Introduction
Critical studies of world politics have called for deepening our understanding of the dynamics of constituting populations as ‘disposable’. Scholars have already examined the detrimental relations ‘between certain layers of the global population, the neoliberal state and the global capital market’.Footnote 1 Although such analyses are certainly welcome, this article cautions against an exclusive focus on contemporary neoliberalism when examining disposability in world politics. Moving beyond ‘neoliberal myopia’,Footnote 2 which assumes that neoliberalism, as the ‘most “advanced” form of capitalism’, has ‘superseded’ earlier capitalist and colonial modes of making populations disposable,Footnote 3 the article calls for greater attention to the dynamics of colonial disposability and the ongoing transmissibility of its harms in the present. Towards that wider end, the article specifically examines the production and legitimation of colonial disposability as it becomes disclosed through the flesh. Calling on Hortense Spillers’ complex distinction between body and flesh,Footnote 4 the article proposes the flesh as a critical device, indeed, as a ‘site/sight’,Footnote 5 a perspective that yields greater theoretical understanding of what I call the ‘critical literacies of the flesh’.Footnote 6 Spillers is widely recognised as ‘the most sequential theorist in Black feminist and humanist inquiry’, whose essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, discussed at length here, is considered a ‘foundational text’ for our understanding of colonial modernity, Atlantic enslavement, race, and gender.Footnote 7
The article argues that the flesh’s understudied ‘critical literacies’ offer an original theoretical examination of the violent dynamics of colonial disposability, as well as contemporary disposability’s colonial and racial antecedents, an important and timely concern for critical global politics. The term ‘the flesh’s critical literacies’ denotes here the flesh’s disclosures of the intertwined semiotic, ethical, and affective operationsFootnote 8 – nay, violences – that the material and structural dynamics of colonial disposability required. Advancing a theoretical analysis of the historical movements between body and flesh (and from flesh to body), it illuminates the inseparability of colonial modernity from processes of colonial disposability in the context of Atlantic enslavement, at the heart of this article. Specifically, the article analyses how these fleshly literacies ‘desediment’Footnote 9 the intertwined processes of commodification/fungibilisation and devaluation of Africans into enslavable bodies in the context of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its afterlives,Footnote 10 as well as how the dynamics of valuation became legitimated through the production and naturalisation of racial difference.
Attention to the flesh’s critical literacies, moreover, refutes the relegation of such dynamics and practices to the colonial ‘past’,Footnote 11 illuminating instead the evolving but ongoing transmissibility of the racial meanings, ethical exclusions, and affective harms that continue to buttress processes of disposability in our co-called postcolonial and post-slavery present, as I discuss in relation to contemporary European responses to African migration. Importantly, however, these critical literacies do not only offer an analytical perspective for understanding the processes of colonial disposability in global politics; they additionally surface the flesh’s insurgent character, disclosing its potentialities for refusal, waywardness, and counter-worldmaking.
Below, I analyse the ‘critical literacies of the flesh’ over four sections. Section one elaborates the theoretical framework of the article, which eschews prevalent understandings of Spillers’ body and flesh distinction as a dichotomy, proposing, instead, a non-oppositional reading of body and flesh as a ‘co-present ensemble’.Footnote 12 This conceptualises flesh and body as being in apposition rather than opposition, showing how the movements between body and flesh (and from flesh to body) – indeed, their ‘betweenness’ – facilitate an analysis of the distinct socio-historical processes of colonial disposability. Moreover, I expand our understanding of ‘literacy’ by bringing Spillers’ insights together with critical pedagogy’s conception of ‘critical literacy’ and Nahum D. Chandler’s notion of ‘paraliteracy’.Footnote 13 This interdisciplinary theorisation provides the analytical foundation for sections two to four, which analyse the processes through which colonial disposability unfolds, as well as its forms of refusal and subversion. Section two examines the production of a complex fungibility, and its imposition upon enslaved Africans within the emerging colonial political economy of enslavement, the repercussions of which continue to affect Afro-diasporic populations ‘post-slavery’. Section three examines how ‘successful’ commodification/fungibilisation required a devaluation of African persons and their revaluation as fungible commodities, and how, moreover, these de/valuation processes required legitimation through emerging forms of racialisation, what Spillers calls the establishment of a ‘cultural seeing by skin color’ (67). Section three also discusses how these valuation dynamics continue to permeate the ongoing politics of abandonment, as seen for example in the 2010s European migration crisis and contemporary anti-immigrant mobilisations in the United Kingdom.Footnote 14 The flesh’s critical literacies, however, also foreground the flesh’s illegibility to the symbolic order and its potentialities for refusal and counter-worldmaking, as section four examines through the work of Saidiya HartmanFootnote 15 and in relation to a range of ‘wayward’ migrant practices in European locales.
‘Between’ body and flesh: Literacies and possibilities
Spillers introduces the body and flesh distinction as part of her theoretical efforts to critique Western feminism’s ‘normative Whiteness’ and its implicit commitment to linear notions of temporality.Footnote 16 Thinking through the prism of the ‘captive female and her descendants’,Footnote 17 Spillers questioned the ‘generalizibility of major feminism’,Footnote 18 which occluded chattel slavery’s ongoing structurations of social and cultural life in the post-slavery contexts of the US and Atlantic societies. Spillers argued, instead, that the Middle Passage marked a radical break ‘for the formation of the racial-sexual body’, initiating grammars – understood as ‘organized structures of meaning and sequence, rights and wrongs in a network of verbal-linguistic laws’Footnote 19 – that continued to operate post-Emancipation. Mainstream feminism’s focus on a universal female subject, however, had failed to grasp the analytical impact of these ‘hegemonic way[s] of thinking, talking, writing about, and ultimately materializing’ social, racial, and gender relations.Footnote 20 Feminist analyses therefore neglected how such grammars had led to the ‘unindividuation’Footnote 21 and ‘ungendering’ of enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants during and beyond chattel slavery. ‘Ungendering’, for Spillers, meant the loss of ‘gender difference’ resulting in ‘the female body and the male body becom[ing] a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific’ (67, original emphasis). ‘African females’ in particular, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson explains, ‘were thought to develop neither feminine temperaments, such as delicacy, purity, chastity, passionlessness, and moral and spiritual virtue …’,Footnote 22 creating a ‘lexical gap between black female and woman’.Footnote 23 Such unindividuation and ungendering enclosed enslaved women and men in ‘an ontological position outside of and in the interstices between such categories’Footnote 24 of man and woman, father and mother, yet worked to secure ‘white personhood’,Footnote 25 sexuality and plantation societies’ gender roles.
In her efforts to undo the sweeping neglect of these grammars, their effects and transmissibility into the present, Spillers centres Atlantic slavery’s interconnected economic, discursive, and affective contexts. To that end, she clarifies that,
… I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh’, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. (67)
For Spillers, the distinction offered a critical ‘conceptual device’ of body and flesh as ‘historical positionalities in confrontation with the modern world’.Footnote 26 This clarification signals the wider significance of the distinction for our understanding of the dynamics of colonial disposability, foregrounding at the same time the ‘inseparability of gender, sexuality and racial subjection’.Footnote 27 It is this trajectory of investigation that this article pursues, extending the important work of Anna Agathangelou and others in International Relations (IR), who turn to these histories and Spillers’ body and flesh distinction to examine the uneven ethico-political mattering of Black bodies in the intersections of world politics, neo-imperialism, and war-making.Footnote 28
Reading Spillers’ quote carefully, however, one is struck by ‘a key ambiguity’ in ‘[t]he order of Spillers’ phrasing’ of ‘body and flesh and their corresponding adjectives’,Footnote 29 namely, ‘captive’ and ‘liberated’ (67): is body ‘captive’ and flesh ‘liberated’, as seems to be implied? And, what is the meaning of ‘liberated’, if the flesh has to be grasped, as Spillers insists, in ‘its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard’, and such irreparable, wounding violence described as ‘high crimes against the flesh’ (67, original emphasis)? The historical physical and affective violations in the slave ship’s hold, which Spillers foregrounds, certainly complicate commonplace understandings of ‘liberated’. At the same time, the apparent ambiguity should cause us to question any reading of the body and flesh distinction as signifying (only) a reduction of body to flesh. This section argues, therefore, that it is important to 1) eschew thinking the distinction as a binary dichotomy and to understand it, instead, as an ‘aggressively and constantly co-present ensemble’;Footnote 30 and 2) to hold fast to Spillers’ reference to the flesh as ‘liberated’ and to centre this as analytically significant.
These orientations, taken together, call on us to grasp,
more precisely and more emphatically, the reduction of body to flesh as Spillers describes it, and the imposition of body and/in its conceptualization upon flesh, as Spillers implies, which comes – by way of some horrible miracle of belatedness – both after and before that reduction. The imposition of body as/in its conceptualization comes before and after flesh but it never comes first. The conceptualization of the body is a regulative and regulatory response to flesh ….Footnote 31
Grasping the distinction as a ‘co-present ensemble’ urges us to resist a reductive reading.Footnote 32 Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s admittedly complex quote above suggests that the flesh is ‘underconceptual’ in the sense that ‘it comes first’, before conceptualisation.Footnote 33 The analysis offered in sections two and three shows how the flesh is violently formed into (enslavable, fungible, racialised, and ungendered) bodies in part through, and as, conceptualisation, which ‘inscrib[es] power onto the flesh’.Footnote 34 As I discuss below, African persons were excised from their pre-existing systems of sociality and meaning and transformed into ‘captive flesh’ (68). Under conditions of captivity, their wounded and lacerated flesh became ‘conceptualised’ as fungible; racialised, they became enslavable bodies within new racist systems of meaning, colonial-economic circuits, and socio-legal relations of plantation societies. These movements from (African) body to (captive) flesh to (enslavable, fungible, and disposable) body must be read concurrently;Footnote 35 however, they often become conflated to a reduction of body to flesh, which obscures the complex ways in which the captive-made-disposable body ‘never comes first’.Footnote 36
I argue that we gain some clarity by considering more fully the preposition that holds the two terms in Spillers’ distinction together: the ‘between’. Nahum D. Chandler’s analysis of the ‘between’ in W. E. B. Du Bois’ thought offers us an unexpected way to understand the generativity of this preposition, in ways that resist a solely dichotomous way of reading. Despite the appearance of opposition or dichotomy in the distinction, the ‘between’, Chandler shows, ‘disrupt[s] the stability of the distinction authorizing … this oppositional logic’. Moreover, the ‘between … would accede to the most general disruption of boundaries. As a movement, a syntactical one … “between” dissipates any simple notion of inside and outside, of above and below’.Footnote 37 The ‘between’, then, does not indicate opposition. I argue that it be read, instead, as indicating movement to highlight the setting in place of a process or dynamic (of both disposability and of refusal, explored below). If the ‘between’ illuminates movement and process, we gain interpretive clarity by holding the ‘co-present ensemble’ of body and flesh together, foregrounding in this way the polysemic character and dynamism of Spillers’ distinction.
Doing so prompts us to reconsider what possible meanings we might give to the adjective ‘liberated’ that Spillers associates with the flesh. Might ‘liberated’, I argue here, point to the flesh’s capacity for disclosing the wider colonial, material production and signification of enslaved bodies as disposable, as well as their exclusion from ethical forms of care and obligation? Does ‘liberated’ point to ‘a different analytics of seeing’,Footnote 38 does it highlight how the ‘[f]lesh was a way to say that a body is exposed in and by way of its flesh’, as Spillers reflects in a recent interview?Footnote 39 If the ‘between’ brings to light movement and process, it calls for greater attention therefore to the disclosive capacities of the flesh, what I call here its ‘critical literacies’, that reveal the dynamics of colonial disposability and the flesh’s illegibility, fugitivity, and potentiality. Pursuing the flesh’s critical literacies offers a non-reductionist reading that promotes ‘a more emphatic analysis of flesh, as something other than withdrawn or withheld or reduced body, as that which is, therefore, apposed [placed side by side] to body’; this facilitates a broader recognition of the flesh’s betweenness, its ambiguous status as ‘crypt and cryptograph’,Footnote 40 as ‘both/and, and beyond’.Footnote 41 Focusing on the dynamics of colonial disposability as illuminated by the movements between body and flesh, and their refusal, requires a nuanced theorisation of what we mean by ‘critical literacies’ of the flesh.
Theorising literacy
How might we theorise the flesh’s literacies into colonial disposability amid growing interest in ‘literacy’ as a living critical praxis? Dalton Anthony Jones discusses post-slavery subjects’ ‘spatial literacy’ as an embodied ‘activity’ arising within historical experiences of colonisation and enslavement; he argues that, besides functioning as ‘a survival mechanism’, it has the ability to ‘decode and disrupt the center of discourse’.Footnote 42 In IR, Agathangelou and Mishall Ahmed, find in Spillers’ work a ‘literacy to articulate primitive accumulation as a double-process’ that entails ‘a notion of originary accumulation that depends on the conquest of and unmaking of the body and making of flesh (torture and terror), and the simultaneous conquest of multiple worlds’; the ‘wounded flesh’, they argue, has the potential to destabilise ‘the world of the (European) man’.Footnote 43 Samantha Pinto, importantly, considers Spillers’ ‘formulation of the flesh as a modality of Black feminist literacy’ to be of particular significance to those questioning the ‘recognized methodologies of representational politics’; flesh provides ‘a vocabulary and a literacy that appeals to innovative, affective understandings of justice for Black women and girls’, beyond ‘the institutional and intellectual histories of White feminism altogether’.Footnote 44
In Spillers’ germinal text we find a complex articulation of literacy, not named as such: the irreparable, ‘high crimes against the flesh’ – ‘lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh’, Spillers argues, function to ‘create the distance between what I would designate a cultural vestibularity and the culture’ (67, original emphasis), where ‘culture’ denotes not (only) a national domain of customary practices but colonial modernity. This critical distance between the community of enslaved and post-slavery subjects and ‘culture proper’Footnote 45 illuminates the movements from African body to wounded, captured flesh to enslavable and disposable body. Spillers’ term ‘cultural vestibularity’, a condition that arises from being set at a distance, in the vestibule of the colonial-modern, emphasises the critical literacies of the flesh and of ‘black culture’ into disposability and its varied forms of refusal and subversion.Footnote 46 Such literacy functions as a kind of ‘radical tool and procedure’ of critique and imagination.Footnote 47
Two additional contributions expand Spillers’ insights. The first understands literacy as a reiterative and fluid ‘movement back and forth between “reading” reality and reading words’.Footnote 48 A political praxis in the service of subjugated communities, it is proposed by traditions of critical pedagogy as a plural practice of reading between the word (discourse, signification) and the world (materiality, structure) that exposes ideological constructions and signification of material realities and subjects, an attempt to bring about ‘fluency in decoding signs’.Footnote 49 Often taken up ‘beyond or without formal learning spaces’ and used towards the ‘organic, critical ends’ of social struggles,Footnote 50 it helps reveal ‘the ways worlds and subjects are made within and for specific movements’Footnote 51 of colonial modernity. This perspective on literacy foregrounds the flesh’s disclosures of the operation of ‘regimes of semiosis’Footnote 52 that make possible the movements between body and flesh and shows how these signification regimes co-articulate with, and support, socio-economic structures in the colonial political economy of enslavement.
The second perspective centres ‘paraliteracy’ as simultaneously a praxis of critique (or ‘desedimentation’) and an enhanced perspective arising from it. ‘Desedimentation’, according to Chandler, entails both a ‘critical moment’ working to destabilise the ossification of ideas and practices that have been naturalised as given and fixed within a hierarchy, as well as an ‘affirmative moment’ that facilitates ‘the production or setting loose of something new or original’ as part of this critical praxis.Footnote 53 The prefix ‘para’ in paraliteracy refers to the distinct viewpoint that emerges from ‘its double position as simultaneously both within and outside of the “mainstream”’.Footnote 54 A paraliteracy, then, is a ‘double or redoubled understanding’ that arises from being displaced from an order, despite one’s centrality to that order, which disturbs the ‘layers of sedimentation’ that produce and occlude the ontological exclusion from the category of the human.Footnote 55 As perspective and practice, fleshly paraliteracies disclose the physical, affective/experiential, and semiotic violences that constituted Africans and Afro-diasporic subjects as available for captivity, injury, and disposal. Calling attention to this disclosive aspect of the flesh, and to the movements between body and flesh, this article contributes to ongoing examinations of the material, semiotic, and affective processes of colonial disposability and their transmissibility in the present. At the same time, however, the flesh importantly disrupts the limits placed on what is naturalised as possible by the social relations of disposability during Atlantic slavery and (settler) colonialism, engendering futural possibilities. This theorisation of the paraliteracies of the flesh, then, makes possible examination of its capacious, situated affordances to disclose both violence and possibility, avoiding its reduction to a hermeneutics of destitution. Section two below turns to the flesh’s literacies in the production and imposition of a complex fungibility upon enslaved Africans.
Disclosing the production of complex fungibility
Employing the analytical approach to the disclosive capacities of the flesh outlined above, this section examines the flesh’s literacies into the dynamics of colonial disposability, focusing particularly on the production of a complex fungibility, and its imposition upon Africans, within the colonial political economy of enslavement. It discusses how the physical violences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade intersected with semiotic and affective violences and how, together, these worked to remake Africans into complexly fungible bodies-as-commodities. First, I examine the disruption of existing regimes of meaning and local systems of kinship, belonging, and sociality entailed in the movement from African body to enslaved flesh, which continue to affect Afro-diasporic communities. Second, I examine how captives’ bodies were inserted into an unknown, emerging colonial and racial system of meaning that denied ‘humanity’, serving the needs of the modern-colonial order and establishing the coloniser subject-class as ‘fully human’. Lastly, I discuss how the production and imposition of this complex fungibility remade slavery hereditable as status.
The Slave Trade and the system of Atlantic chattel slavery involved the sale and physical captivity of Africans. However, this ‘theft of the body’, as Spillers explains, amounted not only to physical violence but led to long-lasting semiotic and socio-affective harms, all coming together in the processes by which ‘the captive body reduces to a thing’ (67, original emphasis), becoming commodified. Enslavement by European empires attempted to divorce the physical from the ‘social body’,Footnote 56 wresting Africans from their families and communities and disrupting their pre-existing systems of meaning, in which they made sense of their lives, social relations, status, and livelihood. Afflicting semiotic harm by disrupting meaning, this prohibition of African systems of sociality and kinship meant the ‘severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire’, which was chief amongst the processes by which ‘“kinship” loses meaning’ and a person was ‘culturally “unmade”’ (67, 74, 72). Being removed from these ‘grammar[s] of sociality’,Footnote 57 the now-captives suffered socio-affective harm through the decimation of their ‘genealogical connection and kinship forms’, as explored later in this section.Footnote 58 Dionne Brand recounts the dislocating effects of such losses for generations of descendants of the enslaved. Brand’s familial story exemplifies the global politics of intergenerational trauma of Caribbean and ‘American’ Afro-diasporic populations:
Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting … Very few family stories, few personal stories have survived among the millions of descendants of the trade … My grandfather never remembered our name and perhaps therefore, in a large sense for me, our way. I balanced on the word at the tip of his tongue. He left me in this anticipation and therefore curiosity. For the name he could not remember was from the place we could not remember. Africa.Footnote 59
The approach espoused here centres the literacies of the flesh to illuminate the transformations of African persons into ‘captive flesh’ (68) and their being remade into an ‘enslaved captive body’, a body which could be inserted into a novel and ‘altogether alien order of meaningful sociopolitical living’, whose purpose was to satisfy the material and meaning-making needs of the political economy of enslavement.Footnote 60 This insertion of the enslaved body for use within this emerging economy affectively compounded captivity’s physical harms: hence, ‘[t]he body is the scene at which subjection occurs’,Footnote 61 a site at which ‘capital “invents” a collectivization of broken, working “bodies”’.Footnote 62
In these new colonial systems of signification, these now-captive bodies were invested with alien meanings and status. Africanity, writ as otherness, was made to signify ‘ontological lack’Footnote 63 for the purposes of ‘racially hierarchizing humanity’.Footnote 64 Equating Africanity with (human) lack and animality helped produce a complex fungibility that formed the bedrock of colonialism and emerging forms of capitalism, understood simultaneously as ‘an economic system, an apparatus of capture, a regime of signs’.Footnote 65 In this emerging modern-colonial context, the ‘sign of capital’ becomes an ‘African sign in the midst of the economy of alterity’, a sign that comes to denote deficiency through devaluation, as I explore in section three.Footnote 66 Presently it is worth noting that reducing Africanity to fungibility is deeply implicated in the continuing harms of colonial disposability, because it was fundamental for ‘the anti-Black World’s construction and constant politico-symbolic reification and reproduction’.Footnote 67 That is why the political economy of Atlantic enslavement required both the prohibition of the enslaved populations’ erstwhile systems of meaning and belonging and also the evolution of a semiotic regime to re-signify and violently transform Africans into enslavable bodies-commodities.
The flesh’s movements function here as critical literacies disclosing the inter-operations between ‘world’ and ‘word’ through which now-captive bodies are rendered as fungible. These paraliteracies concretely specify our understanding of Atlantic colonial disposability and show it to materialise through the imposition of fungibility, that is, the rendering of persons as ‘substitutable and consumable’ things.Footnote 68 Saidiya Hartman’s germinal work identifies three interrelated aspects of fungibility: exchangeability, interchangeability (that is, the ability to ‘take the place of one another’), as well as the reduction of one’s value ‘relative to what they were able to do’ for the coloniser, slave owning class.Footnote 69 Starting from the latter, Spillers argued that re-signifying enslaved persons as fungible commodities meant that they were now reconstituted as ‘being for the captor’ (67, original emphasis). Reconstituting their personality into fungible property attempted to rupture the identity-making processes via which persons constituted themselves as singular beings,Footnote 70 making them also interchangeable. The dynamic of fungibilisation, moreover, produced the enslaved person as exchangeable because it attempted to ‘neutraliz[e] the multi-dimensionality of its [the captive’s] flesh … reducing it to a homogenous commodity of exchange in a pulverizing libidinal economy’.Footnote 71
Jackson broadens our understanding of fungibility further by analysing how efforts to impose fungibility sought to ensure the ‘plasticity’ of the enslaved body. The colonial political economy of enslavement underpinned by anti-blackness required a wider, infinite mutability of the enslaved person, because the ‘fluidification of “life” and fleshly existence’ was central to rendering the enslaved as ‘everything and nothing for an order’ of colonial modernity.Footnote 72 This ‘fluidification’ allowed the Black captive to be abstracted and to be variously ‘enfleshed via an ongoing process of wresting form from matter’.Footnote 73 Ensuring plasticity meant that enslaved persons remained an ‘open sign that can be arranged and rearranged for infinite kinds of use’.Footnote 74 Marked by this ‘ambiguity’, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues for the complex simultaneity of Thing and Human: ‘neither/both Thing nor/and Human’.Footnote 75
‘A self before captivity’, the flesh stands prior to violent productions of captive bodies as fungible units of exchange.Footnote 76 Therefore, its transformation into a fungible commodity ‘within an economy of exchange’ constitutes for Calvin Warren an ‘ontological violation’ that aims to reduce ‘black flesh … to devastating sameness’.Footnote 77 Constructing the enslaved population as fungible reveals ‘the brutality of the biological market’ where ‘the self-possession of a body is interdicted by fleshly dispossession’, an attempted disruption of enslaved persons’ selfhood.Footnote 78 However, the flesh as ‘site/sight’ de-sediments the processes of materially, semiotically, and legally producing the fungible, substitutable, captive body – a ‘body without flesh’ – which now ‘stands as the object of market relations, statistical science, and arithmetic’.Footnote 79
Additionally, however, the flesh’s literacies do not only illuminate the harms wrought on the enslaved populations’ self and ‘motive will’ (67): the movements between body and flesh they help trace, disclose how imposing fungibility and plasticity on enslaved Africans made possible the ‘augmentation’ of the coloniser, ‘master subject’ as fully human, defined as such through the attribution of inhumanity and fungibility to the enslaved.Footnote 80 Spillers powerfully articulates this hierarchical movement as a set of ‘procedures adopted for the captive flesh … [that] demarcate[d] a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory’ (68, brackets added). Her term ‘laboratory’ emphasises how the captive community becomes the site for experimental interanimation: Africans are reduced to fungible objects, available commodities, and tools, whilst ‘the[ir] abjection’ through the ‘figure of the slave’ secures ‘the exaltation of the figure of the master, or the figure of sovereignty’.Footnote 81 Fungibility, therefore, opens up an apparently unbridgeable ‘gulf between the sovereign and the fungible’.Footnote 82 This ‘association of progress with European bodies’,Footnote 83 which fungibilisation processes naturalise, stabilises the human qua modern subject on the basis of ‘black population groups of the New World [being made into] … the embodied bearers of Ontological Lack’.Footnote 84 At the same time, the very process of imposing fungibility erased from view the intersecting physical, socio-affective, and semiotic violations of Afro-diasporic populations as violence: ‘[s]emiotics un-sees it’, as M. Ty succinctly puts it, a point I expand on in the conclusion.Footnote 85 It is the centrality of these violations to the colonial dynamics of enslavability and disposability, and their simultaneous erasure, that the analytical framework of fleshly literacies, advanced here, reveals.
Finally, producing Africans as fungible property undergirded the legal hereditability of Atlantic slavery. This relied on violently enforcing the principle of partus sequitur ventrem [‘that which is brought forth follows the womb’], which formed ‘the main legal innovation of chattel slavery’ and enabled the social reproduction of enslavement by harnessing ‘the reproductive capacity of captive African women, who could thereby only ever give birth to future slaves’.Footnote 86 Black feminists, such as Spillers and Jennifer L. Morgan, and materialist feminists, such as Alys Eve Weinbaum, argue that a core aspect of the dynamic of fungibilisation was chattel slavery’s ‘long history of (re)productive extraction’, a form of ‘(re)productive dispossession’,Footnote 87 whereby enslaved women were made ‘kinless’, with no rights to their own children, who were the property (and often the progeny) of their owners: family, Morgan argues, became gradually transformed into ‘the expansion of someone else’s estate’.Footnote 88 Affective violence, then, was compounded by reproductive and sexual violence, the latter being ‘an unspoken but normative condition’ in/of the plantation,Footnote 89 a destructive but crucial component of expanding Empire.Footnote 90
Discerning the movements between body and flesh, word and world, the flesh’s literacies shed light on the processes by which European empires attempted to transform African bodies into flesh and to insert these as fluidly fungible bodies into slavery’s enmeshed economic, semiotic, and juridico-ethical orders. As the next section illustrates, fungibilisation required both a devaluation of African persons and their revaluation as fungible commodities. Legitimating such de/valuation entailed symbolic effort and categorical violence through racialisation.
Desedimenting de/valuation and/through racialisation
The previous section examined how the flesh’s paraliteracies offer an understanding of the processes of producing, and imposing, a complex fungibility on the enslaved, and help delineate its intersecting harms. The present discussion turns to the flesh’s literacies in the related processes of de/valuation, which naturalised, and helped legitimate, the fungibilisation of the enslaved through racialisation. First, I discuss the symbolic aspects of valuation to highlight its violence and contingency, before, second, examining how the very dynamics of producing racialised subjects both legitimated and occluded such racialisation. Processes of de/valuation continue to affect practices of abandonment and ethical negation in world (necro)politics today, discussed here in reference to the continuing devaluation of racialised, migrant bodies in Europe’s twenty-first-century ‘migration crises’ and contemporary UK immigration policy. The analysis shows, therefore, how an approach centring the critical literacies of the flesh exposes the evolving dynamics of de/valuation and contemporary disposability’s antecedents.
Valuation is far broader than an economic assessment. Its success requires both symbolic articulation and naturalisation. What are the symbolic operations of valuation dynamics? With ‘racial blackness’ in mind, Lindon Barrett argues that ‘value’ ultimately ‘fixes boundaries between the valued and the devalued’; it is a ‘violence’ that inflicts ‘an impeachment of the Other, a wresting of autonomy from the Other, a vanquishing of danger implicit in the Other – in short, the willful expenditure of the Other in an imposing production of the self’, where the ‘self’ denotes the colonising and enslaving master-subject, whose securing was discussed above.Footnote 91 Symbolically, then, value ‘begins with excess’ and ‘masquerades ... its violence’, because its procedures require disrupting forms of life and meaning through the interdiction of the enslaved person’s prior systems of signification and sociality, probed in section two.Footnote 92 This removal of autonomy from the enslaved fixed in place ‘[t]he uneven valuation of human subjects … along ethical and political lines’, through the enforcement of slave status ‘via privatized household violence formally backed by state power’.Footnote 93 This included not only categorical ungendering but also routinised rape, incest, and the ‘brutality of everyday cruelties’ centrally connected to fungibilisation.Footnote 94
While central to the operations of de/valuation, value’s ‘violent agency’ in imposing nonhumanity on the enslaved was subsequently disavowed by the modern-colonial order.Footnote 95 The attempts to erase from view the ‘indelible traces’ of value’s violence and ‘contingency’Footnote 96 relied heavily on ‘producing racial subjects’ and, more specifically, on the ‘systematic stigmatization’ of the enslaved.Footnote 97 Therefore, in the context of Atlantic enslavement, as in many contemporary terrains of disposability, processes of de/valuation co-articulated with, and were legitimated by, processes of racialisation. Simultaneously a devaluation of Africans as differentiated, self-constituting, human persons and a revaluation of captives as commodity, tool, and ‘animate capital’,Footnote 98 racialisation as a process was central to ‘how status is made’Footnote 99 and attached to captive bodies.
Stigmatisation was at the heart of what Mbembe calls ‘Black reason’, which was ‘not only a system of narratives and discourses with academic pretensions but also the reservoir that provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial domination’.Footnote 100 In other words, in addition to being enshrined in legal statutes, stabilising and legitimating the signification of African captives as commodities required the construction and naturalisation of their designation as ‘Ne***’, a term that comes to function as an ‘indicial signifier of property’.Footnote 101 ‘Ne***’ was a category whose invention and stabilisation required tremendous energies.Footnote 102 Looking at ‘colonial black subjects’ illuminates the legal, semiotic, political, and cultural processes that ‘took Virginia, for instance, a full century to configure and “secrete” a class of objects called “the Negro,” named in the law as its negation’.Footnote 103 These are the inseparable ‘dynamics of naming and valuation’ (68), Spillers argues, because in the context of Atlantic slavery, valuation meant ‘exact[ing] an equation between skin color and human standing’.Footnote 104 Successive transvaluations, then, produce the captive body into an ‘iconic sign’ for the ‘system of colonial imperiality, as well as that of capitalist slavery’.Footnote 105 Spillers centres this processual semiotic and material production: ‘[o]ne “becomes” black – neither a phylogeny nor an ontogeny – by virtue of his/her interpellation in total Western Economy’.Footnote 106 Arguing that the ‘materiality of discourse is as solid an aspect of political economy as the Gross Domestic Product’,Footnote 107 she refuses the separation of the material-structural and the discursive, insisting that ‘material values engender symbolic and discursive ones (and vice-versa) in perfect synecdochic harmony’ and that ‘discourses precisely conjugate the social relation’.Footnote 108
Racialisation’s centrality in projects of de/valuation is not consigned to history but remains central to contemporary world politics.Footnote 109 De/valuation’s erstwhile justification based on racial difference is re-emerging in new necropolitical forms in twenty-first-century global politics. This is evident amid growing racial tensions and far right anti-immigration protests urging successive UK governments towards ever more draconian measures towards (so-called ‘illegal’) migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees;Footnote 110 and corresponding policy changes, such as the Labour Government’s replacement of refugee protection with a temporary refugee ‘model’ requiring review and renewal of protection every 30 months as of March 2026, an effort seeking to approximate Denmark’s 90% reduction of asylum claims over the past decade.Footnote 111 The so-called ‘European migration crisis’ of the early 2010s, too, reanimated in new ways Atlantic slavery’s dynamics of disposability and its processes of devaluation and abandonment.Footnote 112 Christina Sharpe traces the European migration crisis to ‘the crisis of capital and the wreckage from the continuation of military and other colonial projects for US/European wealth extraction and immiseration’.Footnote 113 Sharpe probes the ongoing de/valuation of Black flesh, which in the twenty–first century became writ openly onto the surface and into the depths of the ‘Black Mediterranean’ by EU policies dating to the 1980s, as do the deaths of people trying to cross the English Channel on dinghies (‘small boats’) in the years following Britain’s exit from the European Union.Footnote 114 Racialisation in these twenty-first-century contexts co-articulates with/as criminalisation and enables both ‘exceptional’ (see below on the ‘left-to-die-boat’) and routinised devaluation, where ‘migrants’ manner of arrival is becoming a (racialised) proxy for “good” and “bad” immigrants’.Footnote 115
Addressing the stated aim to combat the smuggling of migrants through force, a claim intensifying since the 2010s, Sharpe analyses the dynamics of devaluation in EU decisions ‘to replace humanitarian patrols of the Mediterranean with military ones …’.Footnote 116 Opting to militarily combat the criminality of ‘smugglers’ – echoed in the debate over the illegality of ‘migrants’ in present-day UK – rather than to save Africans making the crossing onto European islands and mainland, EU policy rendered them disposable, ‘unsavable’, and potentially criminal. Lampedusan fishermen, for example, reported at the time being wary of saving the migrants in boats not-seaworthy, following Italy’s ‘scrapp[ing] of Mare Nostrum … after the E.U. refused to help fund it’.Footnote 117 Saving Africans from drowning would mean, the fishermen argued, ‘risk[ing] their boats being seized under Italy’s tough laws on illegal migrants’, with one fisherman claiming, ‘this immigration law is killing people’.Footnote 118 The impunity of de/valuation heightened further when the Justice Committee of the Italian Parliament’s upper house ‘made illegal immigration a crime punishable with a fine of up to €10,000 (£8,500)’ in 2013, enabling the investigation and criminalisation of shipwrecked survivors.Footnote 119 Transforming those fleeing persecution and/or destitution into unsavable, ‘illegalised’ migrant bodies exerted an incredibly high toll on Black life, with the UN International Organization for Migration reporting 24,585 deaths between 2014 and 2024 in the central Mediterranean route alone, the highest figure for any migratory route worldwide.Footnote 120
Sharpe unflinchingly questions the semantic upgrade in media and political commentary that acknowledged this twenty-first-century ‘cargo’ as ‘human’ and as victims, arguing it ‘does nothing, here, to ameliorate the ghosting these ships do of transatlantic slavery or the afterlives of slavery’.Footnote 121 As extensively discussed, the de/valuation of Black persons reached its nadir in 2011 in the abandonment of the ‘left-to-die-boat’ when a ‘dinghy’ sailing from Tripoli and bearing 72 Africans, including children, was not only ‘spotted’ but came well within reach of rescue by ‘many parties, military and commercial’, including ‘one French warship’: ‘the occupants of the ship were not rescued but were allowed to drift for over two weeks until only 9 of the passengers remained alive when it landed back on Libyan shores’.Footnote 122 This illuminates that the dynamics of disposability continue in evolving ways to unfold through de/valuation and to become legitimated through racialisation, now co-articulated as potential criminality/illegality, as in the recent anti-immigration ‘moral panic’ that brought tens of thousands to the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ far-right rally in Autumn 2025.Footnote 123
Advancing an approach centring the flesh’s critical literacies into these de/valuing operations extends accounts such as Sharpe’s by shedding light on the movements between racialised bodies fleeing persecution and economic destitution and their reconstitution as ‘unsavable’ flesh in policy, political discourse, and social attitude. Attention to the flesh’s paraliteracies enables us to analyse their reinsertion as potentially criminal-illegal bodies within the discursive tropes of populist political mobilisation, while also alerting us to their potentiality for refusal and wayward worldmaking, as section four shows. ‘Raciality’s work as a political/symbolic tool’ is disclosed by the flesh as an indelible remainder of the process of de/valuation of bodies, revealing racialisation’s ‘primary function’ to incite and cement ‘irreducible, unsublatable difference among human collectives’; in the case of Africanity, this was ‘transubstantiated’ into ‘a natural deficit … that attributed their economic dispossession to an inherent moral and intellectual defect’.Footnote 124 The flesh’s critical literacies, therefore, help us analyse the production of the de/valued, enslaved, and disposable body by colonial de/valuation dynamics as a ‘contrivance’ (78), a construction which legitimated captivity and colonial disposability, and which today reanimates new forms of disposability facilitated by these colonial and racial antecedents. The literacies of the flesh, therefore, enable a ‘demystification of the mystification of value’,Footnote 125 discussed above as the occlusion of its violence and contingency, in service to the material needs of imperiality.
For Spillers, the violent markings of the racialising colonial ‘cultural text’ on the captive’s body – what she calls the ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ (67) – are simultaneously the result, and disclosive, of the ‘mechanisms of the torture the flesh undergoes, conferring on it the status of a particular type of body, the enslaved Negro body’.Footnote 126 The fleshly hieroglyphics, at once indelible and hard to decipher, offer a paraliteracy compelling us to look ‘“beyond” the violating hand that laid on the stigmata of a recognition that was misrecognition, or the regard that was disregard’, to focus on the very ‘semiosis of procedure that had enabled such a moment in the first place’, a process of signification which had ‘everything to do with those “unacknowledged legislators” of a discursive and an economic discipline’.Footnote 127 Discursive and economic disciplines, however, occlude the violations from view, naturalising these through ‘cultural seeing by skin color’ (67) and attributing them to physical (‘racial’) difference. Despite their erasure from view, the flesh’s critical literacies disclose these movements between ‘word’ and ‘world’, concretely illuminating the conjoined work of discursive-economic disciplinary power through the brutal markings suffered by the flesh; the fleshly paraliteracies surface how the semiotic-economic imperatives of colonialism produced the racialised captive body as the outcome of de/valuation and categorial, racial conceptualisation. Where de/valuation once legitimated the violences suffered in the slave ship hold and legal enslavement, it nowadays naturalises criminalisation and sanctions physical and ethical abandonment. Neither the once-captive body nor the potentially criminal, unsavable, migrant body are natural entities; the flesh’s paraliteracies disclose both as a ‘discursive and particular instance that belongs, always, to a context’, here of evolving colonial modernity.Footnote 128 In other words, the critical hieroglyphics of the flesh desediment how the racialised and enslavable body is semiotically, legally, and socially remade according to the imperatives of colonialism and the political economy of slavery, while reanimations of these processes in the present become obscured by modernity’s ‘fantastical’ entrenchment of racial/racist ‘inscription’ and new formations of hierarchical valuation.Footnote 129
However, as the next section explores, the flesh’s ‘vestibular’ relation to dominant culture and symbolic activity illuminates the radical instability of the ‘between’ and disrupts efforts to fully capture the flesh within grammars of disposability. Compelled by these violating grammars into intimate experiments with fugitivity and freedom, the flesh joins, through its literacies, in the recovery of the ‘insurgent ground’ (80) of this subject.
Flesh, waywardness, refusal: ‘Insurgent’ grounds
The previous two sections discussed the flesh’s disclosures of the construction and legitimation of extractive-racist colonial worlds, respectively examining the production of fungibility and the legitimation of de/valuing the enslaved through racialisation. Moreover, they showed these dynamics to evolve and inform contemporary forms of harm and abandonment, such as those enacted within Europe’s migration-border regime. In order to provide a full account of the flesh’s literacies, however, it is important not to neglect the flesh’s ceaseless self- and collective counter-inscriptions, which work to subvert the dynamics of disposability and show the flesh’s potentialities for refusal and worldmaking, as this section discusses.
Recall that the flesh’s ‘vestibularity’, discussed in section one, arises from being ‘within, as well as outside, the symbolic economy’;Footnote 130 in other words, the flesh does not evade capture by dominant forms of representation (what Spillers calls the ‘brush of discourse’ (67)).Footnote 131 It is this vestibular positionality, importantly, that ‘constitut[es] blackness as a field of ethical and political illegibility against which the dominant symbolic order continues to organize itself’,Footnote 132 exposing colonial modernity’s limited ability to wholly reduce the flesh to ‘a site of passive ruination’Footnote 133 as fungible, de/valued, and disposable. The analytical approach to the flesh’s critical literacies offered here recognises the flesh as ‘a domain of existence from which Black individuals resist and exist’,Footnote 134 one capable of disrupting racist-colonial signification and forging illimitable sociopoetic, aesthetic, always political, forms of ‘break’,Footnote 135 ‘maronnage’,Footnote 136 and ‘poetic revolt’.Footnote 137 While extensive discussion of these is impossible in the confines of this article, I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s research into vestibular, ‘wayward’ forms of living by young Black women in post-Reconstruction United States to surface the flesh’s disclosure of their manifold refusals of segregating violence and transgressions against confinement within racist material, sociopolitical, and semiotic structures in the ‘afterlife’ of slavery.Footnote 138 Exploring Black women’s enfleshed attempts to create the ‘elsewhere’ amid a quotidian reality of lives and futures ‘foreclosed’ by society’s devaluation (307), I then illustrate the possibilities this theoretical account of the flesh’s literacies into refusal and waywardness offers for understanding the practices of migrants in contemporary Europe.
In early twentieth-century US cities, waywardness was affixed to ‘only young women’ (222, original emphasis), especially Black women and girls. ‘Wayward minor’ statutes, such as the Code of Criminal Procedure, defined waywardness in virtually all-encompassing ways, from engaging in ‘premarital sex’ to everyday forms of association with ‘dissolute persons’ – such as ‘drinking, dancing, dating (especially interracial liaisons) … going to parties and cabarets’ – and presence in the streets, outside tenements and on porches (222–224). Policymakers and social commentators used the prism of waywardness to calculate ‘the imminence of future criminality’ (223, original emphasis) of these ‘guilty’ forms of life and presence, echoed nowadays in the assumed criminality/illegality of socially devalued others, such as migrants and refugees, as discussed above. Black women came under intense regulation, including arrest, brutal confinement in reformatories, and physical assault in the streets (race riots), amounting to ‘civil death: the mortification of the self’ for these young women (264).
Developing the method of ‘critical fabulation’, Hartman retrieves and re-imagines Black women’s lives from the archive of post-Emancipation dispossession and confinement, which documents little more than society’s efforts to regulate, contain, and criminalise these women.Footnote 139 Refusing the archive’s authority to ‘decide our knowledge of the past’,Footnote 140 Hartman creatively re-stories these women’s lives, their intimate connections, experiments in queerness, their enfleshed calls for ‘[a]bolition now’ (285, original emphasis). She shows how their wayward, ‘errant ways of living’ evaded the state’s categorisation of Blackness as ‘disorderly and criminal’ authorised by the colour line (224–225). Contesting society’s devaluation, segregation, and the material ‘stranglehold of poverty’, Black women signalled a ‘hunger for a set of new social arrangements’ (307). They enacted these within racist-devaluing regimes of signification and physical containment, improvised by their flesh as exit routes for/through their confined bodies.
Black women’s fleshly errantries engendered evasive and non-normative forms of sociality: seeking pleasure in sexual relations of ‘women who ... loved women’ (321), where the ‘bedroom was a domain of thought in deed and a site for enacting, exceeding, undoing, and remaking relations of power’ (61). Their enfleshed refusals took form ‘[i]n the broken circle of the dance floor … that improvisation of becoming together, that call to assembly, that two-step and slide announcing the struggle against an imposed life, that sensual embrace of a body unmarked by stigma and undisciplined by servitude’ (306). They discovered in living transgressively radical visions of the otherwise and the elsewhere: ‘[o]n the dance floor it was clear that existence was not only a struggle, but a beautiful experiment too … how to live when the future was foreclosed’, making ‘each dance’, and each liaison, into an everyday ‘rehearsal for escape’ (307, 306). Their fleshly practices were misread as ‘disorder’ by regulators, whose devaluing gaze missed ‘all the ways black folks create life and make bare need into an arena of elaboration’ (6). Importantly, this perspective on waywardness cannot be dismissed as ‘apolitical’ or ‘simply cultural’. Black women were radical social thinkers and proponents of a distinctly modern form of life, argues Hartman, writing the ‘text of [their] insurgency’ (260, brackets added) in their fugitive, non-domesticated dreams and visions of other worlds, in authoring ‘new vocabularies’ of the flesh (227–228).
How might the theoretical perspective centring the flesh’s literacies into waywardness proposed here interrupt the totalising gaze grasping migrant lives in the present political moment? How does it supplement important critical research on forms of control, surveillance, and abandonment in migration processes? Can it fracture the near-exclusive focus on the effects of the migration system on migrant lives which, while necessary, risks missing the wayward practices through which migrants engender fugitive ‘livingness’ amid abandonment and control?Footnote 141
Emerging work in migration studies, public health, architecture, and sociology, however, has begun to critically identify, and urge against, the (re)production of ‘unidimensional and stereotyped representations of migrants and refugees’ stories and subjectivities’Footnote 142 within a broader call to ‘dissociate the face of the forced migrant from the “invented threat” that the Global North wishes to perceive’.Footnote 143 Such research rarely draws on Spillers and Hartman explicitly; yet it increasingly reads together ‘bodies as borders’ and ‘non-compliant [migrant] bodies as archives’ of the flesh’s resistance and potentiality for new modalities of life within confinement.Footnote 144 Employing this article’s perspective on the flesh’s literacies into waywardness and refusal helps surface these forms of ‘improvisatory life’,Footnote 145 bringing to light the ways in which ‘migrants matter as innovators of the social, as makers of life, even in the face of biological and social death’; their flesh is revealed by these paraliteracies to be ‘a site of being, breath, and the poetics of life-making’,Footnote 146 as I discuss below via practices of migrant living in the European context.
In Capitanata, southern Italy, Camillo Boano et al. draw on Hartman’s notion of wayward, beautiful experiments to interrogate migrant farmworker ghettos, such as Pista of Borgo Mezzanone, where technocratic projects like the National Recovery and Resilience Plan seek to ‘overcome informal settlements’ [read: ‘eradicate’]. Boano et al. analyse these as efforts to maintain the boundary between ‘white spaces … and the Black spaces of migrant lifeworlds on the margins’. They examine, however, the ways migrants such as Yassin and collectives like Dar Assalam in Pista resist these official efforts through imaginative design and the rebuilding of destroyed homes with neighbours and reusing ‘improvised recycled materials’. Their ‘resistance’ betrays ‘deeply social’ but also ‘highly fragile infrastructures of survival’ – ‘wayward infrastructure[s]’ – that stand as ‘a quiet assertion of permanence in a place defined by instability and planned erasure’. Migrant collective efforts at ‘recomposition’ enact ‘beautiful experiments’, they write, for ‘a possible future besides eviction and removal’.Footnote 147
In Amsterdam, Deanna Dadusc examines how migrant squatting practices bring to the fore wayward forms of ‘inhabitance [as] ... affirmation of presence, a here-and-now praxis of existence’ that engages in the ‘subver[sion of] the material forms of isolation and dependency, as well as the affective politics of fear and silence’ that afflict racialised migrant ‘bodies and lives’ in the Netherlands, where increasingly migration law and criminal law become co-articulated as ‘crimmigration’. Migrant squatting as a form of ‘commoning’ shows the flesh’s literacies into, and refusal of, ‘the enclosures of the border regimes’, a struggle that provides not only actual ‘shelter’ but collective refuge that engenders ‘an arena of elaboration’ (Hartman, 6) of radical social relations and ‘solidarity’ distinct from citizenship.Footnote 148
Research into commoning through cooking by members of OneLoveKitchen, an African social kitchen collective in Athens, also shows, according to Penny Travlou, the ‘network of interacting bodies’ at work to defy the ‘stereotypical representation’ of undocumented migrants as homo sacer and to surface, instead, their enfleshed ‘connectivity, affective cooperation and mutual support’. The efforts of these racialised, undocumented migrants at grassroots ‘economic democracy’ and their ‘weekly assemblies’ building trust and working through conflict render cooking into a fleshly ‘political praxis’ of ‘nomadic’ belonging by African women across the Greek capital.Footnote 149
These forms of wayward connection and experimental relation illuminate the contestations of the flesh in its movements from illegalised migrant body into errant flesh and on to a (collective) body engaged in ‘messy survival’Footnote 150 marked by sociality, refusal, and waywardness. Migrant practices impart a fleshly knowing of their radical efforts at mutuality, for a different present and future, at once mundane and yet ‘requir[ing] acts of collaboration and genius’ (237). This section discussed the critical literacies of the flesh disclosing its own forms of excess and refusal. These offer, in addition to the disclosures of the intertwined material, semiotic, ethical, and affective dynamics of colonial disposability, a ‘site/sight’ into the flesh’s ‘insurgencies’, a perspective of crucial importance for a non-totalising understanding of colonial disposability in critical global politics. At the same time, such an analytic of the flesh’s literacies into everyday insurgencies does not glorify these practices as indicative of the cessation of colonial disposability’s ongoing violences and reanimations in the present, as the above examples also highlight.
The concluding section below reflects on the co-constitution of colonial modernity with these intersecting colonial violences, expanding on colonial disposability’s transmissibility into the present and the flesh’s potentiality for wayward worldmaking.
Conclusion
Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, this article argued, should not be read as a binary opposition but, rather, as a complicated, ‘co-present ensemble’. Contributing to growing interest in analysing disposability in global politics, the article shows how the critical literacies of the flesh provide an approach to understand the movements between ‘word’ and ‘world’, between body and flesh, and how these establish and naturalise social relations and structures central to colonial disposability. In conclusion, I outline the contributions and significance of the analysis of the flesh’s literacies as offering a distinct perspective into the intersecting material, semiotic, and socio-affective processes of colonial disposability, their transmissibility within, and centrality for, contemporary global politics, without occluding the flesh’s potentiality for refusal and wayward worldmaking.
By illuminating the movements between ‘word’ and ‘world’, the flesh discloses the co-constitution of colonial modernity with intersecting physical, semiotic, and ethical violences. The above discussion of the processes by which African persons were remade into enslaved, fungible, and de/valued bodies reveals the interconnection and mutual dependence of the political economy of slavery with an ‘economy of alterity’,Footnote 151 which, the flesh’s literacies show, associated Africans with ‘ontological lack’, imposed on them a fluid fungibility and legitimated their enslavement through racialisation. The flesh’s literacies of its own complex destitution through fungibility and racialised de/valuation, first, ‘records the historically constitutive violence of modernity’Footnote 152 materialising as colonial, racial disposability. The processes of fungibilisation, de/valuation, and racialisation that rendered Africans into ‘captive flesh’ and transformed them into enslavable, interchangeable commodities illuminate, moreover, how colonial modernity’s processes of disposability required not only physical violence but also a constitutive reliance on ‘the conceptual form – the commodity – as the principle of economic (and general) rationality’.Footnote 153 Second, the searing and marking of the flesh, as a paraliteracy of its disposability under enslavement, illuminates the co-extensiveness of modern coloniser subjectivity with ‘the modern Western market and modern Western reason’.Footnote 154 Third, the evolution of the ‘exemplary modern profiles’ of European empires and ‘New World’ settler colonies is shown to be intertwined with the extraction of ‘immense surplus values’ that brought about both the ‘depletion’ and political disorganisation ‘of the political jurisdictions along the Senegambian, Guinean, and west-central African coastlines’ and also the establishment of ‘regimes of enforced labor’ in the colonies and later polities of the ‘New World’.Footnote 155 This article argued, therefore, that the flesh as ‘sight/site’ brings to light this violent co-constitution of modernity with violence, visibilising how ‘[t]hrough terror and appropriation of the enslaved flesh, the capitalist structure jump-starts itself into the global phenomenon’.Footnote 156
These intersecting forms of co-constitution between violence and colonial modernity are of continued significance for understanding grammars of disposability today; yet, as the above analyses highlight, colonial modernity’s production of racial difference occludes from view its co-constitution with the violent processes of fungibilisation and de/valuation. Even though the ‘stigmata’ of raceFootnote 157 obscure the wounds left on the flesh through the imposition of fungibility, nonvalue, and hereditary captivity, fleshly literacies of the movements between body and flesh reveal the ways in which ‘Western forms of economic, political, and even psychological domination’ self-authorised the signification of ontological violence, legitimating its attendant processes of rendering populations disposable.Footnote 158
As shown above, legitimating the devaluing of lives became entrenched through racialisation. These processes placed the enslaved, racialised, and now-fungible, person ‘outside the cultural space of Ethics, relationality, and the sacred’.Footnote 159 This displacement from customary forms of ethical relation and obligation authorised, as Spillers remarks, a ‘protocol of “search and destroy”’ (67) towards enslaved and post-slavery populations. Colonialism’s legitimation of its categorising and ungendering violence, moreover, erased this violence as a crime, and denied its ‘unethicality’.Footnote 160 Importantly, placing enslaved and post-slavery subjects outside ethics and relationality secures the transmissibility of evolving forms of permissible disposability in global politics, as sections three and four discussed. Such emplacement outside ethical obligation reanimates the original violence of captivity and enslavement, which appears to evolve ‘from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments’ (67, original emphasis) of violence.Footnote 161 Far beyond the West African, Caribbean, and South and North American contexts of its emergence, ‘the containment and liquidation of black bodies’ continues today in world politics, for example, through war, extractive ‘development without compromise’, and other enduring carceral-colonial practices.Footnote 162 These rely, Spillers shows, on ‘narrative energies … buried deep in the collective past, that come to surround and signify the captive person’ (69) and Afro-descendant populations. The flesh’s literacies, as a novel form of analysis of the processes of colonial disposability, contribute towards probing the ongoing reverberations and reanimations of these histories, and their instituted grammars and transmissible harms in the present, an important endeavour for critical global politics. And yet, the literacies of the flesh afford a vantage point into how the flesh refuses and exceeds its colonial and racial-capitalist violations, as section four discussed in relation to migrant lives. The flesh’s illegibility and transgression of its discursive and material enclosures, its wayward practices of refusing confinement and imagining an other futurity, centre the flesh’s potentiality for disruptive worldmaking.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stefan Elbe, Anne-Marie Fortier, Marie-Catherine Petersmann, Samantha Pinto, Divya Tolia-Kelly, and RIS’s three anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to audiences at EISA PEC in Prague in 2018 and at the ‘Critical Literacies of the Present’ Workshop, organised by the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and The Critical Theory Research Cluster, University of Sussex, in 2021 for their critical engagement.
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