Michelle M. Wright

REMEMBER 'Everything is Possible'

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? InPhysics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.” By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora,Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it. Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin's postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics' theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic,Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology

Physics of Blackness

DIVA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany./div

Creating Identity in the African Diaspora

Becoming Black

Antje Schuhmann

How queer is Black studies, how racialized is queer studies? In the West, racial fantasies are often sexualized, just as sexual fantasies often rely on notions of a racial Other. Bringing together the latest work by some of the foremost scholars in a variety of disciplines, Blackness and Sexualities offers analyses and critiques that span three continents and looks at topics such as: the secret marketing of black female pornography to white American men; the eroticization of colonial legacies in contemporary German media; the exoticization of African women in previously unpublished photos and diaries by America's first best-selling black novelist; the ways in which film captures how drag queens can claim agency and cooperate with all kinds of sexual communities across racial lines-or fail to do so with terrible consequences.

Michelle M. Wright

Books

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