Intrusions of violence: Afro-pessimism and reading social death beyond solitary confinement
Any serious engagement with the theory of social death must contend with Afro-pessimism. Socio-Legal Studies advances social death as an un-raced and universalizable phenomenon. Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, is exemplary of this kind of work. In order to construct a phenomenology of race, Gu...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
|
| In: |
Theoretical criminology
Year: 2021, Volume: 25, Issue: 1, Pages: 3-22 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Keywords: |
| Summary: | Any serious engagement with the theory of social death must contend with Afro-pessimism. Socio-Legal Studies advances social death as an un-raced and universalizable phenomenon. Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement, is exemplary of this kind of work. In order to construct a phenomenology of race, Guenther attempts to analogize a theory of slavery (social death) with a theory of phenomenology and solitary confinement. Furthermore, Guenther takes up a humanistic reading of Frantz Fanon’s work, as if Fanon was affirming the possibility of a “new humanism” that could restore social life against social death in the post-colonial wake. This essay is an attempt to provide an Afro-pessimist reading of social death; one that engages anti-blackness as a fundamental condition of civil society and provides a close reading of Fanon’s psychopolitics of racial violence. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1461-7439 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1362480619846132 |