ABSTRACT

On February 23rd, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man out for a jog in Georgia, was murdered by two white men who, acting as vigilantes, assumed Arbery was responsible for recent burglaries. While Blacks being murdered by whites in America is nothing new, new theories of identification – specifically, assemblage theory and identitarian articulations – offer us tools to better understand how such events take place. Specifically, we argue that racialization occurs not just on the body, but through a complex process resulting in ‘race’ immanently emerging as the outcome of an assemblage. In this article, we show, first, that Arbery, through no fault of his own, entered into a ‘Neighborhood Watch Assemblage’ that already anticipated the body of a Black man that would fulfill an overdetermined role as ‘criminal’ and that this identitarian articulation emerges through the arrangement of several identifications, bodies, technologies, objects, discourses, affects, and emotions that, together, actualize ‘races’ on bodies. Tragically, in this case, death became a capacity of the assemblage. In contrast to the death of an innocent man in Georgia, we secondly analyze what occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a ‘Law and Order’ assemblage’s outcome resulted in a White identitarian articulation not being, initially, interpellated as ‘criminal’ even though the person had committed murder. Overall, we show that assemblage theory and the concept of identitarian articulations help us better understand such occurrences. Such analyses can shed a different light on episodes of systemic racism and can, eventually, help in overcoming it.

摘要

2020 年 2 月 23 日，在佐治亚州外出慢跑的黑人艾哈迈德·阿伯里被两名白人谋杀，他们作为义务警员，认为阿伯里应对最近的盗窃案负责。虽然黑人在美国被白人杀害并不是什么新鲜事，但新的身份认同理论——特别是组合理论和身份认同理论——为我们提供了更好地理解此类事件如何发生的工具。具体来说，我们认为种族化不仅发生在身体上，而且通过一个复杂的过程，导致“种族”作为集合的结果而内在地出现。在这篇文章中，我们首先展示了 Arbery，并非他自己的过错，进入了一个“邻里监视组合”，它已经预料到一个黑人的身体将扮演一个过度确定的“罪犯”角色，并且这种身份主义的表达是通过对几个身份、身体、技术、物体、话语、影响的安排而出现的，和情感一起在身体上实现“种族”。可悲的是，在这种情况下，死亡成为了组合的一种能力。与佐治亚州一名无辜男子的死亡相反，我们第二次分析威斯康星州基诺沙发生的事情，在那里，“法律与秩序”集会的结果导致白人身份认同的表述最初没有被传唤为“犯罪”，尽管人犯了谋杀罪。总的来说，我们表明组合理论和同一性表达的概念有助于我们更好地理解此类事件。