Author Meets Critics Roundtable: Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Engendering Blackness interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. This book contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Engendering Blackness reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Patrice D Douglass, University of California-Berkeley

Panelists

• Cecilio M Cooper, Science History Institute

• Tyrone S. Palmer, Wesleyan University

• Charlie Pollard-Durodola, University of California Berkeley

Comment

• Eric Stanley, University of California Berkeley

Biographical Information

Cecilio M. Cooper is a 2024–2025 Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Science History Institute’s Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry after serving as a 2023–2024 Long-Term Research Fellow with the Folger Institute. Via black critical theory, they broadly engage debates around science and technology studies, iconography, transness, as well as political theology.

Patrice D. Douglass is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research interests include Black feminist theory, transatlantic slavery, gender and sexual violence, and political philosophy. She is author of Engendering Blackness: The Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford University Press, 2025), which examines the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness.

Tyrone S. Palmer is Assistant Professor of English as Wesleyan University. Palmer's research concerns Black critical thought, poetics, and negativity. His current book manuscript, “Felt Antagonisms: Blackness, Negativity, and the Grammars of Affect,” explores how key Black literary texts theorize the failures of a universalist conception of affect to account for the grammars of feeling that emerge from the singularity of Blackness. Palmer’s scholarship has previously been published or is forthcoming in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Critical Ethnic Studies, Philosophy Today, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Post-45, Discourse, and the edited volume The Affect Theory Reader II: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. In addition to his scholarly work, Palmer has published cultural criticism and poetry in a number of venues, including The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Offing, and Callaloo.

Charlie “eon” Pollard-Durodola is a scholar of black ungendered life. Prior to beginning study as a PhD student, they earned a JD specializing in Critical Race Studies at UCLA Law. Charlie’s current interest is in studying the rhetoric and structure of existential relation, particularly how relationality emerges as problem through the synchronization of legality, desire, and antiblackness. Their first publication “Deadly Desires: The Juridical Birth of Queer Humanism Amidst Slavery’s Afterlife” was published in the UCLA Law Review. Their other scholarly interests include continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical, queer, and trans theory, and fashion and design criticism.

Eric A. Stanley is the Haas Distinguished Chair in LGBT Equity and an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where they are also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Eric’s first manuscript Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke 2021) argues racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to, and not an aberration of, western modernity. Atmospheres of Violence was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. Along with Tourmaline and Johanna Burton, Eric edited the anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), which won the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature and the John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies from the Popular Culture Association. With Nat Smith, they edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press 2011/15), which won the Prevention for a Safer Society Book Award.