| Abstract | This chapter takes up the Black Lives Matter movement that appeared in the United States in recent years, organizing and coordinating responses to racialized state violence against black and brown persons, in order to analyze the biopolitics of racialization in relation to critiques of the dominant conception of “the human” in global politics. Drawing on the theories of Sylvia Wynter and Alexander Weheliye, as well as feminist and queer analyses of Black Lives Matter, we argue that prevailing ways of thinking “the human” as a source of the common in political struggle must attend to the relations among racialization, dehumanization, and affect. In the final section, we focus on a shift from “the body” to “the flesh” in black thought, one that allows us to conceptualize “fleshy pedagogies” that open onto forms of alterhumanist struggle against racialized state violence. |
