While much has been written about Glissant’s critique of transparency and his valorization of opacity, less has been written on the movement between transparency and opacity. But, as Katherine McKittrick has recently pointed out in “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellena,” Glissant’s own writing “moves between and across opacity and clarity.” This observation leads McKittrick to claim that “opacity is a lesson, a way for black people to tell stories that move in and out of clarity, without participating in a narrative economy that functions to objectify them.” In "Radical Consent and Opacity in Gayl Jones' Corregidora," Elias Rodriques seeks to build on McKittrick’s intervention to consider what kinds of transitions between opacity and transparency refuse objectification. As he will argue in a reading of Jones’ 1975 novel, the pivotal scene in which Ursa’s mother divulges her experience of intimate partner violence models the ways in which radical consent as a practice can produce movements between clarity and opacity that do not reproduce the hierarchies that Glissant associates with transparency and instead undermine them. Returning to the distinction between transparency and opacity will prove significant for advancing a more nuanced theoretical understanding of strategies for refusing participation in power hierarchies while simultaneously creating new, alternative modes of sociality amongst the refusers that can undo the structures of violence that brought this refusal into being.

In "Opaque Individuality and Community Work in Issa Rae’s Insecure," Keyana Parks will focus on Issa Rae’s hit HBO show Insecure and how it navigates representing the tenuous balance that can and must be struck between individuality and collectivity by engaging with stereotypes of Black women. Often, stereotype reduces Blackness to collective negative representations that are then mapped onto individuals. In "Opaque Individuality and Community Work in Issa Rae’s Insecure," Keyana Parks examines how the Rae’s show challenges the idea that individuality constitutes individual self-governance or what Martinique theorist Edouard Glissant describes as “an impenetrable autarchy.” She argues that Rae manipulates stereotype to underscore how community has the potential to make Black individuality legible and “irreducible” without yielding to capitalist structures of power that attempt to define and commodify Blackness. In this paper, she focuses on the final season’s development of Issa Dee’s non-profit community organization—which sharply contrasts with her first job in season one at We Got Yall.

In "On the Erotics of Opacity," Omari Weekes will explore Mexico as a key site from which Audre Lorde's sense of the relationally that is possible through the erotic emerges. Rather than turn to Lorde's writing on this period of her life in her 1983 biomythography, Zami, this paper will locate Mexico within the poetics of her correspondences with Black feminist writers like Pat Parker and June Jordan in order to consider how more refracted considerations of Mexico as a space of Black queer affective intensity. By attending to moments of withholding that which cannot be fully knowable, he will theorize what he calls the "erotics of opacity," a mode of ethical intersubjectivity that is dependent upon slow disclosure, oblique referencing, and aesthetic inscrutability. By slowing down the process of constructing relationally and imagining connectivity as a longue durée, Lorde imagines a Black feminist politics that is painstakingly sutured together in moments in which transparency actually may be a luxury even amongst friends and audiences.