Following a five-minute introduction, the four panelists will deliver eleven-minute papers, leaving twenty-five minutes for unstructured discussion. Carmel Ohman begins with “Speculative Spectators: Side-Eyeing Western Empiricism,” showing how, during two literary “renaissances” spanning almost a hundred years, Nella Larsen and Raven Leilani gaze askew at the longstanding aesthetic-scientific iconographical use of Black women’s bodies to negatively define reasonable subjectivity. Creatively reimagining encounters between portrait artist and subject, they denaturalize Western empiricist observation as the benchmark for knowledge production and reorient readers to what Larsen terms Black women’s “speculative spectator[ship]” as an alternative site of critical invention. Similarly engaging Harlem Renaissance women writers and their interpretive legacies, Emerson Zora Hamsa’s “The ‘I’ Is Not Satisfied With Being” argues that Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) disavows, anarranges, and (un)makes black subjectivity through the articulation of a black cosmic praxis that precedes the violence of racialized visibility. Theorizing the (im)possibility of [a] black self[hood] from the framework of the flesh, which is to say blackness before the black(ened) body, Hamsa focuses on the ways in Hurston demonstrates this black disavowal through the refusal of coherence that, at once, illumines and disorganizes the presumed legibility (qua visibility) of black being. Pivoting to post-Civil Rights era structures of literary (il)legibility for multiply marginalized Black subjects, Brandon Callender’s “A Defiance of Mirrors: Letting Go of Reflections with G. Winston James” shows how the yearning for black gay men to see themselves reflected in literature becomes a threatening site of distortion in James’s 2009 short story collection, Shaming the Devil. Where reviewers encourage readers to take its tragic figures as an “unflinching mirror of truth” inspiring reform, Callender argues that this book dedicated to “those unafraid of light and mirrors” actually resists proffered sites of reflection that depend upon homonormative models of sexual subjectivity and sanity. Megan Finch’s “Who Cares? Black Feminist Non-Possessive Ethics of Maternal ‘Care’” considers the depiction of “unreasonable” maternal care in the “Black women’s literary renaissance.” Focusing on mothers in novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Finch theorizes the illegibility of care as such under the framework of Enlightenment rationality in which (white) women’s reason, and their claim to political incorporation, was expressed in their productive care for children. Interrogating mainstream feminism’s reasonable/politically viable female subject (and the critically mad woman of the 1970s and 1980s), Finch locates in these depictions of Black mothers an alternate feminist genealogy of care beyond the bounds of a reasonable, rights-bearing subject of feminism. Bringing together primarily Black scholars of marginalized genders and sexualities from a range of U.S. public and private institutions, this panel considers how Black writers across different historical moments innovate beyond the pale of reason, scrutinizing and often upending the rights and recognitions enshrined in the figure of the Human.