[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality / blockbusting

[Sarah Franzen]

Thanks all for this very interesting conversation. Ken I am especially
intrigued about the comparison between our cases, and the way petroleum,
and blackness are both used as part of a collective identity formation. I
would enjoy reading anything further you’ve written on this. The snippet
you outline here aligns very much with some of the things I’ve been working
on, even the use of a lawsuit around the concept of blackness.

I want to highlight one more point that came up in Alessandra’s post and
connects to earlier discussions, that of the sensory. The sensory
experience plays a role in both the aesthetic and material realms that come
into play. The sensory is a material experience, and an embodied
experience, but never cultural neutral (nor perhaps political neutral) and
therefore becomes the site of production of collective identities, or a
site of domination. In Ken’s example, the process of creating
“demographically black” communities involved a very material regulation of
bodies, which is accompanied by a number of sensory experiences as well,
not least of which are the health affects of the petroleum. I like how Ken
explains that blackness “flows through a body at biological risk … and
helps form a continuity of political experience.” I think this is key to
the sites that have been explored this week – sites in which physical
bodies, materialism, and the political are deeply entwined, and blackness
“flows” and ebbs between and among them into different configurations. This
set of conversations also affirms what Alessandra has been discussing in
exploring the concept of “liquid blackness.” I think what this term offers,
over other terms used to explore race, such as the “floating signifier,” is
that it does not rely on the discursive alone but interrogates multiple
realms including the physical, material, and sensory.

Sarah

-- 
Ph.D. Candidate
Institute of the Liberal Arts
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
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