Tables turning: on the specters of Anthropology, extinction and white futurity

This article departs from ethnographic engagement with a pedagogical performance piece titled ‘Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen’ by the Afro Puerto Rican artist, Javier Cardona Otero. The piece is an embodied critique that ‘turns the tables’ of history, conjuring up colonial specters that not only haunt Anthropological discourses of racial extinction but speak directly to the current existential crisis of white futurity. I read the performance in conjunction with scenes from Raoul Peck’s documentary ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ and words from the Khoisan poet, Diana Ferrus, whose elegiac poetry played a decisive role in the repatriation of Sarah Baartman’s remains. Through the lens of hauntology, the article critically engages with colonial specters that articulate a core contradiction between the supposedly ‘inevitable’ extinction of ‘savage’ races and today’s paranoidal far-right politics of ‘white extinction.’