Feminist logic delegitimates the effect of ontological blackness as opposed to “epistemological masculinity.” Vulnerability is thus weaponized towards the creation of black-as-vessel, existent only for its cultural production

Given the centrality of the concept of fungibility in my argument and its close ties to Afropessimism, it is worth starting by a succinct exposé of the latter’s central tenets. First things first, Afropessimism under consideration here is the US-version of Afropessimism, which was developed several decades after its original elaboration in Africa (with a different meaning) and largely obscured this prior conceptualization.5 A foundational premise of (US-made) Afropessimism is the claim that humanity was “made legible through the irreconcilable distinction between humans and blackness” (Douglass, Terrefe, and Wilderson 2018, 1). The advent of “human” as category was achieved through the violent negation of humanity to the Black, classified as non-human. This founding relationality in which the Black non-human is the constitutive outside of the Human means that Blackness eludes and exceeds the humanist modes of thinking and world-making. This premise is buttressed by the Afropessimist conceptualization of Blackness as “a paradigmatic position, rather than an ensemble of cultural, social, and sexual orientations” (1), as a “structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions” (Wilderson 2010, 58), which is coupled with a methodological refusal – that of any analogizing/comparison between the regimes of violence that discipline non-Black subalterns (dominated but human) and the one that evicts the Black from humanity. For Afropessimists, any analogizing between Black non-being and subjugated being (whether non-Black migrant, woman, queer, disabled) is misguided, as fungible object is incomparable to subordinated subject, and “the structure of the entire world’s semantic field – regardless of cultural and national discrepancies – […] is sutured by anti-Black solidarity” (58). One can hardly miss the divergence between this Afropessimist precept of incommensurable ontological (anti)Blackness, which foregrounds one true antagonism, the one between Black non-human and non-Black human, while it views “other repressive relations like class and gender” as taking place “on the level of conflict – they can be resolved, hence they are not ontological” (Wilderson n.d.), and the intersectional relational schema which, without treating differences as equivalent and interchangeable, conceives them within a matrix of domination where there is no superordinate antagonism. Thus, Afropessimist relational schema is hardly compatible with intersectional relational schema. While the former builds on the premise of only one true antagonism – that between humans and Blacks which is the core of ontological anti-Blackness – relegating the others to the realm of conflicts, because, it argues, they are not ontological, the latter eschews the idea of a single determination (be it race, class or gender) and focuses on theorizing their context-specific mutual constitution and articulations. From an Afropessimist perspective, Blackness doesn’t belong to the domain of subjectivity, identity, agency and epistemology, but to that of ontology, accumulation and fungibility, as determined by slavery and its afterlife (Hartman 1997). What ensue are structural incommensurability and incommunicability of Blackness vis-à-vis all other subaltern positions, “predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not [Marxian] exploitation and alienation” (Wilderson 2010, 58) – for slave is an object, not an exploited labourer-subject (Patterson 1982). They produce the “the absolute non-individuality and interchangeability” (Warren 2017, 397) of Blackness. Here, the concept of fungibility is of paramount importance, as the predicate upon which the enslaved Black is evicted from humanity and turned into ontologically (ac)cumulable and exchangeable commodity. Hartman (1997) argues: the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power. (21, my emphasis) Slavery is determinant in the Afropessimist conceptualization of Blackness and its incommensurability with other social positions of oppression. For Afropessimists, “the black is positioned, a priori, as slave” (Douglass, Terrefe, and Wilderson 2018, 1). One may reasonably inquire, but what about post-emancipation? Afropessimists answer this via the concept “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007) to argue “how the relationship between the slave and their status as fungible property did not substantively change after emancipation” (King 2013, 24). Hartman writes: Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6) For Hartman, emancipation is “both a breach with slavery and a point of transition to what looks more like the reorganization of the plantation system than self-possession, citizenship, or liberty of the ‘freed’” (1997, 12). Accordingly, the plantation supersedes its historical site, so does the fungible object status of the ‘freed’ Black. The lingering effects of slavery have an important bearing on my argument about Black feminist intersectionality’s fungibility in present-day academe. If Hartman theorizes Black non-humanity as being predicated on fungibility, i.e. ontological status of infinitely cumulable and exchangeable commodity, from the structural position of the enslaved, her conception of slavery’s afterlife authorizes the deployments of fungibility after and beyond slavery. Such a post-emancipation use of fungibility is obvious in Wilderson’s work, when he argues: As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world and so is his or her cultural ‘production.’ What does it mean – what are the stakes – when the world can whimsically transpose one’s cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention, onto another worldly good, a commodity of style? (2010, 56, my emphasis). In so doing, Wilderson not only deploys fungibility beyond the historical site of slavery, but also expands it from Black bodies to their artistic and intellectual productions, which are up for grabs, to be done whatever anyone sees suitable. He writes: The object status of Blackness means that it can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses. Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process. Both jazz and hip-hop have become known in the same way that Black bodies are known: as forces “liberated” from time and space, belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking. Anyone can say “[n-word]” because anyone can be a “[n-word].” (2010, 235, my emphasis) Black fungibility under globalized hip-hop brings compelling insights to think through Black women’s fungibility under globalized intersectionality, which becomes intersectionality’s fungibility under globalized knowledge economy. In both cases (globalized hip-hop and intersectionality), Black bodies and intellectual/cultural production are in a state of infinite change and exchange. They are “open spaces of shifting ‘signification and representation’ which humans use to make meaning of their lives” (King 2016, 1023; drawing on Spillers 1987, 75). The enslaved body’s ontological status predicated on fungibility and accumulation hence expands on Black experience and knowledge, turning them into “an open sign that can be arranged and rearranged for infinite kinds of use” (1025).