The End of Supplication

(Hardback)

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The figure of the supplicant negroa figure famously represented in Josiah Wedgewoods eighteenth-century anti-slavery medallioncontinues to sideline histories of radical Black anti-colonialist struggle. The End of the Supplication contends that Black freedom struggles are anti-colonial movements against anti-Blackness and the permutations of slavery, and as such they are ill-served by a dominant Civil Rights discourse that escapes neither the paternalism of white abolitionism nor the caricatures of minstrelsy. The book traces the roots of the white supremacist ideology behind the disarmed, supplicant-negro figure, and it shows how this ideology continues to inform present liberal presentations of Black people as passive subjects at the mercy of white power, which only reinforces the relatively light consequences white people generally incur for harming Black people. These discussions lead to the conclusion that in our contemporary context of rising, openly white-supremacist politics, the figure of the supplicant negro must be definitively destroyed in order to make way for more effective resistance to anti-Black racism. This book is a must-read for students and researchers interested in colonialism and decolonization, diaspora studies, critical race and whiteness studies, African American studies, Black studies, and indigenous studies. It is also of keen interest for anyone frustrated with the still-recurring admonition to go slow when it comes to eradicating structural racism.

Author Bio

Yannick Giovanni Marshall is an academic and scholar of African Studies, Africana Studies, and Black Studies. He holds an MA in African American Studies and a PhD in Africana Studies from Columbia University, USA, and he is currently Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Knox College, USA. Marshall has published two collections of poetry, regularly contributes editorials and articles to Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Black Perspectives, and has given numerous interviews on race, power, and policing. His writing can be found at yannickgiovannimarshall.net