In 1996, Stuart Hall published his important essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” Against the one-dimensional critiques of postcolonial studies, Hall (1996) argued that the framing of the “post” in postcolonial studies was neither a temporal reference to a simplistic “before” and “after” colonialism, nor a celebratory argument that colonialism was fully over. Instead, the “post” for Hall referred to the new claims about Western knowledge that had to be addressed in the wake of important scholars like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Building off Hall, Raka Shome would similarly note that “the prefix ‘post’ used in such a theoretical vocabulary as postcolonial studies does not mean a final closure, nor does it announce the ‘end’ of that to which it is appended; rather it suggests a thinking through and beyond the problematics of that to which it is appended” (Shome 1998, 204). Even as the work of Western scholars like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida would be important for postcolonial studies, Western thought itself could not remain the same after postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies set an agenda that had yet (and remains) to be adequately addressed in thought.Three years before Hall made this argument about postcolonial studies, another related intellectual gauntlet was thrown down in 1993. In that year, R. A. Judy (1993) published (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. This text marked a shift in African American literary studies, in particular, and Black studies, in general. Judy’s book was arguably overshadowed by the release of Paul Gilroy’s important Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in the same year. But the questions Judy raised in (Dis)Forming would not go anywhere. We might say that Judy set an agenda for Black literary studies (and I argue beyond) in 1993 on par with the earlier agenda setting work of postcolonial studies, though I would argue Judy’s agenda would fracture the very terms of Western thought in ways that postcolonial studies could not fully get to. In many ways, that fracture Judy would initiate in Western thought boils down to one seemingly simple question that I would argue permeates Judy’s writing to this day: Can speech and writing bring Black people into humanity, as such humanity is defined under Western thought? Though with some nuance, an important cohort of African American literary studies scholars largely answered in the affirmative by the middle and latter end of the twentieth century, establishing an African American literary studies canon, by using figures like Frederick Douglass and his writing and speeches as proof of Black humanity on Western terms.Judy returns us to the particular context of this African American literary canonical formation, while forcing us to ask more questions about this canonical formation itself. For example, what language must Black people speak and write in to illustrate humanity? Invariably for this new canon, the answer was North American and European English, suggesting that those enslaved Africans who could speak and write in a variety of other languages, such as Arabic, were less important to canonical thought. What must one say and write in English to prove said humanity? Largely, one must write and speak of one’s capacity to transcend the limitations set on one by racist violence. Thus, Judy suggests that the terms of Black humanity for much of the African American literary canon revolved around similar terms of humanity long laid out in European, liberal, democratic Enlightenment thought: the capacity for nationalistic languages to cohere a people and to assist in their transcendence of hardships. In other words, a particular epistemology and ontology bled into African American literary thought, placing a Black face on liberal humanism. But such English-focused logics do not fully follow the historical record. As scholars like Sylviane Diouf (2013) estimate, 15 to 20 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the New World were Muslims and thus speakers and writers of Arabic. Two decades before Diouf, Judy illustrated that the African American literary canon is disformed when we reconstruct, for example, Arabic and Islam as central to African American literary thought. It is to formerly enslaved Muslims like Ben Ali that Judy turns his attention, not to rewrite Black humanity away from English speaking and writing or to argue that Black humanity is demonstrated via surpassing racist violence, but to show that Black humanity just is in and of itself.Importantly, in its application of liberal Enlightenment concepts of humanity (or the tools someone like Douglass had at his disposal in nineteenth-century North America), this African American literary studies canon of the mid- and late-twentieth century would arguably diverge from some components of the Black studies tradition of the mid-twentieth century. Or, maybe more accurately, this African American literary studies canon would accept some modes of Enlightenment thought as foundational. In contradiction to the radical goals of the late 1960s Black studies movement, the African American literary canon of the late twentieth century largely remade Blackness as reactionary: Blackness becomes largely a response to white supremacy, an attempt to prove humanity on white terms.Twenty-seven years later, in Judy’s latest book, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black, we are given yet another masterful move beyond reactions to Euro-American white supremacy. To say “beyond,” here, we must again invoke the “post” concept that Hall and Shome outlined for us in the beginning, as Judy’s work assumes neither a simplistic end of white supremacy nor a refusal to engage in Euro-American white supremacist thought, as though it is irrelevant to our current context. Here, white supremacy does not refer to white people’s violence against nonwhite people, per se, but, as Judy notes in an interview that Fred Moten conducted with him, white supremacy is about the preservation of “the place of that transcendent subject and filling it with a different color, or a different ethnicity” (Judy and Moten 2020, para. 66). Thus, white supremacy is the replication of Western man beyond himself, the presumed universality of Western being, as though it is applicable to Black and Brown people. Sentient Flesh pulls in Arabic and Black studies thought, while also deeply engaging in Euro-American thought to illustrate its white supremacist limits and residue for some components of contemporary African American studies. If we accept Judy’s definition, then we are met with another difficult, yet related, question (if not multiple) at the start of Sentient Flesh: What happens if we do not reduce Blackness to questions of essence or existentialism (different iterations of Western being), but we reconsider Blackness in relation to poiesis, or creative motion and emergence? Sentient Flesh picks up where (Dis)Forming left off, in the sense of pushing beyond one mode of epistemology or ontology. Further, the questions Judy asks are difficult to answer because to do so would be to force many positions to be rethought. We would have to begin again.For the audience of Philosophy & Rhetoric, a journal that historically connected the scholarship of rhetoricians and philosophers (Oliver 1997), these assumptions outlined by Judy in both 1993 and 2020 remain critically relevant. Speech and writing, of course, remain central aspects of study under the journal, and, in a highly rhetorical and philosophical fashion, Judy points us less to the content of speech and writing and more to their form. Further, Judy guides us toward criticism of problematic assumptions that many make about what it means to be Black, an answer that scholars continue to reduce to geographic borders, linguistic patterns, and white supremacist thought, under Judy’s definition of white supremacy. Put differently, there is no shortage of contemporary scholarship on Blackness and rhetoric that positions Blackness as merely a response to Euro-American geography, Euro-American language, and Euro-American being. But Judy argues that Blackness must be (and always is) much more than reaction. In the process, Judy illustrates that his discussion is not merely about Black people, but about Western forms of thought and humanity themselves, which, if he were taken seriously, would cause a reckoning within a multiplicity of academic disciplines.In many ways, Judy’s problematization of essence and existentialism in Sentient Flesh points to a problem of assumed purity in Western thought in general. In other words, this is not a problem solely associated with conservative or progressive thinkers—we find problems in both Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, though from different perspectives. Unlike the logic of transcendence, what Judy is positing is that there is no pure Black subject, lost to slavery, ready to be awoken and returned to via their mastery of Western forms of writing and speech. Likewise, there are no pure subjects alienated from themselves as selves based on the fabrication of an essence, and if we could just do away with all essences, we could all return back to a time when we were just humans, all as one. In some ways, to hold such positions is to accept Euro-American ontology and epistemology as organizing principles for all humanity, which is again Judy’s definition of white supremacy. But rather than simply refuse this position, there is a concern with the para throughout Sentient Flesh, building to and away from the work of Nahum Dimitri Chandler (2013), or a concern with thinking with or alongside of Western ontology and epistemology to understand that they are not all-encompassing and other forms of thought and life exist. This leads to what Judy calls poiesis in Black, or the fostering of “the formation of certain ways of thinking and conceiving, indeed perceiving the world—let us say imagining the world” (Judy 2020, 16). More specifically, it appears as a “thinking-in-disorder,” or the rejection of thinking as merely the mediating relationship between experience and knowledge (Western consciousness).By my reading of Sentient Flesh, Judy’s Poiesis in Black takes seriously the trouble of Euro-American humanism—as soon as the Negro is introduced into Euro-American epistemological and ontological frames, the universality of these frames is found wanting. However, to reject that universality ignores that it had an impact on not merely Europe and European self-conceptions, but European racial classificatory projects as well, which would also impact the ways that non-Europeans existed and thought about themselves in the world. Rather than the purity of European being, Judy notes throughout Sentient Flesh that poiesis exists in apposition to Euro-American humanism, which is not opposition, but side by side, close to one another. This speaks, in part, back to Judy’s (2000) long engagement with W. E. B. Du Bois, which we can find in Judy’s work on “Sociology Hesitant.” For both thinkers, “the mind” is not within you but constituted contextually, through the disorder that exists in the world. Euro-American humanism, too, is not distinct from a particular context, of which the fabrication of the Negro was also central, just as the imagination of other forms of Black life and thought, irreducible to Europe’s Negro concept.It is here that we really see the work of Judy adding to the potential work we can do in journals like Philosophy & Rhetoric. The Negro functions not merely as a descriptor of Black people fabricated by white people, but as media, in the sense that the Negro construct serves a purpose for Euro-American self-imaginations. Following Judy, I have elsewhere referred to similar discussions of the Negro as a media function (Towns 2022). Such media, of course, do not fully correspond to the multiple forms of living of Black people (Poiesis in Black). In fact, the Negro construct ignores that Black people have opened up “infinities of other ways of being human in community becoming, ever becoming” (Judy 2020, 19). What I am calling a post-Judy moment, a thinking in disorder, is a call to take Judy seriously for scholars of rhetoric, English, philosophy, and communication studies—those closest to Philosophy & Rhetoric. To do so is to think about Blackness beyond anti-Blackness, beyond reactions to white supremacy, beyond inhumanity, and toward a concern with other forms of being and knowing. This is not to say that such thought did not exist before Judy or that it exists only after. Again, as per the postcolonial studies moment, this post-Judy moment is no simplistic end to all studies of Blackness or the Negro prior to Judy, but a call to rethink the terms of knowledge about both going forward. In doing so, we would have to have new conversations about what it means to be human in general, of which Blackness would be a central part of the discussion.
Armond R. Towns (Sat,) studied this question.