Race and the colonial partition of the sensible in Achille Mbembe’s work

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the conditions of possibility of slavery and antiblack violence, as well as the conditions of the production of racial significations – of Black being – and colonial fantasies. In order to do this, I intend to use mainly the conceptual resources in Achille Mbembe’s work, and some concepts from Jacques Rancière’s texts on politics, diagnosing what I call the colonial partition of the sensible, and further analyzing the relationship between race as an imaginary construct, racial significations and the social organization of perception and sensibility we inherited from European colonialism. Thus, my intention is to elaborate the meaning of the absence of grievability – in Judith Butler’s terms – and of ethical crises – in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s terms – in the wake of racial violence since the time of slavery. I also intend to show how the time of freedom does not constitute a profound break with what preceded it, for it had not been capable of interdicting the reorganization of language and imagination nurtured by the same background of negativity which emerged with the sovereign exercise of colonial power as the power to not see and hear Black humanity.