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| Publications [#383645] of Michaeline A. Crichlow
Essays, Articles, Chapters in Books
- Northover, PM; Crichlow, MA, A Spectral Decoloniality in the Wake of the Slave Nomos,
in Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness Movement Method Poethics
(January, 2025),
pp. 103-139 [doi]
(last updated on 2025/07/05)
Abstract:
An engagement with decoloniality from the place of Blackness is, invariably, a reckoning with time and the spectral. But rather than seeking an exorcism of ghostly things, we wish to address the ghosts haunting our times to grapple with the temporal complexity of decolonial change processes. What form of spectral decolonial poethics is entangled with Blackness in the spatial histories, living memories, and ancestral practices of communities caught up in the performative contradictions of modern/colonial times? We explore this question on the temporal dynamics embedded in decoloniality by meditating on three interpenetrating processes threaded through Blackness, namely: racial abjection—or becoming spectral (haunting) in a politics of disavowal; racial subjection—or becoming spectacle (fungible) in a politics of transparency; and racial objection—or a refusal of the given in a spectacular poethics of “fugitive movement.” To do this, we focus on the problem of the “slave nomos” which gives rise to the “grammar of suffering” that informs the Afropessimist tradition of Black studies, largely because of its role as a fulcrum force sustaining white worlds. As such, this “slave nomos,” provides the principal political orientation for a fungible, fugitive, abolitionist, rehumaning and returning spectral poethics in decolonial Black struggles to be fully free. By examining the mo(ve)ments of decolonial Blackness, we disrupt the ontological constraints of the Afropessimist tradition by drawing attention to the para-ontological and haunting excess of a fugitive returning found in a spectral decolonial politics for re-existencing.
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