Shackled Democratically? Global Raciality, Terror, and the Black Body

After a series of black youth deaths protesters have taken to the streets challenging the idea that black bodies do not matter in a democracy that promises the world to the world. The protests in several cities in the US have increased along with other protests in other parts of the world. Emerging revolutionary racialized and sexual poetics, I argue, ride the transformative power of the 'erotic' while resisting and interrupting tired gendered and universal portrayals of a democracy of potentiality with a masculine rational forward West-subject as its global agent. The practical and conceptual shifts of the protests in New York City and Ferguson present an energy that disrupts 'business as usual' global raciality and substantively transforms racialized relations. The protester's poetry (poems, slogans, songs) is an essential driver of this energy which contests fetishized syndromes of democratic transformation challenging the ways such democracy shackles and kills black bodies. In fact, these protests speak of the black body and of a democracy otherwise. About the Lecturer: Anna M. Agathangelou, Associate Professor of York University and Fellow Science, Technology and Society at John F. Kennedy School, Harvard