UC Berkeley

Nigger Chaos is a multifaceted and multilayered experimental storytelling project in Black Studies. The stories and pieces of data from which this dissertation draws is animated by the theoretical formations of violent black rebels, sutured together by the sonics of black musicians, arranged and composed with the fugitive in mind. In one register, this study departs from traditional scholarly inquiries into violent black rebellion wherein violence is operationalized as a dependent variable within a predictable arc that extols resistance, rescues the black body, ascribes it with agentic characteristics, and/or identifies rebellion as symptomatic of a larger phenomenon enacted with a predetermined teleological endpoint. Nigger Chaos understands the violence of the black rebel as an independent variable imbued with narrative properties possessing distinctly autonomous semantic and material characteristics. Reconceptualizing violent black rebellion in this manner not only elucidates how the use of violence by black people has historically served as an effort to reshape their lives, but also how their utilization of violence – as an ideological formation freed from means/ends – challenges the founding epistemological antagonisms upon which colonial and state power was created and maintained, namely who is killable and who is not. And, on another scale, Nigger Chaos attends to the long intellectual history that carefully created our current epistemological socio-politico-juridical order and examines the ways in which violent black rebellion intervenes, in the form of a question mark, to postulate different possibilities and new potentialities of being. I do this by tracing the epistemology that animates the codification of the pirate within the legal and political imagination of Western statecraft and analyzing the ways in which these grammars have been transumed over and across time. It is suggested that the interplay between the state and the pirate – as the enemy of all, to whom no rights are afforded and no protection owed – discloses the positionality of the violent black rebel. That is, our current socio-politico-juridical epistemological order, by design, constrains the black subject’s opportunity for redress to be found in appeals to the state. And yet, it is this very same positionality – always an enemy, always potentially violent, and always an internal threat – that makes possible for a new political praxis.