Enacting a Poetics of the “Gaze from Below”: The Queer of Colour Child as an Optic for the Critique of Heteronormativity and Anti-Blackness

My research project conceptualises the idea of ‘Black and queer of colour child’s standpoint’ as a critical optic to examine the ramifications of heteronormativity and anti-Blackness. The project brings the categories of race, gender, and sexuality back to the body and lived experience as the “fleshy materiality” (Jackson, 2020) from which the violence of heteronormativity and anti-Blackness is addressed. In attending to the question of what emerges out of addressing heteronormativity and anti-Blackness alongside from the standpoint and lived experience of Black and queer of colour child, the project derives its material of analysis from a set of self-life-narratives written by (Afro-)diasporic Black and queer of colour authors who (retrospectively) reckon with what it means to navigate an anti-Black heteronormative world as a queer racialised subject. While the queer child as an actual living subject – let alone the Black and queer of colour child – remains undertheorized within the fields of literary studies, queer studies, and cultural studies more broadly, works of fiction – in its various forms – have long invited us to pay attention to this child (Stockton, 2009).

The project of my dissertation builds on the work I did in my RMA thesis which engages the ‘human’ question in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and Aimé Césaire’s Notebookof A Return to My Native Land (1939).Drawing on Audre Lorde’s notion of “biomythography” as a form of writing that combines personal experience with mythology and Black history in the critique of anti-Blackness and heteronormativity (Lorde, 1982) along with Sylvia Wynter’s proposal that the human is a “hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species” where bios and mythoi are equally central to who we are (Wynter, 2015), in the RMA thesis I look at how the auto-bio-mytho-graphical in Hartman’s and Césaire’s aforementioned texts yields a critical optic to imagine being-in-the-world otherwise from the standpoint of the dispossessed as an afterlife of slavery and colonialism. With particular focus on the themes of return(to the ‘native land’) and fugitivity, the thesis looks into how Hartman and Césaire as descendants of “those whose only voyages were uprootings” (Césaire, 1939) attend to the afterlife of slavery and colonialism and what do they propose as a, if at all, way out of its haunting spectre. The thesis, in other words, examines how Hartman and Césaire “decipher the hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers, 1987) and how in doing so they re-write the order of knowledge that engendered anti-Blackness.