Cyborg Black Studies : Tracing the Impact of Technological Change on the Constitution of Blackness.

Abstract

The dissertation offers a meta-theoretical and decolonial critique of epistemological and methodological approaches in Political Theory and Black Studies. Structured in three parts, it begins by arguing that prevalent models in subject theory cannot account for the specific situation of enslaved or colonized people. Focusing on the former, approaches by afropessimist authors are combined with a schizo-analytical methodology to develop a theory of the abjection of Blackness as inherent to (post-)modernity and models of (post-)humanism. The second part applies this model to cinema and phonography, introducing the racial glitch to describe how technologies can break open the suturation of bodies with blackness as a racialized social category. The third part condenses the results of the prior sections into Cyborg Black Studies , mobilizing the term cyborg as a trope to unthink the abjection inherent to notions of the human and offering a new methodology geared towards that goal.