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Wellness in Whiteness: Biomedicalization and the Promotion of Whiteness and Youth among Women

Saidiya Hartman, and Frank B. Wilderson, III, among others. “If there was no antiblackness, there would be no black register (2020:3).” The Black Register is a book centered around Sithole’s analyses of those very writers, thinkers, creators producing from a place of ontological dehumanization. In Chapter 1, “Sylvia Wynter: Contra Imperial Man,” Sithole engages with Wynter on the “human question” (2020:31) and explores her confrontation of the Imperial Man. Wynter’s standpoint here is rooted in a Black subjectivity intent on making known the deceit of the Imperial Man, and then intervening by charting “new imaginations of freedom” (2020:58). In the following chapter, “Aimé Césaire and the Scandal of Human,” Sithole investigates the theoretical space of the human/nonhuman in conversation with Aimé Césaire, who argues for a decolonial humanism that combats the dehumanization of colonial subjection, and proposes the useful theoretical equation of “colonization = thingification” (2020:93). Chapter 3, “Steve Biko as the Figure of the Outlawed,” centers on the life and legacy of Steve Biko. Sithole argues against the martyring of Biko—“the figure of the martyr is a depoliticized figure” (2020:110)—and instead underscores that Biko, Black Consciousness, and Black solidarity, should be “engaged in the everyday practices of political life” (2020:110). In Chapter 4, “The Prison Slave Narrative: Assata Shakur and George Jackson’s Captive Flesh,” Sithole explores how Shakur and Jackson reclaim selfhood through their prison writing, while also underscoring their love for Black people—their “loving subjectivity” (2020:171)—that is foundational to their pursuit of liberation, of justice: “Without love, there is no need for the struggle” (2020:172). “For Mabogo P. More: A Meditation” Chapter 5, reads as an intellectual overview of Mabogo P. More’s existential philosophy. Sithole shows how More’s work, rooted in the will to live, argues for thinking of the Black Consciousness not as an “historical event which came and faded” (2020:217), but rather as a “continued presence, a philosophical practice that is still relevant in this antiblack world” (2020:217). Chapter 6, “Marikana: The Conceptual Anxiety of Bare Life,” shifts in approach with Sithole focusing his analysis on the ways the Marikana Massacre of 2012 has been written about, reported on, commemorated, and understood, in the mainstream, and as supported and encouraged by the state. In so doing, Sithole disrupts the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” arguing that Marikana and its aftermath demonstrates clearly how Agamben’s theory did not take into account the condition and positionality of the Black subject: that of being outside the realm of human, of having no ontological density (2020:237). Sithole concludes with “On the Reconfiguration of the Subject,” declaring revolution, not reform: “the conception of reconfiguration should be understood as the Fanonian leap and the infusion of political imagination to create another world, which will be inaugurated only if the antiblack world comes to an absolute end . . . there is a total end and a new beginning” (2020:240). After all, “what the black wants is not to be white, it is to be—that is alive” (2020:259). In other words, “Dehumanization should end now” (2020:29). While some familiarity with conversations in Afro-pessimism, Africana existential philosophy, and critical theory is helpful, this text is suitable for those in the areas of anthropology, Africana studies, sociology, critical theory, and philosophy that are interested in interrogating the implications of anti-Blackness on the Black body, consciousness, and intellectual thought, as well as the accompanying resistance and reconfiguration of a world outside subjection.