Is the world a captivity?
Anti-Blackness, death, and freedom in Two Distant Strangers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30962/e-comps.3278Keywords:
Anti-blackness, Black social death, Racial hatred, Images of anti-blacknessAbstract
This essay produces a reflection on the concept of anti-blackness, from the philosophical perspective of Afropessimism. In view of the images of police violence and death presented in the short film Two Distant Strangers, we highlight how anti-black racial hatred produces regimes of representation that contribute to the naturalization of the view of racial violence. We identified a parallel between the scenes in the film, the images of George Floyd's death in 2020, and other cases of racial hatred with widespread media coverage (images of anti-blackness), indicating the existence of power dynamics based on Black social death as an existential condition, thus forging a conception of the world as a great contemporary captivity.
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