Thingified Flesh: A Womanist Approach to De/Colonial Reproductive Politics and Research

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Borrowing from Black Studies theorist, Barnor Hesse, I have identified Lorde’s structural, multi-headed monster and its duration through repeated colonial violence as “white sovereignty” (Calvente 271; Hesse 517).2 In Columbus’ biography, his son, Ferdinand Columbus describes how the tribute system to Catholic Sovereigns occurred every three months and, for those children outside of the 14 and older policy, they “were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton” (qtd. in Loewen 56). Tribute payment every three months was an “impossible task” due to the scarcity of gold (Zinn 6).3 While my interpretation of the western world order and its colonial terror and violence is attributed to Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitical life and power, it strays from Mbembe in two distinct ways. First, it does not accept the modernity theorization that western territorialization, i.e., colonization, exists “outside the normal state of law” (Mbembe 13). Territorialization strategies of colonial violence were justified into and as law within the early periods of colonialization including conquest for white sovereignty; this was no paradox but a necessary part of the new world order. Here, I emphasize Mbembe’s point that “the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner” and “colonial wars are conceived of as the expression of an absolute hostility that sets the conqueror against an absolute enemy” (25). Second, I underscore the temporal rather than the spatial when discussing colonized natives and their state of nonbeing. Theorizing upon temporalities breaks away from the space-based permanency of “death worlds” and the “living dead” (Mbembe 40). Not-yet-dead accounts for temporal subjectivities of Black(ened) becoming in terms of both its regulations and its excess possibilities. Aligned with decolonization, alternative temporal subjectivities signify future worlds that are both “anti-capitalist” and “ante-capitalist” (Césaire 44).4 I differentiate labor as “the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life” from work, “the creation of endless artifacts which add to the world of things” (Mbembe 19). Both of these definitions reinforce how white sovereignty operated and depended on colonization and its modes of violent extraction to maintain western life. “Formal humanism” equates human life to White life in the modern world (Césaire 36-37).