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Black Anthropocene Working Group

The Black Anthropocene Working Group

This working group is interested in the meaning of Blackness in the Anthropocene and the ontological politics that might emerge from a Black Anthropocene. The ontological turn in Critical Black Studies appears to be increasingly vital for thinking through what might be at stake in a world after ‘Man’, after the ‘Human’ or after the ‘End of the World’. We are interested in exploring questions of Blackness posed in the register of ‘ontology’ or ‘para-ontology’ within and beyond the field of Critical Black Studies. In particular, we wish to explore ontological questions of Blackness as a way to move beyond the opposition between modern, rational, ontologies and non-modern, relational, decolonial ontologies, which structures much of the debate around the Anthropocene. If, as Critical Black Studies’ theorists suggest, the modern subject/world is grounded upon anti-Blackness, then how does the end of this world allow Blackness to be (re)thought as a condition of (im)possibility for alternative futures? How do we heuristically grasp different approaches to Black ontologies as productive/ speculative/ creative and/or as a negation of or limit to speculative imaginaries? What is at stake in the Black Anthropocene?

We are interested in assembling a working collective to explore and to refine these questions and would seek to organise textual readings, workshops or seminars and the potential discussion, sharing, or publication of group work. The group has been meeting since November 2020 and is open to all. We envisage online meetings on Zoom as the main working mode for the foreseeable future.

Next meeting

Thursday 5 December 2024, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Beyond This Narrow Now”: Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois (2022)

Future meetings

Thursday 23 January 2025, Norman Ajari, Darkening Blackness: Race, Gender, Class, and Pessimism in 21st-Century Black Thought (2023)

Thursday 13 March 2025, Alexander WeheliyeHabeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)

Thursday 1 May 2025, Sampada Aranke, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (2023)

Meetings take place online. If you would like to join the working group please email me.

Suggested readings for future meetings

Bryan WagnerDisturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (2009) 

Kathryn Yusoff, Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (2024)

Matthew D. Morrison, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (2024)

Beatriz NascimentoThe Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (2023)

C. Riley SnortonBlack on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017)

History

Meetings so far have discussed: 1. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine: Consent not to be a Single Being (2018); 2. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014); 3. R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (2020); 4. David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being (2018); 5. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020); 6. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2021); 7. Jayne Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021); 8. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (2021); 9. Joshua BennettBeing Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020); 10. Zahi ZallouaBeing Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021); 11. Dionne BrandA Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2002); 12. Laura HarrisExperiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (2018); 13. Rasheedah Philips (ed.), Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice, Vol. 1 (2015); 14. Jovan Scott LewisScammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020); 15. Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’ (2013); 16. La Marr Jurelle BruceHow to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind – Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2020); 17. Malcom FerdinandDecolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022); 18. Denise Ferreira da SilvaUnpayable Debt (2022); 19. Alexis Pauline GumbsUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2021); 20. Simone BrowneDark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015); 21. Ramon AmaroThe Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (2022); 22. Ashante ReeseBlack Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in the Nation’s Capital (2020); 23. Christina SharpeOrdinary Notes (2023); 24. Tina PostDeadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (2023); 25. William Hart, The Blackness of Black: Key Concepts in Critical Discourse (2022); 26. Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World (2023); 27. Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (2015); 28. Rei Terada, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity (2023); 29. Joseph Winters, Hope Draped in Black (2016); 30. Ida Danewid, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal (2023); 31. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997/ 2022); 32. Rizvana BradleyAnteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (2023);