In a Field of Static: Missed Encounters with Black Feminist Theorizing

With In a Field of Static, James Bliss examines how the debates at the heart of feminist and queer studies represent missed encounters with Black feminist theorizing. For Bliss, Audre Lorde’s public falling out with Mary Daly, feminist theory’s arguments about intersectionality and assemblage theory, queer theory’s debates over negativity and futurity, and the transnational and diasporic turns in feminist and queer studies each demonstrate how different debates, misunderstandings, and missed encounters have drawn the horizons of our political and conceptual imaginations. Engaging literary and critical works by Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde, KimberlÉ Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Barbara Smith, and others, Bliss recontextualizes concepts like relationality, subjectivity, negativity, and belonging through readings across the archive of Black feminism. By revisiting and restaging these conceptual debates, Bliss presents a genealogy of Black feminist theorizing that marks the indeterminacy, the field of static, at the core of Blackness and antiblackness. Insisting on the potential within indeterminacy, this genealogy embraces negativity, abstraction, and speculation as methods for an insurgent conceptual inventiveness—ways of imagining new worlds and new forms of being and relation.