Obscure Light

I am currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender. This project picks up conceptually where Becoming Human leaves off, I aim to explore how key creative and philosophical works of the African diaspora have registered and grappled with the idea that there is a fundamental contradiction between “blackness” and “womanhood” and its material consequences. This project opts to tarry with rather than attempt to reconcile, or find a dialectical solution to, the perceived paradox of “black woman.” Rather than take this category for granted, Obscure Light critically engages its production in social, scientific, and philosophical history. In this way, it aims to both provide a critique of biocentricism (or biological reductionism and determinism) as well as to analyze and clarify the discursive-material operations that produce what I argue is the indistinction of sex/gender and race. To put it another way, Obscure Light’s emphasis is on the administrative and distributive function of the idea of “black womanhood” as such rather than experience or a reified subject. Engaging contemporary queer, intersex, and trans studies critiques of sex-gender dimorphism, it argues that antiblackness constitutes the bedrock of modern logics of sex-gender and meditates on how its terrorizing vertical orders might be toppled by the transfiguring potentialities of blackness.