I am always disturbed when thinkers ascribe the label of other to marginalized, oppressed, peoples (particularly African Americans). Our marginalization, our exploitation, emerges precisely because we are no longer other, because someone or some thing has demanded that we be fully comprehended and understood. If otherness is to be disclosed in racial terms--i.e., blackness--it is because blackness is, as Fred Moten once pointed out, an anarrangment of every line, of every mode of rationalization that would render blackness comprehensible, which is the correlate of oppressing, marginalizing, and killing blackness. The black-as-exploited, the black-as-marginal; these are terms that render blackness--and therefore black people--the same, not the other. The black-as-generative, however, the black-as-creativity; that is otherness par excellence. This is one place (of many) where I agree with afrofuturism: the creativity that pushes us past ourselves, the future that is simultaneously referential of the past--not in a reductive way, but in a way that highlights the irreducible creativity of blackness and black peoples--instantiates blackness as other, blackness as that which cannot be pinned down, grasped, counted, calculated, thought.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:22:35 +0000
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