The Being of Relation

Undoing the world whiteness built: excavating the ways whiteness and neurotypicality structure experience and offering a radical vision for moving beyond them.

How does whiteness shape the world? How does neurotypicality police how bodies move, think, and relate? And what happens when we shift our focus from individuality to relation itself?

The Being of Relation brings together Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation and Fernand Deligny’s errant lines to study the structures that hold whiteness and neurotypicality in place. Moving beyond the confines of pathology and psychological assessment, Erin Manning looks into how blackness and neurodiversity emerge at the very site of relation--where identity is not singular but constantly unfolding.

This work examines how whiteness operates as a deeply ingrained social structure and introduces what Manning calls parapedagogies of resistance: alternative ways of learning and relating that challenge normative binaries. Drawing from critical race theory, neurodiversity studies, and philosophy, Being of Relation offers a framework for reimagining social connections outside of conventional categories.

Erin Manning is professor of fine arts and philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Recent books include For a Pragmatics of the Useless and Out of the Clear.