Black Life-And-Death through Poetry, Theory, and the Archive of Blackness

Abstract

The primary goal of this work is to acknowledge black death as a condition of black existence while also pushing back at this statement to claim the possibility of black life within and against black death. In other words, black life is produced in abundance of anti-blackness. This argument is grounded in the premise that anti-blackness is a structure of violence that repeats across time. Therefore, rather than thinking of history as simply historical, this work argues that the history of blackness is resurgent. Anti-blackness repeats across time and space. This repetition, which is both material and ontological, conditions our understanding of blackness such that thinking blackness because overwhelmingly to think death. My intervention into this context (i.e. history) occurs at two levels—the theoretical/ontological and the poetic. I name this intervention an ontopoetic historical intervention. At the first level, the ontological helps us recognize that blackness is not a singularity. It is an entanglement of time and positionalities. Blackness is product of history that moves in excess of history; and, it is an ontology that is consumed by and in death while also producing black life-in-death as a paradimensional blackness. Through contemporary African American poet, Elizabeth Alexander and her work American Sublime, blackness is witnessed as moving though precarity (i.e. death) and care (i.e. life), as well as time (i.e. history). While history echoes forward, Alexander’s poetry echoes backwards producing a shift in the ontological understanding of blackness. The Black is not solely a death form. Rather, the Black exists (as Ashon T. Crawley would say) as an otherwise positionality. Recognizing the Black as a paradimensional being optimistically moves conceptualizations of blackness away from the historical narrative of blackness as nothing other than death to blackness as a life-in-death.