Accordingly, our papers explore speculative, non-normative, posthuman, and extraterrestrial modes of Black sociality, art, and ontology. Situating our work in relation to contemporary Black critical theory, feminist, queer, and genre studies that theorizes the raced and gendered construction of the human, we draw on the philosophical contributions of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, and Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. These literary critics, theorists, and Black Studies scholars frame our interrogation of the bounds of the human, and aesthetics of resistance, in the social, psychic, and bodily context of persistent anti-blackness.
The session begins with Eve Dunbar's exploration of the aesthetic and affective literary worlds of Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West. While the mid-century is often perceived as a period of aesthetic and cultural integration, Dunbar's paper offers a countervision to that norm. She considers how Hurston and West craft non-normative bodies and desires as the future of black liberation politics in segregation-era African American literature. This presentation focuses on two works: Hurston's 1938 Caribbean ethnography, Tell My Horse and West's 1948 novel, The Living Is Easy. Dunbar argues that Hurston employs the figure of the zombie in her travelogue to offer an anti-work model capable of refusing U.S. belonging, and that, likewise, West reimagines the nuclear family to envision black futures outside of white-patriarchal power structures.
Following Dunbar, Shaun Myers will present her paper on blackness and posthumanism. Myers demonstrates that post-Civil Rights African American literature uses racial obscurity to move beyond “Man.” Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s story “Recitatif” and novel Paradise abstain from disclosing race in normative ways, Myers argues that these narratives disrupt the processes of racial perception that sustain liberal-humanist fictions of Man. Myers uncovers a similar impulse in Octavia Butler’s speculative story, “Bloodchild” (1984). Residing both within and outside racial reality—a narrative mode Myers terms “black anaesthetics”—this text reimagines human being by positioning blackness at the center of what we have come to call posthumanism. The paper concludes by examining the turn from racial illegibility and toward imperceptibility in twenty-first century narrative that, in the vein of Sylvia Wynter and Fanon, dislodges Man from its places of shelter within African American literature.
The third presenter, Maleda Belilgne, examines the speculative aesthetics of black movement. Belilgne focuses on the medical writings of Dr. Samuel Cartwright, an antebellum physician who pathologized slave resistance as "dysaesthesia" in the Southern planter's journal, De Bow's Review. Cartwright defines dysaesthesia as "hebetude of the mind and obtuse sensibility of the body," a condition whereby the slave’s insentience and lack of affect disrupt her productivity. Counter to Cartwright’s claims that the dysaesthetic slave resembles an “automaton or senseless machine,” sensorial incapacity illustrates the agency and humanity of bondwomen and men. Put simply, dysaesthesia is a performance of inhumanity, of object-ness, that paradoxically defies the black captive's status as commodity and instrument of labor. Belilgne demonstrates that such psychic and bodily protest is a type of trespass on the master’s property that informs contemporary black spatial practice. This presentation asks what it means to understand immobility as locomotion, contrasting stillness with "drift," the infinitely produced space of liminality that recurs in African diaspora literature. Belilgne theorizes drift as a mode of black spatial cognition that moves beyond the locational coordinates of the human. Drift references movement without direction, gravitational pull, and psycho-spatial orientation that defies the conventional parameters of the real.
The panel will conclude with Evie Shockley’s discussion of posthumanist aesthetics in art produced by African American creatives in the years 1990-2015, a period shaped dramatically by the operation of “colorblindness” ideology. Shockley uses the term “black graphics” to describe the interplay between visual and verbal modes of representation in Kara Walker's art and Robin Coste Lewis's poetry. She considers Walker’s provocative, expansively titled silhouettes evoking the antebellum U.S. (such as “Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and her Heart”) alongside Lewis’s long poem “The Voyage of the Sable Venus,” which is composed of the titles of visual artworks produced across several millennia of so-called Western culture. Shockley examines the extent to which Walker’s and Lewis’s works insist—through the relationships between visual works and the text that captions them--on the brokenness, fragmentation, excessiveness, and instability of the “human” as a category. She suggests that their interest in the history of representations of black women’s often captive bodies allows these artists to make visible the problems with the human (i.e, Western “Man”) theorized by Sylvia Wynter and Alexander Weheliye, even as they mobilize the discursivity of blackness (gendered, female) against the silencing that “colorblindness” calls for.
These thirteen-minute papers will be followed by a fifteen-minute audience question and answer period. Given the timeliness of this topic to the fields of Black and American Literary Studies, we anticipate a robust discussion.