SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 47
SINE QUA NON
Louis Gates and Houston A. Baker explore the obfuscating nature, playfulness, and coded
meaning within Black literature.7 Toni Morrison explores the Africanist aesthetic and how
Blackness acts as a narrative force in its absence and presence.8 Fred Moten aligns, adding
that Blackness can be considered a type of ‘Jazz’: improvisationistic and resistant to aesthetic
regimes9 . In such ability to circumvent the aesthetic, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe
simultaneously acknowledge Blackness's fluidity and fracturing attributes that disrupt
aesthetic regimes.10
As these scholars lay the groundwork, radial suspense grounds itself in a critical inquiry
about how suspense functions when Blackness is the protagonist and narrative center from
which everything flows. It admits suspense as diffuse and dilating and treats Blackness as a
structural principle as opposed to a featured theme that reshapes how stories are processed
and understood. By offering radial suspense, the essay expands conversations around the
literary device, showing how incorporating Blackness into a story will sometimes force a
breaking of literary form that forces timeless re-reading and revelation that the story’s true
tension belies an unsettled discourse about the irresolvable relationship between blackness,
antiblackness, and Black people wrapped up in metaphysical, ontological, existential, and
political questions of being contested in Black Study and Black Studies.11
In the following pages, the paper attempts to elicit Blackness beyond interpretations
that frame it as absence, lack, void, alien, or maimed. It positions Blackness as an assigned
function to unresolved questions: momentarily interminable, and Blackness as the link
between unresolved questions of Blackness to the defined condition of the subjugated figure.
Finally, I conclude by suggesting that one cannot productively engage literature casting
Blackness as a spectral protagonist, one that silently meanders alongside the physicalized
blackened figure, without productively engaging contemporary Black Studies. As it comes
to bear through Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, radial suspense’s competing stakes are bound
to the discourse of critical Black intellectual thought, the space of Blackness’ interminability,
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, 1. Oxford
Univ. Press paperback, Oxford Paperbacks (New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Houston A. Baker
Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), https://press.
uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5953995.html.
8
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York:
Vintage Books, 1993).
9
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
10
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
11
‘Black Study’ refers to engagement with Black life's social, embodied, intellectual, and a昀昀ective dimensions,
including activity within and outside the academy (see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe New York Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013). Harney states,
“When I think of study, I’m as likely to think about nurses in the smoking room as I am about the university.
I mean it really doesn’t have anything to do with the university to me”(112). Moten agrees: “Studying is not
limited to the university. It’s not held or contained within the university. Study has a relation to the university,
but only insofar as the university is not excluded from the undercommons that it tries so hard to exclude”(113).
Although this essay places emphasis on contemporary Black Studies, the synthetic nature of applying visual
artistic notions of Bradley’s Anaesthetics and Jackson’s insights into Black Light brings to bear this practice that
is, at its essence, about breaking disciplined logics to critical engagement.
7
24