Cultural Extensibility and the Ethics of Cohabitation: Exclusionary Identity, Anti-Blackness, and the Ontology of Culture

This philosophical article examines the ontological assumptions underlying exclusionary claims of cultural preservation and racialised belonging. Contemporary debates on cultural identity frequently oscillate between pluralist recognition and defensive forms of exclusion, yet they rarely interrogate the conception of culture that renders such exclusion intelligible in the first place. To address this problem, the article introduces the concept of cultural extensibility in order to challenge the view that cultures exist as closed, self-identical, or self-sufficient entities. Drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology, relational ontology, postcolonial thought, critical phenomenology, and philosophy of race, the article argues that cultural identity develops through historically mediated and relationally constituted processes rather than through fixed cultural essences or insulated traditions. From this perspective, exclusionary identity claims rely upon a substantialist understanding of culture that denies the relational conditions through which cultural continuity becomes possible. The discussion further examines phenomenologically how racialised exclusion attempts to stabilise identity by restricting relational openness through affective orientation, perceptual fixation, epistemic closure, and defensive forms of cultural self-preservation. This process is described as a form of ontological contraction in which relational co-presence is reinterpreted as threat or intrusion rather than as a constitutive condition of cultural existence. The article concludes that anti-Black exclusion is not only ethically unjustifiable but also ontologically incoherent, and it proposes an ethics of cohabitation grounded in the historically mediated and relational structure of cultural being itself.