Guest Editor's Introduction: On Pleasure and Death in Black Studies

Black studies is in the midst of two preoccupations: pleasure and death. Work emerging from Black feminist theory, Black queer theory, and queer of color critique has centered pleasure, desire, the "funk,"¹ "bottom pleasures,"² and "ecstasy."³ It has drawn on new archives, including pornography⁴ and BDSM,⁵ and generated new analytics, including tactility, sensation,⁶ and the avatar⁷ to advance the study of Black eroticism. The new attention to Black pleasures has both rejected "older" logics of respectability and dissemblance,⁸ and imagined Black eroticism as a practice of freedom even as it has always attended to pleasure itself as complex, fraught, and shot through with violence. That this same body of work has emerged alongside interdisciplinary scholarship upending the fetishization of the visible and celebrating logics of quiet,⁹ wandering,¹⁰ mystery,¹¹ and privacy¹² suggests that Black eroticism might do its freedom-making work not only through logics of hypervisibility but also through quieter, quotidian, fugitive, or illegible practices.

If Black eroticism has underscored critical linkages between sexuality and freedom the turn toward theorizing Black death has emphasized Black unfreedom. Though Black feminists have long theorized the imbrication of Black life and Black death, a range of new texts that are often described as afropessimist have considered not only the ways that Black death is constitutive of Black life, but the necessity of new analytics to capture the variety of ways that Blackness falls outside of the category of the human completely. If the "condition of Black life is mourning,"¹³ afropessimism has rooted its theoretical and political efforts in both the long "afterlives" of slavery—the longue durée of slavery—and in the present moment, marked by increasingly visible protests against state-sanctioned murders of Black flesh. Indeed, the investment in death has called for new attention to how Black subjects inhabit "the wake,"¹⁴ revealing that categories like "the human" need to be fundamentally rethought from the starting point of how Blackness is its constitutive outsider, and called for new analytics like onticide¹⁵ to attend to the (social) death worlds that Black bodies inhabit.

This special issue places erotics and death side by side, considering these respective "turns" in Black studies not as mutually exclusive pulls tugging at the seams of the field but as preoccupations that can be productively placed into critical dialogue. More than that, this special issue endeavors to ask what the side-by-sideness of death and eroticism can tell us about the institutional project of Black studies at this moment in its ongoing unfolding. The issue, then, aspires to pose questions such as: How and why do Black pleasure and Black death coexist at the core of contemporary debates in Black studies? Why these two "turns" in this current moment? What are the gendered and sexual politics of conceptualizing Black bodies—or Blackness itself—either (or both) as ecstatic pleasure and/or as suffering? Which bodies—gendered, raced, classed, national—are imagined to be in pleasure, and which are imagined to be in grief, in suffering, in mourning? In what ways are Black death, Black suffering, and Black pain suffused with the erotic? (Or, which Black deaths, sufferings, or pains are erotically charged?) In what ways is Black eroticism shaped by Black death?

The special issue begins with three short provocations, each taking up the side-by-sideness of Black death and Black eroticism differently. In his provocation, James Bliss poses a series of crucial queries including,

Does talk of mourning foreclose a discussion of pleasure or desire? Is talk of pleasure not also talk of mourning? And what is lost when mourning is reduced to acts of mourning? When desire is reduced to its instances? What happens when loss is the loss of specific, identifiable objects? Or when pleasure is reduced to sensation? How do these terms shape how we think the political—historically or as projects of the present and future? Is a discourse of Black mourning politically debilitating, and are the interventions called 'afro-pessimism' a symptom of a debilitated politics? What...