Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race

Abstract:This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.