Publication Date

1-2023

Description

A common critique of theories of antiblackness is that the concept ontologizes racial formations, thus reifying racial difference as a transhistorical essence that cannot be resisted. Saidiya Hartman gave us a different way to think this relationship between ontology and blackness in her 1997 text Scenes of Subjection. In the epigraph, Hartman describes a force conjuring a “primacy, quiddity, or materiality that exceeds the frame of” theorizing blackness through performance. Hartman emphasizes that this force locked into our language for blackness is not ahistorical. In fact, the very materiality that exceeds the frame of performance is a direct product of a “human sequence written in blood”. Despite Hartman’s refusal of metaphysics, the fact that she must refuse the language of metaphysics speaks to a problematic that cannot be simply shaken off...

Journal

Chiasma: A Site for Thought — An International Journal of Theory and Philosophy

Volume

7

Issue

1

First Page

27

Last Page

40

Department

Critical Black Studies

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