Afrofuturist Archeology: Citizenship and the Delimitation of Life with Death

This chapter explores the question of the relation between blackness and the state, or citizenship. To this aim, the author engages notions of epidermalization, biopolitics, and necropolitics, as well as natal politics but moves in the interstices of these theoretical elaborations of the sovereign power of states. The case of Black Switzerland requires a confrontation with the ways in which blackness is put to use—through border policing in its various forms—to articulate citizenship and national, or proper, belonging. What emerges in the interstices of thinking the articulation of borders for sovereign belonging is blackness as a question of what belonging may mean once the absolute authority exercised against blackness breaks down.