The world as police
Trafford, James (2022) The world as police. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (38). ISSN 1555-9998
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This article argues that colonial modernity birthed the police as a world-shaping force that came to define both civil society and the world itself. By staging a relationship between plantation Barbados and Kant’s Enlightenment, I suggest that the transformation from European frontier to established world required subjugating violence to be everywhere made pervasive and entrenched. The ascent to humanity under colonial modernity conjoined the construction of whiteness to the subjugation and death of Black people. As such, the supposed absorption of enslavement into legal frameworks became the pre-condition for its continuation as white collective society was strengthened through and as policing Black people. Since the literal blood and sand of the colonised continue to be the grounds of white life, the question of abolition thus requires us to reach far beyond the institution of the police.
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