Introduction: “Engaging with the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva”

Abstract

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?’