The Old and New Ethnicities of Postcolonial Black (British)ness

Abstract

The politics of Black identity are shaped by the ongoing tension between Black identity as a category of subjection and rule, and Black identity as the embodied site of racialized being as an ongoing act of creative self-making in resistance to coercive racialization and racist oppression. While the latter is in part the effect of racist subjection, it is also an ethical location from which to challenge racism, and to produce meaning and existence beyond and against the disciplinary weight of Western humanism’s narcissistic representation of the human and the racist logics of Western modernity.