Deep Time, Dark Time

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Brer Soul and the Mythic Being

Challenging accounts of black gender and sexuality that equate radicalism with misogynistic and patriarchal values, this chapter looks to the subversive cinema and performance art of the 1960s for prefigurations of the gender and sex nonconformity of today. Placing in counterpoint the theater and cinema of Melvin van Peebles and the performance and conceptual art of Adrian Piper, this chapter foregrounds the role of a funk epistemology in both cases. Contemporary queer and transgender art and aesthetics can only gain, this chapter argues, by acknowledging these works as sources of fabulation.

Crushed Black

This chapter engages queer and black feminist debates over recovery, reparation, and the archive to offer a new account of the controversial film Portrait of Jason and its afterlives. Taking the metaphor of “crushed blacks” to consider the value of obscurity, blur, and opacity in the archive, the chapter critiques positivist demands for historical legibility and veracity as hostile to the world-making survival stratagems of afro-fabulation.

Habeas Ficta

This chapter engages recent developments in black feminist theory, in particular those that emphasize the pornotroping of the flesh, in order to outline a new theory of fictive ethnicity. Noting how black ethnicity has emerged as an issue in film and performance, the chapter suggests that a fabulation of ethnicity (as well as race) is critical to an understanding of angular socialities in the contemporary African diaspora.

Little Monsters

Intervening in debates over post-humanist responses to climate change, this chapter engages black feminist and indigenous critique to explore the role afro-fabulation plays in contemporary catastrophism. Reading the play and film Beasts of the Southern Wild in relation to a Foucauldian and indigenous critique of sovereignty, this chapter argues that our dreams of rewilding the world after racial capitalism will still need to be decolonized.

Critical Shade

This chapter revisits key debates over documentation and authenticity in the emergence of queer studies, which it considers through the work of a contemporary choreographer who engages in a process of what he calls “fictional archiving.” By reimagining black queer aesthetics as always already central to the development of postmodern dance and other contemporary aesthetic innovations, the chapter shows how this performance enacts a form of “critical shade” on white normative histories and pedagogies of dance, fashion, and performance.

Introduction

The themes and arguments of this book are introduced in this chapter through a consideration of a contemporary artist and video-maker’s engagement with the archive through a practice of “full-body quotation.” The concept of fabulation—drawn from the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson—is introduced, and related to black feminist theories of “critical fabulation.” Feminist and queer theories of embodied memory are introduced in relation to the critique of post-humanism.

Conclusion

The conclusion expounds a theory of afro-fabulative poetics of memory through a discussion of the concept of the crypt in the psychoanalysis of Torok and Abraham, as interpreted through the performance and film work of artist Geo Wyeth. Critical and creative fabulation is a means of decrypting blackness while preserving opacity.

Chore and Choice

This chapter explores the emergence of artificial intelligence as a challenge for theories of post-humanism that fail to center blackness and queerness. Through a reading of the black transfeminine “mind-clone” Bina48—a robot whose affective states mirrors the structural antagonism that the black female subject presents to normative temporalities of technological advance—the chapter seeks to contribute to a nascent field of critical black code studies.

Fabulous, Formless

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.