AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER

THINKING THE BODY-PLACE THROUGH KIYAN WILLIAMS

When Hortense Spillers describes the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, she borrows from Freud the term “oceanic” to indicate “an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, not-yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.”[i] Working through Spillers’s spatial estrangement is important because it allows us to sense the ways that modernity itself produces a broader cleavage between “Man” and place. While Sylvia Wynter dwells most extensively on the production of different genres of the human, embedded in her argument is also a severing of people from place, which results in a discourse of the environmental (background) rather than understanding the depth of connection between living and non-living entities and processes held in proximity.[ii] This is one of the violences that Jacqui Alexander invokes in relation to “archaeologies of dominance,” which we can understand as the intertwining of capitalism and colonial.[iii]  
    As a mode of repair that favors the possibilities of multiplicity and expansion over individuation, I arrive at the body-place in my recent monograph, Between Shadows and Noise, which, I argue, allows us to feel for fuller modes of enfleshment, moving beyond subject-object divisions and the spatial, spiritual, and temporal cleavages that produce “Man.” These dispersals of being occur at multiple scales –“above” and “below” the individual – while acknowledging the impossibility of separating “my” movements from those of my extended kin and spiritual network, each relation producing conditions of possibility, forms of knowledge, as well as constraints and challenges. In this talk I will expand on the politics of the body-place by looking at the work of Ruins of Empire, a recent land sculpture by Kiyan Williams.  

[i] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 72.
[ii] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
[iii] Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 6.

Amber Jamilla MUSSER is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail, she has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on “Care and Its Complexities” and ASAP Journal on “Queer Form;” and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press. She was President of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) from 2022-2023, when she co-chaired ASAP-14: Arts of Fugitivity in Seattle; and she is currently co-chairing ASAP-15: Not a Luxury in New York City in October 2024. She is also co-Editor of Social Text.