This book explores the problematic relationship between reconciliation and the continuance of violence and oppression. Frankowski engages with contemporary issues in philosophy of race, African American philosophy, and critical race theory in connection with German idealism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism.

This text explores critical perspectives on the intersections between colonialism, political violence, and environmentalism to deepen our understanding of genocide and genocidal violence.

We were stolen, sold, and brought together from the African continent. We got on the slave ships together. We lay back to belly in the holds of the slave ships in each other’s excrement and urine together, sometimes died together, and our lifeless bodies thrown overboard together. Today, we are standing up together, with faith and even some joy. Within the last seven years or so, the development of postracial politics has been based on and grounded in a central contradiction (...) found in public memory. On the one hand, therefore, we can address our racist past as a collective. On the other hand, political policy and discourse seem to indelibly invoke tropes of color blindness and reverse racism to further the .. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The history of spectacle terror lynching remains one of the darkest and least explored political events in American history. In this article, I explore the aesthetic relation of this history to the formation of notions of public action and political assembly. I argue that the history of spectacle terror lynching establishes both a past and present form of public sovereignty. As such, I attempt to examine questions of what public action means with regard to a political context of antiblack (...) violence. I conclude that lynching festivals constitute not only a form of politics but a form of public sovereignty that is still in play in our notion of the public. At heart this notion informs not only antiblack forms of racism but antiblack forms of genocide. (shrink)