Black Disembodiment in the Age of Ferguson (original) (raw)
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JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), 2021
The year when Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) was published has gone down as the deadliest year for black youth at the hands of policemen, with no less than 1,134 murders recorded. As he states in many interviews, this is one of the reasons that led Coates to pen his work: to publicly lament so many losses; to confront the difficulties to mourn such violent and untimely deaths; and to shed light on the murderous racist practices that black individuals deal with on a daily basis. To do so, Coates embarks on a journey through history in which he memorializes many black individuals who, until now, have lost their lives in racist violent attacks-from his friend Prince Jones and other several well-known individuals murdered in the last decades, such as Michael Brown or Sean Bell, to, as Toni Morrison puts it, "the disremembered and unaccounted for" (2010, 323). Far from only providing Coates and his son with crucial information about the sociality of blackness, witnessing the death of so many also instils in both a feeling of belonging. Coates's attempt at developing communal bonds through his narration riffs on the concept of "bottomline blackness," which Elizabeth Alexander coined amidst her analysis of the public responses to Rodney King's beating, which she regards as an incident that ended up "consolidat[ing] group affiliations" (78) and forging a "traumatized collective historical memory" (79). Drawing on Ta-Nehisi Coates's celebrated memoir, and bearing into consideration Coates's telling his son that "there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin" (2015, 25), this paper engages in the ongoing discussion about whether Coates's representation of racial bigotries can foster empathic relations or, on the contrary, disavow easy identification from readers.
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 2020
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) evidences the lack of visibility of black women in discourses on racial profiling. Far from tracing a complete representation of the dimensions of racism, Coates presents a masculinized portrayal of its victims, relegating black women to liminal positions even though they are one of the most overpoliced groups in US society, and disregarding the fact that they are also subject to other forms of harassment, such as sexual fondling and other forms of abusive frisking. In the face of this situation, many women have struggled, both from an academic and a political-activist angle, to raise the visibility of the role of black women in contemporary discourses on racism.
Erotics of Epidemicity: Captivity and Refusal in Mediations of Black Trans Life and Death
Women's Studies in Communication, 2023
Building a sustained resistance to the combined processes of gender/sex essentialism, heteronormativity, capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, and colonization in modernity requires persistent critique of anti-trans and anti-Black symbolic action. Rhetorics of epidemicity traffic in erotic logics of racialized colonial gender and humanness that create conditions for violence against Black trans women and femmes. Such mediation practices erase Black trans women and femmes from the political and affective registers of their own theorization, liberation, and representation in the dominant episteme.
Black bodies at risk: Exploring the corporeal iconography of the anti-police brutality movement
Journalism, 2021
Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter movement have reimagined a dynamic Black visual public sphere, where moral arguments about police brutality are sustained through an assemblage of strategic visual appeals. In this essay, I argue that this call-and-response of Black corporeal iconography forms the vanguard of embodied protest journalism in the 21st century. I explain how the concepts of “strong objectivity,” which is rooted in feminist standpoint theory, help validate and liberate the flesh witnessing of the marginalized. Moreover, I offer two broad categories of imagery that B...
"What Feels More Than Feeling?": Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect
Contemporary critical theory is in the midst of the affective turn, which theorizes the centrality of “affect”—taken here broadly to mean social feeling and bodily intensity—to human sociality, intersubjective relationality, and the field of the political. This discursive formation has, to date, been deafeningly silent on the question of racial Blackness. This essay stages a dialogue between affect theory and theories of Black ontology, arguing that Black affect is unthinkable within the reigning onto-epistemological order of Western modernity. The singular position of Blackness throws the purported universality of affect as a mode of sociality into a fundamental crisis, revealing the thoroughly racialized nature of the extant discourse of affect theory. Through a close reading of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, the essay argues further that Black affect falls within the onto-epistemological closure of humanist discourse, positioning Black affective responses as legible only as signs of pathology. This leaves Blacks “trapped in a racial imaginary,” buried under the weight of antiblackness. Citizen theorizes this problematic through its sustained use of the second-person perspective as well as its deconstruction of lyric form. Through her persistent interrogation of the means by which racial violence negates Black interiority, and her exploration of the way it feels to live under constant erasure, Rankine provides a model for theorizing the unthinkability of Black affect. Ultimately, this essay underscores the necessity of theorizing affect from the position of Blackness in order to more fully grasp the persistence of the anti-Black paradigm.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me: A Phenomenology of Racialized Conflict
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2024
This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a conflict event in Ta-Nehisi Coates's autobiography Between the World and Me and contrasting the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz with insights from Black phenomenology, I argue that Coates's experience discloses conflictual, but intertwined, modes of being-in-the-world. Further, it presents an instantiation of a particular kind of conflict, i.e., corporeal conflict. Corporeal conflict applies whenever the body is politicized, i.e., when it becomes the marker for traits representative of a rival political group. Understood this way, racialized conflict is always political. I conclude the article with some remarks on the shortcomings of two dominant conflict theories in political philosophy and the potential for an alternative, phenomenological approach that enables new ways of engaging the other in conflict. The analysis is preceded by a meditation on the role of the Whi...