Since the Combahee River Collective’s influential “Black Feminist Statement” in 1977, Black feminist theory, politically and theoretically, has grappled with how to organize and theorize around the black woman as a multifaceted and multi-oppressed identity. While black feminist thought is known for a theorization of intersectionality (coined in 1991 by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw), this special session is interested in how a critique of European humanism, historically existing alongside and against the narrative of intersectionality, argues the ontological absence of the black woman. Therefore, this special session defines black feminist theory as a point of entry into critical black studies that takes seriously critiques of the human as well as an exploration of the paradox of black gender.
While, the paradox of black gender is much accounted for in black studies; scholars conceive of this speaking subject of the black as masculine (Hull, Scott, Smith 1982, Crenshaw 1989, hooks 1981, Collins 1990, Wynter 1990), while others understand blackness to be ungendered (Spillers 1987, Hartman 1997, Wilderson 2008, Warren 2018), and some conceive of blackness as a sign of the feminine (Glissant 1990, Moten 2003, Chandler 2013). However, this exclusion of black women from a twentieth-century intellectual recovery of black history and theory is historical insofar as it is an attempt to cover over this paradox of black gender. This is not to say that the exclusion of black women forecloses the viability or the importance of these scholars work. Rather, it is a real opportunity and a real chance for those of us interested in exploring the paradox of black gender through the unique ways black women’s thought is masked in other forms and genres of expression such as the artistic and the literary.
To promote discussion, our four panelists will be strictly limited to 10-minute papers. We will begin with “Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead: “Hypervitality” as Anti-Racist Eco-Poetics” by C.R. Grimmer. Their paper, will be reading Danez Smith's books of poems, [insert] boy and Don't Call Us Dead for anti-racist posthuman world-building that materializes postmodernism's abstract "preoccupation with death" and the ecological apocalypse's end of the world. Grimmer’s reading of Smith’s poetics draws on Sylvia Wynter's concept of demonic ground, Katherine McKittrick's mapping of that ground in the contemporary moment, and Avery Gordon's haunting to account for the actual, biopolitical deaths that transpire out of dehumanization as racialization. Ultimately, Grimmer argues that Smith's queer of color poetics create forms of anti-racist, feminist, and queer posthumanisms from the watery grounds and polluted skies of millennial queer and feminist anti-racist cultural production critical of dominant ecological notions of livability and vitality.
Similarly, drawing on Sylvia Wynter as well as Hortense Spillers and Jared Sexton, Brittney Michelle Edmonds and Haylee Christine Harrell take up contemporary discourses of blackness and gender through New Millennium Black Literary Satire and Critical Mixed Race Studies, respectively. Edmonds paper, “What do I Say When I Speak for The Black?: The Gendered Space of New Millennium Black Literary Satire,” investigates the recent and substantial feint by black male authors into satire—a conceptual or abstract literary form—and away from prior historically predominant, if capacious modes of realism. Edmonds is interested in investigating how black male authors turn to satire results in a “nihilistic turn” which revises earlier, canon-making works of African American literary tradition in order to demonstrate the exhaustion of prior representative strategies in the new millennium and to develop an aesthetics of negation that stages the impossibility of black literature as the precondition of its making.
While, Harrell’s paper, “Escape, Fugitivity and the Quest for a Black Human,” puts into conversation Adrian Piper’s Escape to Berlin and Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? in order to investigate how a historical narrative of the “perverse bitter ancestral mix” constructs notions of blackness and the human in contemporary discourses of “mixed-race blacks.” Specifically, Harrell re-reads these travel memoirs in order to investigate how present-day mixed-raced figures either disrupt or reassert traditional notions of tragedy through their relations to the United States’ and its static black and white binaries.
The formal part of the session ends with a paper by Taryn D. Jordan who utilizes the work of Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Michel Foucault in order to explore the relationship between blackness, race, and the human. In “A Face Dissolving at the Edge of the Sea? Du Bois, Wynter, Foucault and the Ends of ‘Man’,” Jordan reads the various components of Paul Stephen Benjamin’s installation at the High Museum of Art,” Black Is A Color,” in order to trace the invention of the human in modernity. Jordan argues that European travelers’ encounters with black women’s bodies that marked them as both extremely beautiful and otherworldly, interdicts the black from consciousness since the black soul (double consciousness) is key to invention of the human. Jordan’s work rounds out the special session as the nexus of her dissertation project is interested in black poetics, modernity, and a critique of European Humanism.
These papers all seek to unsettle the ground on which the human has been erected. This panel is an opportunity for junior scholars to open a larger conversation about the ruptures within historical and modern literatures and theorizations about (post) humanism, blackness, and gender.