Curriculum Vitae by M. Shadee Malaklou
Academic Journals by M. Shadee Malaklou
bell teaches us that love is what makes it possible for life that doesn’t matter—life that doesn’... more bell teaches us that love is what makes it possible for life that doesn’t matter—life that doesn’t have access to the timeline of Man (or any timeline)—to matter. She writes, “No matter our place in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture, when we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination.” bell calls on us to abandon our (bad) faith in Man’s positivism and progress in favor of another kind of faith: “spiritual awakening.” In what follows, I pair bell’s insight with Fanon’s argument that “occult instability” is what yields revolution, in order to elaborate love in bell’s own words: as “reckless abandon,” as a “spiritual awakening” that asks us to give up on this world in search of an/Other, even (especially) if we do not (yet) know where or how or if we will arrive at that landing.
In this paper, I read Derrida's “The Animal That Therefore I Am” through the theoretical framewor... more In this paper, I read Derrida's “The Animal That Therefore I Am” through the theoretical framework that Hortense Spillers offers in her 1987 canonical essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and through the black radical tradition that her essay has galvanized, including afro-pessimistic readings of how black social life inheres in/as/through social death. I argue that Jordan Peele’s filmic imagination—in Get Out (2017) and Us (2019)—demonstrates the ways in which Spillers’ text and those who are in conversation with it put pressure on Derrida's original formulation, to think about how our concepts of the animal and of nature (not least of all, of the animal gaze) are always already raced and sexed. Specifically, I argue that Derrida's animal gaze returns Man to the ‘flesh’ of his being, or to a body beyond signification, which is none other than black ‘un/gendered’ flesh. This paper thus finds that the kind of gratuitous vulnerability that the human body experiences under the gaze of the animal makes that body available in black, which is to say: as flesh; and further, that this fleshification feminizes the human body, making it available as hole, that is to say, as gratuitously penetrable and vulnerable. The latter, I argue, also renders that human body as paradigmatically black.
This paper adds an analysis of social and political constructions of time to Afro-pessimism’s cri... more This paper adds an analysis of social and political constructions of time to Afro-pessimism’s critique, in order to address Kenan Ferguson’s question about the feltness of (un)free dom—what he describes as “debt”—and its relationship to the “less-than-human.” Malaklou argues that this less-than-human, caricatured as the “Black African,” lives in the primordial time of the bush. Her essay thus asks us to reach backwards in time in order to imagine and employ debt as Ferguson wants us to: as an/Other, non-humanist model for being and doing and knowing (and feeling).
This essay argues that objections to nonblack suffering in Trump’s America obscure racism’s prima... more This essay argues that objections to nonblack suffering in Trump’s America obscure racism’s primary operation as a cut that makes human body from racialized flesh. It returns to Frank B. Wilderson III’s argument in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003) that the civil society that organizes our political and social relationality is necessarily exclusionary to posit a libidinal critique. It adds to Wilderson’s intervention a paradigmatic analysis of social and political constructions of time to call not for inclusivity, which Trump betrays as an antiblack praxis, but to call for the exclusivity of the black feminine.
This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms... more This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms.
Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency
says about the nature of black positionality and the significance
of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and
the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations
of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black
m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge
production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition
politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence,
and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through
mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.
In the third season of Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset (2013-14), gay Iranian-American reality televis... more In the third season of Bravo TV's Shahs of Sunset (2013-14), gay Iranian-American reality television personality Reza Farahan makes a curious analogy when he caricatures flamboyantly queer guest star Sasha Salehi as black. Reza associates what he perceives as sexual depravity with racial blackness, I argue, to distance himself from Sasha in time. This essay thus enumerates Reza's homophobic antiblackness as a means by which he curates the imago of a right kind of modern or postmodern Iranian gay. I intervene in the epistemic break brokered by Enlightenment philosophy, which shifts human features from an anatomical to a physiognomical model of difference-a physiognomical model notably tasks the material skin with signifying the spatialization of time, for example, in racial schemas-to elaborate sociogenic psychic processes that distribute and arrange desire and identification. Like Frantz Fanon, who rubs up against white flesh so that it might rub off on him, Reza's is a sexuality of the surfaces in which he seeks white touch to negate the racial schemas that atavistically hail him. I therefore contextualize Fanonian psychoanalysis in/as critical race theory to argue that interracial meetings of bodies and secretions and intimacies level surface topographies to generate one condition of possibility for the "occult" self-invention Fanon prescribes, for black and nonblack persons of color alike.
This essay, forthcoming November 2015 in a special issue of Black Camera entitled, "Fugitivity an... more This essay, forthcoming November 2015 in a special issue of Black Camera entitled, "Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination," examines how the relationship between black performance and black ontology might disrupt the chronopolitics of social death. To date, critical reception of The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete (dir. George Tillman, Jr., 2013) has read the film as a multi-racial coming of age story about two children on the run from state social services in a nightmarish Brooklyn landscape. Against these readings, I argue that the film is available to a more radical interpretation that locates, in the character of Mister, modes of black performance that puncture and disrupt what Frantz Fanon describes as the fact of blackness. Mister’s dreams of escape materialize around a casting call for child actors in Beverly Hills, for which he spends his fugitive summer preparing. His study of acting engages in a serial invention of alternative selves—the production of substitute identities by which he invents himself anew in black. Mister’s fugitive maskings enact the black invention that Fanon champions in the figure of “the leap” into other life-worlds: worlds unbounded by the temporal regime of social death. In theatrical snippets, Mister leans into slow, stalled time to animate life in non-movement; in spite of a formal cinematic structure that thrusts his movements forward, Mister remains suspended in the “colored” time of captivity, which is coincidentally where he cultivates social life.
1. On page 228, the first sentence of the second full paragraph should read:
Public Scholarship by M. Shadee Malaklou
The Platform, 2022
Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou, director of the bell hooks center at Berea College, speaks with journalis... more Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou, director of the bell hooks center at Berea College, speaks with journalist Najma Sharif, sharing insights into bell hooks’ life and work in light of our current social moment.
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Curriculum Vitae by M. Shadee Malaklou
Academic Journals by M. Shadee Malaklou
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms.
Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency
says about the nature of black positionality and the significance
of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and
the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations
of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black
m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge
production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition
politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence,
and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through
mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.
Public Scholarship by M. Shadee Malaklou
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms.
Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency
says about the nature of black positionality and the significance
of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and
the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations
of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black
m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge
production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition
politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence,
and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through
mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.