Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.

Biopower no longer a completely sufficient concept which can describe the way in which life is eradicated and subject to the power of death. Necropower and necropolitics terms he uses to describe how contemporary power renders life as the living dead.

State of exception is not a temporary suspension of the law, but a “permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the law” (13). We are living in a state of exception.

Sovereignty has traditionally rested on the belief that the subject is autonomous. However, Mbembe’s interest is in “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14).

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Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Xenophanes in the sixth century first Europeans to write of the physical difference between blacks and whites. Greeks and Romans unprejudiced and did not attribute qualities to people based on skin color (27).

Chapter 4: Portuguese in the mid 15th century under Prince Henry first to really exploit the west coast of Africa and establish the Atlantic Slave Trade. Began primarily as trading for, rather than the seizing of, slaves.

Unconfirmed as to whether Columbus carried slaves with him on his first few voyages to the Caribbean, however, it is highly likely (87).

First recorded Atlantic crossing of slaves was actually west to east (89).