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Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.

Contemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls’s political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black bodies, allows blacks to sit at the King’s table and creates the necessary safeguards for black protest against discrimination within a constitutional democracy. By implication of its emphasis on rights and inclusion, political liberalism assumes that the presence of black bodies signifies the materialization of a robust American democracy. However, political liberalism discounts the historical role of religion in forming and fashioning the nation’s construction of race. This book argues that the collision between religion and politics during U.S. slavery and segregation created the fragments from which emerged a firm but shifting moral disdain for blackness within the nation’s collective moral imagination. The very problem political liberals want to avoid, our comprehensive philosophy, is central to solving the moral crisis facing democracy.

This book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to expand the parameters of satire to include the satirization found in twenty-first-century African American forms of expression crossing generic boundaries. While many of these texts and performances are satires or comedies in a traditional sense, some offer the satirization of race itself as a strategy to create space for possible satiric readings. The use of comedy, humor, and satire in these texts and performances incisively problematizes the existing social sphere by highlighting its absurdity in both the reality of racialization and the mythology of the “post-racial.” These texts reveal the irrationality of racialization and critique anxieties surrounding race and Blackness to demonstrate the usefulness of satire as a critical frame for articulating Black selfhood. Here the power of satire is found in “laughing to keep from dying,” a form of revolutionary laughter in two registers. The in-group laughter opens up Black interior space to make room for autonomous Black identity formation. Out-group laughter either indicts the listener or offers protective plausible deniability of “just jokes” in which comedy is feigned to lack sociopolitical meaning. This laughter opens up space for kaleidoscopic Blackness, where all autonomous performances of Black self-identity are valid.

During Cuba’s Special Period, the children and grandchildren of early twentieth-century British West Indian immigrants spearheaded the revitalization of Anglo-Caribbean Cuban institutions and community. By turning an ethnographic lens on those black Cubans in Santiago and Guantánamo who were moved to “rescue their roots” nearly seventy years after the bulk of immigrants arrived in Cuba, this book provides insight into racial politics in revolutionary Cuba and, more importantly, into local and regional identity formations that can emerge from intra-Caribbean migration. Andrea Queeley argues that, in addition to seeking out transnational connections in the hope of getting material support through difficult times, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans drew upon a narrative of respectable Blackness in order to challenge the associations of Blackness, inferiority, and immorality that were compounded by racialized inequality resulting from economic reform. Engaging scholarship on diaspora and subject formation, Queeley’s examination of a diaspora within a diaspora provides a window onto strategies and modes of Black belonging that shift across time, space, and place.

This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.

The Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami press between African-Americans, “white” Cubans, and “black” Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. In its challenge to discourses which pit these groups against one another, the book examines the nuanced ways that identities such as “black,” “white,” and “Cuban” have been constructed and negotiated in the context of Miami’s historical multi-ethnic tensions. The book argues that dominant race-making ideologies of the white establishment regarding “worthy citizenship” shape inter-minority conflict as groups negotiate their precarious positioning within the nation. The book contends that the lived experiences of the African-Americans, white Cubans, and Afro-Cubans involved disrupt binary frames of worthy citizenship narratives, illuminating the greater complexity of racialized identities. Foregrounding the oft-neglected voices of Afro-Cubans, the book highlights how their specific racial positioning offers a challenge to white Cuban-American anti-blackness and complicates narratives that placed African-American “natives” in opposition to (white) Cuban “foreigners,” while revealing also how Afro-Cubans and other Afro-Latinos negotiate racial meanings in the United States. Focusing on the intricacy of interminority tensions in Miami, the book adds dimension to modern debates about race, blackness, immigration, interethnic relations, and national belonging.

Brazil, like some countries in Africa, has become a major destination for African American tourists seeking the cultural roots of the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research as well as textual, visual, and archival sources, Patricia de Santana Pinho investigates African American roots tourism, a complex, poignant kind of travel that provides profound personal and collective meaning for those searching for black identity and heritage. It also provides, as Pinho’s interviews with Brazilian tour guides, state officials, and Afro-Brazilian activists reveal, economic and political rewards that support a structured industry. Pinho traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn especially to Bahia, the state that in previous centuries had absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the "map of Africanness" that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, Pinho finds, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.

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? In Physics 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.

How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his “Theory and Play of the Duende”—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process. By the nineteenth-century nadir of its colonial reach, Spanish identity was paradoxically enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, a hybrid of Spanish and American representations of Blackness. Flamenco’s imagined Gypsy, teetering between ostentatious ignorance and the humility of epiphany, references an earlier trope: the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd), who, seeing an angelic apparition, must decide whether to accept the light of Christ—or remain in darkness. Spain’s symbolic linkage of this religious peril with the Blackness of abjection scripts the evangelical narrative which defeated the Moors and enslaved the Americas. The bobo’s confusion, appealingly comic but holding the pathos of the ultimate stakes of his decision—heaven or hell, safety or extermination—bares a teeming view of the embodied politics of colonial exploitation and creole identity formation. Flamenco’s Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful ruckus cloaking danced resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by slavery and colonization.

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation’s capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool,” and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.’s Black residents.