Subjects & Subjection: European Traders, African Sovereigns & Representing Lost Pasts

Employing the familiar philosophical framing, Subject & Subjection, this talk brings into relief an overlooked moment in the African-Christian encounter. “I am overdetermined from without,” wrote Frantz Fanon in reference to a decidedly modern colonial context refracting the existentialist dilemma configured by subject and subjection. But as this talk argues, reducing subject and subjection to a singular past risks overdetermining and reducing blackness to a mere negation thereby losing sight of experiences that exceeded governance mediated by early-modern difference (race) and materiality (capitalism).