I.

In a 2023 keynote lecture titled “The Fugitive and the fugitive” (October 5, 2023, at ASAP/14: Arts of Fugitivity Conference, University of Washington, Seattle), Fred Moten began––as to be expected with his dedication to the sonic realm and phonic matter and their intrinsic connection to an iteration of freedom––with a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1956 musical composition “A Drum is a Woman.” From there Moten carried the audience to the story of Henry Clay: a 100-year-old “ex-slave” (Baker 1996, 79) who was interviewed as part of a US Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s and became one of the re-discovered interviewees to be published in The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives (1996), edited by Lindsay T. and Julie P. Baker. In his narration, Clay speaks about a “whipping machine,” a term prominently featured by Edward E. Baptist in his acclaimed 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism in which torture is established and conceived of as a (central) factor of US American capitalist production, as technology. Many names, all gathered here in the perimeter of histories so violent that also the present moment makes perfect sense.

“Out of the whipping machine comes the drum,” Moten says.

Out of the whipping machine comes the drum.

Let’s stay with Henry Clay for now:

Old Master was awfully kind and religious. I think he would preach a little sometime or maybe teach sunday school. I never seen him whip a slave, but he had a whipping machine, to scare them with mostly. (Baker 1996, 81)

That whipping machine was a funny thing. Old Master just had it to set around so the slaves could see it I think. He loaned it out to a man one time though, and the man used it. It was a big wooden wheel with a treadle to it, and when you tromp the treadle the big wheel go round. On that wheel was four or five big leather straps with holes cut in them to make blisters, and you lay the negro down on his face on a bench and tie him to it and set the machine close to him. Then when you tromp the treadle the wheel go round and flop them straps across his bare back and raise the skin. Getting a negro strapped down on that bench had him cured long before you had to tromp that treadle. (Baker 1996, 82)

Casualness as casualty. Treadle, wheel, leather straps. Tromping the treadle, rhythmically, repeatedly, relentlessly. Clay’s is a description of horror, the colloquial tone so loud it appears to withstand any comprehension. The contrast(ing) implies a dissonance fuming of a lifetime of normalized violence. Conversationally, Clay details the mechanics of how the machine operates, the ritualistic nature of tying a person down to then handling the machine. What cruelty the performance of such brutality shows. But: the “Old Master was awfully kind and religious” and the whipping machine was just one of the many things standing around, as to be expected in a world of chattel and plantation enslavement—violence was always. The symbolic weight that the whipping machine itself, and then Clay’s reconstruction of it, carries truly carves out the psychological destruction and the warfare attached to it.

Baptist, too, interpreted the whipping machine as emblematic of the highly systematized and mechanized violence inherent in the slave economy. However, this description alone was insufficient for him to assert its physical existence (Baptist 2014, 142). If the machine were not a tangible object, then Clay’s invocation of it would already be metaphorical and thus align with Baptist’s usage: a necessary mechanism in the economic expansion and industrialization of the United States. It describes the methodical and violent extraction of labor foundational to modern capitalism.

From a Marxist historical materialist perspective, the whipping machine is a symbolic materialization of the contradictions within slavery’s mode of production. Its deployment relied on the acknowledgment of enslaved people’s capacity to endure suffering while simultaneously denying their minds and spirits recognition as deserving of moral consideration. Enslavement represented an extreme form of capitalistic surplus value extraction, wherein human beings, reduced to the status of variable capital, were instrumentalized as mere productive forces devoid of personhood. As Marx (2013, 579) observed in the context of industrial labor, the reduction of human beings to living “appendages” of machinery exemplifies how capital erases subjectivity in its relentless pursuit of surplus value. This dynamic finds an even more brutal manifestation in the system of slavery, where the commodification of enslaved individuals required the simultaneous recognition of their physical capacities and the annihilation of their existential subjectivity. The contradiction, then, is not merely about whether enslaved people were recognized as human (since, biologically, they had to be) but how they were treated as both human and non-human at the same time, as capital and as surplus value-producing. In the capitalist calculus (Ferreira da Silva & Chakravartty 2012, 366), as laborers they were devoid of labor power and thus akin to machines. Unlike the alienation of wage laborers, enslaved people experienced an ontological reification because they were entirely objectified as tools of production. Under slavery, workers were not only estranged from their labor products but also wholly dispossessed of their labor power. This distinction manifests as a hyper-alienation where the separation between the labor process and the laborer dissolves entirely, exemplifying primitive accumulation’s most violent extremes (Marx 2013, 840–44; Chakravartty & Ferreira da Silva 2012, 364).

Thus, as Saidiya V. Hartman (1997, 21) states in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, “[…] the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery”. The whipping machine operated on this dual exploitation and fetishization, an apparatus of total domination and a site where physical and psychological violence coalesced. Hartman (1996, 209) critiques the “colonial aestheticization” of suffering, where such processes were romanticized and detached from their inherent violence (. The plantation, thus, functioned as a site of brutal intimacy, where proximity between labor, torture, and imposed rhythms reinforced the systemic logic of “racial capitalism”¹While Cedric Robinson’s (1983) formulation of racial capitalism critically exposes how capitalist development was structured through racial domination, it also marks a significant departure from classical Marxist analysis. Robinson challenges the notion that capitalism represents a universalizing, race-neutral mode of production, arguing instead that it elaborates and intensifies existing racial hierarchies. However, this intervention raises important theoretical tensions: if racism is constitutive rather than incidental to capitalism, what becomes of categories like class, exploitation, and historical materialism? Moreover, uncritical use of the term today risks both flattening its conceptual rigor and reifying race itself. Thus, invoking racial capitalism requires careful attention to both its profound critical insights and the historical-materialist tensions it introduces..

Not just as a consequence of labor exploitation but as a necessary mechanism of this control, of production, expansion, and efficacy—for the capitalist machine to function, suffering was necessary. Bodies were grinded down into raw tools of productivity, only recognized as flesh, a distinction made by Hortense I. Spillers in her seminal 1994 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Flesh, so thoroughly theorized by Alexander G. Weheliye (2014), drawing from Spillers’ and Sylvia Wynter’s work, is what is left when legal recognition and individual personhood (body) are denied, and it points to the racialized violence that undergirds the formation of the concept of the “human”. It is constructed through deliberate systems of violence and control that involve a range of brutal mechanisms (Weheliye 2014,39). The forced synchronization of flesh into rhythmic labor was not just about efficiency but also deeply psychological, an effort to reprogram the very idea of humanity, to transform being(s) into something that would bend under the weight of capitalism and its endless need for more. This is technological too: not gears or levers, but a terrifying biopolitical refinement that results in the cultivation of flesh into instruments that fulfill any and every demand of capitalist production. This brutal intimacy, the forced proximity of torture, labor, and the (many and contradicting types of) rhythms, was not just a coincidental byproduct of the plantations, it was cultivated as a central feature of existence under slavery. Hartman (1997, 209) aptly notes that the closeness between, for example, work and song (rhythm) was often argued as “typically African”. What is truly “typical” here is the colonial insistence on aestheticizing suffering. But oppression is not a cultural artifact to be romanticized.

II.

My probing here is moving toward the following objective: to situate and contextualize a history of an everyday experience of technological life within a specific socio-historical geography, to not only better understand but first and foremost unravel the complex interplay between power, technology, and culture. Technology is not an addendum to human life. It is that which structures how life is organized, felt, and understood. I refer to the everyday experience of technological life as that which captures how technology is not only embedded in daily routines but is itself a constitutive rhythm of existence. To grasp this concept is to move beyond abstraction and see technology as shaping the intimate, embodied, and immediate qualities of human experience. “Lived experience,” following Édouard Glissant’s and Frantz Fanon’s seminal approaches to understanding the differing ways people inhabit and interact with the world, is deeply phenomenological, but it is also ontological, epistemological, political, and aesthetic—engaging the full spectrum of what it means to be, to know, to relate, and to create in a complex and unequal world. What they describe, show, and analyze is a way of engaging with the world that encompasses the material, the relational, and the historical. And so, whether or not Clay’s account was a “telling tale,” it undeniably holds a description of a physical reality––a tangible experience of the everyday life of enslavement. This, too, constitutes a history of technology: one deeply embedded within and contributing to the logics of early capitalist production. It reveals a racialized as well as racializing context of technological development that laid the groundwork for what we continue to call “human progress.”

Hence, at this juncture, it is useful to introduce a digression into the concept of technology and its historical evolution, to reflect on how to understand any notion of progress amidst a pervasive sense of an everyday experience of technological life that is constantly moving towards permanent crisis, or rather, global destruction. Eric Schatzberg (2018) has provided a comprehensive history of the concept of technology before the 1930s, in which he divides its usage into two main camps: the instrumental approach and the cultural approach. The instrumental approach views technology as simply a means to an end, a tool used for practical purposes, whereas the cultural approach sees technology as a creative and value-laden process that reflects and shapes human culture (Schatzberg 2018, 2–4). In his manifesto in the final pages of the book, Schatzberg proclaims that “[t]his book is not a neutral work of scholarship but rather an intervention in the present, a first step in rehabilitating technology as a concept for history and social theory, with an eventual goal of shaping technologies toward more humane ends” (Schatzberg 2018, 235). This reconfiguration and positioning of the concept of technology, for the advancement of collective well-being, has significant implications for how we conceptualize technology—especially also from which angles—and its role in society. Criticism of these two camps points out that the instrumental approach tends to be overly deterministic by reducing technology to an impersonal force without acknowledging the social contexts that shape it (Agar 2020). On the other hand, the cultural approach is sometimes considered overly expansive, and thus, analytically unhelpful (Agar 2020). Historically, Schatzberg’s distinction is convincing. In its dichotomizing venture it particularly helps to reveal the many dimensions of technology.

In Capital, Karl Marx reflects on the historical significance of technology, observing: “Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them” (Marx 2013, 493). Technology here is seen as embedded within the structures of material production and social relations. Building on this, Leo Marx (2010) emphasizes that the very emergence of “technology” as a concept marks a historical and cultural shift: technology came to signify not simply isolated inventions, but a complex, systematized force seen as shaping society itself. This abstraction of “technology,” he warns, carries hazards because it reifies human practices into seemingly autonomous systems. The political and social relations that underpin them are thus obscured. Technology reveals but also conceals: it is both the medium of human engagement with the material world and a concept through which relations of domination are masked.A contested and generative relationship emerges precisely between material production and the cultural and social frameworks that either arise from or resist those conditions. In this definition, technology mediates humanity’s interactionwith nature—a means by which humans control, shape, and extract value from the natural world. In the Western scientific epistemology, humans are, of course, separate from nature, standing above it. But Armond R. Towns (2022, 20), in reference to Paul Gilroy, argues “there is a Western concept of nature central to the racial project of the West.” By “placing” Black people closer to nature, colonialists and later imperial powers effectively denied them participation in those domains considered to be uniquely “human,” such as culture, reason, and technological innovation. This is a conceptual split, an alienation of Black people from the category of those who create or use technology. While their bodies were treated as raw “materials” to be manipulated—much like land or animal (or, as laid out earlier, machine)—their contributions to technological and cultural advancements, to human progress, were systematically denied and ignored. It is a troubling existence that Blackness (re)presents for the constructed boundaries between nature, humanity, and technology. And how technology acts both as an instrument of domination and as a means of enforcing this distinction is something that is operative today, as Western history often omits or undervalues the technological and scientific contributions of Black peoples and non-Western societies in general.

In Ursula Le Guin’s 2005 “Rant about Technology” this dimensionality of technology is reflected, too. She writes: “Its technology is [sic!] how a society copes with physical reality. […] Technology is the active human interface with the material world. […] ‘Technology’ and ‘hi tech’ are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t ‘hi,’ isn’t necessarily ‘low’ in any meaningful sense” (Le Guin 2005). In a somewhat differently meaningful sense, the low-tech technology, semantically in line with the outlined historical rendering, represents a form of human ingenuity that is not less sophisticated simply because it does not align with high-tech or industrial-era innovations (of which the whipping machine, literally and metaphorically, was one). Rather, it is a recognition that technology contains all practical applications of human knowledge to mediate the relation(ships) between humans and the material world. These low-tech technologies take different forms that embody ways of knowing and interfacing with reality that resist being categorized (solely) by colonial, industrial, or digital standards.

What makes technological advancements sophisticated and meaningful are precisely their specificity and context, their ability to let us navigate these material realities. A true measure of progress, then, cannot be constituted just through the gadgets we build but must also be grounded in how we relate to each other. The metal and silicon circuits that power ourdevices are as essential as the circuits of (hi)story; those that bring meaning to technologies, those that might also move us f o r w a r d––not along a singular, linear path, but outward into more capacious, relational ways of being. The multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams spoke to that precisely in Park City at Innovator’s House, a weeklong programing where he came together with the director Marc Levin, actress and actor Sonja Sohn and Momolu Stewart, at the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of the film SLAM to talk about actually and meaningfully changing narratives:

When we look at modern devices—as long as they are dependent on those unnamed work forces in the Congo, as long as they are dependent on all of these resources, I’m not impressed with that as technology. Because technology is supposed to move us forward, not continue some sort of analog exploitation that has gone on ever since. And so, the technology that we represent—through poetry, through coding, language—it can be ignored, it can be slept on, it can be renamed “slam,” it can be renamed “spoken word”, you can call it whatever the fuck you want. (Seed&Spark 2023)

III

“Out of the whipping machine comes the drum.”

What is symbolized by the whipping machine is not (materially) opposed to, but responded to by the drum. It is an embodiment of what arises, what remains, and what is not lost in such conditions, namely, forms of expression, of production, and of relationality in the face of utmost violence and “unrelenting silence” (Glissant 1989, 123). In his 2011 book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick (2011, chap. 1) asserts that: “Some information technologies were appreciated in their own time, but others were not. One that was sorely misunderstood was the African talking drum.” Talking drums, sophisticated communication devices capable of imitating the tone and prosody of human speech, have been used for hundreds of years in many West and Central African communities and societies (Gleick 2011, chap. 1). In analogy to the radio, where sound too (and its modulation) is the primary medium carrying information, they have been called “wireless telegraph,” a label often attributed by Western observers trying to make sense of the capacity to transmit information across distances without the need for wires or visual cues. In 2021, a study specifically on the Yorùbá drums called dùndún and the drum language gángan found just how detailed this acoustic surrogacy, this replication of speech, can be (Akinbo 2021). Beyond the metropole, mass media, and modern information technology, the talking drum’s significance persists for millions of people (Mushengyezi 2003). When enslaved Africans were forcibly taken to the Americas, they brought with them not only their knowledge of drum communication but also an entire cultural apparatus that included the rhythms, tonalities, and the capacity for (subversive) expression that these drums represented. Despite efforts by colonial authorities to suppress drumming (Sullivan 2019)—fearing its potential to incite uprisings—the talking drum endured. It allowed the enslaved to maintain ties of kinship, articulate themselves, and create spaces of sovereignty within a regime that reduced them to tools of early capitalist production.

Through the work of Martinican poet, philosopher, novelist, and organizer Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), the significance of the sonic, encompassing sound and language, from the perspective of the everyday experience of technological life of Black peoples becomes profoundly addressable. Glissant’s concepts, such as creolization, Relation or opacity²For a commentary on the rendering of Glissant’s work and interpretation of his concept of opacity in media studies and approximated fields, see Pinkrah (2024)., allow for a rethinking of sound as both medium and technology—a resonant circuit of memory that defies linear logic and colonial control. In acknowledging this memory, and in conceptualizing from this history, language can relevantly be conceived of not just as a communicative tool, but a dynamic, adaptive system that evolves in response to social and historic forces. Language and sound, in Glissant’s framework, also function as feedback loops. They produce complex cultural ecologies, resist attempts to control, categorize, and simplify them not only under colonial imperatives but also within scientific rationalities that seek to reduce multilayered and diverse lived experiences into quantifiable and measurable objects. It is time to think through and make sense of the technological sophistication within the (cultural) subversions of those whose lives and timelines have been constantly and cruelly shaped by systems of domination, uprooting, and annihilation; yet those who persistently imagine and (en)act otherwise.

In Glissant’s 1989 work Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, which is a distinct exploration of Caribbean identity, history, and culture, he states:

From the outset (that is, from the moment Creole is forged as a medium of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. This must be understood.

It seems that meaning and pitch went together for the uprooted individual, in the unrelenting silence of the world of slavery. It was the intensity of the sound that dictated meaning: the pitch of the sound conferred significance. Ideas were bracketed. One person could make himself understood through the subtle associations of sound, in which the master, so capable of managing “basic Creole” in other situations, got hopelessly lost. Creole spoken by the békés was never shouted out loud. Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. ³Author’s note: footnote from the original text omitted here.

This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise. (Glissant 1992, 123–24)

In the face of an imposed silence as part of a system of total dehumanization, enslaved people developed forms of expression that were deeply rooted in sound, rhythm, and oral communication—all practices that are shaped by the material and social conditions of enslavement. These sonic practices, including the early formation of Creole languages, emerged in contexts of extreme linguistic diversity and structural violence. While Creole as a linguistic system would solidify over generations, its origins and the broader centrality of sound to enslaved life underscore that language cannot be understood solely in semantic or grammatical terms. Instead, it operates as a dynamic and adaptive system, that embodies resistance, relation, and survival through its sonic and expressive dimensions. Cecile Malaspina (2019, 11)positions noise as fundamental to theorizing, arguing that it shapes how we conceptualize and engage with the world by resisting neat categorization as mere disruption. Instead, noise emerges as an interplay between unpredictability and control and embodies the tensions inherent in systems that seek to regulate and contain complexity. When “noise is essential to speech” and “din is discourse,” audibility and inaudibility become political. And when direct speech is mostly forbidden, scream, noise, and seemingly meaningless sound all become necessary as a form of covert communication. Discourse is camouflaged, only “wild animals” to be heard. The use of pitch and intensity to “bracket” meaning is analogous to modulation in signal processing which adds complexity to an apparently simple message so that it could be deciphered only by those with the shared knowledge to understand it. Forms of encoding and encryption appear as spoken word. Sound is leveraged to reclaim a position, agency, and to somehow be in community. Noise as discourse, noise is discourse.

“Out of the whipping machine comes the drum.”

The trajectory from the whipping machine to the talking drum to Creole represents a layered experience of technological life. The drum and Creole language became mechanisms by which Black people, relegated to the categories of nature and/or machine, reasserted their presence and positioning in the world, their agency and power. It could be said that, in this way, they effectively subverted the colonial use of technology for control, transforming it into a technology of liberation. But, as argued earlier in the text, technology is imbued with contradictions, which means that one particular technology can serve multiple, sometimes even opposing purposes. Technologies also often change in purpose, become appropriated, lose relevance, or take on entirely new forms. Even colonial-era society itself engaged in subversive appropriations of technologies, manipulating tools initially designed for oppression in unforeseen ways. What holds true, however, is that through practices of survival, resistance, and creation, Black life reconfigured the very coordinates of relation between the human, the natural, and the technological, and by that unsettled the colonial matrix that sought to fix these categories in place. Much like the evolution of language, the history of technology is not a simple narrative of human ingenuity. It also stands as a testament to the ways in which tools and machines as well as expressions and means exist in the space of contradiction of the everyday experience of technological life.

This is an urgent insistence for us to thoroughly consider this everyday experience of technological life. Technology, typically understood through the lens of machinery and especially industrial progress, must include the intangible yet operative mechanisms not only of survival but of life itself. Sound, rhythm, and language have historically (been) operated as technologies in their own right and form part of a continuum of Black technological resourcefulness and imagination that adapts and redefines what communication and information mean across various contexts. Remaking the boundaries of what constitutes “technology” and “progress” is not just an academic exercise; it is imperative if we are to genuinely move f o r w a r d. Not to make progress but to progress, collectively.

LITERATURE

Agar, Jon. “What Is Technology? (Technology: Critical History of a Concept, by Eric Schatzberg, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2018).” Annals of Science 77, no. 3 (2020): 377–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2019.1672788.

Akinbo, Samuel Kayode. “The Language of Gángan, A Yorùbá Talking Drum.” Front. Commun. 6:650382, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.650382

Baker, T. Lindsay, and Julie P. Baker, eds. The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives. University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.

Chakravartty, Paula, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction.” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Pantheon Books, 2011.

Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. University of Virginia Press, (1989) 1992.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Le Guin, Ursula. “Rant about Technology.”, 2005. Accessed October 15, 2024.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology.

Marx, Leo. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 561–77.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume One. Wordsworth Editions Limited, (1867) 2013.

Moten, Fred. “The Fugitive and the fugitive.” Keynote Lecture at ASAP/14 Conference: Arts of Fugitivity, UW Seattle and Bothell and Seattle University, October 5, 2023.

Mushengyezi, Aaron. “Rethinking Indigenous Media: Rituals, ‘Talking’ Drums and Orality as Forms of Public Communication in Uganda.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2003): 107–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369681032000169302.

Pinkrah, Nelly Y. 2024. “After Opacity. A turn towards language, again.” In The AI Anarchies Book edited by Clara Hermann, Elise Hunchuk, and Maya Indira Ganesh. Junge Akademie, 2024,  130–37.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Schatzberg, Eric. Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Seed&Spark. Seed&Spark’s Innovators’ House | SLAM: Poetry as Innovation (Saul Williams, Clip). Posted January 22, 2023, by Seed&Spark, YouTube, quote appears at 00:01:30–00:02:10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF7p80uJ3Nk. Accessed November 5, 2024.

Spillers, Hortense I. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987).” In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present edited by Angelyn Mitchell. Duke University Press, 1994, 454–81.

Sullivan, John Jeremiah. “Talking Drums”. Oxford American 107 (Winter 2019).
https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-107/talking-drums

Towns, Armond R. On Black Media Philosophy. University of California Press, 2022.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.

• 1
  While Cedric Robinson’s (1983) formulation of racial capitalism critically exposes how capitalist development was structured through racial domination, it also marks a significant departure from classical Marxist analysis. Robinson challenges the notion that capitalism represents a universalizing, race-neutral mode of production, arguing instead that it elaborates and intensifies existing racial hierarchies. However, this intervention raises important theoretical tensions: if racism is constitutive rather than incidental to capitalism, what becomes of categories like class, exploitation, and historical materialism? Moreover, uncritical use of the term today risks both flattening its conceptual rigor and reifying race itself. Thus, invoking racial capitalism requires careful attention to both its profound critical insights and the historical-materialist tensions it introduces.
• 2
  For a commentary on the rendering of Glissant’s work and interpretation of his concept of opacity in media studies and approximated fields, see Pinkrah (2024).
• 3
  Author’s note: footnote from the original text omitted here.