Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis James Arnett POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND THE BLACK FEMALE IMAGINATION, by Kristen Lillvis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 144 pp. $44.95 cloth. Kristen Lillvis's Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination demonstrates how emergent theories of posthumanism and black humanism provide generous new angles through which to look at contemporary African American literature. In this critical work, Lillvis elaborates a genealogy of black women's literature and culture that takes us from canonical neo-slave narratives of the 1980s, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sherley Ann Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), through the funhouse mirrors of Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, to the works of Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Julie Dash. Ambitiously covering literary, musical, and visual narratives, this text productively periodizes contemporary black women's writing and demonstrates continuities between past-facing and future-oriented narratives. Lillvis's text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures, which we might characterize as Afrofuturist—while acknowledging important critiques of the term—and which urgently calls for an evaluation of literature, culture, and politics of the present as it looks towards an increasingly uncertain future. Lillvis explains in the introductions to the book and to each chapter how contemporary eruptions and flashpoints of racial tension call for a reconsideration of some texts whose scholarly criticism and apparatus has unfairly burdened them, limiting an appreciation of their contemporary applicability and vitality. Indeed, Lillvis's work consistently engages with the weight of literary critical discourse on each of these texts, doing due diligence to situate each within the field of scholarly secondary texts. In the first two chapters in particular, Lillvis strives to bridge the gap between black humanisms and posthumanisms to demonstrate how these artists are "transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters" (p. 6). In her reading of Morrison's Beloved and her more recent A Mercy (2008) in chapter one, Lillvis endeavors to explain the "posthuman liminality" of Beloved and Sethe and how both characters experience "liminal temporalities" in the continuities of past, present, and future in their fraught mother-daughter relationship (pp. 11, 13). In chapter two, Lillvis focuses on the possibility of black-white solidarities in spite of historical and ideological contingencies and violences in Williams. In chapter three, she turns to the fierce theme of reproductive justice and self-narration in Jones's Corregidora (1975) and, in chapter four, the horizon of multiple gendered temporalities and racialized consciousnesses in Butler's Kindred (1979). Chapter five explores the communicative transversality of black womens' relationships in the short fiction of Sheree Renee Thomas [End Page 246] and Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991). This final reading points out how, for instance, multiply constituted and temporally and subjectively liminal consciousness is "developing through connections to others—particularly mothers—across space and time" (p. 116). Lillvis's stated project—to draw together black humanism and post-humanism into a hybridized and generative "posthuman blackness"—is ambitious; she wants to describe the "boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures [that] enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power" (p. 8). There is great difficulty in preserving the ambivalence between a poststructuralist, posthumanist rejection of binaristic thinking in favor of multiplicities and Lillvis's focus on primarily biological, feminine gendered kinship structures. She acknowledges that there are inherently some difficulties in her project: "locating power within the bonds that exist between mothers and children in diasporic cultures can be a dangerous project" (p. 116). Nevertheless, Lillvis capably situates a Deleuzean posthumanist multiplicity as an evolution of DuBoisian double consciousness and Fanonian triple consciousness (chapter four) and then goes further, implicating Glissant's notion of transversality (chapter five). Perhaps the shortcoming of the work is not in what it fails to do but in what it fails to name itself doing, if that is not too fine a point to make. The productive labor of mothering is the central focus of nearly all...