I re/turn to my island home for the first time since earning my doctoral degree from Midwestern State and starting my first tenure track job. Some tings haven’t changed. In the place we call the “droiyn” room—what would translate to a living room1—I sit among objects: a wooden sofa set I bought my mother the Christmas I worked my first job (or as my brother calls them “de Foodmasters chairs”); photos from my childhood, some in dilapidated aging frames, glass broken, Scotch tape visible and one dangling—turns out I rarely smiled in them—a graduation photo with a bearded grin, dreadlocked, roped, medaled, pride in a native son hugging my Black mother; a set of curtains I know very well—they signify no season, is not no Easter curtains, if yuh ketch me. I open an email from a white administrator colleague. She asks to see the syllabus for my fall “Projects in Black Rhetoric” undergraduate course, one never before taught at the historically white institution where I now work. But we’re a good three weeks from the beginning of the semester. She wants to see if 25 percent of my course is “global” to market the course to other departments: how “transnational” will Projects in Black Rhetoric be? I mull over how to measure transnational Blackness (to sell it).

I think: how does the white university measure me? . . . “And then I found I was an object in the midst of objects” (Fanon 1952, 82); in the wake of the fracture, I dig deeper. What does my Black im/migrant non/being mean in percentages to them, to me in a temporality so unlike the “Cathedral of Learning”? “And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed,” echoes Fanon (87). I re/turn under racializing surveillance with/in temporal relation/ships to technologies like “ships’ registers in which African lives were recorded as units of cargo, or listed alongside livestock on slave auction notices, and census categories, estate records, and plantation inventories that catalogued enslaved people as merchandise” (S. Browne 2015, 42). And have we, Black beings, then, not always been “transnational” tings in the West? Existing in the nowhere-land of the slave ship, transitory, belonging to whichever nation bought us without really be(long)ing? As Black feminist Katherine McKittrick recounts, “new world blackness arrives through . . . accounts, price tags, and descriptors of economic worth and financial probability” in the “mathematics of unliving” (2014, 17). And like the (now cultured as) buzzword “transnational,” do we not try hard to measure Blackness in words, in terms, in cultures? How Black are you in these fractures when raced an object, much less an unhappy object? De ting about Blackness is that thing that also surrounds it, co-constitutes it with its ghosts.

The word “ting” in Trini/Trinbagonian usage metonymizes in/discretion, as a verb, noun, pronoun, what have you. It is not uncommon to say/hear: “De ting nah!”; “By ting and them”; “Yuh know, de ones they use to ting with.” Growing up, we were schooled out of this word through British English. Nouns, pronouns, and verbs have particular functions. Be discrete. Describe what you see in front of you so that others may also understand. But still, we understood a parent sayin “pass de ting nah” pointing with mouth and pursed lips, and you knew when your brejrin or sistrin say, “das de ting self!” you were on the right track. Ting then became heavily gendered/sexualized with age and experience. “Bad tings” (promiscuous/unruly young women), “bess tings” (attractive young women), and a host of other adjectivized “tings” evolved “tings” in adolescence to shape young boys and girls into (de)meaning heteronormative projects. De ting is, ting still paradoxically kept its amorphous shape, still means what you want it to mean with an elasticity I have yet to find in other words. Only “being” comes close. But I want to pause for a second to think of nouns as verbs in particular. What does the fracture between a static “ting” transformed actional into being glean for how we think of language? To think through Fanon ([1952] 2008), what “will” will “find a meaning in things”? What can an object-beingness, as I’ve described throughout Black or Right, do for Blackness?

Via Spillers and Moten, Sharpe comes to the idea of “anagrammatical blackness,” in the literal and “in the metaphorical sense in how, regarding Blackness, grammatical gender falls away and new meaning proliferates”: “So, blackness anew, blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place in time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (2016, 76). This conception of the transformative potentials for Blackness is at the heart of what I call rhetorical reclamation in deep ecologies. If we think/read/write to make Blackness by using the possibilities of the fracture to be actional, to (em)body/(per)form its out of place-ness as object-being, we can see avenues for Blackness beyond the measuring containment of surveillance, outside of its non-Black and Black policing (yes, we often do this, too; think quickly of the game “Black Card Revoked”).

Being that out of place-ness, even ephemerally, means occupying the Fanonian “atmosphere of certain uncertainty” ([1952] 2008, 83) in the ecological ghosts of Blackness, how ever. It means co-constituting a para/ontological Blackness. In those temporal, historical fractures between Black non/being, we can find that out of place-ness. In Trini culture, the phrase “fass and out of place,” as in “you too fass and out of place,” might be hurled at someone minin yuh business, or overstepping a line by being “boldface.” S. Browne points to possibilities in this phrase and also to the Jamaican “facety,” meaning “obtrusive, audacious, and ‘not knowing one’s distance’” (2015, 72). Browne invites us to understand this phrased idea as rejecting the colonial “lived objectification,” as refusals to stay in one’s place (72). As a means of channeling the ways in which Blackness in wake of fracture can rhetorically reclaim by using the space where it is objectified to be out of place, to make rhetorics to hurl back at the white heteropatriarchal window of viewing ourselves (Du Bois’s Veil) in Fanonian epidermalization, let’s re/turn to Ferguson for a (cultural) moment.

Ferguson, Missouri, in the US cultural imagination has come to signal many things. Some think of damage, harm, and violence. But not always to the living. Some summon Ferguson not as a place but a temporality: “Users on Twitter felt like they were participating in #Ferguson, as they tweeted in real time about the unfolding events, rallied supporters to join various hashtag campaigns . . . and monitored live streams where they could bear witness to the tear gassing and arrests of journalists and protestors” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 7; emphasis in original). Ferguson fractures open, lets us see and go where we shouldn’t—in digital spaces, between individuals and institutions, between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. Black feminist historian Barbara Ransby (2018) re/tells, “Wilson told Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson not to walk in the street. They talked back at him telling Wilson they were almost at their destination” (47). They never got there, at least not together. Always going while gone, Black being, fracturing ‘gon’ “mourn/ until we forget we are mourning” (D. Smith 2014). “Brown fit the description” (Ransby 2018, 47) as Black beings tend to. “Things escalated from there” (47), as the amorphous specter of Blackness in white imagination means that property broken should only be broken by its rightful owners. When “things escalate,” they must be put back in their rightful place. Rightful, meaning, in contemporary usage “Of a person: having a legal claim; legitimately entitled to a property, position, or status; holding by right or custom” (“rightful” 2020). Is it possible for the socially dead, the always already criminalized, the undocumented im/migrant, the Black being in the afterlives of slavery, of delegitimized custom, to be rightful, to claim an adjective “of a person”?

We know now how overpoliced Ferguson is by its white authorities; we don’t need stats. Brown’s “same old body. ordinary, black/ dead thing” (D. Smith 2014) lay “to fester in the hot summer sun for four and a half hours,” protected by threats of dogs and guns (Taylor 2016, 153). Crowds gather and residents make a memorial of things, “teddy bears and memorabilia,” in place of the place where Brown’s body once was. A cop’s dog pees on the memorial. Later, Brown’s mother shapes “rose petals in the form of his initials,” and “a police cruiser whizzed by, crushing the memorial and scattering the flowers” (154). How do we re/member things always out of place? In anagrammatical Blackness, there’s no way to arrange things to signify, “As the meanings of words fall apart, we encounter again and again the difficulty of sticking the signification” (Sharpe 2016, 77). When the spirit, the word, cannot rest it haunts. Ferguson itself attests. Even its hashtag means unwilfully. And “Just as residents rebuilt the memorials for Mike Brown within hours every time the police tried to destroy them, the same dynamic held for the protests” (Taylor 2016, 156). If it was the destruction of property with/in the Uprising that police cared so deeply about in contrast to Black non/being, why then destroy the marker of Black memory, every time it re/emerges, (per)forms new shapes?

Narrative can exert control over pasts, over history, can turn some/things deadly into saintly. But Ransby explains the philosophy in the #BlackLivesMatter theory that “there did not have to be a correlation between ‘sainthood’ and Black citizenship. This was an important shift in the discourse about who is or is not a sympathetic victim of injustice. Brown did not have to be a church-going, law-abiding, proper-speaking embodiment of respectability in order for his life to matter, protestors insisted” (2018, 49). But could his death matter as well? These qualities attached to the deviant that make being unworthy, Cohen (2004) suggests, ought to be where Black study places focus. Brown might then become a subject of politically queer analysis when we disengage with normative epistemologies (Cohen 2015). Think otherwise. How can we find narrative for these who speak differently? Whose language falls away in the wake of history? #BlackLivesMatter wants us to theorize a world in which the tag should fold in on itself, where we wouldn’t have to use it by using it. How might we tell its story, especially in the spaces between Black non/being? #IfTheyGunnedMeDown imagines a literal social death—that space between the first- and third-person Fanon goes on about (1952, 83). #HandsUpDontShoot, likewise, means the criminalized recognize the system, putting verbed, adjectivized, into the passively constructed. The logics of grammar and words again fall away. What’s fluid—between, across, outside—is where it’s at. Going is already gone for unruly tings.

In late September 2014, a couple months before a jury rules Wilson free, “Mike Brown’s memorial was doused with gasoline and ignited” (Taylor 2016, 157). This time / we cannot mourn until we forget. The insistence on desecrating the ways we re/member tell us we can’t. The “Black dead thing” whether body or in place of a body still cannot be in place. Under the white heteropatriarchal gaze, belonging won’t be a physical space, and here’s where we must find potentials in Black para/ontology. For if a hoodie can make the Black non/being criminal, then let’s use its ghostly body to find some shape with/in it to be, otherwise. Rhetorical reclamation radiates not in the symbol of the hoodie as a product/commodity but in the shapes it can shift to make ghosts mean ghastliness, that otherwise. How then can we see the possibilities in the para/ontologically meaning that Blacknesses of Black being in the fracture?

I tie the Black rhetorics offered in looking with/in and through Blackness in the historically white university and beyond together through the processes/literacies of rhetorical reclamation—and its associated means, “rhetorical reclamations”—in the previous chapter. Rhetorical reclamations turn the fracturing space of Fanonian epidermalization (animated in the afterlives of slavery) back at the white heteropatriarchal window, through which Black non/beings make themselves other/wise to possibly hurl rhetorics back at that white pane. They make Blackness precisely when/where objectness commodifies it or renders it potentially socially dead. “Reclamation” and “reclaiming” in this sense, should not evoke the mainstreaming of a term or its neutralizing incorporation into some kind of positive-through-negative affective conversion that happened some time in the past giving us present agency. We should think of reclaiming, maybe, like the relation/ships that Trini calypsonian Singing Sandra ([1999] 2001) above suggests between sleeping, “waking,” and keeping in de “deviant” “voices from de ghetto.” These languages, these acts, and their in-betweens co-constitute the process of rhetorical reclamation, where to be doing one might also do the others, recognizing the process, Black non/being, as transient. Black sleep rhetorizes wake keeping as Black wake keeping rhetorizes sleep: now is a past that is a present; it have no day/dey in between.

Although the word “Black” “has been held up by some (but not all) linguists as a premier example of reclamation because it can now be used referentially, without risk of insult or self-abnegation” (Chen 2012 65), I’m not sure that, in white institutional spaces in the United States, we might be as comfortable with it as these linguists are. While Geneva Smitherman wrote of “Black’s widespread use accepted cross-racially” (1977, 35), I’d argue that neoliberalist ideologies/practices reverse whatever “normalization” might have been palpable in the 1970s. My current job position was offered in “African American” rhetoric, and I myself have been referred to by this “politically correct” nationing adjective by white folk. Neither citizened African nor American, I wince. #BlackLivesMatter’s universalizing spinoffs testify to white public and institutional defensiveness undercutting ideas about Black’s neutralized reclamation.

But rhetorical reclamation, see, resists assimilation. The act of re/claiming here summons the “claim” of de ting as a question, a demanding request; the re of de ting represents a turn “once more.” To turn once more to a demanding question in the process of possibly meaning, then, in the moment of fracture, rhetorical reclamations pulsate Blackness’ potentialities through deep ecologies in the United States (and the West broadly construed). But the fracture is always moving, so how do we translate Blackness’ para/ontology without falling short?4 We can’t. Yet still, we struggle. Opportunities stew in the means by which we do, the processes, so we look to the rhetorics of re/turning in the fracture for the spaces we might sojourn for Black non/being. Possibilities for rhetorical reclamations run through the analysis of Black rhetorical technologies of each chapter of this project. Black autoethnography, Black hashtags, Black inter(con)textual reading, and Black deviance/disruption represent these reclaiming means.

In creative analysis of one’s condition, in reclaiming the Black feminist mandate that “poetry is not a luxury” for Lorde (1984, 36), Black autoethnography positions Black non/being in relation/ships with culture (dominant, subversive, or otherwise). “Nameless and formless” (36), autoethnography like/as poetry illuminates when rhetorized to tell the story of the thing and its “quality of light” (36), often caricatured by the very rhetoric of storytelling; it (per)forms, dances, as the Black athlete or the Black entertainer might be expected to in the US white gaze. And like these figures, the politicizing of that (per)forming, well, it’s usually not welcomed, usually out of place: “shut up and play!” In white educational institutions, (per)formed token service as the Black being often means playing in the pocket—game managing. But autoethnography gets outta pocket. In the bind of institutional “diversity”—of being the number, not the figure—it means being with/in the fractures of deep ecologies to meaning-make by telling one’s story otherwise, otherwise. It grasps the ghosts of Blackness—that we don’t wanna see, want to keep under the bed, the bad dream of non/being Black, the sleep in wake keeping—to dance Césaire’s “jail-break dance” (qtd. in Fanon [1952] 2008 54).

Hashtags connect. They (per)form more of a place than a being, while being a place, while being a being. As a technology of our digitized zeitgeist, they mean while referring elsewhere. Put to antiracist Black and Black feminist use, though, they split things open, they decode (Conley 2017), call attention while carrying away. They re/present things, places, beings, conditions, while marking time, conjuring a “feeling of shared temporality” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015, 7), but are they really that feeling? They might be. But they also conjure the what’s-left-behind, affecting the spot of the memorial, like Mike Brown’s, where mourning mourns in an unforgetting re/membering. Black hashtags used to rhetorically reclaim reopen spaces to question the being of Blackness, as in the Black feminist “#YouOKSis?” or Eric Garner’s dying “#ICantBreathe.” The spaces of these Black tags corral while opening up, define while differing, and in some cases might “empower” through their definitions as Lorde urges in the “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984). They afford pedagogical possibilities to mean with/in the context of Blackness, where avenues for antiBlackness no doubt exist, but in showing us those alleys, they help us learn. While #BlueLivesMatter might infuriatingly appropriate and equate racial identity with an occupation, reinscribing racial capitalist white supremacy, it also makes visible, rearticulates, what we knew was already there for all to see. Now we know how to find and not find what we want to find and what we don’t want to find. More important, though, rhetorically reclaiming tags do the dual work of exposing the white window while moving to break that white p/l/ane: #BlackLivesMatter tells us that Black beings matter while showing how they historically/temporally/affectively don’t, how even language might fail to explain:

Inter(con)textual reading asks deep rhetorically ecological questions. By thinking through the meanings produced/negotiated through the African indigenous framework of botho/Ubuntu to mobilize the Black feminist ethic of literacy as the practice of freedom via hooks (1994), Black inter(con)textual reading as a methodology reveals generative intersections for those meanings, places where we can do rhetorical reclaiming. #BlackLivesMatter prompts us to ask these sorts of questions through its Black queer feminist politics re/turning to the wake of the Combahee River Collective’s work. As cofounder of that collective Barbara Smith suggests, “There’s so many things to say about Combahee” (2017, 43). Fuh real, in its wake Combahee reveals opportunities for us to say / make / think / arrive at / depart from so many tings. Smith goes on, really digs in, declaring, “We need more dialogue about the history and the ongoing organizing of people who claim and share these politics” (43). That’s the kind of dialogue that deep ecologies might make happen when we think through just what it means to chant Shakur’s “We have nothing to lose but our chains” (1973) alongside Lamar’s “Alright” (2015a). The intense histories, temporalities, affects, meanings of these texts, their counter/public commonplace phrases, and the beings they conjure in use demand our attention. What does it mean for Black lives to matter when flowers to re/member the Black dead get peed on in Ferguson streets, when Walker’s (1982) “all my life I had to fight” gets paired with Black masculine hype, and/or when the ways “Black mainstream culture has gotten into the fuckery of white mainstream culture is ridiculous” to a Combahee cofounder (Frazier 2017, 133)?

Black inter(con)textuality helps us to see cracks in white heteropatriarchal windows that double consciousness for Blackness, to see in those fractures where Black meaning might take us to mean beyond frameworks for legal recognition or capitalist assimilation. Simultaneously, those fractures show us the frame, the pernicious white public and institutional defensiveness, that operate as a constraining background with/in which antiBlackness remains mundane. Growing up, I was always warned that “yuh hafta read to write,” and this Black methodology collapses the two into its process-based moves toward antiracism, while incorporating gesture, thinking, clothing, movement, and other ways of (per)forming Blackness into the mix toward Black feminist justice. In making intersections that question as Black inter(con)textuality does, we relation in ways that draw clearer the where and how of rhetorical reclamation.

In the now of wake keeping, that reading methodology opens paths toward revealing the daily operations that un/make Blackness in white institutional spaces. In/security concerns materialize routines that afford white supremacy means to re/animate old tropes in dominant cultural imaginations of Blackness as criminal specter. Those deviant ghosts—that disrupt in showing up to “scare” workers who just wanna do they jobs, they “don’t want to be exposed to this” (Keep[MwSU]Public 2016) when Blackness occupies white spaces—do more to speak Black non/being than diversity’s “non-performative” language (Ahmed 2012). When just the word “Black” haunts criminal, schemes dreadlocked, tatted, and hoodied, means that cops must underline how “high stress” they job is, “high stress, absolutely,” through the mouth of a Black body (Department of Public Safety 2016b), we play, unwillingly, the dangerous game of measuring whose feelings make a real gun pop and a fake gun real. Through Cohen’s (2004) embrace of deviance, though, rhetorical reclamations reveal sites of the sleeping wake, of fracturing Blacknesses out of place, boldface, that might break the p/l/ane of white institutional defensiveness.

Blackness, transitory, could peep through. Rhetorical reclamation, to continue this fracturing space metaphor just a lil further, might be conceptualized as the kind of “black hole” that Black feminist historian of science Evelynn Hammonds (2004) theorizes via fellow Black feminist Michelle Wallace’s (1990) hold of astrophysics to discuss the hegemonic negation of Black creativity. In reading Black women’s sexualities, Hammonds explains, “we can detect the presence of a black hole by its effects on the region of space where it is located,” while calling for “strategies that allow us to make visible the distorting and productive effects” (2004, 310). In Dark Matters, Browne evokes this idea to shatter the surveillance of Blackness, “being that nonnameable matter that matters the racialized disciplinary society” (2015, 9). I follow Black feminists Wallace, Hammonds, and Browne with Black inter(con)textuality to suggest its technologies of reading that make partially visible Blackness’ para/ontology, with rhetorical reclamations the black holes unfolding possibilities for “distorting,” “productive effects” (Hammonds 2004, 310). Black feminist relationality, activism, and theory conjure these boldface capacities.

But Black autoethnography, Black antiracist hashtags, Black inter(con)textual reading, and generative Black deviance only represent some means for rhetorical reclamations. These should be understood on a larger spectrum of rhetorics of Black non/being that call out with/in fracture. Brittany Cooper (2018) in Eloquent Rage teaches us in conversation with Lorde (1984) that Black feminist calling out can be from a place of messy rage, a process as opposed to something precise. I want to situate these processes (autoethnography, hashtags, inter(con)textual reading, generative Black deviance) on a range of rhetorical reclamations spanning from something like rhetorical silence to the kind of “cancelling” thrust we might see on Black Twitter, digitized/(em)bodied/in between. These reclamations crystalize in an otherwise kinda Black being that uses its amorphous, co-constitutive, para/ontology for a range of potentialities that can resist for many operative ends, or not. They take up a space outside, but inside material spaces as “its energy distorts and disrupts that around it” (Browne 2015, 9), like Hammonds’s idea of the black hole, like being inside the white institution while being somewhere outside it too. These reclamations lie with/in knowing you’re the ghost of slavery conjured to maintain the white heteronormative equilibrium but to fuck with it. In re/claiming otherwise in that space, rhetorical reclamations make Black matter that permeates the deep rhetorical ecology, resisting the very commodification of Blackness that has the potentialities to make us see that “anti-Blackness is the fulcrum around which white supremacy works. Right?” as #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza (2017) asserts. They repeatedly force hard questions that we cannot always answer neatly, that we may not always hurl specifically, or just ask more questions, for the same or similar causes. But that’s okay. We’re here to try to crack/open spaces for Blackness, to virally spread Fanonian epidermalization to infect—meaning to dis-ease, to contaminate, to take hold of and/or to be communicated to (“infect” 2010)—otherwise the socially dead, the dead yoked to the socially dying,5 and objectified Black non/beings.

There is little more dangerous than a willful thing

R. A. T. Judy, “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity” (1994, 225)

These technologies, and the larger spectrum of rhetorical reclamations, allow us to hurl Black being in what I have described throughout as a kind of “object-beingness.” I talk of Blackness’ para/ontology, of using otherwise the objecthood and its “certain uncertain” surroundings that come from the historical conception of it as always already means, for fueling colonialism and racial capitalism. As Mbembe re/minds us, “Clearly, not all Blacks are Africans, and not all Africans are Blacks. But it matters little where they are located. As objects of discourse and objects of knowledge, Africa and Blackness have, since the beginning of the modern age, plunged the theory of the name as well as the status and function of the sign and of representation into deep crisis” (2017, 12; emphasis mine). Let’s dig deeper into that crisis to think through what the object-beingness of Blackness through rhetorical reclamations in deep ecologies might mean for new materialist frameworks of objects’ mattering. Through an African indigenous relational recognition of the living and nonliving and the Black feminist intersectional politics mobilizing the entanglements of being in hegemonic systems, we might peep how Blackness means through this “object-beingness.”

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and studies that genealogically follow seek “to give voice to a thing power” (2010, 2). “Instead of focusing on collectives conceived primarily as conglomerates of human designs and practices (‘discourse’),” Bennett emphasizes “the active role of nonhuman materials in public life” (1–2; emphasis in original). In rhetorical theory, work like Laurie Gries’s Still Life with Rhetoric (that analyzes the distributive meanings of memes) animates these investments to consider “reality to be collectively, materially, and semiotically constructed via a variety of actants that have equal ontological footing. New materialists thus acknowledge the vital and transformative characteristics of matter—characteristics typically reserved for humans alone” (2015, 6). My objection to the re/animation of these lives of objects rests not in the attempt to give dem time/space/matter attention. On the contrary, I strive throughout to consider the co-constitution of Blackness with objects, spaces, matter, and so forth. My problem lies with the premise of ideas of the nonhuman in a binary opposition to the human in Bennett, and Gries’s specific claim of “equal ontological footing” (6). As the opening epigraph to Black or Right from Fanon points out, Blackness’ being has “no ontological resistance” in its construction relative to whiteness ([1952] 2008, 83). Wynter extends, pronouncing that to even think “ontological sovereignty,” we must engage a totally different version of the human and our theories thereof, which orthodox thought (re)produces (Wynter and Scott 2000, 136). To claim equal ontological footing for humans, nonhumans, animals, and objects, then, suggests that Black beings now, but not always, classed “human” exist on a flattened plane of reality where ontology can be conceived of on the same terms as white Man. But what happens when we theorize Blackness from the Fanonian “zone of non-being,” from Moten’s claim that Blackness’ history is one of objects resisting (2003, 1), from a re/turn to Mbembe’s idea that Blackness “constituted the manifestation of existence as an object” (2017, 11) in its conceptualization by Europeans? What happens when we re/turn simultaneously to the “deep crisis” of signification that Blackness conjures (12), to Sharpe’s anagrammatical Blackness where words fail to “stick” signification (2016, 77)?

Aimé Césaire (1972) calls “thingification” that process by which European colonizers hail(ed) their humanity/superiority by re/inventing the colonized as objects through the colonial encounter, by destroying the colonized’s past. Fanon, likewise, throughout his oeuvre, illuminates how colonizers “make the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation” (1967, 35), while also drawing on white notions of the Black non/being as “animal” ([1952] 2008, 86). But I want to be careful here to mark distinctions between dehumanization, objectification, and bestialization. While these things certainly overlap, easy conflation of them undoes understandings of the processes that Black feminist relationality knows as disciplining beings into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans (as Weheliye 2014 shows via Wynter and Spillers). Because Black feminists like Wynter, Spillers, Lorde, and Hill Collins, among others, through relational frameworks visibly expose the concatenated ways Black women’s subject positions complicate objectification as well as the genre-ing of beings (Wynter in particular) in relation to the “human,” the terms flow more than interchangeably. Mel Y. Chen’s (2012) mobilization of “animacy hierarchies” (Silverstein 1976) in linguistics to evoke “horizontal relations between humans, other animals, and other objects” (Chen 2012, 50)—in thinking through racial mattering and Karen Barad’s agential realism’s focus on the “material-cultural” (1996, 179)—complicates new materialisms along these lines, but not in specific relation to Blackness, Black object-being, or the workings of Black social death. But, Z. I. Jackson (2020), through challenging the human-animal divide by noting that “the animal” emerges not as a result of, but through histories of antiBlackness, gives us pause on dehumanization, because the African’s humanity through abjecting animality “is ultimately plasticized” (23). Becoming Human makes clear that posthumanism puts Blackness in space of the unthought, presupposing all humans privilege over all animals (16–17). Yuh see, as Black performance and literary scholar Jayna Brown suggests, the “we” of universal positioning in new materialism must be situated historically (2015, 327). I push here, then, to re/iterate the question(s): if given the history of/Blackness “is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity” (Moten 2003, 1), and, if in the United States and elsewhere, “Black people ejected from the state become the national symbols for the less-than-human being condemned to death” (Sharpe 2016, 79), have Black beings ever really been human? Was Mike Brown being in the Ferguson street and (not on the sidewalk) an “object” out of place for Darren Wilson to put in place? Was Mike Brown’s being left to lay in the same street for hours dead not an object in place for the white heteropatriarchal gaze? Was Mike Brown’s memorials being peed on, driven over, and set ablaze not objects subjected to antiBlackness?

I propose that rhetorical reclamations, which derive from Black feminist relational methodologies of knowing and being, self-reflexively pose these kinds of questions in transiently occupying an object-beingness in the fracturing moments of Fanonian epidermalization. In those spaces, somewhere on or off Chen’s (2012) horizontal spectrum of animacy, with/in or out/ of Z. I. Jackson’s (2020) possible “everything and nothing” of anti/Black ontological plasticity, Black being hurls itself as object to ask the above questions (and others like it). Framed via Ubuntu, the recognition of interrelative co-constitutions between the living and nonliving means that these reclamations can spotlight the cracks in non/being to be otherwise. In that para/ontology, in Black disruption’s generativity, its polysemy, a multiplicity of possibilities arises for Blackness to mean and how Blackness could mean. To what specific antiracist ends those meanings might be put, well yuh talkin a whole setta other questions.

Since I endeavor, through the Black rhetorics evoked with/in deep ecological encounters in white institutional spaces, to open up spaces for meaning, to ask questions, before we “pause for a cause” leh we think through some possible ends to which these technologies of rhetorical reclamations might be put. These suggestions do not intend to boundary the potentialities of these rhetorics, but instead to call attention to the various fluid ways (and ways in-between) the technologies of rhetorical reclamation might be deployed for quotidian Black non/being in white spaces couched in various Black philosophical traditions. These range from Black humanism, to Black posthumanism, Afropessimism, Black antihumanism, racial realism, and, of course, the deep ecological spaces with/in between.

To suggest rhetorical reclamations be used for a Black humanist project does not plead to locate them as rhetorical technologies fueling assimilation into a liberal multicultural humanity or its afterthoughts. De progress narratives could salt.6 As should be clear by now, these Black rhetorics do not fund or hope for recognition from state institutional apparatuses, for pro-Black/Black separatist entrepreneurship, or for what might result of rhetorics longingly reading the Black past in modernity via “nostalgia” as Baker identifies (1995, 1), which might desire attempts to re/cover some lost agency or elevated social status.7 While #BlackLivesMatter does admittedly thrust to affirm Black humanity (Garza 2014; 2017, 166), the movement eschews these kinds of moves that rally around traditional notions of Black freedom (and their respectability politics), instead centering Black queer feminist ethics that feed the “call out” element radiating beneath the full spectrum of rhetorical reclamations. In practice, then, the clap-back energy of these rhetorical technologies can very much seek, through Black feminist materialist and humanist means, antiracist ends that broaden categories of human. Black autoethnography, Black hashtagging, Black inter(con)textuality, and generative Black deviance derive from the Black feminist relational epistemologies and #BlackLivesMatter contexts with/in their deep rhetorical ecologies. We might even envision #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives as striving (in some, but not always all, ways) to usher in Wynterian “new genres of being human” that always already disarticulate human being from the white heteropatriarchal genre of Man through epistemological rupture (Wynter 2007, 112).

Calls for what might be characterized as a Black posthumanism sometimes evoke Wynter, as in Conley’s (2017) argument for Black feminist hashtags via Weheliye’s “assemblages of freedom” (2014, 137) that deploys Wynter’s and Spillers’ Black feminist relationality to read racializing assemblages. Greene Wade centers Wynter in formulating a Black feminist posthumanist viral Blackness “to shift and/or erode borders/boundaries that inhibit the free flow of blackness” (2017, 35). Both Conley (2017) and Greene Wade (2017) formulate Blackness outside of the understood categories of human as Man via digital and in-person assemblage; re/call the specific political potentials of Black hashtagging in chapter 2. Pritha Prasad (2016) likewise underlines the “coalitional possibilities” via Black Twitter through #BlackLivesMatter-related tags like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack. But ventures abounding through Black autoethnography, inter(con)textuality, and the potentialities of Black disruption skewed otherwise also open up notions of Black being co-constituted by its temporalities, its spatialities, its specters. Rhetorical reclamation conjectures in and past the boundaries of attempted Black ontology to imagine dynamic kinds of Blackness, always shifting with possibility with/in and out of any one Black body.

The object-beingness of Blackness’ fractures speak to conditions of Black social death, lets us in/to the wake of Trans-Atlantic slavery, colonialism, the wretched temporal underbellies of the now that is a past, an Afropessimist condition. In Sharpe’s (2016) wake of Fanonian epidermalization, Spillers (2003) reveals the “oceanic ungendering” (214) of Blackness when conjured criminally as ghosts haunting the white university as disruption. We might sneak in these opportunities to see how that deviance can reflexively illuminate the pasts of slavery in the stop and frisk that fails to afford Black bodies notions of heteronormative gender relations, making us pure property. Black hashtags might also reveal the depravity of the pasts where #ICantBreathe evokes lynching control over Black non/being to teach what enslavement means in twenty-first-century terminologies. Autoethnography could uncover the always already of criminalizing the Black body as out-of-place commodity in the deep rhetorically ecological contexts of plantations and house and field slaves at the white university, along with those spaces’ un/bodied technologies of control. Meanwhile Black inter(con)textuality offers fracturing questions that might wake the Black body out of its deep neoliberal contexts to show us what’s really good, ya feel?

Rhetorical reclamation might seem foreign to Black antihumanist ends, but not when Black autoethnography can show how “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness,” through the fracturing experiences of anti-Blackness that lead Frank B. Wilderson III (2015) to his points on Black non/being. While he claims historicity and redemption as antiBlack, and that Humanist narrative precludes Blackness from its arcs because Blackness lacks “the psychic and/or physical presence of a sentient being . . . ab initio” (2015, n.p.) Wilderson gets in/to this place through analyzing his story of experiencing antiBlackness from a Palestinian friend, uses his own poetry to get to the heart of these declarations. The metaphysical nothing that Calvin Warren (2018) claims of Blackness to argue its ways outside of being in Ontological Terror parallels the Blackness of the Fanonian fracture and may be what deviance means as specter. If the Afropessimist, Black antihumanist, or nihilist strives to expose antiBlackness for ending the West as we know it, to emerge, or not, out of being into something otherwise, then rhetorical reclamations could throw that very Black non-being at the white heteropatriarchal window desiring to completely destroy it. To use another metaphor, Black antihumanism could use viral Blackness to spread awareness of Fanonian epidermalization (through, say, hashtagging) for its own contagious ends. The technology of inter(con)textual reading, then, may uncover for them the fracturing cracks at which to hurl, the gaping wounds in which to infect, non-being, breaking the antiBlack window, poisoning its body to reveal “there is no place like Europe to which Slaves can return as Human beings” (Wilderson 2015).

At the end of the previous chapter, I suggest my particular theoretical stance toward practicing these rhetorical reclamations through racial realism (Bell 1992). That posture evokes struggle not for its outcome but for the factors determining struggle, for its processes and the reasons that prompt them rather than its anticipated products. In situating rhetorical reclamations in this way, I could summon autoethnography to engender Black being’s catharsis, to work toward antiracism, to expose antiBlackness, and/or to provoke policy change. Engagement with Black hashtags might conjure being in relation/ships with others, forging the interconnectedness of Ubuntu to respect, to heal, to call out, or other/wise. Within this framework inter(con)textual reading fosters its question-making perhaps to offspring, to make realist struggle see itself moving in a variety of directions, to cut away at easily received popular messages about Blackness that might, after all, play into hegemonic meanings of it. You might ask: Who doesn’t wanna, at least once, bump “Alright” without thinking about racialized hypercapitalism? Listening/reading/thinking/writing through inter(con)textuality, though, might force us to check ourselves for the things we might be complicit with. To the racial realist, Black deviance/disruption generates meanings of non/being in the world that can chip away at antiBlackness one crack at a time; who knows if the white p/l/ane will break? The acts, though, might be worth each fracture’s distorted Black light.

How are we beholden to and beholders of each other in ways that change across time and place and space and yet remain?

Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016, 101)

And it’s in these questions of what those Black holes might help us otherwise be, even in deeply antiBlack ecologies, de tings about Blackness that we can’t really explain or see in signs, significations, languages, or faiths, when nouns, verbs, adjectives fall away, what metaphors can we leave to describe the way for some being else, some other/wise, coming behind? I’m trying to unwind. I try to undiscipline. I’m trying to mind fractures to find the kind of rest that keeps me waking up as de ting about Blackness always outside of me, asking, other/wise/.

The true leap, Fanon wrote at the end of his Black Skin, White Masks, consists in introducing invention into existence . . .

Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” (2003, 331)