Abstract

Amid an ongoing global pandemic that targets the respiratory system, access to air, to breath, and to life has become a metaphor for ongoing systemic inequalities and exclusions. It is a moment, as Achille Mbembe notes, that renders breath a "fundamental right to existence" that cannot be "confiscated and thereby eludes all sovereignty" (62). Yet, as the fundamental ground on which human life is premised, breath has—during the transatlantic slave trade, through regimes of colonialism and imperialism, and continuing through the present in state-sanctioned murders of Black women, men, and children by the police—functioned historically as a site of racial terror. In other words, the deprivation and weaponization of... Read More.