English Honors Papers

Document Type

Restricted

Advisor

Hubert Cook

Publication Date

2024

Comments

This paper is restricted to users on the Connecticut College campus until May 24, 2026.

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the imbrication between negative subjectivity and the fiction writing of Gayl Jones. In doing so, this work reimagines conceptions of intimate and interpersonal love, community, and retributive violence in the face of conditional (anti)Blackness. Through an engagement with contemporary scholars of Black Studies and with the help of the abundant archive of Black music, this project aims to prioritize, reproduce, and heed to Black Artistic registers of feeling that embrace duress, destruction, and madness. Through her literary performance, Jones reproduces and fabulates moments of Black social life that expand and simultaneously shatter our conception of a given and universal human subjectivity. What can be extracted from Jones’s writings, particularly Corregidora, Ensinaça, and Chile Woman, are the ways that (anti)Blackness shapes, destroys, and incentivizes the relational possibilities of the world. This paper proposes the embrace of the negative subject position as a preliminary beginning to catalyze a future without (anti)Blackness.

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.