Black Critical and Cultural Theory

This year saw texts concerned with mass incarceration, slavery, surveillance, historiography, the politics of freedom and race and modernity. The first three texts under review by Talitha Leflouria, Dennis Childs and Simone Browne on black incarceration and surveillance suggest that the difficulty of imagining and realizing black freedom in modernity is intimately tied to the difficulty of constructing a history in the shadow of New World chattel slavery. This thematic concern extends to the work of Neil Roberts and Sylvia Wynter wherein the dominant subject of History must be unsettled in order that something like black history might emerge. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Black Political Theory and Black History; 2. Prison, Slavery Studies and Black Historiography; 3. Surveillance Studies and Black Visual Culture; 4. Black Political Theory and Freedom; 5. Philosophy and Cultural Theory. Jeramy DeCristo has composed the introduction as well as the first three sections and David Marriott has written the final section.