Blackspace
by Anaïs Duplan

Reviewed by Dr. John Murillo III

Early in Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, in an essay entitled “Communication After Refusal: The Turn to Love & Polyvocality,” Anaïs Duplan writes about the “non-ontological blackness” theorized by and represented in the video works of video/performance artist and Professor of Art Ulysses Jenkins. Duplan writes about the vexed visuality, temporality, and rhythm of Jenkins’s Inconsequential Doggereal in order to think about the relationships between risk, legibility, and liberation as they pertain to Black creative work. Jenkins ‘distreats’ narrative and utilizes incoherence in order to conjure a necessarily, generatively, radically illegible work that can be witnessed, but which resists understanding or interpretation, and in that resistance becomes understandable or interpretable or experienced as a risky, even revolutionary, even liberating refusal.

I remark on Duplan’s handling of Jenkins first and at length because Jenkins’s work, as Duplan frames it, to me best analogizes the structure, style, and content of Blackspace as a text and as a piece of textual art. Duplan’s movement between objects of analysis, personal reflections, interviews with fellow poets and artists, and genres of writing—historical analysis, theorization, close reading, anecdotal reflection, and poetry—parallels the funky defunct rhythm of Jenkins’s video works. Shifts from one conversation of artwork or thought to the next are sudden, and threads of thought cross, knot, or sometimes change direction altogether. Abstract philosophical meditations on liberation, esthetics, movement and dance, sound and music, and language cut into and between glimpses of conversations with theorists and artists. None of it is wholly seamless. Nor is it at all incoherent. Instead, the structure, style, and content of Blackspace marshals a Black chaos magic in order to conjure an arranged derangement.

Duplan’s writing throughout defies traditional orders (e.g. divides between genere). Each essay and poem is a complex, shifting mediation on how Black art articulates itself, its Blackness, and its aspirations; each individual offering is an intentional failure at marshaling chaos into ordered thought about any singular idea or subject. And each is a derangement in a disordered nebula of derangements, adrift but for their orbit around a central cluster of questions: What is Afrofuturism and what are its possibilities? What constitutes liberation, and where/when can it be located—be it in the body, the self, the work, or elsewhere? And what is the relation between freedom, Blackness, and creation—of the self, of art, and of Black life writ large? Apropos for the challenging and beautiful chaos of the writing, Duplan does and does not answer these questions once one arrives at the end, which is really the center, of Blackspace. Moving with and wading through his writing is as important as any finality or beginning such answers might portend.

As a trans* man who transitioned along the course of conjuring Blackspace, Duplan asks and performs these questions and meditations as much as he feels and experiences them. We learn later in the text that the beautifully nebulous disarray of his writing also functions as a careful, philosophical obfuscation of the personal, lived nature of these questions about selfhood, art, and freedom. These are and are not just abstract concepts and theoretical insights. When Duplan writes about how Afrofuturism offers “permission to speak…to dream, to imagine that you and the people who look like you will continue to exist in the future” in the essay entitled “Permission to Speak,” he is offering a critical assessment of the political and cultural potential of Afrofuturism to Black artists, and to Black people in general, and he is thinking out loud about what Afrofuturism opens and enables for himself. This is evidenced by the final line of that paragraph: “To me, this sounds like everything” (emphasis mine).

This is also evidenced by Duplan’s interspersal of personal reflections amid the disarray of poetry and analysis: stories about his relationship with his parents, his sexuality, his body, his friends, and his colleagues and mentors gravitationally tether Duplan’s fractal meditations and musings to one another. How he experiences himself in his body, and how he articulates himself—if only approximately so—in his writing is reflected by the theoretical concerns he writes and the objects of analysis he curates. The unknowability and unintelligibility of it all is both maddening and enlivening. There is agony in being unable to know and also joy in the exploratory possibilities of not being limited by the finality of knowing. It is all and neither and very much more.

Blackspace is a personal, poetic, and theoretical collection. Blackspace is a Black space for a radical kind of poiesis that sometimes effortlessly, sometimes with great effort, but always necessarily breaches the boundaries between genres of writing in order to think about and to stage an approximation of the kind of freedom that remains elusive to we who work Blackly with language, and image, and sound, and body to create. What Duplan offers is frustrating, and strange, and beautiful disorder (un)contained in the Blackspace (un)bound by the medium of the book. Blackspace practices what it theorizes, and entangles the art of writing with the rigor of theory to produce a work untethered to convention and liberated from the limitations of genre. In other words, it is everything.