This dissertation is Black Theory. At its foundations are twin concerns for the rigor of Black Thought, and for the capacity of that thought to be made legible to Black people in and beyond the academy. Through Black Literature and Theoretical Physics, it asks: what is it to be Black in the time and space of the antiblack world? Black writers and creators explore the fundamental spatiotemporal characteristics of Black being—a state of nonbeing structured by social death—and theoretical physicists provide insight into the structural and phenomenological mechanics of time, space, and the forces that move through, warp, and rend them. Taken together, they tear an opening into prevailing discourses in and outside the academy that take for granted the “violently unethical” relationship between Blackness and spacetime. The first half of the dissertation focuses on the temporal; the second half, the spatial. The first chapter questions prevailing, largely unquestioned assumptions about blackness and temporality. Through the works of Gayl Jones (Corregidora) and Octavia Butler (Kindred), an alternative name and theory for Black time—untime—emerges. The second chapter examines what are examples of untimely Black Literature, literature that mobilizes untimeliness as a creative and destructive force in order to imagine the unimaginable, focusing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The third chapter shifts to a concern for the black spatial, reading Paul Beatty’s recent work, The Sellout, in relation to Anthony Paul Farley’s “Behind The Wall of Sleep” in order to consider the “stankiness” and deathliness of black space, theorized as a labyrinthine dead zone, a “nowhere.” And the final chapter brings black intramurality to the fore. Reading Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go alongside Tina Mabry’s 2012 film, Mississippi Damned, I pursue what became a guiding question of the project as a whole: given “our” untimeliness in this nowhere, how have, do, and might “we” make time and space to move, mourn, and create Blackly together, from street to screen to page, and beyond?
Murillo III, John,
"Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out of Nowhere"
(2016).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0B856JG
