Lived Coherence of Imperial Topography by A. Shahid Stover

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#23, MARCH-MAY/2017

Empire recognizes no horizontal limitations, thus deterritorializing coloniality through structural-inert reconfigurations of a western imperialist continuum as topographically coherent lived relations of power between an imperial mainstream of modernity and socio-ontological underground. As such, even when geohistorical proximity between underground and mainstream positionality increases, the Raw of coloniality exhibits a lived persistence, exacerbating the intersubjective resonance and intermediations of human ‘being-in-the-world’. “What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” (1) And yet, by its steady encroachment of what was formerly outside, Empire accounts for gaping geohistorical wounds of coloniality as a coextensive socio-cultural integration of biopolitical alterity in lived topographical coherence to the normative gaze; thus ultimately globally consolidating a paradigm of oppression that is intimately familiar to Black community throughout the Diaspora. As such, the continuity of the imperial mainstream’s murderous universality as simulation of the human condition “no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational”; (2) thus insuring a coercive anonymity under which Black subjectivity-as-human ‘being’ quietly disappears without incident.

(1)Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, (Bantam Books, 1968) p.2.

(2) Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, (Verso, 1999) p.5.