[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality

[Ken Rogers]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the late arrival, but I encountered a few technical glitches on the way here.


I’m very pleased to join the conversation and hope to make a worthwhile contribution to this rich, ongoing discussion on liquid blackness. I want to extend my appreciation to all the other contributors and to Alessandra for the invitation to participate in this sustained forum.


I’ve been reading through the group's posts with great interest and enthusiasm, and I have already learned a great deal from the exchange. I find the idea of linking liquidity and blackness together to be a compelling framing device for developing a critical understanding of the inherent fluidity of blackness in contemporary culture, one that is naturally allied to the expanding vocabularies of new black thought and corresponds to the diverse ways that blackness can be felt and understood. I find liquid blackness to be a more ample and adaptable construct for assessing the cultural moment than the dubious term “post-blackness,” which has always made me uneasy. I’ve found the conversation so far has dealt quite expertly with how blackness flows into modernity, aesthetics, affect, phenomenology, perception, art, media, and representation. It demonstrates the vital contribution of a new wave of humanities-based black studies and critical race theory in advancing a set of concepts, theories, and critical tools for accessing how black experience resonates throughout the social sensorium—a critical discourse that moves beyond rhetorics of slavery and emancipation and the politics of identity.


I would like to say as an aside that this discussion points to the irreplaceable sphere of critical race scholarship in the humanities that pursues knowledge about race that is interpretive, non-reductive, and qualitative in nature, which I fear continues to be dangerously undervalued labor within the present climate of the research university and remains at risk in a university system that has taken up an increasingly instrumentalist point of view on knowledge output, a troubling fact I’m realizing more acutely as I have recently taken a role in administration (I’d be willing to take up this point later should the occasion arise).


The topic for this week orbits around the twin themes of materialism and ontology and is inclusive of broad concepts like plasticity and malleability as well as more formalized theoretical fields such as new materialism(s) and object-oriented-ontology. We were asked to discuss these issues in relationship to our own scholarship, so rather than begin with a top down theoretical assessment of how such theories might align with liquid blackness, I thought it more useful to begin by starting from the ground up and throwing out a couple of specific examples in my own work to collaboratively speculate about how liquid blackness might support a way of thinking through a concrete problem.


1. Black plasticity. I’m working on a book exploring the interdependent histories and cultures that emerge from the rise of petroleum extraction and consumption (including consumer plastics) and media technology, which I call petromedia. Oil is itself a kind of liquid blackness, but resisting this crude analogy, I wish to develop a more integrated material analysis of petroleum that argues how it is a conduit for  social and political plasticity. Liquid blackness might be a way of thinking through the flexible, plastic, malleable social response to the power of oil in black communities, which, much like the history of petroleum itself, involves certain technologies of domination that double as agents of radical transformation. One chapter focuses on an active urban oil field located at the center of historically black Los Angeles (Baldwin Hills, Ladera heights, Crenshaw, Leimert Park and parts of Inglewood) to illustrate the material intertwining of black modernity and petromodernity. More generally I hope this project can help bring more new black thought into the environmental humanities.


2. Black Friday. In 2012 I published a piece in WSQ about the death of Jdimytai Damour, a Haitian Wal-Mart contract worker who was killed in a Black Friday shopping spree in 2008, that is a kind of critical companion piece to to Amber West’s poetic reflection on the exact same incident that can be found in the new issue of Rhizome on Afro-Pessimism. I’d be also willing to revisit that piece in the context of liquid blackness as well as emergent discourse of afro-pessimism, since it has entered the conversation already and many of us are probably rapidly working our way through the articles in that issue. If there is interest, I could certainly make a link to that article available to the list.


Either or neither of these cases might be a fruitful place to begin. I suppose what is common to both of these projects—and perhaps points toward an underlying methodological here—is that they identify areas of social experience where blackness appears as a material ontology of race (broadly conceived) when in fact it is a political ontology of racialization, one that is always localized and specific to its historical-material context. This might also contain an implicit critique of the applicability of the ontological turn to the sphere of political thought in general, although I haven’t yet pursued such a line of critique any further.

-Ken








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