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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Andrew Santana Kaplan is an assistant professor of African American literature in the Department of English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Prose Studies; Political Theology; The Comparatist; Chiasma: A Site for Thought; Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy; and Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future (McFarland 2023).

Kevin Pyon is an assistant professor of American Literature, Race, and Ethnic Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Women’s Studies, Black Camera, Early American Literature, Early American Studies, and CR: The New Centennial Review. He is currently completing a book project, “The Political Theology of the Enslaved” (working title) that explores how early Black authors and poets turned to religious imagery and theological concepts to articulate grammars of violence and represent figurations of alterity unavailable within the political language and imagination of the nation-state.

Abstract

This essay interrogates the critical presuppositions of the genre of autotheory for reckoning with the aporia of social death central to the fields of Black studies. The burgeoning scholarship on autotheory has viewed its formal hybridity as indexing a radical intersubjectivity that exceeds the generic and ontological assumptions of the universal subject of theory and the self-possessive individualism of autobiography. However, we contend that autotheory’s perceived embodiment of a radical intersubjectivity is predicated on a universal capacity for kinship that elides its parasitic relation to the generational kinlessness of slavery and its afterlives. Whereas autotheory writ large makes recourse to an implicit or explicit humanism as an avenue for articulating a radical intersectional or coalitional politics, the examples of Black feminist autotheory considered in this essay reckon with the figure of the Black maternal as “both mother and mother-dispossessed,” which is to say Black kin/lessness. As theorized by Hortense J. Spillers, Saidiya V. Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, the Black maternal indexes the condition of natal alienation on both the micro scale of the family—partus sequitur ventrem—and the macro scale of the nation/ diaspora. If, as Spillers argues, the ungendered (captive) flesh comes before (liberated) body-capable-of-kin, then we argue that the Black maternal’s natal alienation introduces a caesura between auto- (self) and theory, leading us to (re)cast the work

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