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Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)
Abstract
In taking up the profound and necessary challenge of Afro-pessimism, scholars engaged in black study must not only attend to the relation between blackness and nothingness that Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton elaborate in their encounter with the work of Frantz Fanon but must also investigate the resonance, presence, and topography of blackness in and as nothingness that is manifest at the intersection of mysticism and logic in black study. This essay is an attempt to contribute to that investigation.
... The scientific and educational preference for closed systems positions bioinformatics in diametric opposition to Moten's (2013) idea of a para-ontology. We anticipate that bioinformatics premised on closed systems will employ education and educational governance as the primary means to extend the idea of a productive body, particularly within the economic processes of racialized optimization and accumulation. ...
... As such, a decoloniality of bioinformatics should account for the dissipative structures and thanatropic regressions of open systems, and accelerate machinic contagions and virtuality released from these reproductive functions. What Moten (2013) discussed as an ontology of disorder, then, is oriented towards proliferating disequilibrium, and dehisence, and is 'dangerously ' contingent, dissident, indeterminate, incalculable, uncertain, and unbinding. Our decolonial bioinformatics follows Colebrook's (2011) reading of Deleuze that it if the self-efficient human organism were to be 'radically recalibrated' in the future, it is possible to live outside the confines of closed systems and develop injunctions to biopolitical and educational control. ...
... The scientific and educational preference for closed systems positions bioinformatics in diametric opposition to Moten's (2013) idea of a para-ontology. We anticipate that bioinformatics premised on closed systems will employ education and educational governance as the primary means to extend the idea of a productive body, particularly within the economic processes of racialized optimization and accumulation. ...
... As such, a decoloniality of bioinformatics should account for the dissipative structures and thanatropic regressions of open systems, and accelerate machinic contagions and virtuality released from these reproductive functions. What Moten (2013) discussed as an ontology of disorder, then, is oriented towards proliferating disequilibrium, and dehisence, and is 'dangerously ' contingent, dissident, indeterminate, incalculable, uncertain, and unbinding. Our decolonial bioinformatics follows Colebrook's (2011) reading of Deleuze that it if the self-efficient human organism were to be 'radically recalibrated' in the future, it is possible to live outside the confines of closed systems and develop injunctions to biopolitical and educational control. ...
... The scientific and educational preference for closed systems positions bioinformatics in diametric opposition to Moten's (2013) idea of a para-ontology. We anticipate that bioinformatics premised on closed systems will employ education and educational governance as the primary means to extend the idea of a productive body, particularly within the economic processes of racialized optimization and accumulation. ...
... As such, a decoloniality of bioinformatics should account for the dissipative structures and thanatropic regressions of open systems, and accelerate machinic contagions and virtuality released from these reproductive functions. What Moten (2013) discussed as an ontology of disorder, then, is oriented towards proliferating disequilibrium, and dehisence, and is 'dangerously ' contingent, dissident, indeterminate, incalculable, uncertain, and unbinding. Our decolonial bioinformatics follows Colebrook's (2011) reading of Deleuze that it if the self-efficient human organism were to be 'radically recalibrated' in the future, it is possible to live outside the confines of closed systems and develop injunctions to biopolitical and educational control. ...
... 6) that always already circumscribes black life, the animal gaze in Peele's films makes possible a fleeting and ephemeral moment of escape, locating black social and/as material life, following Jared Sexton's speculative reasoning, "not in the world that the world lives in, but… underground, in outer space" (p. 28); that is to say, not in the human world or in the world of the mis-en-scene, but in what Fred Moten (2013) describes as an "elsewhere and elsewhen" (p. 746)-an underground pr "undercommons" (Moten & Harney 2013) outside of the probing, phallic gaze of those who need to know. ...
Louis Althusser’s concepts of the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus are applied to the current rationalizations and institutionalization of the use and abuse of experiments on animals. The concepts of hegemonic, quasi-counterhegemonic, and counterhegemonic discourse and practices are introduced to show the array of approaches to testing on nonhuman animals, ranging from justification, to supposed amelioration, to outright rejection of the torture to which they are subjected. An examination of the biomedical industrial complex and the psychology/psychiatry industrial complex shows how they utilize a justify the torture of animals in the name of acquiring knowledge supposedly for the welfare of humans. Although the quasi-counterhegemonic position, as illustrated by the 3Rs and the Animal Welfare Act, calls for better treatment for laboratory animals, it still accepts their abuse in the interests of human well-being. Counterhegemonic arguments are presented including the arguments that the results of animal experimentation are both unreliable and unnecessary and morally wrong.
... For Spillers (2003, 205), preservation becomes a form of celebration transforming the body in demise into a 'hieroglyphics of the flesh'. For Moten (2013), degenerative and regenerative preservation is critical celebration for Blackness. Celebration as the essence of Black thought, the animation of Black operations, constitutes an 'undercommon', underground, submarine sociality (Moten 2013, 742). ...
What does it mean to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode? This paper deconstructs the notion of consuming Black death in a loop (or repeat mode) online and its redistribution in the virtual realm centring the Black body in this pornotropic assemblage. The spectacularisation of Black death and its juxtaposition as a banal encounter is examined against the history of slavery and White oppression. The enactment of Blackness as lacking form or ontology redrafts the virtual sphere in enacting a politics of refusal for reconstituting Blackness adduced through its fluidity. The virtual as an unstable and disembodied realm is re-read as a generative graveyard for reclaiming Black consciousness and Black humanism. In countering the ‘Black horrific’ the paper discerns digital platforms’ agentic and sensuous potential as a stage for performative insurgency to resurrect an affective Black body politic through the disembodied formlessness of the virtual sphere.
... There is nothing "universal" about it; therefore, the only way to make it intelligible is to leave out the parts that may only be accepted by another Black person, and even then discretely" (p. 89e90) If then, disequilibrium or "violence" must be left out of the narrative, there is no possibility of the restoration of the equilibrium, which leads scholars like Fred Moten to describe what he and others term "fugitivity" (Harney & Moten, 2013;Moten, 2013) or the lack of the possibility of homecoming. Fugitivity is therefore both destabilizing to narratives of assimilation and emancipation and difficult, if not impossible, to narrate. ...
The strength of narrative inquiry research on teaching (NI) is that it amplifies the voice of practitioners, supports listening carefully to those who work most closely with children, and resists the way many other research paradigms function in practice as elaborate preemptory rationalizations for dismissing teachers' insights as myopic and biased. One of its limitations lies in the uncontestable fact that teachers-like everyone-dare not perfect, that the demography of the teaching profession over-represents the majority population in most nations, that all teachers work in contexts shaped by a continuing history of racism, and therefore teachers' reports on their experiences are often compromised by the institutionalized racism and settler colonialism in which they are embedded. Like other research methods, NI is vulnerable to the influence of neoliberal discourses that locate the cause of racism in individual attitudes and neglect the need for teachers to find ways to address the systemic and institutionalized forms of racism affecting children's lives. This essay examines the way NI scholars can reduce the chances of complicity with systemic racism while maintaining their core commitment to respecting teachers' experience as an important source of educational insight.
... 47 Moten, who dedicates various passages to Mackey's mu in his trilogy, affirms that "mu signals that which is most emphatically and lyrically marked in Édouard Glissant's phrase 'consent not to be a single being'." 48 However, that impossible (to tell, to "pass on," as Toni Morrison has forever impressed in our minds and language through the words of Beloved) excess experienced in the hold of the slave ship was also something which trespassed upon the technical experimentation and mu proposed by Mackey, something through which mu turned into an experimental and improvisational technique for survival, something which overdid, in the words of Derrida, the Crossing: the proximity of the flesh (of slaves in the hold), the excessive touch; the "hapticality or love" advanced by Harney and Moten. Mackey's antiphonal and "contrapuntal island" was an experiment of "hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy," the whispering and feeling of "one other's touch." ...
Taking its cues from Derrida’s evocation of voyage as both crossing and movement between trance and excess (outrance), but also as a deviation (détournement), this paper will attempt to deflect Baldwin’s carto(bio)graphy and his own crossings. In particular, through both a suggestive polyphony of voices (Éduard Glissant, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Denisa Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, Nathaniel Mackey, Wilson Harris, and Sevan Bussell) and the analysis of some superb passages from Baldwin’s essays, conversations, and interviews, the discussion will revolve around Baldwin’s consent to be (in) trans, that is to transversally live within and beyond the national context, heteronormativity, and racialization; but also consent to be in trance, a sort of musical and exilic “limbo” that the author overcomes through a profound commitment to the work of love, conceived as haptical excess. As a result, this affective displacement will be crucial in unfolding a critical examination of how to inhabit the world in trans/trance and beyond it: “without the terror of touch.”
... Antiblackness has been and continues to be central to the making of Western empire and modernity as we know it (Hartman, 1997(Hartman, , 2007T. L. King, 2019;Mbembe, 2017;McKittrick, 2006McKittrick, , 2013Moten, 2013;Sexton, 2011;Wilderson, 2010;Wynter, 2003). As Black Studies scholars Walcott (2020) and Wilderson (2010Wilderson ( , 2020 have suggested, trans-temporality forces us to contend with the who and why of antiblackness just as much as we deal with the what. ...
Our current moment is abundant in examples of global antiblackness whereby racial violence visibly signals the quotidian elimination of Blackness, or the making of Black people into an object or abstract discourse to be terminated. That antiblackness is global is nothing new. In fact, antiblackness has been and continues to be central to the making of Western empire and modernity as we know it. However, until this point, the social studies education discipline has yet to fundamentally advance a critical analytic that captures the specificity of global antiblackness and the invention of Black as non-human and anti-citizen. In this article, we aim to problematize vernacularized conceptualizations of citizenship in social studies education that sidestep the socio-historical significance of anti-Black world systems in the creation of human/non-human and, consequently, citizen/anti-citizen. More specifically, we argue that BlackCrit interlopes antiblackness in the intellectual apprehension of taken-for-granted concepts such as Blackness, globality, citizenship, and racism. In drawing from BlackCrit, we suggest that social studies education, and educational research in general, must reconcile that the world operates on the premise that to be human is to be distant from Blackness and to be citizen is also to be distant from Blackness. Overall, this article serves as a provocation to rethink our philosophies, theories, and paradigms of global citizenship within the domain of anti-citizen and non-human.
... (Kristeva, 2011, p. x) Crealectic counseling is a form of intellectual empathy that helps not only to think into the place of the other (Kant, 2007, p. 307), but also of the Other, the Creal. We humans have a need for ontological webs of belief-However, crealectic care attempts to avoid reifying ontology and instead display what Moten, in speaking of blackness, nothingness, and mysticism in the flesh, describes as para-ontological (Moten, 2013) or, we could say, trans-ontological. Fruitful parallels can be made between the oceanic feeling unfairly mocked by Freud (Wang, 2020), and the relation between the Ocean paradigm and slavery. ...
This article is the fruit of a written dialogue between a sociocultural psychologist and a philosopher invested in the study of the Creative Real, in a context that resonates with process philosophy and posthumanism. Each of the two authors come from a different tradition (or, rather, different traditions) to the topic of posthuman creativity and their approaches overlap considerably but include as well important points of difference, ranging from writing style to key concepts and areas of application.
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1940/1996), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both (1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, (2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World – toward gratuitous messianic freedom.
Jordan Peele’s (2017) Get Out presents a political critique of American post-racial discourse. Using Brian Massumi’s concept of affective fact, I articulate how the film navigates a post-race perception of racially motivated threat as solely affective and immaterial in relation to the actual enactment of violence onto the racialized body in contemporary America. I locate this film in the theoretical lineage of contemporary Black radical thought, with particular emphasis on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of fungibility and Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity. By analyzing scenes that inaugurate the film’s study of threat, surveillance, and state-mandated control, I argue that Get Out reveals how apparatuses of racial violence intertwine with what Harney and Moten call state-thought. I conclude that Get Out should be read as a commentary on Black cinema and Black aesthetics, particularly how Black aesthetics forms itself against, within, and around neoliberal political discourse.
The article explores contemporary debates regarding the representation of Indigenous resistance in the field of settler colonial studies by putting the work of Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe into conversation with the political allegories articulated in two contemporary Western films. Its first section, tracing what Wolfe called his “pharmacological indebtedness” to Gayatri Spivak, considers the methodological problems for settler colonial studies that have emerged from Wolfe’s critique of the settler intellectual’s representation of Indigenous resistance. The second section suggests an alternative direction for transnational settler colonial studies by undertaking a comparative reading of two films—Hell or High Water (2016) written by US settler filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, and Goldstone (2016) written and directed by Indigenous Australian (Gamilaroi) director Ivan Sen. Both films collapse the detective genre with settler colonialism’s most recognizable representational genre: the Western. In so doing, they articulate narratives about the ongoing crimes of settler colonialism that offer novel perspectives on the question of what is knowable—and by whom—under settler colonialism’s structure of violence.
In efforts to protect my sanity while learning computational arts at a Western institution, I have established a subversive anti-conformist strategy where I activate the ideologies of Hood Feminism, Negritude and Poetics to survive. Hood Feminism explores Black womanhood in a different modality from Black feminist studies. I am activating Hood Feminism in its intended form as praxis of women of color who survive without access to resources and privilege. These are women who survive by all means necessary against the propagation of toxic ideologies of Western society. I am activating Negritude as a way of maintaining positionality to the desired behavior that is institutionally imprinted on students, especially students of color. Negritude is a way for me to constantly reject the efforts of the conformist hegemonies by connecting with what it means to embody Blackness. Poetics materializes as a method of connecting with computation and other students in a meaningful way.
“high Under the Pew: A Critical Meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black” thinks Joseph Winters’s text in relation to critical poetics, Black studies and Black feminist thought. In particular, I trace how Winters’s philosophical engagement with the concept of “melancholic hope” in Black literary production extends these above-named intellectual traditions’ critiques of the post-enlightenment subject. More precisely, Winters dwelling with “melancholic hope” as it manifests in Black aesthetic and political thought attends to modes of being inassimilable to racist, heteronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives of space-time and progress.
A proposta da disciplina é estudar uma parte da extensa bibliografia sobre racismo e antinegritude produzida pelo pensamento crítico negro, com ênfase em autoras e autores anglófonos (lidos em traduções ao português). Terão destaque textos recentes associados ao Afropessimismo e ao debate sobre a teoria crítica da raça (de Frank Wilderson III, Claudia Rankine e Saidiya Hartman). Também revisitaremos obras mais antigas (de Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon e W. E. B. Du Bois, entre outros) que são referências importantes nesses debates contemporâneos. Além dos textos teóricos, estudaremos algumas obras literárias (como os romances Kindred de Octavia Butler e Amada [Beloved] de Toni Morrison) e um filme (Nós [Us], de Jordan Peele). Tanto no caso das obras ficcionais quanto no dos textos críticos, o objetivo será entender melhor como a escravização e a violência antinegra abalam a própria possibilidade de narrar. Diante das diferentes formas de falência da lógica narrativa, que nos levam a considerar a relação entre racismo e trauma, a questão será também o que o legado da escravidão deixa como tarefa para a interpretação (Aida Levy-Hussen) e para a "fabulação crítica" (na expressão de Saidiya Hartman). Espera-se ainda que ao longo do semestre consigamos compreender os modos como essa bibliografia pensa os limites do humanismo e dos discursos de inclusão e como avalia a contribuição do espetáculo público da violência para a reprodução da morte social.
Through the conception of Black desire, a Black-specific rendering of Eve Tuck’s researching for desire, I argue that educational research lacking critiques of antiblackness can cultivate damage-centered narratives that misguidedly identify brokenness in Black youth, rather than brokenness in society. Drawing from a yearlong critical race ethnography, rooted in BlackCrit, I demonstrate how four Black high school students’ critical engagements with literacy reveal the ways antiblackness operationalizes in their lives and how they compose counter structures to this oppressive regime. Through critical literacy artifacts and interview data, I analyze the utility of centering a critique of antiblackness in researching for Black desire as revealed through the voices of the Black youth. Through the findings, I contend that Black students asserting ownership over their reality demonstrates the ways Black desire, through a pointed critique of antiblackness, can function as a tool for critical race educational praxis.
This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation.
This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work, in fact, challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through the ‘onto-ethology’ that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal.
This short text takes up some questions having to do with acts of self-definition, collective authorship, and expression, and how they are rehearsed, examined, and denied—in short, put into motion—by means of musical performance. To improvise is to work with known materials and techniques, moving them in the direction of uncertainty. When you improvise with others, you bring your skills and your musical personality to the encounter. You use them to participate in an exchange, and that exchange issues something new, something that could not be foreseen—and that is open improvisation, at least according to one widespread and common-sense understanding of the practice. But I will explore another
variant, one that embarks on its journey toward uncertainty by pulling apart personality and rendering it into a site of ongoing investigation. Both of these understandings of improvisation convert certainty into uncertainty, one by stretching or risking the self in a situation of surprise, and the other by disassembling or nullifying the self in order to get free of it. I want to think about these fascinating problems in relation to George E. Lewis’s influential pair of descriptive tools, the Afrological and the Eurological. This schema of postwar spontaneity remains useful and productive, I will suggest, when it is reanimated in analytical scenarios that might disrupt the work of disentanglement that it is often called upon to perform.
The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true story of Mohammed Assaf, a young man from Gaza who became a sensation in Palestine when he won the Arab Idol contest in 2013. Abu-Assad's rendition of the story in The Idol is not faithful to real life, but instead offers an affective lens to Assaf's extraordinary rise to fame.
My paper will argue that Palestinian attachment to Assaf expresses an enigmatic longing for hope. Notwithstanding articulable desires for better futures under unbearable socio-political realities of everyday life in Gaza, Assaf's journey to fame offered not so much optimism for a better future but the affective space for Palestinians to dream and playfully come together. Dubbed “Palestine's Dream,” Assaf's success sparked a desire in Palestinians to feel joy. In the film, Assaf's inspiration was his defiant and gender queer sister. Theorizing her defiance through D.W. Winnicott's ideas on the origins of creativity, play, and a “good enough environment,” this paper claims that her queer affect is transmitted to her brother as an ineffable wish for something otherwise. In this way, The Idol posits the source of hope in imaginative creation in excess of familiar narratives.
This volume offers new approaches to some of the biggest persistent challenges in the study of esotericism and beyond. Commonly understood as a particularly “Western” undertaking consisting of religious, philosophical, and ritual traditions that go back to Mediterranean antiquity, this book argues for a global approach that significantly expands the scope of esotericism and highlights its relevance for broader theoretical and methodological debates in the humanities and social sciences.
The contributors offer critical interventions on aspects related to colonialism, race, gender and sexuality, economy, and marginality. Equipped with a substantial introduction and conclusion, the book offers textbook-style discussions of the state of research and makes concrete proposals for how esotericism can be rethought through broader engagement with neighboring fields.
In 2017, TSQ published its special issue on the convergence of blackness and trans*ness, “The Issue of Blackness.” In their introduction, “We Got Issues,” editors Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton offer a vision of a black trans* studies that acknowledges twentieth-century black feminist thought as its primary genealogy. For Ellison et al., the move to make black feminism the intellectual center of black trans* studies not only resists black women's persistent erasure from institutional narratives of knowledge making but also opens the contributions of trans* studies onto new fields of possibility for thinking and feeling embodiment, sociality, and memory otherwise. Aiken, Modi, and Polk build on Ellison et al.’s vision for a black trans* studies by bringing the concerns of “The Issue of Blackness” into conversation with recent black feminist critiques of disciplinarity and representation to imagine again how a black trans* studies rooted in black feminism might take shape in the university today.
This article offers a transatlantic, decolonial theory (or method for the study) of religion by insisting on the need to resituate the Americas and the transatlantic historical experience as primary sites for theorizing modern religion. Despite the surging interest in decolonial theory, its concrete connection with key topics and issues in the field of religious studies has not been systematically theorized, while decolonial theorists working outside the field of religious studies show little or no interest in the formative role of religion in the constitution of the system of modernity/coloniality. This article seeks to build a cohesive framework for a decolonial theory of religion in conversation with various decolonial, anti-racist thinkers writing from Latin American, Caribbean, and US contexts. By pointing at secularity as a key element of modernity/coloniality, the medium through which religion enacts coloniality, it raises critical questions regarding method and theory in the study of Latin American/Caribbean religions.
This essay considers the fraught possibilities for resistance to anti-black violence in contemporary performative acts of protest. I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s work in Scenes of Subjection and Fred Moten’s dialogue with her in In the Break as a theoretical foundation to specifically think for the problems and possibilities of resistance in performances of “die ins.” Ultimately I argue that the die-in, through the simultaneously ephemeral and traceable/iterable ontology of performance, inaugurates a black queer future-in-the-present that departs from without leaving behind Jose Munoz’s notion of the “Then and There of Queer Futurity.” I posit that in the scene of the die-in, black performance presents both a scene of subjection (the reenactment of death) and a scene of resurrection (the protestors get up and continue their lives after the protest “ends”), and thus urge us to hear in Hartman’s phrase “scenes of subjection” the lower frequencies of “scenes of resurrection” which are possible in black performance. Black performance, then, becomes a site where the binary between pessimism and optimism might break down, which I argue makes possible what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.” In the scene of resurrection, black performance is imminent to death but not reducible to that imminence.
A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a gate; children leaning against yellowing stucco walls papered with posters advertising 40-ounce bottles of beer; these are among the images that mobilize affecting geographies of Blackness in RaMell Ross's Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) and Sophia Nahli Allison's A Love Song for Latasha (2019). Affecting geography in film, as I am conceiving it here, refers to the manufacture and circulation of affect through evocation of associative relations between images of space, place, and time (by way of cutting, montage, and duration, for example).[1] Ross's shots of the plantation, for example, are cross-cut with found footage from a silent-era film featuring a blackfaced Black actor peeking out from behind a line of trees.[2] The sequence opens with a "phantom ride" filmed from a car as it quickly makes its way up the palatial house's gravel driveway. Whatever visceral response might be mobilized for a spectator by the apprehension of a plantation house, which at once signifies histories of wealth, beauty, and captive, enslaved bodies, is linked to affects that are mobilized by the evocation of silent-era minstrels, which are then linked to the present moment by way of the contemporary vehicle driving up the lane. The sequence is free from any of the expository discourse that is typical of the documentary form, save for one question posed via an intertitle card-"What happens when all the cotton is picked?"-and instead opens meaning through affecting images that reference, but do not represent, spaces, places, and times. By "affect" here, I loosely distinguish between emotion, a named (although not necessarily reliably named) response to stimuli, and affect, a pre-cognitive, unnamable, and physical response to the proximity of objects.[3] Affect, in other words, is generated at the point of immediate perception-conscious naming or contemplation of affect translates it into emotion. The aesthetics of affect in film involves cinematographic techniques (manipulation and manufacture of images and sounds) that function to generate visceral spectator responses to subjects, objects, and sounds on screen without necessarily aiming to attach them to specific emotional interpretations. The affecting devices might involve expressions of emotion on screen (through gestures, sounds, or words-a person crying, for example), but film affect is unnamable, something experienced bodily by spectators rather than, or prior to, being experienced as cognition or interpretation.[4] Steve Pile similarly describes the distinction between the field of emotional geography and affect geography. Emotional geography is interested in the study of professed or observable emotional responses to spaces, places, and other geographic or architectural objects. The field of affect geography is interested in the ways in which affect functions
Against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of faith in modern reasoning, work on islands and with island cultures has come to the fore in the development of alternative, non-Eurocentric, non-modern, ways of being and knowing. Much attention has surrounded a wide range of critical work associated with the 'ontological' or the 'relational' turn, highlighting interstitial, entangled, post-and more-than-human creative encounters of becoming. This paper examines the emergence of what we call 'abyssal thought', a related but distinctly different analytical approach drawing largely from critical Black studies. Central to abyssal approaches is the understanding of the world as ontologically inseparable from its violent forging through antiblackness. In putting coloniality at the heart of the modernist problematic , abyssal work turns to the Caribbean in particular as a gateway, door or 'punctum', a space of 'abyssal geographies', inviting a deconstruction or unmaking of the world. Exploring how, this paper draws out three key aspects of the abyssal analytic: (1) the abyssal 'subject' forged through the ontological violence of the making of the modern world, (2) the abyssal as a refusal of impositions of spatial and temporal fixities, and (3) the methodological approach of 'paraontology'. Thus, its key concerns are those of refusal, deconstruction and 'suspension' rather than of creative becoming. In distinction to relational ontologies of interstital island work, the desire is not to save or to remake understandings of the human and the world but rather to negate them.
Background/Context
Black people continue to be popularly imagined as lacking humanity and, as such, are often the disproportionate subjects of unceasing race-gender terror and state violence. A vast body of scholarship has documented the failure of schools to adequately serve Black youth in general, and Black boys and men in particular. There is compelling evidence, however, that consistently humanizing interactions with adults in school lead to positive relationships that in turn may protect against Black boys’ experience of school as fundamentally dehumanizing.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
This study examined the significance of positive relationships between Black boys and adults in school as they move(d) across the P–16 education pipeline. The study is guided by the following primary research question: How do young Black men and boys describe and understand their interpersonal relationships with adults in P–16 schools?
Research Design
A descriptive phenomenological approach was used to understand how 28 Black boys and young men discuss and describe the characteristics of relationships with adults in their school or university. Seven video- and audio-recorded focus groups were conducted. Data analysis occurred in three phases. Video clips from focus groups were analyzed in the first phase of data analysis. During the second phase of our data analysis, researchers employed critical race theory as a key analytic perspective to interpret the data for what they revealed about the ways anti-Black racism and white supremacy structured schooling experiences. The third phase of analysis centered on coding the entire data set, regardless of grade band, for three specific types of interactions: disciplinary/behavioral, social/relational, and academic.
Findings/Results
Key findings from the study center on (a) these participants’ keen awareness of the ways their words/behavior/actions are generally misread and misunderstood in U.S. society and (b) the significance of educators’ race-gender perceptions of them in building positive relationships that establish and sustain authentic human connections.
Conclusions/Recommendations
Human connection emerges over time and differentiates what our participants ultimately perceived as “good”/positive relationships from “bad”/negative relationships with educators. Recognition of the residual consequences of U.S. chattel slavery for the ways we see, know, and understand Black people and Black children is essential to cultivating positive relationships with Black boys. Although “bad” relationships are characterized by interactions reflecting racial misandry that Black boys come to expect as a normal, ordinary feature of their schooling experience, positive relationships are evidenced through consistently humanizing interpersonal interactions with adults that actively counter harmful racial scripts.
n this chapter we are concerned with how presupposed ideas of life animate dead educational practices, often through viral racist practices. Notwithstanding the philosophical neglect that ‘life’ has received, today we grapple with new developments in bioinformatics that encourages a rethinking of what constitutes life. Rather than understanding life within humanist traditions (e.g., a contained subject position), we propose a speculative reading of bioinformatics as a particular moment of ‘excess contagion’. We argue that bioinformatics is a scientific and technological force that exceeds enclosures, but one that education will try to harness in order to widen its own limits, particularly through the optimization of human capital. If bioinformatics can simultaneously equalize and exacerbate unequal forms of life, we conclude paradoxically, that accelerating this bioinformatic moment might instantiate a ‘decoloniality of informatics’ through the proliferation of contagious, uncertain, errant, necrotic, and mutant life. Rather than reform education and its anti/racist declarations of vitalist life, we suggest an accelerated use of ‘contagious bioinformatics’ as a way to proliferate unknown becomings for new kinds of intra-connectivity, especially between human and inhuman networks of relationality.
This essay examines the significance of time to the production of black ontology and thus to the field of black studies. It takes as its point of departure the field-changing call to think more critically about the enduring legacies of chattel slavery, particularly how this imperative has cultivated an anticipatory logic that helps to forecast the conditions of blackness and to analyze the nature of black ontology. It argues that alongside the large-scale, transhistorical modes of structural analysis that characterize this approach, attention to the more local, everyday experiences of black people—particularly their feelings—is critical to understanding the ontological conditions of blackness. Examining plays and performances by black artists and civil rights activists Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone, it proposes that, while fleeting and ephemeral, these feelings not only inflect black existence but also are rife with epistemic value that is as crucial to understanding black ontology as the social, political, economic, and discursive structures that underwrite the modern racial order. Critically analyzing the shifting interrelation of time, feeling, and black ontology renders the act of proclaiming who is dead or alive, free or not, a more complex and reflexive enterprise. It shows that no singular structure or network of structural relations can fully anticipate or explain away black ontology. This calculation is always and everywhere a question of time.
The year when Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) was published has gone down as the deadliest year for black youth at the hands of policemen, with no less than 1,134 murders recorded. As he states in many interviews, this is one of the reasons that led Coates to pen his work: to publicly lament so many losses; to confront the difficulties to mourn such violent and untimely deaths; and to shed light on the murderous racist practices that black individuals deal with on a daily basis. To do so, Coates embarks on a journey through history in which he memorializes many black individuals who, until now, have lost their lives in racist violent attacks-from his friend Prince Jones and other several well-known individuals murdered in the last decades, such as Michael Brown or Sean Bell, to, as Toni Morrison puts it, "the disremembered and unaccounted for" (2010, 323). Far from only providing Coates and his son with crucial information about the sociality of blackness, witnessing the death of so many also instils in both a feeling of belonging. Coates's attempt at developing communal bonds through his narration riffs on the concept of "bottomline blackness," which Elizabeth Alexander coined amidst her analysis of the public responses to Rodney King's beating, which she regards as an incident that ended up "consolidat[ing] group affiliations" (78) and forging a "traumatized collective historical memory" (79). Drawing on Ta-Nehisi Coates's celebrated memoir, and bearing into consideration Coates's telling his son that "there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin" (2015, 25), this paper engages in the ongoing discussion about whether Coates's representation of racial bigotries can foster empathic relations or, on the contrary, disavow easy identification from readers.
Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.
This essay attempts to imagine what nonbinary gender might be through an autotheoretical and imaginative email exchange between the author, as “X,” and the author’s gender as nonbinary. Indeed, theorized conversationally throughout are the difficulties and potentialities of nonbinary gender, or nonbinariness as a refusal of gender.
This article considers how Black culture workers engage in ongoing struggles over the meaning and value ascribed to Black lives in an anti-Black world that demands Black death. The artists explored in this article deploy modes of poetics that create possibilities for fugitivity, or escape, from the overdetermination of Black life as always, already, and only “dead.” Such fugitive poetics demonstrate the ways that blackness defies and exceeds social death, even as it is, perhaps, permanently tethered to the potential for premature Black death in an anti-Black world. The article also calls attention to how this poetics of fugitivity draws upon the cultural resources of religious language, beliefs, rituals, and practices to imagine and enact other worlds of possibility for Black futurity beyond the overdetermination of social and/or physical death.
Recent texts in the historiography of slavery have focused on slave-owning women in an attempt to overturn the paradigm of the benevolent mistress. While “benevolence” has silenced and exceptionalized mistresses’ violence, newer interpretations draw from slave testimony to establish forms of equivalence between the power of the mistress and that of the master. Because this normalization of white women’s power nonetheless relies on standards of historiographical interpretation—the predominance of political economy, the imperatives of affect and agency—it does not sufficiently access how historiographical methods participate in stabilizing gender and pathologizing black rage. This article proposes that the difference between the mistress and master is a fantasy necessary to the circulation of the libidinal economy of slavery. In doing so, it pursues an inquiry into the pleasures of interpretation and speculates on the ways historiography invests in the white woman in order to extend its interlocutory life.
The introduction to this special issue frames White supremacy as a central concern within linguistic anthropology, both as a focus of analysis and as a power structure that has profoundly shaped the field’s logics and demographics. We emphasize how carefully attending to language, discourse, and signs can productively illuminate White supremacy’s slippery logics, organizing principles, dynamic infrastructures, and diverse practices. Centering the role of White supremacy in constituting modern sign relations can contribute significantly to linguistic anthropologists’ efforts toward understanding historical and contemporary power structures that organize the dynamic yet systematic interplay between language and context. We hope that this special issue builds constructively on longstanding and more recent linguistic anthropological work that has led us to reconsider the fundamental relationship between language, race, and culture while also pushing our field in important new directions by reconsidering the fundamental relationship between language and racism as a strategy for understanding and contributing to efforts toward combating White supremacy.
This article attempts to analyse mapping practices at the intersection of geography, black studies and literary studies, in order to reassess the political and pedagogical possibilities of mapping under late capitalism. I turn to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved to track black cartographic practices otherwise obscured or, as Katherine McKittrick writes, “rendered ungeographic”. The novel offers a hidden and unauthorised archive for the often clandestine geographic practices that make possible fugitivity from the mechanics of “slaveholding agro‐capitalism” and its ongoing legacy. As an unofficial archive of black geographic practice, Morrison’s novel might itself be thought of as a map: a contemporary mode of memorialising the depth of place, relation, and navigation—a depth no two‐dimensional map can accommodate. Finally, this article demonstrates the valuable interventions that black studies and black creative production can make within the subfields of critical cartography and critical geography.
The essay suggests that Frantz Fanon's French term damnés has very different existentialist and political meanings than those conveyed by the English word wretched. Fanon's conception of the damned was highly influenced by the revolutionary modernist political imagination of black militant poets such as Jacques Roumain and Aimé Césaire, especially by Roumain's poem "Sales négres." Fanon's damned hence cannot be considered as a mere sociological category. Reading The Wretched of the Earth through Giorgio Agamben's ideas on the modernist meanings of the witness and the remnants, I finally argue that what is lost in translation is the apocalyptical, messianic, and redemptive langue of Fanon's damned.
Off the coast of Ireland As our ship passed by We saw a line of Ashing ships Etched against the sky Off the coast of England As we rode the foam We saw an Indian merchantman Coming home. "Seascape" Langston Hughes Time the destroyer is time the preserver, Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows, and chicken coops, The bitter apple and the bite in the apple. "Dry Salvages" T.S. Eliot I HAVE CALLED THIS ESSAY "All the Atlantic Mountains Shook" because I wish to suggest profound and hemispheric events that originate beneath the surface of things and which are not confined to any particular nation but arise from all four corners of the Atlantic — North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Appearing at the beginning of book two of William Blake's poem, "Jerusalem," it is a phrase of the revolutionary two decades ending the eigh-teenth and beginning the nineteenth centuries when those events were adumbra-ted in social practice. In his prophetic poem, "America," etched in 1793, the year that the British military made an armed bid to crush Toussaint L'Ouver-ture and the Dominican slave rebellion, Blake envisioned an Atlantic Utopia: On those vast shady hills between America & Albion's shore, Now barr'd out by the Atlantic sea, call'd atlantean hills, Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world, An ancient palace, archetype of mighty Emperies, Rears it immortal pinnacles, built in the forest of God. Peter Linebaugh. "All The Atlantic Mountains Shook," Labourite Travailleur, 10 (Autumn 1982), 87-121.
The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take place. Its manifestations have changed over the years, though it has always been poised between the realms of the pseudo-social scientific, the birth of new sciences, and the normative impulse that is at the heart of—but that strains against—the black radicalism that strains against it. From the origins of the critical philosophy in the assertion of its extra-rational foundations in teleological principle; to the advent and solidification of empiricist human biology that moves out of the convergence of phrenology, criminology, and eugenics; to the maturation of (American) sociology in the oscillation between good-and bad-faith attendance to "the negro problem"; to the analysis of and discourse on psychopathology and the deployment of these in both colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance; to the regulatory metaphysics that undergirds interlocking notions of sound and color in aesthetic theory: blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay, even when that decay is invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality.
Black radical discourse has often taken up, and held itself within, the stance of the pathologist. Going back to David Walker, at least, black radicalism is animated by the question, What's wrong with black folk? The extent to which radicalism (here understood as the performance of a general critique of the proper) is a fundamental and enduring force in the black public sphere—so much so that even black "conservatives" are always constrained to begin by defining themselves in relation to it—is all but self-evident. Less self-evident is the normative striving against the grain of the very radicalism from which the desire for norms is derived. Such striving is directed toward those lived experiences of blackness that are, on the one hand, aligned with what has been called radical and, on the other hand, aligned not so much with a kind of being-toward-death but with something that has been understood as a deathly or death-driven nonbeing. This strife between normativity and the deconstruction of norms is essential not only to contemporary black academic discourse but also to the discourses of the barbershop, the beauty shop, and the bookstore.
I'll begin with a thought that doesn't come from any of these zones, though it's felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities:
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.1
This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and...
In order to elucidate some of the ways in which critique and subjectivity become inextricably linked in Foucault’s oeuvre,
the paper proceeds first by briefly discussing the concept of critique as limit-attitude as it appears in some of Foucault’s
methodological writings. Subsequently, the main tenets of Judith Butler’s commentary on the essay ‘What is Critique?’ will
be summarized, concentrating on the image of the virtuous, self-making subject that the author’s interpretation brings out
of Foucault’s original text. The second part of the paper aims to develop an alternative reading of Foucault’s notion of critique
by looking at the ways in which the notion of space operates as an underlying perspective in his archaeological analysis.
Ultimately, it will be shown how the spatial implications of Foucault’s early works and a more passive form of subjectivity
as unfolding from his discussion of the ‘author function’ and his own methodological reflections coalesce into a form of practical
critique, which, as wished by the author, may take ‘the form of a possible transgression’ (Foucault 1984a, p. 45).
KeywordsArchaeology–Butler–Critique–Foucault–Non-human becoming–Space–Subjectivity–Thought of the outside
What would it mean for both queer and African diaspora studies to theorize that the black Atlantic has always been a queer Atlantic? What new geography—or better, oceanography—of sexual, gendered, transnational, and racial identities might emerge through a queer reading of transoceanic dislocations between Africa and the Caribbean? This article examines canonical African diaspora and queer theoretical texts in dialogue with recently published creative texts that imagine queer relationships between African kidnapees in slave ships' holds. These creative texts, I argue, more expansively theorize conceptual space both to rethink submerged sexual, racial histories and to comment on the intersections between African diaspora and queer experiences in a contemporary era of Haitian refugees, transnational Dominican laborers, and international West Indian “gay” activists. Texts examined include Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic (1993), Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), Ana-Maurine Lara's Erzulie's Skirt (2006), and Dionne Brand's Map to the Door of No Return (2001).