In a Field of Static (Paperback)

Paperback. With In a Field of Static, James Bliss examines how the debates at the heart of feminist and queer studies represent missed encounters with Black feminist theorizing. For Bliss, Audre Lordes public falling out with Mary Daly, feminist theorys arguments about intersectionality and assemblage theory, queer theorys debates over negativity and futurity, and the transnational and diasporic turns in feminist and queer studies each demonstrate how different debates, misunderstandings, and missed encounters have drawn the horizons of our political and conceptual imaginations. Engaging literary and critical works by Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, KimberlE Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, and others, Bliss recontextualizes concepts like relationality, subjectivity, negativity, and belonging through readings across the archive of Black feminism. By revisiting and restaging these conceptual debates, Bliss presents a genealogy of Black feminist theorizing that marks the indeterminacy, the field of static, at the core of Blackness and antiblackness. Insisting on the potential within indeterminacy, this genealogy embraces negativity, abstraction, and speculation as methods for an insurgent conceptual inventivenessways of imagining new worlds and new forms of being and relation. In a Field of Static recenters Black feminist theorizing in the debates that shaped contemporary feminist and queer theory, offering an original genealogy of Black feminist thought that engages with the indeterminacy at the core of Blackness and antiblackness. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…