Embodying the Cipher: Revolt and Reconfiguring "Blackness" in the Black Radical Movement

Abstract

As Abdul JanMohamed points out about the racialized subject, “all socio-political-cultural relations on the racial border are predicated on the definition of the ‘other’, the black [subject], as nonhuman, as a being who does not belong to the human realm of the master’s society and who consequently has no ‘rights’ within that society” (JanMohamed 1992, 97). Thus, the cultural politics of inscribing the racial border gets predicated, among other things, upon the hysterical denial of the black subject’s “humanity.” Within the colonialist Manichean economy of producing socio-historical dissimilarities between the imperialist and the colonized subjects in terms of universalized moral/metaphysical binaries, “blackness” often becomes a powerful signifier of the ultimate evil—”non identity.”