Productively Destabilized: Black Studies and Fantastic Modes of Being

Abstract

The 2008 release of Richard Iton's In Search of the Black Fantastic marked a significant moment in debates about the relationship between culture and politics within black studies. His concept of “the black fantastic” destabilizes notions of modernity by grappling with the people, expressions, knowledges, and modes of being written out of a Western modern structure. This article explores what Iton's concept of the black fantastic offers black studies as a methodology.

Keywords:

• black studies
• cultural politics
• interdisciplinarity

Acknowledgments

A special thank you to Robert Allen for introducing me to In Search of the Black Fantastic, and to Jason Hendrickson, Tiffany King, and Jasminder Kaur for their prompt feedback and support in writing this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers and guest editors for their comments.

Notes

Ralph Ellison, “Living With Music,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1964), 187.

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.

“Richard Iton,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 15, no. 1–2 (2013): 172.

Joe Street, “In Search of the Black Fantastic (Book Review),” American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (2009): 1116.

Keith A. Mayes. “In Search of the Black Fantastic (Book Review),” Political Science Quarterly 125, no. 1 (2010): 160.

Robert Butler, “In Search of the Black Fantastic (Book Review),” African American Review 43, no. 2 (2009): 527.

Shana Redmond, “In Search of the Black Fantastic (Book Review),” Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 3 (June 2009): 579.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 16.

Ibid.

Ibid., 289–290.

“Richard Iton,” 173.

Ibid.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 11.

Lia T. Bascomb, “An Interview with Margaret B. Wilkerson,” in Forty and Counting: An Anthology Commemorating Four Decades of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, ed. Ronald Williams II (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies, 2010), 45, 46.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 257.

Ibid., 17.

Richard Iton, “Still Life,” Small Axe 17, no. 1 40 (2013): 37.

Adolph Reed Jr, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene, (New York: New Press, 2000), 168. For more engagement with these critiques see Vaughn Raspberry, “Black Cultural Politics at the End of History,” American Literary History 24, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 796–813; and Hortense J. Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 3 (Winter 2006): 7–28.

Rasberry, “Black Cultural Politics,” 801.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 102.

Ibid., 103.

A lyric from Janelle Monae's “Q.U.E.E.N.” collaboration with Erykah Badu.

“Richard Iton,” 170–171.

See Armstead Robinson et al., Black Studies in the University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969); Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

See Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of us are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Westbury, CT: Feminist Press, 1982).

Iton, Black Fantastic, 196.

See Gerald Horne, “Toward a Transnational Research Agenda for African American History in the 21st Century,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (2006): 288–303..

George Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 52.

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Iton, Black Fantastic, 200.

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (1998): 291–325; Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Diaspora and Desire: Gendering ‘Black America’ in Black Liverpool,” in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, ed. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah Thomas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 73–92.

Iton's analysis of Paul Robeson is one example.

Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Iton, “Still Life,” 35.

Ibid., 34.

See for example Alice Walker's “The Unglamorous but Worthwhile Duties of a Revolutionary Artist” (In In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, 130–138. New York: HBJ, 2003), where she names how she had never been taught black literature in her formal schooling, and then lays out a set of guidelines for the preservation of that field both within and outside of the academy.

Raymond Williams's 1958 “Culture is Ordinary” had a profound effect on the ways in which the academy engaged with culture. Black Studies’ relationship to the Black Arts Movement expounded on the importance of culture. Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby have all contributed extensively to these discourses, creating a discursive field of black cultural studies.

See for example Barbara Christian's “Race for Theory” (Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 67–79) where she critiques not only the canonization of a selective theoretical practice within literary studies, but also notions of the authenticity of black language that are based on a restrictive definition of blackness.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 211.

Ibid., 135.

Ibid., 135.

Manning Marable, “Living Black History: Resurrecting the African-American Intellectual Tradition,” in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 9–10. See also M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 311.

Hall, In the Vineyard, 26.

Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master's Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 160.

Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” Voices of the African Diaspora 8, no. 2 (1992): 15.

Ibid., 13–16.

Karla Spurlock, “Toward the Evolution of a Unitary Discipline: Maximizing the Interdisciplinary Concept in African/Afro-American Studies,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment, Jr. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 768.

Charles A. Frye, Towards a Philosophy of Black Studies (San Francisco: R&E Research Associates, 1978), 59. James Stewart uses the term “transdisciplinary” to express this kind of methodology. See Itibari M. Zulu and Karanja Keita Carroll, “Transdisciplinary African American Studies Approaches and Implications: A Collective Interview with James Stewart,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 2, no. 2 (March 2008).

Iton, Black Fantastic, 120.

Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 16.

Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” October 53 (Summer 1990): 93.

Ibid., 93.

Ibid., 109.

Ibid., 108.

Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 206.

“Highest” in terms of traditional Western hegemonic notions of “high” and “low” art.

Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 288.

See Alondra Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 9.

Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 288.

“Richard Iton,” 174.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 259.