There have been a growing number of studies published on abject socialities and aesthetics. Examples include José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection (NYU Press, 2010), Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus (Duke Univ. Press, 2014), Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006), and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human (Duke Univ. Press, 2014). Building on this existing scholarship our session focuses specifically on cultural expressions produced in abject spaces within the western nation states such as the U.S. and the U.K. Our session asks how texts such as pulp fiction, dance, and kink subcultures have interrogated what it means to be human by embracing histories of negative inheritances. The session demonstrates how these cultural expressions push against the “wrongness of being” and offer unknown possibilities of our freedom and creativity as a species. If as Darieck Scott argues “abjection in/of blackness endows its inheritors with a form of counterintuitive power,” then what are the possibilities of such power?
To promote discussion we have selected three panelists who will each present for seventeen minutes, leaving time for a robust discussion. The papers on this panel examine genres, spaces, and subjectivities in excess of normative definitions of humanity, specifically as addressed by popular cultural forms. We will begin with “The Queer Elsewheres: Single Room Occupancy Hotels and Queer Socialities in Black Pulp Fiction” by Debarati Biswas. She explores how Robert Deane Pharr’s 1971 novel, S.R.O., thematizes the lumpenproletarization of racialized bodies in abject spaces within the white bourgeois nation state through the portrayal of a wild space such as the Logan, a single room occupancy hotel located in Harlem, NY. Set in the moments surrounding the failed promise of the Civil Rights era, she argues that Pharr’s novel stages an interrogation of the forms of freedom produced by a Cold War world structured by the ideology of racial liberalism and asks readers to imagine the possibilities of black and queer socialities in spaces marked by confinement, regulation, and surveillance. Instead of pining for the possibility of an actual escape from their conditions (since there is none), the characters re-imagine the Logan through queer worldmaking activities such as the ritual of writing, the capacity to love and empathize, and the more mundane rituals of sex, addiction, and gossip.
Similarly, Kirin Wachter-Grene in “A Mistress, Her Slave, and Their Queen: Black Leatherwomen and the Networked Family,” explores black women’s historical, manifold involvement with the leather, kink, BDSM, and fetish communities during the 70s. Within the surveillance of a white supremacist state, black female and queer sexualities have been silenced and censored for centuries in the name of respectability, protectionism, and uplift. Wachter-Grene represents black leatherwomen as engaging a practice of erotic kinship that embodies an ethics of care by exploring the erotic trio of Viola Johnson and her lifemates Mistress Jill Carter (the first black female International Ms. Leather and icon to leatherwomen around the world) and Queen Cougar (leatherwoman and “gift” to Johnson and Carter for their 24th wedding anniversary) as forming what Melissa Murray deems a “networked family”—a chosen family that practices kinship-based relations of caregiving determined by affective, rather than biological, ties. Using archival materials from Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, Wachter-Grene illuminates the affective intricacies of Viola Johnson’s kinship communities and the committed practice of lifestyle slavery.
Anthony Bayani Rodriguez’s paper, “The Importance of Calypso in Sylvia Wynter’s Intellectual Journey,” pushes beyond the boundaries of the United States and showcases Sylvia Wynter’s life in London during the 1950s as it coincided with an extraordinary burst of cultural activity by black migrants, exiles, and dissidents from across the colonized world. For Wynter and many colonial migrants living in London during postwar period, black dances such as calypso were an important source of entertainment as well as an outlet for cultivating a sense of Third Worldist, internationalist, and anticolonialist consciousness. Prior to establishing herself as a writer and social critic, Wynter toured Europe as a member of Boscoe Holder’s dance troupe “the Caribbean Dancers.” Rodriguez demonstrates how this brief period of her life was pivotal in the development of her identity as a black woman, and how it fueled her interest in exploring the Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions that were repressed during her youth in colonial Jamaica. Drawing on archival research as well as rare and unpublished interviews with Wynter, Rodriguez examines this largely overlooked period of Wynter’s early life in relation to her subsequent work as a black studies scholar and radical social theorist. Laura Westengard, the presider, will pose questions to both the panelists and the audience so a lively discussion may ensue.
These papers all examine archival and understudied late 20th century resources to reimagine what it means to be human in abject spaces. These popular texts and cultural expressions both work within and exceed structures of abjection and surveillance to create socialities, aesthetics, and epistemologies that redefine white capitalist, heteronormative notions of humanity and demonstrate the possibilities of black and queer “counterintuitive power.”