Black Gravity, or a Hidden History of Empire

Abstract

This essay takes this occasion—the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Evelynn Hammonds’s germinal essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality”—as an opportunity to explore the turn to spacetime and astrophysics in Black feminist writing and scholarship. This understudied tradition has unfolded concurrently alongside the rise of maritime and aquatic metaphors in Black studies. Focusing on the image of the black hole, the essay argues that this metaphor operates as a stimulus for confronting disciplinary objects of anxiety in Black studies, Caribbean studies, physics, and Black feminist studies. By analyzing origin stories that surround the moniker black hole in physics, the essay shows how imperial violence and notions of Black gender and sexual alterity suffused the term from its inception in the world of physics—a history that Black feminist theorists call to memory and challenge in their redeployment of the image.