by Daniel Tan
Francophone representation of the black colonial subject claims a lineage stemming from codified wartime propaganda and regimes of visual control over the racial imaginary. Gradual widenings in a postcolonial French filmic canon produced a reclamatory arc of formerly silenced black narratives. As black filmmakers rose to the scene, irruptive claims to a newly-voiced black phenomenology sliced through a clean, French colonial fabric of reality. Two such narratives—Ousmane Sembéne’s La Noire de…, and Michael Haneke’s Caché—offer illuminating testimonials and forays into what might be called black “explosion:” a kind of death-driven inclination, defying normalcy and eluding hegemonic notions of white purity or subjectivity. Our cases of the depressive non-productivity and suicide of Diouana in La Noire de… and the abrupt and haunting suicide of Majid in Caché constitute here a kind of ontology that irrupts and runs counter to white normative constructs. Placed in conversation with Fred Moten and Darien Leader’s texts on black performativity and the black socio-economic condition, Lee Edelman and José Muñoz’s propositions of an unyielding queer futurism or utopianism, and Mark Fisher’s concept of an anticipatory Afrofuturist “hauntology,” our two visual texts come to posit black explosiveness as neither a solution or strategy, nor a problem, but rather an intuitive means of black existence—a subjectivity necessarily borne out of inhabiting a society that disavows the black subject, and a disorder that has been the only means of “order,” so to speak, for the black subject.
Viewed in this light as an ontological elusiveness and fugitivity, as being resistant to being used in the normative, capitalistic sense, black explosiveness surely enacts death to the construction of a black-subject-made-object and calls for the death of a system that reproduces that order, through the self-imposed death of the self. Yet, if we understand black explosivity also as a kind of testimonial needing to be heeded, a beckoning towards a new mode of interpellation, and a suggestion of alternate modes of subjectivity, then we are called to bear witness to the black explosion’s call for a reimagining and broach our normalized, deadened means of world-making. Black explosion comes to stage the death of the world as the normative powers that be have constructed it—and, moreover, summons a glimpse at a hauntingly ephemeral conception of a virtual new sociality parallel to ours, a new world order pregnant with potential that has always already existed.
Fred Moten discusses the conception of blackness in theory as being historically interpellated as an object and not a subject—that, when black subjecthood is posited, it confounds and has historically confounded normative systems of ontology. Moten’s “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream” demonstrates that both Marx and Sassure are ill-equipped to capture or rationalize black existence, black subjectivity, and black performance: Marx, through his refusal to acknowledge a human, speaking commodity—despite slavery, the literal commodification of historically black and brown peoples, being a contemporaneous phenomenon—and Sassure, through his evaluation of the commodity-sign as unvocal. Moten writes, “The speaking commodity thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Sassure, thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription.”[1] As Moten later suggests, black performance is “a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis,”[2] that destabilizes Western theory, by presenting a vocalized and material exception to a constituted, enshrined norm of whiteness. Black performance destroys and disrupts the paradigms laid out by white, Western theorists because it points to their inability to account for the black subject’s anomalous existence. Black performance, then, is a vocalization from those who were not supposed to speak, were not ever conceived to possibly speak, and were rendered dead and lacking in the white imaginary. The system, Moten seems to say, cannot accommodate blackness because it was written with the exclusion of black bodies in mind—or perhaps with black bodies completely out of mind. Furthermore, as what Moten frames as a “replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion,”[3] black performance asserts something neglected and criminally overlooked in the Western narrative: the unheard-of and inconceivable existence of a black subject. Because of this irreconcilable assertion, unfettered and unaccommodating acts of black performance will inevitably be discounted and relegated to abject margins of the system—even as black performance might exist simultaneously in privacy, in outside circles unbeknownst to this public white world.
Moten deconstructs a kind of disavowal of blackness—denying black subjectivity and relegating blackness to the realm of objecthood, while founding the socio-economic system itself on black labor and black bodies—in his “Case of Blackness.” Moten posits, “The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology.”[4] Moten also captures the sense of elusiveness, of fugitivity inherent in blackness: the “criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping—a certain reticence,”[5] and the constant repulsion of white concepts of purity and normalcy with which they are incompatible and diametrically opposed. Black fugitivity, as he describes it, is “ante-normative” and therefore “anti-normative,”[6] in that the black subject has existed before colonial or capitalist regimes condemned it to be an object or a non-subject, undercutting normative and naturalized Western claims on subjectivity. The black subject is ante-normative specifically because she predated and existed as a subject before being denied subjecthood by the normative Western powers that have historically been. The black subject is thereby also anti-normative by virtue of being an anomalous and un-interpellated subject, resistant to and therefore undermining an unyielding norm that claims universality.
And yet, while black fugitivity suggests blackness is averse to and incompatible with white notions of purity, normalcy, and universality, this is not to suggest that black subjects are unencumbered by the system, that they have escaped and are free from its penalties and legalities. They are, as Moten offers in his opening excerpts and “re-recollections,”[7] to never be extricated from what blackness has historically meant. Here, Moten discusses the violent rape and beating-made-spectacle of Frederick Douglass’ Aunt Hester, the physical abuse and a kind of psychological scarring. There is a deeper register to this violence: through “re-recollection”—a reproduced retelling of a retelling—the black consciousness is re-traumatized through memory, in a scandalous form of visual consumption that cannot be escaped and is surely reproduced either in the real or within social imaginaries, try as we valiantly might to avoid re-traumatization. In a sense, Moten describes how the black body is put into another kind of use in the white imaginary, in a kind of disciplinary labor—propping up certain narratives and visual consumptions—even after its death through a re-reification. Forced to the margins of society on account of their alleged sub-humanity, and too often paying a punitive price for being inherently resistant to regimes of normalcy, the black subject is placed in an cyclical impasse, being told and re-told of their “criminal” antagonism and being punished for it twofold, in visceral and psychological ways.
Having threaded Moten’s concepts of black fugitivity and irruptive ontology, we might better understand specific cases of black explosiveness. These are cases in which black subjects veer towards self-annihilation, with a kind of unfettered death drive and an unwillingness to cohabit or conform to systems of oppression and marginalization any longer. Perhaps best exemplifying black explosion is Ousmane Sembéne’s film La Noire de…, which follows the journey of Diouana, a female maid from Dakar who is hired by a French white family and made to work in France. In a series of flashbacks and retreats into stream-of-consciousness types of monologues, we are made privy to Diouana’s past as it constitutes her present: her life back in her village at Dakar, her family and her lover, the conditions of her hiring, and her anticipatory glee at the prospect of moving to France. Yet we see the present is not as rosy as Diouana had envisioned it, as Sembéne makes legible themes of alienation, objectification, and racialized spectacle-making. Monologic, rhetorical questionings often frame the scenes to Diouana’s point of view, as she wonders why she is made to cook, clean, and care for the Madame, Monsieur, and their children, what exactly she is doing in France, and why she is there slaving away. The story reaches its climax when, after having been given a counterfeit letter penned by her masters, threatened with no food, and reprimanded for her refusal to work, Diouana commits suicide by slicing her throat in the family’s bathtub—a final act and reclamation of agency from her white masters. In his Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon names an uncannily similar phenomenon for the black subject, in the context of French coloniality: “The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes.”[8]
What is so intriguing about Diouana is her apparent outward flatness and her seemingly stale nature as a character. In the present tense with her employers, she is never shown to dialogue; rather, she is made to seem unresponsive, sluggish, and unproductive, unwilling to forge any connections in her new home and stoically unemotive. With a body language that borders on roboticism, Diouana surely—read by her white French masters—is made to seem the prime caricature of an indolent, uncivilized African, unwilling to work, seemingly incapable of speech, and perhaps mute, dumb, or just unattuned to social cues. Diouana sticks out like a sore thumb in the orderly, cog-like structure of the Madame and Monsieur’s house, an unfunctioning thing meant and purchased originally for its sole functionality. Yet, if we are to take a more nuanced reading of Diouana’s unresponsiveness, and if we found our understanding of her situation upon her monologic confessions, we might construe claims of Diouana’s sickness in a different register. One interpretation can be found in The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression, in which Darien Leader postulates depression as a symptom of social stressors and extrinsic pressures, as a subconscious form of bodily protest to normalized oppression: “the more modern society urges us to attain autonomy and independence in our search for fulfillment, the more resistance will take the form of the exact opposite of those values.”[9]
Certainly we can map Moten’s theories on black fugitivity here. Diouana’s depressive unwillingness to work and be exploited—what Madame describes as her “sickness”—can be likened to the fugitive’s incompatibility with normative constructs. No longer can she be construed as a dysfunctional, bespoke tool—Diouana’s internal monologue inflects our understanding of her condition with her self-reflective own understanding of the situation, and reveals a depressive mode of self-realization and inherent resistance that surely cannot belong to an “unspeaking commodity.”[10] Where her French employers asserted her objecthood as a puppet or instrument for their utility, Diouana countered by denying them the right to that by denying her own life from herself; where her French employers threatened withholding food or wage, Diouana threatened them by withholding her own commodified value—thereby asserting her own subjectivity in a situation in which it had gone unrecognized. Diouana’s suicide, then, is ironically a recognition of her own life in her act of diminishing it. Her assertion of agency, through protestation and a detonating violence, allows her to slip through the shackles of her slavery, and blast out of the system—though blasting her own body in the process.
Diouana’s agency is twofold: she is an agent not only because she recognizes and responds to her situation, but because she re-enlivens herself through reclamatory refusal. In Fred Moten’s “Gestural Critique of Judgment” we find a string of questions that surely resonate with Diouana’s situation: “What does it mean to be against or outside of the law of the home and the state, the home and the state that you constitute and which refuses you? What does it mean to refuse that which has been refused you? What new infusion is made possible by such refusal?”[11] When refused humanity and instead offered a non-positionality of objecthood and slavery, Diouana had decided her role was to evacuate her given situation, in depriving the colonial system of its energy; what is made possible through Diouana’s refusal of her sub-humanity is her own reclamation, self-actualization, and self-assertion. As the ultimate form of alienation—an alienation of herself from her own body—Diouana effectively turned her silence into a permanent action that spoke for itself, an almost uncanny incarnation of Fred Moten’s speaking commodity. Having been stripped of humanity and having been denied interpellation as a fellow human being, in an egregious and abrupt show of violence that could not but be witnessed, Diouana asserts an agency and a subjecthood that had always been hers from the start—a beckoning to Moten’s notion of ante-normativity—and effectively reminds the French family that she, too, is a subject with wants, needs, and a past. She reveals herself as being fixed in meaning as the object-made foundation of their domestic system and, having extracted herself out of the equation, the French family is made to collapse.
La Noire de… notably also concludes with themes of haunting and a kind of residual legacy that comes with the explosive black subjectivity. In the final scenes of the film, we track Monsieur as he treks to Diouana’s home village and—with despicable tone-deafness, insincerity, and insensitivity—offers reparations for Diouana’s suicide with a check to her family, re-interpellating Diouana as a commodity to be bought and an object with a price that, with its due usage, must be requited. The final shots of the film speak especially to the kind of residual effect of black explosivity: a boy acquainted with Diouana, happening upon her suitcase brought by the Monsieur, takes up her mask and doggedly stalks the Monsieur as he vacates the town, staring down the man in an unshakeable—and, evidently for the Monsieur, frightening—pursuit. This scene can be read as a subversion of the roles of the see-er and the seen, of the white subjectivity being capsized for the vision of the black subject. Yet, with Moten’s concept of the black ante-normative, this scene takes on a new register: it is almost as if the boy, having now realized a black agency revealed in Diouana’s suicide, having encountered an intrinsic subjecthood that had always been there, takes on the legacy of Diouana herself, haunting the Frenchman and disrupting a normative dynamic of looking/being looked at. The donning of the mask speaks to a retreat into a ante-normative subjectivity centered around us and not them so to speak, one unfiltered and unconfined by the colonial system. What the boy’s means of acting out of line constituted was an irruptive re-explosion, countering Diouana’s re-objectification by the Monsieur and undoing attempts at renormalization.
We can further tease out themes of haunting and ghost-like, residual legacy in Michael Haneke’s film Caché, while also conceiving of how black explosivity in both Caché and in La Noire de… might amount to a confession with a humanizing act of testifying, even if the intended audience does not necessarily bear witness. Black explosion here is bundled with testimonial and confession, filling in histories previously ellided, and disrupting not just the fabric of daily life but an ordained colonial or white suprematist history that decontextualizes and makes structurally absent the black colonial subjectivity. Caché shadows the Laurent family, an affluent French white family headed by successful talk show host Georges Laurent, as they receive surveillance tapes and vague threats from an anonymous stalker. Georges Laurent, the father of the Laurent household, is made to re-confront repressed memories that the messages allude to—of the Paris massacre of Algerian workers in 1961, and of his own terrorizing relationship with Majid, an Algerian man whom Georges’ family had adopted following the death of his parent, who had been employed by the Laurents. Events cause Georges to meet with Majid in his apartment in a confrontational, tense scene. Georges skirts talking about their past and demands that the end of any kind of terrorizing stalking, while Majid seems shocked that he is remembered or acknowledged at all. After that confrontation, Majid cries, almost as if, after being ignored and marginalized for all his life, this one recognition and interpellation of his past and present, this one mode of touching—albeit one of hostility and antagonism—was too much to handle. At what can be said is the climax of the film—not unlike the climax of La Noire de…—Majid invites Georges to his apartment, claiming he did not know who sent the tapes but that he wants Georges to be present for what is to follow. Majid commits suicide on the spot, with a literal explosive spray of blood.
Suicide here is again the black explosivity that disrupts the Laurent family’s busy, bourgeois life: a figure from the past dehisces the clean sutures of their cleanly domestic life by reminding them of a past that they are so willing to bury. Moreover, the act of suicide here is what constitutes the confession intrinsic in black subjectivity: just as Diouana’s suicide might, with Leader’s excerpt in mind, be read as an asymptotic bodily response to the sick capitalist conditions she had been situated in, Majid’s explosion is a direct testimonial of the conditions of alienation and socio-economic strife which had been repressed all this while, of being made a homeless orphan twice over, living an un-interpellated diasporic life, and forced to the margins of society. Majid’s suicide was a confession of the insufferability that had been ignored willfully by Georges Laurent and a general French society that was all too willing to move past and around colonial memory. Here, Majid interpellates Georges as a witness—though Georges himself may not and verily does not accept himself as a testifier—and Majid cleverly derives a self-recognition in the process, walking through his trauma by wielding Georges as almost a mirroring witness to his narrative and thereby allowing himself to be finally interpellated as a subject. Majid’s act of self-violation was, as with Diouana, a kind of humanizing relief by evacuation and a permanent self-rapture.
Themes of haunting are rendered perhaps more legibly here than in La Noire de… The surveillance tapes and stalking—messages alluding to the cutting of chicken heads, abduction of children, and bloody scenery that harkened to Georges’ childhood past—traumatize and terrorize the Laurent family, who are made self-conscious and reflexively aware of their being made a spectacle of, of being seen, certainly harkening to the reversal of dynamics of visibility in the ending scene of La Noire de…. Georges in particular is visibly shaken, yet he is curiously unrepentant. Here is where we might apply Moten’s concepts of the normative and the black fugitive’s resistance to the normative, in the sense that the system excludes blackness and hence makes them to be resistant. The Laurent family is portrayed in a kind of aphasic, guilt-less condition with respect to colonial memory. They are not afflicted with amnesia per se; Georges Laurent, for instance, does not forget memories of the Parisian massacre of Algerian workers that caused Majid to be homeless, or of the slanderous framing of Majid as a child that resulted in his expulsion from another household. What Georges and the French postcolonial society as a whole display is a kind of reticence to remembering, an aphasic inability to admit, and a refusal to allow weighty memories of his crimes to disrupt the clean, sanitized fabric of his reality.
In one scene, Georges attempts reminiscing with his mother on Majid, but his mother curiously cannot remember him. It is as if her mind skirts around Majid because it is just too inconvenient to remember the boy and the discomfort that the memory provokes. Later, when the stalking of the Laurent family crops up in business meetings and casual dinner conversation, the issue is framed almost like a nuisance or a hassle, a dirty infringement on Georges’ professional life. There is a kind of uncleanliness for the neo-colonist in remembering and acknowledging those who are made to be un-acknowledged, and the neo-colonist is framed—in a great rhetorical leap in their neo-colonial mind, and a kind of self-victimizing dance—almost as a pitiful target of plaguing memories. Never once are Majid’s alienation and the historical marginalization of Algerians brought to the fore. Instead, in a kind of fugitivity, he slips out of memory and becomes a nebulous dark matter, relegated to unmined and archived murk of lost narrative, as if what he represents makes him unfit for the rote, palatable bourgeois French lives of the Laurent family—disappeared, yet enduringly present still.
Though the sender of the surveillance tapes is never readily conceded to the audience, we can assume that Majid’s son had some involvement in the matter. Hints are given that he colluded with Pierrot, the Laurent family’s only son, and that he had knowledge of his father’s difficult past. We might frame Majid’s son’s actions as, not unlike the masked boy of La Noire de…, a kind of disruptive legacy, a kind of tributary re-performance of the black explosion. After Majid’s suicide, Majid’s son follows Georges Laurent into his workplace, and demands that they speak. Even with the kind of tacit experience forced upon Georges—the experience of being oppressed, plagued with traumatic memory—and even with the detonating force of Majid’s suicide, Georges makes it known to Majid’s son that he is willfully unrepentant, that he is guiltless of what he had caused and that he has a clean conscience.
We might perhaps be inclined to see Majid’s black explosion as a kind of failure; even with that disruptive force, even with that relegated tacit experience, and even with that self-inflicted death and reclaimed agency, the neo-colonist feels no urge to change his ways and remains unempathetic. However, if we take a different reading—if we are to understand black explosivity not a strategy or tactic harnessed to provoke change or to mobilize, but as an intuitive resistance to things as they are and as they have been constructed—then Majid’s explosion and his mere existence cannot and should not be construed as a success or a failure. The haunting of the Laurent family is then not a deliberate or contrived effect on Majid’s part, but incidental to the fact of his explosion and not something that can be controlled or exploited. The fact that Georges Laurent remains remorseless and guilt-free despite that explosive display and Majid and his son’s irruptive intrusions is not a gauge of the explosion’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness, of explosiveness’ potentiality for productivity. The explosion never had an underlying agenda, and pigeonholing or framing it in the context of intentionality is a misconstrual of black explosiveness.
If we are to view black explosivity as a kind of unredemptive and irreconcilable ontology, then we might find it lucrative to inspect queer theory and a resonant queered subjectivity that is resistant to normalizing tendencies. During a roundtable discussion entitled “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” theorist Lee Edelman explains queerness as inherently refusing usage or utility: “If queerness marks the excess of something always unassimilable that troubles the relentlessly totalizing impulse informing normativity, we should expect it to refuse not only the consolations of reproductive futurism but also the purposive, productive uses that would turn it into a ‘good.’”[12] Viewed in this way, as a kind of intuitive queer phenomenon, Majid’s explosion and, moreover, his existence and the existence of the neo-colonial black subject is and always has been resistant, eluding the system and disrupting a societal fabric that denies and absolves itself of it. His “queered positionality”[13]—one that destabilizes and resists a sanitized and inoffensive neo-colonial narrative—cannot be wielded for mobilization against the system, nor corralled into usage. If the explosion works against the system, it does so not because he postures himself that way but because, as Moten describes, the colonial, black subjectivity is ante- and anti-normative to begin with. Explosion might then be considered merely the most salient form of innate, ontological resistance, one that serves as the queered anti- and ante-normate.
We might say that the legacy of Majid to Majid’s son—and the legacy of Diouana to the village boy—was one of self-recognition and epiphany, acknowledgment that their existence is and always has been resistant, from their most passive acts or inaction to their most outright modes of explosion. Majid’s son and the village boy of Dakar come to better understand their kind of fugitive subjectivity, and more cognizantly situate themselves in the context of which they have always already been inhabitants. There is a sobering shared non-legacy here that is given by inhabiting this black subjectivity, though: there is no “reproductive futurism”[14] here in this system for the black subject, and irruption—be it through micro-ruptures, acting out of line, and intuitive depressive bodily resistance, or through death-driven suicide—offers a respite, ranging from gradual movements to entire meteoric, self-inflicted blasts away from a hopeless place.
Majid and Diouana’s routes of self-violation might offer a bitter and sobering irony. They propose that the only way to deaden the current punitive paradigms and oppressive regimes is to deprive the black subject of life. There is a sure unredemptive edge to this promise of annihilation: it is as if to say that the black subject condemns themselves to death as a necessary and only step towards normative dissolution, that even in their death there is a refusal to be reform the system—only rapturous evacuation. Yet, if we are to revisit haunting and the interpellation of Georges by Majid as testifier, then the black explosion’s trajectory away from the normative does not and should not stop here. We might tease out an underlying cadence and ethical call to the black explosive voice. Revisiting Haneke’s Caché, we can trace a haunting, a kind of doggedly-pursuing specter—which we might not assuredly mark as deliberate, but is nevertheless loosed—summoned in Majid’s act of suicide.
British theorist Mark Fisher speaks of an uncannily similar phenomenon of “hauntology” in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. As a punned portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, hauntology is meant to encompass a non-being that nevertheless enjoys a kind of positive existence in the real. It is, however, Fisher’s own delineations of two directions of hauntology that prove a useful analytic for our cases of black explosivity: hauntology as first “that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality,” and hauntology as also “that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behavior).”[15]
Understood as a kind of hauntology, the black explosion’s call for the death of the normative deepens in pitch and content—and it becomes bundled, too, with a kind of moral call to reimagine. What Diouana and Majid’s calls elicit is not just a confession of the insufferability of their circumstances and a preemptive self-killing in a system fated to crush them anyway. If read in order to glean the hauntology’s sense of virtuality, the act of explosive self-violation becomes a refusal that not only rejects but posits and suggests—suggests a world, reflected in the knowing eyes of the black exploding subject, that they have always already been subjects, and a truth they face in their martyrous movement away from this world. The act of refusal in the black self-annihilation is never just stubborn contrarianism towards the system—it is a sauntering towards some heretofore unimagined other potentiality, embodying the second definition of hauntology, invoking a kind of “always already”[16] possibility. The refusal of black objecthood, in the black explosive agency, reveals the fallacy of that enshrined ‘fact,’ and moreover reinstates their humanity. Black explosivity and queer disruption might perhaps signal what has already always been, harkening back to Moten’s notion of black ante-normativity.
Viewed in this way, black explosion offers a queered scope into a kind of utopian alternate mode. In his Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, queer theorist José Muñoz describes the capaciousness of queerness as containing a specter of the virtual, of the utopian: “Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essential about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”[17] The role of witnessing becomes a moral imperative here. If we are to shirk the role of the testifier—as Georges Laurent, in his criminal unresponsiveness, did—and if we are to refuse to acknowledge our implicit interpellation as audience interwoven in the black explosion, then we are to be tone-deaf to a moral call and we are to miss the opportunity of glimpsing the virtual that is proposed.
This sentiment is echoed in the closing line of Mark Fisher’s “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” wherein the Afrodiasporic existence of blurred temporality is likened to the hauntology of modern soundscapes, beckoning towards an anticipated future that never really panned out. Fisher concludes his piece with a foreboding statement: “When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.”[18] When the world seems deadened to the black subject and when the black subject explodes in resentful reaction, there is surely a “relic of the future”[19] to be mined in that refusal—a gesturing both away from here and towards somewhere else. The black explosion, then, is not merely a summoning of a spectral virtual world, but an invitation for us to step beyond ours, and step towards that new possibility—and it is begun through a kind of radical witnessing and humanizing of the exploded subject, a new world founded by a newfound interpellation of a black subject that had always been a subject all along and a recognition of historical elisions. The legacy of the black explosion to us as willing listeners is thus both a moral calling and a beckoning towards a future that is possible, if we believe and commit ourselves to it: it is an ethical call to investigate and listen; it is a call to action towards that suggested otherworld.
Black explosivity, irruptive queering, and intuitive counter-intuitiveness represent the black subjectivity in outright contrast to the paradigms from which they are excluded, denied, and made unacknowledged pariahs. Unredemptive and uncaring, uncrafted and un-confinable, unassimilable and unwilling to be made worthy, intuitive in its counter-intuitivity, the black subjectivity is neither a problem nor a solution, but a fact and an eventual and sure condition. Understood, too, as a kind of hauntology that both summons non-normative virtual visions and invokes us to bear witness to previously un-exhumed narratives, the black explosion becomes an ethical call for a re-molding of our praxis towards a now-visualizable virtuality. In the words of Afro-futurist Sun Ra, “There are other worlds they have not told you of”[20]—worlds that always have already been and could quite very well be in the now—and, in the eye of the explosive black storm, we catch an ephemeral glimpse and are called to chase those worlds.
***
[1] Fred Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 13-14.
[2] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 14.
[3] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 14.
[4] Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 187.
[5] Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 178.
[6] Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179.
[7] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 3.
[8] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952/2008), 107.
[9] Darien Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009), 3.
[10] Moten, “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream,” 5-6.
[11] Fred Moten, “The Gestural Critique of Judgement,” in The Power and Politics of the Aesthetic in American Culture, Vol. 7 (Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 2007), 91-112.
[12] Lee Edelman, Carolyn Dinshaw, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, J Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2-3 (2007): 189.
[13] Edelman, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” 189.
[14] Edelman, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” 189.
[15] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester: John Hunt Publishing, 2014), 19.
[16] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, 19.
[17] José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
[18] Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2013): 53.
[19] Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” 53.
[20] Sun Ra, “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of),” recorded July 17, 1978, track 5 on Lanquidity, Philly Jazz. Compact disc.