UC Santa Cruz

On Quietly Being Out of Time asks media scholars and creatives to develop a politics of opacity, errantry, and care for the Black life and living embedded in our work. To do so, my dissertation reorients the epistemological and methodological concerns of scholars and creatives working with media collections featuring Black life and living. The weight of my work attempts to shift scholars and creatives from knowing Black media as objects we hold, towards what it might mean to embrace the Black moving images and life that appear (or refuse) our media streams. I explore how we might see and enact this embrace by acknowledging that media collections and archives allow scholars and creatives to work within what critical Black studies scholar and philosopher Christina Sharpe (2016) notes as the ‘wake of Blackness.’ I use ‘wake’, ‘holding’, and ‘anagrammatical blackness’ from Sharpe’s (2016) work to argue that when we work with Black moving images we are participating in the re/arrangement of how Black lives come to socially and culturally matter. I write across sociology, Black studies, archival theory, and media studies to show how working in and through Sharpe’s (2016) ‘wake’ exposes the urgency of using our work to demonstrate how Black life can be unknowable, refuse hypervisibility, and still be a nexus of care.

Artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death and television and film producer Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness serve as my case studies for producing work that collects / gathers / and arranges Black life and living towards opacity, errantry, and unknowability. I use their work to theorize how scholars and creative have to augment our sense of life, refusal, and care to imagine our work as a part of how Black life and living are socially and culturally re/arranged. I contend that in doing so we extend the concerns of our scholarship and creativity beyond using Black life as data or a rhetorical/metaphorical tool and wander towards developing practices of care for Black moving images that are systematically denied to Black people. My dissertation ends with a section on rest. In this section, I make a clear connection between how Black lives continue to labor outside of their corporeal forms and within the televisual images we use in our work. This ending allows me to suggest that a politics of care for the Black life and living in our scholarly and creative work must also imagine methodologies that honors all iterations of Black life to experience rest.