Subjects Implicated in Imperial Intimacies: Identity, Reason, Power, and the Reparatory Justice Movement

Abstract: This article examines how people implicated in imperial histories may approach how they think about themselves and their relationship to power in order to support reparations for the transatlantic enslavement and trade of Africans. It analyses Michael Rothberg's political theory of the implicated subject in relation to Hazel V. Carby's historical biography Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019) to illuminate how these two works help us think about the reparatory justice movement. Carby's discussion enables a more complex understanding of identity, reason, and power than how they are implied in the theory of the implicated subject. First, the theory of implication seems to dismiss the concept of identity yet leaves untouched problematic presuppositions about it. Second, rather than assuming a self-reflective understanding of complicity, social justice, and solidarity, the theory of implication needs to confront questions of open, public, and transcultural reasoning and debate. Third, the theory of the implicated subject negatively considers power as exercised in social situations, which subverts the possibility of the alliances that are necessary for successful social justice movements. Because implication is an inevitable condition of globalized modernity and beyond, it serves us well to consider both its negative and positive aspects, something Carby's biography helps us to do.