Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:34 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. James Bliss Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies Literary theory continues to be received by some as if it were an alien or antagonistic presence from whose leaden and reductive grasp it is imperative to keep literature protected. It is rare, however, that it is the literary, as such, that is being protected, rather than a certain comfortable accommodation with it—not irreducible strangeness and surprise, but the security of knowing that one’s expectations will be fulfilled and one’s competence as a reader rewarded. The pleasures of accommodation and immediate assimilation are the first that theory asks us to forego—which may do as much to make it seem forbidding and “inhumane” as anything it actually proposes. —Elizabeth W. Bruss1 I. Theory Not for the first time, we find ourselves building new genres. Pursuing new writings. Not for the first time, the theoretical and the literary envelope, eclipse, and rearticulate one another. What’s more, the theoretical has been a mode of artistic practice for so long that every page is a palimpsest, a sedimentation of sedimentations of conceptual frames— swirled, spiraling genealogies. Fluent in invented tongues, in the idioms 1. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 483. 35 James Bliss Books Discussed in This Essay Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. By Stephen Best. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Queer Times, Black Futures. By Kara Keeling. New York: NYU Press, 2019. of invention, in the fluid looseness of disintegrated discourses, our works turn singular. The monograph as signature. The page promises to freeze the text, the object, the artwork, the lifeworld, the performance, and in that stillness to teach us its movements. New moves, secret passageways, lines of escape and gaps in the walls of institutions that die, dissolve, and ossify around and inside us. And here we are. The permanent apocalypse that racial capitalism has been for most life has reached the quadrangles of the college campus. What are we even doing anymore? In the great and dreadful remaking of higher education, as students face permanent indebtedness as the cost of entry into a world without work, what is the ethical impetus for our researches and the systems within which we publish? What are the ethics of critical cultural studies in a debt mine? By what arithmetic do we benefit the students we teach to “steal from the university ” when the university is so much more adroit at stealing from them (and us)? At the same time that the contours of our professional lives are, apparently, unraveling, we find ourselves in (another) new renaissance in Black studies and Black study. We find ourselves within (another) new moment of textual production around the trio of race/gender/sexuality— that is, around Blackness or around Black feminism. 36 James Bliss Or, Black invention—where the Black female, femme, feminine, and maternal operate as synecdochic figures for a species of poiēsis.2 In the 1980s, Jacques Derrida wryly called California the “state of theory” as a function of its tectonic instability.3 In the 2010s, Blackness became the state of theory as a function of its coincidence of death and life, ending and beginning, absence and excess, apocalypse and invention. Blackness, in this instance, is as material as it is metaphor, a projection of meaning across both the great ephemeral skin and the body as flesh. This piece emerges from a sense of the necessity and the hazards of an intellectual history of a moment during which, to take a suggestive phrase from Jared Sexton, “Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”4 But already language presents an issue. What is the relationship between Sexton’s “theory” and the “theory” found in the epigraph from Elizabeth Bruss? Or, between Sexton’s “theory” and Lewis R. Gordon’s “theory,” as Sexton borrows from Gordon’s “Theory in...