David Ventura

This introduction offers an overview of some central strands through which contemporary Black radical thought has conceived the temporal dimension of practices of refusal. Tracing the connection between time and refusal that emerges across the works of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman and other contemporary Black thinkers, we position refusal as a radical temporal practice that can unsettle the racialized grammars of time inaugurated by the histories of transatlantic slavery and Western colonization.

In this article I consider the kind of temporality that radical practices of refusal can be said to open in resistance to the enduring afterlives of slavery. To do so, I study what I call two abyssal figurations of refusal in Édouard Glissant's work, namely, the ‘silent walker’ in his 1990 Poetics of Relation and the ‘nameless woman’ in his 1981 novel The Overseer's Cabin. In both cases, I argue, Glissant envisions refusal as an ambivalent performance that — bearing a constitutive relation to what he calls ‘the abyss’ of racial slavery — transversally exceeds both the Black optimist and Afro-pessimist readings of refusal that retain currency in contemporary Black studies. What is echoed in the two figurations I study is the ambivalent sense in which the refusing performances of blackness simultaneously divert and remain held by the temporal structures of anti-Black coloniality that they strain against or refuse.

In their shared works, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeatedly advise that ethical practices of experimentation must be imbued with a large dose of prudence. Among commentators, this concept of prudence has primarily been read in cautionary terms, as that which merely enables ethical subjects to avoid the “many dangers” of experimentation. By contrast, this article develops a wider, more positive reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian prudence. Focussing specifically on A Thousand Plateaus, I show that, for Deleuze and Guattari, we must always exercise prudence in ethics because prudence constitutes one positive means of maximizing the success of experimental ethical praxes.

This paper elucidates Édouard Glissant's contribution to contemporary scholarship on the afterlives of slavery by examining his varied explorations of the enduring temporal significance of the Middle Passage. In theoretical writings such as Poétique de la Relation, Glissant extensively casts the Middle Passage as an abyss (gouffre) that radically disfigures all senses of time for those who–or whose ancestors–survived the trauma of forced transportation to the Americas. Moreover, in fictional works such as Le Quatrième siècle, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony, Glissant creatively reimagines the history of Martinique to explore how this abyssal experience continues to ambivalently shape the lived temporality of Caribbean peoples today. Addressing a tendency in recent Glissant scholarship to separate his theoretical from his fictional texts, this paper reads both in tandem to argue that they diffract one another to portray the Middle Passage as an ambivalent temporal beginning: as both the radical rupture in temporal coordinates imposed by the historical experience of slavery, and as a condition for potential shifts away from the oppressive, racializing, and colonizing structures of time that have emerged in the wake of that brutal historical legacy. Indeed, insofar as Glissant conceives the meaning of the Middle Passage as an abyssal double beginning, his work intimates vital poetic strategies of resistance and refusal that challenge the unjust configurations of time that continue to dominate our worlds today.

The final chapter of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth includes several psychiatric case histories that speak to the indelible effects of the deathly atmospherics of colonialism on the psychology of the colonized. Though Fanon reveals that these case histories are drawn from his own clinical practice in Algeria, he almost entirely refuses to contextualize their inclusion in the text, and even warns that his presentation intentionally ‘avoid[s] any semiological, nosological, or therapeutic discussion’. In this article, I read Fanon’s case histories in Wretched in terms of Christina Sharpe’s notion of Black redaction, which she adumbrates in her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as a critical strategy for ‘imagining otherwise’ that seeks to counter the generalized anti-Black atmosphere that still governs the world in the wake of transatlantic slavery. My argument is that in presenting the case histories of Wretched in refusal of dominant psychiatric discourses, Fanon engages a Black redactive strategy that aims to imagine the psychological effects of colonization otherwise than through the pathologizing colonial frames by which racialized and colonized lives are systematically rendered invisible. Further, I contend that reading Fanon’s case histories in such Black redactive terms enables us to recognize that his clinically inflected political thought is not premised on a valuation of pathology, as has been argued by his Black optimist (Fred Moten) and Afro-pessimist (Jared Sexton) readers alike. In fact, as I conclude by arguing in response to these readings, at play in Fanon’s Black redactive strategy in Wretched is not a valuation of pathology, but the matter of its transvaluation.

In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon seemingly rejects the role that the past can play in the creation of decolonized futurities, famously writing: “I am not a prisoner of History (l’Histoire). I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.” On this basis, Fanon’s thought has often been read as opposed to the more prophetic vision of the past offered by Édouard Glissant, which emphasizes the contrapuntal potentialities that inhere in Black vernacular cultures and histories. In contrast to such readings, this paper contends that Fanon and Glissant similarly uphold a dual conception of the past as encompassing both History (l’Histoire), or the racialized fantasy of chronological linearity that was invented by Western modernity, and histories, a subterranean and mobile network of memories that always remains fugitive to the colonial machinations of History. Tracing this more ambivalent conception of the past through Black Skin, White Masks, Wretched of the Earth, and the writings that Fanon penned during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria, I argue that Fanon’s thought on the past, far from being opposed to Glissant’s, in fact similarly upholds the prophetic value that the past qua histories can play in unleashing decolonized futurities.

In their shared works, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeatedly advise that ethical practices of experimentation must be imbued with a large dose of prudence. Among commentators, this concept of prudence has primarily been read in cautionary terms, as that which merely enables ethical subjects to avoid the “many dangers” of experimentation. By contrast, this article develops a wider, more positive reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian prudence. Focussing specifically on A Thousand Plateaus, I show that, for Deleuze and Guattari, we must always exercise prudence in ethics because prudence constitutes one positive means of maximizing the success of experimental ethical praxes.

This paper develops a response to the ethical conception of the human Other formulated by Gilles Deleuze in his review of Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday. The central contention here is that although Deleuze develops a compelling notion of intensive ethics in response to Tournier’s novel, that ethics also remains deeply problematic in refusing to ascribe a positive role to the human Other. My wager is that some of these problems can be brought to light by placing Deleuze’s philosophy in dialogue with that of Emmanuel Levinas. As I seek to show, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity not only reveals that Deleuze is mistaken in failing to ascribe a positive ethical role to the human Other, but also begins to point the way toward a more positive conception of ethics that does not oppose the Other to the intensive realm that Deleuze so much values.