Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation

by John Murillo III

Overview

In Impossible Stories, John Murillo offers bold new readings of recent and canonical Black creative works within an Afro-pessimistic framework to excavate how time, space, and blackness intersect—or, rather, crash. Building on Michelle Wright’s ideas about dislocation from time and space as constitutive to being Black in America, as well as on W. E. B. DuBois’s theories of temporalization, he reconsiders the connections between physical phenomena and principles, literature, history, and the fragmented nature of Black time and space.  Taking as his lens the fragment—fragmented bodies, fragments of memories, fragments of texts—Murillo theorizes new directions for Black identity and cultural production. Combining a critical engagement of physics and metaphysics with innovative readings of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, he offers new ways to think about anti-Black racism and practice Black creativity. Ultimately, in his equally creative and analytical responses to depictions of Black people left out of history and barred from spaces, Murillo argues that through Afro-pessimism, Black people can fight the anti-Black cosmos.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814257777
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	01/06/2021
Series:	New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
Edition description:	1
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Murillo III is Assistant Professor of African American studies at University of California, Irvine.

Read an Excerpt

We must map our premises. Black “life” and “death” do not matter in this world. This is the structural truth of the anti-Black world in which the terms “life” and “death” do not adhere to Black folk the way they do for others because this world violently warps the way Black folk, as socially dead beings, relate to the conditions of being alive or dead. This truth (or “fact”) telegraphs an unethical, gratuitously violent antagonism between Black folk who “live” and “die,” and the anti-Black world that sanctions, desires, and demands the meaninglessness of even those quotation marks. The most attentive Black thought and action works to examine the forces that drive the anti-Black world, and contend the destructive, terrorizing manifestations and effects of those forces as they position Blacks in space and time. This project attempts to map these forces from a Black position through a careful examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black literature. I am guided by this set of questions: How do the violent forces that position Blacks in space and time affect the literary creation we might produce? How might we engage Black literary creation? And what is at stake in both Black literary creation and our engagements with it?

“Living,” “dying,” and creating in the “afterlife of slavery,” the haunting and structural subjection that seals Black folk into “crushing objecthood,” is to “live,” “die,” and create in relation to an antagonism that is temporal, spatial, and political-ontological in nature. As Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, slavery violently disfigures time and space, creating a “tear in the world . . . a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being [and] a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.” Time and space shatter in slavery’s unending wake such that slavery persists as an afterlife, framing and disfiguring the scenes of subjection we endure and bear witness to across time and space. Tear. Rupture. Shatter. In this writing, we will investigate Black creative work while inhabiting the totality of this spatiotemporal fragmentation. We read time and space in and through Black literature, and draw from physics to help develop a nuanced, unique approach that both merges my interests in Black studies and theoretical physics and also illuminates what I understand to be two, underthought—or uncritically thought of—fundamental features of being: time and space. By holding and beholding the fragments of lived and literary Black stories that speak to the fractured relationship between Blackness, time, space, and creation, we aim to establish a more precise understanding of Black temporality and spatiality. Our claim and aim and hope are that a better grasp of how Black folk relate to space and time clarifies the stakes and mechanics of Black creative work, and that thinking about Black creative work as being made from out of time and out of nowhere opens us into the impossible forms of Black creation that just might transform the cosmos as we know it.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Black (W)hole of It All 1

First Arrangement Black (In) Time: Untimely Blackness

I Prelude: Untimely Fragments and the Beginnings of a Reflection 23

II Black Holes and Generations 33

III Untime 53

Second Arrangement The Untimely Works and Worlds of Impossible Stories

IV Prelude: Trauma Work 77

V Of Shadows and Diamonds 95

VI Elliptical in Love Dot Dot Dot 121

Third Arrangement Transmissions from Out of Nowhere

VII Prelude: No Place, Not Any Place, Out of Place 137

VIII Nowheresville 147

IX Stanky Shrines and Hollow Bastions 163

Outro: Out of Time in the Middle of Nowhere 185

Bibliography 195

Index 201

Editorial Reviews

Impossible Stories is clever and provocative. Murillo effectively stages a set of conversations between and among physics, literary production, and African American studies and in doing so does the impossible work of telling the impossible story of artistic creation in the context of trenchant anti-Black racism.” —GerShun Avilez, author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

“This is a powerful scholarly and creative work. It should find an interested and enthusiastic audience among academics, artists, and activists concerned with issues of aesthetic, ethical, and political import to the matter of black living and dying. This is a first-rate study of stories that both will and will not be heard but that must to be told, over and over again.” —Jared Sexton, author of Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing

“The uniqueness of Murillo’s style and methodology is this study’s greatest asset, carving a new path in African-American scholarship. Few other books look like Impossible Stories or talk about this material in such a way. … As such, the book is just as much an introductory course in astrophysics as an analysis of Black life, delivered with the excitement of a professor who actively cares about the material.” —Jacob DeBrock, Extrapolation

From the Publisher