This dissertation interrogates the relationship between affect and blackness, as it is intimated in the materiality of water and its attendant sensations. My methodology draws from black feminist theory and metaphors extracted from the natural and neurosciences. In so doing, I grapple with the following questions, as they relate to specific cases within the black aquatic: How does the figure of gestation appear as both deathly and vivified in the black aquatic? How does blackness travel as a queer contagion, or vector, within water? What does a topography of racial affect look and feel like? How do we make sense of black temporality—an element that has been denied futurity and rendered ahistorical, anchoring modernism all at the same time—within the oceanic, a space crosscutting zoological and cosmological time? How is black subjectivity represented as a synesthetic experience? Regarding the Caribbean and the Pacific, what are the biosocial components and historical stakes of black surf culture within neoliberal strictures of privatized land development? And, ultimately, how do the affective and spatial components of “vestibularityâ€â€”a term I borrow from Hortense Spillers— appear throughout the black aquatic? The archive for this project encapsulates film, black popular culture, art, and an ethnographic and theoretical study on black surf cultures. Artwork by Doreen Garner; performances by Azealia Banks, Beyonce, and Maxwell; and cinematic offerings by Barry Jenkins, Spike Lee, and Steve McQueen represent key objects of analyses. Although mostly a theory-based undertaking, this project’s composition—its intellectual framework, archive, historicity, and historiography—can be located between the 1980s and the 2010s. This 30-year expanse marks a confluence of several socio-political and scientific phenomena: the galvanization of globalization; the increased awareness (and fantastical denial) of global warming and its antiblack machinations (e.g. Hurricane Katrina); the affective and sonic turn in the humanities from the 2000s and onward; the rise of embodied film theory (e.g., “sensuous cinemaâ€); critical leaps in black cinema’s newfound visibility and experimental aesthetics, both in the art world and the major motion-picture market; and the institutionalization of Black Studies. As far as particular historical incidents, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the calculated malice behind water management in Flint, Michigan also serve as grave moments in the black aquatic whereby necropolitics and disaster capitalism converge in egregious proportions. Examinations of these tragedies, which parallel the privatization of water and profiteering of disaster relief, are ongoing and exceed the space of this dissertation. While no “singular†event grounds this dissertation, all of the above-mentioned processes and intellectual foci find commonality in the neoliberal milieu of posthumanism and its contentious relationship to theorizations of black life.

Last modified

• 10/21/2019

Creator

• Jared Christopher Brian Richardson

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-0cq9-vp15

Subject

• African-American Studies

Keyword

• affect
• black studies
• visual studies
• geophilosophy
• black popular culture
• visuality

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright