To See the Earth before the End of the Antiblack World

People are grabbing at a chance to see the earth before the end of the world, the world’s death piece by piece each longer than we

—Ed Roberson, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World”

Black ambivalence

Black study ever feels its twoness—unflinching critique of the scope and nature of black death, steadfast celebration of the abundance of black life; two unreconciled strivings, two warring commitments in one dark body of inquiry, whose impassioned faith alone keeps it from being torn asunder. As that field given to the interrogation of the “problem” of being black, black study is beset by an abiding dilemma, one that Christina Sharpe wrestles into words in In the Wake: “In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death?”1 That the co-presence of these two operations of black study deserves a question, is questionable and not straightforward, implies how bearing witness to the black death we die and the black life we live may otherwise be expected to conflict. The demands of attending to “so much” black death, on the one hand, and the “largeness that is black life,” on the other, and so, to two seemingly competing magnitudes, appears to pull the witness of black study in opposite directions. Indeed, there are times when the shadow of black death is so terrible you can hardly get out from underneath it. Because there is just “so much.” Too much. It’s all too much. Too many thousands gone and going that it hardly ever seems time to stop telling of the dead and dying. Not out of some dumbstruck morbidity, but as a passionate act of faithfulness. We could fiercely love our large black life and still never quite arrive at the thought of it. Too much death to wade through. Then there are times when black life is so large, when our living is so abundant, and so deep, and so stunning and stubborn and real that we can hardly envision an end to the telling of “all that beauty,” goodness, and truth, which makes black life a veritable largeness.2 There are times when we keep so busy living our best black lives that we just “ain’t got time to die,” as the great bard of our spirit Hall Johnson once put it.3 Black life, the very living of it, the inexhaustible bearing witness to it, can take up all our time. Can leave nothing for death, “so much” as there is. How, then, can we speak a word for black life that does not constitute a retreat from a full and unflinching account of “so much” black death? Or how can we testify to the scale and scope of black death without diminishing by even a single iota the “largeness that is Black life?” Can black study serve two masters? Is the field fated to possess but half a heart in either of its causes? Are the inexhaustible demands of our witness to black death and black life pitted against one another in perpetual conflict? Are the testaments of black death and black life locked in an opposition that can only ever manifest as mutually detracting?4 Or are they, as Sharpe’s outline of her own black study implies, somehow cooperative? And if so, how are we to think the nature of their cooperation?

The tension between black death and black life expressed in Sharpe’s question arguably lies at the very bottom of a more general tension that runs throughout black studies, in a way rivaled perhaps only by the equally fundamental tensions between enslavement and freedom or blackness and antiblackness. Today, this general tension has come to be expressed in the debate between afropessimism and black optimism and their contending, but also overlapping and hardly altogether oppositional, understandings of blackness as social death and social life respectively.5 But far from unique to our critical moment, I propose that the specific tensions between these friendly schools of black thought are actually indicative of a broader black ambivalence that has defined the practice of black study since the “dawning of blackness”6 in Middle Passage and, with it, reflections upon the “problem” of being black. As far back as the “astonishment” and “terror”7 that gripped Olaudah Equiano at the threshold of his interpellation into the antiblack world during his oft-cited, first ever encounter with the ocean and a slave ship, black study has been caught between the two. Precisely how these “two” get named and how the tension between them gets resolved is a matter of constant variation in black study, with no universal or right expression. However, black ambivalence represents my attempt to name the tension itself, which has seemingly always defined exercises of black study, both as a formal academic discipline and as the lay exercise of noticing, feeling, or thinking about the problem of being black.8 Lay black study is what Equiano practiced in real time aboard a slave ship in the 18th century. And lay black study is what we are still doing at various levels of intensity and depth whenever we have occasion, and we often do, to experience and reflect on the problem of being black. It’s what we’re doing when we watch or don’t watch, share or don’t share, all those videos, articles, or tweets. It’s our everyday studying on the problem of being black. Even those we honor as the priests and priestesses of our study are really just lay folk who have sat long enough with their ambivalence to name its contours and wrestle it into script and writ. Like when Du Bois recognized in “double consciousness” both a gift and a problem. Or Spillers recognized in the “ungendering” of the black body during Middle Passage both a violent exercise of domination and a “wild and unclaimed richness of possibility.”9 Or when Tinsley recognized in middle passing bodies of water a fluidity both painful and revolutionarily queer.10 Each of the above episodes of black study attend to some aspect of the being of blackness and stake out the contours of that witness in ways that elicit both our pessimism and our optimism. Of course, there are more priests than we could ever name and more priestesses than have passed into public awareness. I love Du Bois, but it’s my grandmother’s black study that is most often saving my life. It’s a great world if you don’t weaken, she’s always telling me. With the blood of all her perished brothers and the years of her son’s life swallowed up by prison, she knows well that this world has trouble that will bring you to your knees. And still, she insists that this world is a great one if you can just hold on. So I do.

I sketch this rough genealogy of the black ambivalence inhering in the multiple levels of our black study not to be exhaustive. Indeed, if black ambivalence inheres in all exercises of black study as I am suggesting, then such an undertaking is better suited to a library than a single essay. Neither do I mean to conflate the meaningful differences between the various kinds of twos catalogued above. Rather, I wish to offer a sense of just how enduringly and essentially ambivalence has attended black study since its earliest enactments, whatever its expression and however its specific tensions get named and scaled, be it evenly, optimistically, pessimistically, or something else. Beneath it all, however, and constituting what can be recognized as a fundamental tension of black study, is the essential push and pull between black life and black death. It is from these particular two that all other tensions arguably derive their stakes and meaning. Consider the tension between blackness and antiblackness so prominent in today’s black study. Black death is why antiblackness hurts the way it does. And blackness is beautiful, in part, because we’re (still) alive. What I am calling black study’s ambivalence, then, ultimately derives from our commitment to an object of study, blackness, in which the contrasting phenomena of black life and black death, inhere in significant measure. It refers to the coexistence in black study of the profoundly opposing emotions, beliefs, and attitudes elicited by the witness we bear to these phenomena and to the contrasting phenomena to which they give rise. Black ambivalence also names the conflict that besets black study in its commitment to tell the truth about the lived experience of blackness, and thus, to sound out black death and black life as veritable magnitudes that, precisely because they are significant and not negligible and challenge our attention unto exhaustion, pull at us from both sides such that bearing witness to one always seems to come at the expense of a failed witness to the other.

But to say that black study is caught between the two is not to say that it is indecisive or resigned to a stalemated inaction as some connotations of ambivalence can imply. Rather by black ambivalence I mean something closer to the etymological sense of the word, which simply denotes the “capacity to combine” (-valence) “both” (ambi-). Indeed, we might think the ability of black study’s twos to combine by attending more carefully to the joining spirit obtaining in the suffix “-valence,” which arrives at ambivalence by way of chemistry. There it is used to form nouns denoting the various kinds of chemical bonds that can form between atoms in the formation of molecules. In chemistry, an atom’s “valence” refers to the measure of its capacity to combine with other atoms through a kind of volatile incompleteness. Atoms naturally incline toward a state of chemical stability that obtains in possessing a complete set of electrons on their outermost shell. An atom that is independently complete in this way has a valence of zero and will not combine with other atoms. But atoms whose outermost shells lack a full complement of electrons will readily bond with other atoms by giving, accepting, or sharing electrons in ways that facilitate their mutual completion. The spirit for joining inhering in the -valence of ambivalence, wherein the volatile incompleteness of atoms compels their joining, yields a helpful way of understanding black ambivalence as something other than a stalemated indecision between black death and black life. Like atoms with incomplete outer shells, black study’s attention to black life and black death also exhibits a kind of volatile incompleteness. Not only is there too much of either to be fully sounded out, but testimony about one remains perpetually open to the challenge of testimony about the other. In this sense, and in a way similar to the valence of atoms, the testaments of black life and black death have holes in their shell, chinks in their armor. They are vulnerable to each other and each other’s vulnerability. But rather than an impossible either/or, atomic valence allows us to conceive such black ambivalence as a reactive both/and.

Black ambivalence, then, is an active and reactive ambivalence, not an inactive resignation. The stalemated indecision possibly implied by the split of black study’s attention between black death and black life is really a committed uncertainty. By the very nature of its critical object, black study is held from an indomitable, invincible, or impervious kind of knowledge. It is wounded in the knowing of what it knows. Whenever it commits itself to voicing the measure of the life or death it perceives, it does so against the grain of its awareness of the significant evidence to the contrary. And this awareness hampers, burdens, or pulls at a testimony otherwise undaunted, unquestioning, unflinching, or perfect. Even when black study would set its face like flint to fully elaborating black life or black death, its passionate heart is always leaking certainty to the evidence that is pulling, in varying degrees of intensity, its attention in the supposedly opposite direction. Consider the faint tug of black social life on Orlando Patterson when he ultimately means to lay bare the totalizing extent of slavery’s “social death.”

When we say that the slave was natally alienated and ceased to belong independently to any formally recognized community, this does not mean that he or she did not experience or share informal social relations. A large number of works have demonstrated that slaves in both ancient and modern times had strong social ties among themselves. The important point, however, is that these relationships were never recognized as legitimate or binding.11

Although Patterson ultimately dismisses such black social life as informal and exerting “no binding force,” he is still bound to it, however faint or slight its pull. It matters little that he goes on to argue that the social life of the slave is ultimately underwritten by a still more fundamental and determining social death. The point is that he cannot attend to this death without contending with, and therefore registering, the counterpull of life. Patterson’s piercing testimony about social death is volatilely and compatibly incomplete with respect to social life; and the chemical reaction between the two is what yields his black study.

Thus, like two compatibly incomplete atoms the uncertain testaments of black life and death are open and reactive to one another, and this reaction is black study. The coexistence of our attention to black death and black life implied by the ambivalence of our study also has no fixed or right balance which it must assume. Its only faithfulness is to whatever opens up its mouth. It is tuned and attuned to the faithful telling of whatever compels its witness, to whatever it’s trying to say. And it skews optimistic or pessimistic the way a musical composition assumes a minor or major key. In what follows, I want to speak a word of black life. I want to think through just how it is that black life can constitute a veritable “largeness” in the face of “so much” death. Yet even with this as my explicit intention, I cannot sound out this word without contending with the black death that there also is. This does not mean that I must stop or reverse course. Only that this word of black life that I have is spoken under and with the pressure of, against and with the pull of, black death.

… And there are days, like today, when I simply have to stop. My brother just texted me the bad news about Ahmaud Arbery, who perished obscenely in a citizen’s arrest. I resisted two other invitations to watch the video today before his. I swore I wouldn’t. I’m not sure why I did. But now that have, now that I’ve watched them stop him, I have to stop too. I have to stop typing these words about black life. I have to relax my hands from the keyboard on my laptop. I have to use them to hold myself together instead. Or else to pray, to get my hands on God and call God to account for this world …

It’s taken me a few days, but now that I’ve finally worked up the nerve to return to this word of black life (even as the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd will soon stay my hands again), the black life that I know, I know in a way that is deeply wounded. Deeply aware of what makes it untrue. Deeply aware of the halftruth, if not outright lie, I might be telling. This word of black life that I’m attempting to sound out is afflicted by my knowledge of a world cohered around the uneven guarantee of a citizenship that just is arrest. By my knowledge of a world not only where everyone is a policeman empowered to bring death to our doorsteps, but where everyone is a landlord aspiring to arrest the ground as their private property. This word that I have is beset with ambivalence. Not in the sense that I am undecided or apathetic about blackness or black life, but in the sense that I do not have the luxury of speaking this word without doubting. I doubt. I’m uncertain. I don’t know. At least not the way I might a perfect or uncontested fact. But I’m also decided. I’ve got a made-up mind. This word that I have, the antiblack world didn’t give it. And it for damn sure can’t take it away.

“The largeness that is black life”

It’s true that black life and black death share my attention. But they do not share it equally. Maybe I’ve spent too much time in church around talk of resurrection. Maybe I’m too hopped up on that good opium religion. Although my father is fond of saying it’s not religion it’s relationship, and my church is nothing if not the church of Relation. But even if I had never set foot in a church, I suspect I might just as well have been done in by black art, which, as it happens, is always taking me to church anyway, even as it is constantly challenging and opening up what I imagine church, life together, congregation, gathering, fellowship, community, and commons to be.12 Whatever and whoever’s to blame, I want to make plain just how stingy black life is with my attention. I’m simply given to what Christina Sharpe has beautifully described as “the largeness that is black life.” I am taken by all that this compact formulation manages to say. By its insistence that black life is no meager thing, but actually constitutes the kind of thing that can be justly reckoned a largeness. I am struck too because Sharpe insists this about black life in full and committed awareness of the brutal realities of antiblackness and black death. In this way, Sharpe’s word of black life is reminiscent of the one Frank Wilderson perhaps surprisingly offers up while interviewing Saidiya Hartman in “The Position of the Unthought”:

In my own work, obviously I am not saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together.13

What formulations like “tremendous life” and “the largeness that is black life” each imply is that black life is a lot. Both an abstract magnitude and, with respect to the spatial connotations of “largeness” in particular, the kind of thing that takes up space. Which is to say that black life is also a lot in the sense of “a lot of land.”14 And black life also takes place, which in addition to reinforcing its spatial character, also invokes that colloquial way in which we speak of something that happens, that unfolds in time as well as space. As a lot, in these ways, black life is precisely the kind of thing that is likely to strain our capacity to think and talk about it. It leads us to ask questions like: just how tremendous is “tremendous life?” How large the “largeness that is black life”? Can we really expect to apprehend such magnitudes without working up a sweat? Does that which qualifies as large and tremendous not merit more extensive elaboration? Devoted and sustained attention? And as often as the testimony about black death occasions confessions of ineffability,15 do we also know black life to be similarly ineffable? As presenting us, its witnesses, with too much for words? Does the ineffability of black study go both ways? And what would it mean if, before rushing on to whatever qualifications we are want to make about black life in light of the scale and scope of black death, we consented to be delayed, to be held up by so tremendous a largeness?

What I’m after in raising the above questions is a practice of black study that is careful to hold open enough room to accommodate the thought of black life as a genuine largeness, and not something that is merely eked out in an otherwise antiblack world. Of course, the scale and scope of black death is reason to question whether there are even sufficient grounds to think black life this largely. However, I want to propose that the grounds for lingering with “black life” may actually exceed even our most unyielding appraisals of the totalizing scope of black death. I also want to raise the possibility that, regardless of how large we find black life relative to black death, the global ecological crisis may actually necessitate that black life assume a larger share of our critical attention. Indeed, what are the conditions of necessity for the skewed study of the largeness that is black life, and do we already inhabit such a time as this?16 And, to what extent does the universal nature of the climate crisis broaden exactly who it is that needs to be engaged in such black study, beyond the usual black suspects, who have never not needed to?

Of course, the difficulty of lingering with black life in this way is what can seem its relative smallness compared to how we have come to understand the allencompassing scope of black death. The fact that our death founds and coheres a world. Our world. The problem for thought, then, of “the largeness that is black life” is the world’s worth of death with which we have to contend before we can be open to apprehend that largeness as genuine. Any attempt to think the largeness of black life must therefore do business with what, to my mind, is black study’s most courageous and faithful sounding out of the magnitude of black death. The contention that we live not in a world with antiblackness, but in a constitutively antiblack world.17 The antiblack world looms before one who would begin to think “the largeness that is black life” as an emergency in need of our most immediate attention. It activates a kind of critical triage, in the performance of which we feel almost duty-bound to neglect the seemingly less emergent phenomena of black life.

The primary implication of this understanding of the antiblack world is that it changes how we understand the task of liberation. For if the entire world is antiblack, and not just the bad apples of a few individually racist people or even institutions, racism’s redress is not a matter of reform, but apocalypse. As the formal institution of racial slavery continually recedes into our historical rearview, it can come as a shock to many that The Liberator has no less reason to be in print today than yesterday; not to mention that, to be really true to its name, the famed abolitionist newspaper would essentially need to be rebranded as a doomsday periodical. Its subscribers need, if not desire, nothing short of the end the world. No other abolition will do.

But the antiblack world is also remarkable for how it induces what might be recognized as a kind of critical claustrophobia. Its unsparing analysis of black unfreedom simply leaves no room in the world for the flourishing of black life. Such critical claustrophobia, on the one hand, is immensely generative because it squeezes us into the ethical necessity of imagining and creating new worlds. Yet, it is also daunting. In the bible, Nicodemus famously wonders at Jesus’ teaching about the need to be born again. How much more we who must contemplate the rebirth of the entire world? Where will we find a womb big enough? Particularly when, in the attempt to accent the total antiblackness of the world, we sometimes tend to collapse any substantive distinction between the antiblack world and the planet itself, or what the ecopoet Ed Roberson, in distinction to the world, has alternatively called, the “Earth.”18

“No slave is in the world”

There is perhaps no more unflinching thinker of the antiblack world than Frank Wilderson. His theory of afropessimism brings the fundamental antiblackness of the world into sharp relief by illuminating the existential debt it owes to Middle Passage. He writes: “The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world.”19 Or, put still another way, slave, world. You wouldn’t know it, since it’s only two words, but so far as this world is concerned, you’ve just read the entire book of Genesis. According to Wilderson, Middle Passage marks the genesis of an inextricable dyad: the modern world (indexed by “the state and civil society”) and the “ontological position” of “the Black,” which is irrevocably excluded from the world as its necessary and constitutional outside.20 This paradigmatic exclusion of “the Black”—who, according to Wilderson, historically comes online as nothing other than the world’s slave—manifests as a global regime of black vulnerability and death that has endured since the transatlantic slave trade. And what this exclusion begets is a world. The very world whose genesis we witness in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. It’s not merely rhetorical that, after boarding a slave ship, Equiano became persuaded that he “had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill [him].”21 What better expression of the antiblack world than that which was immediately apparent to the captive Equiano as a “world” offering every indication that it was going to be the death of those who, like him, were coming online as “black” in the world. The “skewed life chances” Saidiya Hartman famously identifies as the “afterlife of slavery” can ultimately be attributed to the dawning of this antiblack world in Middle Passage, organized from the moment of its inception and by definition, against black life. There is a reason Hartman’s inquiry into the origins of antiblack racism leads her to the slave castles.22 This world, Wilderson makes clear, was going to kill middle passing Africans and us, their black descendants, not in a circumstantial expression of malice, but out of parasitical necessity. Somebody has to foot the bill for western humanism’s flight from precariousness and the vicissitudes of ecological life. It’s no mere coincidence that the civil liberties incubated and sustained by the “state and civil society” emerge against the historic backdrop of the “dawning of blackness” as the human nonhuman (not to mention the dawning of nonhuman nature as mere property and natural resource), on whom the burden of life’s precariousness is displaced. The steep slope that is the hyper precariousness of the hold relative to the security of the deck and, finally, the transcendent invulnerability of absentee owners, introduces into history a frozen racial seesaw that hasn’t been back down since and that furnishes the antiblack world with its tilted axis.23 Traveling to and fro across the Atlantic and weaving together a truly new world, the slave ship’s nonhuman hold24 indexes the original instance of Fanon’s famous “incline” as a global, and not merely local, reality. One that, the emancipations and decolonizations of history notwithstanding, endures into the present essentially unchanged.25

Thus, following and extending Orlando Patterson’s definition of slavery as “social death,” Wilderson argues that slavery was never essentially about forced labor, so much as a nascent world establishing its constitutional and perpetual outside.

… work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the solid plank of work is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of claims “against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air.26

The world can no more call blackness back from its fundamental exclusion than a nation can permanently suspend its borders and go on being the inherently exclusionary thing that it is. In a way that activates our critical claustrophobia, Wilderson asserts that the world simply isn’t elastic enough to incorporate “the position of the Black,” because its exclusion founds, defines, and coheres the world as such. And since it lies outside the only world there is, or at least the only world afropessimism seems to acknowledge, “the Black position” can only register as a “space of negation.”27

But the same critical claustrophobia we rightly experience with respect to the world, we also experience just as intensely in afropessimism with respect to blackness, which is defined comprehensively as “social death.”

Afropessimism is premised on a comprehensive and iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness: Blackness is social death: which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never equilibrium: never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a paradigmatic position (rather than as a set of cultural practices, anthropological accoutrements) is elaborated through slavery.28

In this way, afropessimism defines blackness ultimately and exclusively as a position relative to the world. All that blackness is or can be was spoken once and for all in the dyad, “slave, world.” Spoken not just as the world’s first cause, its “Let there be light,” but as its perpetual refrain. So long as the world exists, blackness, being coterminous with slaveness, can mean nothing but social death. Furthermore, blackness’ exclusion from the world is the equivalent of its exclusion from humanity. Just as no slave is in the world, but rather in a “space of negation” against which the world maintains itself, Wilderson makes the parallel argument that “the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity.”29

We might ask two questions in order to address the critical claustrophobia induced by the claims of afropessimism. First, is the world, in fact, totally antiblack? And second, is blackness totally defined by its relationship to the world? With regard to the first question, it is important to note, given the relationship in afropessimism between being in the world and being human, that what Wilderson calls the world should be more precisely recognized as the human world. Hence, his use of “world” interchangeably with “the state and civil society.” At first glance, this clarification could seem to alleviate our critical claustrophobia by clearing space for an appeal to that part of the world which is not reducible to humanity. Surely there is a great deal more to the world than humans, the critique would go, and to forget this would constitute an objectionable instance of anthropocentrism. Yet the conflation of world and Human in afropessimism is upheld in the etymology of “world” itself. Deriving from a German compound that combines the base for “man” (were) and “age” (old)—or, literally, the “age of man”—“world” is etymologically inclined toward its very first definition in the OED: “human existence” or “a period of this.” Even if “world” can also mean “Earth” and is popularly used this way, it is inherently given to naming the space and time “within which the human being deploys [its] being.”30 In this sense, “world” silently beat “Anthropocene” to the punch centuries ago, intuiting humanity’s capacity for world-making long before scientists began arguing for a new geological “age of man” and the now widespread appreciation of earth as “The Human Planet.”31 The critical purchase of Anthropocene discourse primes us more than ever to recognize the veritable world inhering in and as the Human—an exclusive category that environmentalism critiques as elaborated through environmental degradation, but which black studies otherwise elucidates as elaborated through global white supremacy and antiblack racism.32 In light of the Anthropocene, then, blackness’ exclusion from humanity is justly reckoned exclusion from the world.

This is why Wilderson can contend, without a hint of hyperbole, that “no slave is in the world” while also admitting no meaningful distinction between slaveness and blackness. The stunning picture conjured by these sweeping words in many ways encapsulates afropessimist thought and the terrible findings of its black study. Though what they picture, paradoxically, is an absence. To illustrate “the Black position,” Wilderson essentially holds out to us a pure nowhere. A where’s Waldo with no Waldo. The world with no blacks in it. The antiblack world. The problem of being black, then, is that we just aren’t here. We’re extraterrestrials, as it were, hailing from the deep, if not outer space. It is the problem of a life to which the world has said no, even if you manage to live a hundred years and never hear anyone say it to your face. For what else is nigger but a luxuriated no?

And yet, staunch afropessimist that he is, Wilderson sounds damn near like a black optimist when he references our “tremendous life.” His totalizing sense of the antiblack world, however, the fact that its outside registers as a mere “space of negation,” strains against the spirit of that tremendousness. Not because the world can or should be rescued from a total identification with antiblackness, but because afropessimism appears to acknowledge no substantive elsewhere beyond the world, and consequently understands blackness to be totally defined by its relationship to the world. But is it? The conclusion of Wilderson’s black study—that blackness is coterminous with slaveness and social death—needs to be recognized as the specific yield of a focused, but also narrow, consideration of blackness as a position relative to the world. Sobering as afropessimism is, to the extent that the frame of our analysis is the world, I wholly affirm it. If there is any wiggle room to relieve our claustrophobia, it isn’t to be found in the world. And if afropessimism is guilty of anthropocentrism, it isn’t with respect to the world and its just conflation with a western humanism elaborated through antiblackness and environmental degradation. To invoke and rework a Project Pat admonition, don’t save the world. It don’t want to be saved. But even if we recognize the world as totally antiblack, is blackness reducible to its relation to the world? Has blackness no other kin besides the world that disowns it as its first cause? No other frame or relations by which to be studied and known? And just where, if not the world, is blackness? Where exactly does our “tremendous life” unfold? And is the tremendousness of black life not itself an invitation to think this apparent black nowhere as somewhere more than a mere “space of negation”?33 Is it possible to think black elsewhere in terms other than the exclusively negative fact of its exclusion? Is black elsewhere somewhere we can, or perhaps even should, live?

“The ground we walk on”

Sharpe’s In the Wake also elaborates a theory of the world as totally antiblack. However, for Sharpe, blackness is not totally defined by its relationship to the world. This difference, I believe, has to do with her concern less with the ontological position of “the Black,” and more with the position and being of blacks. It’s Sharpe’s regard for black social life, beyond the mere exclusion of blackness from the ontology of western humanism and individual subjectivity, that begins to establish the grounds for apprehending black life as genuinely tremendous. Furthermore, Sharpe theorizes the position of blacks as somewhere more than a mere “space of negation.” For Sharpe, the position of blacks is no pure nowhere, but an actual space she theorizes as the “wake.” Although she activates multiple connotations of “wake” throughout the text, two stand out in particular as designations of time and space respectively: the “still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” and “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship.”34 As a “conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora,” the wake, notwithstanding all of its precarity, establishes a positive claim for blackness on life, in so far as living is minimally expressed within a space and time. And by invoking an ocean that constitutes no less than 71 percent of the planet’s surface, the “wake” may even turn out to be our womb big enough. Its spatiality and temporality are occasion to actually think black life and living beyond mere negation. Thus, Sharpe explains that:

while the wake produces Black death and trauma—‘violence … precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (Wilderson 2010, 76)—we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.35

However, this gesture toward black life does not come at the expense of a retreat from the totalizing scope of black death outlined by Wilderson. Invoking his contention that “violence … precedes and exceeds Blacks,” Sharpe similarly argues that black death constitutes an “immanence and imminence” that not only looms over, but also inheres in black being in the wake. And just as with Wilderson, for Sharpe, the ubiquity of black death animates the world. In fact, her specific expression of the antiblack world only intensifies, rather than alleviates, the critical claustrophobia induced by afropessimism by implicating both the human and nonhuman in antiblackness. By appealing to natural metaphors whose status as metaphor are at best uneasy, Sharpe enlists neutral environmental phenomena into the antagonistic ranks of global antiblackness and black death. For example, she theorizes antiblackness as “the weather.”

[T]he weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack. And while the air of freedom might linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend to the bodies in the hold.36

Just as climate science has sounded the alarm on global warming, here, Sharpe calls attention to the other inconvenient truth about our climate. Namely, that it is antiblack.37 By arguing for an appreciation of antiblackness as the “weather” and our “total climate,” Sharpe holds out to us a world in which premature black death is not only normative but natural. Ta-Nehisi Coates employs a similar rhetorical strategy in Between the World and Me when, after the exoneration of the police officer who killed his friend, he writes that the “earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.”38 In this way, both Coates and Sharpe deliberately suture over whatever critical distinction we might otherwise make between the world and the Earth. And the purely metaphorical status of Sharpe’s appeal to “weather,” like Coates’ appeal to the earthquake, is uneasy to say the least. The so-called natural catastrophes of Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti bring into sharp relief how natural phenomena can be literally, and not just figuratively, antiblack. The devastation of these so-called “natural” disasters and “acts of God” cannot be understood apart from the human legacies of slavery and colonialization that leave black people across the planet disproportionately vulnerable to literal weather.39

Beside the weather above and around, Sharpe also theorizes antiblackness and black death as the “ground” below. She writes:

The ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on [emphasis mine]. And that it is the ground lays out that, and perhaps how, we might begin to live in relation to this requirement for our death. What kinds of possibilities for rupture might be opened up? What happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an “I” or a “we” who know, an “I” or a “we” who care?40

If, as Sharpe insists, black death and antiblackness are the “ground,” then they stand in the same relation to the world as the bottom pieces of a Jenga tower do to the rest of the tower. In the classic game, you don’t mess with the bottom pieces unless, against the spirit of the game, you’re trying to bring the whole thing down. So would the world topple, Sharpe suggests, without the bottom it claims in antiblackness and black death. As a metaphor, “ground,” in both its materiality and status as foundational, forces us to reckon with the ways that black death underwrites the life of the world. As the ground, black death is not a replaceable feature of a world progressing everyday further beyond an ethically checkered past. It is its very foundation, necessary if the world is to remain upright. Considering how creatively the world continues to borrow from its own life, robbing the only planet we’ve got to pay for the world, a Jenga tower is a particularly suitable metaphor.41 But God help the world whenever black folks’ turn comes along. Because our move really is the earthquake. The world has built its tower on our backs. But this also means we’ve got the whole world in our hands. The world is right to fear the rebellion raging on in the streets in the wake of Aubrey, Taylor, and Floyd. Right to pray to the police and law and order the way it does. The sky isn’t falling, but the bottom is falling out.

In tandem with the “weather,” Sharpe’s sense of the “ground” amounts to a totalizing portrait of the antiblack world that implicates the human and nonhuman and hems us in on every side. These uneasy metaphors leave us nowhere to go but elsewhere. By putting the squeeze on us, they pressure us all the more into the ethical necessity of the end of the world. Moreover, their uneasy status as metaphor resonates in compelling ways with recent developments in the environmental humanities, which argue against the ideological disentanglement of the human from nature, while also calling attention to humanity’s growing capacity to dictate the fate of the environment altogether. The critical confusion of the natural and the human in Sharpe’s sense of the “weather” and “ground” justly disabuses us of any illusions of the neutrality of our environments. Rather, it alerts us to our inhabitation of a world totally suffuse with as much antiblackness as environmental degradation.

Within the totalizing scope of black death, however, Sharpe holds open the possibility of the rupture of black life worked out on and against the grounds of black death. In this way, her analysis parallels the rupture of the “knowledge of Relation” within what E,douard Glissant otherwise narrates in Poetics of Relation as the encounter of middle passing Africans with the “absolute unknown,” not unlike Equiano’s encounter with a previously unknown ocean. This encounter, Glissant contends, “in the end became knowledge,” and “the knowledge of Relation,” because the captives of the hold “share[d] in the unknown with others.”42 Likewise, for Sharpe, our knowledge of the ground together as a “we,” even if that ground be death and antiblackness, similarly occasions the rupture of black life into death. Sharpe’s sense that knowledge of black death as the ground can, however paradoxically, actually occasion the rupture of black life also parallels a critical insight of ecology, which argues along different lines that knowledge of the ground is necessary to any sustainable practice of human life. Aldo Leopold, for instance, has famously argued for humanity’s development of a “land ethic,” wherein the human species recognizes itself as a member of a “land community” that includes not only the ground, but the creatures with whom we share the ground.43

Yet Sharpe doesn’t just insist that there is black life in the wake, she stunningly constructs black life as a “largeness.” It is one thing to insist that there is black life, though death be the ground and life consequently be lived in the totalizing shadow of death as the potential energy of premature death. But it is quite another to suggest that this life amounts to a largeness. Indeed, if death is the ground, how can black life be understood as anything approaching a “largeness”? Even if we admit a certain largeness to black life, if death is the ground, and antiblackness our total climate, how large can large even be relative to what would necessarily have to be a still larger death? What’s larger than the ground? More tremendous than the world? How much black life can there reasonably be when the death-dealing violence of antiblackness has otherwise been determined to “precede and exceed Blacks,” or when black death looms as an “immanence and imminence”?44 If we are to take the magnitudes suggested by Sharpe and Wilderson seriously, then it seems that black life is larger than perhaps our expressions of the antiblack world can fully accommodate.

To apprehend black life as a genuine largeness, it may prove worthwhile to make a critical distinction between what Sharpe describes as the “ground we walk on” and the ground as such. Between ground and Humanity’s superficial interpellation of ground as docile surface made to accommodate the whims of the world. Such a distinction not only means that ground is not reducible to humanity’s uses and extraction of ground, it also recognizes that ground, possessed of great depths, greatly exceeds its instrumentalization. It’s with this insight, that we enter unflinchingly into the realm of “perhaps how” in Sharpe’s contention that recognition of the ground as black death (and also significantly more than black death) “lays out that, and perhaps how, we might begin to live in relation to this requirement for our death.” While it may be all we can see, the apparent docility of ground is an illusion limited only to its surface. Western humanism’s ambitions for the ground are perhaps best glimpsed in the fact that the “total amount of concrete ever produced by humans is enough to cover the entire Earth’s surface with a layer two millimeters thick.”45 Yet deep down, and we need not dig very far, we know that ground is hardly the obedient servant we imagine it to be. It’s important to point this out because it is the beginning of understanding how a totally antiblack world, though indeed a world and massive in scale, is far from total in and of itself. This insight is how we can begin to put flesh and bones and breath to “the largeness that is black life.” How we can begin to flesh out the space and time of black elsewhere, not as nowhere or nowhen, or a mere rupture (even though it is exactly this relative to “the ground we walk on”), but as the motherfucking planet. Black life isn’t the jackhammer breaking up the ground we walk on, it is the coconspirator of the ground beneath the ground we walk on, which the ground we walk on has never fully succeeded in containing.

… The cement trucks never seemed to get around to reinforcing the sidewalks where I grew up in Philadelphia. But I never failed to notice how smooth the roads and sidewalks were where my classmates lived, how nearly like ice they were. How much more like my shirt after my mom took an iron and starch to it than before. From an early age, I experienced just how unevenly the “ground we walk on” is distributed. How the grounds we have to walk are not the same, and how “walking,” as the sterilized, noncontingent, guaranteed, autonomous, individual practice the world desires it to be, is a safe experience of ground that the world is careful to assure to some and much less attentive about maintaining for others. But this also meant that I knew how hard Humanity had to work at the world. With the bruises on my knees, I understood that the ground we walk on was not ground’s final word. That the roots of trees and stubborn grasses and sometimes even flowers all had a way of bleeding through the concrete we walk on with a tenacious patience. That the western humanism indexed by the Anthropocene is fated to lose this war to remake the planet in its own image. That, in this way, the earth is kind of like my stingiest wrinkled shirt. The one that gave mom so much trouble …

Deep down, ground is about the work of so much more than being walked on; and our critical awareness of the distinction between the ground we walk on and the ground as such requires not only an awareness of depth, a commitment to deep reading and the more underlying the superficial or readily apparent, but also a sense of the planet, what Gayatri Spivak has called “planetarity.”46 Sharpe’s invocation of the “wake” already performs this work by bringing us right up to that ground we humans cannot walk on. But just beneath “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship,” lies the deep that we also inhabit. This deep figures prominently in Equiano’s black study of his drowned shipmates, the revelations of which may be extended to blackness writ large. Of those who jumped over the side, Equiano writes: “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself, I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.”47 Humans cannot live underwater. Yet, here, Equiano uses “inhabitants,” a name reserved for the living, to describe those we know to be dead. Moreover, he claims to envy these slaves their freedom. Yet, if we suspend our immediate objections to Equiano’s apparent misnaming of the drowned and take seriously the lives that were lived underwater, awfully abbreviated as they were, then what emerges is a vision of human ecological life, as such life would need to be conceived on a blue planet.

It’s the surprising life and freedom of the deep that opens my mouth and occasions my black study. The deep strikes me as another kind of “conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora,” one that can help us apprehend black life as a genuine largeness for no other reason much more complicated than the simple fact that we live on a deep planet. If blackness inheres as an uncertain and precarious relation “to the ground we walk on,” if this has been our situation since at least the steps blinked on the face of the Atlantic, if we can’t quite stand our ground (and are constantly losing our lives to those who can), if we are generally excluded from the global harvest of white settlement, it is also the case that we, precisely because we are refused the surface, live (and that our religious and expressive traditions harbor and cultivate) a deep relation to the earth. In other words, blackness is inhabitation of the deep, is a deep interface with the planet. Black life, it turns out, isn’t just large, it’s the only life any of us have to live, if we’re ever truly to learn how to live well together on this deep planet of ours. The deep has proven as good a place as any to begin my personal search for black elsewhere.48 But if I ever arrive, I’ll be sure to let them know it was Wilderson and Sharpe who sent me.

.02%

I’ve said I want to speak a word of black life; and no one has cleared more theoretical ground for such a word, and so, for the skewed study of black life as a genuine largeness, than Fred Moten. While certainly no stranger to black death or antiblackness, Moten’s black study is a party more often than it isn’t. He makes the bias of his black study plain when he outlines his desire in Black and Blur to “subordinate by a measure so small that it constitutes measure’s eclipse, the critical analysis of anti-blackness to the celebratory analysis of blackness.”49 Jared Sexton once heard Moten state “measure’s eclipse” numerically, detailing in “The Social Life of Social Death” how Moten once “remarked to the effect that he always wants his writing to be comprised of 49.99% critique and 50.01% celebration.”50 This delineation of black study into the “celebration of blackness” and the “critique of anti-blackness” yields another compelling example of black ambivalence. And just as we observed of the cooperation between the testaments of black life and death in Sharpe’s black study, the “critique of anti-blackness” and “celebration of blackness” are, for Moten, not oppositional, but complementary operations that combine to produce black study. Thus, he explains that the “rich, rigorous, powerful, and utterly necessary analytic of anti-blackness” actually enables the celebration of blackness; and that this celebration, in turn, is “done not to avoid or ameliorate the hard truths of anti-blackness but in the service of its violent eradication.”51

This delineation of black study offers a framework that bonds the witness of our forked-tongued tradition together. But beyond serving as just another example of black ambivalence, the subordination of critique to celebration in Moten’s black study also raises important questions about the nature of the relationship between blackness and anti-blackness. That there could be even marginally more blackness to celebrate than antiblackness to critique pulls blackness out from under anti-’s totalizing shadow. It leads us to question whether “anti-blackness” is the first, only, and exhaustive word of black study, whether the only blackness to speak of is that which gathers under anti-’s orthographic shadow. When we take part in “the devotional practice that is given in recitation of the sentence ‘blackness is x,’” have we been misspelling blackness?52 Leaving out a silent “anti-”? Is there any word we can speak for blackness that does not always already presume this prefix, which is nothing but the grammatical sign of blackness’ existence within what Frank Wilderson has theorized as a broader “grammar of suffering”?53 Does blackness have any life outside of the anti-black “world that was going to kill” Equiano? Of course, in .02%, we are talking about a black lining thinner than silver’s. But razor thin as it is, its sheer excess is enough to put significant pressure on the understanding of antiblackness as that which “precedes and exceeds” blackness. It introduces the possibility that this apparent relation can, by another frame, appear inverted, such that blackness rather “precedes and exceeds” anti-blackness, and is not diminished by anti-blackness’ capacity to occlude. By establishing blackness (and by extension black life) as excessive, the .02% margin by which Moten subordinates the “critique of anti-blackness” to the “celebration of blackness” models and invites such ambivalence as is ultimately skewed in the direction of black life.54 But what grounds are there to justify this sense of “the largeness that is black life?” And are they quite so substantial as that which the antiblack world furnishes to the thought of black death?

Perhaps we can pursue the grounds of .02% in the nearly nothing interval of “soon” that elapses between Equiano’s initial “astonishment” at the sight of an unknown ocean and his “terror” upon boarding the slave ship.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were sound by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.55

Notwithstanding the terror of the antiblack world that was going to kill him, I am struck that the very “first thing that saluted” Equiano, even prior to the slave ship, was the sea. And that when he saw it, he was astonished. That this astonishment was “soon converted to terror,” in a conversion which mirrors Equiano’s own conversion into cargo—and thus, the Black subject of the nonhuman hold— suggests an interval so short as to be almost negligible. Especially when considered beside the sheer scale of the antiblack world, and all there is proportionally to say about something on the scale of a world when held up against a moment, here and already gone. The agenda for black study that Equiano’s record of the beginning would seem to set is the study, critique, and overturning of this world. And I am certainly about that life. But here is where I stumble, felled perhaps too long in the passing interval of “soon.” It’s Equiano’s “astonishment” that gets me, again and again and always. That there was, that there could be, astonishment. Then, in the time of astonishment, for a moment, but only for a moment, the Earth gathers, dancing.

Equiano did not jump to see the Earth before the end of his world and the beginning of ours. But he did see it. And he was astonished. Just prior to being “saluted,” or hailed in the Althusserian sense, by the slave ship—“Hey you there! Hey, cargo!”—to discovering that he really was the cargo for which the ship was waiting, and in this way being interpellated as black, Equiano was greeted by the blue face of an overwhelmingly blue planet. What if, compelled by such astonishment, we fall deep into the fleeting interval of soon? What would it mean to think the dawning of blackness in Middle Passage as not reducible to the “social death” hailed in the salute of the slave ship? What if, instead, we think blackness as not just responding also, but first, to the hailing waves of the astonishing sea? “Hey you there! Hey, earthling.” What if, as our original antiphony, blackness dawns in the ongoing response of black ecological life to the hail of a blue planet?

The study of black life as a genuine largeness begins when we, with Equiano and an innumerable cloud of witnesses, stop to behold the Earth before the end of the antiblack world. This Earth still hails and is hardly as much world as it appears on its surface, which is so much more ocean than not. Or else do we suppose that whiteness has managed to straightjacket the planet so utterly that its definition is no longer possibility, as the narrator of Invisible Man once averred?56

If, as Ed Roberson explains, the “nature poem occurs when an individual’s sense of the larger Earth enters into the world of human knowledge,” and if the “main understanding that results from this encounter is … that the world’s desires do not run the Earth, but the Earth does run the world,”57 then what would it mean for a larger sense of the Earth to enter black studies? Or, to invoke a beautiful line of Roberson’s poetry that I can’t stop thinking about, how might we endeavor, “to see the Earth before the end of the [antiblack] world?”58 And what would happen to our understandings of black life as that which is insisted from the totalizing grounds of black death, if we shift our critical frame from the world to the Earth, as our era of climate crisis seems to demand? Indeed, if by “social death,” black studies has arrived at its most complete understanding of what it means to be black in and relative to the world, it is yet left to the field to attend ever more robustly to what it means to be black on and in relationship to the Earth, that exceeds the world. The necessity of this vector of black study is all the more apparent in the light of a global ecological crisis that has illuminated the (Human) social life of the world as a still deeper death. So, if what we want is not only apocalypse, but an apocalypse we might live in, then even more than social death, we must learn to study and celebrate what, by another frame, can be perceived as the largeness that is black ecological life. Because after the end of the world, there will be black people on Earth, or none at all.