UCLA

Abstract: Claiming the “right to opacity” for historical Black subjects has been an evolving epistemological method used by present-day black scholars. Advocating for the refusal of dominant legibility, the right to opacity contends with ostensibly unknowable and complex experiences of the enslaved. As Black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman further contextualizes Edouard Glissant’s stance as “that which enables something in excess,” my research questions how historical and existing Black people act as vessels through which these inter-Trans-Atlantic subjectivities are mobilized. In my dissertation, Returning to the Vessel: Archival Opacities & Fabulating Black Futures Post-Reconstruction to Present, I impart my neologism “opaque-fabulations” to study enigmatic reperformances of American slavery that adopt the utility of reimagining and complicate the expectations placed on Black performances as freedom projects,” to decolonize“ dominative impositions of transparency” and represent underwritten diasporic histories. In examining reperformances of American slavery from the 18th century-Reconstruction alongside current Black historically minded fabulations—in theater, performance art, film & television, I study Black reembodied performances as intimate methods for reveling in concealed and radical ways of knowing. Shade, redress, and transgressive tactics are employed as productive performances of the opaque to destabilize violent structures that circumscribe Blackness to dual conditions of hypervisibility and absence. Although the notion of opacity and fabulation dually evoke realized possibilities for resistance amid domination, the acknowledged impossibility of historical revival through embodied narrative emphasizes the necessity to respect a complicated history of enslaved lives that may exceed contemporary expectations for recognition. The methodological framework of “opaque- fabulations” adaptably extends emerging black feminist and queer scholarship from theorists such as Daphne Brooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Tavia Nyong’o to address the re-imaginings of black insurgent practice that reject desires to be understood. Via a study that centralizes the utility of reembodiment, “opaque-fabulations,” importantly brings into relation – the afterlives of slavery, its affects, and the Trans-Atlantic histories that inform them.