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There are maps to the Door of No Return. The physical door. They are well worn, gone over by cartographer after cartographer, refined from Ptolemey's Geographia to orbital photographs and magnetic field imaging satellites. But to the Door of No Return which is illuminated in the consciousness of Blacks in the Diaspora there are no maps. The door is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. It is also perhaps a psychic destination. Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 1)

I am not interested in rescuing Black being(s) for the category of the 'Human', misunderstood as 'Man', or for the languages of development. Both of those languages and the material conditions that they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths. I am interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it. I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror. By considering the relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth. And I want to think through what they call on us to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say, in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance.

— In the wake : on Blackness and being by Christina Sharpe (Page 116)

The constant production of Black death is and as necessary returns us to the singularity. But just as the weather is always ripe for Black death, the singularity also produces Black resistances and refusals.

— In the wake : on Blackness and being by Christina Sharpe (Page 124)

Who has become the 'mass' of mass incarceration? If it is not the case that Euro-descended people and those racially marked white are subjects of criminalization en masse to a degree that remotely approaches the criminalization and incarceration of their Black, Brown, and Indigenous counterparts, then it may be necessary to accept that the term 'mass incarceration' actually presumes casual and official white innocence, including the normative assumption of white bodily entitlement to physiological integrity and civil mobility.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 193)

The trauma of the mark—the dispossession or negation—cannot be borne. Who can bear it? Who can bear being nothing? How can nothing be? The duration of this impossibility, this negation that limits us, that closes us in, that horizons us, this unbearable world that we shoulder, is something we ourselves have projected in order to make sense of the unthinkable negation—in order to make it intelligible, in order to bear the unbearable burden of objecthood, death. Lost in the labyrinthine ways of our own minds, we mistake symptoms of trauma for the laws of nature and nature's god.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 91)

The colorline is the constitutive contradiction of the market. Without the colorline there is no market. The market requires ownership, and this ownership is an ownership of people that is displaced onto an ownership of things. What are these things other than the crystallized labors of laborers past, other than accumulated, dead, labor? The Middle Passage is the primal scene of accumulation that became these United States. As we follow the mark of the black, it leads backward along the timeline, as do all marks, to a primal scene. The scene is played out at the far points of memory and speculation; in this case, our case, the primal scene of accumulation is the Middle Passage and the marking of the body as white-over-black.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 86)

The Human is a construct. To know the Human is to know, first and foremost, what it is not. Humans are sentient beings who are not Black. Blacks are sentient beings who are not Human. There is a structural (which is to say, necessary) antagonism between Blacks and Humans; and this antagonism hinges on violence. The paradigm of vio lence that positions and oppresses degraded forms of Humanity, such as colored immigrants, women (who are not Black), LGBT people, Indigenous people, and working-class folks (who are not Black), cannot be analogized with the paradigm of violence that positions and oppresses Blackness. Any analogy between the grammar of suffering of degraded Humans and the grammar of suffering of Blacks is hobbled by the ruse of analogy. Degraded forms of Humans are positioned and oppressed by a grammar of suffering known as exploitation and alienation. But Black people are positioned and oppressed by a grammar of suffering known as "fungibility and accumulation" (Hartman 1997). Blacks are objects and implements to be possessed (accumulated) and exchanged (made fungible) in the mate rial and psychic life of Human subjects. Black people are the things that belong to Humans. In this way, all Humans are Masters in their relation to Blacks; and all Blacks are Slaves in their relation to Humans-and this paradigmatic arrangement holds true, Afropessimists argue, whether we are speaking about exalted Human formations, such as heterosexual White males, or degraded Human formations, such as the LGBT community or Brown immigrants or the working class.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 41)

Following Baldwin, Spillers, Hartman, and others, we call attention to the perpetual, if unnoticed and ignored, theoretical incoherence generated by the deep-seated antiblackness of modernity. Applied to the plight of Black people, concepts and theories meant to index social domination and human suffering invariably falter and fall short. Under racial slavery, for instance, "the captive female body... could be converted into cash, speculated and traded as commodity, worked to death, taken, tortured, seeded, and propagated like any other crop, or murdered," Hartman reminds us. "The work of sex and procreation was the chief motor for reproducing the material, social, and symbolic relations of slavery [that]... inaugurated a regime of racialized sexuality that continues to place black bodies at risk" (Hartman 2016, 168-69). In apperceiving such antisocial, antihuman conditions, even the most radical theories of the Social and the Human, much less their mainstream counterparts, cannot but misrepresent. What conceptual vocabulary is up to the task? Exploitation or primitive accumulation? Patriarchy or misogyny? Hegemony or subalternity? Relative to antiblackness, such categories "are all thrown in crisis" (Spillers 2003, 221). Misrecognition and euphemism are inevitable.

— Antiblackness by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas (Page 2)