Society of Scholars Cohort Archive

Dispensation of the Faculties: prohibition of capacity, radical persistence, Black arts, antimmanent critique

My project examines how the distribution and exercise of the human faculties, as a capitalist dispensation, relies upon and implies the prohibition of the faculties to Blackness. I theorize radical Black persistence as movement that works to suspend both this prohibition and capacity itself. Reading cinematic, media, and literary works, I pair discrete faculties with explorations of specific media as a means of theorizing each faculty and its prohibition. Over the course of this itinerary, my goal is to elaborate a materialist, immanent conception of anti-Blackness and to approach persistence as an antagonistic, antimmanent, apophatic materialism.