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9781478039167 Academic Inspection Copy

In a Field of Static

Missed Encounters with Black Feminist Theorizing
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With In a Field of Static, James Bliss examines how the debates at the heart of feminist and queer studies represent missed encounters with Black feminist theorizing. For Bliss, Audre Lorde's public falling out with Mary Daly, feminist theory's arguments about intersectionality and assemblage theory, queer theory's debates over negativity and futurity, and the transnational and diasporic turns in feminist and queer studies each demonstrate how different debates, misunderstandings, and missed encounters have drawn the horizons of our political and conceptual imaginations. Engaging literary and critical works by Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, Kimberle Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, and others, Bliss recontextualizes concepts like relationality, subjectivity, negativity, and belonging through readings across the archive of Black feminism. By revisiting and restaging these conceptual debates, Bliss presents a genealogy of Black feminist theorizing that marks the indeterminacy, the field of static, at the core of Blackness and antiblackness. Insisting on the potential within indeterminacy, this genealogy embraces negativity, abstraction, and speculation as methods for an insurgent conceptual inventiveness--ways of imagining new worlds and new forms of being and relation.
James Bliss is an independent scholar living in New Orleans, Louisiana.
"An achingly original, sparkling project that situates Black Feminism as the center of what we know as Critical Theory without making it look like, sound like, or come from the same histories or pedigrees. James Bliss's book is a history of the field that is also at the edge of the field, conceptually, pushing Black feminist theory into new territory."-Samantha N. Pinto, Inside the Body of Black Feminism "A stunning work of contemporary criticism, In a Field of Static establishes James Bliss as a laudable critic whose description and expression of Black feminist theorizing is both an important individual contribution and ongoing tribute to Hortense Spillers, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and more. It's both a primer on Black feminisms as well as a unique theorizing of them."-Dana Murphy, author of, Foremother Love
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