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In this paper I take seriously the need, at times, for dissemblance, but argue that telling, or disclosing, is also an act profoundly concerned with black futures. I explore the relationship between disclosure and place-making through the lens of Black women's writing. I argue that being in diaspora requires reckoning with the idea of place, even when one has been sold, stolen, or fled from their original home. I draw on Jennifer Nash's characterization of Black feminist theory-voice as "affectively saturated," "deliberately revelatory," and grappling with the ethics of disclosure. Using these categories, I consider how the work of Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet warrior, does the work of telling and making place. Ultimately, I suggest that tellings, or the act of speaking one's truth, are spiritual work that create the space for struggle and pave the way for future(s).
This paper examines Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s 2023 installation which combined bricks, eucalyptus trees, earth, tarp, and basins to create a “Fictitious Museum of Objects Stolen by the Police.” Drawing on Tavia Nyong’o’s theories of “afro-fabulation” and “queer and trans aesthetics,” I argue Brasileiro’s work is an afro-fabulation—invoking the technology of the museum to work both with and against it. The installation not only “fabricat[ed] new genres of the human out of the fabulous, formless darkness of an anti-black world.” It called into question the human altogether, drawing on Umbanda and other Afro-Brazilian religions to insist on the memory and soul of objects, invoking both the history and agency of Afro-Brazilian religious materials confiscated by police. Saturating her museum with Umbanda theology, Brasileiro responded to the secular force of the museum with counter-theology, pursuing cosmological alternatives to address historical violence, dissolve difference, and access spiraled forms of time.
At the heart of this essay lies a critique of the economy of salvation through the three-time sale and re-sale of a six-year-old Black enslaved girl in mid-1800s Tennessee. While her bill of sale conflates “sound” with her capacity to possess the mental and physical faculties needed to produce capital, each slave sales her in the discovery of her refusal to speak. This refusal unsettles the presumed transparency between Black flesh and its assigned economic and social value, revealing the limits of biological legibility under racial capitalism. The line of inquiry proceeding the conclusion that “she was absolutely an idiot and of no value” questions the function of speculative value and how the act of exchange, confirmed by ocular-centric fantasy, qualifies the public conversion of unsound flesh into speech. By further investigating why the forced translation of the commodity is salvific, this paper engages Black exchangeability as a ritual of perception that deifies gender as biologically sovereign.