The threshold of fire: Man the shooter and his subhuman incendiary Other

The white gunman and the ‘rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag-burners’ On 25 August 2020, seventeen-year-old (white) Kyle Rittenhouse shot three antiracist protesters in the US state of Wisconsin, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Equally shocking was the impunity with which the shooting was carried out. 1 Rittenhouse was protected by the police from […]
Photograph of interior of Old Egyptian Fort, destroyed by English Fleet. July 1882, Alexandria, Egypt.

Racial properties of colonial appropriation

Reivew of Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 272pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82237 139 7 hb., 978 0 82237 146 5 pb. Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property is a significant intervention into contemporary debates on empire, the property relation, imperial […]

What a body can do

On 11 Brumaire, Year XI [November 2, 1803], a Guadeloupe tribunal sentenced Millet de la Girardière to be placed in an iron cage in the square at Pointe-à-Pitre and left there until dead. The cage employed for this public torture is eight feet tall. The criminal confined therein straddles a sharp blade. His feet are […]

Philosophy and the Third World

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• PHILOSOPHY liD TIB TIIRD WORLD ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• O.1.Ladimeji When dominant and subordinate groups exist in close relation to each other, the dominant group which usually has control of the centres of intellectual orientation will set about constructing a world-view in which the subordinate group has its submission ontologically determined, and will begin systematically indoctrinating members […]

Out of Africa: Philosophy, ‘race’ and agency

Social scientists have long grappled with ideas about race. In recent years, discussion on the significance of these ideas – particularly in exploring notions of identity, and the cultural and political options these appear to make available – have penetrated other areas of the humanities. A spate of recent publications signals that it is philosophyʼs […]

Fanon, phenomenology, race

Fanon, phenomenology, race David macey ʻThe black man is not. Nor the white.ʼ [1] Thus Fanon in the concluding section of Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), in my translation. It is quite impossible to work with the existing versions, the most obvious index of that impossibility being the unfortunate decision to translate the title of […]

Sarkozy’s law: The institutionalization of xenophobia in the new Europe

2008, www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/les-roms-craignent-une-contagion-de-la-vague-de-racismeitalienne_546904.html?p=2. [archive] 5. ^ European Network Against Racism, Press Release, 19 May 2008, http://cms.horus.be/files/99935/MediaArchive/pdfpress/2008–05–19%20anti-Roma%20events&20Italy.pdf. 6. ^ Il Giornale, 5 September 2008. 7. ^ ‘Italy Reassures EU that Fingerprinting Gypsies is Legal and Not Racist’, International Herald Tribune, 24 July 2008, www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/24/europe/EU-EU-Italy-Roma.php. [archive] 8. ^ www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/ital-a06.shtml. [archive] 9. ^ ERRC et al., ‘Security a la […]