This essay takes up Huey Newton's notion of revolutionary suicide. Against the objection that black suicide is merely reactive, Newton proposes that revolutionary suicide follows other principles and demonstrations. Revolutionary suicide is resistant but in ways that does not make it always possible to distinguish between resistance and reaction—in fact, Newton argues that black revolutionary suicide should be considered a life-affirmation, and that this affirmation reveals a will to power in a decidedly Nietzschean sense. This means—if we read suicide as resistant in its reactions—that black affirmation cannot be read on the order of a sovereign decision (as a sacrificial relation to life and death); nor as will, representation, or as a refusal which always relates to an end (the end of oppression, or injustice). This is why, strictly speaking, Newton's reading of revolutionary suicide is not to be confused with a classical notion of sovereignty (whether that of Bataille or Mbembe), nor with the political definition of self-murder as resistance (by Spivak, or Puar). At the end of this essay, the notion of revolutionary suicide is shown to be something else altogether. That is to say, revolutionary suicide serves not only to realize the form of the one and the multiple (according to a non-messianic and non-sacrificial economy), but also puts into question the presumed inescapable relation between blackness and state murder (due to the relentless nature of necropower and anti-blackness).

This essay considers Edward Said's many engagements with the work of Frantz Fanon and how those readings are woventogether through a politics of style, exile, and diaspora.

Mutilated, dying or dead, black men have a role to play in the psychic life of culture. From consumer dreams to media fantasies, from sensual intimacy to outpourings of murderous violence, there is a persistant imagining of what black men must be; a demand that black men perform a script - become interchangeable with the uncanny, deeply unsettling projections of culture. This study explores the legacy of that demand on the image of black men, its distorting, and necessarily violent, effects on how black men have learned to see themselves and one another. The author draws upon popular culture, black cultural theory, and the language of psychoanalysis to explore how black men have found themselves paralysed by such images, unable to escape their deathly internment. What is revealed is a vicious pantomime of unvarying reification and compulsive fascination, of whites taking a look at themselves through images of black desolation, of blacks intimately dispossed by that selfsame looking. What emerges is a disturbing picture of how black and white identities have become distorted, imagistic equivalents of one another - a projected screen where phobias and fantasies meet.

Let me suggest provisionally that fetishism (or at least its structure) always has to do with repudiation and loss. That it commemorates a loss, but a loss that is simultaneously recognized and denied (perhaps it is recognition that is denied?), by substituting a sign, a sign that preserves the loss it effaces like ice preserves the muddy footprints of passersby. And that, reciprocally, the knowledge and belief that sustain fetishism always run the risk of falling prey to doubt, so that as soon as the subject ventures into it, it runs the risk of fi nding itself somewhere it would rather not be. Frantz Fanon claims in Black Skin, White Masks that it is in the fetishism analyzed both by Freud and by Marx—or rather, where this analysis breaks down—that the psychopolitical dimensions of racial antagonism most needs to be thought.1 One imagines that such thought (especially if it were to turn out to be a case of precarious redoubt), has a complex structure that is diffi cult to pin down. My working hypothesis here, in what is rather speculative, is that this structure must have at least an antinomian relation with the structure of the fetish as Freud and Marx present it, and especially in the distinction between illusion and loss, acknowledgment and disavowal, phantasm and reality. Moreover, we shall see that antinomy is also part of our problem and, as such, cannot solve the problem of the fetish.

This special issue of The Black Scholar depends on the idea that contemporary Black experimental writing begins at the point where (white) notions of the avant-garde become impossible, or at least ...

Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life David Marriott (bio) CORPSING AND SOCIAL DEATH The word "corpsing" (verb) signifies a blunder occurring when, in accordance with the performance of a role, an actor is "put out" of his part. A role that is corpsed is one that exposes the limits of performance and, depending on the metaphor, denotes the "death" of theater, as theater. A role that is corpsed, which is something contrary to the usual performance of a part, is one that evidently does away with an actor's mastery (of illusion) and no more clearly than when the dis-join between persona and part is exposed. Corpsing therefore raises the more general problem of how any kind of performance can proceed or withhold itself from the possibility of blunder when trying to follow certain rules, or at least how any performance that relies on the ability to properly communicate itself to another can do so without, conversely, also revealing that propriety as artificial and theatrical. For example, the fact that when an actor is corpsed he also reveals the necessary demise of their role, or what is most proper to its performance, it follows that the possibility of blunder—often hilariously—has a force and impetus that cannot be easily borne by the normal codes of performance, except in laughter. So too the fact that corpsing tends to produce a kind of infectious joy at the actor's expense, at his or her inability to subdue, or subordinate, the corpse (and its affects) to the governance of spectacle, authority, or ego. But the fact that something so contagious should also compel an actor to give up his part and commit himself to a particular loss of character doesn't mean that we should lose sight of the fact that corpsing is also spectacle. And while I entirely agree that corpsing is usually determined rhetorically as a kind of excess of body over representation, I also insist that the whole scandal of corpsing (its impure force) lies in this spectacle of what happens when the most self-present mastery [End Page 32] (of representation) comes across that which is both unmasterable and unrepresentable. First, insofar as corpsing reveals a discord, it is not clear from the metaphor whether corpsing denotes a failure to repress or the pleasure of failed repression, a pleasure that is also a death. Hence whatever follows from the failure of performance (that is, from performance itself insofar as we understand the corpse to be expressly, if unwittingly, performed) results also, albeit unconsciously, from the pleasures of failure. Hence the infectiousness of corpsing may quite correctly be said to follow from the spectacle of unmastering, because this spectacle depends especially on the failure of any resistance to manifest itself, insofar as the subject gives in to this failure but not without giving up on the persona of a role as I have just defined it. Second, I have said that this failure does not depend on decision or will but on the unconscious nature of performance, and a general consideration of accident and contingency cannot help us at all in the formation and ordering of particular corpsing events. For corpsing to be an event it must resist the very notion of event (i.e., as something ordered by the terms of performance, for it surpasses those terms). We are also ignorant of the actual motivations and reasons of why people corpse—that is, of why orderly forms of communication and performance succumb and fail, and therefore it is better and indeed necessary for what follows on corpsing and black social death to regard corpsing as radically contingent. It seems to be only by a metaphor that the word "corpsing" is applied to acting and theater. What is commonly meant by corpsing is a moment by which an actor exceeds the limits of theater and no longer is in command of a role. Corpsing, therefore, seems to have been defined more precisely as the death of theatrical artifice. But corpsing is also evident outside theater; we see it when people fail to live up to or grasp their social roles. Hence the derisive laughter attached to those...

The body lies in its boredom and shit: desireroots through the interstices, between vacant stares and a wordthat reminds usof the whole echoing loveliness –like attending the wedding of two strange...

Journal Article 9Black Critical and Cultural Theory Get access David Marriott David Marriott Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 23, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 190–206, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbv008 Published: 22 April 2015

Critical QuarterlyVolume 57, Issue 3 p. 35-50 THE LONG 1930S The ocular truth: C.L.R. James's England David Marriott, David MarriottSearch for more papers by this author David Marriott, David MarriottSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 October 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12211Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume57, Issue3Special Issue: The Long 1930sOctober 2015Pages 35-50 RelatedInformation

This is a study of the founding terms of Black British independent cinema from the 1980s. Looking closely at the work of filmmaker John Akomfrah, and cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, this essay examines the complex imbrication of form and theory in that cinema, paying particular attention to Hall's emphasis on the motif of "articulation" and how, for A korhfrah, the formal qualities of Black British independent cinema related allegorically, dialectically, symptomatically to Hall's theory of the conjuncture. Drawing on four structural motifs method, archive, genre, and filiation I also look at works by Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, and Frantz Fanon.

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What happens to Fanonism when, instead of resistance or liberation, it becomes a discourse of invention? What happens to Fanon’s critique of colonialism and his imagining of a decolonial future, when that critique and imagining are staked not on the refusal of racial humanity itself (in the sense of an appeal to a “new humanism”…), but in the sense that Fanonism itself, as such, would be a discourse and reading of invention? In this essay I compare Fanon’s reading of invention with that of C.L.R. James’s reading of spontaneity in Notes on Dialectics.

Waiting to Fall David Marriott (bio) There is no other crime than time itself. —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 1. Gaze and Identity Since the advent, over the course of the twentieth century, of black responses to cinema, the challenge of film to black spectators has tended to focus on the dangers of fantasy. “One of the irreducible dangers to which the moviegoer is exposed,” writes James Baldwin, is “the danger of surrendering to the corroboration of one’s fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen” (1976, 29). The idea of cinema as a kind of “throw-back” (of fantasy or, more accurately, its corroboration; a danger which seems to immediately raise the question of what it might mean to be so “thrown”) was frequent in first black responses to film, to be replaced by more sociopolitical concerns with cinematic “realism.”1 Whence comes, among other things, a concern with what it means to view a [End Page 163] film when the “reality” being screened is not black but “what whites think and feel about Negroes,” and we are aware not of dreams but of “nightmares” made up of “anti-Negro attitudes and practices” (Ellison 1995, 306, 304). This eclipse of the “real,” and the trope of cinema as nightmare was not, or not only, a metaphor but a means to raise the question of racism in cinema. Such concerns are implicitly present in many works in which the terms “phantasy,” “illusion,” “stereotype,” or “omission” play a prominent part.2 Without being able to undertake a reading of these terms here, one of the main focuses of these studies stems from the analogy between screen and mirror, which threatens self-presence and blurs self-recognition. In most cases, this analogy is governed by assumptions that go back at least as far as early cinema; hence the need for historical clarification as a preliminary to a more systematic treatment of film media or rhetoric. One has to return, in the history of modern cinema, to the moment when the racial-fantasy-media idea underwent significant changes that are at the center of important tensions (in philosophy, and elsewhere). A first and obvious example would be the change that takes place in film theory, when the word “look” (or “gaze”) tends to supplant other denominations for filmic language, including that of realism. Although the problem is perhaps most evident in the history of French film theory and philosophy, I do not intend to trace the trajectory that led Bergson or Merleau-Ponty to consider the real and cinema as antithetical, when they were still more or less synonymous for Sartre or Bazin.3 The trajectory is too complex to be touched on here, and the omission of race is too problematic, or ambiguous. However, with the 1952 appearance of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, mask blancs, the question of race in cinema was raised directly.4 In chapter 5, for example, Fanon makes being seen, at the expense of seeing, coincide with the affect of a racist gaze in modern cinema. In such cinema—his examples include Duel au soleil, Réquins d‘acier, and Sans Pitié—race emerges via a fantasy that is able to capture the “reality” of black experience rather than its mere “representation.” Whence too the explicit suggestion in Peau noire, mask blancs that there is a new experience of racism in the postwar period—a racism tied to an experience of rupture and crisis and corresponding with the breakdown in the narratives of [End Page 164] colonialism, and the emergence of neo-liberalism, in modern cinema. Chapter 5 on “The lived experience of the Black” offers a rigorous account of this break, and a singular reading of why race, in cinema, is marked by an experience of the “imago” (a word which Fanon derives from a reading of psychoanalysis).5 “Attend showings of a Tarzan film in the Antilles and in Europe,” Fanon suggests. “In the Antilles, the young Negro identifies himself de facto with Tarzan against the Negroes. This is much more difficult for him in a European theater, for the rest of the audience, which is white, automatically identifies him with the savages on...

This essay discusses “My Calling Cards, Series 1#” by artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. It examines the notion of etiquette in her work more generally, and discusses why the question of xenia and xenophobia remains crucial to Piper’s art as well as to her Kantian aesthetics. The second half of the essay is taken up with the discussion of that aesthetics, and seeks to clarify Piper’s reading of race and aesthetics by means of a reading of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).