UC Davis

This dissertation intervenes in theories of reproduction that posit transformative kinship as inherently liberatory or redressive of structural violence. Instead, it interrogates the role that speculative imaginaries play in rearticulating the social order, specifically concerning antiblackness. The project considers emerging interdisciplinary conversations about race, kinship, and population through a reading of poiesis as a theorization of antiblack violence. This reading not only approaches antiblack violence as a sign or consequence of the reproduction of the social, but rather seeks to understand how antiblack violence potentiates and renews the processes and performances that set up social reproduction—how such violence continually solves for what, how, and who must be captured in order to resource forms of being and sustain its continued formation as lifeworld. In order to highlight the ways this particular reading of violence (or this violence as reading) engages the metaphors and materiality of pregnancy and birth, I term this preformative or subtendent antiblackness gestational violence. I argue that gestational violence—a metaphorical and (dis)embodying violence that brings being(s) to form both conceptually and conceptively—is the key creative force through which society renews its modes of relation and stabilizes the symbolic order. Without antiblack violence the material reproduction (of bodies, of being, of society) cannot continue. The title of the dissertation plays on the term life expectancy in order to note the thick grammatico-poetical join of antiblack violence, measures of aliveness, and processes of bringing life into being. The primary texts I choose to think with in this dissertation—Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, David Marriott’s poem “Riverflesh,” Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, and Donna Haraway’s poetic scholarly monograph Staying with the Trouble—elaborate these layers of life expectancy and allow me to parse the performativity of gestational violence.