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Abstract

Abstract Beginning with the premise that “liquidity” is an abstraction, this essay takes up liquidity as the condition for thinking capital, race, and racism, the ways in which capital shapes the possibilities of being—black—in the world. Using a range of theorists, from Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt to Martin Luther King Jr., and a host of cultural figures, most prominently Colin Kaepernick, the author explores how the black body, in its stillness and in its movement, provides us with a singular opportunity for thinking the “abstraction of liquidity” across (and within) a range of registers: some that reinforce one another, others that throw each into sharp relief, and still others that, surprisingly, confound expectations. Liquidity, then, as that vehicle which evinces the capacity to give new form(s) to thinking some of the critical difficulties of our moment.