Ontological Terror

Understanding systemic racism: Anti-Blackness, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the re/creation of white space and time.

“…In similar ways that most white people were (and are) likely to forge solidarity in their whiteness, many white people can, and have found common purpose in anti-Blackness (e.g., National Football League fans and owners protesting a kneeling football player; Liu et al, 2019). Given the explicit functions of anti-Blackness in sustaining white privilege and power, we can thus appreciate Warren's (2018) assertion in Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation wherein he writes: "Black freedom, then, would constitute a form of world destruction : : : ." (2018, p. 6).…”

Attempting Redress: Fungibility, Ethics, and Redressive Practice in the Work of Saidiya Hartman

“…Calvin Warren's Ontological Terror draws on Hartman's account of fungibility in offering a reading of how Black people are taken as not having any sense of being-no recognizable or stable essence-of their own. 11 C. Riley Snorton centers a rethinking of fungibility in its relationship to the mutability of gender for Black peoples in his Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. 12 Much like Tiffany Lethabo King in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, 13 Snorton emphasizes the relationship between Hartman's account of fungibility and visions of Black fugitivity drawn from Moten.…”

“…48 Warren echoes Wilderson's claim that this ontology requires a "paradigmatic analysis," 49 arguing that "Hartman's analysis in the postbellum period and my analysis of the antebellum period provide a paradigmatic perspective on emancipation". 50 Such readings, in their attempts to isolate Hartman's senses of Blackness, fungibility, and emancipation are belied when put in conversation with Hartman's focus on a redress that questions the totalism of these formulations and their desire to say what Blackness is-or is not-distinct from how it is made and remade. Rather than focusing on ontological descriptions of Blackness as fungible, Hartman clarifies that her "reading attempts to elucidate the means by which the wanton use of and the violence directed toward the Black body come to be identified as its pleasures and dangers-that is, the expectations of slave property are ontologized as the innate capacities and inner feelings of the enslaved, and moreover, the ascription of excess and enjoyment to the African effaces the violence perpetrated against the enslaved".…”

For Estrangement: Queerness, Blackness, and Unintelligibility

“…On this model, shared with someone like Muñoz, a return to and re-interpretation of marginalized traditions or alternative possibilities not taken up in the past can animate visions of alternative futures. Here the unintelligibility of queerness or blackness marks intrusion into the present of the radically otherwise in both this past and future.10 In his epilogue to Red, White, & Black, Wilderson writes that "…whereas historical time marks stasis and change within a paradigm, it does not mark the time of the paradigm, the time of time itself, the time by which the Slave's dramatic clock is set"(Wilderson, 2010, p. 339).11 For discussions of how queerness and blackness have, respectively, been tied to conceptions of madness seeHuffer (2010) andWarren (2018).12 This non-teleological or purposive sense of estrangement might be a part of its importance insofar as its untethering from certainty or purpose links it to a sense of freedom. Though I do not have room to elaborate on it here, this may be an opening to think further on connections between Baldwin's work and existentialism.…”