The Inscription of Racialized State Violence in the Everyday of Black Subjects in the African Diaspora

• In Event: Black Transnationalism

Abstract

The modern state is premised upon notions of white supremacy that are sustained through both legal and cultural apparatuses to enforce anti-black ideologies (Goldberg, 2002). The African diaspora is a counterdiscourse to Western discourses that perpetuate the Black subject as ontologically inferior and antithetical to the nation state. More specifically, intellectuals and activists sought to remake, rename, and rearticulate how African descendent subjects experienced the tension between loss and hope (James Clifford,1994) . The loss and hope I will interrogate in this paper is how state violence permeates the everyday for people in the African diaspora. I explore the condition of suffering as (in)visible technologies of state violence in the everyday. I operationalize state violence within and outside of physical, violent, sexual, and fatal practices enacted by state actors and institutions. The visible and invisible mechanisms of violence result in visceral implications for Black people where quotidian moments and gestures of violence shape interactional-level conditions of pain. This pain induces Black subjects across the African diaspora to tirelessly work to persistently live, reject, and resist the exposure and subjection to an anti-black global regime.

Author

• Kenly Elizabeth Kelly Brown, University of California, Berkeley