Another becoming-black of the world: neoliberalism and anti-racist struggles

Abstract

Extending a concept of Achille Mbembe, this essay proposes the notion of “another becoming black of the world” as a category capable of making the relations between race and capital thinkable within the dimension of social struggles. Crossing bibliographical research and conjuncture analysis, the relations between race and capital are discussed, on the one hand, as operations of power that structure new generalizing slippages of racial/social subjection and hierarchization in the context of neoliberal capitalism; on the other, by analyzing the emergence of a global set of social struggles involving the protests of Black Lives Matter. This “another becoming black of the world” exceeds the merely critical or diagnostic functions of the ongoing powers existing in the category of “becoming black of the world” and, encompassing them, reveals the points of contact in which anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles intercept one another in the context of neoliberalism.