This interdisciplinary forum convenes a wide-ranging conversation centred around the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose unrelenting
inquiry locates the workings of raciality in the very constitution of the
modern subject, and, relatedly, global and historical consciousness. Da
Silva’s excavation of raciality is consequently ...
This interdisciplinary forum convenes a wide-ranging conversation centred around the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose unrelenting
inquiry locates the workings of raciality in the very constitution of the
modern subject, and, relatedly, global and historical consciousness. Da
Silva’s excavation of raciality is consequently expansive in its implications and fundamental in its focus. Throughout her oeuvre, including
Unpayable Debt (2022) and Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), the crucial
role of ‘law’ in legitimizing the modern, global racial and economic
order remains a central problem. Da Silva’s decolonial agenda will meet
with immediate sympathy from many in anthropology – a discipline
that has engaged in sustained auto-critique of its own complicity in
racialized colonial rule for decades (see Asad 1975; Lewis 1973; Pels and
Salemink 2000; for a contemporary instance, cf. Price 2011). However, da
Silva shows that any narrow focus on specifc direct linkages to related
problematics of knowledge production occludes the constitutive role of
modern subjectivity in the globalization of modern juridical rule itself.
The ambition of da Silva’s excavation addresses, among other things,
such recurring questions for legal anthropology as: ‘who has law and
in what sense can diferent populations be said to have law?’; ‘how has
the idea of “law” helped to reproduce the very world wrought by the
post-Enlightenment?’; and ‘How might we test the limits of law?’
