Myers, Shaun
(2023)
Black Anaesthetics: African American Narrative Beyond Man.
In: Pitt Momentum Fund 2023.
Abstract
My current book project, Black Anaesthetics: African American Narrative Beyond Man, argues that writers such as Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Andrea Lee invented literary techniques of radically obscuring blackness to trouble the racial logics requiring that it always be uttered or seen. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black women writers gained unprecedented visibility in a US cultural marketplace shaped, on the one hand, by the Black Arts Movement’s demand that Black artists represent lived racial experience and, on the other, by the historical white demand that blackness reliably take its appointed form: embodied and spectacular. Yet, even as these contending forces intersected, certain Black women writers refused these expectations. Studying these women’s narrative racial experiments, Black Anaesthetics tells the story of how their integration of the mainstream publishing world conditioned the development of what I term black anaesthetics, narrative practices figuring blackness as indeterminate, but always in the shadow of the racialized world. I contend that this neglected archive of Black women’s experimentalism answered calls to transform humanism. In doing so, I illumine the disavowed Black past of what now goes by the name of “posthumanism.”
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