Abstract
Enduring legacies of racial violence signal the need to reconcile with the past. This paper comparatively explores various speculative works that either reinforce a paradigm of White innocence that serves to deny such legacies or center critical dialogue between the past and present. It draws on a range of theoretical works, including Seshadri-Crooks’s (2000) Lacanian analysis of race, Taylor’s (2003) notion of the body as repertoire for embodied knowledge, Wright’s (2015) concept of Black epiphenomenal time, and Hartman’s (2008b) method of ‘critical fabulation.’ Through an analysis of the narrative tropes of caves and mirrors in the Star Wars Skywalker saga (1977–1983; 2015–2019), this paper firstly unpacks the bounded individualism that permits protagonists Luke and Rey Skywalker to refute their evil Sith lord ancestry and prevail as heroes. It then turns to the works Black Panther (2018) and Watchmen (2019) to comparatively examine Afrofuturist narrative strategies of collectivity, embodiment, and non-linear temporality that destabilize bounded notions of self and time to reckon with the complexities of the past. It concludes that speculative approaches to ancestral (dis)connections are indicative of epistemological frameworks that can either circumvent or forefront ongoing demands to grapple with the past.
Highlights
Race in the contemporary context is undetachable from history
The latter is a tradition that Derrida and Prenowitz (1995) pinpoint as the Western framework for memory. Through his deconstruction of the term ‘archive’ as denoting authority—as home of the archon—Derrida (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995) unsparingly shows how Western memory is one that fundamentally delineates and organizes history, obsessively determining what is remembered and what is forgotten. This is the epistemological framework that allows for what Wekker (2016) identifies as a prevailing paradigm of White innocence anchored by an “epistemology of ignorance” (p. 17)
Whereas the Star Wars scenes analyzed above place individuality t the forefront, Black Panther (2018) brings up collectivity at various levels, one that spans both horizontally and vertically, unbinding temporalities through intergenerational conversations that cross the borders of life and death and through the invocation of diaspora as an archival site of memory that, in turn, becomes embodied by the likes of Killmonger
Summary
Race in the contemporary context is undetachable from history. As Fields and Fields (2012) argue, racial ideology from the past has been recrafted again and again to remain contemporary and pervasive, at the same time that the contemporary evades such history. A speculative approach, this critical fabulation is especially critical of closure, producing less of a finite ending and more of an open-ended dialogue that reestablishes an ever-embracing relationship between the past, the present, and an imagined future that is liberated This critical fabulation speaks to an undoing of what the Fieldses (2012) have termed “racecraft,” the mythical occult science that weaves together the illusion of race and its practical forms of racism. Through his deconstruction of the term ‘archive’ as denoting authority—as home of the archon—Derrida (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995) unsparingly shows how Western memory is one that fundamentally delineates and organizes history, obsessively determining what is remembered (i.e., housed within the archive) and what is forgotten (i.e., excluded from such authorized and localized site) This is the epistemological framework that allows for what Wekker (2016) identifies as a prevailing paradigm of White innocence anchored by an “epistemology of ignorance” The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research based on the findings of this paper
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