The Body’s Legacies Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body

The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body tackles police violence and racial body politics in postcolonial France. Throughout the work four decolonial thinkers and activists—among whom Marboeuf—share thoughts around the subject of the individual and collective racialized body. The exchange pivots around a concrete, devastating instance of racially motivated police aggression where a young man of Congolese descent, Théo Luhaka, was assaulted by police officers following a race-based identity check in a Parisian banlieue in 2017.* Weaved through personal recollections, philosophical perspectives, and sociological scrutiny, there emerges an unambiguous account of present-day police brutality and institutional racism. This powerful testimony of systemic oppression of Black lives draws a straight line from historical colonialism into the present and throws into crisis the self-congratulatory western narrative of progress and reason that has led to contemporary democracy with its supposed all-encompassing equity.