This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and the symbolic that forecloses not only an analysis of slavery, but also the constitution of settler colonialism itself. Through an immanent critique of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” we identify what animates their critique of metaphor, and drawing on scholarship in Black studies, we offer an alternative theorisation of slavery and settler colonialism.

White over black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death;hence, the end of forever. [1] But before 'race,' something else has happened, both within the context of 'race' and alongside it. [2] [1] Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, a "global analysis of the institution of slavery," has become the elliptic center of the socio-historical scholarship on slavery. [3] A "landmark," a "cornerstone," generating a figural economy that telescopes debates about domination and resistance, retention and originality, and the methodologies that get us here or there, Patterson's conceptualization of "social death" has traversed disciplinary boundaries and is mobilized in radical black studies, comparative literature, psychoanalysis, sociology, cultural studies, political science, anthropology, archaeology, and history. [4] Indeed, Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, or more precisely, his titular concept-metaphor "social death," tellingly appears in those works pushing the pertinence of disciplinary boundaries to the breaking point. While the basic tenets of his thesis circulate widely, the historiographical origins, political stakes, and theoretical tensions internal to his intervention are less understood. Is Patterson read well?Save for the first few pages of the book's introduction, is he read at all? I contend that there is something symptomatic in the relative staying power of social death, of social death as a question on which to project one's own political and philosophical positions. Historical cipher, philosophical allegory, explanatory device or heuristic, political technology or regime, diffusive status of the marginalized, practice of exclusion, political ontology, effect and threat: social death's proliferating use or disuse is not incidental, but is the whisper, rather, of secrets harbored deep within, and on the surface of, the malign metaphysics of slavery, echoing everywhere as time and space. Mysticism in the flesh. [5] While texts are written to confirm or combat both the historical instance and political pertinence of social death, there are questions that go unasked. To start: What is social? What is death? Who decides their presumed relation, and how has this relation been indelibly seared and severed and sutured by the violence of slavery? [2] These questions are less an attempt to "out" other scholars for their thin scholarship than an endeavor to raise a doubled query about the status of the mobility of a concept in our unethical and anti-black

Abstract“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for debate, only the status of its interaction with capitalist circuits (a rearrangement of difference within unity). Mirroring the Marxist methodology of rising from the “abstract” to the “concrete,” this article moves to substitute the abstraction of labor with that of slavery and closes by restaging the concrete development of “real subsumption” through the problem of abolition. Such a substitution deconstructs Marx's method by situating slavery's transposition to brute force (and race's reduction to false consciousness) as the productive source of the capitalist form of value.

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Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While “benevolence” has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses’ violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women’s power nonetheless relies on standards of historiographical interpretation—the predominance of political economy, the imperatives of affect and agency—it does not sufficiently access how historiographical methods participate in stabilizing gender and pathologizing black rage. This article proposes that the difference between the mistress and master is a fantasy necessary to the circulation of the libidinal economy of slavery. In doing so, it pursues an inquiry into the pleasures of interpretation and speculates on the ways historiography invests in the white woman in order to extend its interlocutory life.