Black Studies’ Beloved(s): or, afropess-i-missives

Abstract

This composition’s signal concern is the play of Black Studies’ Beloved(s): both the interplay between such Beloved(s) and what play follows from them. By Beloved(s), this essay means not only the varied figurations present in Toni Morrison’s seminal novel and the many meditations on Morrison’s Beloved within the field of Black Studies, but Black Studies’ own haints—how these Beloved(s) bear and shape the langues that Black Studies uses to enunciate both black study and politics. Over the decades since its initial institutionalizations within the academic marketplace, Black Studies has born many such haints in the process of excising the monstrous holdovers of its extra-academic origins and interventions seen as intrusions on Black Studies’ crystallizing institutional forms. On the occasion of Hortense Spillers’s recent remarks about afropessimism and celebrations of Spillers’s work, including that of Spillers’s psychoanalytics, this composition lingers with haints, jamming in a shared site of excision: the break between psychoanalysis and Black Studies.