In her mixed media collage Do Androids Dream of How People Are Sheep? (2010), Krista Franklin superimposes images of animals, plants, and machines onto a photograph of a black woman in profile. A tiger’s torso defines the woman’s forearm, while an iris encircles her upper arm. A motor fills part of her semi-transparent breast. Additional items—several raspberries, a buck’s head—help to constitute the woman’s skin, muscles, or bones. These magazine cutouts evoke historical and contemporary conceptions of the black woman as fighter, mother, and laborer, while other pictures, including watchband links near her heart and a vault handle at her elbow, propel the woman forward into a technophilic future. Like the cyborgs of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.> (1968)—the science fiction novel from which the collage derives its name—the woman of Franklin’s piece defies easy categorization. Both human and nonhuman, subject and object, artifact and prophet, she conveys an identity as intricate as the white lace background against which her image rests.
By blurring the boundaries of human, animal, plant, and machine in her art, Franklin points to not only the woman’s complexity but also her ubiquity: she encompasses all states of existence, shaping and being shaped by what surrounds her. The Boss fashion label at the crook of her elbow, for instance, suggests the reflexive relationship between women of color and the clothing industry, a mutually constitutive association that extends from fashion houses to manufacturing plants. In the fashion world, African American designer Tracy Reese has garnered media attention for dressing First Lady Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, and British designer Carly Cushnie, whose parents hail from Jamaica, and her Canadian design partner, Michelle Ochs, of German and Filipino heritage, have received acclaim for outfitting such stars as Alicia Keys, Salma Hayek, and Reese Witherspoon (Adams). Despite the success of these style makers, laborers of color face unfair and unsafe working conditions in the United States and abroad. American retailers employ black workers in “more low paid cashier positions” and “fewer supervisory roles […] relative to [their] white counterparts” (Dayen), while apparel companies have named Ethiopia “a top sourcing destination” for garment manufacturing due to “cheap labor” and “inexpensive power,” a combination that in some countries—Bangladesh, for example—has led to worker exploitation and even to death (Passariello and Kapner; Jamieson, Hossain, and Bhasin). Representative of the diverse yet interconnected roles women of color occupy in the clothing industry, the Boss label affixed to the black woman in Do Androids Dream of How People Are Sheep? signals her liminality: her location on both sides of the dividing line between empowered and exploited, revered and reviled, honored and objectified.
In the United States, black women’s liminality precedes their recognition as citizens; in fact, it predates their arrival on colonial American soil. The Middle Passage journey from Africa to the Americas placed captured Africans between continents, languages, and identities. Toni Morrison and bell hooks compare this historical reality to contemporary existence. Morrison argues that “modern life begins with slavery,” since upon being enslaved, Africans experienced the “kinds of dissolution” and “madness” that characterize modern and postmodern life (qtd. in Gilroy, Small 178). Hooks similarly regards black women and men as representative figures in modern and postmodern societies, asserting in her essay “Postmodern Blackness”— the inspiration for my term posthuman blackness—that the “overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance” (27). According to Morrison and hooks, disorientation—a side effect of both forced and chosen border crossings—describes black life in the present as well as the past. But what about the future?
Franklin and other contemporary black artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and theorists record and reconfigure the black subject’s experiences of liminality by blending references to the past and present with predictions for the future. Kodwo Eshun situates this blending within the cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism. According to Eshun, Afrofuturism “reorient[s] the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective,” thereby pushing the black artistic “tradition of countermemory” into the future (“Further” 289). Franklin, a self-described Afrofuturist, asserts that this temporal interplay shapes her collages: “I like to pull the past and present into visual and literary spaces so they can live together,” she states in an exchange with art curator Tempestt Hazel, adding during another interview, “Octavia Butler is a huge influence for me when it comes to that kind of thinking about the future and what the future looks like for us in America. For me, the future is now too: we’re living in a wild time. So my view of the world is an extrapolation of the present and how we survive it” (Franklin and Hazel; Franklin and Andrews). In Afrofuturist cultural productions, historical experiences of disorientation converge with contemporary strategies for survival and futurist projections of vitality. As such, the black subject settles in multiple time periods simultaneously.
This understanding of black identity as temporally flexible, based in the history of what has occurred as well as the potential of what is to come, corresponds not only with the Afrofuturist aesthetic but also with the views of being and time found in the wider field of posthumanism, within which Afrofuturism resides. In posthuman theory, the subject—the individual, both body and mind—exists in networks of knowledge, discourse, and power that influence and are influenced by the subject. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “becoming,” theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Halberstam (who has published as J. Jack Halberstam since 2012), and Ira Livingston situate the posthuman being in a state of constant transformation that indicates the intimacy of past, present, and future temporalities as well as “self” and “other” identities. More than simply linked to the surrounding world, the posthuman subject travels “across and among” the borders of self and other, the “other” including people, communities, regimes, and technologies (Halberstam and Livingston 14). This movement indicates that the posthuman individual engages in a type of evolution that “produces nothing other than itself”— that is, the connections made between self and other within and across time are always already a part of the posthuman subject, a temporal paradox that elucidates the posthuman being’s simultaneous existence in the past, present, and future (Deleuze and Guattari 238).
Consider, for example, the subjective and temporal liminality of a classic posthuman figure: the cyborg. For most people, the word cyborg immediately brings to mind popular man– machine amalgams, such as the Terminator, Robocop, and the Borg from Star Trek. With their visible blending of organic and inorganic elements—a patch of skin here, a prosthetic arm there—these cyborgs incorporate the other onto and into the self, thus breaking down and reconstituting the borderlines of identity. However, not all cyborgs display discernable inorganic or otherwise alien physical characteristics, nor, despite pop-culture imagery, do they all feature white, male flesh. Instead, cyborg boundary crossings can occur internally or even conceptually across lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and other identity factors. According to Donna J. Haraway, “fusions of outsider identities”—such as the combination of gender and racial oppressions experienced by women of color—form the “potent subjectivity” of the cyborg, which makes the cyborg “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (174, 149).1 Jasbir K. Puar brings Haraway’s cyborg theory into conversation with intersectional feminist theory, analyzing their associations to each other and to systems of power. Puar argues that considering posthuman networks in the context of intersectional identities and, similarly, intersectional identities in the context of posthuman networks “can help us produce more roadmaps of [the] not quite fully understood relations between discipline and control” (63). She postulates that this new type of theory—itself a cyborgian joining of discrete elements—may allow those who navigate multiple marginalizations to reframe exclusionary histories, change dominant narratives, and craft more egalitarian futures (175–77).
By bringing together social theory and identity politics, posthumanism theorizes the being and bodies of individuals and their societies. I introduce the term posthuman blackness to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their coincident experiences in multiple temporalities. While viewing black history and the black subject through a theory that, in its name, concerns that which is post human may seem parachronistic and non–subject oriented, posthuman blackness describes a temporal and subjective liminality that acknowledges the importance of history to the black subject without positing a purely historical origin for black identity. Posthumanist readings of contemporary black women’s historical narratives reveal that individual agency and collective authority develop not from historical specificity but, rather, from temporal liminality.
The very term posthumanism expresses the boundary crossings that the theory proposes. Inquiries into the “post” in posthumanism evoke Kwame Anthony Appiah’s discussion of the “post” in postmodernism and postcolonialism. Appiah argues that the prefix post most often functions as a “space-clearing gesture” that moves a theory (e.g. postmodernism) beyond that which preceded it (e.g. modernism) (348). However, in the case of postcolonial literature, Appiah maintains that early postcolonial texts express a shift away from colonialism and also a “return to traditions,” particularly a realism that naturalizes the pre-colonial past (349). While he finds that later postcolonial literature “challenges” these “earlier legitimating narratives” (353), Appiah acknowledges the relationship between tradition and innovation in “post” theories, a temporal liminality likewise recognized by Stuart Hall. In his discussion of the “post” of post-Marxism and poststructuralism, Hall emphasizes the influence of the root theory on the theory that follows, asserting, “‘[P]ost’ means, for me, going on thinking on the ground of a set of established problems, a problematic. It doesn’t mean deserting that terrain but rather, using it as one’s reference point” (149). The complexity of “post,” as outlined by Appiah and Hall, applies to the “post” of posthumanism as well: posthuman bodies—and bodies of work—cross boundaries of time, place, and culture.
Additionally, the temporal liminality of “post” theories speaks to posthumanism’s indebtedness to humanism, particularly in terms of race-focused interpretations of the theories. Humanism, according to received history, centers on the liberal humanist subject, who functions as “the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (Macpherson 3). The liberal humanist subject’s supposed “freedom from dependence on the wills of others” and unqualified possession of “his person and capacities” reveals, as feminist, postcolonial, and postmodernist theorists have pointed out, the limitations of this definition of the human for women, people of color, and the poor (Macpherson 3; Hayles 3–4; Weheliye, “‘Feenin’” 23). Despite—or, rather, because of—the exclusiveness of the liberal humanist identity, many artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and theorists seek to discover alternative or denied notions of humanity, such as black humanism.
Black humanism rejects the supremacy of the white liberal humanist subject by considering “how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain” (Weheliye, Habeas 8). In his black humanist practice, Alexander G. Weheliye turns to black women theorists such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, who posit “differing modes of the human” that emphasize “the historicity and mutability of the ‘human’ itself, gesturing toward different, catachrestic, conceptualizations of this category” (Wynter, “On Disenchanting” 241; Weheliye, “‘Feenin’” 26). Keith Cartwright too finds that black identity and “countercultural black authority” develop out of experiences and “traumas […] unaccredited in Western thinking” (11). The discovery of novel “performances of the human” in black-authored texts rectifies the historical denial of black humanity and “interrogate[s] ‘other humanities’” besides the liberal humanist subject (Weheliye, “‘Feenin’” 30, 40). For instance, Caroline Rody and Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu contend that black women authors, like the fictional women found within their works, return to the “mother-of-history” in an effort to reimagine “their difficult inheritance, the stories of their own genesis” (Rody 3–4; Beaulieu 25). Keith Byerman joins Rody and Beaulieu in arguing that the tales these writers tell operate in the tradition of postcolonial literatures and poststructuralist and postmodernist theories to empower diasporic peoples and “rectify the historic invisibility” of black women by “exploding the oversimplified stereotypes” offered in the dominant histories of their lives and cultures (Beaulieu 25; Rody 4–5; Byerman, Remembering 3, 22–23, 54). Though these scholars may not identify as practitioners of black humanism, they participate in black humanist projects by transforming the past into a present source of power for black women authors and characters, and they also highlight an opportunity for additional work on women authors’ role in imagining black futures.
Posthuman theorizing, when executed with an awareness of black humanist histories, acknowledges the significance of the past to present and future ideas of black identity and simultaneously considers alternative temporal reference points for the origin of black autonomy and authority. For instance, a posthumanist reading of Beyoncé’s short film Lemonade, released in April of 2016, emphasizes black women’s liminality. References to black feminism and womanism intertwine with and develop out of visuals reminiscent of Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (1991), poetry from Somali British poet Warsan Shire, allusions to the Yoruba water goddess Oshun, and cameos by black athletes and actors, including Serena Williams, Zendaya, Amandla Stenberg, and Quvenzhané Wallis (Roberts and Downs; Primeau). The quotes, visuals, and cameos signify the diverse cultural realms occupied by the black women featured in the film. In terms of temporality, Lemonade chronicles the history of black women’s intersectional oppression via images of antebellum architecture, footage of the Superdome, references to infidelity, and appearances by women mourning the deaths of their unarmed black sons.2 However, the film additionally points toward the potential of the future, with Beyoncé experiencing watery and fiery rebirths as the video progresses through eleven stages of grief. Title overlays of the stages— “Intuition,” “Denial,” “Anger,” “Apathy,” “Emptiness,” “Accountability,” “Reformation,” “Forgiveness,” “Resurrection,” “Hope,” and “Redemption”— mark the linear progression of time during the film, yet they also encapsulate temporal liminality, representing a present-day response to a past event (“Intuition,” “Denial,” “Anger,” “Apathy,” and “Emptiness”), the restoration of a previous peace (“Accountability” and “Forgiveness”), and the emergence of a new state of being (“Reformation,” “Resurrection,” “Hope,” and “Redemption”). The audio and visual references in Lemonade affirm that black women transcend temporal and subjective boundaries, existing throughout time and in manifold cultural, political, and personal contexts.
Given the prevalence of border crossings in black-authored art such as Franklin’s collage and Beyoncé’s film, several scholars have begun investigating the relationship between posthuman liminality and black identity. Lisa Yaszek uses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to point toward the power black subjects can gain by imagining the future (“Afrofuturist”), and Kalí Tal briefly considers notions of multiple, interconnected subjectivities in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980). In terms of book-length literary criticism, Matthew Taylor devotes half of Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (2013) to exploring the relationship between race, community, and subjectivity in Charles Chesnutt’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s texts. In the collection Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (2008), editor Marleen S. Barr and her contributors examine science fiction by black women in terms of race and gender theories, while in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Ytasha L. Womack studies black visual and performance art, music, film, and literature through ancient and futuristic lenses. Moreover, organizers at Connecticut College, the New School, New York University, Clark Atlanta University, University of Geneva, Essex County College, Pomona and Scripps Colleges, Loyola Marymount University, and other higher-learning institutions have developed conferences and colloquia on liminal spaces, places, times, and identities, all but promising that additional publications on posthumanism and race are forthcoming.3
Recent criticism not explicitly engaged with Afrofuturist or posthumanist theory also points toward the interconnection of distinct states of being and time in contemporary black-authored texts. Lisa Woolfork assesses black authors’ use of the time-travel model in twentieth-century science fiction and magical realism, arguing that time travel allows for lived (rather than latent) experiences of historical trauma in the present. Likewise, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy examines temporal and subjective relationships in African American fiction, situating Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981) as “palimpsest narratives” that consider how the history of slavery shapes contemporary people and cultures (Remembering 8).
Following the work of these intellectuals as well as that of Giselle Liza Anatol, Patricia Melzer, Ingrid Thaler, and Marlo David, who explore the “intersections of history and progress, tradition and innovation, technology and memory, the authentic and engineered, analog and digital” in texts by black science fiction authors and musicians (David 698), Posthuman Blackness asserts that the boundary crossings that exist within posthuman cultures enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic history in the present and also imagine the future as a site of power. Posthuman liminality infiltrates black visual art, film, music, and literature, including neo–slave narratives set in or focusing on the antebellum South. Neo–slave narratives, Valerie Smith argues, “illustrate the centrality of the history and the memory of slavery to our individual, racial, gender, cultural, and national identities” and “provide a perspective on a host of issues that resonate in contemporary cultural, historical, critical, and literary discourses” (168). As Smith indicates, neo–slave narratives depend on temporal liminality: stories set in the past comment on the present and create new futures.
As such, Posthuman Blackness asserts that contemporary black women’s neo–slave narratives claim the future as fundamental to current and past conceptions of blackness. I begin by demonstrating the relevance of posthuman theory to canonical black literature—novels that have received significant and valuable readings from scholars working within the sphere of black humanism—in order to examine how historical fictions express that moving beyond the pain of the past requires an engagement with both black histories and futures. Traditional neo–slave narratives—whether published during the first wave of the genre (the 1960s to the 1980s [Misrahi-Barak 38]) or today—feature characters with a forward-looking perspective that allows them to conceive of their present and past circumstances as continually developing. Chapter 1 considers America’s most famous neo–slave narrative, Beloved (1987), as well as Morrison’s second neo–slave narrative, A Mercy (2008), through posthumanist theories of liminality. I argue that Morrison gestures toward a posthumanist articulation of becoming-subjectivity by positioning her women characters as simultaneously past and future oriented. Chapter 2 moves beyond an analysis of the individual and toward an examination of the community, asserting that Sherley Anne Williams’s neo–slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) demonstrates the shift from power structures based on difference to systems rooted in posthuman solidarity.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 establish that posthuman theory develops and deepens the existing black humanist and Afrofuturist readings of contemporary black music, film, and science fiction. Chapter 3 serves as a bridge chapter, uniting the analysis of canonical literature from chapters 1 and 2 with an examination of popular contemporary texts. The chapter focuses on black humanist, Afrofuturist, and black posthumanist perspectives on black music, extending the existing discussions of liminal spaces, places, and bodies in Erykah Badu’s and Janelle Monáe’s songs and videos to Gayl Jones’s blues-infused neo–slave narrative, Corregidora. Chapter 4 considers Middle Passage experiences in Butler’s science fiction, arguing that the temporal and subjective liminality associated with the Middle Passage allows characters and readers to develop an understanding of blackness both associated with and distinct from of the ontology and cosmology of white power. Finally, chapter 5 examines two speculative texts—Sheree Renée Thomas’s short story “How Sukie Cross de Big Wata” (2003) and Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (1991)—that employ the figure of the unborn or newly born child to represent the black subject’s unfixed position in time. By creating “pre-human” characters who participate in the action of historical narratives— characters who exist in history but only from a real or imagined future time following birth and maturation—Thomas and Dash promote posthuman temporal flexibility as a source of agency.
These and other examples reveal that regardless of genre, black women’s historical narratives include characters that exceed the time periods into which they are written. Posthuman Blackness asserts that contemporary black women’s texts express the potential for individual agency and collective power to develop from temporal liminality. The authors and theorists considered herein demonstrate that the boundary crossings that exist in posthuman cultures enable black subjects to make connections to diasporic histories and futures in the present. These artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly their women, to assert that the potential inherent in the future inspires black authority and resistance. Taken together as part of a larger collage of black culture—a collage that, in the vein of Franklin’s art pieces, Beyoncé’s videos, and posthumanism’s liminality, develops through the assemblage of ideas, materials, and beings—these works of historical fiction depict not only the black subject’s existence in the past but also her concern for and creation of that which is imminent.