Andrea Warmack

In The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change (2024)—an energetic dovetail of disaster sociology and feminist epistemology—Pascoe and Stirling claim there is no such thing as a natural disaster, as all disasters are the product/result of human construction. They use Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival” to anchor their project and focus on Lorde’s understanding of the relationship between poetry, knowledge, and survival to critique dominant the disaster imaginaries. I suggest that a more accurate use of “A Litany for Survival” leans toward a phenomenological epistemology of surviving, rather than a focus on the survivor.

Early american Black Blueswomen—such as Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone—perform Blues as a praxis that both critiques and transforms the ways in which american Black people were—and continue to be—excluded from the construct of the human subject. Merleau‐Ponty's account of inter‐subjectivity is predicated on his account of the human subject who is always‐already in a social milieu in which they are never taken for an object. Subjectivity is affirmed through the subject's ability to differentiate itself from objects via sight. In this way the human subject is sensorially, affectively, epistemically, and axiologically organized as eye‐forward. The human subject's ability to exceed objectification runs counter to the lived experiences of a number of precaritized peoples, specifically, american Black people. If being seen without being objectified is the lived experience of the subject, then subjectivity is an exclusive way‐of‐ being in the world. Rather than inhabit this exclusion from human subjectivity as a lack, american Black people—as is evidenced by Blues—create a social otherwise with distinct ways of living—not just surviving or enduring—created within, but not wholly determined by, the pornotrope or the wake. This paper begins to sound out a way that this social otherwise breathes life into its own socio‐ethical experience via a turn to the aural. This paper takes up Blues to explore what expressive and affective ways‐of‐ being in the world are possible with an ear‐forward sensorial organization.

Not all homo sapiens are human subjects. This paper explores the lived experience of homo sapiens but not human that I call “lived flesh.” A lived experience/distinction that shouldn’t be possible on Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm.” The use of flesh is deliberate and emerges from my engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The affective, experiential, and ethical practices of american Blackwomxn in these texts problematize Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity and his account of the generality of Being (“The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). Merleau-Ponty’s effacement of raced, sexed, and gendered difference results in a construct of the human subject that cannot include all homo sapiens.

In chapter 7 of her 2008 book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman writes, “I too am trying to save the girl, not from death or sickness or a tyrant but from oblivion. [...] These words are the only defense of her existence, the only barrier against her disappearance”. Hartman’s project in Lose Your Mother is a search for a life beyond the archive; it is a search for a living narrative, written on, in, and by the body—an act of re-membering. The same sentiment is echoed in Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Cooper offers a sympathetic rejoinder to Hartman’s investigation of what it means to be the contemporaries of the enslaved, and what it means to theorize: to produce a living history by a loving engagement in, with, and through the body. Cooper’s approach is to utilize the practice of listing. Listing is the “intentional calling of names [that] create[s] an intellectual genealogy for race women’s work and was a practice of resistance against intellectual erasure”. Beyond Respectability engages with some key thinkers in early Black feminist thought: Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauli Murray. In this review, I briefly summarize the key theories described in the book. I conclude by arguing that Cooper’s reading is limited when it comes to reading Pauli Murray as a “race woman.”