Shattering Black Flesh: Black Intellectual Writing in the Age of Ferguson

Abstract

This essay argues for the logic of radical proximity as a vital methodology for black intellectual writing in the “Age of Ferguson.” It takes as its starting point age-old demands for scholars to maintain a critical distance from their objects of study. I demonstrate how the assumption of choice in calls for critical distance ignores the unruly character of trauma, history, and memory; ignores how, on occasion, they inflect black writing over and against the will of the author. To do so, I retrace the psychic routes of one of my own attempts to craft black intellectual writing in the age of Ferguson. Using personal storytelling as a critical narrative praxis, I argue that in the face of contemporary antiblack violence, and on the heels of New World slavery, injunctions against proximity are often futile—in so far as they aim to mediate relationalities routinely beyond the control of the writer. I conclude by advocating for multiple forms and platforms of black writing in the age of Ferguson. Black writers, I argue, must prevent social media—themselves technologies of neoliberal capitalism and promoters of its racial logics—from regulating what constitutes “authentic” grammars of black intellectual writing and political expression.