This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue was merely a numb object of the past. Fanon seems (...) to reiterate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological discovery in Ideas II that the hand that touches the surface of a table, as it moves across it, also feels itself touched. Fanon’s aim is not simply to calculate the destructive effects of colonization, against arguments for its partial “civilizing” benefits. (shrink)

This essay asks after the lateness that affectively structures Fanon's phenomenology of racialized temporality in Black Skin,White Masks. I broach this through the concepts of possibility, “affective ankylosis”, and by taking seriously the dismembered past that haunts Fanon's text. The colonization of the past involves a bifurcation of time and of memory. To the “burning past,” wherein colonized experience is stuck and to which we remain sensitive, is contrasted the colonial construction of white, western time as progressive and futural—a construction (...) that relies on the very indifference, ankylosis, and closure of this time to the multiple, lived temporalities of colonized others. (shrink)

Bioethics has increasingly become a standard part of medical school education and the training of healthcare professionals more generally. This is a promising development, as it has the potential to help future practitioners become more attentive to moral concerns and, perhaps, better moral reasoners. At the same time, there is growing recognition within bioethics that nonideal theory can play an important role in formulating normative recommendations. In this chapter we discuss what this shift toward nonideal theory means for ethical curricula (...) within healthcare education. In particular, we contend that more attention to the particularities of historical and social context needs to be incorporated into bioethics training. To make this argument, we focus on two examples: teaching units on race and medicine and those that focus on stigma and coercion in mental health. For both, we show how a pedagogical approach in which educators focus on social injustice could influence how practitioners engage in ethics in the clinic. This chapter, then, demonstrates what a commitment to nonideal theory can mean practically when it comes to bioethics education. (shrink)

Trans and gender-nonconforming people sometimes say that certain gender norms are authentic for them. For example, a trans man might say that abiding by norms of masculinity tracks who he really is. Authenticity is sometimes taken to appeal to an essential, pre-social “inner self.” It is also sometimes understood as a moral notion. Authenticity claims about gender norms therefore appear inimical to two key commitments in feminist philosophy: that all gender norms are socially constructed, and that many domains of gender (...) norms are both morally and prudentially bad. I argue that that this apparent tension is illusory. Concordant with existing trans narratives of authenticity, I articulate an existentialist view that understands authenticity as a socially embedded, constructive project undertaken in a non-ideal social world, rather than a reflective uncovering of a pre-given, essential self. I then show that authenticity and morality can come apart; what is authentic for someone need not be either morally good or good for them. I conclude that the authenticity of gender norms does not cut against the feminist commitments that I identify. This conclusion enables a theoretical space that is both respectful of trans experience and critical of dominant gender norms, an important liberatory goal. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential (...) for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. (shrink)

This essay examines the theory of maternal impressions, the belief that a woman’s experiences or emotions during pregnancy could explain congenital disability or emotional/ behavior differences in her child and asks why this theory circulated as an explanation for disability seen at birth by both medical doctors and in literature for far longer than it did across the Atlantic. By presenting examples from nineteenth-century medical literature, popular fiction, maternal handbooks, and two canonical works of literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (...) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave, I argue that maternal impressions worked to maintain anxiety for women, and particular white women, to ensure they felt responsible if anything was “wrong” with their child. Ultimately, I show how maternal impressions was both an ableist and racialized understanding of inheritance that wouldn’t be discarded until the emergence of eugenics in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted by (...) the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

: My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer (feminist) analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

This article is an effort to register the archival surge among Palestinians in Palestine and beyond. It is focused not on the collection of archives but on the mulitmedia practice of archiving as political practice. It is not the work in and on archives that redefines the terms of engagement but the practice of archiving itself. The challenge is directed at what constitutes custodial control, access, rubrics of order, and a pedagogy of use. Academics, artists, and activists are challenging the (...) aesthetics of dissent and the work of aesthetics in redefining what constitutes the political in oppressive colonial regimes today. Countermovements of documentation are efforts to displace rather than only disprove colonial truth. The conceits of what counts as archival labor—and who can do it—are poised to implode. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

Using the turn of the century blackface performer Bert Williams as a case study, this essay explores how we might think about black male performativity in the New World as a historical formation, one that extends both over the time of modernity and across the space of diaspora. I draw from contemporary theories of circum-atlantic performance and black feminist studies of the impact of slavery on black racial and gendered identities, to argue that performance affords a unique window into how (...) blackness is constructed in a space between the black male performer and his equally racialized New World audience. The essay theorizes a notion of key black male performances as ‘signature acts’, then explores discussions of minstrelsy by other black American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and the black British writer Caryl Phillips. Using Fanon's notions of triple-consciousness in tandem with Brechtian and Freudian theories of alienated performances and jokes, the essay concludes with a brief analysis of some of the gendered significations in lyrics from Bert Williams’ first musical comedy and then also in a novel about the performer by Caryl Phillips. (shrink)

The portrayal of the enslaved woman Fotis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses exposes the intersection of gender, sexuality, and slavery. Apuleius’ novel allows a window into interactions beyond the relationship of slaveholder and the enslaved person over whom s/he claimed dominium. Centering Fotis in Apuleius’ narrative shows how a discourse of slavery worked: an enslaved woman is made present as a body that may be sexualized and surrounded with fantasies of sex and violence. The sexual episodes of Lucius and Fotis reveal an (...) aesthetic, facilitated by the system of slavery, of consuming bodies, watching bodies consumed by violence, and framing effacement and degradation as romance, an operation of power at the core of chattel slavery. (shrink)

In both popular culture and academic disciplines, feminism, especially feminisms of women of color, is increasing in popularity. But with that popularity comes certain challenges. It would seem that, due to its popularity, Black feminism has gained a nominal invite to professional philosophy’s (largely) white school social affair. But it has been invited by hosts who don’t quite know what to do with Black feminism once it’s arrived.

Home care is one of the fastest‐growing industries in the United States, providing valuable opportunities for millions of older adults and people with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional settings. Home care workers assist clients with essential activities of daily living, but their wages and working conditions generally fail to reflect the importance of their work. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay and other care ethicists, we argue that good care involves attending to the needs (...) of another out of a concern for their well‐being. Such care should be standard in the home care system. Yet, because of the pervasive racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the home care industry perpetuates, home care workers and their clients cannot reasonably be expected to care about each other. We endorse reforms aimed at enabling home care workers and their clients to form and maintain professional relationships that cultivate care.. (shrink)

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention (...) to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways. (shrink)

while conducting a routine patrol, Peter Liang, a Chinese American New York City police officer, accidently fired his gun in the stairwell of the Louis Pink projects of Brooklyn, New York. The bullet ricocheted off the wall and struck Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old black father, who had entered the stairwell with his friend after giving up on the notoriously malfunctioning elevators. According to reports, the bullet "tore through [Akai's] body, fractured his third rib, nicked his sternum, and pierced his heart (...) and diaphragm."1 Akai immediately fell onto the cold concrete floors as blood poured from his chest. His friend ran to his aid and began to pump his chest while Officer Liang debated whether he should report the... (shrink)

This article draws on the thought of Sylvia Wynter to argue that the development of frameworks of race in the early modern period played an essential, if as yet unconsidered, role in the development of modern skepticism. In formulating this history—and taking Stanley Cavell’s conceptualization of skepticism as an important point of reference—this article positions skepticism as both a historical and ongoing nexus for practices and experiences of racialization. Responding to this, I propose a variant of skepticism that I term (...) enforced skepticism, explored here through a reading of Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017). This is a form of skeptical experience that is born not from epistemological doubt but from the violent foreclosures of access to self-expression and a livable world. (shrink)

I write this essay from a place of thirst, discontent, dream; from being housed in the United States but not at home there; from thinking through this writing in English, a language that is not home; and from wanting to continue making a place that is not home. I think through this inquiry from a place of cohabitation with Western ways of knowing that have purposefully demonized peoples of African descent as less than human; from the tradition of Haitian thinkers (...) and resurgents who emphasize spirituality as crucial to recreating themselves endlessly; and from imagining the unseen, unfelt, and invisible powers that illuminate the process. In this place of feverishness, I sit with Haitian writer and singer Mimerose Beaubrun's monograph Nan Dòmi in order to consider the possibilities and impossibilities that might be realized through a practice of decolonial labor that bridges the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the metaphysical and the material. Taking inspiration from María Lugones's phenomenological approach of decoloniality and Beaubrun's theory of nan dòmi, this essay asks: what in Beaubrun's Nan Dòmi opens decoloniality as a radical onto-epistemological terrain from which to rethink subjectivities, politics, and worlds in uneven and unjust geographies? (shrink)

This paper shows the relevance of findings from studying the logic of self-referential statements to Cultural studies, Black Cultural Studies in particular. Results following from the incompleteness of the systems in which these statements are quantified help to clear up a paradox stemming from current Afropessimist discourse.

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead ‘say nothing’, and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of ‘saying nothing’ is then explored in (...) a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones's neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975). (shrink)

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years, killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like othe...

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture (...) the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers. (shrink)

This paper argues that in social circumstances deformed by persistent anti-black racisms, invisibility does not necessarily constitute a failure of recognition or acknowledgment by others. Rather, it comes forth as a protective shield, to resist reductive and objectifying forms of seeing that often result in violence. But such invisibility has its limits. In this paper, I read Incendiary Art (2017) by Patricia Smith, a collection of poems set in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, to (...) interrogate both the limits of such protective invisibility, and the responsibility of the reader to acknowledge the potential violence of their own gaze. I examine the emancipatory political value of the poetic as showing a way towards a transformative engagement with others as ‘who’ they are, and subsequently towards a mutual co-constitution that is at the very heart of actualising a democratic political plurality. (shrink)

Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown (...) women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires. (shrink)

Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83 provides a helpful point of departure for this philosophical treatment of pan-African subjectivity. His meditations on music resonate with continental and diasporic accounts of the musicality of African social organization. This in turn provides an opening into a discussion around the tension between conceptions of African identity tied to heritage and continuity on one hand, and considerations of the rupture brought about by the Middle Passage and colonialism on the other. Drawing on African philosophy and Black (...) Studies more broadly, this article argues for a conception of African identity that, while taking seriously heritage and origins, ultimately emerges intersubjectively as a result of the movements and reverberations across the constellation of African worlds. Not only are these pan-African reverberations constitutive, the author argues that they are also key to our survival. (shrink)

The rapper Mykki Blanco is lauded as a trailblazer in the contemporary queer hip hop movement, and it is this reputation that, in part, makes the single of her debut album so curious. The song ‘Loner’ is unequivocally pop and explores health, loneliness, love and sex, echoing Blanco's shifting relationship to gender, genre, sobriety and serostatus. Amidst three key performances of this song, Blanco's consciousness was at various stages of development and they reflect her journey into trans womanhood and through (...) HIV seroconversion. As such, her relationship to gender and disability comes in and out of focus as the legibility of her art and affect jockey across black gay, gender fluid and trans modes of self-determination. This confluence of Blanco's affect, genders, music and performances leads to certain questions. What constellates loneliness during a black trans process of becoming? What collateral genealogies and intellectual and expressive cultural formations come to bear on the affective attachments of black queer, trans, feminist art? In this article, I offer an account of the antagonistic relationship between affect studies and black studies in order to contextualise the stakes of thinking affect alongside gender and race. I also forward a theory of ecstatic loneliness which attends to the ways in which anti-blackness, HIV stigma and transphobia produce negative affects that function as the basis for imagining a trans-inclusive care practice that is empathetic to the experience of seroconversion. Through analysis of three performances of ‘Loner’, I find that wayward commitments to gender lead to various emplacements of the song in black cisgender, transgender and gender-fluid discourses of affect, community and performance, resulting in an interdisciplinary method of black and queer self-making that is underexamined in affect studies scholarship. (shrink)

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and (...) enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, specifically by women of colour, to account for absences and evasions in Maggie Nelson's relation to queer feminist literary history. Resituating her quotation about “kinship systems” from Judith Butler into Butler's discussion of house mothers in ball culture, it calls attention to the erasure of queer racialized embodiment and intellection from Nelson's account, emblematized by Cherríe Moraga's Medea and – as embodied site of “shit and labor” (...) – the perineum, figuring the work of connection. (shrink)

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery (...) and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery. (shrink)

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city (...) and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself. (shrink)

This article critiques dominant feminist analyses of the “Hottentot Venus.” It argues that these analyses of the construction of Black women as “other,” which borrow heavily from poststructuralism, make race and gender transhistorical and metaphysical constructs. The article critiques what has become the theoretical orthodoxy on the “Hottentot Venus.” It takes issue with two presumptions in particular: first, that there was a core image of the Black woman in the nineteenth century, and second, that the fear of the anatomy of (...) the “other” is the source of negative representations of Black sexuality. The article proposes an alternative way of understanding the construction of Black women in colonial discourse. It argues that social relations, rather than psychological dispositions, determine how bodies are seen and perceived. (shrink)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also to engage (...) in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible, and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among Indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations (...) of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women's presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Trans of Color inclusion is not simply a gesture of affectionate commitment to María Lugones's theory of impure communities. Rather, it is required for the enactment of her liberatory theory within and across communities of color. While María Lugones's historico-theoretical analysis of the colonial/modern gender system relies upon anthropological citations of Native gender and sexual diversity, she argues that we must bracket gender for the benefit of [cis]women of color feminisms. However, if this bracketing does not first carefully uncover cisgender (...) histories of violence, then this decolonial feminist praxis reinscribes the invisibility of transphobia, racism, and colonialism's violent intersections, performing another mode of erasure and silence on Trans, Two-Spirit, and Nonbinary Native, Black, and Latinx peoples. In placing Lugones's texts into conversation with the voices of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color theorists, I argue that the mutilation of trans flesh makes possible the integration of [cis]People of Color into the gender–sex binary even if as failures. More important, this essay offers the beginnings of a phenomenological account of Trans World-Traveling, where the unruliness of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color bodies cocoons decolonial worlds from within the spiraling folds of abject flesh—always already in infra-communication with ancestral pasts, presents, and futures. (shrink)

Hortense Spillers ends “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” with a provocative suggestion: “Actually claiming the monstrosity … ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.” In this article, I knead the material, representational, and performative powers operating through conceptually separate and yet deeply entangled contested terrains: the “real,” or the scene of “actual mutilation,” whose high crimes against the flesh coincide with the construction of the “symbolic.” Through Baradian performativity, I read Spillers's theorization on the name as (...) an event wherein proprietary relationships, which necessarily oscillate between material/signification binaries, are called forth in historical terrain in the moment of racial address. Paying close attention to her grammar, the first half of this article tracks Spillers's movement through an undercurrent of American historical mythology that, as she demonstrates, misnames the black mother. The rest of this article then takes up to what extent certain “mocking doubles”—minstrel and/or monstrous tropes resuscitated but not redeemed or even necessarily renamed—might agitate their way toward new texts for female empowerment and the cultivation of the black mother's power to “name.”. (shrink)

This article argues that Frank B. Wilderson's political ontology can be read as both a critique and a radicalization of Giorgio Agamben's formal political-ontological framework constructed around the two extreme poles of sovereignty and bare life. Wilderson critiques and expands Agamben's framework by locating the zero point of political abjection not within bare life, which is still implicated within the ontological zone of Human being by way of an included exclusion, but within Black social death, which is cut off absolutely (...) from Human being. While such a political ontological framework provides an extremely powerful optic for the absolute ontological abjection of Black existence in relation to all other racial positions in the modern West, its absolute prioritization limits the scope of an analysis of power relations that might offer an account of racial positioning that is both broader than and resistant to the political ontology of Western race relations. In conclusion, turning to Fred Moten's Black optimism and Deleuze's and Guattari's account of micropolitics and lines of flight, the article argues for a pragmatics of resistance that finds its practical condition of possibility within the micropolitical field of power relations that marks an excess to the anti-Black macropolitics of political ontology. (shrink)

At the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet (...) gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between traditional, or aesthetic, modernism and modernity as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of race and gender as these have been addresse...