This racial ordering has infiltrated the university, codifying liberal notions of universality to constrain Black futurity, culminating in psychic violence.

In addition, Euromodernity’s schema of racial ordering ensures not only an imprisoning of the black body but also of black reason. The collapse of the slave into the prisoner generates a similar carceral outcome, or as Wilderson puts it, “the Black subject” is but “a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting” (2020, 251). The racial calculus of Euromodern method formulates a social arithmetic where Afrocentricity always equals a breach of civil society and therefore, warrants an expulsion from the body politic—of politics itself. Depoliticizing the black subject as political pathology, as monstrous embodiment, engenders a racial outlaw, a political felon—one who is perpetually conceived as a fugitive of modernity.

Euromodernity’s racial stratification became its most inviolable organizing principle. This separatist imperative of colonial modernity reveals that the need to separate the civilized from the barbarian will always requires an apparatus of control and containment. For this reason, Sarah Haley calls this configuration, “Jim Crow Modernity,” which is “the maintenance of this racial-gendered order vital to a nuanced understanding of the southern carceral regime” (2016, 3). Euromodernity or Jim Crow modernity is both an arrest of black political mobility and deeper still, a seizure of black futurity. What manifests is the displacement of blacks as felons—wards of the carceral state. The penitentiary, in its ongoing racial segregation, remained one of the last bastions of post-Reconstruction segregation: “It is as if the jail were a microcosm of Jim Crow and the organization of the jail an elaboration of a persistent social norm” (Robin 2019, 51). The grammar of Euromodernity also crystallizes what Steve Biko argued to be Apartheid’s defining feature, “a policy of racial segregation based on white superiority and ‘custodianship’ of and political exclusion of blacks” (2002, xxxiii). Custodianship, in its juridical sense, simply means blacks are held in custody—handcuffed—to their white proprietor. Like the plantation before it, the penitentiary stands as the new field of forced labor, whose teleological imperative is black exile, not merely from the temporal present as rights-bearing beings, but equally exile from both past and future. “[T]he history of our day,” as Du Bois observes, is a history of scientific imperialism: “That history may be epitomized in one word—Empire” (2007, 48). Euromodern method, in the Du Boisian view, was a captive enterprise which disavowed to avow “the domination of white Europe over black Africa and yellow Asia, through political power built on the economic control of labor, income and ideas” (ibid). Scientific imperialism constituted Euromodernity’s custody of ideas and its relation to an economy of forced labor regimes.

The penitentiary facilitates the circuitry of an imperial science through penal servitude. The black prisoner self-constitutes a modern crime; after all, during the 20th century, “one in four African American men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine is in prison” (Gilmore 2022, 89). In the 21st century, “[t]he latest projection is that roughly one in three African American boys born in 2001 will eventually be incarcerated at some point in his life” (Muhammad 2019, 281). Blackness as carcerality is an ongoing fatal condition in the Euromodern world—it is temporal imprisonment. Or, to put it plainly, as James Baldwin does, “America has at last found a way of dealing with the Negro problem. ‘They don’t want us—period! ”’ (1998, 738). Penal servitude systemizes ways and means to ensure black exile from the domain of politics through forced labor regimes: “In 2016 some 24,000 prisoners in 29 prisons across the United States went on strike to protest inhuman conditions and unfair pay for work” (Patterson and Zhuo 2018, 421). These anti-black state-sanctioned policies of control and expulsion illuminate a penal matrix of racism, institutionalism and economism, the combination of which produces, “a new neoliberal racial order” that “continue[s] to perpetuate racial inequality in the modern era” (Dawson and Francis 2015, 30). This tragic commerce between race and economics, held together by their culminative effect, would manufacture a form of scientific method colonized by ethno-class logics.

The result births a colonial nexus of capital and labor, what Kenyan thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o labels as the emergence of capitalist modernity: “Colonization with all its interlinked economic, political, cultural and even psychic dimensions, has been central to the making of capitalist modernity” (cited in Rodney 2022, VII). This methodological turn toward capitalist modernity reproduces what Walter Rodney condemns as “bourgeois empiricism,” whose mode of rationalist justification substitutes black radical truth-telling for European myth-making (2022, 185). As such, Du Bois posits “industrial imperialism in America” was the consequence of Euromodern method and its mode of bourgeois empiricism, owing to the longstanding historical relation between science and empire (2007, 48). This formula of colonial-imperialism mass produced human subjects for the explicit purposes of captivity—a capture of both mind and body. The penitentiary towers as modernity’s indispensable instrument for enacting such a neoliberal racial regime. This nexus between method and Euromodernity enacted “the expulsion of black men from American democracy,” reproduced in its contemporary form through mass incarceration as a form of racial “caste control” (Du Bois 2007, 48). Race, as a modern caste system, anchors itself as the locus of power in the Euromodern world through the hierarchization of hues—this method was, as it were, a commerce of color. The existence of the plantation-penitentiary also conditions the formation of carceral subjectivities raced as black felons. In the final analysis, the captivity of the black body from plantation to penitentiary witnesses its completion through the imprisoning of black bodies of thought in order to annihilate any contravening, emancipatory methods.

The Euromodern Incarceration of Black Studies

Katherine McKittrick posits the existential weight of “science” for the black thinker who has to bear heavily a “monumental system of knowledge that is fueled by colonial and plantocratic logics,” a weightiness that “bears down on all black people, inside and outside the academy, and puts pressure on their physiological and psychic and political well-being” (2021, 3). Sedimented by colonial epistemologies that reconstructs the fields of plantocratic captivity, the recursive violence of Euromodern method occasions the arrest of black dialectical thought. Nowhere is this more certain than in the quest for a black humanism outside the narrow precincts of European Enlightenment, beyond the discursive corridors of Euromodernity. Frederick Douglass’ “Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” made manifest the epistemic unrest and racial violence inherent in the Euromodern scientific apparatus. For the black subject, method incarcerates humanhood within the cages of brutehood so as “to enslave and imbrute him” (1854, 34). Yet, in contesting modernity’s concretion of blackness as being anterior to, or outside of, the “natural history of man,” Douglass critically interrogates the category of Euromodern humanism by chronicling the epistemic failures of method, or what he dubs, “ethnological science” (1854, 3; 5). Deeper still, at the crux of Douglass’ dialectical method—the negation of a negation (disavowing method’s unscientific science)—lies a radical recasting of black humanism outside the carceral trappings of Euromodern methodologies of being: “Away, therefore, with all the scientific moonshine that would connect men with monkeys; that would have the world believe that humanity, instead of resting on its own characteristic pedestal—gloriously independent—is a sort of sliding scale” (1854, 8). This hierarchization of being is a consequence of a liberal modernity or as Lisa Lowe states: “[m]odern hierarchies of race appear to have emerged in the contradiction between liberal aspirations to universality and the needs of modern colonial regimes to manage work” (2015, 36). Therefore, in the modernization of plantocratic logics—whether in agricultural fields or discursive fields—imposed penal labor practices culminate to produce carceral bodies of reason—the violent capture of black reason through the scientific apparatus of Euromodern method. Stuart Hall maintains, “[i]t is not the status of racist discourse as ‘scientific’ but the fact that its elements function discursively which enables it to have ‘real effects”’ (2021, 347). The historical movement from black barbarity to black criminality is hardly an abstraction. Understood as a zone of cultural dissolution, policing, raiding, and the accosting of black life ends in either natural or discursive death. Genocide is accompanied by ethnocide, or more surgically, Negrocide —black political elimination. This arresting of blackness reveals itself at two critical junctures: slave labor then and discursive labor now. What, then, might it mean to be “laboring subjects of history” within the fields of discursive labor practices (Lowe 2015, 143)? What are black bodies of reason if not captives to carceral methodologies?

The inaugural turn to Black Studies as a historicizing of the black subject, and her ways of being human, stood as a denial, or at the very least, a contestation of Euromodern method and its hierarchy of racial configurations. Sylvia Wynter argues Black Studies was actualized as a product of the radical imaginary of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, with “original transgressive intentions,” whose revolutionary ire partly fueled not only by the arrest of anti-racist black thought, but also due to its embodied assassination à la “the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.” (2006, 109; 108). That radical posture of the resituation and reconstruction of the black subject became a form of discursive laboring, whose effect induced a violent penal counterreaction. Perhaps this explains the imprisoning of black reason, in its disciplinary appearance, as a field of thought. For example, Hortense J. Spillers argues, “in the past, detractors of Black Studies model disparaged it because it was said to be an unresearched field” (2003, 467). Such carceral methodologies enabled Euromodernity’s ongoing arrest of Afrocentric discursive labor: “Still called ‘victim studies’ by those who have no idea what its architects were aiming for, and who have no interest in knowing, it is, to their mind, the sign of ‘Africanity’—the illegitimate issue of an unnamed and unnamable source” (2003, 470). Black Studies is one congealed and prefigured in an ahistorical account around the “natural history of man.” Put another way, Euromodernity instituted the naturalization of black humanity by eternally suspending the question of its capacity for historical contingency. As such, blackness became an already known quantity and locked up, as it were, in an Old World racial historiography. This is what Du Bois means when he writes, “If the Negro was admittedly sub-human, what need to waste time delving into his…history?” (1998, 727).

The question, then, of the sub -discipline of Black Studies, as it is still sometimes referred, becomes reducible to blackness as sub-human. The latter lacks the civilizational development of the human being, the former lacks the epistemic maturity of a scientific method. As a logical consequence, and to little surprise, Black Studies, as a sub-discipline, lacks canonical infrastructure in Europe. The scientific archeology of blackness, underwritten by the co-articulation of method and modernity, avows Black Studies as carceral reason. Accordingly, Black Studies is condemned as being outside the discursive field and therefore, exoticized as a site of affect over and above reason. Captive to plantocratic logics, Black Studies become conceptually contained and canonically confined. For instance, short-circuited funding and other forms of pecuniary disinvestments plague Black Studies programs since their early inception (see Alkalimat 2021). What’s more, following the surge in recognition in 2020 around the Black Lives Matter Movement, there was a deluge of race-conscious “cluster hires” across the landscape of the American academe for the re-absorption of black faculty, arguably under the banner of liberal modernity’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. However, those hiring trajectories have largely waned. Ad hoc hiring and funding mechanisms continuously reveal the liminal zone to which black reason is trapped. In the main, liminality, or as Patterson once labelled it, “institutionalized liminality,” is a form of imprisonment to the margins (2018, 340). To be sure, the consequences are far reaching across the symbolic universe of political practice, for an arrested Black Studies cannot relink the ruptures between praxis and theory. Nevertheless, even there, the possibility of eruptions and irruptions are made manifest in a Black Studies that functions as both decarceral and abolitionist praxis: “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (Harney and Moten 2013, 42). The potentiality of Black Studies, and even beyond it, black reason, lies in building a culture of transformation. Or, as Amílcar Cabral restates it, there must be a reinstituted truth-based scientific order for the ongoing demands of cultural transformation: “we have to base our culture on science. We have to rid our culture of everything insofar as it is antiscientific” (2016, 124). Euromodern carceral methods delimit Black Studies as “antiscientific” phenomena, by which I mean to say its subject of study is always already illicit. Stuart Hall explains these cohering plantocratic logics as follows: