To be salved, to be slave(d): reading ‘healing’ with and against the specter of Black suffering

Abstract

ABSTRACT If the World ordering mandate of antiblackness is thought neither as a set of abhorrent acts, nor as a ‘system of beliefs and practices that attack, erode, and limit the humanity of Black people’ (Carruthers, 2018, p. 26) but, more terrifyingly, as the prophylactic therapy that constitutes a knowledge for everyone else to know that they are alive, then one may be able to diagnose a matrix of violence that is not performatively contingent, but paradigmatically organic and necessary. The destruction of Black bodies is a necessary symbiosis used to develop the social, legal, political, and anthropological accouterments of what it means to be Human; Blackness is the interminable ‘beyond’ of absolute abjection as the frontier of social life – ‘afflicted, mutilated, a fatal way of being alive’ (Marriott, 2000, p. 15): the quintessential foil to the question of ‘who’s in?’ Upon a critical (re)turn to David Marriott’s (2000) meditation upon the ontological necessity of lynching to fashion and fasten selfhood along with Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) comprehensive provocation that the violation of Black bodies is unrecognizable as such, this paper examines the Humanist assumptions underwriting the concept of ‘healing’, a concept announced by theorists, practitioners, and the general population to have universal applicability. Through a lens of analysis that understands that the ‘castigated particularity’ (Hartman, 1997, p. 123) – the Slave – shores up the universal as its frontier, one may be obliged to ask, what does ‘healing’ as a concept have to say about the (socially) dead or fatally alive?