The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the question of black liquidity in relation to Zygmunt Bauman's conception of liquid modernity. Along these lines, it charts the historical process by which capitalist modernity cast the Negro as a commodity and how that led to so-called Negro liquidity as the principal collateral in an extensive banking-finance-credit system with international scope. In that system, Negro liquidity was so thorough a monetization that its relation to Negro work was somewhat tangential—in the sense that simple ownership of a Negro indicated creditworthiness, irrespective of what work that Negro did. What's more, from 1850 to 1860, the accumulated wealth generated by that credit finance system, measured in Negro liquidity, was the largest in the nation. Drawing an analogy between that system of credit financing based on Negro liquidity and the current system of art credit financing, in which the artist's blackness is monetized, the essay foregrounds the appositive relation between this capitalist genealogy of liquidity and a concomitant genealogy of black poiēsis entailing a concept of liquidity not completely determined or circumscribed by that genealogy. Construing this poiēsis as polygenous and para-semiotic, the essay argues that it is a performative black critique of capitalism's commodification of life.