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ABSTRACT
This article considers how Black culture workers engage in ongoing struggles over the meaning and value ascribed to Black lives in an anti-Black world that demands Black death. The artists explored in this article deploy modes of poetics that create possibilities for fugitivity, or escape, from the overdetermination of Black life as always, already, and only “dead.” Such fugitive poetics demonstrate the ways that blackness defies and exceeds social death, even as it is, perhaps, permanently tethered to the potential for premature Black death in an anti-Black world. The article also calls attention to how this poetics of fugitivity draws upon the cultural resources of religious language, beliefs, rituals, and practices to imagine and enact other worlds of possibility for Black futurity beyond the overdetermination of social and/or physical death.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Jennifer C. Nash. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
2 For a helpful account of the genealogy, theoretical terrain, and intellectual interlocutors of Afropessimism, see William D. Hart. The Blackness of Black (Key Concepts in Critical Discourse). Lexington Books, 2020.
3 See Frank B. Wilderson III. Afropessimism. New York: Liverite Publishing Corporation. See also, Jared Sexton & Huey Copeland, “Raw Life: An Introduction” and Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought” in Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), pp. 53–61 and 183–201; Jared Sexton, “Unbearable Blackness” in Cultural Critique, Number 90, Spring 2015, pp. 159–178.
4 See Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
5 Fred Moten. Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being). Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
6 See Andreana Clay, The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics. New York: NYU Press, 2012. See also, Sekou M. Franklin, After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation. New York: NYU Press, 2014.
7 See Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why it Matters. New York: Basic Civitas, 2008.
8 See Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. p.9.
9 See Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” in South Atlantic Quarterly v112 n4 (2013 09 01), 737–780.
10 See Sharon Patricia Holland’s description of “spaces of death,” in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
11 Kevin Quashie. Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
12 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019. Charles “Chip” P. Linscott also offers an important critique of the ways that #BlackLivesMatter’s use of social media both opens space for resistance and reinscribes modes of surveillance that thwart resistance. See “All Lives (Don’t) matter: The Internet Meets Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism” in Black Camera, Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2017 (New Series), pp. 104–119.
13 In Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, religion is referred to as “a technology of living.” In an article entitled, “Technology of Living: Toward a Black Feminist Religious Thought,” Black feminist theorist of religion, Tamura Citation2016 04 02, draws upon Bambara’s use of “technology of living” to describe possibilities for redescribing the complexity of “black religion” and its significance for contemporary Black and feminist studies.
14 See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
15 In her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe insisted that though Black people are continually subjected to the forces of violence and death, Black people are “not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” Sharpe’s “not only” is crucial to my argument about the overdetermination of Black death throughout this article. As is her insistence that however Black people are known, in terms of anti-Black violence and death, to non-Black people, this does not, and cannot, fully define the ways in which Black people know and define ourselves to ourselves and one another. And this self and intracommunal understanding of Black identity, worth, and value beyond violence and death matters.
16 See Karla F.C. Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
17 See Patrice Douglass and Frank Wilderson III, “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World” in The Black Scholar, Volume 43, Number 4, Winter 2013, pp. 117–123.
18 To view these music videos, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXD0vv-ds8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak4vLEBxIo4
19 This motif of reanimated Black life after death is also explored in Flying Lotus’ previous music video/short film, “Until the Quiet Comes,” produced by Khalil Joseph. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pVHC1DXQ7U.
20 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 11.
21 Ibid, 11.
22 Ibid, 17.
23 Ibid, 134.
24 This subject is more fully explored by Claudia Rankine in a 2015 New York Times essay entitled, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.” See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html
25 Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017, p. 70
26 Sharpe, In the Wake, 7.
27 Ibid, 7.
28 Ibid, 4.
29 Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead, 64.
30 Ibid, 65.
31 Ibid, 66.
32 Ibid, 66.
33 Ibid, 76.
34 Ibid, 77.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael Brandon McCormack
Michael Brandon McCormack is Associate Professor of Pan-African Studies and Comparative Humanities (Religious Studies) and Director the the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville. His research explores the intersections of Black religion and culture, activism and the arts.