“Theorizing in a Void”: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics
“Theorizing in a void” names the process of imagining possibilities for becoming otherwise from a seeming nothingness filled with generative yet unrealized potential. Black feminist analysis has worked on dual registers with respect to representation(alism): thought that investigates and exposes how antiblackness generates and sustains indexicality as a mode of fraudulent referentiality and thought that more radically forgoes the mimetic imperative in order to approach, via gesture and metaphor. The ontologization of racial blackness implies the polymorphous but not seriality, in other words, the collapse of a distinction between the virtual and the actual-or an un/doing of the distinction between being and becoming as space-time matterings such that the “play of (quantum) in/determinacies”. Even as the sublimity of blacken(ed) mater, or non-representability in discourse, pulls black feminist theorizing in a non-representationalist direction, black feminism, nevertheless, is minimally committed to both providing an account of anti-black representation and investigating where such representations come from.
