The Black Anterior

Abstract

The Black Anterior Erica R. Edwards (bio) Near the beginning of Ntozake Shange's 1974 classic Black feminist choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the lady in yellow remembers coming of age in a Buick on the night of her high school graduation. Colored "deep black," the Buick becomes a scene of too much pleasure: more people than seem possible crowd into the car—a young girl plus five pretty boys, all cousins—the young graduate sweats her hair out at the dance and, back in the car afterward, makes love for the first time. The Buick, conjured in memory, aids the feet and hips of the performers onstage in setting the choreopoem in constant motion against Black stasis. The soundtrack for this scene, powered by the lady in yellow and her slightly mocking compatriots in orange and blue, who sing backup, is the Dells' "Stay in My Corner." And more miracle than the layin' on of hands that ends the choreopoem is this: the Buick reaches its destination without event, and its Black inhabitants are even afforded the luxury of aging: "WE WAZ GROWN WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN," says the lady in yellow, and even if that bold assertion belies a youthful bravado, the past tense waz reminds us that the lady in yellow has indeed achieved the maturity of a grown-ass woman reflecting on the night she "gave it up in a buick." Sometime between Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" and the Dells' "Stay in My Corner," some womanish stuff happens. And by the time the sun comes up, the girl-woman rolling her hips in the back seat "cdnt stop grinnin."1 Shana Redmond's 2022 presidential address, "The Dark Prelude," teaches us to hear in detail scenes like this—scenes of motoring, listening, enjoying, coming, and coming through in deep black—where to hear in detail is to grieve in detail the lives these scenes index and, in so doing, to place ourselves in the way of Black culture's metronome of aliveness. But it teaches through its multimedia form: it must be heard, and it must be heard in concert. The address insists that if we listen for the interiors of Black vehicularity—which is to say, the Black anteriors that surface through the comingling of black automotive and audio technologies—we might hear well enough to be overcome by Black study's ethical excess. Our work might be overtaken, that is, not by the [End Page 219] thick description of telling the world as it is but by what Redmond refers to as the "thick emotion" of Black study's grief and what she refers to elsewhere as the "thick camaraderie" that counters the "thin bonds of sympathy" tying well-meaning liberals to dark subjects whose deaths serve as the precondition of white life.2 Redmond begins with this overstanding and overtaking: "I cry a lot," she confesses. The setting for "The Dark Prelude" is, indeed, the thick Black anterior, where what comes and lies before the black death that preconditions white life—what is in advance of and surrounds this black deathliness—is held and holding, and beheld and beholding. The Black anterior is what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to as "the black before and before," "the already and the forthcoming": Consider the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, first theorists of the revolution of the surround, the black before and before, the already and the forthcoming. Their twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innovation. This is not a contradiction if the new thing, always calling for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations, the patrolled highways and the prison towers.3 If Blackness is the constantly improvised mode of commoning and communing that is anterior to the carceral apparatuses mounted to harness and control it, Blackness is the antagonism to enclosure, to, even, racial Blackness. And if what we, students of the Black anterior, bring to American studies is a refusal of "America" and its...