The presidential theme of “Emancipatory Narratives” provides the perfect opportunity for this panel to explore Black Flesh and Corruption. As Herman Beavers explains, emancipatory narratives “describe not only what it means to be oppressed or in bondage but the sensations that come with inhabiting liberatory space.” This panel is all about what it means to possess liberatory space by way of Black flesh. In other words, while Black skin is marked by slavery and later emancipated, Black flesh has always been a liberated space of resistance. This topic is crucial today as we study the spaces in which Blackness can exist. This special session topic contends that with Black flesh we are better able to understand freedom through resistance and corruption.

The scholarship on Black flesh is growing at such an exciting rate. Most of this scholarship, including the panelists’ work, responds in some way to Hortense Spillers. In Spillers’ seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” she argues that one should “make a distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” This panel reads Spillers alongside Frantz Fanon, who was much more interested in how Blackness is defined by Black skin. This panel attempts to, as Fred Moten explains, get at “the precisely unlocatable difference between skin and flesh.” Our entryway into the discussion on Black flesh is through thinking of corruption, since Blackness is understood as corrupt.

Each panelist will speak for 12-13 minutes max, which will leave us with around 20 minutes (or more) of generative discussion.

Dr. Zay Dale’s essay “Black Flesh and Corruption in Giovanni's Room” argues that the white protagonist’s confrontation with his queerness details what it means to accept corrupt Black flesh by resisting white moral purity. Dr. Kendall Dinniene’s essay “Black Fat Flesh in The Bluest Eye” argues that in Morrison’s novel what we understand to be excess flesh is the product of an anti-Black calculus that must not be reformed or assimilated into but instead exceeded and corrupted altogether. Nana Prempeh’s essay argues that in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, the protagonist, Azaro, embodies a poly-ontological conception of Black flesh, and this multiplicity allows Black flesh to persist, regenerate, and corrupt despite exposure to structural, social, and metaphysical violence. Grace Murry’s essay argues that in Alice Walker’s novel Meridian, the protagonist’s madness, ecstasy/vertigo, and ascetic spirituality lead her towards a new way of relating with the world by searching for and creating meaning(s) beyond the skin and through corrupt Black flesh.

This panel incorporates a variety of voices in multiple ways. Dr. Zay Dale is a current Assistant Professor of Black Literature at the University of Kansas. Dr. Kendall Dinniene is a Hughes Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Southern Methodist University. Grace A. Murry is a current PhD Candidate in English Literature at Cornell University. Nana Karikari Prempeh is a current PhD Candidate in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There are also three Black scholars for this panel on Black Flesh and Corruption. Two scholars have published several essays on Black Literature. While each scholar is currently at an R1 university, we have a range of geographical locations from the south, to the Midwest, to the east coast.