Black Speculative Futures 2022–2023
Autumn M. Womack, Faculty Convener
This seminar investigates the enduring interplay between speculation and Blackness. In recent years, speculation has emerged as a key term in Black and African American Studies with speculation emerging as the site where Blackness gets refracted, refined, and (re)imagined. Speculation, Saidiya Hartman reminds us, activates a methodological approach to reading and writing Black histories that both evade and are erased from the historical record. But speculation is also the economic engine of racial capitalism and a mode of creative dissent and art making. Taking up this capacious understanding of speculation and the speculative, this seminar will explore how writers, scholars, artists, and cultural producers across historic periods mobilize speculation as an analytic, a creative praxis, and an interventionist strategy. Over the course of this year-long seminar, we will investigate various iterations of speculation – creative, financial, economic, methodological – and the forms it takes. We will place questions of speculation at the center of our discussion of public policy, histories of racial capitalism, aesthetics, performance, and literary genre. How, we will ask, do those figures who are made to secure exploitative systems of economic and ideological values forecast alternative civic and social futures? And how has speculation emerged as extractive economic practice and an insurgent praxis? This series will bring together scholars, artists, and writers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, all of whom think diversely about speculation in their work, their method, and their practice.
Speakers
Marisa Fuentes
(This resource is representative of Marisa Fuentes's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Dispossessed Lives by ISBN: 0812293002Publication Date: 2016-05-26Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.
Monica Huerta
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress Monica Huerta presented during the seminar.)
The Unintended by ISBN: 9781479812424Publication Date: 2023-06-06Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership. The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts.
Justin Leroy
(This resource is representative of Justin Leroy's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Leroy, Justin. "Black History in Occupied Territory: On the Entanglements of Slavery and Settler Colonialism." Theory & Event, vol. 19, no. 4, 2016, pp. N_A.
Justin L. Mann
(This resource is representative of Justin L. Mann's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
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Mann, Justin L. "Black Insecurity at the End of the World", MELUS, Volume 46, Issue 3, Fall 2021, Pages 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab029
Matthew Morrison
(This resource is related to the work-in-progress presented by Matthew Morrison during the seminar.)
Blacksound by ISBN: 9780520390577Publication Date: 2024-03-05Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Janet Neary
(This resource is representative of Janet Neary's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Neary, Janet. “African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity.” African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Black Reconstructions. Ed. Eric Gardner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 233–258. Print. African American Literature in Transition.
Nadia Nurhussein
(This resource is representative of Nadia Nurhussein's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Black Land by ISBN: 0691194130Publication Date: 2019-09-17The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power.
K-Sue Park
(This resource is representative of K-Sue Park's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
- Park, K-Sue. "Property and Sovereignty in America: A History of Title Registries Jurisdictional Power." The Yale Law Journal, vol. 133, no. 5, 2024, pp. 1487.