. Developing their scattered insights, I argue that the lumpenproletariat names both the tendential production of an economically redundant surplus population and the lack of any automatic correlation between this (or any) social condition and political subjectivation. This gap between economic and political, structure and subject, becomes then the space for the creative articulation of a collective subject as a properly political project. This is precisely the task of a socialist politics today.

Whether in terms of its objective position at the point of production or its subjective consciousness of the need for revolution, the decline of the industrial proletariat has often been figured as synonymous with that of socialist politics. In contrast, my dissertation suggestions that a recuperation of the rich and half-forgotten legacy of the lumpenproletariat emerging out of the Black radical tradition can help provide a model for constructing a powerful socialist movement in the present.

This dissertation explores the idea of “history” as a general theory of meaning in its rapport to Christian political theology and its liquidation into the secular idea of a world divided into “familial,” “civilizational,” “national,” “racial,” and “religious” entities and collectivities. The author attempts to demonstrate that the relevance of historical meaning expands globally with Christian colonialism and imperialism, and that historicization ultimately amounts to racialization. Acquisition of historical meaning is the rite of entry into the world of nations, and history ultimately figures the political collectivities that it founds and bestows meaning upon as “communities of blood,” or communities in possession of a sacred shared substance that persists over time, is often constituted by means of purging from it what is produced as “foreign,” and has to be protected and immunized against exterior contamination. The process of acquisition of modern racial-historical meaning and formation into a national situation is particularly explored with reference to Iran.

A variety of scholarly and literary texts are recited, alongside an exploration of postmodern war and democratic politics in an attempt to demonstrate the theological underpinnings of historical meaning. Interrelations of “religion” and “race” are particularly explored and the idea of “secularism” is questioned specially in its rapport to Christian imperialism, Orientalism, and the philological history of “Semitism” and anti-Semitism. The text is largely sui generis, self-referential and poetic in method: it explores the resonances and dissonances of various texts and strives to express the semantic noise of these juxtapositions all the while that it seeks to explore the obscene undersides of contemporary political ideas and ideals.