Meine Freiheit, Die Es So Noch Nicht Gibt: Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus

Alexander Weheliye’s book Habeas Viscus has garnered a great deal of attention in various critically oriented fields in the humanities, and justifiably so. It offers a refreshing take on multiple debates that have begun to stall–or appear stale–in critical theory, continental philosophy and postcolonial studies: the question of the human and humanism, the place of race and colonialism in contemporary critical theory, and the ontological status of the cry and other para- and a-rational modes of expression and their liberatory function in black diasporic aesthetics. Weheliye’s notion of race as “racializing assemblages” provides a conceptual vocabulary that is able to problematize racism as well as gesture at its nimble and lethal mutability across space and time. This essay seeks to locate Weheliye within a broader intellectual context, including, in particular, that of a still-nascent German postcolonial studies.