Three-fifths

• In Event: Becoming Representative

Abstract

Whether symbolic or descriptive, conventional theories of representation rest on the assumption of a prior collective identification with other citizens as members of a common public and shared political culture for which they bear responsibility. In this paper, among the observations about the brokenness of liberal democratic norms, institutions, and citizenship that proliferate today among democratic theorists, I ask whether collective identification should be counted among those broken objects. Starting with the US Constitution’s three-fifths clause and continuing up to the present when Black Americans are being murdered by the police even as the offices of president and attorney general were, until recently, occupied by the first Black Americans to hold those positions, I map the limits of collective identification and representation for Black Americans.
Concentrating on the work of critic Fred Moten, my purpose is two-fold. First, I aim to understand better the nature of the break that he documents. My second purpose is to take the measure of politics beyond representation that he develops in order to answer this question: What it would mean to repair those broken attachments in light of the failures of representation? Since I argue that Moten’s advocacy of fugitivity depoliticizes the collective forms of Black life he celebrates, I read his accounts of improvisation, insurgency, and resistance as harbors from which practices and efforts of democratic repair might embark rather than the autonomous forms and destinations that emerge from his descriptions. Central to this effort, and significant to the possibility of redeeming representation is the installation of a Black universal subject in place of the abstract, race-neutral subject currently at the center of the American political language and imagination around representation and its concept of the people. This alternative Black universal links the concept of representation not just to a genealogical politics, but one that ultimately shifts the horizon of the US state beyond its current position.

Author

• Ali Aslam, Mount Holyoke College