This panel is inspired by Dana Williams’ presidential theme on “Visibility” and the paradigmatic example she draws from Toni Morrison’s “Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading.” Like Morrison, this panel reads and theorizes what is and/or remains invisible in 19^th-Century African American and 20^th-Century Caribbean writing across different genres—including what these invisibilities demand of readers.

Here, “invisible” signifies in two ways. The first concerns that which is structurally concealed with respect to anti-/blackness in the Americas. This sense of invisibility is evoked in various ways at the dawn of the 20^th-Century and its wake, such as: W. E. B. Du Bois’s "Veil" (1903), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Frantz Fanon’s "zone of non-being" (1952), Hortense Spillers’ "ungendered female flesh" (1987), and Saidiya Hartman’s "position of the unthought" (2003). The second concerns that which is intrinsically invisible. This sense of invisibility is explicitly inspired by the conception of "the Invisible" in Africana cosmologies in general and Haitian Vodou in particular; but it also refers to the unrepresentable abyss of blackness that Aimé Césaire, for example, plunges readers into in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939/1947/1956).

The first paper, by Biko Mandela Gray, is called, “Just Visiting, or Thinking with Rumors: Sojourner Truth’s In/visibility.” He considers how to "sit with" the dead when their primary sources elude our archival and cognitive grasps: that is, when we cannot pin the person—or their thought—down. Gray shows how this is the case with Sojourner Truth, who comes to us through rumors, whispers, and legendary tales. Instead of trying to pin her down by correcting the historical record, this paper sketches a hermeneutic method Gray calls “visiting” as a way to read black life when its primary documentation is absent in the archive. That is, "visiting” contemplates how to "read" someone whose historical existence is in/visible insofar as she does not transparently represent herself to us now.

The second paper, by Sam Plasencia, is called “David Walker’s In/visible Appeal, or the Fugitive Inhabitation of an American Grammar Book.” She argues that Walker’s typographical performance usurps hegemonic grammatical and rhetorical units—through italics, dashes, negative questions, shifting pronouns, commas, metonymic slippages and repetition—in order to deconstruct the governing anti-Black episteme. This episteme functions to variously elide, mask, legitimize, and normalize the violence of anti-Blackness. Therefore, by stalling the normative interpellative operations of America’s grammatical and rhetorical infrastructures, Plasencia argues that Walker advances a theorization—in the sense of theoria, meaning to see or show—of anti-Blackness as an ontological problem.

The third paper, by Andrew Santana Kaplan, is called “Abyssal Encounters, or Corpsing the Reader in Césaire’s and Fanon’s Négritude Poetics.” They argue that a synthetic analysis of David Marriott’s poetics of corpsing and J. Kameron Carter’s poetics of para-liturgy—each derived from readings of Césaire—opens the door to theorizing a psychopolitical liturgics of the abyss. Adopted from the theater, corpsing occurs when an actor is involuntarily dispossesses themselves from their performance (i.e., “breaks character”). For Marriott, blackness is corpsing as such and therefore corpses itself in all its iterations. Fanon crystallizes this insight in his parody of Césaire, wherein négritude becomes the apotheosis of blackness's impropriety and dispossession. In contradistinction, Carter fugitively channels liturgy’s perlocutionary hegemonic function in religious worship to theorize a para-liturgical “fecopoetics” that cultivate otherwise modes of black aliveness from the “waste” of Man. However, though influenced by Marriott, Carter does not contend with his psychopolitical thesis concerning how blackness never corpses itself more than when it feels most alive. Kaplan takes up what Carter tacitly disavows by theorizing what it means for readers of Black radical thought to un/consciously undergo an abyssal encounter with the para-liturgical-psycho-poetics-of-corpsing.

The final paper, by Isabelle Ensass, is called “Poetics of Endarkenment: Encountering the Invisible in Haitian Vodou and Maurice Blanchot.” They perform a comparative reading of Haitian anthropologist Mimerose Beaubrun’s account of her initiation into Haitian Vodou in Nan Dòmi (2010) and Blanchot’s allegory of the writer in his retelling of the myth of Orpheus. By reading Blanchot through the lens of Beaubrun's initiation, Ensass theorizes a mode of writing that communicates with "the Invisible(-World)". In turn, this mode demands readers and writers to refuse "Enlightenment Reason" through a self-emptying withdrawal from the Visible-World.

Inspired by the contemporary developments in/of Black Study, this panel asks: how can we read, reveal, and/or inhabit that which is without grammar? Each paper thus attempts to theorize what it means to tarry with the blackness of that which is or remains invisible—including what happens to the reader during-and-after this encounter.