Talk Yannick Marshall: The Plot. Antiblackness as Vehicle for the Climate Apocalypse

In this talk, Yannick Marshall investigates how antiblackness drives environmental collapse. He extends the argument of his book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon, tracing the transformation of fugitive life into racial order, with different places playing a role in this process. 

The swamp, the voting booth, and the plains

Marshall turns to three sites—the swamp, the voting booth, and the plains—to examine antiblackness as the vehicle of environmental collapse. The swamp, once a refuge for the enslaved, the runaway, and the maroon, was cleared to make way for the propertied settler and to secure the settler order.

The voting booth mobilises the idea of a Black threat to create an environment conducive to extractive business in a way that direct campaigns against the environment could never achieve. In Tanzania, the neocolonial state relies on authoritarianism so that a violently antiblack regime can displace Indigenous communities and traffic minerals and living beings to the Arab Gulf, all in the name of conservation and growth. 

Following J. T. Roane’s thinking on plotting spaces of Black autonomy, these three ‘plots’ reveal how racial power continues to plot space, plot against Black liberation, and put down the very plots of Black freedom.

Yannick Marshall

Yannick Giovanni Marshall is a scholar, writer, and speaker specialising in anti-colonial Black thought, political exile, and dissent.
He taught Contemporary Black Thought in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts before leaving the United States in protest of the escalating suppression of Black Studies, protest, and academic freedom.