UCLA

My thesis, entitled, “Ontological Bodies in AntiBlack Worlds: Disability, Humanness, and an Otherwise Politics of Being,” is an investigation of what Sylvia Wynter in her article “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” calls, “a politics of being.” More specifically, I am interested in tracing Sylvia Wynter’s concepts of the evolution of Man and it’s overdetermination, the way in which humanness came to be coterminous with (certain arrangements of) flesh, and how this concatenation has come to bear on disability as a politics of being that is dependent on an antiBlack ontological schema. This exploration wends its way through multiple sites, both excavating their specificity and stringing them together like pearls: the western university, the field of western medicine–or as I will elaborate, western ethnomedicine–a tendency that appears in disability studies that I will argue is ‘ultranormative,’ and the language we have been given to denote disability as a discrete phenomenon of bodily arrangement leading to discrimination. Additionally, this thesis is deeply invested in methodology. Using a speculative form of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “study,” and that signals what Katherine McKittrick calls, “the fictive work of theory,” I approach my thesis through a lens that, rather than being interdisciplinary, is informedly and intentionally undisciplined. This kind of approach, one that uses a creative praxis in order to unearth and attempt to move away from a universalizing academic modus operandi, is necessary to disavow the replication of the dynamics of flesh and humanness that I am trying to uncover. Indebted to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Jasbir Puar, and Fred Moten, this thesis asks the question, what would it mean to be human in our own image, as the ones who are seen to be never quite human enough?