A Queer Visitation

Abstract

Abstract This article meditates on black unbelonging as the haunting impasse reached when attempting to wrest a phenomenological account of black life amid perpetual black death. It seeks to expose the calculated dislocation of black modes of being, embodiment, and sensation from hegemonic categories of experience that serve to capture, to surveil, and to leave Blacks in a state of “constitutive discomfort.” Rather than merely signifying non-ontology, alienation, or racialization, black unbelonging further allegorizes self-possession and originary constitution as haunting the interpellative processes that maintain the Western subject of phenomenology in modernity. After reframing Merleau-Pontian flesh not within a redemptive phenomenology but through a Spillersian invocation of the flesh-of-this-world as the proper object of antiblack terror, the article demonstrates how the protagonists of Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016) stage black unbelonging through various Gothic conventions. Ultimately the article champions alternatives to phenomenology simpliciter that are ephemerally indexable by what it calls “black necromancy.”