Notes from the Kitchen, the Crossroads, and Everywhere Else, too: Ruptures of Thought, Word, and Deed from the "Arbiters of Blackness Itself"

This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms. Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency says about the nature of black positionality and the significance of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and the slave polity—the "arbiters of blackness itself"—via considerations of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence, and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.