Black under settler colonialism: Caren Holmes, ‘Afrofuturist Responses to State Violence’, Brief Encounters, 4, 1, 2020, pp. 12-18 | settler colonial studies blog

Black under settler colonialism: Caren Holmes, ‘Afrofuturist Responses to State Violence’, Brief Encounters, 4, 1, 2020, pp. 12-18

29Mar20

Excerpt: The African diasporic subject encounters the territories of occupied North America within a ‘post abduction existence’. Contemporary manifestations of state violence and dehumanization are reproductions of generational legacies of mass incarceration, apartheid and slavery imposed upon those racialized by categories developed to alienate the original class of abductees. In 1988, the American hip hop group Public Enemy proclaimed in a song, ‘Armageddon been-in-effect’ for the African diaspora: that is to say that ‘the conditions that continue to restrict black freedom and foreclose black futures mark the aftershocks of a man-made apocalypse’, also known as the transatlantic slave trade. In this essay, I explore two short stories written by Black authors in the United States. Each imagines Black resistance to the American settler colonial condition and to futurist mutations of state violence imposed upon Black and Brown communities. Both stories conceive of creative strategies through which their characters confront forms of structural and material violence which imprisons Black life in and outside of prisons and situates it closer to death. Several scholars have understood and represented the experience of Black people in settler colonial North America as that of the alien or post-human subject.

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