[-empyre-] week 4

[Sarah Cervenak]

Thank you Alessandra for the invitation to participate.  I’ve been
following the discussion with great interest and am still processing the
various ways that participants have been theorizing blackness in and as
liquidity.  I think I see my current work (both singly authored and
collaboratively composed with J. Kameron Carter—those distinctions really
always undone the more our collaborative engagement grows--) connects to
this concept of “liquid blackness” in several ways.  To begin, my second
monograph in progress is called *Black Gathering: Toward an Aesthetics of
Un/Holding.  **Black Gathering *thinks about modes of assembly that
intervene against long historical operations where gathering itself is
coextensive with anti-blackness and settler colonialism. Engaging with post
1960s black literary and cultural production, I think about forms of
gathering that bespeak a notion of blackness unmoored from the calculative
constraints and spatiotemporal suffocatings engendered by
post-Enlightenment sense-making.  That is, an enduring logic of settler
colonialism and the anti-blackness that was slavery’s condition and ongoing
legacy presumes that blackness ambles as to be-held and settled
matter.   According
to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s enormously influential essay (at least for my
work and the work Jay and I do together), “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics:
The Quest(ion) of Blackness at the End of the World,” "the Category of
Blackness consistently reproduce the effects of efficient causality.  Stuck
in the always already there (of) Thought—as reproduced in concepts and
categories—where the Category of Blackness (like other social categories),
because it refigures formalizations (as laws, calculations,or
measurements), arrests Blackness’s creative potential. (84)”



This arrest—or seizure, what Frank Wilderson, Omise’ekeTinsley, Fred Moten,
Christina Sharpe and Jay Carter have described as the state/ship
hold—presumes that Blackness can be held, used, contained, that if it
exists as liquidity, that liquidity can be governed.  Against such (post)
Enlightenment logic, however, Black people have enacted, created,
participated in forms of gathering that not only forego its hegemonically
regulative features but that presumes that integral to such re/assemblage
is the ethical commitment to release.  That is, the condition and ‘end’ of
such movement is a notion of blackness as an ongoing letting go-ness.
Unfettered
travel and other/wordly communion.  An example of a hold that heals, a
gathering that releases, appears in Toni Morrison’s *Beloved *(1987).   In
this ex-slave narrative, the former slave and “unchurched preacher” Baby
Suggs held communal prayer amidst previously gathered life within
previously gathered space, in a “wide-open place […] nobody knew […] known
only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place” (106).  “Cry,”
she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without
covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing
children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped
crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed,
children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the
Clearing damp and gasping for breath” (107).  Poignantly this gathering
coalesces precisely in a “refusal to coalesce” (Moten, “Blackness and
Poetry”), where dancing became crying becomes the ecstatic time for
breath-recovery.  In many ways, Morrison helps us to consider what’s at
stake in a (non or anti) notion of blackness that at once moves as tired
flesh and ethereally ambles as the breath that comes out as gasp,
caress?  Rustles
in the tree, otherwise knowledges ushered in by another kind of
gravitational inhabitation.



Flesh, breath, the fluorescence and immeasurable weightiness of life in
between category.  It is toward and in the interest of this “poethics” of
unholding where my research questions and modalities of engagement reside.


thanks, Sarah

-- 
Sarah Jane Cervenak, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and African American and
African Diaspora Studies
UNC-Greensboro

*Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom*
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Wandering/?viewby=author&lastname=Cervenak&firstname=Sarah&middlename=&sort=newest&aID=28646
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