My dissertation “TO SAVE MY OWN LIFE: Antebellum Autobiography and the Figures for Black Ontology”, directed by Stephen Best, revisits the autobiographical narrations of several canonical (formally enslaved) writers to discover in them the origins of the contemporary methods for black study—emblematized by the archival poetics of M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong! and the auto-theoretical polemics of Frank Wilderson III’s Afro-Pessimism. To articulate the relationship between these two poles of contemporary black critical thought—one that voices drowned slaves through a new vocabulary assembled from court documents, the other which polemicizes against coalition as it draws the reader closer and closer to its subject’s position— my project revisits their dual origin in both the production and reception of three slave narratives. These narratives and texts, by Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, make case studies for body chapters that address what lives on the other side of the constraints of a (white, abolitionist) literary market turned field of academic study. Alongside the more direct reference within each text to the author’s awareness of their narrative’s significance to their contemporary struggle for freedom, the subsequent debates surrounding Equiano’s natality, Wheatley’s proposing of initial figural position for black speakers, and crafting of a historical fiction, and the third Jacobs’s self-metaphorization and references to the archives of enslavement, make the literary (historical) evidence in negative to the positive, radical, and ultimately ontological potentials of struggling to articulate life through an oppressive and abstract medium: the autobiography and, more broadly the written word, “the dead letter.” The formally registered “self-consciousness” of these narratives—accounts of the transition between being an object who is subject to the violence of mere syntax, and the self-objectification that results through the transaction of manumission in their becoming legitimate subjects—held in turns of phrase and figure are shown in an opening chapter to prefigure the auto-theoretical and archival methods of poetic and theoretical representations of blackness in contemporary black (literary, critical) study, just as they were the foundational pieces of “factual” evidence to the lives of the enslaved that helped to ground that field in the later 1960s.Overall, my project is aimed at recontextualizing the slave’s writing, to show it working alongside other 19th century thinkers on the displacement of universalist enlightenment categorization through the ontological propositions produced in negative by way of their phenomenological accounts of the (black) being, or more precisely of the becoming being of the black person, in text. A description and theorization of this specific becoming that extends through (black, American) literature and theory past the floodgates of emancipation, through the failure of reconstruction and the multiple waves of black renaissance and rebellion, toward the establishment of the field of black study which has produced the very poetic ontologies the field now uses to narrate, poetically reconstitute, or politically reconcile (black) lives in general. As a result, the project includes a pointed genealogy of the contemporary investigations into the being of blackness, which carries back several poetic figures or polemical theories for a black ontology, indexed above by the work of Phillip and Wilderson, but also present in that of Frantz Fanon, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, Sylvia Wynter, et al. This subterrain genealogy demonstrates how the phenomenological and historiographical methods of representing and theorizing blackness developed out of and alongside the more canonical trajectory for their formulation across the 19th century and 20th century—from Hegel to Emerson to Nietzsche to Husserl to Heidegger to Sartre to Fanon to Derrida and so on. Which is to say, from the heart of the critical writing of the 19th and 20th century, the beginning of the critique of enlightenment. And that the slave narrative participates in this critique, particularly, through the deployment of several literary tactics with archival or auto-theoretical consequences—spinning false yarns about their pasts, building frame narratives, and using abstract figures to describe material conditions. These early black autobiographies are, in this light, synthetic documents that help reinvent the genre and purpose of autobiographical writing, merging the historiographical inventions of archival awareness with an auto-theorist’s poetic approach to self-preservation, and thus anticipating if not creating the field of black study as it moves and works and has it’s being today.

What do we mean, this dissertation asks, when we talk about "contemporary literature"? Far from being a fixed category of literary history, the contemporary is always on the move. Just as the "now" when I am writing this abstract is different from the "now" when you are reading it, the contemporary does not so much delimit history as drift across it. So what does it mean to call ourselves contemporary? In "Contemporary Drift," I argue that "contemporary" is more than a name for novelty--it is also an untimely connection to the past. We can best grasp this paradox of contemporary life, I suggest, by reading it through the historical dynamics of genre. More drag than drift, genres stay the same even as they change over time; they are recognizable precisely to the extent to that they're repeatable. The iterations of genre interrupt the fragile immediacy of the contemporary. Reconsidering the fates of the historical novel, the realist novel, the detective novel, and the noir film, I claim that genre shows us what it means--and what it takes--to see ourselves in history.

The way we consolidate a sense of the now is intimately connected to larger issues of literary history: how we construct canons, how we distinguish historical periods, how we lay claim to the continued relevance of the past. My project thus aims to reorient our literary present by looking not at new forms but at renewed forms. Each chapter of my dissertation engages the recent "afterlife" of an older genre in order to show how it conjures a complex image of the contemporary. These reanimated genres insist on the present's singularity yet inevitably invoke its continuity with the past. I consider the strange figure of the speaking dead that links classic film noir to the nostalgic repetitions of neo-noir; the entangled politics of waiting, reading, and race that structure the detective fiction of Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, and Vikram Chandra; the tension between the distant gaze of periodization and the everyday details of realism staged in the work of Bret Easton Ellis and J.M. Coetzee; and the modes of anachronism that shape historical novels by John Fowles and Tom McCarthy. These ostensibly outdated genres show how the present can encompass days, decades, even centuries. In doing so, they suggest that being contemporary means always being just a little out of date.