Upheavals in Black Thought

Abstract

Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called “the position of the unthought.” This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to “include” blackness (ReidPharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the additive approach through which, for instance, black and brown stripes were recently added to the redesigned rainbow flag (Campbell 2019: 82 – 87). Even in inclusionary or additive gestures, race often serves either as an analogy to sexuality or as a past historical social struggle (aka. “the civil rights movement”) upon which the LGBT movement now builds (Johnson and Henderson 2005: 4 – 5). As recently as 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005: 220) could remark how the archive of queer theory remained predominantly white,