ABSTRACT
This conclusion attempts to tie together the threads of thinking Black skin’s affective life through the prism of intersectionality. It begins with Audre Lorde’s injunction, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ and Lewis Ricardo Gordon’s ‘thinking in Black’ to continue the argument earlier in the book that intersectionality is intrinsically Black feminist decolonial theory, concept, methodology and heuristic. Drawing on the preceding discussion on Black skin as intersectional object, the argument here meditates on the pain, violence and otherness of enslavement’s and colonialism’s afterlife. The book’s decolonial analyses were developed through Black feminist decolonial fugitivity/maroonage/errantry in reading representations as artefacts of the continuing life of intersectional Black skin within contemporary coloniality. Read through cultural representations, Moten’s unlocatable difference between Fanon’s ‘skin’ and Spiller’s ‘flesh’ with which we began- is thought through the proposition that 21st-century coloniality entails that intersectional Black skin is still only capable of being flesh because freedom remains elusive and must be struggled for. This Black feminist decolonial reading into fugitivity/maroonage/errantry to get to freedom reminds us that staking a claim to intersectional Black life is still a site of contestation, but, as Aimé Césaire suggests, we must imagine and practice our way to freedom.
