Spirals

Decolonized dialectics does not begin or end with the thinkers considered in this book, and so the conclusion sets out from Frederick Douglass. Despite not having read Hegel’s Phenomenology, Douglass himself enacted—in his fight against the slave breaker Covey—something both akin to Hegel’s formulation, but in notably decolonized form. Gesturing toward this broader tradition of decolonized dialectics, the conclusion works through a series of unanswered questions, suggesting that a decolonized dialectics bears a specific relation to questions of positivity, tradition, and space. In particular, Angela Davis provides a powerful theorization of the importance of distance and space, in which substantive communities provide the rearguard support for oppositional, dialectical struggles. Finally, the conclusion raises the peculiar relationship running throughout the volume between decolonial theory and the state, broadening a narrow anarchism to embrace what Fanon, following Césaire, called “the end of the world.”