On October 15, 2025, Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, by Patrice Douglass, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley.
Professor Douglass was joined in conversation by Salar Mameni, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Henry Washington, Jr., Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Courtney Desiree Morris, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of Ethnic Studies.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.
About the Book
In this incisive book, Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human.
By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence — one of the most prevalent under slavery — continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. “Engendering Blackness” urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.
Podcast and Transcript
Listen to this panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts and other streaming platforms.
(soft upbeat music)
[SARAH HARRINGTON]
Welcome, everyone. My name is Sarah Harrington. I’m the program manager here at Matrix. I’m very thankful to be introducing today’s Authors Meet Critics panel. The conversation today is about Patrice Douglass’s book Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence.
(applause)
Very exciting. Congratulations. Dr. Douglass has written a profound and challenging book that compels us to confront the history of sexual violence rooted in slavery as indissociable from the production and reproduction of blackness.
This book exposes a critical truth, what made this history possible continues to haunt our present day understandings of what it means to be human. Our panelists will reflect on the profound implications of this work and what it means for the conversations we are having today. Today’s event is part of our Authors Meet Critics series and co-sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, the UC Berkeley Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Ethnic Studies.
Extra special thank you to Eric Stanley from Gender and Women’s Studies for your support.
(applause)
Finally, thank you both to Cori Hayden, our interim director for spring, who helped get this all set, and Marion Fourcade, who’s our faculty director here, for their assistance in programming this conversation. Marion is teaching and was very sad to miss this today. And thanks to Chuck and the rest of the Matrix staff.
Before we get going with the panelists, I just wanna mention a few things we have upcoming here for the rest of the fall semester at Matrix. We also have a whole set of spring events in the works, so please stay tuned for that. Our next two events are Matrix On Point conversations, “Conspiracy Theories” and “Spaces for Thriving,” and then a talk on “Insurance in the Climate Crisis.”
Another book talk by Maximilian Kasy, who’s visiting from Oxford in December, and then we’ll wrap up with a talk from journalist Alexis Madrigal at the end of the semester. So before I leave the floor to the panelists, let me introduce our moderator, Courtney Desiree Morris, on the end here.
(audience applauding)
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual conceptual artist and an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, Black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African diaspora. She’s a social anthropologist and published a book, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and the political repression from the 19th century to the present.
She is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and the dispossession in the US Gulf and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender and Families of Color, Make-Shift: Feminisms in Motion, and Asterisks. Without further ado, I will now turn it over to Courtney.
(audience applauding)
[COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS]
Okay. Can everyone hear me? Am I mic’d up properly?
Okay, great. Thank you for that introduction. It’s really good to be here.
I am, I’m actually on course release this semester, but when I was asked to moderate this discussion for Engendering Blackness, I thought, of course, I must come back and make myself available for this very important celebration for our dear colleague, Patrice Douglass. And so, I’m really delighted to be here. Thank you all for coming.
I’m honored to moderate today’s discussion with our colleagues, Salar Mameni and Henry Washington Jr. And so I’ll begin by just introducing all of our panelists and then offering a few opening remarks, and then I will hand it over to Professor Douglass.
Patrice Douglass is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable, but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing blackness in the present. Her current book project, Race and Abortion Ethics, which is well underway — the subtitle is Anti-Blackness and the Opacity of Liberty — interrogates the impermissibility of abortion in US law and politics. Specifically, the project critically examines how situating abortion as an ethic is sutured by the vexed relationship between philosophical and juridical notions of liberty and property.
By attending to social and legal histories, US geographies, the rhetorical strategies of abortion concerns, race and abortion ethics illumines how Black– how racial Blackness, excuse me — subtends the conceptual framework of reproductive rights and anxieties about their inevitable usurpation. Her research on blackness, gender, Afro-pessimism, reproductive justice, and Black philosophies has been published or is forthcoming from Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies of Media and Culture, Political Theology, Journal of, the Journal of Legal Anthropology, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Prism: Theory in Modern Chinese Literature, Souls: The Journal of Visual Culture, Theory and Event Literature and Culture, and the Black Scholar. And you can clap for Patrice ’cause she’s amazing.
(audience applauding)
Please clap for Patrice, always.
(audience applauding)
Our first speaker responding to Professor Douglas’s remarks will be Salar, Salar Mameni, who is an art historian specializing in contemporary transnational art and visual culture in the Arab Muslim world, with an interdisc– interdisciplinary research on racial discourse, transnational gender politics, militarism, oil cultures and extractive economies in West Asia. Mameni is the author of Terrascene: Accrued Aesthetics, which was published by Duke in 2023, 2023. I also taught it in one of my graduate seminars this spring.
It’s fire. And this work considers the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era in relation to the concurrent declaration of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Playing on the words terror and terra, Mameni proposes the term Terrascene in order to think of the planetary in conjunction with ongoing militarization of transnational regions under terror.
The book engages contemporary art and aesthetic productions, paying particular attention to artists navigating the geopolitics of petrocultures and climate change. Professor Mameni has published articles in Kipral, in Catalyst, Signs, Women and Performance, Alrida Journal, Fuse Magazine, Philip Review, and the Canadian Art Journal, and has written for exhibition catalogs in Dubai, Sharjah, and Istanbul. Mameni was the curator of Snail Fever at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai that explored art as a pandemic, bringing together artists from the region whose works consider the embodied viral and contaminating nature of sonic and visual aesthetics.
Please welcome Professor Mameni.
(applause)
And then our final respondent for our panel today is Professor Henry Washington Jr., who is an assistant professor of African American Studies here at UC Berkeley. His research broadly explores how dominant constructions of cultural difference help justify the persistence of inequality in the era of inclusion, as well as how minoritarian cultural forms attempt to contest these constructions and produce more complex truths about humanness. He is at work on his first book project, “Looking to Be Included: Social Science, Black Imagination, and the Culture of the Criminal, 1896 til,” which elucidates the shifts in the nature of power and in the forms of Black cultural production affected by the postbellum emergence of “the criminal” as an alleged exemplar of race and gender alterity.
His writing appears or is forthcoming in the peer reviewed journals Women and Performance and Camera Obscura, the edited keyword collection Think from Black: A Lexicon, and the exhibition catalog for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century. Please welcome Professor Washington.
(applause and cheering)
So before we begin, and I hand things over to the mighty Patrice Douglass, I, I wanted to offer a few remarks. I recently had to read all of Patrice’s work, and it was just so incredible to really sit down and engage with the truly prolific and just deeply rigorous body of work that she has produced over the past decade. And so, as I, you know, I didn’t bring my copy of my book today, but I was telling Patrice before I started that it’s now completely brutalized and dog-eared and starting to, the pages are beginning to curl because it’s really a book to work and to think with in a deep and sustained way.
And so in Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence, Professor Patrice Douglass argues that sexual violence was not simply another horrific form of injury in a long red list of terrors under slavery, but rather is, quote, “the ontological anchor through which subjectivity and the scale of humanness are mediated.” End quote. In this trenchant work, Douglass disrupts the tendency in feminist and queer theories of many kinds to marshal the figure of the slave to anchor liberal projects for the reclamation of rights, citizenship, and state recognition of modes of redress for regimes of racial and sexual terror.
Throughout the work, she demonstrates that sexual violability is not an effect of the plantation, but rather its fundamental condition of possibility. To ground her arguments, Douglass offers the concept of racial sexuation as an analytical tool for thinking slavery, sex, and sexual violence, and the production of Blackness as a form of nonbeing. She defines it as “the process by which slaves were made vulnerable to sexual acts and other acts that may not be perceivably sexual.”
Though following Franz Fanon, she suggests that all forms of rich terror carry a latent sexual residue “to bar the slave from entrance into the human sexual order.” If, as Douglass argues that “the sexual violability of slaves still requires a theoretical vocabulary,” racial sexuation provides just such a new conceptual framework for thinking the relationship between sex, violence, slavery, and nonbeing. In this work, she takes several conceptual fields including some of my own beloved conceptual fields like Black feminist theory, queer theory, as well as white liberal feminist legal theory and philosophy, and Marxist theory to task in their treatment of sexual violence, slavery, and Black ontology.
Specifically, Douglass is concerned with how gender as the central analytical object of various feminist intellectual projects obscures the force of sexual violence as a tool of racecraft. She extends the insights of Hortense Spillers and by interrogating the analytical claims of a range of scholarly actors that reproduce gender differentiation as a transparent category while ignoring the many ways through the law, cultural discourse and social practice that the slave exists outside of the humanizing forms of subjectivity upon which normative gender is premised. In so doing, Douglass not only challenges critiques of Afro-pessimist thought as a masculinist theoretical endeavor that cannot account for gender, but rather illuminates how gender as “a possession of the human” is destabilized by Blackness, which, as she argues, exposes its outer limits.
Douglass deploys a rigorous multi-disciplinary method and I would actually maybe argue even anti-disciplinary in your kind of utter rejection of these sort of somewhat arbitrary distinctions between the kind of forms of knowledge production. She deploys a rigorous anti-disciplinary method assembling a broad range of analytical objects, including legal cases, novels, Shakespearean plays, archival documents, films, and popular commodities. Importantly, a significant number of her critiques focus on texts and legal cases that have long been objects for critique in the field of Black feminist studies.
Yet, while working with seemingly well-worn materials, the analysis never feels derivative or redundant. Instead, Douglass brings a fresh and innovative analysis to these familiar objects, pointing the way to more robust and unflinching modes of Black feminist critique that move beyond binary gender logics that obscure the vexed structural position of the slave in a white supremacist settler colonial social order. And I have to say, if for me, reading Patrice’s huge body of work now, it’s really difficult to overstate the impact that this work will have on the fields in which many of us labor.
And apparently I have it on good information that the children are already organizing reading groups on Twitter. Engendering Blackness is a groundbreaking text in the truest sense of the word that will unsettle, that will vex, and hopefully transform Black feminist approaches to the archive, legal theory, and political philosophy, and will no doubt be on heavy rotation in classrooms across the country and around the world as we grapple with what her interrogations into the archive of the slave suggest for contemporary struggles for Black liberation, and an end to the necro-political project of man that now poses an existential threat to the future of human and more than human life on the planet. This is an incredibly powerful and relentless work of insurgent Black feminist thought that I’m sure will become required reading for anyone serious about doing any serious kind of theoretical work at all.
As a colleague who’s familiar with Professor Douglass, I can say with no exaggeration that she is a scholar of rare brilliance, and who has produced a singular work of Black feminist critique that will have many rich and varied lives as it is taken up by scholars thinking in the wake of this tremendous contribution. So please join me in celebrating Engendering Blackness—
(members applauding)
–and Patrice Douglass.
(members applauding)
[PATRICE DOUGLASS]
Oh, wow, Courtney that was amazing. Oh, and I didn’t have any nerves before you started talking. But whoa, how am I supposed to live up to it?
(Douglass laughing)
Like I have so many nerves now. But thank you. I have so many thank yous, but Courtney, I’ll start by saying thank you so much for that introduction.
I’m really at a loss for words and that’s not something that’s common of me. I have some students in the room, they know I can talk a lot. So thank you so much.
Also, thank you to Salar and Henry for agreeing to participate in this conversation with me, taking the time to engage the work and to provide serious comments that get me to think even further than perhaps I thought when I wrote Engendering Blackness. Okay, I’ll just say thank you to the Social Science Matrix for making this event possible, and specifically to Sarah Harrington, who has wrangled me multiple times to solidify dates and to get things moving and her tenacity and consistency with poking me has made it possible for us all to be here today. So thank you.
Also thank you to my home department, Gender and Women’s Studies. So many of my colleagues are here today. Specific thank you to Eric A. Stanley, who made it very clear that this book needed to be celebrated and made sure to clear the path such that it could be done.
And so, thank you, Eric. I appreciate that. Also thank you to all of you who are in the room.
I’m overwhelmed with– Oh, thank you. I’m overwhelmed with just the sight of you all in your presence, and I know that you could have chosen to be many other places today, and your choice to be here is deeply felt and appreciated.
I also saw someone walk in the room who I went to high school with, and that touched me deeply. Hi, Lonnie.
(audience laughing)
I, small bit, this is not about the book, but I grew up here in Berkeley. And so I went to Berkeley High, and so I have a deep root in this place, and so it feels wonderful to have so many faces whom I’ve interacted with in, in various ways here. So I wanted to start by actually talking about the artwork of the book and how that came to be.
Which is not apparent to people unless you know me and you know what the little marking on the back of the book suggests about who made this artwork for me. So this was actually made by my son.
And so it’s a painting that he made for me when I started my first academic job at Duke University some years ago, and I had this very empty office and no artwork and nothing sort of adorning the walls, and I couldn’t think of a way to honor my space and to honor myself, and he knows that the colors of black and white or the shades of black and white are important to me. And so he made this paint stroke canvas painting for me that I had in my office when I began this journey. And I thought it was best to try to incorporate it in the cover of the book somehow, and I reached out to my editor, Erica Wedder at Stanford University Press, and I said, “If there’s any way you can maybe like put it in there a little bit,” and they sent me the mock-up and it was the entire cover.
And so it’s not only my book, but it is also my son Lathan’s book, and he takes that very seriously. So I just wanted to start there with some levity before diving into very complex and hard topics, which is a conversation about sexual violence under slavery, which is not an easy conversation to have, nor is it a simple history to sit with. And so I wanted to write a book that honored that history with the respect and attention that it deserved and, set out to write this book different than the dissertation.
I completed the dissertation, and I felt that it was incomplete in some of the gestures that it made, some of the conclusions that it drew, and so I wanted to write the book anew. And so that is essentially what this version of Engendering Blackness came to be. So Engendering Blackness interrogates sexual violence as the most refracted violence of slavery.
It is found everywhere, historically and presently, in all things from antebellum employment disputes, the Fugitive Slave Acts, distinctions between federal and state law, and early American political theory to post-emancipation literature, Hollywood film, and critical theory. As objects of investigation, I employ the archive of U.S. slavery, legal records, newspapers, autobiographies, political communiques, log and record books as primary objects. Furthermore, my book places Black feminist theory and critical conversation and intention with feminist philosophy, feminist legal theory, queer theory, and political theory to unpack and critique the reoccurring trope of the sexually violated slave across various fields.
Engendering Blackness argues that most feminist, philosophical, and legal theory works lack the conceptual rigor to grapple with a slave as structurally denied or structurally deemed unrapeable and genderless, yet ripe with sex. These genres of thought subsume the racial dynamics of sexual injury into broader theories of how sexual violence, namely rape, impacts a universalized feminine or vulnerable subject. However, Engendering Blackness contends with, I’m sorry, contends that while sexual violence is a universal experience that traverses all historical epochs, modern racial slavery produces a relational difference in the utility of sexual violence as a forceful measure of the scales of humanness and slaveness.
Slaveness. Which is to say while anyone can experience sexual violation, the sexualization of the slave through violence was central to the racialization of Blackness as ontologically bound outside of the sexual dynamics of human life. The significance of this intervention is not solely for historiographic purposes, but most importantly, it’s to articulate the ways in which the present terrain of Black gender and sexuality is still captive to this relation.
Engendering Blackness investigates how present conversations on anti-Blackness, gender, and sexual violence must contend with this history to attend to the gendered and sexualized contours of violence, both sexual and otherwise. In this respect, Engendering Blackness present– prevents– presents a philosophical envage– engagement with the relationship of sexual violence and slavery as an ontological question. And so the images on the screen here are some that I include in the final chapter of the book where I talk about 12 Years a Slave in the circulation of both the images of Patsy’s repeated violation on screen, and also the subjugation of Platt, who is named Platt under slavery, but is Solomon by his free name, and how they’re both bound and constricted by a sexual arithmetic that the film tries to work to disavow but is unable to do so.
And I do that by sort of bringing the film into conversation with the press tour that the film had. Um, thinking about how Patsy becomes sort of understood as triangulated within a sexual matrix of mistress in relationship to her master and mistress. But in reality, she’s a sexual object that doesn’t have the agency that the actors and the director are trying to sort of usurp her into, and so I questioned whether or not I would do film analysis in the book
but I end it there, and I think that it did some work in terms of making the present tense of this particular conversation more apparent. So I arrived at this project after immersing myself in deep readings on antebellum case law, slave narratives, and other 19th century records. There are countless appearances of sexual violations against the enslaved in the archive of U.S. slavery.
However, these harms were not registered as crimes or injuries. What was profound to me in my readings was the frequency with which sexual violence appeared in text or documents where one would not assume to find such acts. This engagement with the archive led me to consider further how pervasive sexual violence was across all iterations of the antebellum world, and furthermore, and perhaps more centrally, these findings led me to contend with sexual violence at what, as what gives rise to Blackness rather than understanding sexual violence as an act committed against Blackness as a preconstituted subject integrity or form of being.
Engendering Blackness is a part of a growing body of literature that is invested in contending with the history of slavery and the presump– presuppositions about Blackness through philosophical registers. Additionally, it places a particular focus on the gendered and sexual dimensions of slavery to illuminate the intractability of Blackness from gendered and sexual concerns. Sexual violence is taken up as the primary concern to highlight its latency in public discourses on slavery, and the incompleteness of its emancipation.
So the book develops the concept of racial sexuation to elaborate a more expansive framework for understanding the implications of sexual violence as a structural component of modern racial slavery. Racial sexuation connotes how the slave is suspended within a terrain of sexual violence as a permanent status of ontological obsolescence. It indexes a condition of non-being that is always sexualized and violating, an indeterminate status that is propelled into structural relations by force through proximity and repetition, and most essentially, through fantasy and desire.
I employ terms like sexual violability or sexually violable to symbolize the manner in which racial sexuation is realized through grotesque and mundane forms of sexual brutality, how sexual violations were structured as a permanent potential for the slave, even if each slave did not individually experience such, and more crucial to the argument laid out here, that every violence of slavery, sexual and non-sexual, arguably works in service of preserving and protecting the slave as gratuitously sexually available in a manner inconceivable for non-slaves. Everything relating to Black slaveness is sexually violent because all violence is oriented by the sexual. The engendering of Blackness through sexual violence exposes the realm of racial sexuation that makes human gender possible, and holds the slave ontologically captive to the human’s multiplicities.
What sexual violence and slavery reveals is that the sexualized force that conditioned the lives of slaves serves to mark violation as a permanent status for Blackness, while also wagering the value of being human as an otherwise to this status. In this respect, the sexual violability of the slave as potentiality and the acts and fantasies of these violations inaugurates a grammar of value meaning matter of what it means to be human as an ontology that is distinct and structurally protected from the gravity of capture, dispossession, and loss that constitutes Blackness. Thus, the title of the book sits in tension.
The ontology of sexual violence demarcates a structural logic of accounting for sexual violence that forecloses the ability of thought to grapple with Blackness, which emanates from sexual violence. This position challenges the perception that the sexually violent experiences endured by Black people from slavery to the present are but one component of racialization. Instead, I contend that sexual violence operates as a modality of force that reinaugurates the conditions of slave capture that usher Blackness into modern coherence by marking, by the marking of peoples as Black through an identification of their perceived sexual otherness and fecundity.
Racial sexuation as a modern predicament is what made and propelled Blackness into thought as the amorphous and violable condition that reason incessantly attempts to capture, even centuries after the first slave ships set sail for worlds unknown to the captives onboard. It’s critical to note that Engendering Blackness is a critical expansion of Afropessimism, which is a theory of anti-blackness and ontology in violence. Offering a radical return to the Fanonian treatise on Blackness, Afropessimism contends that slavery is a paradigmatic relation rather than a historically situated experience.
Though one, although one can point to 1865 as the formal end of slavery in the United States, Blackness as the slave of modernity maintains a captive relation within the hu– with the human and its world. This position contends that the human is not, or I’m sorry, this position contends that the Black is not human, nor is it a subject of the human world. Nonetheless, anti-blackness is essential to the over-determination of the human as a universal signifier of common struggle and community.
The argument taken up in the book maintains that the human is a political ontological category constructed and maintained through a violent relationship with Blackness. Reading the captive condition on its own terms without equivocating towards humanness and its various forms of subject differentiation allows for an unflinching attunement to the scales of violence’s force. Violence here is more capacious than physical acts, as it engulfs Blackness within a totalizing ontological erasure.
Afropessimism interrogations clarifying Fanon’s insistence that “Ontology, once it finally admits as leaving existence by the wayside, does not permit us to understand the being of the Black man.” Questions linger about the import of Afropessimist frameworks on studies of slavery. How does manhood relate to, “The unbearable hydraulics of Black disavowal,” that Frank B. Wilderson III describes as saturated in gratuitous violence?
Is the violent thrust of the world that Afropessimists described rooted in a type of masculine violation reserved for cis men or masculinist appeals towards reading violence as a singular truth? What is gender to Afropessimism? My book is a response and a disavowal of the assumption that sits at the heart of these questions.
The Afropessimist is demanded by other Black Studies feminist and queer theorists to disavow the objectification that the archive reveals, and to assert that the truth of the structural predicament of the slave is one of denied entrance into human community. Thus, there is a great effort to amplify the social life of the slave in contradistinction to emphasizing the totalizing conditions of social death. As a theory, social death contends that the slave is natally alienated, generally dishonored, and subjected to gratuitous violence.
Yet social death is not disproved by the social life of the slave. Prioritizing the focus on social life instead of social death is meant to produce a more nuanced reading of slavery, not fully shrouded in violation. The desire here is to render the racial slave more than just their violating conditions, and thus a human suspended by abjection rather than a “true,” and I do this in italics, “slave who is totalized by objecthood.”
Recognizing the social organization of gender and sexuality within the communities of slaves is meant to illuminate social life, and thus contour slavery as a totalizing condition. This position, however, is belated, insofar as it fails to question why gender and sexuality demand forceful implementation within the social arrangements of captive life. Why is the theoretical project of most area studies to forcefully insert the significance of slave gender and sexuality within a history where its subjective qualities are vaguely present, rather than to question the explanatory power of those identificatory terms for the captive condition altogether?
Scholars across many fields have explored the vexed nature of sexual violence in slavery. Many Black feminist historians have explored the role sexual violence played in shaping the experience of slaves. Furthermore, Black feminist theorists such as Angela Davis, Evelyn Heyman, Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, Hortense J. Spillers, just to name a few, have connected the history of sexual violence under slavery to structures of power that continue to orient, orient and control Black life in the present.
Building on this work, Engendering Blackness is critically concerned with how concepts like Blackness, womanhood, manhood, sexual will and agency, and human liberty are challenged as neutral and natural descriptors when engaged through the sexualized terror of the slave. Despite their thorough research on sexual violence and slavery, scholars who examine the particular femaleness or maleness of the experience of sexual violence for the slave have yet to consider how the value and grammar of these terms are produced at the nexus of sexual terror in the m– emergence of New World slavery, which is to say, although sex/gender difference are constructed, or, I’m sorry, although sex/gender difference as a constructing order predates modernity, slavery unearths a new paradigm of gender and sexuality that employs sexual violence to constitute a distinction between being human and the subjugation– subjugated category of slaves. The vast history of sexual violence and slavery illumines a structural distinction between gender and sexuality, which def– sorry, which define aspects of personhood undergirded by liberty and filiation in Black gender and sexuality, which was constituted under sec– slavery as a relation of reproduced by force.
Furthermore, my work challenges binary assumptions about what constitutes gender and its relationship to shape to sexual orders of violence. I guess, I should explain my slides before I move forward. These are the texts that really sort of inspired a lot of my thinking in this book and also are texts that I deeply engage throughout.
So one of them is Black Holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality by Evelyn Heymans. This is an image from Hortense Spillers’ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. The central image Black Women’s Roles in the Community of Slaves by Angela Davis is perhaps one of the first radical engagements with the predicament of sexual violence under slavery, thinking about its implications for Black women’s radical insurgency.
Scenes of Subjection, which there’s no words that I can give to give it credence, but the third chapter of the book “Subduction and the Ruses of Power,” really helped me to start to think about sexual violence as something that cannot be assuaged or wrapped up, that it is inherently embedded with contradictions. I remember having a professor who told me that that chapter in that book was a problem, and I think just hearing that person say that incited within me a drive to really want to sit with why this person was so scandalized, but also kind of disavowing that this chapter needed to be a part of this book. And I think I’ve taken up, obviously, a call and response to that flippant dismissal.
And Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body, which has become a text taught in numerous classes across college campuses, but has also become sort of a central, not sort of, but has become a central pillar in the fight for reproductive justice. And I think that the way that Roberts scaffolds this book across thinking the predicament of the female slave to thinking the context of reproductive control and coercion in our present tense animated questions for me that also continue to sort of undergird what’s going on in the book. So I thought it important to not just skip my slides, but additionally, I’ll let you finish your picture, Paola.
(all laughing)
These are images the objects that I analyze in the book. So I analyzed Betye Saar’s Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which was a mixed-media assemblage that was produced by Saar for a call for revolutionary Black art in response to the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was a call from a Black institution, cultural institution here in Berkeley called Rainbow Signs, where they were looking for representations of the political moment, and this is what Saar produced for that call.
The image in the middle is called Virginian Luxuries where it’s an undi– unidentified artist of, from 1825 representing the sort of luxuries of white male sexual possibility with sexual violations of Black women and physical brutality of Black men, and thinking about those things as orbiting in a similar access. And the last image here is a clipping from a nine, I’m sorry, a 1778 newspaper about a runaway slave named Sarah. And I used this ad in my second chapter to think about how Sarah is construed within this ad and objectified as a sexual object, but also a gender deviant, to use that as a way to usher in a conversation with Black feminist theory about assumptions of gender and particularly assumptions about the mobilization of womanhood and what the field perceives to do with that category.
So I’m almost done here.
(Patrice giggling)
So my work challenges binary assumptions about what constitutes gender and its relationship to sexual orders of violence. Engendering Blackness thinks Blackness and gen– gender beyond biocentrism, which is the belief that each is innate to the body and or genitals, and instead interrogates these terms in relationship to sexual violence as what makes and unmake slaves and humans. Lastly, by drawing on history, theory, philosophy, and aesthetics, Engendering Blackness argues that the replication of the sexual vulnerability of the slave as an allegoric object is not a, is not unique to any particular field or mode of thought, but illustrates the capaciousness of the unrelenting hold of slavery on the conceptual frameworks of its afterlives.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
[SALAR MAMENI]
So I’d, I’d like to start by expressing my gratitude to Patrice for inviting me to be a part of this conversation to Sarah for organizing the panel, and of course it’s a pleasure to be in conversation with Henry and Courtney. So, thank you so much. As I expect you’ve already gathered from Patrice’s introduction, Engendering Blackness is a theoretical book that’s meant to provoke thought, to unnerve, and to destabilize disciplinary and political assumptions about its key components of analysis, namely blackness, slavery, gender, violence, and sexuality.
At its core, this is a theory book. As Douglass notes in her introduction to the book, quote, “What does it mean to theorize about rather than to accumulate facts on sexual violation and slavery?” End quote.
This, I believe, is an important point to highlight since theory inherently provokes. Theory pushes against our broad understandings of the structure of the world and works to rearrange our basic assumptions and perceptions about how things work. So, in the time that I’ve been given here, I’d like to enter into dialogue with two of the theoretical strands of Patrice’s book.
My entry points are, of course, through the lens of my own disciplines and my own research interests but which I hope will offer some lines of inquiry for further thought and conversation. So again, thanks for opening up the space for dialogue. So first, while reading Patrice’s book, I was struck by the extent to which, unbeknownst to myself, Afro-pessimism, or maybe I should say feminist Afro-pessimism as a framework, had influenced my own theorization of the figure of the terrorist.
My book, as Courtney generously just mentioned, titled, Terracene A crued Aesthetics, published in 2023, theorizes the figure of the terrorist as a racialized other who falls outside of the category of the human. What is significant in the context of my conversation here and in the context of Afro-pessimist theorizing, is that the terrorist is not an identity category, right? We don’t think of the terrorist as an identity, and this is exactly what makes it so hard to define the figure of the terrorist from a humanist ontological framework.
The figure of the terrorist cannot be claimed as an identity or presented as one mode of social life or one mode of being human amongst many. By definition, the terrorist is a violable and killable body, one who falls outside of security apparatuses of protection. Furthermore, as I detail at length in my book, the terrorist is fundamentally non-human in that it emerges from within inner species’ ecologies and geographies of war and disaster such that state and governmental definitions of terrorism are equivalent to unpredictable sites of danger, such as hurricanes and viral diseases, all of which they seek to preemptively eradicate and eliminate.
So, to be called a terrorist, in other words, is to be defined as a non-being in a state of ontological crisis. So, Afro-pessimism as a theory as Douglass quotes, quote, “Is a theory that in which slavery is a paradigmatic relation rather than a historically situated experience.” End quote.
It seems to me that Afro-pessimism offers the tools for theorizing terror in a way that a humanist lens simply cannot. Indeed, Patrice’s book stages a forceful critique of academic studies of slavery that prioritize, quote, “The focus on social life instead of social death.” End quote.
The desire in such studies, Douglass argues, is to render the racial slave more than their violating conditions, and thus a human suspended by abjection rather than a true slave who is totalized by objecthood. In other words, Douglass poses a question about the desire to transform the institution of racial slavery into what she calls compulsory humanism. So before moving on to my second point about the book, I want to pose an open question for Patrice should you wish to respond.
My question is this: Do you see Afro-pessimism, and, you know, I think I sh– I should say feminist Afro-pessimism, as applicable to this theorization of the terrorist as I have, you know, briefly laid out here? In other words, does Afro-pessimism, in your view, offer an analysis that can allow for the institution of racial slavery to create the conditions of possibility for this later figuration of the terrorist, which of course includes but is not exclusive to Blackness? I’m here thinking about the close association of the concept of the terrorist with Muslims, and in this particular moment of ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is the figure of the terrorist that has enabled an utter global consensus and disregard for Palestinian humanity subjected to violent killings, torture, and famine, and orchestrated ethnic cleansing alongside silencing of any opposition to this ongoing terror.
So while prior to the 20th century, the category of the Muslim in the context of the transatlantic slavery, was an index of humanity, as we learn from scholars such as R. A. Judy, Sylviane Diouf, and Aisha Khan amongst others, the Muslim over the course of the last century has become folded into the terrorist. So to clarify, I’m not asking if the category of the slave is analogous to the category of the terrorist, this is not about analogizing, but rather if the institution of slavery can be understood to produce the conditions for the figuration of the terrorist, and if Afro-pessimism enables this more expansive mode of theorizing. So that’s one question.
Now to my second inquiry. One of the many provocative aspects of Patrice’s book is that it invites us to think about the implications of racial slavery transnationally. An instance of this is the discussion in chapter four, where Douglass carefully reads through a number of late 19th century case studies appearing in the work of the Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
In these proto-psychoanalytic cases, Austrians discuss their sexual fantasies in which Black slaves on the American plantation become objects of arousal, desire, identification, and sadomasochistic fantasy. Through reading these cases, Douglass powerfully argues that, quote, “The psyche, like the plantation, is arranged by anti-Blackness.” This is an anti-Blackness that is not limited to the psychic formation of the white master on the plantation, but a global psychic formation far removed from the plantation.
In my reading, Patrice’s theorization has implications far beyond Europe, and I think an obvious place to look is Indian Ocean slavery, which predates the historical timeframe of transatlantic slavery. A figure that features prominently in discussions of Indian Ocean slavery is that of the castrated eunuch. Orlando Patterson has provided important analytical starting points for understanding the eunuch in the context of a general analysis of enslavement globally and across centuries.
I want to bring attention to one aspect of Patterson’s reading of this figure. In his seminal book, Slavery and Social Death, published in 1982, Patterson calls the eunuch, quote, “The ultimate slave.” He writes, quote, “The ultimate slave is best represented in the absolute person of the eunuch.”
While I cannot go into much detail here, the eunuch’s body in Patterson’s study is the site of convergence of his three definitional aspects of slavery, natal alienation, violence, and dishonor. For Patterson, the eunuch’s castration was not only enabled by natal alienation, but prevented kinship ties, rendering the enslaved eunuch socially dead and hence a non-threatening figure to be brought into royal inner circles such as within the Fatimid courts in Egypt, Ethiopia, Byzanti, or Chinese slave systems across Africa and Asia. And these are some of Patterson’s own examples.
The unique thing about eunuchs, Patterson writes, quote, “Was that they had been castrated, which added to their secondary sex changes did create an anom– anomalous third sex.” End quote. What stands out in Patterson’s theorization of the eunuch’s third sex is his highly gendered description of the eunuch’s body.
So I’m gonna read you just a long quote from Patterson. He writes, “It is an established medical fact that eunuchs undergo many physical changes, which do indeed make them appear abnormal. They tend to grow fat and their skin has an effeminate quality under which thin lines appear as they grow older.
In the vivid terms of one observer, they come to look like mummified old women. Their voices remain girl-like for a long time, then as they grow older come to sound like harsh female shrieking. They waddle rather than walk.
They perspire excessively. Modern study suggests that no cognitive changes result from the operation, but surely the trauma of castration must have had an emotionally destabilizing effect on every person who has experienced it.” End quote.
Now, I read this elaborate quote because I want to ask Patrice a question about gender. Patrice’s book convincingly argues that while gender is often called upon to understand sexual violence, the category of gender does not explain the overwhelming archive of gratuitous violence within the institution of racial slavery. Douglass indeed refutes theories that read cases of violent castration of the Black eunuch as emasculated, arguing that the category of Black masculinity cannot explain violent castration.
My question, however, is related to this elaborate gendering of the eunuch, as described by Patterson. To what extent do global practices of castrating slaves, which goes back to antiquity, have had an effect on our very understanding of gender binary and the production of the gendered human? In other words, does the institution of slavery, in fact, produce the embodied illusions of gender just as they produce the psychic formations of sexuality, you know, in the Austrian examples possessed by the human?
So just to wrap up, I’m very grateful for this opportunity to think of, you know, about the far-reaching implications of, of your theorization and in particular with these figures of the eunuch and the terrorist, which are, which I think, you know, you inspired me, inspired me to think that these are not just abjected w– figures awaiting humanity, but produced through the very violence that is humanity itself. So thank you.
[MODERATOR]
Thank you,
(unintelligible)
.
(audience applauding)
[HENRY WASHINGTON JR.]
Okay. Can you hear me? Okay.
I’m excited to be in conversation. We are running out of time, so I’m gonna hop right in. In the introductory chapter of her 1987 landmark text, Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby describes the aspiration of her critical undertaking as a gesture toward a Black feminist criticism that might be, quote, “Regarded as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions.”
End quote. This aspiration emerges from Carby’s dis-ease with certain dimensions of bla– of the Black feminist project, at this time very much still in its early formation as a self-conscious intellectual tradition. This included what Carby decried as a bioessentialization of the Black female body, as Black feminism’s putative subject and object of inquiry, along with an– along with a fetishization of tradition as a paradigm through which Black feminist institutional practice might proceed.
Owing in part to its institutional imperative to produce a project that might find legibility and thus resources for sustenance in the US, US university, Black feminists had rehearsed an idea of the project’s interpretive and ideological unity into critical hegemony. This necessarily foreclosed the more rigorous dynamic thinking, Carby suggested the position of the Black woman might otherwise open up. I begin here because Engendering Blackness‘s relationship to and critique of the idea of intellectual tradition, Black feminist and otherwise, is to my mind one of its most important contributions.
Douglass’s book is one of the fullest realizations of Reconstructing Womanhood’s aspiration I have seen published in its wake. Its attention to the ontology of sexual violence as that which is inaugurated in part through racial slavery’s physical acts of brutalization, but is exhausted neither by its material dimensions nor its experiential reality, demands a critical reassessment of some of the terms and conceptual logics that an accounts of racialized gender under New World slavery and so-called freedom are now legion. The idea of Black feminist tradition, as fashioned with varying degrees of critical introspection by the Black feminists– the Black feminist historians Douglass mentions, like Deborah Gray White and Darlene Clark Hine, alongside such Black women literary critics as Debra McDowell, Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl Wall, and Barbara Christian, demanded at once a singularity and a familiarity.
That is, it would require the attestation of a unified Black female experience and Black feminist aesthetic on the one hand, alongside an avowal of the kind of universalizing intelligibility of her form and forms that might lend its project canonizability on the other. This twinned imperative, with its attendant contradictions, perhaps explains why the project proceeded as it did, with largely unanswered questions about several key conceptual problems. Most importantly for our concerns here being the promise and peril of Black women’s inclusion, both in the annals of the archive and in the order of human gendering.
As Douglass elaborates, quote, “Within Black feminism, the Black woman operates as an uncontested figure of truth whose violation produces the conditions of possibility for autonomic resistance to centuries of unflinching violence.” End quote. But the violence of slavery is, for Douglass, not reducible to a historical suppression of the female slave’s gender.
Which is to say her alleged humanity cannot be surfaced with recourse to her renaming nor through her resistance or its retrospective description and imagining. Rather, as Douglass’s concept of racial sexuation insists, the structural predicament of the slave, male or female, quote, “Indexes a condition of non-being that is always sexualized and violating, an indeterminate status that is propelled into structural relations by force through proximity and repetition and most essentially through fantasy and desire.” Differentiation as such needs the Black as the embodiment of its fantasy of lack to give form and flesh to what it means to be human.
As the second chapter argues, Suspended Absences and the Substrates of Naming the Female Slave, Black feminist appeals to this taxonomic paradigm of difference-making are not only unrealizable, but actually entail their own violence. Naming the female slave the Black woman as an attempt to counter dehumanization necessarily proceeds by way of a logical reliance on a presumption of so-called inalienable and innate womanhood. In this schema, genitalia is taken to evidence the Black slave’s capacity for gender’s mimetic emergence.
Sylvia Wynter is perhaps the most provocative interlocutor for this critique. For Douglass, her Beyond Miranda’s Meanings suggests that the void of the Black woman here Caliban’s woman, is an ontological erasure that can be redressed through a kind of accounting and recovery that womanism might model, the assumption being that simply occupying demonic ground might re-enchant humanism, ushering in a new praxis of relation. Douglass further argues that in Wynter, anatomical sex difference still over-determines Caliban’s supposed patriarchal potential.
Which is to say that in Douglass’s view, we actually misdiagnose and under-theorize the Black man’s parallel violation. Both these figures lack coherent claims to gender differentiation, having only, quote, “Fantasms of fantasies, desires, and phobias that can also speak back, what some call resistance, but are trapped in the violence of their anti-Black unmaking.” End quote.
Having long distanced herself from Black feminism, at least as a descriptor of her intellectual project, it is ironically by way of Douglas’ critique of the essay’s investments in humanization that Wynter’s project becomes clearly legible within what Douglass terms the theoretical politics of dissemblance predominant in Black feminist discourse. This is all to say that the primary way I am left to think with Engendering Blackness is as an invitation to consider more carefully what might be described as the cycle politics of Black and Black feminist theorizing and tradition-making. If one of the book’s central insights is its refutation of the ontological possibility of Black woman as a mimetic category in terms of its explanatory potential for the terms of violation under which the female slave suffers and as a framework through which that suffering is imagined to be redressed, then it begs the question, what attachments or desires have given rise to the artistic and critical practice of the discourse’s pervasive investment in the humanization of gendering?
After all, as Douglass writes, it is not for want of clarity about the violence of categorization that Black feminist theory sustains this investment in Black womanhood and her tradition. As she writes, quote, “As a field, Black feminist historiography has an acute awareness of the contradictions of extending the category woman to female slaves and Black women more generally without caveat. However, this understanding does not result in the field abandoning the use of woman as a qualifier for slave or Black.
Rather, the scholarship redoubles the category of Black woman as a primordial figure whose affection and response to violence and violation are, to use Davis’ term, their own mythical transpositions.” End quote. I wonder then what mode of historicity might a delineation of desire in Black feminist art and theory help affect?
Jared Sexton has convincingly argued that we cannot presume the slave desires freedom, in part because of the imposition of the master’s volition and desire, which is as psychic as it is material. Are the conditions by which one might disentangle something like a Black or Black feminist revolutionary desire from the master’s volition and desire imaginable? Or are they entirely lost to the onset of racial sexuation in its totalizing force?
This is a particularly provocative and important set of questions, especially insofar as they are posed by a self-consciously Black feminist project. As a kind of meta-critical examination of Black feminist tradition-making undergirded by a persistent longing for inclusion, by way of what Calvin Warren has described as the cloak or garment of gender that never quite fits Black being, Douglas’ critical Black feminism unearths a way forward, if counterintuitively by way of a metaphysis– if counterintuitively by way of a metaphysical descent. Answers to these questions can at times be somewhat difficult to ascertain in the text as written, in part because I am speaking to concerns that I think are not Douglas’ priority, even as they are latent throughout.
But I think this is also because precise accounts of desire’s functioning and indeed the mechanics of the numerous psychoanalytic presuppositions that buttress so many of the book’s evocative claims, like sexuation and the death drive, are not elaborated. Such inclusion would aid my reading substantively. Perhaps a consequence of how generously the book delivers on Carby’s call to take up– to take Black feminism up as a problem and not a solution, it at times provides less than one might hope in terms of critical genealogies generally.
As another instance of this, I am also curious in terms of the text’s thinking with and alongside Black feminist philosophies, what intellectual history undergirds Douglas’ use of ontology? Wynter and Spillers seem to mean something like a Blackness ontologized, perhaps in the case of Spillers because of her heavy reliance on a Lacanian account of the Black woman’s misnaming for her account of ungendering, and for the Black intramural communicative rationality delineated in her essay, All the Things, as having the potential to rewrite the Black woman’s narrative in a restoration of Black subjectivity from a prior emptiness, a space of silence or denied speech, and denied relation to others. In the case of Spillers and Wynter, I think slavery is cast as at once productive of an ontology and heavily indebted to knowledge claims, which are evidently alterable given the fact of their own emergence in relation to a particular conjuncture.
Douglass seems to mean something more permanent than this, but what is the critical departure from a particular conception of ontology that gets us here? And somewhat relatedly, in terms of ontology’s privileging of totality, I would like to know more about how we might think the interpretalive protocols of racial sexuation, particularly in so far as they might be understood as intention with the instability and incoherence of racial seeing. I’m thinking about this in part because we’re reading Passing in my Literature and Black Feminism class, which provoked a question for me about how the kind of context of Passing might model a less straightforward script for Fanon’s look a negro encounter in its kind of sexuating dimensions.
And finally, this is a smaller question related to these larger ones, given how the violence of slavery sature– saturates conceptuality and naming for Douglass, I would like to hear more about the topographical decisions throughout the book, especially capitalizing the word blackness alongside or maybe against the striking through of the word mother. To be sure, these are all questions that emerge from my strong conviction that this is a book saying something unique and important, which scholars across gender and sexuality studies, black studies, philosophy, and beyond would do well to take seriously. I am excited for the opportunity in this conversation to gain even further guidance on thinking with and taking up its evocative formulations.
(panelists applauding)
[COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS]
Thank you both for those really wonderful and just very thoughtful contributions. Patrice, if you’d like an opportunity to respond?
[PATRICE DOUGLASS]
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much that can be said. We have 15 minutes left.
(all laughing)
[COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS]
20.
[PATRICE DOUGLASS]
Thank you, my mic’s, it’s hidden under my chin.
(laughing)
If you wouldn’t mind, I think I may want to sort of go in order, and then make some connections, but I’d, first I’d like to say thank you to you both for extremely evocative and thought-provoking comments, which I’m still thinking through as I attempt response, and emphasis on attempt.
(laughing)
So I think to come back to your initial question, Solar, on the figure of the terrorist and how Afro-pessimism may speak to or provide some kind of alternative lens or, or complementary lens to think about. For me, this sort of guides me to think about the kind of black trad– black political tradition that underguards Afro-pessimism that sometimes people don’t think so so readily about, but in some of the earlier works of Frank Wilderson and also my some of my current works we think a lot about black political insurgency and think about the, the legacies and the consequences of black political action in the 1960s and ’70s. And so I think for me, in terms of thinking about the terrorist and its interrelatedness to the FBI’s counterintelligence program and the response, the very forceful and violent response to the idea that Black people could imagine their own liberation, I think is all interconnected.
And as you were saying, it’s not allegorical but it definitely highlights and amplifies the structural relationality of the U.S.’s violent force as a permanent constitution of its racialization and racial naming, classification in making, but also how those struggles begin to sort of bleed into one another. And so I’m thinking specifically about Assata Shakur who recently passed may she rest in power, and how she was the first woman who was added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list. And that there’s a continuation of this struggle of sort of Black political struggle that’s being animated through the conceptualization of the figure of the terrorist as a central component of the U.S.’s war on so many things.
And so, it also, you know, as I was thinking with your comments made me think about in addition to Assata Shakur also, as you’re noting, the hyper surveillancing of Black Muslims once the War on Terror began, the infiltrating in very similar ways to COINTELPRO of Black mosque and the indictment charging and permanent incarceration of Black Muslims under terrorist charges. And so I think that Afro-pessimism often gets understood as like an exclusively black conversation when in reality, it is first and foremost a conversation around structural positionality and thinking about scales and sort of consistencies of violence. And that I think sometimes the assumption about differentiation between those violences are about how certain groups are perceived as maintaining certain qualities of humanness that blackness erodes and so therefore there’s a kind of distancing.
But to again quote Frank Wilderson, “The call of Afro-pessimism is to invite whites and also racial junior partners,” as he says, “to dance the dance of social death,” which is to embrace and to embody the anxiety that these figures that are attuned in spaces of only solely violence and then beginning and thinking solely there rather than trying to escape towards some flight of freedom or some kind of reappropriation of the current terms of the world as possible for some other kind of remaking. And so I think that’s how I would frame sort of a response to the ways that Afro-pessimism can inform or think with the terracing. I think that the question around the eunuch is a really big one.
And as you were reading Orlando Patterson’s quote, I could not get over the hyper feminization of the figure of the eunuch as its particular heightened, like permanent slaveness. And so for me, it brought up, like, I have a section in the book on the Black eunuch and how Eldridge Cleaver, also within the same tradition of Black radical insurgency and Black political insurgency is writing about the Black eunuch as a divestment in his ball. So it’s a divestment in a certain kind of anatomical claim to gender.
But I think what was very interesting for me in hearing you read Patterson is also how, you know, there is this way that gender or the experience of sexual terror becomes the grounds for which there’s sort of a super or a hyper exponentializing of the– the gravity of the condition because Spillers kind of does an inverse where the female slave becomes exponentialized as the quintessential slave through her own sexual violation. So there’s an interesting way in which there’s a hierarchy that is mapped out along the lines of an assumption about what kinds of sexual violence is sort of the zero degree of conceptualization, the end of zones of being, the sort of point of no return. I think it’s a chicken and an egg.
It’s not really something that one can come to a conclusion on, is the female slave more quintessential as the power or harmed more, or this slave is harmed more? And then when you start to deconstruct, you see that there’s some gender assumptions at play in how the concern even animates itself in the first instance, which is that the concern is on sort of the aftereffects of a morphing into a more feminized gendered subject, rather than actually on the violence itself, which is the violence of castration and physical amputation. And so there’s no focus on the anatomical features of that violation, but more so sort of a transitioning that that violation may cause, and so it’s a fear of transitioning, a fear of transness at play.
And I think i– It’s important to know how trans studies and specifically uh, the work of someone who I’ve been thinking with for many, many years, Cecilia Cooper, has really helped me to undo the way that gender stakes a claim on thought, even in ways that we may not perceive, which is to think that perhaps the TransAtlantic slave trade morphed something that was prior to so– something conceptualizable and real, you know? And that slavery comes in and changes the scope of things.
Rather, looking at gender as a as a– an ins– imposition that is not an aid and it’s not natural, it’s not something that exists since the dawning of man, which is a very Christian sort of assumption about gender. But really looking at gender as a script of power and possession, that even womanhood falls underneath the category of, or within the purview of, and my book is trying to really get at where those investments might then redouble a very cis-centric and very transphobic investment in gender as a solution to a history that is predicated on those very demarcations and binary conceptions in the first instance. And so that’s all a way to say that thinking about this particular figure helps to get at the sort of anxieties of what people are perceiving that this slave is losing and therefore, perhaps may then sort of mark a form of loss that may be conceived as inconceivable.
And to me, Patterson is a very seemingly afraid of transness.
(Patrice laughing)
Maybe perhaps not aware, but that doesn’t matter.
(Patrice laughing)
It– it’s there nonetheless, and so I think on that particular point connects me to some of your readings, Henry, which are really pushing me. So if I’m not complete, it is because I am still thinking. Yeah.
But the– the figure of the– the female and the Black woman and how that orients the second chapter of the book is also, again intent on sort of amplifying an anxiety, where there’s been a very sort of repulsive gesture within Black feminism to say that to be termed female was to be termed in some way that was deracinating and incomplete, and that womanhood could come around and recover.
[HENRY WASHINGTON JR.]
Mm-hmm.
[PATRICE DOUGLASS]
And I think that there’s no way to dissect womanhood from its racial violence, and that the value of womanhood and the privileging of womanhood is because of its exclusionary categorization. And so the work of the Veolia Glymph is really helpful for me in that way, which comes into that chapter as well, where she’s thinking about the constitution of the mistress and how the mistresses distinction between the female slave is the mistresses’ proprietary claim to violence in the domestic space. And so, I think, you know, I am deeply indebted to the various feminists that you name, that I name in the book that I’m working through, and as Courtney and I were talking about before anybody enters the room, the work is pushing Black feminism, but it is not disavowing or discarding Black feminism.
But it’s really wanting to push the theory in a direction where it’s engaged critically in the same ways in which other forms of critical theory are engaged. And I found myself writing that particular chapter, which is pushing even some of my own previous work forward, is to avoid the kind of deification of Black women’s scholarship and Black feminist scholarship as something that is sort of recited like a Bible, but not something that is actually engaged and disarticulated in certain ways to push our frameworks to stop replicating things that don’t serve us. And there’s a way in which Black feminism has taken up this investment in cis womanhood that I think is very transphobic, and is very exclusionary, and doesn’t do the work of thinking capaciously about the laundry of slavery for all Black people, not just Black people who identify their gender by their genitals.
And so, rather than saying it like that, I wanted to get into some of the most critical text that may not call themselves Black feminist text, but are read within Black feminism to make new departures within the question of womanhood, and to look at how these texts are very serious in certain ways. They give us a very sophisticated theoretical language, but perhaps are not rising to the occasion of being able to think about gender as critically as perhaps it could, you know. And so, I teach Beyond Miranda’s Meaning a lot, and I’m always really taken back by the assumption of the possessive nature of Caliban’s relationship to this woman.
And I remember, like, flippantly, I was like, “Well, what if really, like, Caliban doesn’t want a woman? And what if a woman doesn’t want Caliban? And what if Caliban’s like, you know, just all of these various differentiations that would then make the argument break apart.
And so then, as I approached engaging with the afterwords, which is the afterwords to Beyond Cumbia or I think that’s the name of the, the collection. But, or Out of Cumbia or maybe it’s not even that. But, regardless, engaging with this afterwords in a way that allows us to not sort of rest at the demonic grounds as this sort of reclamation, but even in some ways tear that apart, which Cecilio Cooper does a really good job at.
And I continue to plug Cecilio because I think they’re really brilliant. But I think in terms of the psychoanalytic piece you’re right, it is underdeveloped, and it’s underdeveloped for a reason.
(laughing)
Because I didn’t want to give a lot of space in the book to the kind of patriarchal maneuver that occurs in psychoanalysis often, which is like allegiance to a father or even an allegiance to a mother, right, where you sort of have to stake your claim. Like, is this psychoanalysis through Freud? Is it Lacan?
Is it LeBlanc? Is it this? Is it this?
Is what it? You know, I just wanted to think about some of the terms that psychoanalysis makes operable and useful, like desire and fantasy, drive, death drive, but to not engage in the tango of trying to privilege a certain school over others, which takes a lot of space. But I do appreciate the gestures that Spillers makes in All The Things She Could Be.
And I didn’t get a chance to get into the argument a lot, but there is a disagreement within Black studies about, or at least within certain angles of Black studies where how to deal with her particular departure from Lacan, or how she sort of asserts that Lacan is unable to see, or that it fails or falls apart on a question of racial intrusion. And David Marriott thinks that Sylvia, I’m sorry, that Spillers is completely wrong. And then Frank Wilderson thinks that she’s completely right, right?
But then it gets into this tango, which diverts away from the question of sexual violation and sexual violability in a way that I just wanted to touch on in certain points of the book, but to not go so deeply into that direction. And so in a sense, I left it intentionally vague and incomplete. But it’s interesting, as Courtney was saying, that there are some Twitter students who are formulating reading groups.
It is a point that continues to come up, which is like, what is the relationship of the text to certain veins of psychoanalysis? And I really appreciate other people arguing that for me, ’cause I don’t have any stakes in that fight. But I did find in coming back around to the idea of the book post-dissertation that certain psychoanalytic gestures were necessary.
Because there was a way that sexual violence was persistently thought of only in material terms, in terms of the material effects on the body and embodiment, and that here was less said about the psychic dispersion of the sexual status of the slave into places like Eastern Europe and other contexts where people haven’t even encountered someone to say, “Look, a Negro,” but yet they’re fantasizing about sexual encounter with the power dynamics of the plantation, such that their own sexual awakenings emerge through th– through this paradigm. And so I wanted to be able to account for that as a part of this, not something that’s excessive or somehow an anomaly or something to scratch your head at. But you know, if you go to Germany, there are these huts that are Uncle Tom’s cabins that you can go and engage, and they still exist, and Germans will still fight for them to exist.
And I think that there’s something powerful there and important to rest on, rather than to sort of just shoo it to the side, and I found that out actually while writing chapter four. I was in Germany in summer 2024, explaining to someone who had brought me over as a Fellow that I was writing this, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, there are lots of Uncle Tom’s cabins.
In fact, one of the train stations in Berlin is called that.” I was like, ‘What?’
(chuckling)
It just exploded my world, right? So like, there’s an unendingness to the way that people derive pleasure from slavery. And that’s what I wanted the book to be able to, in some way capture.
And so, rather than trying to announce this particular truth the book wants to deepen the contours of the story, and to not sort of inaugurate some primary way of doing it, but to call attention to the contradictions and to the things that are still unsettled. And then I look forward to how the book may produce work that moves forward and continues to even push my own frames of thought. So I’ll end there.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
[COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS]
Thank you all for being here this afternoon. Thank you, Salar and Henry for your wonderful comments. Thank you so much, Patrice, for this incredible work. And thank you all for joining us. Have a great day.
(audience applauding)
(soft upbeat music)
