Cedric J. Robinson, Black radicalism and the abolition of Europe

Abstract

A militant critique of ‘Europe’ as the civilisation of racialism singles out the work of Cedric J. Robinson from other critical scholarship on Europe. Even though his concept of ‘racial capitalism’ is increasingly cited, on the whole, Robinson’s works are largely unknown in European studies. Perhaps they are too threatening to Europe’s self-centred and self-embellishing narratives on racism, which would explain European studies scholars’ silent treatment of Robinson’s critique of ‘Europe’ as foundational to the West’s culture of racialism. Unlike the proponents of postcolonial and decolonial studies, Robinson does not challenge Eurocentrism from a non-European perspective, but rather from the erased history of European slavery as the material variant of Western civilisation. To this end, he dives deeply into European medieval and early medieval history with a series of interventions that aim to abolish the notion that European culture was universalist in its trajectory, rather than racialist ab initio. And from that understanding derives the imperative for the abolition of the Western racialist order of civilisation.