Flourishing after the Family: Racial Capitalism and Suzanne Césaire's Impossible Oikoi

This article intends to short-circuit the masculine homosociality inherent to the current reception of racial capitalism in francophone critical thought. It argues that this reception silences non-masculine critical and poetic promises that go beyond canonical francophone accounts of the imbrications between racism and capitalism. To do so, it briefly reviews the normative genealogy of the conceptual formalization of racial capitalism to highlight the absence of women, feminists, and queer people in the narrative that today reaches francophone spaces. Then, it excavates Suzanne Césaire's prescient critique of capitalism, wage-labor, and the politics of the family, engaging with her articulation of a cannibal poetics.