Sara‐maria Sorentino
Biographic Data
| ID | 4447918 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara‐maria Sorentino |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara‐maria |
| FAMILY NAME | Sorentino |
| SIGNATURE | SORENTINO S M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alabama |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Between Revelation and Reflexivity: Introducing the Leap of Black Studies
Book Forum: Posthuman Dialectics and the Underdetermination of Human Capacity, For Better and Worse Posthuman Dialectics and the Underdetermination of Human Capacity, For Better and Worse
Money, slavery, myth
The article engages relays between the origins of money and origins of slavery, using Marxist reconstructions of "substance" in order to approach the negative zone of anti-blackness. In one move, I read money and slavery as two sides of the same coin: expressions of anxieties concerning equivalences that cannot be in reality (money) and inequalities that persist in democratic life (slavery). In another, I continue to argue that slavery exerts an …
Abolish the Oikos
Apparent similarities between Marxism and Afro-pessimism on questions of abstraction, social reproduction, and abolition have curiously not marked the beginning of a conversation. To gauge the dimensions of this halted conversation, this article explores the uses of the oikos in theorizing the demands of the present. Drawing from conflictual interpretations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Politics and reading against the grain of Marxist feminism,…
Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change
Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon presents readers with two Fanons: the dialectical prophet of change and the anti-dialectician of destruction. The first Fanon lives above ground in the world we recognize as synthetic and systemic. Taking center stage are translations, theories of revolutions that recompose the possible from the given. For Arnall’s dominant Fanon, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into …
Pathology without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness and Metaphors of Disease
In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing …
Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation: Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg
This essay explores Sylvia Wynter’s appropriation of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s “reoccupation thesis” to clarify a number of key metaphysical moves in Wynter’s oeuvre with respect to her sociogenic method. We are motivated by the sense that attending to Wynter’s reading of Blumenberg will afford appreciation of her return to Scholastic questions, including 1) how this return activates the problem of race in the longue durée and 2) what …
The Intrusion of Slavery into the Time of Schmitt and Shakespeare
“A lot turns on the specific interpretation of the intrusions into the purity of the play that Schmitt describes,” write David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton in their introduction to Carl Schmitt’s fecund yet puzzling text Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).1 What is “a lot”—this almost everything, but not quite? A lot turns on the interpretation of intrusion, yes, and not simply for our understanding of the internal integrity of Schmitt’s essay, or his corp…
Mistresses as Masters
Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While "benevolence" has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses' violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women's power nonetheless relies on standards of hi…
So-Called Indigenous Slavery: West African Historiography and the Limits of Interpretation
This essay explores the mobilization of so-called "indigenous slavery" in the historiography of slavery in West Africa in order to expose the limits of historiographical interpretation and the tensions between black studies and African studies, which are here constituted around a shared negativity. This discussion provides some context for the debates of historians Walter Rodney and J.D. Fage, while also bringing these concerns into explicit conv…
Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”
This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and…
The Calculus of “Flood Proportions”: Reading Martin Luther King, Jr., When It Is Too Late
I open with how Martin Luther King, Jr., closes his 1968 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”1 In this, the third and last of his “political autobiographies,”2 King strikes a tone more radical and melancholic than the King of public memory. His future-orientation is complicated, even subdued, by mathematical metaphor…
Natural Slavery, Real Abstraction, and the Virtuality of Anti-Blackness
The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method
“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for…
On Slavery and the Study of Surveillance
Ongoing mass mobilizations against both the radically invasive surveillance state and the extrajudicial murder of black people begs the question of their relation: is anti-black violence but a parochial version of a more generalizable problem of power? The interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies typically responds in the affirmative. Finding commonalities across various sites of social control, surveillance studies has become especially p…
Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”
This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and…
The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method
“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for…
Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation: Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg
This essay explores Sylvia Wynter’s appropriation of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s “reoccupation thesis” to clarify a number of key metaphysical moves in Wynter’s oeuvre with respect to her sociogenic method. We are motivated by the sense that attending to Wynter’s reading of Blumenberg will afford appreciation of her return to Scholastic questions, including 1) how this return activates the problem of race in the longue durée and 2) what …
Mistresses as Masters
Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While "benevolence" has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses' violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women's power nonetheless relies on standards of hi…
Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change
Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon presents readers with two Fanons: the dialectical prophet of change and the anti-dialectician of destruction. The first Fanon lives above ground in the world we recognize as synthetic and systemic. Taking center stage are translations, theories of revolutions that recompose the possible from the given. For Arnall’s dominant Fanon, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into …
On Slavery and the Study of Surveillance
Ongoing mass mobilizations against both the radically invasive surveillance state and the extrajudicial murder of black people begs the question of their relation: is anti-black violence but a parochial version of a more generalizable problem of power? The interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies typically responds in the affirmative. Finding commonalities across various sites of social control, surveillance studies has become especially p…
Natural Slavery, Real Abstraction, and the Virtuality of Anti-Blackness
The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method
“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the content and form of slavery is not usually up for…
So-Called Indigenous Slavery: West African Historiography and the Limits of Interpretation
This essay explores the mobilization of so-called "indigenous slavery" in the historiography of slavery in West Africa in order to expose the limits of historiographical interpretation and the tensions between black studies and African studies, which are here constituted around a shared negativity. This discussion provides some context for the debates of historians Walter Rodney and J.D. Fage, while also bringing these concerns into explicit conv…
Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”
This essay offers a critical analysis of the metaphysical and methodological presuppositions of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. While Tuck and Yang position settler colonial spatiality as structured by a settler‐native‐slave triad, we argue that their critique of metaphor entails the collapse of the triad into a settler‐native dyad, the reduction of slavery to forced labour, and a division between the material and…
The Calculus of “Flood Proportions”: Reading Martin Luther King, Jr., When It Is Too Late
I open with how Martin Luther King, Jr., closes his 1968 book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”1 In this, the third and last of his “political autobiographies,”2 King strikes a tone more radical and melancholic than the King of public memory. His future-orientation is complicated, even subdued, by mathematical metaphor…
The Intrusion of Slavery into the Time of Schmitt and Shakespeare
“A lot turns on the specific interpretation of the intrusions into the purity of the play that Schmitt describes,” write David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton in their introduction to Carl Schmitt’s fecund yet puzzling text Hamlet or Hecuba (1956).1 What is “a lot”—this almost everything, but not quite? A lot turns on the interpretation of intrusion, yes, and not simply for our understanding of the internal integrity of Schmitt’s essay, or his corp…
Mistresses as Masters
Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While "benevolence" has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses' violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women's power nonetheless relies on standards of hi…
Pathology without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness and Metaphors of Disease
In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing …
Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation: Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg
This essay explores Sylvia Wynter’s appropriation of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s “reoccupation thesis” to clarify a number of key metaphysical moves in Wynter’s oeuvre with respect to her sociogenic method. We are motivated by the sense that attending to Wynter’s reading of Blumenberg will afford appreciation of her return to Scholastic questions, including 1) how this return activates the problem of race in the longue durée and 2) what …
Abolish the Oikos
Apparent similarities between Marxism and Afro-pessimism on questions of abstraction, social reproduction, and abolition have curiously not marked the beginning of a conversation. To gauge the dimensions of this halted conversation, this article explores the uses of the oikos in theorizing the demands of the present. Drawing from conflictual interpretations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Politics and reading against the grain of Marxist feminism,…
Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change
Gavin Arnall’s Subterranean Fanon presents readers with two Fanons: the dialectical prophet of change and the anti-dialectician of destruction. The first Fanon lives above ground in the world we recognize as synthetic and systemic. Taking center stage are translations, theories of revolutions that recompose the possible from the given. For Arnall’s dominant Fanon, “to theorize is to translate, to dialectically convert any inherited doctrine into …
Money, slavery, myth
The article engages relays between the origins of money and origins of slavery, using Marxist reconstructions of "substance" in order to approach the negative zone of anti-blackness. In one move, I read money and slavery as two sides of the same coin: expressions of anxieties concerning equivalences that cannot be in reality (money) and inequalities that persist in democratic life (slavery). In another, I continue to argue that slavery exerts an …
Book Forum: Posthuman Dialectics and the Underdetermination of Human Capacity, For Better and Worse Posthuman Dialectics and the Underdetermination of Human Capacity, For Better and Worse
Between Revelation and Reflexivity: Introducing the Leap of Black Studies
Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works)