Dark Opacities Lab Manifesto

What is the evasion of racial and colonial capture? How might we understand it, on the one hand, in political terms, and on the other hand, in aesthetic terms?

Enclosure/capture/
The prison/oversight
Carcerality 

Fugitivity/on the run/
Evasion/avoidance
Abolition

Representation/inclusion/
Visibility/legibility
Extraction 

Opacity/illegibility
Invisibility/inscrutability
Anticolonial

When we think of capture we think of the static the enclosed the prison the photograph. We think of the trap of visibility as per Foucault, and the trap door offered by Stanley, Tourmaline, and Burton. 

We think of the CCTV still, the blurry close up of those caught on surveillance footage, captured and placed into the local news, the national spotlight, deemed criminal based on logics steeped in white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. 

We think and theorize and study against capture as a means to think for those on the run, for those under cover, for those invested in fugitive planning, for methods necessary to enact liberation under accelerating conditions of unfreedom, surveillance, policing, and ceaseless harm.

We create and make manifest such methods of opacity as a means to divest from the diversity inclusion equity discourse. We are not interested in the administrative and extractive violence of producing art and cultural expression to behoove cultural institutions who are only now interested in the work of diasporic, BIPOC, immigrant, Third World communities. We will not fall for such platitudes when the bottom line is the bottom line, capitalist accumulation for the white walls and whiteness itself. 

Opacity emerges as an anti-colonial strategy theorized first by Édouard Glissant that has become increasingly of interest in certain fields of study. We draw from the foundational work of Francophone Caribbean anticolonial theorist Glissant to ask how opacity might work as a strategy against the overwhelming statist and capitalist desire for omnipresent sight, vis-à-vis surveillance and forms of policing. In turn, it is vital to reckon with the demand for visibility and representation for racialized and visible minorities as it plays out as part of liberal forms of inclusion, while understanding the contradictions of such forms of inclusion as they exist against the backdrop on ongoing structural violence against such communities (Lloyd, 2019; Hartman, 1997, Stanley, 2021). For example, as Saidiya Hartman argues, “the afterlives of slavery”—in which the practices of Black dehumanization, captivity, and premature death, continue into the present, despite state recognition of being an “emancipated” peoples. A framework of opacity understands how and why strategies of increasing visibility for marginalized communities, especially those of color, might actually hide or occlude quotidian and normalized structural violence. As these theorists have argued, the mainstream rhetoric of equity, diversity, and inclusion can often be predicated on a kind of violence, requiring the disavowal of historical injustice and harm so as not to express forms of racial grief and grievance.

McKittrick conceptualizes opacity as rigorous practice of study, wonder, and curiosity that prompts the aesthetic work of affirming life and aliveness as we live through, and counter, colonial and plantation violence. McKittrick locates black aesthetics as a site of learning, remembering, imagining, and creating. We emphasize how this definition of aesthetics loosens us from the grips of institutional art discourses of representation, retrieval, or reveal in terms of subjection and oppression. Rather, here aesthetics is a “working through,” by ideas and by stories, which shows up and takes cover in what we recognize as opacity.

Opacity is a method of living conditioned by moments of clarity that emerge in the post-1492 violent world order that also gives rise to action, activity, organizing, creating. “What do I mean, where have I seen this before?” This question formulated by McKittrick holds the power to identify moments and movements between opacity and clarity. 

I attended a screening of They Are We (dir. Emma Christopher, 2014) at a diasporic film festival. The film documents the reunion of Gangá-Longobá people severed by enslavement; one side in Perico, Cuba, and the other in a small village Sierra Leone. When the Afro-Cuban family visits the Sierra Leone side, they joyfully encounter physically the indigenous medicinal plant they’ve known through song exclusively for over 170 years in Cuba. The Dominican woman who facilitated a post-screening discussion verbalized her grief over indigenous practices lost in slavery.

“When you realize arroz con gandules would just be Jollof rice if your Puerto Rican ancestors weren’t stolen from Africa”
—@mmconze

LaTanya S. Autry, arts worker known for organizing the Museums Are Not Neutral movement, shares on Instagram her experience with trying to recreate a recipe in diaspora. Her experience speaks to the way diasporic literacy flashes between clarity and opacity and back again. 

“I am a child of the African Diaspora. lately I returned to trying to figure out how my grandmother cooked the sweet potato snack she’d offer me when I hanged out with her back when I was just a kiddo in elementary school. I don’t know how she made them. but I remember that she would cut them into discs.

I have tried to make them only twice. but I have thought about them all of my life.

this time I boiled them. I pierced the potato with a fork before boiling also I halved it because I didn’t want to ruin a whole sweet potato. (I was testing this out.) it looks like my method messed up the texture. it’s close, but not right.

and actually to tell the truth, I think this might be a yam and not a sweet potato. it’s not sweet enough.🙃

she’s probably watching me and shaking her head (lovingly though)

well, things get lost in the diaspora, but the memory is still with me. I will try again.”
—@artstuffmatters (LaTanya S. Autry)

Opacity prompts, activates, and wonders. 

The CLICK emerges as a remembering perceived as knowledge. The CLICK enables the perception of the limit of Moraga’s knowing which she experiences in fear, terror, shock. The CLICK only happens in radical connection and collectivity, in embracing the nightmare of internal and interracial perpetuation of colonial racial heteropatriarchal violence. “I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me,” Moraga says. “If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it: this polite timidity is killing me.”

We enter the nightmare as source of potential knowledge.

Darkness sources poiesis, an activity of bringing something into being out of nothing.

If the Enlightenment gifted the knowledge that refined embodied sensorial experience and brought light to human being, what kind of being could darkness bring? If the Enlightenment gifted the knowledge that brought light into the world, what would it mean to know in darkness?

In conceiving of opacity’s function as, in part, a material mode in which to evade forms of racial and colonial capture, what can be said for the value of opacity as against forms of punishment, from harassment to enclosure, from policing to prisons? How is opacity–as a fugitive strategy, as one that begs for motion and non-fixedity, that operates against reduction and so-called clarity?

In a 2021 article entitled  “The Unsettling Surveillance of Anti-Asian Racism” Jane Hu argues that the legibility of hate crime status for contemporary forms of anti-Asian violence oftentimes means the ramping up of both surveillance and policing technologies, both of which are structured by historic and ongoing forms of anti-Blackness. In my reading, legibility and determining motive for hate crimes ultimately argue for a sense of clarity and transparency that the violence was motivated by forms of prejudice, racial or otherwise. Rather than focus exclusively on the demand for legibility, I want to think against the liberal demand for transparency to theorize opacity as it offers abolitionist value that is inherently against forms of surveillance and policing. I specifically choose to think with a selection of community organizations, including CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Muslim Abolitionist Futures, and Carceral Technology Resistance Network; to think with artists Assia Boundaoui and Jess X Snow; and with scholars Ren-yo Hwang, Anjali Nath, and Vivian Truong, all of whom help me think through opacity as a way to arrive at community defense as an abolitionist horizon for Asians and other diasporic kin in the contemporary.

And yet, to return to McKittrick, to acknowledge the limits of opacity as a result of it existing as a “terrible working through of objecthood and the legible and quiet forms of racist violence. Opacity is not freedom; it is a terrible working through of racist visual economies that simultaneously accumulate and dispossess black people.” If it is not freedom, if it requires an acknowledgement of the terror and the trauma of the plantation and the colony, then what can it offer? McKittrick gives us much language here in terms of wonder, curiosity, prompt, but I hone in moreso on your note:

“We emphasize that this definition of aesthetics loosens us from the grips of institutional art discourses of representation, retrieval, or reveal in terms of subjection and oppression. Rather, here aesthetics is a “working through,” by ideas and by stories, which shows up and takes cover in what we recognize as opacity.”

If we are loosened from such aesthetic institutional grammar, is there not the possibility of the opposite existing and positing other ways of making and mattering:

Of abstraction–non-representation
To not mine our personal and often painful histories–against such retrieval
To conceal, keep hidden–as Rita Dove writes “If you can’t be free, be a mystery”

And I know that the ruse of analogy is just that, a deception, dangerous in its ability to occlude details, complexity, nuance. But, there is something valuable in this particular analogy between display of our work and of our bodies–and its not just the politics of the gaze, though that does give us much to sit with. From bell hooks giving us the “oppositional gaze” to Laura Mulvey naming the “male gaze” and now Tina Campt offering “a Black gaze.” But if we go beyond the occular, beyond sight, beyond vision, what do such forms of consumption enable both aesthetically and politically. But perhaps I am more invested in thinking about the political ramifications of the gaze, the danger of being seen, being recognized, for what or who you are thought to be. To be on display. To be read in public.

It is the danger of being consumed, extracted, digested and transformed through the vessel in an abstract and material sense. 

It is in the possibility of being read as out of place, as out of joint with whichever norms are operating. It is existing, being in harm’s way.

Vivian Huang theorizes “inscrutable aesthetics” in her brilliant 2022 book Surface Relations to describe Asian American racialization as a queer form, describing the focus of her book thusly:

“[I focus on] Asian American appearance through this interaction of surface. How has the racial category ‘Asian American’ itself taken on an inscrutable form: all exterior surface with ambiguous interior content? […] Asian inscrutability queers knowledge because it refuses the high valuation of modern thought as a kind of colonial capture. This book follows in the Indigenous, Black, anti-racist, feminist, and queer intellectual legacies that have destabilized modern foundations of knowledge by historicizing the violence extracted by Western thought”

This is the kind of distillation of thinking we need–because it crystallizes ideas in ways that also multiply in meaning. It is gesturing toward the many possibilities of what inscrutable aesthetics are and can be, how surface relations offer a way of understanding the very political underpinnings of this concept of Asian inscrutability. Maybe this appears contradictory: that inscrutability and inscrutable aesthetics are structured by a particular politics, that the impenetrability of the Asian figure/face/surface in the North American context, offers a way to read what appears as apolitical or neutral as instead strategic and studied, a kind of militancy.

How does the seeming impossibility of reading–and thus knowing–the Asian face as affectively devoid or politically ambiguous by statist heteropatriarchal white supremacist forces then confer upon said face a kind of militancy, strategic and studied? In my estimation, part of what Huang’s argument conjures is a historic relation between Asianness and whiteness that is forever bound up by colonial and imperial ties, where forms of colonial and postcolonial resentments play out. However, Huang’s interest lies in the quotidian queer affective forms of Asians akin to “staying in” (Lee) and remaining “in the closet”: how might staying in…the closet then offer a way of imagining opacity otherwise?

By choosing to remain ambiguous, unconfirmed, hidden away, concealing oneself–however we choose to put it–is to consciously maintain something of ourselves. 

Our truth, our power,
our self-knowledge,
our sense of safety,
our sense of survival,
our mode of freedom. 

By operating inscrutably we operate against the overwhelming weight of constant sharing, public life, the public eye, the watchful eye, the surveillance of everyday life, the desire to be seen; we operate against the gaze, its consumptive, greedy, ceaseless operation. “You’re Feast Has Ended” as artists Nep Sidhu, Nicholas Galanin, and Maikoyo Alley-Barnes have articulated. The gaze is consumption incarnate, it is a desire for the ocular to dominate, to nullify other senses. For the feast to end, staying in, remaining in the closet might be better options than the alternative. Insofar as it revises and transforms the very terms of sociality and relationality itself, there exists a political potential in the racialized queer form of staying in, staying opaque.

It is this collective vision of ambiguity,
haziness, occlusion,
avoidance, concealment,
we arrive together.

Me and you.
(Your mama and your cousin too)

When much feels pointless, wresting with the overwhelming apocalyptic, what does it mean to study and create and think and practice in collectivity? Moten and Harney’s undercommons might give us the tools we need for Dark Opacities Lab, embedded in black study, paying our debts to intellectual, political, and aesthetic genealogies;

let us steal,

we begin our fugitive planning,

despite it all.