Hortense Spillers

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020 in the city of Minneapolis, a global anti-racist rupture in the fabric of racial capitalism has occurred. Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd after calling out “I can’t breathe!” was essentially choked to death on an open street. The act by Chauvin and the lack of action by the other police officers was captured through the cell phone cameras of bystanders. Despite this event happening under the conditions of the dispersion of the visual field and in an era of technological surveillance, the cops did what cops do.

In this essay, I provide a synthesis of three authors at the forefront of black studies: Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, and Alexander Weheliye (respectively). This essay has three primary objectives. The first objective is descriptive. I use Spillers' thesis on the metaphysics of antiblackness to frame the essay and offer a description of the current institutions and how they proactively work to erase black being and many integral parts of black culture. The second objective is expository. I offer an explanation (using the thesis of Calvin Warren) as to why antiblackness exists as it does and how it is perpetuated in the status quo as such, contending that the infusion of political thinking into academic spaces hijacks rhetoric and weaponizes it against black bodies. The third objective is speculative. I offer Alexander Weheliye's strategy as a potential mode of resistance to the current world order. Using Weheliye's analysis of diaspora, I theorize that a weaponization of black studies in academic spaces through a strategic move to subsume other forms of knowledge could potentially cause a rupture in the fabric of rhetorical humanism. The contents of this essay are the intellectual property of the authors that I cite, and I take no credit for the creation of these ideas. The purpose of this work is to draw a useful connection between three influential black studies authors and apply it to the issue of rhetorical antiblackness in academic spaces.

Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh.

In recent years, comparisons between abortion and slavery have become increasingly common in American pro-life politics. Some have compared the struggle to extinguish abortion rights to the struggle to end slavery. Others have claimed that Roe v Wade is the Dred Scott of our time. Still others have argued that abortion is worse than slavery; it is a form of genocide. This paper tracks the abortion = slavery meme from Ronald Reagan to the current personhood movement, drawing on work by Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman to develop a discourse of reproductive justice that grapples with the wounded kinship of slavery and racism.

In this paper, I read Derrida's “The Animal That Therefore I Am” through the theoretical framework that Hortense Spillers offers in her 1987 canonical essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and through the black radical tradition that her essay has galvanized, including afro-pessimistic readings of how black social life inheres in/as/through social death. I argue that Jordan Peele’s filmic imagination—in Get Out (2017) and Us (2019)—demonstrates the ways in which Spillers’ text and those who are in conversation with it put pressure on Derrida's original formulation, to think about how our concepts of the animal and of nature (not least of all, of the animal gaze) are always already raced and sexed. Specifically, I argue that Derrida's animal gaze returns Man to the ‘flesh’ of his being, or to a body beyond signification, which is none other than black ‘un/gendered’ flesh. This paper thus finds that the kind of gratuitous vulnerability that the human body experiences under the gaze of the animal makes that body available in black, which is to say: as flesh; and further, that this fleshification feminizes the human body, making it available as hole, that is to say, as gratuitously penetrable and vulnerable. The latter, I argue, also renders that human body as paradigmatically black.

(Informal description) This paper begins to build a bridge between theoretical physics, black studies, and black literature in order to 'map' what I envision the Black Imagination to be. I theorize it as a universe unto itself, with its own physics (distorted, relative to the antiblack world/universe's physics). So in a fundamental way, I'm interested in how this Black imagination and its physics might tell us something interesting about the Black Position (Wilderson). In this essay, I'm interested in building toward a serious question about the Black imagination's temporality, and how that might reveal something instructive and fundamental about Blackness's relation to time. I understand this relation to be gratuitously violent, nonlinear, and unethical, and I call it "untime."

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

In his 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas raises important questions about the subject’s relation to nature and to history.  His account of the ethical significance of paternity, maternity, and fraternity in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being suggest powerful new ways to understand the meaning of kinship, beyond the abstractions of Western liberalism.  How does this analysis of race and kinship translate into the context of the Transatlantic slave trade, which not only stole Africans from their families and communities, but also imposed upon them a single “fictive” kinship relation to the master?  What if the problem of racialization is not only a matter of being “chained” to one’s identity through (presumed) blood ties, but also being violently separated from one’s kin?  What does it mean for the concepts of ethical and political fraternity if the only father recognized by law and society as legitimate is the slave master?  Or if the bodies of slave women are exploited, not only for productive labor, but also for the reproductive labor that makes more slaves for the master?  If kinship is a way of making sense of the relation between past, present and future generations, then what does a radical disruption of existing kinship relations, and the imposition of one fictive, absolute and unilateral kinship relation, do to the social meaning of time and of history in a particular community?  In this paper, I reflect on the significance of fecundity and kinship in the context of US slavery, both in order in order to situate my analysis in the particular history of my own present community, and as a way of demonstrating the significance of a more determinate social analysis for Levinas’ ethics of singularity and politics of universal justice.

This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political
thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as modernity’s singular constitution, which invented anti-/Black positionality as the World’s fundamental structure of antagonism. The second is the contemporary turn to Paul by continental philosophers who attempt a modern reinterpretation of the Apostle’s apocalyptic announcement of the messianic event as a paradigm for radical politics. This essay will argue that, on the one hand, Paul’s apocalyptic-messianic framework can both elucidate and situate how Afro-pessimism uncompromisingly inhabits its antagonistic non-relation to the World as such. On the other hand, Afro-pessimism can show how Blackness is “the position of the unthought” that contemporary Paulinism is unconsciously parasitic upon—circumscribing its theorists’ attempt to radically formulate apocalyptic-messianic fidelity in the modern World. The motivation for staging this encounter lies in their shared conviction that true justice demands the end of the World. My essay aspires to dialogically elucidate this shared conviction by constellating their homologous theses, which reveals what I call "the Black messianic." I argue that if it is still possible, in the wake of racial slavery, to hear the Apostle’s summons to messianic existence and outlaw justice, then, in modernity, Afro-pessimism is its paradigmatic mode of fidelity.

As part of his 1975 solo debut album, Água do céu-pássaro, Ney Matogrosso recorded a cover of "Barco negro," a Portuguese fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues and based on an earlier Brazilian song, "Mãe-preta," written by Caco Velho and Piratini and recorded by Os Tocantins in 1943. Matogrosso conflates the two versions, titling the track, "Mãe preta (Barco negro)." This article marks Matogrosso's recording as an iteration of transgender voice and locates-in his performance and album artwork-queer, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian intersections that rework the mãe preta figure central to Brazil's foundational narrative. Making use of Hortense Spiller's theorization of the transAtlantic slave trade as "body-theft," I argue that Matogrosso's referents and trans voice reembody the Luso-Afro-Brazilian black mother in ways that unsettle Lusotropicalism and haunt Portuguese nationalist tropes.

I am sitting in the backseat of a Van Gogh blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, thin but healthy. A guy who calls himself "Mohawk John" is behind the wheel. His orange spikes touch the roof, testifying, one hopes, to a commitment to something deeper than just a nickname. He is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. Like so many of the white youth out in search of freedom that I have encountered since going ABD and hitting the road, he is reckless, eager, and his feet are made of lead. Leaving Chicago we skirt Lake Michigan as the sun begins to set. Rhizomes: issue 29: Dalton Anthony Jones

In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of African people brought to America involuntarily as “articles of merchandise” could be, or was ever intended by the framers to be, a citizen under the US Constitution. I argue that Blacks still occupy this questionable “non-human/non-citizen/slave” category which allows the police to suspend their obligation to the law when it comes to policing Black communities. Using the personal testimonies of Black people’s experiences with police in the 2017 Chicago Department of Justice report, I demonstrate how and why Black peoples struggle against the police in the afterlife of slavery. This struggle, moves black communities to united against the police who are experienced as an “occupying force,” that exemplifies the myth of “post-emancipation” as the police function as 21st Century field hands and slave catchers. Only without the police would a free society be possible.

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness
to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’
Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being--especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence--work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of new media and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the Black allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.

Das Meer mit seiner Weite und Unbestimmtheit stellt metaphorisch wie materiell einen Ort dar, der mit Abenteuer und Gefahr sowie Endlosigkeit und Selbstauflösung assoziiert wird. Die Position des Meeres in Adornos und Horkheimers Interpretation einer Episode aus Homers Odyssee wird mit dem Diskurs kontrastiert, der aktuell die Sklavenverschleppung über die Middle Passage des Atlantiks vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert und ihre Folgen für die US-amerikanische Gesellschaft der Gegenwart untersucht. Das Nichtidentische dient als begrifflicher Rahmen, um die Subjektivierungsprozesse und Unterdrückungsverhältnisse, die sich für Odysseus bzw. die Versklavten im amorphen Raum des Meeres abzeichnen, verständlich zu machen. Es zeigt sich, dass sich mit diesem von Adorno geprägten Begriff sowohl Potentiale als auch Gefahren einer zerstörten Identität denken lassen und er deshalb im politischen Kontext stets einer Perspektivierung bedarf.

In June 2013, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) cut off Flint's water supply in response to the city's proposal to reportedly save money by switching to The Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA). In the interim, the city made a contract for water with a private engineering firm. The Houston-based firm, Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, also had offices in Flint and began using the Flint River water instead of Lake Huron and Detroit River water. Meanwhile, in nearby Detroit and in April 2013, the DWSD entered a "contract with Homrich, a demolition company, to carry out 70,000 shutoffs in 730 days … sponsored by Rodney Johnson of Grosse Pointe" (Bellant et al.). The DWSD reportedly initiated this to do damage control over the debt incurred from delinquent water bills. A year later, both Flint and Detroit began experiencing residential push back on the privatized water regulation and shut off processes: in April 2014, residents in Flint began complaining about the water, reporting rashes, and bacteria concerns, while nearby residents in Detroit began a protracted battle over 17,000 residents having their water shut off. Flint issued a boil water advisory to kill e coli and boost chlorine flushing, but did not formally acknowledge the toxicity levels as a danger to residents. By August 2014, both cities' residents had begun protesting the inability to access clean and affordable water at home.

Both the Detroit and Flint events are useful for analyzing of how racialization happens through regulation of and access to water, especially since the large majority of the population in each city self-identifies as Black or African American.1 The political battle also put race in the forefront of its protests over clean, affordable water in postindustrial urban spaces. This was heightened by the "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement simultaneously receiving increased publicity. Both Flint and Detroit's "water crises" and subsequent protests demand an examination of how the privatization and regulation of water participates in making the all-too "material" component of protests that align with "Black Lives Matter" increasingly [End Page 19] evident. This materiality in both the cultural (race) and literal (water) sense is especially notable since both cities are also part of a larger narrative of globalization and the privatization of water within the U.S. Citizens went up against corporate and State interests over water politics to stake a claim in the right to life itself, a right only possible with access to clean water.2 By articulating together the violence of poisoning or withholding water within two cities near the Great Lakes, a specific history of racialized violence and protest to that violence surfaces. This article explores this history to ask how water is wielded as both "matter" and "metaphor" to implicitly say that some protected lives "matter" more than those exposed to precarity by privatizing and regulating "matter" itself. Turning to the language of literal and cultural meanings for matter creates a historical, material analysis of how water regulation violently racializes.

In this article, we ask: "how does race matter when working with intersectional feminism in a postcolonial Nordic context?" We take our cue from feminist and postcolonial scholars who have pointed out that minoritisation and majoritisation processes in the Nordic area are entangled in ongoing racialization processes. Working with and around the video installation Black magic at the White House by the artist Jeanette Ehlers, we hold on to the particularities of racialisation processes in the Danish context, as well as their insertion in a global racial ontology. We establish a conversation between Ehlers' installation and the work of two US black scholars from the humanities: Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers. These scholars have not been influential in the European uptake and further elaboration of intersectionality, but we argue that engaging with their work opens a perspective that focuses on affect, absence and disappearance rather than only representation, identity and recognition, thereby worldling intersectionality differently than standpoint theory. Experience is also constituted through affective encounters, the ephemeral, forgotten and bypassed qualities and intensities. We conclude the article by drawing a preliminary sketch of elements in what we, paraphrasing Spillers, call a Danish "grammar book" of the racialized and gendered ordering of the human that again complicates the stories we may tell about how race matters and what Nordic intersectional feminism may look like, as well as the interventions this may open up.

This essay explores the method of close reading as a critical strategy for feminist classrooms, especially when focused on the foundational violence of anti-Blackness and coloniality. Through a personal reflection on my own efforts to break away from my formal education in “the Western canon” (sic.), I argue that radical learn- ing requires vulnerability and an attentiveness to unconscious habits, motivations, and defenses. I focus on the method of close reading as a pedagogical strategy that cultivates these kinds of sensibilities, while also undercutting the informatics-diversity machine of the neoliberal university. I describe my experiences with this radical learning through three meditations that build upon one another: the methodology of close reading; the effects of reading Black feminists as canonical texts; and the strategic, limited use of canonical European theories as methods for the construction of syllabi, rather than objects of analysis. The essay concludes with an examina- tion of a recent course I designed and taught with psychoanalytic heuristic devices. Throughout the essay, I argue for grounding our feminist classrooms in prolonged discussions of the ongoing impact of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, in all its forms.

EXCERPT: This struggle centers around the problem of political time / political temporality which is the impetus for this writing. I wish to reflect on time as a crucial site of contestation in the present South African conjuncture – by which I mean to refer to the question that Rose herself poses, namely how much “at a deep level, has really changed” in the wake of colonial-apartheid? Both this question and the manifold answers it invites demarcate a fundamental set of tensions over how to think about and reckon with the unliveable histories of violence, oppression and dehumanisation without which the very idea of South Africa would not, could not, exist. One finds broadly two ways of thinking about these histories. On the one hand, a protocol of optimism narrating South Africa’s unfoldment in teleological terms, of triumph and progress, a story of a “miracle nation” which, even if still imperfect, overcame the apartness of the past and remade (or is remaking) itself under the signs of democracy, equality, and freedom. Rose joins many others in noting the waning purchase and coherence of this narrative in the face of undeniable empirical markers of a riven and disharmonious social fabric punctuated by persisting racialised distributions of power, vulnerability, and (quality of) life. On the other hand is a narrative of failure and delayed rupture – where the founding historical injustice is still in motion even if in disguise. This critical protocol insists on a present that is continuous with its past, where the division between past and present itself comes into interminable crisis, where the time of conquest and apartheid is a living presence, compounding and intensifying with the passage of time. My own contribution in what follows is not only to adduce theoretical support for this second historical sensibility but to argue more generally for serious and greater attentiveness to the problem of political temporality and historical time in South African legal, political and social theory and practice.

Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present.