(Im)possible Breathing: On Courage and Criticality in the Ghostly Historical Present

Abstract

Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the figure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breathability in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in multiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its differential and differentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by suffocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination.