“Paradigmatic Accoustics: Blackness, Performance, and the Quotidian Politics of Sound” focuses on black music and performance that operate in the rising dominance of telecommunications. Communicative capitalism names the conjoining of the telecommunications industry (radio, television, cinema, and the varying digital platforms) and financial speculation during late capitalism that blurs the boundaries between civil society and social surveillance. Black music figures as a prominent force in the rising profits and power of the telecommunications industries. My research identifies how black music is used as a sophisticated means for commodifying the participation, attention, and affect of the general public using digital interfaces. The first part argues for a different view than one that see "riots" as "the language of the unheard.” Instead, this project explores how the rebellions operated as an active resistance to communication, forming a politics of sound, relation, and care that affirms the non-communicable and poetic aspects of black antagonism in an active refusal of the confluence between communications technology, police power, and politics. The second part historicizes this telecommunications boom as an aspect of what Dr. Saidiya Hartman once called “the afterlife of property” and the theories of commodity, subjectivity, and property that racial slavery and anti-black racism produced. By centering the social predicaments and existential conditions that Black performers work through, my intellectual project explores black music as a key site to interrogate the shifting meanings of the political in our moment. In this way, blackness is more than its contemporary ubiquity; instead I argue that black sound and performance displays how black voice is a troubling presence for communicative capitalism and theories of political subjectivity in general.

Flowers Grew Out of the Asphalt” addresses how the treatment of Black women in the afterlife of slavery, under the guise of whitening ideologies, contributed to the formations of regional identity and Black women’s geographies in the city of São Paulo. The lives and presence of Black women after abolition often go unrecognized as part of a larger omission of slavery and Black histories in public discourse and the brick-and-mortar archive. Relying on medicolegal municipal incident reports, this dissertation centers Black women, their geographies, and spatial histories to push against traditional narratives and imaginings of São Paulo as a principally white, Europeanized city.

This dissertation examines the limitations of the current lynching lexicon using a rhetorical and linguistic analysis and focusing on Black women to read the lasting effect of lynching violence. I demonstrate that centering Black women in our analysis of lynching disrupt how lynching is theorized both temporally and spatially, on the one hand, and disrupts the language and type of speech used to describe lynching as a social process on the other. I study the occurrences of Black women's appearance in lynching language and our cultural memory while examining Black women's foreclosure from some iterations of memory. Threaded through and grounding each chapter is an interrogation and critique of the sociocultural status of womanhood, particularly when the terms are qualified by the signifiers "Black" or "white." Moreover, while the project will necessarily interrogate the anti-black violence of institutional archives, cultural memory, and lynching grammar, subsequently expanding them, the essential work here is to excavate the stakes of the social category of the woman and the concept of womanhood. I argue that the social category of "woman" and the assumptions about womanhood are racialized gender terms constructed through oppressive patriarchy, which subsumes women under the oppressive regime of white male dominance. Finally, the research formulates a grammar of lynching that expands lynching's lexicon to include Black women as survivors, witnesses, knowledge producers, and carriers of memory in the wake of lynching violence. Through this rhetorical and ontological critical theory project, I bring greater attention to how lynching is memorialized in public memory, which is a largely un-studied site of the production and reproduction of the meaning of lynching, and Black women survivors of lynching as the unseen authors of meaning-making about the nature and lasting effects of lynching violence. The project aims to challenge assumptions about racialized and sexualized anti-black violence.

This dissertation frames Lillian Smith (1897-1966), Rita Mae Brown (1944-), Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946-), Mab Segrest (1949-), and Dorothy Allison (1949-) as a distinct political tradition whose concern with how people are trained to inhabit and (re)produce whiteness radically departs from anti-racist political thought and activism among white southern women of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter reads archival materials alongside of memoirs, speeches, and political essays to explicate forms of anti-racist praxis and theorizations of white racialized genders and sexualities. These forms of anti-racist praxis are, I suggest, methods by which white people can perform psychological healing that—as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others have called for—is one necessary step in abolishing a white supremacist and anti-Black world.

Transgressing Trans analyzes the formation of the wrong body narrative (a man trapped in a woman’s body and vice versa) within sexological discourse. Drawing from sexological literature, anti-abolitionist texts, theology, black studies and transgender studies, this dissertation attempts to address the role (anti)blackness played in the creation of the wrong body narrative. How does the depoliticization of the wrong body narrative continue to inscribe trans politics and identity with anti-black racism?

Utilizing a Foucauldian genealogy, I reinterpret the history of sexology by showing how certain events were indeed historical processes caught in specific cultural, political, and economic times. Karl Ulrichs was the first person to construct a scientific theory of same-sex desire (he coined the term “Urning,” who was a male-bodied individual with a female soul) in 1864, around the time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was “abolished” (1859) and the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). I posit that these landmarks are not coincidental; the notion of being trapped in the “wrong body” became legible through the structures of slavery and the scientific racism that followed.

Organized around a series of case histories, the first chapters examine the historical, political, and cultural context of the formation of the “scientific” field of sexology, specifically through the early manifestations of the “wrong body” narrative within nineteenth century American and European biological science, psychiatry, theology, and anthropology. In the later chapters, I move to the 1950s when the term transsexual first became popular in both medico-science and the media in the United States, and then to the 1980s when transsexuality became an official mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (DSM-III). The discourses used to describe the transsexual continued to rely on the language of degeneration and pathology through reiterating not only the spirit/flesh duality, but also incorporating narratives of the primitive and the savage within the codification of transsexuality.