Surfaces, Subjectivity, and Self-Denial

Abstract

None Like Us begins with a story of familial cleavage. Though he does not explicitly delve into its contours, Stephen Best describes a graduation dinner that reveals (to him) a distance between him and his father. Another attendee describes this separation (on the part of father) as having been born from a conflict between pride and disgust— the father is proud of his son’s success, but it also announces an unassimilable difference between the two. Best likens this to an injunction to community within Black studies, which he describes as not only uncomfortable but problematic: “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” (1). This narrative is meant to explain Best’s project, which is to decouple Black studies’ relationship between the archive and community. However, this is not just any archive but that of the transatlantic slave trade, which has traditionally undergirded the idea of a Black diaspora, a term that itself has been understood to refer not only to a shared history but to common cultural, aesthetic, and religious practices. Best bristles not only at the mandate to think with slavery when thinking about Blackness but also the assumption that this history provides a useful form of commonality. Ultimately, Best aims to uncover and work with a productive version of negation: “This coveted alienation would entail a gesture best parsed as a kind of doubled movement: away from the ‘clenched little