Black feminism is entrenched in biocapitalism. Only by refusing the economic structure on which neoliberalism sustains itself, can one experience emergent cultural practices and reform

In reading Butler’s fictions as contributing to and nuancing a black feminist philosophy of history keyed to the rise of neoliberalism, I treat it as a meditation on evolving forms of racialized and gendered dispossession as these are recalibrated to changes in the mode of (re)production the rise of contemporary biocapitalism and consolidated by a postracial ideology that disavows the salience of processes of reproductive racialization to the extraction of life itself on which biocapitalism depends. To further develop this reading of Butler’s literary fictions, throughout this chapter I draw on Raymond Williams’s ideas about “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” cultural formations.10 Though Williams did not consider racial or gendered power when he developed these analytical concepts in the 1970s, his ideas about how cultural formations mediate historical and thus material processes resonates with Butler’s ideas about mediation as expressed in her novels about enslavement. As Williams’s conceptual trilogy suggests, literature not only allows for apprehension of dominant cultural formations; it also allows us to access “residual” (formed in the past but still “active” in the present) and “emergent” (“alternative” and yet often inchoate) cultural formations that continuously exert pressure on, compete with, and reshape dominant ones. Whereas residual formations are routinely incorporated into dominant ones through processes of reinterpretation, dilution, projection, inclusion, and exclusion, emergent cultural formations reveal “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” (123). Emergent formations come in two varieties: those that are elements of some new phase of the dominant culture, and those that are “substantially alternative or oppositional to it” and thus connected directly, if unevenly, to the emergence of new social classes (123). When we take up Williams’s conceptual terminology, we see more clearly how Butler’s fictions render visible the incorporation and reinterpretation of racial slavery as a residual formation within the dominant biocapitalist processes that are depicted. Put in the language used elsewhere in this book, Butler’s fictions render visible the sublation (read the negation and the preservation) of slavery in biocapitalism. In giving expression to more than one cultural formation and representing more than one economic formation (or, perhaps more aptly, in representing what Stuart Hall would describe as complexly articulated economic formations, including slavery and biocapitalism), Butler’s fictions reveal the contestation that goes on among the array of reproductive cultural projects that are currently in existence.11 In so doing they make visible the afterlife of reproductive slavery in the form of a cultural residue that is alive and well in contemporary biocapitalism. And they reveal the possibility of opposition to biocapitalism and neoliberalism in the form of emergent cultural processes. These emergent cultural processes might ideally challenge the hegemony, by rejecting the ideologies that secure the smooth functioning of racial capitalism and biocapitalism through elevation of neoliberal market values in all social interactions and celebration of the obsolescence of race. By refusing to represent clean breaks and discrete historical epochs, by insisting on complex economic structuration, Butler’s fictions reveal multiple modes of production vying for hegemony. And they reveal that an active and ongoing contest for reproductive hegemony is always already under way. Recognizing (albeit without citing) the Benjaminian maxim “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” Butler uses fiction as a weapon in a war against “the enemy” (read: historicism), refusing, through creation of her various dystopian worlds, to allow the enemy “to be victorious.”12 She does not pander to myths of progressive departure, or to the inevitability of defeat. Instead she offers us an array of representations and a philosophy of history in view of which she invites readers to grasp the material complexity in which we have been and continue to be immersed. In so doing she urges her readers to stop wasting time—to jump into what amounts to an ideological fray. After all, the outcome will determine our collective future.