Jyothis James

Frederick Douglass's theory of “picture‐making” invites us to consider how Black males have crafted themselves with dignity, despite being bombarded by negative depictions in hostile visual regimes. The theorization and lived application of Douglass's esthetic philosophy serve as a counter‐forensic practice against specimen logic, challenging negative images of Black males crafted through racial fantasy and criminalization. Douglass's theory can corroborate the field of Black Male Studies by demonstrating how negative visual regimes generate the racial “imago” that contributes to the dehumanization of Black males as the “man‐not.” Though curtailed in this position of vulnerable exclusion, Black men have demonstrated visual agency, as seen in the Black dandy and carceral portraiture. These efforts can be read as an extension of Douglass's “outer man.” Therefore, the appreciation of Black male esthetic labor toward self‐definition is demonstrably a dignity‐sustaining mode amid precarious status and can serve as a conceptual supplement to existing theories of Black male exclusion and vulnerability.

Andrea Pitts’ Anzaldúan reading of multiplicitous agency critically weaves together Latinx, Latina feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, and disability theorizing alongside Anzaldúan scholarship to demonstrate how pluralistic communities come together for positive social transformation. In this process, they provide a powerful scholarly resource to Anzaldúan scholarship. Ultimately, Pitts invites us to break away from modes of being that fall into individualism, insularities, binaries, isolation, and even imperialism to imagine instead “new geographies of selves” (32). This revision involves developing an agential capacity that recognizes ours and other’s (nos y otrxs) multiplicitous and complex identities and their interaction. By being open to this complexity, opacity, ambivalence, and the imperative to new ways of being both intangible and tangible radical transformations emerge in practice. However, though rooted in Leonard Harris’ insurrectionist ethics, Pitts recognizes one must leave room for a coalitional process that may not succeed but is always open to interpretation and challenge considering the fluidity of multiplicitous agency that informs it (166).