UC Irvine

In a Field of Static examines the debates that shaped contemporary critical theory as an interconnected series of missed encounters with Black feminist theorizing. Turning on a phrase from Hortense Spillers, it remains necessary for practitioners interested in Black women’s literary, political, and social texts to ‘clear the field of static.’ In a Field of Static offers an account of the ongoing ways critical theory eclipses Black feminist theorizing, a history of the critical debates that have shaped Black feminism’s presence in the academy, and a feminist critique of the racial and gender politics of field formation. The first chapter tracks the early itineraries of ‘theory’ in the US academy, elaborating how ‘theory’ came to name a specific set of critical practices and how Black feminism was constructed outside of and opposed to the theoretical. The second chapter is framed around the prison writings of Assata Shakur, her incarceration in a men’s prison, and her denied appeals to be incarcerated in a women’s facility. Within those stories, the chapter explores Hortense Spillers’ theorization of ‘ungendering’ as a form of originary positivity, rather than the loss of gender. The third chapter offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine recent critiques of intersectionality produced under the heading of “assemblage theory.” Intervening in these critiques of intersectionality, the article traces alternative theorizations of spatiality and subjectivity internal to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, extending them through Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the interstice as the nonsite of the Black female subject. The fourth chapter turns on the limits of narrativity, and how Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur constructed life narratives in the face of a state violence whose weapons included narrative. The chapter tracks how a feminist Black radicalism emerges within Black revolutionary formations in the 1970s. The final chapter explores the Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The chapter elaborates a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.