Slippin’ in and out of frame: An Afrafuturist feminist orientation to Black women and American citizenship

ABSTRACT

Heeding Karma Chavez’s (2015) call to imagine rhetoric as “something entirely different,” I introduce what I call an Afrafuturist Feminist (AFF) rhetorical approach with the aim of offering one means by which rhetorical studies can move beyond normative white constructions of citizenship. In this piece, I flesh out a theoretical framework that explores the ways Black women’s truthtelling engineers rival conceptions of Blackness, creating spaces for us to reimagine what citizenship can look like in the lived experiences of Black Americans. I invoke the phrase, “in and out of frame,” to preliminarily consider how Black women like Assata Shakur and Cardi B employ rhetoric as threat to negotiate citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• fugitivity
• antiblack violence
• truthtelling and agency
• Black women’s rhetoric

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to acknowledge my homie, Niq, whose support of my work and faith in me over the years has helped get me through some of my brightest and darkest days. I would like to also thank Rico S., Goyland W., and Byron C. for all of the time and energy each of you have put into reading my drafts, chatting with me through my ideas, and providing me with invaluable insight and feedback. I cherish each of you dearly. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge Dr. Ersula J. Ore, my fellow 757 bad-bitch academic, who has guided me and loved on me and my work in ways I never thought possible. Words cannot begin to describe how thankful I am we are able to breathe together through this life.

Notes

1 “The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman at Duke University,” YouTube video, 55:00–55:14, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, October 5, 2016, https://humanitiesfutures.org/media/black-outdoors-fred-moten-saidiya-hartman-duke-university/.

2 I use b/Black strategically to differentiate between how blackness is conceived and treated versus the affirmative celebration of one’s Blackness despite the social pathologies that criminalize their affirmations. Moten (2008) speaks of this as his work on Black fugitive movement calls attention to the para-ontological distinction between Blackness as being and Black people (being vs. beings). Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218. See Eric King Watts, “Politics, the Police, and Anti-Blackness,” Howard Journal of Communications 28, no. 2 (2017): 207–11, doi:10.1080/10646175.2017.1288180.

3 D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Karma Chavez and Cindy Griffin, eds., Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012); Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, & American Identity (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).

4 Susan Zaeske, “Signatures of Citizenship: The Rhetoric of Women’s Antislavery Petitions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (2002): 147–68, doi:10.1080/00335630209384368; Carly S. Woods, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018); Chavez and Griffin, ed., Standing in the Intersection.

5 Ore, Lynching.

6 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015), doi:10.1080/00335630.2015.994908.

7 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997): 66–70. To steal away, or “stealing away” one's right to life, as described by Hartman, refers to the ways enslaved populations negotiated precarity and life in plain sight.

8 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014): 5–6.

9 Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion,” 163.

10 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

11 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

12 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “‘We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves’ A Dialogically Produced Audience and Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the ‘Present’,” Gender Forum 22 (2008): 40.

13 I emphasize the “a” in an Afrafuturist feminist rhetorical approach to place the gendered positionality from which I speak under constant investigation. While I identify as a cis-gender Black woman, I wish to acknowledge and be accountable for the ways gender operates in and through conversations about citizenship. It is important to remains cognizant of how binary logics embedded in some Black women’s truthtelling simultaneously erase queer, non-binary, and trans Black women from the frame altogether, making slippin’ in and out of frame look different for Black women across the spectrum.

14 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 2.

15 Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton & Company Incorporated, 1978), 255.

16 Fred Moten, “Blackness,” in Keywords for African American Studies, ed., Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 28.

17 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179.

18 Ore, Lynching, 13.

19 William David Hart, “Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 39, no. 1 (2018): 17. I understand “stealing away Blackness,” via Black women’s truthtelling as the means by which Black women slip and out of antiblack frames to reaffirm their Blackness beyond the now. Drawing from Fred Moten (2008), I understand that Black social life is stolen life. To affirm one’s Blackness despite the pathologies that persist about the nature of Black life, is to embrace Black sociality as a covert operation; an operation intent on stealing away our Blackness in plain sight (out in the open) through one’s singing, storytelling, writing, speechmaking, performing, etc.

20 Hart, “Constellations,” 24.

21 Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

22 Ore, Lynching, 54.

23 See Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (United Kingdom: Zed Books, Ltd., 1988, 2000).

24 Shakur, Assata, 51.

25 Sharpe, In the Wake, 73–5.

26 “Cardi B: I Became a Stripper to Escape Domestic Violence,” 0:08–1:24. DJ Vlad, January 17, 2016. Video, 6:26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzfcNl-o9bI&t=2s.

27 “Cardi B: I Became a Stripper to Escape Domestic Violence,” 1:23–1:24.

28 Angels Carabí, “An Interview with Gloria Naylor,” Universidad de Sevilla 1 (1992): 31.

29 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997): 66–70.

30 Moten, “Blackness,” 27.

31 Sharpe, In the Wake, 13.

32 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 177.