Going a piece of the way with Carole Boyce Davies’s migrating subject: on open reading, naked agency, and Naked Athena

Abstract

This essay draws on Carole Boyce Davies’s influential Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), and its theory of subjectivity as movement, to highlight Davies’s contribution to reconceptualizing efforts of black subjectivity. Relatedly, the essay teases out the potential new uses of the conceptual avenues she opened up thirty years ago. Exploring defiant disrobing within the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; not so much as an easily read feminist or feminine performance of contestation and resistance (though also as that), but as a border-crossing story given life and sensitive to multiple interpretations in social media, academia, and beyond; yields the concept of naked agency and its connected reading praxis, open reading. Naked agency and open reading showcase the unstable nature of subjectivity qua agency, which results from the emerging and subjugating effects of our hyper-digitized age. Through insurrectionary self-exposure, I expand yet depart from Davies’s formulation of subjectivity, thereby inscribing myself within the genealogy of Black women and thinkers that she originated three decades ago.