TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF BLACK INTIMACY

As extensions of an order of knowledge rooted in Western humanism, white institutions and frameworks do not have the epistemological capacity to account for and meditate on the fullness of Black existence. Thus, theorizing Blackness, in part, is a project of annotations and redactions that attempts to consider what it means for Black people to contend with the mundane and permanent fixity of anti-Black disregard without reducing the fullness of our lives to subjection and disregard. This chapter assumes that Black knowledge production exceeds the research practices and data regimes advanced by traditional social science protocols, locating possibility in the inwardness of Black existence. As such, this chapter builds on the tradition of the Black essay to propose the Black intimate, a conceptual frame for annotating Black affective interior patterns over and against the reductive anti-Black logic enforced by traditional social science research.