Alfred Frankowski is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research interests include contemporary political philosophy, black aesthetics, critical race theory, German idealism, phenomenology, post-colonialism, and critical genocide studies. He is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on African Genocide: Memory, Silence and Anti-Black Political Violence (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021) and author of The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Philosophy of Mourning (Lexington Books, 2015).

• A Note on the TextAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Till, the Aporias of Anti-Black Violence, and Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 1: Monuments of Racial TerrorChapter 2: Architectures of Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 3: Form and SenseChapter 4: Carceral TerrorismsChapter 5: Generative Necro-Ecologies and Anti-Black SovereigntiesConclusion: Anti-Black Terrorisms and Aesthetic Dissent

Powerfully disturbing and philosophically transformative, Al Frankowski’s Sovereign Violences of Racial Terror marks the first sustained book-length intervention in academic philosophy to treat lynching not as episodic brutality but as a constitutive form of sovereign anti-Black violence. Refusing to confine racial terror to the past, Frankowski traces its aporias across law, memory, sovereignty, and state power. Moving from the lynching of Emmett Till to contemporary carceral regimes, this work compels a fundamental rethinking of genocide, legitimacy, and the political itself. Urgent, uncompromising, and theoretically rigorous, this book reshapes the terrain of Black political thought and Black philosophy more broadly.

Alfred Frankowski is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research interests include contemporary political philosophy, black aesthetics, critical race theory, German idealism, phenomenology, post-colonialism, and critical genocide studies. He is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on African Genocide: Memory, Silence and Anti-Black Political Violence (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021) and author of The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Philosophy of Mourning (Lexington Books, 2015).

• A Note on the TextAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Till, the Aporias of Anti-Black Violence, and Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 1: Monuments of Racial TerrorChapter 2: Architectures of Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 3: Form and SenseChapter 4: Carceral TerrorismsChapter 5: Generative Necro-Ecologies and Anti-Black SovereigntiesConclusion: Anti-Black Terrorisms and Aesthetic Dissent

Powerfully disturbing and philosophically transformative, Al Frankowski’s Sovereign Violences of Racial Terror marks the first sustained book-length intervention in academic philosophy to treat lynching not as episodic brutality but as a constitutive form of sovereign anti-Black violence. Refusing to confine racial terror to the past, Frankowski traces its aporias across law, memory, sovereignty, and state power. Moving from the lynching of Emmett Till to contemporary carceral regimes, this work compels a fundamental rethinking of genocide, legitimacy, and the political itself. Urgent, uncompromising, and theoretically rigorous, this book reshapes the terrain of Black political thought and Black philosophy more broadly.

Alfred Frankowski is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research interests include contemporary political philosophy, black aesthetics, critical race theory, German idealism, phenomenology, post-colonialism, and critical genocide studies. He is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on African Genocide: Memory, Silence and Anti-Black Political Violence (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021) and author of The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Philosophy of Mourning (Lexington Books, 2015).

• A Note on the TextAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Till, the Aporias of Anti-Black Violence, and Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 1: Monuments of Racial TerrorChapter 2: Architectures of Racial Terror LynchingsChapter 3: Form and SenseChapter 4: Carceral TerrorismsChapter 5: Generative Necro-Ecologies and Anti-Black SovereigntiesConclusion: Anti-Black Terrorisms and Aesthetic Dissent

Powerfully disturbing and philosophically transformative, Al Frankowski’s Sovereign Violences of Racial Terror marks the first sustained book-length intervention in academic philosophy to treat lynching not as episodic brutality but as a constitutive form of sovereign anti-Black violence. Refusing to confine racial terror to the past, Frankowski traces its aporias across law, memory, sovereignty, and state power. Moving from the lynching of Emmett Till to contemporary carceral regimes, this work compels a fundamental rethinking of genocide, legitimacy, and the political itself. Urgent, uncompromising, and theoretically rigorous, this book reshapes the terrain of Black political thought and Black philosophy more broadly.