Peculiar Institutions: anti‐Blackness, instituent praxis and Black extitutions (original) (raw)

2023, Institution: Critical Histories of Law. Edited by Francis Cooper and Daniel Gottlieb

Peculiar institutions: anti-Blackness, instituent praxis and Black extitutions norman ajari Where are we with the theorization of the Black condition and experience? Contemporary Black thought is structured by the urging question of Black disposability. While the history of African subjugation and anti-Blackness is intertwined with the very trajectory of modern Europe and its colonies, recent events have conditioned a necessary reframing of these centuries-old questions in terms of life, death and survival. Mass incarceration, police brutality and homicidal vigilantism, combined with rampant economic and social inequalities, have induced a militant and theoretical diagnosis of Black overexposure to the risk of death and dying. This conjuncture has led to converging theorizations from authors with otherwise different theoretical backgrounds. Famously, in her 2007 book Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore defined racism as 'the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death'. 1 The recent research of Leonard Harris tends to corroborate Gilmore's orientation: 'Racism is always a function of the undue loss of life and health. … The probability of death defines racism: who dies, who