A Precursor to Necropolitics: Decoloniality in Black Theology and Black Power

Black Theology and Black Power (BTBP) features liberationists who are devoted to resisting liberalism's realpolitik. The decolonial implications of their devotion illustrate the necropolitical frame of reference BTBP foreshadows. Section one describes liberation as the method Black theology uses to dismiss liberal politics that displace Black death. The ideals that established conditions for norms regarding death and life are political and, as the second section shows, emblematic of liberal theories that emphasise the inviolability of the individual. The last section explains the importance of French critical theory to necropolitics through the concepts biopolitics and homo sacer. Francophone theoretical accounts of necropolitics should be celebrated neither as a novel nor as a fatalistic way to affirm decoloniality and die, sacrificially. As a result, Black theology's method can be appreciated both by theists and humanists whose death and life function as a decolonising, illiberal necropolitics.