Introduction

Abstract

A communitarian impulse runs deep within black studies. It announces itself in the assumption that in writing about the black past "we" discover "our" history; it is implied in the thesis that black identity is uniquely grounded in slavery and middle passage; it registers in the suggestion that what makes black people black is their continued navigation of an "afterlife of slavery," recursions of slavery and Jim Crow for which no one appears able to find the exit; it may even be detected in an allergy within the field to self-critique, a certain politesse, although I have no doubt that this last may be a bridge too far for some. My goal, at any rate, is to encourage a frank reappraisal of the critical assumptions that undergird many of these claims, not least and certainly most broadly the assumed conjuncture between belonging and a history of subjection, for as much as attempts to root blackness in the horror of slavery feel intuitively correct, they produce in me a feeling of unease, the feeling that I am being invited to long for the return of a sociality that I never had, one from which I suspect (had I ever shown up) I might have been excluded. Queer theorists have tended to bemoan the omnipresence of futurism in queer politics. I