Anwar Uhuru

The article is a brief analysis of Cornell’s Imaginary Domain (1995) as an intervention into decolonizing intersecting systems of oppression. Cornell’s Imaginary Domain forces us to think of the intersecting factors that retain systems of power. It isn’t just about one form of oppression but all systems of oppression that separate us. However, creating a shared struggle to find and embody wholeness in response to the historical traumas of slavery, segregation, and systems of anti-Black oppression is fraught with tensions.

This article argues that in a space of artistic performance Black people can fully imbed themselves in the space, despite the temporality of the performance itself. Therefore, in the act of performing, Black people are able to fully be recognized as a human whole. The goal of this article is to think of a Hip Hop beingness that fuses the temporal/body, consciousness/beyond the body, and the ancestral connections of orality and genetic memory. I do so by looking at how black performance disrupts dominant narratives of black bodies as being just flesh. This article brings together, Hip Hop studies, Africana philosophy and performance theory to argue that the space of performativity moves beyond the notion of blackness as void and does not solely focus on the constraints of corporeal blackness. Instead, the black body imbeds the space it occupies. In doing so, it disrupts and reconfigures space, time, and narratives of belonging.

This essay introduces the concept of onto-plasticity as a framework for understanding Africana women's intersubjectivity within Western modernity, shaped by race and gender. Building on Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's concept of ontological plasticity, Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, and Africana Womanist thought, I argue that Black women are constantly shaped and reshaped by racial, sexual, legal, and knowledge systems. Onto-plasticity describes this forced flexibility but also points to something beyond being treated as interchangeable: the ability to take part in shaping and reshaping oneself. Through practices such as fugitivity, testimony, pleasure, joy, and rest, Africana women resist the categories imposed on them and define themselves. Looking at these practices from Black feminist and Africana philosophical perspectives, I suggest that Africana womanist intersubjectivity is more than just surviving in an anti-Black world. It is a way of being that lets Africana women refuse imposed labels and imagine new ways of living.

Kameron Carter’s reading of Black life as matter, as the imaginary, and as an innovation of possibilities enmeshes Black theology, Black womanist/feminist thought, Black Diaspora and Black American Studies, Philosophy, and Queer of Color Critique to reveal how the project of the western world erases Black physical and intellectual legacy. A project that is anti-black, anti-other, anti-difference that erases the legacy of the physical and intellectual aspects of Black contributions to the western world. His book is an invitation to think through what Black ontology would look like outside of white western constructions of religion and social scripts. Carter’s radical shift from being beyond the long durée of enslavement, colonization, segregation, and its afterlives scripts an (anti)blackening because of the western project of erasure works to undo such a project. The book is working against the social ontology of being a fragmented object that is plasticized, fetishized, and dissolved into a state of non-being. It is a project that disrupts and decolonizes previously constructed (anti)blackening architecture by creating a blueprint that asks for Black matter as an incomplete project because it must include imagination and innovation.

This article is an analysis of how anti-Black misandry appears in both theory and cultural production through Black male vulnerability (BMV) and fungibility. BMV and fungibility are tools that are used to maintain false perceptions and narratives of Black males whether they are heterosexual or same-gender loving (SGL). Focusing on the duality of BMV and fungibility is an act of insurrection because this article is talking with and theorizing from the perspective of Black males in the ways that both queer and gender theory under feminism do not. For example, I use the term SGL because there are men who do not identify as gay or bisexual because of the racist fetishization and exclusion from both the White LGBTQ community and feminist gender theorists.

This essay is to invite a new form of theorizing Baldwin’s intellectual archive beyond a work of protest or as being contributory to Queer writing. I argue that Baldwin’s thought often in the form of the polemic is a form of non-violent resistance. Baldwin’s contestation against whiteness and the methods of Black erasure in general and Black male annihilation in particular is why he is challenging the complexity of protest. In pushing against traditional or what has become traditional ways of analyzing Black thought, my essay highlights why figures like Baldwin are read in fragmentation. Hence, my insistence on Baldwin being categorized as a Gender/Genre theorist more so than a Queer theorist. Because his writings are on the erasure of Black Male existence within and outside of heteronormative spaces.