Patrice D Douglass | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)
Publications by Patrice D Douglass
The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, 2024
This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century... more This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.
Journal of Legal Anthropology, 2023
This Forum article examines the use of the term ‘liberty’ in the majority opinion in the US Supre... more This Forum article examines the use of the term ‘liberty’ in the majority opinion in the US Supreme Court case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade (1973). Using the concept of analytics of raciality as theorized by Denise Ferreira da Silva, this argument considers whether liberty as a political philosophical concept can extend beyond its post-Enlightenment origins to include the racial body. By critically examining debates that think reproductive rights solely in relation to the law, this argument considers how to think about abortion beyond particular legal advances to consider the long history of racial reproductive violence as instituted by slavery and colonialism.
Political Theology, 2023
Examining representation in the work of David Marriott, this essay engages the role affect plays ... more Examining representation in the work of David Marriott, this essay engages the role affect plays in mediating the negrophobic and negrophilic effects of lynching. By specifically taking up Marriott’s discussion of lynching alongside his elaborations of racial fetishism, this essay considers how the desire for lactification is(re)produced through the Black male’s confrontation with racial terror as disembodiment. The personal narratives of lynching survivor James Cameron are revisited in curious correlation with an interview reaction to the film Get Out (2017) given by a Black male movie goer. The central concern here is to critically mediate how the movie goer, who does not witness a lynching , upon exiting the theatre reproduces a similar affect to Cameron. Engaging racial fetishism as elaborated by Marriott through the work of Frantz Fanon exposes how one can be captured by a cultural fantasy that is passed down without a sustained referent
Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2023
In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization United States Supreme Court decis... more In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization United States Supreme Court decision-which overturned the landmark decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey-UC Berkeley Law Professor Khiara M. Bridges testified before the United States Congress about the potential catastrophic consequences of the ruling. Bridges discussed abortion as an issue impacting people with the capacity for pregnancy, 1 which was met with intense opposition and disregard from Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley. He insisted that abortion was a "women's right issue," while pressuring Bridges to agree. 2 However, in a clear and direct response, Bridges offered firm rebuttal, noting that this line of questioning from Hawley was transphobic, stating further, "Denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous." 3 This, she argues-and the argument presented here will agree-"opens up trans people to violence," given that multiple genders are represented under the umbrella of people needing abortion access and care. 4 While Bridges' trans-inclusive Senate testimony was largely lauded by abortion rights advocates, what is curious about this exchange is the alignment between Hawley's insistence that abortion is a women's rights issue and the feminist legal literature written on reproductive and abortion rights. A scan of the literature would suggest that feminist legal thought also, though from a different premise, largely announces the need and crisis of
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2021
This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COV... more This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clar ify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.
This article employs the tools of Black Studies to critical engage Assata: An Autobiography, by A... more This article employs the tools of Black Studies to critical engage Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur and aspects of Shakur’s political legacy. Specifically, this article draws upon Black feminist critiques of gender theory to interrogate how Assata and the altering of Shakur’s image elucidate the distinction between Human and Black gender. Thus, I argue the antiblack nature of the (un)gendering of Shakur, which extends from the text into the present, demonstrates the unrelenting hold of slavery on its after/life. In this respect, inheriting Black Studies must contend with the irreconcilability of antiblack (un)gendering violence as it expands beyond the individual into Blackness.
Journal of Visual Culture, 2018
This article interrogates the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Ame... more This article interrogates the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case on lawful police searches, to track the political assumptions that undergird conceptions of the legal boundaries of police search and seizures. Specifically, the author examines how the vestiges of slavery structure both the constitutive elements of how bodily autonomy and freedom from physical invasion is understood under the law. Thus, by employing critical Black Studies in tension with affect theory, this article questions what limits are present in the law that reify, even or especially through dissent, the ontological arrangements of slavery and its afterlife. Keywords affect • Blackness • critical theory • law • policing • slavery
This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical qu... more This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical questions about how various conceptualizations of gender violence occlude critical theorizations of how black people die at the hands of the state. Black death is thus taken up as a Black feminist theoretic to challenge the discursive capacity of gender as a singular category to articulate conclusively the suffering of Black gendered subjects. Thus, by examining the narrative maneuvers of the 2017 Women's March to articulate police violence as a gender concern, this essay demonstrates how the specificities of Blackness are crowded out by the drive towards a collective politic.
This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Cond... more This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, to argue that the positioning of the Human within scientific and political thought necessitates an underscoring of violence as it relates to blackness. This position interrogates how Arendt positions slavery in the Greek polis and the Roman res republica to establish her foci on modern political life. I offer an analysis of Prigg v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as complicating Arendt’s political dichotomy, by shifting focus to the legal history of American slavery. Prigg rewrites and establishes the demarcations of US Federal and State law. However, the majority opinion and dissents make fleeting reference to the fugitive slave in question, Margaret Morgan, and the possibility that she may have been sexually violated while being forcibly returned to slavery. I conclude that the contours of this case, specifically the erasure of sexual violence, demonstrate how racial slavery provides contexts to modern political life not explored by Arendt’s primary concern with slavery in antiquity.
O ver the past fifteen to twenty years, black philosophy has enhanced its explanatory power by wa... more O ver the past fifteen to twenty years, black philosophy has enhanced its explanatory power by way of a deliberate engagement with critical theory. One of the most notable examples of this turn is found in Lewis Gordon's extended readings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartrethe dialogues Gordon has staged between Fanon's blackened psychoanalysis and Sartre's Marxist existentialism. 1 We contend that black philosophy should continue to pursue this kind of juxtaposition: an irreverent clash between ensembles of questions dedicated to the status of the subject as a relational being and ensembles of questions dedicated to what are more often thought of as general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, reason, and mind; in the form, specifically, of a clash between questions concerning the always already deracination of blackness and questions, for example, of metaphysics-rather than pursue a line of inquiry that assumes a stable and coherent philosophical vantage point from which a black metaphysics can be imagined. This is because, as we argue below, for blacks no such vantage point exists. Such a project could stand the assumptive logic of philosophy on its metaphysical and ethical head; just as a similarly blackened project has turned the assumptive logic of critical theory (specifically, its start-ing point, which assumes subjectivity) on its relational head. A focus on violence should be at the center of this project because violence not only makes thought possible, but it makes black metaphysical being and black relationality impossible, while simultaneously giving rise to the philosophical contemplation of metaphysics and the thick description of human relations. Without violence, critical theory and pure philosophy would be impossible.
Teaching Documents by Patrice D Douglass
In this seminar we will examine the rhetorical architecture of Afropessimism (the structure of it... more In this seminar we will examine the rhetorical architecture of Afropessimism (the structure of its claims, its ensemble of questions, its selection of topics, distribution of concerns) and the rhetorical architecture of its nemesis, Humanist theory and discourse. Our goal is to grasp how and why Afropessimism theorizes Blackness and Slaveness as coterminous and inextricably bound; and why the figure of the Slave is barred, ab initio, from Humanism and its plethora of sentient renderings (exploited and alienated workers, oppressed gendered subjects, or sexually othered beings, etc.). A central focus on the question of violence will help us to map these distinctions.
The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature, 2024
This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century... more This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.
Journal of Legal Anthropology, 2023
This Forum article examines the use of the term ‘liberty’ in the majority opinion in the US Supre... more This Forum article examines the use of the term ‘liberty’ in the majority opinion in the US Supreme Court case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade (1973). Using the concept of analytics of raciality as theorized by Denise Ferreira da Silva, this argument considers whether liberty as a political philosophical concept can extend beyond its post-Enlightenment origins to include the racial body. By critically examining debates that think reproductive rights solely in relation to the law, this argument considers how to think about abortion beyond particular legal advances to consider the long history of racial reproductive violence as instituted by slavery and colonialism.
Political Theology, 2023
Examining representation in the work of David Marriott, this essay engages the role affect plays ... more Examining representation in the work of David Marriott, this essay engages the role affect plays in mediating the negrophobic and negrophilic effects of lynching. By specifically taking up Marriott’s discussion of lynching alongside his elaborations of racial fetishism, this essay considers how the desire for lactification is(re)produced through the Black male’s confrontation with racial terror as disembodiment. The personal narratives of lynching survivor James Cameron are revisited in curious correlation with an interview reaction to the film Get Out (2017) given by a Black male movie goer. The central concern here is to critically mediate how the movie goer, who does not witness a lynching , upon exiting the theatre reproduces a similar affect to Cameron. Engaging racial fetishism as elaborated by Marriott through the work of Frantz Fanon exposes how one can be captured by a cultural fantasy that is passed down without a sustained referent
Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 2023
In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization United States Supreme Court decis... more In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization United States Supreme Court decision-which overturned the landmark decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey-UC Berkeley Law Professor Khiara M. Bridges testified before the United States Congress about the potential catastrophic consequences of the ruling. Bridges discussed abortion as an issue impacting people with the capacity for pregnancy, 1 which was met with intense opposition and disregard from Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley. He insisted that abortion was a "women's right issue," while pressuring Bridges to agree. 2 However, in a clear and direct response, Bridges offered firm rebuttal, noting that this line of questioning from Hawley was transphobic, stating further, "Denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist is dangerous." 3 This, she argues-and the argument presented here will agree-"opens up trans people to violence," given that multiple genders are represented under the umbrella of people needing abortion access and care. 4 While Bridges' trans-inclusive Senate testimony was largely lauded by abortion rights advocates, what is curious about this exchange is the alignment between Hawley's insistence that abortion is a women's rights issue and the feminist legal literature written on reproductive and abortion rights. A scan of the literature would suggest that feminist legal thought also, though from a different premise, largely announces the need and crisis of
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2021
This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COV... more This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clar ify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.
This article employs the tools of Black Studies to critical engage Assata: An Autobiography, by A... more This article employs the tools of Black Studies to critical engage Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur and aspects of Shakur’s political legacy. Specifically, this article draws upon Black feminist critiques of gender theory to interrogate how Assata and the altering of Shakur’s image elucidate the distinction between Human and Black gender. Thus, I argue the antiblack nature of the (un)gendering of Shakur, which extends from the text into the present, demonstrates the unrelenting hold of slavery on its after/life. In this respect, inheriting Black Studies must contend with the irreconcilability of antiblack (un)gendering violence as it expands beyond the individual into Blackness.
Journal of Visual Culture, 2018
This article interrogates the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Ame... more This article interrogates the dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case on lawful police searches, to track the political assumptions that undergird conceptions of the legal boundaries of police search and seizures. Specifically, the author examines how the vestiges of slavery structure both the constitutive elements of how bodily autonomy and freedom from physical invasion is understood under the law. Thus, by employing critical Black Studies in tension with affect theory, this article questions what limits are present in the law that reify, even or especially through dissent, the ontological arrangements of slavery and its afterlife. Keywords affect • Blackness • critical theory • law • policing • slavery
This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical qu... more This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical questions about how various conceptualizations of gender violence occlude critical theorizations of how black people die at the hands of the state. Black death is thus taken up as a Black feminist theoretic to challenge the discursive capacity of gender as a singular category to articulate conclusively the suffering of Black gendered subjects. Thus, by examining the narrative maneuvers of the 2017 Women's March to articulate police violence as a gender concern, this essay demonstrates how the specificities of Blackness are crowded out by the drive towards a collective politic.
This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Cond... more This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, to argue that the positioning of the Human within scientific and political thought necessitates an underscoring of violence as it relates to blackness. This position interrogates how Arendt positions slavery in the Greek polis and the Roman res republica to establish her foci on modern political life. I offer an analysis of Prigg v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as complicating Arendt’s political dichotomy, by shifting focus to the legal history of American slavery. Prigg rewrites and establishes the demarcations of US Federal and State law. However, the majority opinion and dissents make fleeting reference to the fugitive slave in question, Margaret Morgan, and the possibility that she may have been sexually violated while being forcibly returned to slavery. I conclude that the contours of this case, specifically the erasure of sexual violence, demonstrate how racial slavery provides contexts to modern political life not explored by Arendt’s primary concern with slavery in antiquity.
O ver the past fifteen to twenty years, black philosophy has enhanced its explanatory power by wa... more O ver the past fifteen to twenty years, black philosophy has enhanced its explanatory power by way of a deliberate engagement with critical theory. One of the most notable examples of this turn is found in Lewis Gordon's extended readings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartrethe dialogues Gordon has staged between Fanon's blackened psychoanalysis and Sartre's Marxist existentialism. 1 We contend that black philosophy should continue to pursue this kind of juxtaposition: an irreverent clash between ensembles of questions dedicated to the status of the subject as a relational being and ensembles of questions dedicated to what are more often thought of as general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, reason, and mind; in the form, specifically, of a clash between questions concerning the always already deracination of blackness and questions, for example, of metaphysics-rather than pursue a line of inquiry that assumes a stable and coherent philosophical vantage point from which a black metaphysics can be imagined. This is because, as we argue below, for blacks no such vantage point exists. Such a project could stand the assumptive logic of philosophy on its metaphysical and ethical head; just as a similarly blackened project has turned the assumptive logic of critical theory (specifically, its start-ing point, which assumes subjectivity) on its relational head. A focus on violence should be at the center of this project because violence not only makes thought possible, but it makes black metaphysical being and black relationality impossible, while simultaneously giving rise to the philosophical contemplation of metaphysics and the thick description of human relations. Without violence, critical theory and pure philosophy would be impossible.
In this seminar we will examine the rhetorical architecture of Afropessimism (the structure of it... more In this seminar we will examine the rhetorical architecture of Afropessimism (the structure of its claims, its ensemble of questions, its selection of topics, distribution of concerns) and the rhetorical architecture of its nemesis, Humanist theory and discourse. Our goal is to grasp how and why Afropessimism theorizes Blackness and Slaveness as coterminous and inextricably bound; and why the figure of the Slave is barred, ab initio, from Humanism and its plethora of sentient renderings (exploited and alienated workers, oppressed gendered subjects, or sexually othered beings, etc.). A central focus on the question of violence will help us to map these distinctions.