Negative Dialectics of the Racial Self: Bhanu Kapil on Writing/not-writing | CU Experts

Here, Higashida says people live in the long shadow of the historical moment that Bhanu Kapil revisits in "Writing/not-writing: th[a][e] Diasporic Self: Notes Toward a Race Riot Scene." As if they need further proof of this fact, the essay cannot help but evoke the 1992 Los Angeles uprising in addition to the 2011 riots beginning in Tottenham London, and spreading throughout England, but she prefers to think about their shared roots in late capitalism's uneven development. This is the historical and political narrative that she extrapolates from Kapil's essay, which for her is a meditation on the "I" that speaks out of and illuminates late capitalisms endemic racialized violence and inequities. Instead of positing the identity or even identities of British Blackness, Kapil conceptualizes the "I" as a vector. Out of these discontinuous histories and struggles, she adds, Kapil's writing/not-writing emerges to negate the nation-state's negations of a diasporic subject who has yet to come to people--"future yellow" and "future black."

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