fantasy, "graphics" and the black sacred sound: some initial notes

How does fantasy as a genre, the "graphic" novel as a textual residue and the sound of aunt hester's scream all converge within/without blackness?

The fantasy genre allows for new livabilities, new ways to explore subjectivity and race. Science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy tend to be hegemonic projects, projecting whiteness and heteronormativity into the future. Either that or they espouse postracial ideologies without dealing with the realities and historical concreteness of how and why racial categories were and are deployed, resisted, contested, accepted and known in and through specific racialized-sexualized bodies. That is, they seem to want to do away with race without making a-way for historically raced-sexed bodies to speak anything meaningful about raced sexualities and sexed racialities. Still, these projects of futurity are furtive ground for black folks to work out, in, through and against notions of subjectivity.

This is similar to the black sacred sound - sound I conceive as the history of abjection, subjection (that denies personhood), and objection - and how it works to reconfigure the mangled and manipulated historical/imagined bodies. Thus, I think through the sound by taking the scream of Fredrick Douglas's Aunt Hester and making it a (raced-sexed) category of analysis for sound - "aunt hester's scream." I want to project Aunt Hester's literal scream that resulted from the slavemaster's whip as a sound that is both anterior and posterior to her victimization. As a category of analysis or, say, a genre of sound, aunt hester's scream contends with the queer "assemblages" of race-sexed-gendered-historicized-futurized subjects and sounds, subjects who make sounds, sounds that make subjects.

I want to explore the novel as "graphic" in unconventional ways. First, I am interested in how the novel can explore assemblaged subjects (subjectivities, even?) in "graphic detail" or explicitly, creatively, hauntingly. Here, I think of Morrison's Beloved, Ellison's Invisible Man and Baldwin's Just Above My Head. But I am equally intrigued with graphic representation in novels - how typography manipulates messages (and I rely on Jennifer Brody's work on typography in Invisible Man, here). Lastly, I am interested in how a story's detail allow readers to draw mental pictures - how they allow for graphic imagination.

Graphic detail. Graphic representation. Graphic imagination. All three - what I'm terming graphesis - evince aunt hester's scream: they exceed intention, are historical but not containable in its historical moment and hallucinate the past, present and future. They all collaborate to rework the mangled and manipulated queer assemblages of (black) subjectivity and open space for new ways to be, see, hear, feel and seize blackness. Here, I use Fred Moten's understanding of blackness as that which particular subjects possess but that equally possesses those subjects...subjects formed, informed and deformed by it.

Thus, I ask: why does performing blackness through graphesis have currency? In the fantasy genre, what does black(ness) - or why does it - allow for play(fulness), for magic and enchantment, for vibrato, falsetto, playful punctuation, screams? What does this mean for black subjectivity and personhood?