Black Subject Research Articles

THE SOCIOGENESIS OF RACISM AND ETHNIC-RACIAL RELATIONS IN SCHOOL: A CRITICAL VIEW

This study addresses the sociogenesis of racism in Brazil, examining its manifestation in the school environment and the challenges of developing pedagogical practices capable of mitigating this exclusionary culture and its violence. Based on a current, historical, and theoretical contextualization, the study seeks to investigate how racism manifests itself in education and what its consequences are in everyday school life, analyzing how prejudice, discrimination, and the devaluation of black and indigenous cultures and subjectivities impact students' learning processes. It is concluded that racism is prominent in Brazilian society and its consequences affect education, with impacts on school dropout rates, student performance, and social inclusion.

An Aesthete Thinks About Herself for Too Long

This is an auto-theoretical essay on the importance of aesthetics and its nuances concerning identity. Autotheory is a literary practice in which the author presents a theory and uses autobiographical evidence to support it. There is a disregard for aesthetics on a societal level. Aesthetics are defined in this essay as personal tastes that are core to a person’s identity, whether that identity is true to the subject or what they feel they should aspire to be. When thinking about aesthetics, there is a common belief that aesthetics are a superficial aspect of one’s identity. While aesthetics is mostly visually based, this essay argues that aesthetics evoke deeper meaning based on the already established identity of the subject. Through the dissection of identities and their nuances, this essay discusses how aesthetics play a deeper role in identity and community building. This essay also breaks down certain connotations of aesthetics, especially concerning femininity and Blackness. There is a notion that women should care about how they look because they are expected to present ‘acceptably.’ If aesthetics concerns how subjects present themselves, this essay argues that there is a negative view of aesthetics due to its association with femininity. When analyzing femininity through the context of Blackness, aesthetics are now something that a Black female subject should aspire to, whether she wants to or not. This essay argues that the intersectionality of Blackness and femininity means that certain aesthetics can be imposed onto others. Aesthetics are integral to how subjects want to or feel they should express themselves. It is worth discussing because it can show how or why certain aesthetics are adopted or rejected. This essay also notes that an acknowledgment of one’s aesthetic can allow for a deeper understanding and appreciation of the subject’s self. Due to the unconventional nature of auto theory, this essay does not follow traditional essay rules in terms of format, voice, and language.

The pragmatics of black–white conversations: Richard Wright’s representation of the African American experience

Abstract Richard Wright represents the African American experience of white racism in his novel Native Son and autobiography Black Boy. In the two works, Wright delves into the psychic effects of white racism on young African Americans. From a pragmatic perspective, this article analyzes the conversations between whites and young African Americans in the two works, with the aim of exploring how the conversations can impact on how the young African Americans think about reality and about themselves in relation to whites, that is, how whites attempt to form black subjectivity through conversation. The conversational mechanisms of the formation of black subjectivity are investigated by building on research in pragmatics on conversational cooperation and interpersonal pragmatics. The article first examines the structural features of black-white conversations, and explains the conversational norms by using Grice’s theory of conversation as the explanatory framework. The analysis sheds light on the relative nature of Grice’s maxims and the inseparability of the informational and the relational aspects of conversation. The article examines the relationship dynamics of black-white conversations by drawing on studies in interpersonal pragmatics. From the stylistic feature of the use of address terms, the study delves into the interracial pragmatics of black–white conversations.

Reclaiming Black (Female) Subjectivity and the Othered Gaze in Harriet's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Analyzing White Representation in the Black Imagination

This essay explores the representation of whiteness and the reclamation of black (female) subjectivity in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by a black female author during the antebellum period, Jacobs’ narrative offers a unique critique of the hegemonic power structures that defined her era. The essay examines how Jacobs uses her narrative to subvert the dominant racial and gender ideologies, presenting whiteness as the Other and reclaiming her identity and agency through the act of writing. By analyzing the text through the theoretical lenses of Slave Narrative, Feminist Discourse, and Otherism, this paper highlights the complex ways in which Jacobs negotiates her subjectivity in a society that systematically denies (her) black humanity.

Inside the Black (W)hole: A Queer Black Feminist Retrospective

This essay introduces a spirited cross-disciplinary and intergenerational queer black feminist dialogue about what Evelynn Hammonds’s 1994 differences essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” has meant, and continues to mean, for queer black feminist knowledge production and (academic) subject formation within and beyond the United States. Across ten essays and one poem, contributors to this special issue of differences interrogate what it means for queer black feminists to labor in a field under constant erasure; to argue for the possibilities for queer and trans and sick black women’s erotic agency in the context of hostile institutional formations such as the academic and medical industrial complexes; and to analyze the relevance of empirical black holes for theorizing polymorphous black female sexualities and erotic freedoms. From inside the black (w)hole, contributors chart the history, present, and futurity of Hammonds’s “Black (W)holes,” and, by extension, the black diasporic feminist, lesbian, queer, and trans intellectual and sociopolitical life-worlds in its wake.

A poetics of opacity: disability, race and gender in Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte

ABSTRACT Une fenêtre ouverte/An Open Window (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of the mental health difficulties suffered by both Sylla and her friend, Aminta Ngom. This article reads Sylla’s film as embracing Black female disabled subjectivities that have been historically constructed – through intersecting patriarchal, colonialist and ableist regimes – as abject or aberrant. While scholarship on Sylla’s film has addressed ideas of female madness, it has not engaged with (Black feminist) disability studies – a critical lacuna addressed here. Drawing on ideas of opacity (Glissant), ‘mad methodology’ (Bruce) and Black feminist disabled perspectives that question emancipatory or healing coherence (Pickens, Nack Ngue), the article reads Sylla’s film in terms of a poetics of opacity that opens to a cripping of cinematic time and space. While focusing on a relationship of female friendship, solidarity and care that offers refuge from fraught familial dynamics, the film’s empathy is capacious, extending to Aminta’s mother and daughter too. As Une fenêtre ouverte traces the tensions that structure these various relationships, it reveals its feminist approach, its mode of feeling in solidarity, to be one that embraces strategies of opacity and ethical ambiguities.

Resistance, Transformation, and Empowerment: The Development of Feminine Identities in Mokámbo, aromas de Libertad and Kanga, la tierra de los sueños by Victoria Evita Ika

Abstract: Equatoguinean female authors have experienced a sort of Boom in literary production in the 21st century. Although there is still a relatively small number of women authors, they have made a significant impact on the Equatoguinean literary scene. Victoria Evita Ika explores the complexity of the formation of the multifaceted identity of a contemporary African woman in her novels Mokámbo, aromas de libertad (2010) and Kanga, la tierra de los sueños (2016). This analysis aims to explore how these two novels transform the development of identities of the modern Equatoguinean woman through surviving horizontal violence into a call for resistance and change. Her ability to learn from her experiences leads to finding a voice of resistance which is analyzed through the lens of the postmodern concept of "radical Black subjectivity." The struggle to negotiate between victimization and activism in order to realize her dreams, challenges the protagonist to make difficult choices. Both novels champion the resilience of women in their ability to adapt to the constant challenges they face in modern day Equatorial Guinea. This flexibility in the spirit of women is the true success and what ultimately keeps hope alive for the future of Equatorial Guinea.

The Subject of Black Subjectivity

Abstract In multiple essays, CLR James lays out what a theory of subjectivity must account for to resolve issues stemming from reducing subjectivity to a singular identity. Most proposals for a theory of subjectivity do so by making the subject the object of another’s propositions or claims about the world. I argue that this is an identity claim. The converse of this process is also true, that the subject who claims another as the object of their proposition must also be the object of a proposition themselves, leaving the capacity to form these expressions untouched. In Black Cultural studies, there has been a lot of attention paid to the capacity for one to become the object of their own propositions due to the conception that Black identity overdetermines Black subjects’ expressions prior to their articulation. Our reorientation to the study of subjectivity posits an entity whose operation functions to mobilise as well as implement identity claims. Subjectivity is a capacity while identity becomes the object of that capacity, an object shared between subjects that are known by becoming the object of propositions regarding the world, including their own. This essay attempts to resolve the conflicts that arise once the mistake of conflating subjectivity with identity claims is made and proposes a model whereby the concept of Black subjectivity can be explained.

Exploring non-perturbative corrections in thermodynamics of static dirty black holes

This research delves into an extensive exploration of the thermodynamic characteristics exhibited by a contaminated black hole subject to a uniform electric field, within the theoretical framework of the Einstein-Nonlinear Electrodynamics (ENE)-dilaton theory. The investigation encompasses a thorough analysis of diverse thermodynamic facets, encompassing heat capacity, Helmholtz free energy, and internal energy. Through this comprehensive examination, valuable insights are provided into the distinctive behavior of the black hole when subjected to the influence of the electric field. Moreover, our study embarks on an exploration of the nuanced interplay between quantum effects and the thermodynamic profile, with a particular focus on scrutinizing the quantum-corrected entropy. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between quantum mechanics and the thermodynamic attributes exhibited by the system. By doing so, we aim to illuminate the non-perturbative corrections inherent in this intricate system, thereby contributing to a holistic comprehension of the altered thermodynamics characterizing dirty black holes within the confines of the specified theoretical framework. In essence, this research endeavors to uncover the subtleties of the modified thermodynamic landscape governing black holes tainted by external factors, specifically within the context of the ENE-dilaton theory. The outcomes of this study promise to extend our understanding of the intricate interactions within such complex systems, offering valuable insights into the non-perturbative corrections that manifest in their thermodynamic behavior.

On that demon time: Black time geographies of reimagining, recovering, and resisting

This article introduces “Demon Time” as a theoretical concept for examining Black time geographies. Building off the theorization of demonic space, I theorize that demon time is an alternative Black temporality. I use the soundscapes of the Black church, the Black barber/beauty shop, and the strip club to think through demonic temporality as a mode of reimagination, a reimagining of Black subjectivities, a mode of recovery, an iterative process of recovery from anti-blackness, and a mode of resisting, a continual resistance of normative logics and western ideologies. These Black soundscapes produce Black timescapes which are anchored to time-spaces of Black cultural production. Thus, demon time offers us a way to reorient how we understand Blackness in moments of economic, social, and ecological crisis, while also allowing us to think about the incommensurability of Black temporalities across Black regions in the US.

Disciplining the disobedient Black maternal subject: the assimilatory pedagogies of public suffering and punishment

Drawing feminist analyses of the affective work of shame, compassion and pain into dialogue with Black political theory's critique of the ‘ordinary’ spectacle of Black suffering and death, this article theoretically examines the disciplining of Black maternal subjects who behave badly in Nordic public space. Considering media coverage of two separate instances from 2019 where Black mothers are either threatened by the risk of death or succumb to death, this article analyses how the racial logics of national assimilation locate these women as deviantly unassimilable subjects who are swiftly made culpable for the conditions of their own suffering.

Can You See Her? The Absent Presence of Black Female Subjectivity in Get Out (2017)

ABSTRACT This article investigates racial-sexual violence, and conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity as they are situated in the cinematic Black political imagination. Through a Black feminist analysis of Get Out (2017), the author argues that the film and its articulation of race in the post-Obama US fails to account for gender and sexuality by tangentially engaging Black women in its dissection of race and racism. The author contends that Black women are the absent presence in the film and utilizes theories of temporal, spatial, and material racial-sexual violence and the coupled subject invisibilities to dissect the (in)visible Black women in film.

Black Diasporic Subjectivity and Lacanian Lack of Home: A Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

ABSTRACT This article proposes a re-examination of literary representations of Black diasporic subjectivity and loss of home using Lacanian psychoanalysis. Traditionally, loss of home in the African context has largely been seen as disruptive of Black diasporic subjectivities, and thus widely regarded as a traumatic experience. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s subjectivation process, the article argues that home is a fundamental lack of (Black) diaspora – a forever lost object-cause of desire – whose loss triggers an unending diasporic desire for home. By reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2017), the article examines continual disruptions of Black diasporic subjectivities in the wake of various displacements and their reconstruction via Lacan’s subjectivation. Situating Americanah in the contemporary discourses of transnationalism, the article challenges conventional understandings of loss of home by arguing that this diasporic lack of home enables diasporic creativity, inducing creative day-to-day forms of diasporic homemaking in the host land.

The Blackout in Stepford and the Shadow of Southern Horror

Abstract: In this essay, I reconsider Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Step-ford Wives and place it in dialogue with its filmic adaptations, to reflect on how much the films based on Levin’s novel foreclose and marginalize black representation and embodiment that had been centered in the novel. I argue that shifts from the novel The Step-ford Wives to the first film, released in 1975 and directed by Bryan Forbes, erase the black female subjectivity that centrally shapes the novel. Similarly, by implication in the 2004 film The Stepford Wives directed by Frank Oz, blackness is associated with a decaying urban landscape and scapegoated as the corrupting force that would prevent the actualization of an ideal or peaceful home in a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, where escape from blackness and the pathologies associated with it, including crime, are idealized. Black people are the community’s hidden and unspoken fear, a fear that looms (ironically even more than the literal horrors carried out in the town among its white citizenry), linked to auras of blackness classically illustrated within gothic writing. Toni Morrison has famously discussed the Africanist presence that inflects early canonical American literature, even when black bodies are absent and black characters do not materialize within gothic narratives.

“The Best Little Boy in the World”: Disidentification in the Production of Black Gay Male Subjectivity1

This article examines how Black gay men produce identities in correspondence with cultural scripts of Black manhood. I illustrate how these scripts organize a subjectivity shaped by white supremacy and signify racial consciousness, respectability, and commitment to Black antiracism. The script intentionally excludes queer men. Instead, Black queer men are “faggots,” a subjectivity signifying weakness, wasted manhood, and capitulation to whiteness. Utilizing Muñoz's (1999, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis) concept of disidentification, I track how participants engage in a reimagining of the conventional script of heteronormative Black masculinity to embody a subjectivity I call Super Black Man. This hybrid subjectivity responds to interlocking systems of race, sexuality, and gender in their lives by locating space in conventional Black male subjectivities for Black gay men. As Super Black Men, participants accomplished identities that did not compromise their self‐expression or affiliation with Black communities. I discuss how disidentification adds analytic complexity to this empirical investigation of Black gay men's identity work. What results is a more robust understanding of how race shapes the motives, trajectory, and outcomes of racialized sexual identities.

“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Abstract Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61) is the earliest known work of fiction written by a Black woman in the United States. Its distinctiveness lies in the internationalism through which the labor regimes of the southern plantation are shown to be intimately bound to global sites of colonial dispossession. Besides unpacking the entangled strands of British and American imperialisms, the author-narrator critically emulates conventions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace, evincing an understanding of both her embodied self and her intellectual labor as commodities in a world system built with racialized labor. Crafts’s novel revises the notion of chattel slavery as provincial, situating it instead within the Atlantic World’s expansive flows of capital and commodities. It presents not a geographically and socially demarcated institution but a plantation empire that goes far beyond the contours of the American South or, indeed, the continental United States, creating a remarkably nuanced conception of Black positionality, one informed not only by race but also by global capital. As part of a broader field-based inquiry, this article probes the affordances of thinking about antebellum Black Atlantic political subjectivity as positioned between two imperialist projects: British abolitionism and American plantocratic expansionism.

Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities

The Haitian Revolution—the famed historical event that redefined the liberatory possibilities of modernity and altered Black diasporic subjectivities—offers a wealth of knowledge that has yet to be fully analyzed. This article explores the diasporic and queered possibilities embedded in the story and aesthetic representation of the revolutionary actor, Romaine la Prophètesse. This liminal figure of the early revolutionary era galvanized thousands of formerly enslaved people to fight against the French colonial apparatus while embodying a feminine, creative, and spiritual gendered subjectivity, diverting from the overdetermined masculinist and militaristic ethos of the time. Nonetheless, most accounts of Romaine are tangentially mentioned and do not explore the rebellious possibilities of this historical figure’s imaginative gendered presentation. To counter the analytical impasse imposed by Western and authoritative archives and methodologies, the author employs a “radical interdisciplinarity”—a crucial Black studies approach—to unearth the potential of creative genders and their role in upholding Black diasporic epistemes of freedom and resistance. Paying attention to Haitian abstract art, and particularly the work of Haiti-born, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu, the author explores how his pieces blur temporal, spatial and ontological registers offering a glimpse into undecipherable, yet affective, genealogies of “freedom dreams.” Indeed, through the use of a conceptual frameworks that honours the “right to opacity,” the author suggests that the obscured mythology and the abstracted aesthetics of Romaine la Prophètesse allow for a genealogical reading of queer spiritual ontologies that are part of larger Black diasporic freedom epistemes and that are demonstrated through contemporary Haitian queer designations and advocacy work.

A Swamp in Name Only: Imagined Geography, Abandonment, and the Archive in W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Abstract This article illustrates how Black literary production in the Jim Crow era grappled with the necessity of seeking representation shaped by a historically dispossessory archive. In The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) the reinvention of swampland by an abandoned Black woman into a farmable and habitable settlement constitutes a form of recovery that would secure representation for Black tenant farmers. At the same time, the article argues, this act of recovery, much like the multigeneric and multivocal form of the novel itself, ultimately exceeds the forms of representation that, for W. E. B. Du Bois, both make Black subjectivity possible and seek to regulate it.

Versatile Black Female Identity in Olympia Vernon’s Eden

Political movements of racism and feminism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries included monolithic approaches to identity that treated each category of race and gender exclusively. As a result, these movements fail to serve the black feminist liberation project because they do not treat blackness and gender as interlocking aspects that shape their experience. Therefore, this article aims to examine how black women’s intersectional position is represented in Eden(2003), a novel about the American South by Olympia Vernon, and how this examination enhances a powerful, versatile black female identity. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and gendered subjectivity as positionality, this study highlights how black Maddy Dangerfield, the protagonist, navigates women’s racial and gender suppression in the novel. In doing so, Maddy acquires consciousness that problematic racial and gender configurations throughout history do not necessarily hold deterministic powers over her subjectivity. In this sense, versatility as a form of radical black female subjectivity is an outcome of a simultaneous positioning as part of a historical context and detached from the determinism of that context. Maddy uses her positional perspective to create new meanings about blackness and femaleness. This process exposes how values attached to race and gender hold no deterministic power over a woman’s subjectivity. The significance of this study lies in shedding light on how versatile black female identity is part of a non-traditional way of resisting racial and gender domination that enacts engaging intersectionality and positionality

Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromodernity, contrastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution.