SNFI: Race

Vocabulary
Whiteness
White Supremacy
Intersectionality
Performativity
Performance Studies
Middle Passage
Civil Society
Anti-blackness
Antagonism
Ontology
Sovereignty
Gratuitous Violence
Slave
Savage
Settler
Social Death
Paraontology

Authors

Kimberly Crenshaw

received a B.A. from Cornell in 1981, a J.D. from Harvard Law in 1984, an LL.M. from the University of
WisconsinMadison in 1985,
The term intersectionality theory was first coined by Kimberl Crenshaw in 1989.[2] Crenshaw
mentioned that the intersectionality experience within black women is more powerful than the sum of
their race and sex, and that any observations that do not take intersectionality into consideration
cannot accurately address the manner in which black women are subordinated

Black+ woman
Black+ woman+ poor
Black +woman+ poor+ queer
Black+ woman+ poor+ queer+ U.S. Citizen+

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, radical feminist, womanist, and civil rights activist.

The masters tools will never dismantle the masters house

The value in our differences

Audre Lorde 1980. Paper Delivered at the Amherst Colloquim Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
Redefining Difference Extracted from:Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial
Perspectives (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) Anne McClintock, Ella Shohat and Aamir Mufti

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy that

needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such as economy, we have all been
programmed to respond to the human differences among us with fear and loathing and to
handle those difference in one of three ways 1) ignore them ;2) if that is not possible, copy the attributes of those who are
dominant ; or 3) destroy the attributes of those who are subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across out human
differences as equals. As a result,

those differences have been misnamed and misused in the

service of separation and confusion. Certainly there are very real differences among us of
race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences that are separating us. It is rather our
refusal to recognize those differences and to examine the distortions that results from our
misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation. Racism, the belief
in the inherence superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.
Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right
of dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism. In a lifetime pursuit for each one
of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize , reclaim,
and define those differences upon which they are imposed . For we have all been raised in a
society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour our energy needed for
recognizing and exploring differences into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers or that they
do not exist at all.

This results in voluntary isolation or false and treacherous connections.

Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative
change within our lives.

Favorite Color- Poem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYaOuQJUI84

Patricia Hill Collins

Eurocentric Epistemologies
Patricia Hill Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment(Revised 10th Anniv 2nd Edition) 2000

In the United States, the social institutions that legitimate knowledge as well as the
Western or Eurocentric epistemologies that they uphold constitute two interrelated parts
of the dominant knowledge validation processes. In general, scholars, publishers, and other experts
represent specific interests and credentialing processes, and their knowledge claims must satisfy the political and
epistemological criteria of the contexts in which they reside (Kuhn

1962; Mulkay 1979). Because this

enterprise is controlled by elite White men, knowledge validation processes reflect this
groups interests.3 Although designed to represent and protect the interests of powerful White men, neither schools,
government, the media and other social institutions that house these processes nor the actual epistemologies that they promote
need be managed by White men themselves. White women, African-American men and women, and other people of color may be
enlisted to enforce these connections between power relations and what counts as truth. Moreover, not all White men accept
these power relations that privilege Eurocentrism. Some have revolted and subverted social institutions and the ideas they
promote. Two political criteria influence knowledge validation processes. First,

knowledge claims are

evaluated by a group of experts whose members bring with them a host of

sedimented experiences that reflect their group location in intersecting
oppressions[ that] No scholar can avoid cultural ideas and his or her placement in
intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. In the United States, this means that a
scholar making a knowledge claim typically must convince a scholarly community
controlled by elite White avowedly heterosexual men holding U.S. citizenship that a
given claim is justified. Second, each community of experts must maintain its credibility as
defined by the larger population in which it is situated and from which it draws its basic, taken-forgranted knowledge. This means that scholarly communities that challenge basic beliefs
held in U.S. culture at large will be deemed less credible than those that support

popular ideas. For example, if scholarly communities stray too far from widely held
beliefs about Black womanhood, they run the risk of being discredited. When elite
White men or any other overly homogeneous group dominates knowledge
validation processes, both of these political criteria can work to suppress Black

feminist thought. Given

that the general U.S. culture shaping the taken-for-

granted knowledge of the community of experts is permeated by widespread

notions of Black female inferiority, new knowledge claims that seem to violate
this fundamental assumption are likely to be viewed as anomalies (Kuhn 1962). Moreover,
specialized thought challenging notions of Black female inferiority is unlikely to be generated from within White-male-controlled
academic settings because both the kinds of questions asked and the answers to them would necessarily reflect a basic lack of

Believing that
they are already knowledgeable, many scholars staunchly defend controlling images of
familiarity with Black womens realities. Even those who think they are familiar can reproduce stereotypes .

U.S. Black women as mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels, and allow these commonsense

beliefs to permeate their scholarship

Warren and Fasset

Warren and Fassett, 4, assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green
State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and assistant professor in the
Department of Communication Studies at San Jos State University, where she teaches courses in instructional
communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies.
John T. and Deanna L., Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430 (pp. 414-415)

Performative pedagogy, while still an undertheorized site of investigation (and pedagogical

practice), has groundings in various fields ranging from dance and theatre to English and
communication studies. Our commitment to performative pedagogy emerges from traditions of
oral interpretationa field of study where researchers and teachers feel one can develop a
thoughtful and complex understanding of a literary or popular text, such as a poem, by
performing that text, by reading that text through the body. Wallace A. Bacon's work on the
potential of performance is indeed persuasive: "The performing act comes as close, perhaps, as
we shall ever get to the transcendence of self into other. It is a form of knowingnot just a skill
for knowing, but a knowing. [. . .] If the engagement is real, not simply pretended, the self
grows" (73). While Bacon here discusses the transcendence of self into the other, his work is a
possible way of thinking through whitenesswhere whiteness is so invisible to the perceiving
white subject that his own racial identity is effectively othered. Thus, the engagement with
whiteness is an engagement with the other, a reconceptualization of the self as other. Certainly
the work of Boal is key in this process of engagement. His work on forum theatre alone can be
imagined as a productive and engaging site of understanding how power is situated in our lives,
in our bodies. His work has been framed by several scholars as performativemost clearly by
Elyse Lamm [End Page 414] Pineau, who, aligning her work with Boal's, argues that
performative pedagogy is a trickster (that is, subversive) pedagogy. Pineau offers four ways of
framing and defining performative pedagogy, noting that through this pedagogical method one
might assist in challenging and subverting systems of power such as whiteness. She frames this
redefinition as educational poetics, play, process, and power (15). In "Educational Poetics," the
banking mode of education characterized by traditional information dispensing into waiting
students is reframed into an "educational enterprise [that is] a mutable and ongoing ensemble of
narratives and performances" (10). "Educational Play" resituates pedagogy in the body, asking
students and teachers to engage in corporeal playa mode of "experimentation, innovation,
critique, and subversion" (15). "Educational Process," on the other hand, acknowledges that

identities are always multiple, overlapping, ensembles of real and possible selves who enact
themselves in direct relation to the context and communities in which they perform.

E. Patrick Johnson

Quare Theory
Prof @NW. Head of the Performance Studies Department
Quare Theory
JOHNSON 2K6 *Patrick E., professor of African American studies and performance studies at
Northwestern University, Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about Queer Studies I learned
from my grandmother in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology"Quare," on the other hand, not only
speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. "Quare." offers a way to critique stable notions of
identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges. My project is one of recapitulation and
recuperation. I want to maintain the inclusivity and playful spirit of "queer" that animates much of queer theory, but
I also want to jettison its homogenizing tendencies. As a disciplinary expansion, then. I wish to "quare- "queer"
such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially
condi-tioned. This reconceptualization foregrounds the ways in which lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and
transgendered people of color come to sexual and racial knowledge. Moreover, quare studies acknowledges the
different "stand-points" found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered [LGBT]people of color differences
differences that are also conditioned by class and gender. Quare studies is a theory of and for gays and lesbians of color. Thus. I acknowledge
that in my attempt to advance "quare." studies, I run the risk of advancing another version of identity politics. Despite this, I find it necessary to
traverse this political minefield in order to illuminate the ways in which some strands of queer theory fail to incorporate racialized sexuality.

The theory that I advance is a "theory in the flesh:' Theories in the flesh emphasize the diversity within and
among gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color while simultaneously accounting for how
racism and classism affect how we experience and theorize the world. Theories in the flesh also conjoin theory
and practice through an embodied politic of resistance. This politics of resistance is manifest in vernacular
traditions such as performance. folklore, literature, and verbal art.

Performance Theory
JOHNSON 2K6 *Patrick E., professor of African American studies and performance studies at Northwestern
University, Quare Studies or (almost) everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from my grandmother in
Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

Theories of performance, as opposed to theories of performativity, also take into account the context
and historical moment of performance. We need to account for the temporal and spatial specificity of
performance not only to frame its existence, but also to name the ways in which it signifies. Such an analysis would

acknowledge the discursivity of subjects and would also unfix the discursively constituted subject as always already a
pawn of power. Although many queer theorists appropriate Foucault to substantiate the imperialism of power,

Foucault himself
acknowledges that discourse has the potential to disrupt power: Discourses are not once and for all
subservient to power or raised up against it, anymore than silences are. We must make allowances for
complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and effect of power, but also a hindrance, a
stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmit and produces
power; it reinforces it , but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it. Although people of color, myself included, may not have theorized our lives in Foucaults
terms, we have used discourse in subversive ways because it was necessary for our survival. Failure to
ground discourse in materiality is to privilege the position of those whose subjectivity and agency,
outside the realm of gender and sexuality, have never been subjugated.

Womack
Ytasha Womackargues stretches all the way back to ancient African griot traditions; she also notes
the frequent references to Egyptian astronomy and the pyramids.
She describes Afrofuturism as "the intersection between black culture, technology, liberation and the
imagination, with some mysticism thrown in, too. It can be expressed through film; it can be
expressed through art, literature and music. It's a way of bridging the future and the past and
essentially helping to reimagine the experience of people of colour."
A brief and in no way definitive breakdown of Afrofuturism's musical lineage might look
something like this. The 50s and 60s were dominated by the free jazz and avant garde work of Sun
Ra and his Arkestra, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane, with some
psychedelic input from Jimi Hendrix and Love. The 70s and 80s were when George Clinton's
Parliament/Funkadelic and Prince sent funk to outer space and dub innovators such as King Tubby
and Lee "Scratch" Perry beamed out cosmic signals from Jamaica. The 90s saw a renaissance and
reimagining of Afrofuturism in hip-hop (OutKast, Kool Keith's Dr Octagon alias and RZA), neo-soul
(Erykah Badu) and techno (specifically Detroit producers such as Drexciya), with all embracing the
philosophy and giving it their own distinctive edge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOui_ftQkVE

Dylan Rodriguez

Dylan Rodrguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He
received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California,
Berkeley (2001), and earned two B.A. degrees and a Concentration degree from Cornell
University (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZPQRLqy9i0

Black Boys- Poem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Wf8y_5Yn4

Dylan Rodriguez, Professor, University of California Riverside, Nov. 2007 Kritika Kultura AMERICAN
GLOBALITY AND THE US PRSION REGIME: STATE VIOLENCE AND WHITE SUPREMACY FROM ABU GHRAIB
TO STOCKTON TO BAGONG DIWA

Variable, overlapping, and mutually constituting white supremacist regimes have

in fact been fundamental to the formation and movements of the United States,
from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to recent and current modes of
neoliberal land displacement and (domestic-to-global) warfare. Without
exception, these regimes have been differently entangled with the states
changing paradigms, strategies, and technologies of human incarceration and
punishment (to follow the prior examples: the plantation, the reservation, the neoliberal sweatshop,
and the domestic-to-global prison). The historical nature of these entanglements is widely
acknowledged, although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to

either isolate or historically compartmentalize the complexities of historical

white supremacy. For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy
may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented,
institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized human difference,

enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal

possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of peoples collective
capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a historical
vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is
simultaneously premised on and consistently innovating universalized
conceptions of the white (European and euroamerican) human vis--vis the
rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and
biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or nonhuman. To consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation
(rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of
the modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the
social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American
globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering.

Jared Sexton

Jared Sexton The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism InTensions Journal 2011 by York University
(Toronto, Canada)

Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the
antiblack world developed across his first several books: Blacks

here suffer the phobogenic reality

posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or
signify various social pathologiesthey become them. In our antiblack world,
blacks are pathology (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Motens contention that even much
radical black studies scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and
extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that Gordon deepens the already
problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he
fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than
remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in

this acceptance or
affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs
accrue to being black, [is] to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life
under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates
of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an affirmation of
pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness in a
valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to
sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, The Black Man and Language: A Senegalese who
culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive,

learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment
(Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white

existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative above all,
dont be black (Gordon 1997: 63)in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that resides in

In this we might create a transvaluation of

pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. [24] To speak
of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black
the idea that I am thought of as less than human (Nyongo 2002: 389).xiv

social life in black social deathall of this

is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement ,

Black optimism is not the

negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not
negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much
a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black
(social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the
codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of
an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief.

people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society
has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with laborthe modern world system.

Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived
underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against
afropessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical
dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in
social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death.

Wilderson
Frank Wilderson
Grammar of Suffering
Frank Wilderson Red, White, and Black 2010
Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is
assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the grammar of
political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich underwrites
political discourse and which underwrites cinematic speech is also unspoken. This
notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And this structure of suffering crowds out others, regardless of the sentiment of
the film or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question. To put a finer point on it,
structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another
(despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological position from which
they speak)
5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V317J0V11w0

Frank Wilderson- The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented at

Imprisoned Intellectuals Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages are
White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And the invitation ion to
participate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not extended to the unwaged. We
live in the world , but exist outside of civil s society. This structurally impossible position is a paradox,

because the Black subject, the slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its
genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of
this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gramsci we
have consistent silence. In taking Foucault to task for assuming a universal subject in revolt against discipline,
in the same spirit in which I have taken Gramsci to task for assuming a universal subject, the subject of civil
society in revolt against capital, Joy James writes : The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons,
it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In
fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois selfpolicing. The state routinely polices the14 unassimilable in the hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks , control units
, and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not
Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that
they are confronted by, or threat ended by the removal of, a wage -- be it monetary or social. But Black

subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy,

because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements like the
prison abolition movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave If we are
to take Fanon at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets out to change
the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder # (37) then we must
accept the fact that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely
as a repository of complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction
at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of
gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those other bodies for which
violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level
of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of
History, no data for the categories of Immigration or Sovereignty; it is an experience without
analog # a past, without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the

level of the Imaginary for #whoever says #rape # says Black , # (Fanon) , whoever says
#prison # says Black, and whoever says #AIDS # says Black (Sexton) # the #Negro is a phobogenic
object # (Fanon). Indeed &a phobogenic object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a
program of complete disorder. But whereas this realization is, and should be cause for alarm, it should

or worse, disavowal # not at least, for a true revolutionary, or

for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. 15 If a social movement
not be cause for lament,

is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it
should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present
themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the
Negro has been inviting Whites, and as well as civil society #s junior partners, to the dance of
social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been , and

remain today # even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition
movement # invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is
pro-White, but it is to say that it is almost always anti-Black which is to say it will not dance with
death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because
it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing
resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a

negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal al to affirm , a program of complete disorder.
One must embrace its disorder, its in coherence and allows oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed
one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites
one #s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word #prison # being linked to the word #abolition #? What are the movement 's lines of political
accountability y? There #s nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated,
by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself: no one, for example, has ever been known to say #gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner,
or maybe not come at all. # But few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness # and the state of political l
movements in America today is marked by this very Negro phobogen is: #gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all. # Perhaps
there #s something more terrifying about the joy of Black, then there is about the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today p refers
to remain in- orgasmic in the face of civil society # with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. But if, through this stasis, or paralysis , they try y to do the work
of prison a abolition # that work will fail; because it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e. the worker) on behalf of a position of in coherence, the Black
subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between worker s and s laves. They remain coalitions
opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply feed our
frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant

or White woman demanding a

the Black subject # be

s/he a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting # gestures toward the disconfiguration
of civil society: from the coherence of civil society, the Black
subject beckons with the in coherence of civil war. A civil war which
social wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of

reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of
absolute dereliction: a scandal which rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that
unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. A Black specter waiting in the wings, an
endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but must nonetheless be
pursued to the death.

Fred Moten
Brilliant Action- Don Cherry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whBYYWZPyeQ
Fred Motenprofessor of English at Duke2013 (Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),
The South Atlantic Quarterly 112.4: p.749-750).
Within this framework blackness and antiblackness remain in brutally antisocial structural support of
one another like the stanchions of an absent bridge of lost desire over which flows the commerce and
under which flows the current, the logistics and energy of exclusion and incorporation, that
characterizes the political world. Though it might seem paradoxical, the bridge between blackness and
antiblackness is the unbridgeable gap between Black being and Human life (Wilderson 2010: 57).
What remains is the necessity of an attempt to index black existence by way of what Chandler (2007: 41)
would call paraontological, rather than politico-ontological, means. The relative nothingness of black
life, which shows up for political ontology as a relation of nonrelation or counterrelation precisely in the
impossibility of political intersubjectivity, can be said both to obscure and to indicate the social
animation of the bridges underside, where the im/possibilities of political intersubjectivity are
exhausted. Political ontology backs away from the experimental declivity that Fanon and Du Bois were
at least able to blaze, each in his own way forging a sociological path that would move against the
limiting force, held in the ontological traces, of positivism, on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the
other, as each would serve as the foundation of a theory of relations posing the nothingness of
blackness in its (negative) relation to the substance of subjectivity-as-nonblackness (enacted in
antiblackness).
On the one hand, blackness and ontology are unavailable for one another; on the other hand, blackness
must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontologys sanction against the
very idea of black subjectivity. This imperative is not something up ahead, to which blackness aspires; it
is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisyphean, that blackness serially commits. The
paraontological distinction between blackness and blacks allows us no longer to be enthralled by the
notion that blackness is a property that belongs to blacks (thereby placing certain formulations
regarding non/relationality and non/communicability on a different footing and under a certain
pressure) but also because ultimately it allows us to detach blackness from the question of (the meaning
of) being. The infinitesimal difference between pessimism and optimism lies not in the belief or disbelief
in descriptions of power relations or emancipatory projects; the difference is given in the space between
an assertion of the relative nothingness of blackness and black people in the face, literally, of
substantive (antiblack) subjectivity and an inhabitation of appositionality, its internal social relations,
which remain unstructured by the protocols of subjectivity insofar as muwhich has been variously
translated from the Japanese translation of the Chinese wu as no, not, nought, nonbeing, emptiness,
nothingness, nothing, no thing but which also bears the semantic trace of dance, therefore of measure
given in walking/falling, that sustenance of asymmetry, differences appositional mobilityalso signifies
an absolute nothingness whose antirelative and antithetical philosophical content is approached by way
of Nishida Kitaros enactment of the affinities between structures and affects of mysticism that
undergird and trouble metaphysics in the East and the West. Indeed, the content that is approached
is approach, itself, and for the absolute beginner, who is at once pilgrim and penitent, mu signals that
which is most emphatically and lyrically marked in douard Glissants phrase consent not to be a single

being and indicated in Wildersons and Mackeys gestures toward fantasy in the hold, the radical
unsettlement that is where and what we are. Unsettlement is the displacement of sovereignty by
initiation, so that whats at stakehere, in displacementis a certain black incapacity to desire
sovereignty and ontological relationality whether they are recast in the terms and forms of a Lvinasian
ethics or an Arendtian politics, a Fanonian resistance or a Pattersonian test of honor.