Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out of Nowhere By John Murillo III B.A., University of California, Irvine Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2016 © Copyright 2016 by John Murillo III This dissertation by John Murillo III is accepted in its present form By the Department of English as satisfying the Dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Drayton Nabers), Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Philip Gould), Reader Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Christina Sharpe), Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Peter Weber), Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA John Murillo III was born in Los Angeles, California. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Irvine in June 2011. While at the UCI, Murillo worked as staff, and briefly as Co-Editor, of Umoja News Magazine, and held the position of Director of Communications for UCI’s Black Student Union. During his tenure at Brown University, Murillo taught literature and writing courses, and counseled and mentored students in and beyond the classroom. This carried over to his work as a WISE Mentor for Black students the University of California Irvine, beginning in 2015. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The ones I love deserve the first, last, and most gratitude. My mother and father, D’Juana and John, cared for and carried, and continue to care for and carry, me on the wings of their continued and boundless wisdom and experience, and their insatiable desire for a dreaming they do not name, but no doubt perform. My brothers, Joshua and Jeremiah, provide me the opportunity to judge my capacity to teach and to be taught; they, in their love and peculiarity—a peculiarity that drives us all to create—drove and drive me to aspire to blur the lines between student and teacher so that I might more carefully and imaginatively consider the words and worlds I sought to put down on paper. My aunt, Veritta, who, like my grandmother, Brenda, stands stalwart through sickness, faithful through trial, and not only embodies a relentless aspiration to heal and be healed, but also puts this aspiration into practice; healing becomes devotional, spiritual, and mobile, through her. And all of my family: their very being nurtures me, drives me, compels me to make and keep making time and space for my own thoughts, and so for them and all they have been and might be. To the love of my life, Chinyere Amobi, I express gratitude that cannot be made v legible in the grammar and language available to me; this is ultimately a failure. But for being refuge and rock, advisor and caregiver, for being my partner, closely journeying with me through the trauma and work of this program, for holding me, my hand, and my head, in the hold of this ship—for being all and more than I could ever need or dream of, I thank her. To Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Christina Sharpe who, from afar, offered valuable conceptual and philosophical insight into my work, into navigating the academy, into diving deeper and deeper into this oblivion of thought I’ve leapt into, and to never stop moving, writing, thinking, and caring, I offer my most sincere appreciation and thanks. To professors Ellen Rooney, Philip Gould, Deak Nabers, Daniel Kim, Rolland Murray and Stuart Burrows, I offer my thanks for the various iterations of practical insight and advice into my writing and into my career you provided at different points along this journey. To everyone and anyone who might have expressed, in any way, doubt or disbelief in my capacity to find something creative, imaginative, caring, brilliant, beautiful, and Black beyond the event horizon; to everyone who, in that same breath, revealed their unwillingness to take the imaginative and conceptual leap, let alone wish me well as I did so, I thank you for what became fuel to the flame of my drive and my expression, here, in this project, and beyond. And to God, in whom I have been faithful, flawed as my expression of that faith might have been at times; that faith has guided me beyond myself, beyond this work, beyond the imaginable, and into a kind of ceaseless, difficult, promising, unsettling, and vi loving project that, as I envision it, “can never really be done.” vii TABLE OF CONTENTS VITA .................................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION: Turning to the Dark Side .................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: Black (in) Time - Untimely Blackness ...................................................... 10 CHAPTER 2: Untimely Wor(l)ds in the Key of Love ..................................................... 66 CHAPTER 3: From Out of Nowhere .............................................................................. 109 CHAPTER 4: Dark and Black Matter - The Gravity of Being Together ....................... 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 214 viii INTRODUCTION: Turning To The Dark Side Black “life” and “death” do not matter. This is the structural truth of the antiblack world, and this truth (or “fact”1) telegraphs an unethical, gratuitously violent antagonism between Black folk who “live” and “die,” and the antiblack world that sanctions, desires, and demands the meaninglessness of even those quotation marks.2 The most attentive and radical Black thought and action works to examine the forces that drive the antiblack world, and contend the destructive, terrorizing manifestations and effects of those forces as they position Blacks in space and time. My dissertation attempts to map these forces from a Black position through a careful examination of twentieth century Black literature. Specifically, I am guided by this set of questions: How do the forces that position Blacks in the space and time antiblack world affect the kind of (literary) creation we might produce? How might we engage Black (literary) creation? And what is at stake in both 1 Pace Frantz Fanon, this is an explicit reference to the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (1967), “The Fact of Blackness.” 2 Pace Hortense Spillers, this is a reference to “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” in which Spillers writes of the dereliction of the idea of “freedom” or “liberation” for Black flesh: “Even though the captive body/flesh has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (68). I carefully dissect this passage among other key passages from her groundbreaking text in chapter 1, but her work is integral to my thinking throughout and beyond the dissertation. 1 Black (literary) creation, and our engagements with it? “Living,” “dying “ and creating in the “afterlife of slavery,”3 the undying, haunting and structural subjection of Blacks that seals us into “crushing objecthood,” (Fanon, 82) is to “live,” “die” and create in relation to an antagonism that is temporal, spatial, and political-ontological in nature. As Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, slavery violently disfigures time and space, creating a rift or “tear in the world…a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being [and] a physical rupture, a rupture of geography” (Brand, 4-5). Time and space shatter in slavery’s unending wake, such that slavery persists as an afterlife, framing and disfiguring the scenes of subjection4 we endure and to which we bear witness across time and space. My dissertation reads time and space in and through Black literature, and draws from Physics—from modern and emergent theories in quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and general relativity—to help develop a nuanced, unique approach that both merges my interests in Black Studies and theoretical physics, but also illuminates what I understand to be two, underthought— or uncritically thought of—fundamental features of being (time and space). On the one hand, it is as if time “shows no movement,” slavery’s persistence in “endless disguise” (e.g. see: footnote 3) throwing the idea of linear progress (read: temporal movement away from slavery) into violent disarray.5 On the other, it is as if all possible temporal movement and “all moments” in the antiblack world “somehow gesture 3 From Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, in which she writes: “This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of