Racial Conscription and Its Limits Antinomies of Race in Teju Cole’s Novels

Abstract

This essay argues that relations between race, blackness, and class in
Teju Cole’s novels Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023) are mobilized by an
antinomy in the global production of raciality between the progressivism of racial inclusivity narratives and the reality of neocolonial expropriation in the world’s largely non-white postcolonial countries. I argue that the narrators of these novels construct race, what appears as stable difference, in opposition to blackness, the constitutive aporia that ratifies the humanity of Western Man. By pacifying blackness through race, the narrators recuperate racial difference in contradistinction to blackness’s radical alterity to the human. Race in this contained form comes into crisis when confronted with capital, revealing race’s complicity in reproducing capitalist relations. Therefore, the racial antinomy is a contradiction produced and
mobilized by capital as a form of appearance that obfuscates the violence engendered by the expansion of the capitalist world-system
into the global periphery.