ABSTRACT
This essay revisits the practice of sovereignty, a mode of self-legitimating power and violence that has undergirded racial and colonial formations. In response to the sovereign paradigm, I maintain that the juxtaposition of Blackness and sovereignty, articulated in the work of Cedric Robinson, departs from the qualities and attributes of sovereignty, including the need to preserve the order of things against the threat of anarchy. I conclude that Black sovereignty gestures toward an ethics of the unsovereign, formulated powerfully in the work of thinkers like Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, and Tiffany Lethabo King. This ethics, which underscores permeability and affectability against the pretensions of autonomy and the will to control, aligns with decolonial thought and practice.
