Meditations on the Dead, the Dying and the Displaced: Theorizing Structural Anti-blackness as the Root Cause of Africa’s ‘Forever Wars’

This workshop interrogates global anti-blackness and white supremacy as enduring, foundational forces that choreograph and haunt the genealogy of international relations, alongside the formation of modern African governance, sovereignty, sociality, subjection and insurrection. It critiques mainstream Western scholarship and media representations that attribute the provocation of African insurgents to supposed cultural or moral deficiencies, and/or to biological inferiority. Instead, this workshop puts forth the argument that Africa’s humanitarian crises, particularly the proliferation of protracted wars in the post-Cold War era, are entrenched within a global anti-black onto-political order forged by the system of transatlantic slavery and sustained in its afterlife.