Hearing a Black Ghost Made Flesh: "Three-ness" and the Afrophantasmic
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Date
2021-04
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Abstract
Hearing the Three-ness: DuBois and the Afrophantasmic
"One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings," writes W.E.B. DuBois (1903) in The Souls of Black Folk, "two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Written as a conception to explain the understanding of autonomy amidst systemic racism, DuBois' ideology serves as an equally compelling parallel in my audionarratological research of black disabled phenomenology, and it's erasure within Afrofuturism 2.0. Coining the term Afrophantasm, for me, it represents the dual understanding of Vivian Sobchack's (2010) "phantom limb," or the self-conceived questioning of one's own disabled body as (un)whole; alongside Judith Butler's interrogation of performativity and the role that such spectral visibility suggests to others, cloaked together in Aliyyah Rahman's (2018) "Black Ecstatic," and the power of black joy. Borrowing from DuBois, I suggest that black American disability is instead, a "three-ness" which I argue in my research must first be understood as spectral, then later, weaponized and deployed to disrupt ethereal understandings of raced ableism in the world, through the empathetic re-imaginings of audio.
As a theoretical construct and critical tool set to uplift Blackness, Afrofuturism should have already addressed this. Though originally conceived as a rhetorical counternarrative against "nineteenth century scientific racism, technology, and the struggle for African self-determination and creative expression," Afrofuturism, and it's contemporary twin—known as 2.0—currently serves as "the body of systematic Black speculative thought originating…as a response to [white] postmodernity" (Anderson, 2016.) Through a complex nexus of art, music, literature and more, the genre exists as a unique utopic universe progressively centered totally on black lives, black experiences, and black bodies, juxtaposed against a world built to erase them. It's no wonder then that Mark Dery (1994) suggests that "African Americans…inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies." Yet, when it comes to the subaltern realm of blackness and disability together, those in need of a reprieve are instead assaulted with new shiny digital tools of discrimination courtesy of the internet, which shift the violent erasure away from race, and redistribute it instead to the black body.
Amidst the of clarion calls for Black Vitality this past summer, the blockbuster successes of Afrofuturist fantasies like Black Panther and Altered Carbon, the recognition for disability remains a phantom among an intersectional group where race supersedes even the weight of embodiment; and so it is here that I aim to submit my research. Focusing not only in the lived experience but also in the lived voice of blackness, audionarratology provides a direct path to empathy and imagination, utilizing African American rhetorical strategies and digital creative writing to showcase a narrative beyond DuBois' idea of either/or. Combining Debra Walker King's (2008) concept of psychic black pain, futuristic soundscapes, and digital "signifyin," (Gates, 1989) I aim to create a different kind of scholarly storytelling that recognizes the power in an embodied trifecta. In a complex mix of identity and physicality, it is my way to reclaim black disability, and to reorient the conversation of the posthuman black body to one that truly envisions and includes us all.
Description
Humanities: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)
Keywords
disability, blackness, invisibility, rhetoric