Two questions frame this response to Amin’s article ‘The Remainders of Race’. It first introduces an epistemological question that recognizes the impossibility of separating ontology and epistemology in modern thought and asks why contemporary studies of racial subjugation so infrequently consider the concept of race’s onto-epistemological function. The second, methodological, question necessarily follows. Acknowledging that ‘the what of race’ cannot be separated from the ‘how of race’ makes it crucial to ask why the former is no longer considered in most (...) analyses of the latter. There follows a mapping of the context of emergence of political-symbolic strategies that carve out racial difference and cultural difference as human (moral) attributes. The article shows that, rather than an extraneous notion or a referent of a natural (god-given) human attribute, the concept of race is the modern ethico-political device that refigures the workings of scientific universality in political and ethical texts. What this does is to enable the argument that, instead of manifestations of human ‘sorting’ instincts, the operatives (juridical, economic and symbolic) of raciality proliferating in the global present consist of biopolitical architectures, mechanisms and procedures designed and assembled with the main tools of racial power/knowledge, namely racial and cultural difference. (shrink)

Vété-Congolo’s challenges us to consider alternative ways of understanding the self and the world outside of racial and other hierarchies. One such alternative she examines in this symposium is formed around the Creole term “moun” (‘human person’) and the phrase “tout moun sé moun” (“all human persons are human persons”). Developed under enslavement on Caribbean plantations, this radical epistemic resistance drove, she argues, Caribbean Pawòl or Caribbean Ethics. Vété-Congolo’s respondents José Cossa and Denise Ferreira da Silva, agree that this black (...) resilience under enslavement needs to be acknowledged as an alternative way of understanding the self’s relation to the world. However, while Cossa clearly distinguishes ‘moun’ from its contemporary European humanistic counterparts, Ferreira da Silva argues that ‘moun’s’ ethical moment should not be considered as belonging to the post-Enlightenment political architecture of equality and freedom, but as an act of rebelry. (shrink)