Aperture

There must be many and different ways of redefining the current conjuncture by way of refiguring.

With the emphasis on specificity, refiguring in black can be defined as doing things differently and deliberately so from the black point of view. Precisely at this specificity, there lies the critical mode of thinking about black figures and studying them differently. In this meditation, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus are figures who are not only located in black thought but they are thematized outside the conventions of their critical reception and commendation, which means they cannot be studied otherwise. By being refigured from the black point of view, this is the insistence that they must be located outside the limitations that are imposed on them as stagnant figures. In short, Refiguring in Black has a different tenor and disposition of these figures, hence their refiguring from the black point of view. What is presented here is a meditation by way of refiguring. It is a critical practice, a discourse, whose critical disposition, operation, is (on) the edge. By refiguring, it means that this suite gives new meaning to the thought of Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus as in a form of reformulation - rupture. In other words, they are refigured in ways that part company with familiar interpretive practices, discourses, styles, sensibilities, and tropes. Things become radically different.

This, in essence, means seeing things differently, seeing them for what they are, seeing them like never before - say, anew. It is not only seeing just for its own sake. It is the seeing that has been refused, where blackness has been blinded so as not to see things for what they are. It is to see differently and, according to Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1987), it is to see clearly. What does it mean to see clearly? To see clearly is not only to look. It is to have a point of view. It is to see dissimulation and to unmask its falsities, malice, and pretenses. To see clearly is to see differently. It is to see what is not seen. To see clearly is refiguring. It is, according to wa Thiong'o, the institution of a different reality, which comes into being by means of having seen things differently because they are seen from the perspective of the black. For wa Thiong'o, there should be a look at what deformed the black, and that means having to come into confrontation with what deforms and liberates the self from this deformation. It is to begin anew. To see clearly, ways of seeing differently, mean coming into contact with what has always been hidden from sight. Not that what is seen is kept off sight. For it is something that is there on sight to see but the black is blinded not to see. Thus, it is as if things are invisible, while they are not. They are there; it is just a way not only of seeing differently, but of seeing clearly after the black has removed the blindfold.

At the moment of this opening, a foundation is laid, and the claim is made that refiguring in black is a distinctive point of view, which, in itself, as radical, presents an opportunity to do things differently, to see them in distinctive ways, to feel them otherwise and, more precisely, to be free to inhabit the realm of the unknown. This is what the work of Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus is all about. More so, refiguring their work, and that being done from the black point of view, illuminates the darkened spaces that have decentered these figures and the concerns they bring.

To see in darkness is not to see clearly without any light, or if what is seen is clearly visible. The way of seeing is the call to end blindness. The black must see clearly, and this means seeing what W. E. B. Du Bois (2015 [1903]) calls the "color-line," which is the fundamental problem, and which even went beyond what was marked as the scene of the twentieth century. The clear mark of the world is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) calls the "abyssal line." Linked to this also is seeing, at the level of alterity politics, which perpetuates coloniality through the paradigm of difference, and which V. Y. Mudimbe (2003) calls the "fault-line." All these aforementioned lines are drawn not on sand, but are engraved on the crust of the earth. At the somatic level, they are drawn all over the racialized body of the black, even more visibly, in the psyche that is fabricated and abstracted by dehumanization. These aforementioned lines, after being seen for what they are, metamorphize, and embody what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) refers to as "lines of damnation." These are the lines that demarcate those who embody life and those who are denied this life.

In this refiguring, Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus are engaged in themes that do not account for the totality of their work, but themes that will illuminate different ways of thinking about them. That is why this refiguring is contrapuntal in nature. If there is a grain, this radical instantiation thinks, reads, scripts, and discourses against this grain. The whole idea of this refiguring is, as a practice and disposition, to engage in the open field that black life is - rupture.

Thus far, the incessant and necessary effort of black thought is what has stood in its own name, and no form of interdiction has claimed absolute totality in obliterating it. The way in which refiguring in black is articulating itself has been a forced grammar, a matter of struggle, a matter of necessity. The point is that black thinkers have been doing the thinking, while they are refused the very idea of thinking. They are interdicted when it comes to matters of thought and, as a contrapuntal gesture, they radically refuse and radically insist on doing the thinking from their own black point of view. This, in short, is what refiguring in black means. For, as its imperative, it does the work of grasping and grappling with matters of thought in different registers and dispositions that are fundamentally black. Definitely, this is refiguring in its contextual definitional form, the disposition of this meditation. There is a different accent through which things are thought, and refiguring is such a form. It can also be said, in relation to the forms that dominate the current conjuncture, that refiguring is the disfiguring of forms (more especially if they orthodoxically insist on closure as opposed to rupture).

There is no refiguring in black outside black thought. Already at work is black thought as the constitutive element of black life. The questions, concerns, and matters of black life are confronted by way of refiguring in order to understand the critical conjuncture the black is in. Making sense of reality and the world as it were, refiguring in black signals the generativity through which existential concerns have erupted in different and profound ways. This meditation, at this current conjuncture, is one of the ways (among many other dispositions), by way of refiguring, that black thought is taken up. By doing this, through Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus as figures of black thought, refiguring in black is heightened into one of the dispositions through which the black point of view is made bold and manifest in the arena in which it has been rendered mute, irrelevant, banal, and all things outside "standards."

To say refiguring in black is to attest to what is not in the name of what is lying out there. Rather, it is a phenomenon that is lived, it is in the current conjuncture of the past and the present. It is the radical work of those who live in their current conjuncture, and who not only make a difference, but who act out of necessity as opposed to acting from luxurious choice. The conditions in which they find themselves have fundamentally to change not by chance, but by pure intentions of their making, their radical effort. They are more about pushing limits. In other words, Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus do refiguring in black as what is vast and ever-expanding in its grammar, what is impure in its genealogies, trajectories, and horizons, which, in themselves, attest to the complexity of reality as such.

At the heart of this refiguring is Cedric Robinson (2000), whose concept of the black radical tradition is its very edge, and is the operation of how black thought unfolds. It is that critique of Western civilization, the elementary definition whose mode of operation is fundamental as it attests to the material and the concrete, whose abstractions and poetics are not a luxurious muse, but are having to grasp and grapple with different ways of meditating about black life through the criticality of Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus. This, to Anthony Bogues (2010), has been the question and concern of what it means to live inside empire. These four figures are those whose thought and life is in the clutches of this empire. It is in this location, however, that insurgent forms of black life are acted and re-enacted to become a radically different reality. Douglass, Morrison, Spillers, and Mingus are within the black radical tradition. In emphasizing the deliverance of the black radical tradition, Fred Moten (2013: 237) points to its "radical resources," which should be mobilized, ones that "lie before the tradition, where 'before' indicated both what precedes and what awaits, animating our times with fierce urgency." This is where generativity lies, and it is what marks the critical thought of Douglass, Morrison, and Spillers. And, as Moten signals, this is a way of tapping into the resources that lie...