Sets, Moments, Riffs

Given this enormous range, one can only scrape the surface or really brush by certain moments of this compelling and beautifully written book that, as Judy explains, is organized less into parts, sections, and chapters, than into “Sets,” “Moments,” and “Riffs.” The reader passes through a series of appositional unfoldings, flows, and breaks in which the enrichment, intensification, or really the fleshing out of the conceptual contributions takes place. “Sets” could signify in many directions: the running order of a musical performance (also suggested by “riffs”), the logico-mathematical unit in set theory, the divisions of a tennis game or exercises at the gym, but, experientially, these sections also crash upon a reader like the series of waves which surfers call sets, sometimes disorienting and upending expectations and sometimes enabling a ride out to a tremendously satisfying conclusion.

To briefly illustrate a particularly illuminating riff—the third of the second moment of the first set—we find a limpidly clear account of Hortense Spillers’ field-defining and theoretically compact essay, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe,” using the framework of ideology critique developed in Roland Barthes’ 1957 essay “Myth Today,” an essay mentioned only in passing by Spillers (66). The exposition here is a gift of painstaking analysis to which any teacher of this essay will be indebted, and it serves to illuminate with quite searing clarity the notion of “sentient flesh” itself. The acts of violence meted out upon the bodies of African slaves, the markings of which Spillers memorably calls “hieroglyphs of the flesh” (67), are shown, via Barthes’ analysis of mythology, to come to meaningfulness precisely as the acts of violence naturalize what is historical upon the black body in the signifying operations of the modern mythology of racial capitalism. And this flesh is shown by Judy in turn, in the context of Windham’s “us is human flesh,” to be “always already marked as interpolated in some signifying system” (199). Just as the violence of slavery reduces Black bodies to flesh, and that flesh consequently hovers indeterminately between nature and culture in “vestibularity” according to Spillers’ powerful analysis, so, Judy argues, “rather than giving temporal primacy to flesh as the stolen sign, Windham’s statement presumes that meaning and form are expressed spontaneously: the flesh is with and not before the body and person, and the body and person are with and not before, or even after the flesh.” Further, “[t]he point is that Windham’s person is inextricably of the flesh, lives life as flesh.” (210) Here, following Barthes, we learn there is no originary or “natural” signified prior to the historical context which is then marked by that context as the source of meaning making. Rather flesh itself, as sentient: feeling, thinking, signifying, multiplies meaning and possibilities in its own living plurality, not in a simple journey of expression, but in the uneven and pluralized activity of para-semiosis. The unfolding of para-semiosis relies on an extended engagement with the prefix para-, denoting here alongsideness or displacement as “generatively transgressive” (319), and takes place via a consideration of Nahum Chandler’s notion of para-literacy along with Oscar Becker’s notion of paraontology as taken up by Fred Moten, as well as Lacan’s notion of par-être (321ff).1 Judy, in line with “afro-pessimist” thinkers such as Frank Wilderson, Calvin L. Warren, and Axelle Karera, sees no traction in the ontological or even a paraontological project for Black being (or its designation as nothingness), Chandler’s uptake of the para- prefix in relation to Du Bois’s double consciousness, and Fred Moten’s defense of paraontology notwithstanding.2 However, taking his cue from Moten’s investigation of motility and flight as well as the operations of “life in common” (320), that is, of what moves, flees, acts, sings, plays, dances, and makes in common, in community, as “us” rather than as I or me, Judy will arrive at para-semiosis as the way of being/becoming of sentient flesh. The para- gives the alongsideness or displacement denoting plurality and alterity, while the -sis suffix denotes the ongoing action of meaning making (Ancient Greek nouns with this suffix are often translated as gerunds).

Particularly striking to this reader, Judy invokes not only Barthes but also Aristotle in the course of reading Spillers. Striking because there is a suggestive connection between the essentially normative teleological thinking of natural coming-to-be in Aristotle (things in nature develop toward their final form, which has causal power), and Barthes’ critical semiological analysis that examines how historical situation becomes naturalized, and by which certain signifieds are converted into self-evident signifiers and thus are activated as ideological signs. To understand the link more clearly, we might consider Judith Butler’s theorization of sex as the naturalization of gender norms in Gender Trouble. What Aristotle installed as metaphysical telos, namely the completed adult male form of the organism, is retheorized in the 20th century, in a lineage that may be traced from Barthes to Butler, as the result of a set of historical practices which, via the operation of ideology, sediment and thus reappear to “common sense” as natural. For Aristotle, both women and “natural slaves” will “fall short” (in different ways) of attaining to this completed human telos, given in advance.3 For Spillers, then, read through Barthes, the designation of “flesh” is less a prior natural fact destined to hover in vestibularity at the entrance of history, than a historical act of naturalization which suspends black flesh in vestibularity in an ideological operation whose structure, if not its specific content, echoes deep into the longue durée of antiquity.

But Judy’s engagement here is less with Aristotle’s politics or metaphysics than with his notion of poiēsis—“hacked” from him, as he says, following Ferreira da Silva, in order to “release its radical possibilities” (13). And here Judy is doing something provocative and deserving of closer attention. Following Aristotle’s Poetics, Judy notes that the term poēisis, which means making more generally, the making of any artifact, but in this context specifically the making of literary texts—poetic production whether epic, lyric, or tragic—is closely allied to mimesis, which means most of all for Aristotle the imitation of an action. This may be sharply distinguished from Plato’s mimesis, which is modeled chiefly on the notion of visual representation, thus static, and which always represents a partializing degradation of ontological form.4 What is central for Judy here is that poēisis as mimesis “formally exhibits what it exposits, a change in action in a duration of time” and that it therefore connotes “human creating in semiosis, in saying possibility” (13). This creating unfolds in time, and is embodied and affective as well as conceptual. Following medieval Arabic readers of Aristotle, including Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Al- Fārābī, among others, Judy argues that this affective creation articulates and sustains an “aesthetic community” and indicates ethical action taking place and living in community, engendering and sustaining what he calls “poetic socialities.” Such poetic socialities are illustrated in Sentient Flesh primarily by the dance and vocal performances of juba beating, and in particular the Georgia Sea Islands version called the Buzzard Lope: “juba beating the flesh expresses and enhances sentience, without denying the animal, moving in time, in contradistinction to standing as the zero degree from which space and time unfold. . . . we make the world, but do so as one of the actualizing forces (in Aristotle’s sense of ἐνέργεια, energeia) on earth in community (in Kant’s sense of activity in reciprocity, but without his regulating heteronomy) in time” (218). As Judy notes, the resonance here with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of the undercommons and Anthony Bogues’ notion of “common association” is by no means accidental (14–15). It is worth noting that the Greek aisthēsis, from which we derive our term “aesthetics,”­ denotes feeling or sensation, and makes a good translation for the Latin-derived word “sentience.” Sentience, para-semiosis, poiēsis in black thus form the cluster of concepts constituting Judy’s key theoretical contribution to Black Studies: feeling in common, making (poiēsis) in common, and making meaning (semiosis) in common, without either arrival or lapsus into a discourse of whole, individual, or static being.

This being in motion of the poetic process, of poiēsis, is key for Judy, and in the context of the Spillers analysis we find an unusual comparison of Aristotle’s analysis of coming to be in the Physics and the specific kind of making that is poetic making, treated specifically by Aristotle in the Poetics. Coming to be, too, is a fundamental kind of motion, indeed it is motion at the level of ontology, hence the basis for the comparison. But it is also precisely in Book 1 of the Physics that Aristotle introduces the innovation of a material cause in order to solve the central problem of how some thing can come to be out of nothing, from what was not there before. The material cause, he proposes, must persist through the development of a thing, from the absence of a form to its presence, in the way that clay persists through the process of pot-making. Positing such an underlying substance, namely matter, thus solves the problem of how new things will appear in the world, whether in art or in nature. But in the very same moment that Aristotle introduces this innovation, he also divests matter precisely of its capacity to move itself, rendering it passive and, I would insist, abject. So just as the carpenter, as maker, acts upon wood to create a bed, by introducing into it form and motion, so in natural coming to be the father’s seed acts upon the mother’s passive menstrual blood to imbue the offspring with both form and motion, and if we move to another of Aristotle’s favorite examples, we could also say that the doctor acts upon the patient’s body, now rendered passive, to imbue it with the art of medicine, the movement and form that will produce health. The consonance here between this Aristotelian analysis of matter with the slavers’ production of abjected flesh in Spillers’ analysis of shattered kinship bonds, whether maternal and paternal, both fleshly and symbolic, in “Mama’s Baby” (these themes are developed by Jackson), is striking. And it stands perhaps in a certain conflict with Judy’s analysis of the act of technē poiētikē, the art of making, as a resource for poiēsis in black (191–4; 232ff). It would thus be necessary to interrogate, anachronistically, how and whether the “poetic socialities” of the Arabic philosophical tradition might countenance the materiality upon and through which such poiēsis takes place.

Returning Movement to Matter

Judy proceeds by taking up the three primary elements in Aristotle’s analytic in the Poetics to show how these might correspond to Aristotle’s causal account of technical coming to be. He identifies 1. Mimetic media (that is rhythm, music and language), 2. Mimetic object (the persons portrayed), and 3. Mimetic modality (genre: epic, lyric, tragedy) and, quite boldly, analogizes them with material cause, formal cause, and moving cause, respectively (194). But since, as we have seen, matter has been divested of all motion in the causal account, and the source of motion or archē kinēseōs is illustrated in the Physics by Aristotle as the father (in the case of natural coming to be), or an advisor or maker (in technical coming to be), it simply cannot hold that the motile media of rhythm, music, and language can represent the material cause—for Aristotle this is already divested of movement. If we are, then, to take seriously Judy’s quite radical (and as far as I know, unprecedented) provocation to think the metaphysical causal account of the Physics alongside the analytic discourse of the Poetics, which takes tragedy as its primary object, we may instead find that the tragedian, the author engaging in technē poiētikē, may be understood as a kind of doctor, conferring the purgative or cathartic effects upon the audience as body or material cause, and thus purifying and healing that body, and the polity, of certain disequilibrations. Such disequilibrations, as Greek tragedy demonstrates, take place precisely in the arena where kinship (the place where coming to be by nature, the facticity of reproduction in the human sphere, marked as feminine, is managed), collides with the polis, marked as masculine. The analysis of the Poetics must then be understood less as one of creation in action, formed from the confluence of the four causes, than one that begins from the assumption of an already completed totality, something perfect and well-formed, established in advance by the poiētēs, the poet or maker, definitionally masculine. The end product of this poiēsis, namely the best tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannos, may then be analogized with the healthy male adult organism in the excellence of its constitution, one with the effective technical function in its temporal enactment of bringing the body, and moreover the body of the polis, into a state of health. Aristotle thus proceeds anatomically in the Poetics, breaking the tragedy-organism down into its elements or parts, and showing how they work together as a functional whole, but none of these parts will correspond directly to any of the four causes as analyzed in the Physics, since all of them involve action and movement, and really any sense of the abjected embodiment indicated by Spillers’ notion of flesh has long fallen away on the tragic stage (the female bodies of the tragedies are nothing if not endlessly unruly, even when dripping with abjection). The excellent tragedy in the Aristotelian analysis is thus a protocol, an algorithm for restoring masculine excellence. The poet or tragedian is already one of the kalos k’agathos, the elite men of Athens who exist in a form of ideal sociality and polity, in reciprocal friendship and ruling by turns, representing noble action through poetic making with their free time, and supported entirely by the invisible scaffolding of slaves and women that make their form of excellent living possible. Any hacking of Aristotle’s notion of poiēsis will, it seems to me, need to reckon with these difficulties.

What might poiēsis look like that does not depend on abjected matter or flesh, whose labor is invisibilized or hypervisibilized, for making what it makes? Might Heidegger provide a clue when he tells us that “dwelling rests on the poetic,” and that “poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building”? (2001, 212–213). In putting para-semiosis in place of or prior to para-ontology, might we yet glimpse a kind of plural making, a kind of being-at-the-crossroads, that does not rely on the abjection, invisibilization, or hypervisibilization of enslaved and laboring flesh involved in poiēsis as technē? This is perhaps where the potential of poiēsis in black may come into its own, improperly, in love-improper, as Judy will affirm.

The question thus may become, to invoke another part of Sentient Flesh, is there a way to return movement to matter so that it may move itself so as to create meaning and possibilities in community, to allow the appearance of the movements of para-semiosis and poiēsis in black, as in the dances of the Juba and the Buzzard Lope analyzed in the book’s second Set? Motility, kinēsis, arguably a central problematic for Aristotle, is also the central problematic of Sentient Flesh, with its continuous emphasis on the dynamic rather than static. (The dynamic here ought not to be conflated with Aristotle’s dynamis, which strictly speaking indicates a capacity for an activity or being that is given in advance, rather than any motility or activity itself). And as we have seen, in his parsing of the four causes Aristotle also inaugurates the divestment of motion from matter in the Western tradition. If we follow this thread back behind Aristotle and even Plato, to Presocratic thinking, where elements are always understood as possessing their own distinctive motion and this conceptual divestment involving matter as such has not yet begun, we may find ourselves in the terrain of Nietzsche’s Dionysus, also dancing to the beat of the dithyramb and dissolving the boundaries of the enclosed individual, a possible point of confluence between Judy’s poiēsis in black and the German philosophical tradition in which Du Bois himself was so thoroughly steeped.

This disaggregating and pluralizing force, the Dionysian, that is also, however, cruel and destructive, is itself beautifully analyzed by Judy in Sentient Flesh, in the Second Set, Second Moment, Second Riff on Du Bois: “The Doctrine of Submission with ‘The Renaissance of Ethics.’” Judy shows us how Nietzsche’s destructive mastery, embodied by Dionysus, also leads to what Du Bois calls the “Strong Man,” and he reads two Du Bois works here with extreme care, showing how, especially in his 1890 Harvard commencement speech on Jefferson Davis, he supplants the Roman ethical ideal of the Strong Man (discussed once again with a highly edifying detour via Aristotle’s Ethics) with his conception of the “submissive man,” less craven in his “submission” than flexible and responsive to his surroundings. We might find commonalities in this discourse of the Strong Man with what Marilyn Frye has called, “arrogant perception,” described by María Lugones as “the tendency of those in power to arrogate others to serve their interests, not only in practice, but at the very level of perception” (71, see also Frye, 66–72). Lugones counters this with what she calls “loving perception,” gained through “world travelling” and “playfulness.” The gendered elements I am foregrounded here are hinted at by Judy in his examination of Du Bois’s suggestion that the adjective in the Latin phrase “vir bonus” be feminized to “bona,” effectively changing vir to mulier (283–84). I do not mean to suggest that Judy himself ought to have further foregrounded these themes, but the resonances for a feminist reader are certainly powerful, and hint toward the future possibility of a productive confluence between the project of Sentient Flesh and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black Feminist Poethics.

Zōon Echon Mythos

Mining Aristotle’s physics, ethics, and poetics for their liberatory dimensions may pose certain difficulties, and yet not prove impossible. One place where Judy may have made more of these for Black Studies is in Aristotle’s famous definition of the human as the zōon echōn logon, the animal that holds logos, which may be thought of as the capacity for speech or language, the ability to give an account (and thus to engage in para-semiosis), and arguably a far cry from the modern renditions of “the human” adumbrated within racial capitalism. Translating the multi-signifying and inherently plural notion of logos as “reason” and “rationality” (286) is, after all, a Latin accident, albeit one with far-reaching consequences for the later apportionment of such “rationality” via the racist classificatory schemas of Western modernity. Logos, nonetheless, is traditionally defined against mythos, story or narrative: Aristotle’s name for “plot” in the Poetics. As Heidegger reminds us (2010, 5), following Plato’s Sophist, a discourse about Being ought to distinguish itself from the “storytelling” (mythos tina diēgeisthai) about Being characteristic of the multiple discourses of the Presocratics, though of course Plato’s own continual recourse to myth and literary device itself vitiates any such easy distinction.5 Judy’s para-semiosis, with its insistence upon both plurality and motility, effectively overturns this exoteric Platonic tradition; one might therefore adjust the Aristotelian formula along Judy’s lines as follows: zōon echon mythos, the animal who holds stories, stories in which coming to be, plurally and in sociality, is always at stake. Sentient Flesh’s extraordinary range, and its ecumenical and associative approach, hacking and mining the “Western” tradition especially in its far less Western Arab trajectory, focalizes the ancient discourse on poetics as deeply promising site for thinking black ways of being (as opposed to black “being”) as “sentience,” as precisely making meaning as motile, aesthetic, communal, and a simultaneously timely and untimely work in progress (I am thinking here of Marlon Riggs’ resounding filmic meditation on black queer identity, “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t” (2004)). This, I think, is Sentient Flesh’s signal contribution. Pace Karera’s critique, Sentient Flesh reclaims poetics as a site for thinking (black) becoming in a postmetaphysical present more profoundly and precisely than any ontological discourse has yet proven capable of. I hope to have shown here how stakes of this difference may be precisely located in the Aristotelian corpus, in the uncrossable break we find there between the Poetics and Metaphysics, but that going there also raises complex questions about the ways in which women, as well as slaves, are abjected and fall short of arrival in being, and are thus co-implicated in this ancient terrain, whether poetic or metaphysical. However, as Judy’s examples of black cultural production in Sentient Flesh and other theorists such as Moten demonstrate quite clearly, collective or communal poiēsis in black dispenses quite summarily with the problem of the poietēs as author, authority, or sovereign. The break between metaphysics and communal poetics is truly revealed here as an absolute chasm (perhaps the gap between an ontology of Dasein thought as that which raises being as a concern and poetic activity will prove less easy to affirm, but that is not question that we can resolve here, or really any time soon).

Judy’s willingness to move beyond sedimented readings of the Greeks is clearly demonstrated in his fine analysis of Du Bois’s tragic plotting in “The Coming of John,” and, by way of illustrating the strength of his engagement with Greek poetics I will close with a brief consideration of this story. In a sense, it is hard not to read “The Coming of John” as almost entirely conforming to the most excellent of tragic plots as defined by Aristotle’s Poetics. We have a hero, John Jones, perhaps a little better than us in his character, talents, and aspirations, leaving his Southern home town to seek his fortune. In New York, city of crossroads, by chance he meets his hometown double, the white John Henderson, and fails to recognize him. He is accused, by dint of his race, of committing a sexual transgression (in the form of a casual inadvertent touch) against John Henderson’s female companion while watching Wagner’s Lohengrin. Later, he returns to his home town, from whose people he is now estranged due to his education, and his double, John Henderson, by dint of his race, commits an overt sexual transgression against his, John Jones,’ own sister. John Jones kills his white double with a branch that echoes the tree upon which he himself will be lynched. Not divine ordinance but historical conditions seal his dreadful fate, and yet in the moment when the inevitable approaches, in the form of the lynch mob, he hears the swan song of Lohengrin and the whistle of the wind.

Evident throughout the story are the elements of tragedy as delineated by Aristotle: reversal and recognition, a theme of doubles, a chance that is not a chance, an escape from destiny that assures the tragedy, the arousal of pity and fear, in fact every requisite device, and yet Judy resists a tragic reading of the story. Surely he is right to resist the Schopenhauerian reading of the tragedy as inevitably producing resignation when the will meets its absolute resistance and finds itself powerless—such a reading is certainly suggested by Du Bois’s own Germanist training and argued for, for example, by Paul Kirkland (2015). It is indeed in the sound of the swan’s song and in the whistle of the wind, in those Wagnerian echoes of living on and possibility so alive for Du Bois, where transformation may be seen to take place, that Judy finds the aesthetic operations of para-semiosis and poiēsis in black at work. Here in this sonic, aesthetic terrain there is much that resonates with other strands of contemporary Black studies, and indeed it is Fred Moten’s work that rings loud: “Moten remarks how Glissant’s account of creole beginning with the imposition of sound on the enslaved body—the Negro—instigates a semiosis in which, pace Ferdinand de Saussure, phonic materiality, noise, is meaningful in itself. The pitch tonic color, repetition, and so rhythms of noise articulate a movement of relationality” (236). But also, in these Wagnerian strains in Du Bois that signify beyond a nineteenth-century dialectic of freedom and necessity and into fleshly, poietic sentience, might we also hear a persistence of a feminine strain, a poethical strain, in da Silva’s sense? After all, in the wake of the Gotterdammerung of the Ring cycle, only the Rhine Maidens, along with the feminine elements of water and earth, remain, and these too surely signify in a plural mode that we might also read through Judy’s para-semiosis. Let us therefore add Judy’s thinking to a tradition of reading tragedy that does not run aground on the shoals of Schopenhauerian resignation,6 but rather attends to the generative poietic possibilities of the doubling or pluralizing it continually raises, its call to work through the corporeal/conceptual ordeal of the double bind, what Reiner Schürmann, drawing on Sophocles’ Antigone, calls amphinoien, thinking from both sides (2003, 38), or what we might, with Du Bois, and returning to the specificity of black life, theory, and practice, call “double consciousness.”

Emanuela Bianchi is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University with affiliations in Classics and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham University Press, 2014) and La Naturaleza in Disputa: Physis y Eros en el pensamiento antigua (in Spanish), trans. Valeria Campos, Mariana Wadsworth, and Franchesca Rotger, (Editorial Hueders, 2022).

Notes

This essay grew out of a response delivered at a Book Launch Panel for R. A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh held at NYU’s Department of Comparative Literature on November 18, 2021. The essay benefited immeasurably from conversation with R. A. Judy and my fellow panel participants, Jay Garcia and Fred Moten, as well as colleagues and students in the Department of Comparative Literature.

1. Karera treats the theme and stakes of Judy’s para-semiosis vs paraontology at some length—these are difficult discourses about which to make determinations since the source material from Chandler is an unpublished manuscript and hard to access; Karera does not, however, find Judy’s substitution of the latter by the former convincing.

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2. See Leung for a defense of Moten’s paraontological understanding of blackness as originary nothingness as against the Afropessimist position that proposes, following Sartre, that nothingness can only be understood as relative to being.

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3. Aristotle, Politics, 1160a10–15.

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4. Plato, Republic, 597b-e.

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5. Plato, Sophist, 242c. On Plato and poetry, see, for example, Destrée and Herrmann.

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6. See, for example, Glick.

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Works Cited

1. Barthes, Roland. 2012. Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.

2. Bay, Mia. 2000. The White Image in the Black Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

3. Destrée, Pierre and Fritz Gregor-Herrmann (eds.). 2011. Plato and the Poets. Leiden: Brill.

4. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2016. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Routledge.

5. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press.

6. Glick, Jeremy. 2016. The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. New York: NYU Press.

7. Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection. New York: Oxford University Press.

8. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Perennial Classics.

9. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.

10. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press.

11. Karera, Axelle. 2022. “Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets.” Critical Philosophy of Race 10, no. 2:158–197.

12. Kirkland, Paul E. 2015. “Sorrow Songs and Self-Knowledge: The Politics of Recognition and Tragedy in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.” American Political Thought 4, no. 3:412–437.

13. Leung, King-Ho. 2022. “Nothingness without Reserve: Fred Moten contra Heidegger, Sartre, and Schelling.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/17570638.2022.2091971.

14. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

15. Moten, Fred. 2014. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4:737–780.

16. Riggs, Marlon, T. et al., directors. 2004. Black Is—Black Ain’t: A Personal Journey through Black Identity. California Newsreel.

17. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2:81–97.

18. Schürmann, Reiner. 2003. Broken Hegemonies. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

19. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2:64–81.

20. Wilderson, Frank. 2010. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.