UC Berkeley

In Black and Blur, Fred Moten asks, “what if we start acting like whiteness is not the surround?” This dissertation takes up this question, exploring practices and possibilities for decentering Modernity’s pervasive white subject. Through various modes of reading, writing, feeling, and relating, I describe a listening practice that could disorient and destabilize my own white subjecthood. When I say listening in this project, I am really thinking about a kind of embodied sensibility or attunement, a way of relating that is multisensory and not based purely on “hearing.” A listening that attempts to decenter white subjecthood requires a radical reframing where we move away from the conception of listening as silent attention, attending instead to forms of what Sadiya Hartman describes as “the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity” of “black noise.” This is where an engagement with the color blue becomes integral to this listening practice. Blue is important here for its role in Black studies, its theological history, its proximity to darkness, and its potential for destabilizing the subject. While I attend to sonic and vocal evocations, resonances, and rhythms in the texts I read, I consider blue as a figure that pushes against the edges of language, sight, and sound. In the texts, blue is never purely visual, it is full of noise and frequency. Blue is constantly falling into darkness, into sound or music, into void, indeterminacy, and infinity. Attending to blue alongside sound allows me to meditate at sensory edges, looking to places where those edges dissolve into echoic atmospheres and darkness.

The texts I engage in this dissertation might all loosely be called “autotheory.” A perpetually inchoate genre that resists stable classification, autotheory might be best described as a kind of writing, thinking, theorizing, and feeling that engages, disrupts, and distorts the coherent self. By investigating forms of selfhood that are de-articulated and deformed, I am pointed toward a disoriented, multi-sensuous practice that destabilizes and challenges my own white subject position and embodiment. Because the listening practice I describe moves toward disorientation, it must be approached diagonally and indirectly. So, I lean heavily on association throughout the chapters, jumping around and leaving connections open-ended.

My first chapter takes up Fred Moten’s essay “Blue Vespers” from his 2017 book, Black and Blur, in which he explores the artist Chris Ofili’s series of blue paintings. Weaving Ofili’s work into his own, Moten gives us a radical, persistent blue seriality that works through prayer and devotion rather than address. Moten’s writing makes possible alternate formations of sociality, unraveling the seemingly discrete bounds of Modern white subjecthood and enacting a radically entangled “we.” My second chapter takes up two of Maggie Nelson’s experimental texts, 2009’s Bluets and 2015’s The Argonauts. Bringing Nelson into the conversation allows for a shift in my exploration of unraveled whiteness. Here, I attend to the ways in which Nelson undoes her own selfhood in forms of writing that linger in impossibility, unwritability, and plurality. My final chapter offers an initial attempt at this listening practice through extended readings of Claudia Rankine’s 2015 book, Citizen: An American Lyric. Rather than assume that Rankine’s engagement with the second person “you” is an invocation that allows for white understanding, I explore instead what kind of listening can or must occur when there is no mutual, stable, intimate ground on which to communicate.

Each chapter is its own encounter, in which I get caught up in an indeterminate milieu of fascination, resonance, and sensation, and where my selfhood gets bent alongside the various selves made by the texts. Each of these texts offers what I see as a spiritual experiment in writing the self, whether through experiences of art, color, collectivity, love, pain, history, or violence. I read through a sort of skewed phenomenology, where I am led by embodied, sensuous experience but not quite from a coherent first-person perspective. While I attempt to linger in a disorienting blue fog throughout this dissertation, this practice must also repeatedly reflect upon itself. The self-reflexivity required for a listening that decenters whiteness must never cohere or congeal, for it would merely reinscribe whiteness as the methodological focus. There is thus an inherent tension to this practice, for it must be self-reflexive and self-critical, while simultaneously shifting focus away from my white self. It is a listening that can never be finished, that will always have to begin again.