The avengers of citizenship studies: Ida B. Wells and Frantz Fanon

Enslavement and citizenship are entangled in colonial modernity’s global racial capitalist projects. While critical work on citizenship has highlighted the unfreedoms grounding modern projects, studies have not looked at the ideas of the avengers, those supposedly unfit for history and politics, and how they draw our attention to the persistence of black violence. For them, the projects of modern citizenship are neither liberating nor progressive. Drawing on the Haitian Revolution, and in conversation with Ida B. Wells, and Frantz Fanon, I argue citizenship studies can benefit from thinking about the collapsing of emancipation with national-civic racial justice from the vantage point of enslavement, genocide, colonization, and their transfigurations into imperial and national racial capitalist projects. I conclude with the ways Fanon allows me to expand the notion of black avenger through the idea of the wretched and invention, beyond citizenship and towards the possibility of a differently composed world and humanity.