Introduction “The Angel Would Like to Stay, Awaken the Dead, and Make Whole What Has Been Smashed”

This book shows that racialized subjects are formations that arise out of historically specific projects and strategic relations of power — in this case study, the early modern project of colony building on Manhattan Island and its relations of colonial domination. This introductory chapter narrates that during the early modern era of European expansion and the emergence of the capitalist world system, Manhattan Island became a crossroads for the articulation of the ideal and material relations of colonial domination that produced relationally constituted and differentially value racialized subjects — for example, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized, enslaver and enslaved, black and white. It notes that the quasi-military trading monopoly known as the Dutch West India Company built the first colonial outpost on Manhattan Island.

Articulation (sociology) · Colonialism · Economics · Economy · Genealogy · Ideal (ethics) · Market economy · Monopoly · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · White (mutation) · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law