Toward a Black Radical Critique of Natality

Abstract

In this article I criticize Hannah Arendt's concept of natality as unable to confront the ways in which racial capitalism links the biopolitical cultivation of natality to the necropolitical natal alienation that is structural to modern slavery. I base this argument in an understanding of social death as the production of racial capitalism, one that gives slavery an aftermath, post-abolition, which continues to dispossess Black and brown people of their capacity to begin something anew via their inclusion into juridical personhood. I conclude this article with an articulation of the political impossibility of Black and brown people to begin something anew under a polis that remains structured by racial capitalism in Ralph Ellison's phenomenological description of the invisible man's misrecognized new beginnings with the Brotherhood.