Hai Zi – Chinese Sergei Yesenin: tanatological poetics and “romance with death”

The article considers the work of the Chinese poet Hai Zi (mostly based on works not translated into Russian) as a characteristic example of the spiritual and artistic influence of Sergei Yesenin's work on modern Chinese poetry. The poetic dialogue of Hai Zi and S. Yesenin is considered from the point of view of tanatological poetics, which allows us to present their work as a single meta text, developing various variations of tanatopoetics in order to achieve absolute self-identification by synthesising “self” – death – art. The category of death is considered as the integral basis of the work of S. Yesenin and Hai Zi, which ultimately leads to the realisation of their personal attitude to death as the ontological, epistemological and axiological basis of life and creative work. The article justifies that the “romance with death” of S. Yesenin and Hai Zi is a manifestation of their life-building strategy, consonances in motif and figuration are revealed in the aspect of tanatological poetics, taking into account the different nature of those motifs: the spontaneous-organic feeling of death in S. Yesenin and the tanatological ideology of Hai Zi, based on the synthesis of Western philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of S.Yesenin's poem “The Black Man” and the poem “Spring. Ten Hai Zi” as works that expose the key settings of the poets' tanatological discourse, as well as an analysis of Hai Zi's poem "Life Was Interrupted" as prisms for the reinterpretation of S. Yesenin's life and work within the framework of the tanatological paradigm of "Chinese Yesenin" and the most important act of semiotisation of life and creative work of the Chinese youth, when suicide is positioned as the final statement.

The Traumatic Mark in Invisible Man

Invisible Man is the representative work of Ralph Ellison, a famous contemporary American black writer, which mainly describes the growing process of a black man. The aim of the thesis is to analyze the racial trauma that the protagonist experienced at school, in the factory and political group, the three kinds of symptoms after the trauma-hyperarousal, intrusion and constriction, and the result that the protagonist cannot recover from his trauma due to racial discrimination.

Countering the "Phenomenology of Whiteness": The Nation of Islam's Phenomenology of Blackness

The Nation of Islam (NOI) has intrigued American society since its inception in 1930. Historically, the religio-nationalist organization has been the object of admiration for its uncanny ability to reform the lives of downtrodden blacks. At the same time, the NOI has garnered condemnation for the controversial, racialized and divisive doctrine that it espouses. This condemnation has led to a dismissal of the NOI’s doctrine as reactionary, bigoted, and fanciful myth-making. In recent decades however, scholars have begun interrogating the doctrine of the NOI. Rather than dismissing it, scholars in various fields have recognized the critical and phenomenological nature of its doctrine as it goes about the “mental, physical, and spiritual resurrection” of black Americans. In this article, I interrogate three of the most controversial claims of the NOI: The White man is the devil, the Black man is God, and its endorsement of the separation of Blacks into their own territory. Viewed through the lens of phenomenology, I submit that the NOI’s doctrine and actions should be viewed as the establishment of an emancipative and recuperative “Phenomenology of Blackness” that counters a lifeworld built upon the disembodiment and dehumanization of Black bodies. Reframing the NOI’s doctrine in this way positions it as a linguistic, religiously stylized, praxis-oriented critical hermeneutic phenomenology.

The Construction and Destruction of Clay’s “Ideal Self” in Dutchman

Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman tells the tragic story of Clay, a black man who is seduced, insulted and killed by a white woman Lula on the subway. In order to fit into mainstream American society, Clay always constructs his “ideal self” and plays the role of a fake white man. Lacan’s mirror stage theory can explain the cause of the construction and destruction of Clay’s ideal-self.

Everybody’s Protest Cinema

This article uses Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” to consider that literary mode’s corollary in the 1990s New Black Cinema. It argues that recent African American movies posit an alternative to the politics and aesthetics of films by a director such as Spike Lee, one that evinces a set of qualities Baldwin calls for in his essay about Black literature. Among these are what recent scholars such as Ann Anlin Cheng have called racial melancholy or what Kevin Quashie describes as Black “quiet,” as well as variations on Yogita Goyal’s diaspora romance. Films such as Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and Joe Talbot and Jimmy Fails’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) offer a cinematic version of racial narrative at odds with the protest tradition I associate with earlier Black directors, a newly resonant cinema that we might see as both a direct and an indirect legacy of Baldwin’s views on African American culture and politics.

Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

The (Afro) Future of Henry Box Brown

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

“La racaille,” a performed figure in French contemporary youth

In France, la racaille is a stereotyped figure of a young (usually identified as Arab or Black) man who lives in a suburban cité (social housing estate) . I have repeatedly met la racaille during my ethnographic studies on heterosexual romantic relationships among 15- to 20-year-old youngsters from three different social backgrounds—working class in cités (2002–2005), working class in villages (2008–2011), and bourgeoisie in Paris (2016–2020). I encountered it in the form of a performed figure—object of speech, clothing choices, gestures, movements, and ways of speaking. This presence reveals a collective fascination in which various negative judgments are mixed with shared admiration for its high social visibility. Stylish and powerful, la racaille is fascinating, at any rate because it embodies an exaggerated masculinity that is untroubled and unquestionable.