The De-American Bartleby

This section considers how Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” challenges the authority and coherence of the American project.

The Sonic Bartleby

Basing the discussion on Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” this section focuses on the rising significance of sound in the digital regime of the image and what it might do to the norms and standards of language and communication.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the use of speculation in corporate scenarios in order to introduce the book’s main themes of speculation, futurity, interdisciplinarity, finance capital, queer temporality, and Black existence.

“Corporate Cannibal”

This chapter continues to develop a reading of Coleman’s essay through an engagement with pop star Grace Jones’s body of work. I discuss Édouard Glissant’s conceptualization of “errantry” as a mode through which Jones navigates the historical imbrication of Black skin with questions of ownership, gender, sexuality, (im)propriety, and technē.

Yet Still

This chapter considers how four films, Looking for Langston (directed by Isaac Julien, 1989), The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye,1996), Brother to Brother (directed by Rodney Evans, 2005),and The Aggressives (directed by Daniel Peddle, 2005), involve related, but different organizations of time. While all of the films offer insights into the temporality of a present sense of political possibility, the first three films evince a desire for a usable past that might work in the service of the present, while The Aggressives organizes time idiosyncratically in a strategy that provides an opportunity to consider how queer temporality carries spatial implications that might anchor another orientation toward the past, present, and the future—one in which listening for “poetry from the future,” without insisting it be recognizable as such, is an ethical demand of and for our times.

Interregnum

This chapter begins to explore what Herman Melville’s 1853 “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” offers to Queer Times, Black Futures.With its setting being Wall Street, New York City,its title explicitly referring to that center of finance, and Bartleby’s occupation as a legal copyist directly implicating the story in questions of law and governance, “Bartleby” has inspired philosophical concepts relevant to the spatiotemporal entanglements of concern throughout this project.The ensuing sections on “Bartleby”also call attention to the story’s interplay of sound and vision in ways that might be of interest to those who are thinking with and through the digital regime of the image in societies of control, and how the story raises questions about the American enterprise that might generate imaginative formulations of the errant possibilities it harbors. Finally, I argue that what Gilles Deleuze refers to as Bartleby’s “queer formula”—“I would prefer not to”— can be understood as a mode of radical refusal, a de-creative, unaccountable, ungovernable, and errant insistence that confronts such violences head on in search of an expressive realization of existence beyond measure.

“World Galaxy”

This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different constellation of Afrofuturism, one that turns not toward outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, but toward an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor’s and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel,Who Fears Death, and Kahui’s short film,Pumzi, from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.

Black Cinema and Questions Concerning Film/Media/Technology

This chapter focuses on the role technological considerations have played in the history of Black cinema, with a particular emphasis on the rise of technologies of digital mediation. In this chapter, I follow the interest in technē posited in the first wave of Afrofuturist cultural production during the 1990s, and suggest that Beth Coleman’s 2009 essay on “Race as Technology” offers a conceptualization of Black existence that is attuned to the contested ontological status of Black being, if there is such a thing.

“It’s after the End of the World (Don’t You Know That Yet?)”

This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in reorienting speculative imaginations toward the presently impossible, thereby emphasizing the salience of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of “transindividuation” as an intervention into Western conceptualizations of Being.