"I Ran From It And Still Was In It": Meditations On Melancholy And Race...In The Meantime

This project engages with the question of black liberation. My project asks two key questions: in the absence of liberation, what can or does exist? And will liberation ever arrive? I answered these questions by tracing the figured opposition of Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism. I argue that while many see these approaches or experimental analytics in an oppositional way, it is important to focus on the interregnum of these two critical dispositions if we want to understand the possibilities for a world otherwise. Remaining in the interregnum can allow us to trace how and in what ways the presuppositions of Euro-American constructions of modernity implode. In modernity, Blackness has always been a site of untimely meditation manifesting itself in different and inventive ways. I argue that our current frameworks informed and shaped by white supremacy limit our imagining a future without Blackness, without whiteness and without race, because modern ego formation relies on these very enslaving structures. Beyond just imagining, toward making real, my project asks: what do we do in ‘the meantime’ as we invent (a new now/present and therefore future)? What is rendered central in the meantime, this site of transition and suspension, is a not a linear movement. Rather, the meantime as a method and a device allows a reading of these two radical dispositions about Blackness that discloses the indissoluble relationship between the ontological nothing and Blackness as its sociopolitical allotrope in the logics of melancholia as the liminal end of the world. Instead, staying with and in “the meantime”, I show how collapsing this imagined opposition between Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism (as responses to the anti-blackness and violence against the slave) challenges the melancholic structuration of antiblackness and its contingent utilitarian concepts such as the ego that comes in the desire for a mother and homeland, as expressed through the ‘return’ to Africa for Black people, and the need and desire for a Black other, as expressed through the figure of the slave, for white people and white supremacy. I thereby arrive at a conversation that nuances race, melancholy and notions of liberation and conclude with reminders of the importance of love to and for revolution