{"id":54966,"date":"2017-09-20T16:02:23","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T16:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54966"},"modified":"2017-09-20T16:02:23","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T16:02:23","slug":"on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54966","title":{"rendered":"On Black Negativity, Or the Affirmation of Nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Black Negativity, Or the Affirmation of Nothing<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Society and Space<\/a>
\n2017-09-18<\/p>\n

Jared Sexton<\/strong><\/a>, Interviewed by Daniel Colucciello Barber<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Jared Sexton<\/a> is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism<\/em><\/a> (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing<\/em><\/a> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). In these books, as well as in his numerous articles and essays, Sexton addresses themes of contemporary political and popular culture, or more broadly the cultural politics of the post-civil rights era United States<\/a>, focusing on questions of race and sexuality, policing and prisons, multiracial coalition, and contemporary film.<\/p>\n

The range of themes addressed in Sexton\u2019s work is motivated by a central commitment to the field of black studies. Importantly, black studies is here understood not as one field among many, such that it would become identifiable through its division from others. Black studies\u2014as \u201can internally differentiated project\u201d\u2014concerns what Sexton describes as \u201can unlimited field,\u201d one that ramifies upon, because it is implicated in, all fields of study.<\/p>\n

This interview attends to and foregrounds Sexton\u2019s theorization of the meaning, stakes, and implications of the unlimited field of black studies. While such theorization is bound to matters that entail a sociological specificity, the questions that thereby emerge likewise entail the opening up of \u201ca whole series of ontological matters.\u201d Such double entailment follows from Sexton\u2019s focus on the singular \u201csociopolitical status\u201d of blackness in the modern world: if blackness \u201copens the space for articulating what is unthought,\u201d this is because blackness is \u201cthat which relates to the undoing or unraveling of every social bond\u201d and so inhabits them, negatively, from within.<\/p>\n

Daniel Barber<\/strong>: In \u201cThe Social Life of Social Death<\/a>,\u201d you speak of \u201ca procedure for reading, for study, for black study or, in the spirit of the multiple, for black studies<\/em> \u2026 wherever they may lead. And, contrary to the popular misconception, they do lead everywhere<\/em>. And they do lead<\/em> everywhere, even and especially in their dehiscence.\u201d This is a lesson that I am constantly learning from the reading of your work. You characterize such black study as \u201can exemplary transmission: emulation of a process of learning through the posing of a question, rather than imitation of a form of being,\u201d and it is inarguable that your writing has been at the vanguard of such exemplification.<\/p>\n

Many of your recent essays have explicitly pressed the stakes of a dehiscent \u201ceverywhere.\u201d The incommensurateness of the position of blackness with discourses of the universal\u2014which, as you demonstrated in Amalgamation Schemes<\/em><\/a>, remains the case even in a purportedly pluralized, expansive discourse such as multiracialism\u2014marks an opening up all over, according to the unthought recesses of what Dionne Brand<\/a> has called \u201ca tear in the world.\u201d I can imagine this everywhere coming to be interpreted as \u201cmore\u201d universal than universality, and I wonder how you would think about this? Dehiscence\u2014or, along similar lines, the ungrounding entailed by deracination\u2014certainly exceeds the universal, but such excess would seem to refuse its being related in terms of universality.<\/p>\n

Jared Sexton<\/strong>: First, let me thank you again for your rich and generative questions here, and for the careful and sustained reading required to formulate them. I say that especially because I am aware of the ways that, for all of the moments of real critical engagement I\u2019ve enjoyed since entering academia, aspects of my writing, as one instance in a much larger collective project, have been fairly consistently distorted and, at times, caricatured for some time now. Some of that has to do of course with very broad developments in intellectual life in the United States\u2014academic celebrity culture, social media \u201chot takes,\u201d \u201cme too\u201d research protocols, the denigration of the arts and humanities, etc.\u2014and some of it has to do with an understandable, if disagreeable, anxiety about conserving radical thought under reactionary conditions. But then too I think much of it reflects the type of paralogical affect, or animus<\/em>, that Frantz Fanon<\/a> explored so provocatively in his time and that I have, again among many others, tried for a while now to understand better. It strikes me as a ressentiment not of<\/em> the slave, but rather about<\/em> and against<\/em> the slave, and those thought to be slavish…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview attends to and foregrounds Sexton\u2019s theorization of the meaning, stakes, and implications of the unlimited field of black studies. While such theorization is bound to matters that entail a sociological specificity, the questions that thereby emerge likewise entail the opening up of \u201ca whole series of ontological matters.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8,6941,20],"tags":[27520,27521,27519,1471,27518,27517],"class_list":["post-54966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-daniel-barber","tag-daniel-c-barber","tag-daniel-colucciello-barber","tag-jared-sexton","tag-society-space","tag-society-and-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54967,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54966\/revisions\/54967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}