Beschreibung:
Abstract This article argues for the necessity, for white scholars, to turn to the study of what I call enslavism, a term necessary to situate current anti-Black practices in the “future that had been created by men and women in chains” (Hartman, Saidiya V. [2007]. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York, NY: Farrar, 233) and thus to critique them as the ongoing afterlife of enslavement, instead of addressing slavery as an event in bygone history. Conceptualizing their work with this term, white scholars may labor to contribute to Black Studies by way of “sitting with” (see Sharpe, Christina [2016]. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) black knowledge which can enable us to produce a critical protocol, to paraphrase Hortense Spillers, of enslavism as the ongoing afterlife of social, cultural and political anti-Blackness in the future that transatlantic enslavement has made. To produce those critical protocols means to re-read the longue durée of humanism in a way that abolishes the human’s ontological reign of life, and of knowledge, based as it has been on black non-existence for the human.