Imperial (S)Kin: The Orthography of the Wake in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

The publication of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black has placed the novel among other works of history and art, which recall the material and epistemic violence of institutional racism and the lasting trauma of its legacy. Thus by interlacing, within the context of black critical theory, Yogita Goyal’s and Laura T. Murphy’s examining of the neo-slave narrative with Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of the wake and Alexander G. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus as critical frames for the discussion of racialized subjectivity, I consider how Edugyan’s use of the conventions of Victorian adventure literature and the slave narrative rethinks the entanglements between the imperial commodification of life and the scientific agenda of natural history. Given how the narrative emphasizes the somatic register and its epidermal terms as a scene of meaning, I bring together Frantz Fanon’s idea of epidermalization, Steven Connor’s phenomenological reading of the skin, and Calvin L. Warren’s reasoning about blackness in an attempt to highlight the metalepsis resulting from the novel’s use of the hot air-balloon and the octopus as dermatropes that cast the empire as simultaneously a dysfunctional family and a scientific laboratory. Loaded into the skin as a master trope is the conceptual cross-over between consciousness and conscience, whose narrative performance in the novel nourishes the affective labour of its reader as an agent of memory.

Otherwise than Blackness

This essay thinks through the centrality of the concept of “the World” to theorizations of affect and the presumed correlation between feeling and world—that is, the notion that affective experience is necessarily generative of world(s)—that operates as an uninterrogated maxim in both contemporary and classical theories of affect. Focusing on the figure and question of the World and its grammars of relation(ality) and becoming, this essay considers the implications of an insistence on worlding in the context of anti-Blackness. It argues that the sustenance of the very concept of the World necessitates a foreclosure of Black affect’s destructive drive. Black affect is therefore an impossibility within the World, as that unbearable negativity which drives us toward its necessary destruction. In light of this, the essay argues further that the tendency toward an uncritical embrace of affect as a mode of world-forming within strains of Black critical theory—represented by turns to “the otherwise”—performs a sublimation of Black affect’s radical negativity, as encapsulated in the desire for the End of the World.

“Hey, Black Child. Do You Know Who You Are?” Using African Diaspora Literacy to Humanize Blackness in Early Childhood Education

This article examines the partnership between a teacher and teacher educator disrupting a colonized early childhood curriculum that fosters a dominance of whiteness by replacing it with the beauty and brilliance of Blackness. We explore the following research question: “What are the affordances of teaching from an Afrocentric stance in a first-grade classroom?” We employ Afrocentrism, which includes African cultural principles as the paradigm, and our theoretical lenses are Critical Race Theory and Black Critical Theory. Our Sankofa methodology revealed that African Diaspora literacies fostered (a) positive racial and gender identities, (b) community, and (c) positive linguistic identities in the work to help children to love themselves, their histories, and their peoples. We close with implications.

Remembering Tamir Rice and Other Black Boy Victims: Imagining Black PlayCrit Literacies Inside and Outside Urban Literacy Education

Building on Critical Race Theory, Black Critical Theory in education (BlackCrit), and Black Male Studies (BMS), the author theorizes what he terms Black PlayCrit and, by extension, Black PlayCrit Literacies. Black PlayCrit brings attention to the specificity of Blackness and anti-Black misandric violence in the play experiences of Black boys, including Tamir Rice, who was murdered by two police officers while playing with a toy gun in a public park in Cleveland, Ohio. Black PlayCrit Literacies serves as a conceptual and pedagogical tool to challenge anti-Black misandry in Black boys’ play experiences. Given that the play experiences of Black boys (and other children of Color) are racialized and gendered, yet undertheorized in extant literature, specific recommendations are provided for urban literacy education research and practice to acknowledge and protect Black boys from the anti-Black misandric violence they face during boyhood play.