Global War and the Racial Imaginary

In my contribution, I want to show that Henderson’s essay opens a crucial reexamination of the nexus between histories of racial violence, genocide and the social imaginary of the West. Rather than taking for granted the idea that the formation of, and institutionalization of, the modern European/Western state-system constituted as a rational political and legal order—insofar as it circumscribed violence within a certain juridical framework—we need to better understand the consequences how such an order founded on white supremacy unleashed a racialized genocidal violence within itself. My argument here focuses on the concept of race war as way of making intelligible how state strategic action comes to be racialized in what I’ve called, the “global racial imaginary.” I conclude with a gesture towards Afro-pessimism structural understanding of modernity and anti-Blackness.