The Raw of Coloniality by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#20, JUNE-AUGUST/2016

Globally comprehensive constellations of racist dehumanization saturate lived relations between western imperialist power and the wretched of the earth [1] as coloniality. Empire sustains coloniality through the normative gaze of modernity constituted by structural-inert violence and miseducation of soul, as an unjust deterritorialized topographical coherence that positions an imperial mainstream superimposed over a socio-ontological underground. This globalized consonance of established power justifies the persistence of that biopolitical signification of subhumanity called ‘race’, providing a rational anthropological basis for positing a western imperialist continuum as the scientifically evident journey of human evolution originating in a blatant fetishization of nature, and ultimately culminating in modernity itself.

However, coloniality in the Raw discloses the presence of an irreducible socio-ontological intensity of violence conceived during systematic endeavors of overdetermination-from-without intent upon the reduction of human ‘being’ to ‘objecthood’, as rationally cultivated and methodically undertaken during the biopolitical crucible of chattel slavery [2] that not only ushers in modernity, but serves as the very condition of its possibility.

The Raw of coloniality socio-ontologically permeates, although it is not synonymous with the hyperexploitation of labor by capital and the subsequent spiritual alienation and empirical commodification of human experience, as indicative of ever prevalent socio-historical relations within the imperial mainstream of modernity, which are even more pronounced in its current guise of advanced neo-liberal capitalist globalization. “What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as new global powers. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the most important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality.” [3]

Indeed, coloniality in the Raw implicates modernity as an ever-widening circumference of inscribed violence that binds structural-inert racist dehumanization to unprecedented cultural proliferations as passive social intermediations with the world, coercing human ‘being’ towards spiritual abdication of human subjectivity.

Coloniality in the Raw is thus located precisely in merciless proximity to the Real of a lived historical gravity binding western imperialist power and the Black Diaspora together as an imperial topographical coherence of biopolitical alterity. “This relation, in effect, as a real antagonism, is in no way reducible to the practico-inert ensemble of the process of exploitation: but it cannot be regarded as a genuine reciprocal praxis of struggle since it pits against one another series still paralyzed by alterity.” [4] Such paralysis of alterity ensures a coerced absence of intersubjective resonance of human ‘being’ and social recognition amongst human community within Empire mediated by structural-inert violence as prefigured by the lived experience of “the African-American”, who “suffers a more insuperable kind of subjugation than would be true under pure colonialism: he cannot sever his ties with his rulers and go his own way.” [5]

And yet, as the Douglassian anti-slavery dialectic [6] suggests, emancipatory praxis initiates irreconcilable historical momentum towards transforming an exceptional antagonism into an exceptional antagonistic reciprocity, thus overcoming the socio-ontological paralysis of biopolitical alterity, enabling potentialities for an insurgent geonational trajectory of unremitting confrontation with western imperialist power, even while simultaneously coexisting in unrelentingly close and indivisible geoterritorial proximity.

[1] “the wretched of the earth are precisely the only people capable of transforming life, and who change it every day towards feeding, clothing and housing the whole of humanity.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, (London: Verson, 1960, 1991) p.241. Modified translation my own. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1961, 1963).

[2] “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine.” Frederick Douglass, “The Nature of Slavery”, My Bondage and My Freedom, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 1850, 1855, 2005) pp.328-9.

[3]Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Coloniality At Large, edited by Mabel Morana, Enrique Dussel and Carlos A. Juaregui, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) p.181

[4] Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol.1, p.730.

[5] Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution, (New York: Apollo Editions, 1968) p.70.

[6] Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, (New York: Collier Books, 1892, 1962) pp.134-144.