That’s why they call me shine1
– Louis Armstrong

I like the sunrise, cos it brings a new day2
– Nina Simone

Since when did American novelist Gertrude Stein become “negro whisperer”? My question may strike you as odd, or exaggerated, but we must contend context: speaking through, and possibly “for(e-)”3 black people, Stein’s Melanctha4 is a reflexive vision, in which the title character – an African American woman more defined by her sexualized, distant desires, than her development as a worthy protagonist – inscribes dark images into imagined spaces: the negroes in their natural habitat. Spotlighting this con/text, we see how her text cons. Playing a confidence game with conventional notions of literary structure, Stein’s values expose the institutional nature of race-based visualities. The text is the scrim through which a darker theatre is apparent. What strikes we most, ain’t the blatant rendering simple of black psychological space – black men are brutal, black women are lascivious…the white off-beat goes on. 

Look at her,
all out of rhythm and shit.

What’s most brutal is her ventriloquistic “for(e-)”, which shadows authentic black realities – black materialism. Her attempted appropriation of black bodies leaves us in the dark. The fullness of blackness that fore-shadows Stein – anticipatory black ontologies – is precisely that which she occludes. 

[Sing!]5
Joy and pain…it’s like sunshine and rain
That’s why they call me shine6

Repeating and rehearsing this musical progression, the always brilliant artist, Glenn Ligon, serenades Stein:

[Sing!]
In the dark
It’s just you and I7 

Does the void hold only the couple? Although he cannot touch the brassiness of Mother Nina, at least he reached for something. The kind of reaching that comes from the resistance to ascent/assent we hear in Miles Davis’ windy-wispy-whistle, as if he’s trying to clear the sax of any residual haunts.8 If for nothing else, the brilliance of Ligon’s techniques of re/appropriation might light-up the darkness. What forms might his luminosity bring-forth? 

Glenn Ligon’s Warm Broad Glow (2005), poeticizes black radiance through the phrase, “negro sunshine.” This specific slogan, is scripted with paint and neon lights. Plucked from Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, in which the author comprehends black radiance as an excess of black joy, writing of her protagonist, “Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine,”9 Glenn Ligon recaptures, revises, and rehearses a curious consignment, thought lost in the captured cargo: Joy and pain is like sunshine.10 Oh how the ship moaned glows. Ligon’s is a vessel that radiates the ontological possibilities of black existence. Where Gertrude Stein brackets the potential of black life, occluding symbiotic possibilities of joy and pain, Glenn Ligon abstracts/extracts from her, in order to open black promise. Ain’t Ligon and Stein an off couple?  Mother Nina addresses the couplet, with a verse in praise of the sun. The majestic, marching orchestral precedes her wisdom:

[Sing!]
IIIII like the sunrise, cos it brings a neewww day
I like the new day…it brings, new hope they say11

Similar to Mother Nina’s vocals promoting and enacting black advancement through the temporal trope of the sun, Ligon’s lights offer plurality to black brilliance. Reading against Simone Browne’s necessary definition of her phrase “black luminosity”12 – interminably surveilling black bodies – the duet, Nina-Ligon, produce hope. Said another way: Nina + Ligon = future. Ain’t black promise radical…dangerous? DuBois by way of Cedric Robinson reaches towards the flame: “Consequently, we have had a past, we can have a future…Black Sovereignty!”13 The plurality is in the promise, in the advance towards a future. 

What this resistance to assent, and acceptance of ascent, assumes is a challenge to the continuum of words that are welded to the meanings they carry. But words don’t work that way. Simply performing an etymological operation, we see that words do not carry universal spatio-temporal meanings. Given my focus in this essay on black radiance, we contemporarily designate “shine,” as a “giving forth or glowing with light.” Endless commercials qualify the act. From teeth, to hair, to cars, the logic of “shine,” and its attendant desire, is deeply rooted in contemporary human logic. Advancing towards a past, the very same term establishes its plurality when meaning: “attempt to please” (perhaps 19th century), “brightness” (16th century), and the always already derogative for “black person” (perhaps 19th century). That’s why they call “we” shine schien/schein? In this language game – switching to German, schien and schein mean appearance, certificate, light, seem, sham – what we are trying to get at, reach to, spotlight, “Flashlight!...Now we lay us down to speak,”14 a state in which “black radiance” operates as a tool deployed to expose multiple limits: language, and the speaker as authority. When we inquire to Stein’s position as speaker, we wish to not only exorcise her limits, but also, the limits of language, and its attendant ill-logic. How in the hell did Gertrude Stein become “negro whisperer”? Our sense is that the “radicality” of Stein’s rupture with convention is merely a slight tear. Enslaved by language, she can’t go where Fred Moten, by way of Nathaniel Mackey, suggest we locate black experience…our experience: 

Words don’t go there.
Words don’t go to where this sadness welled up from.15

She don’t know how the ship glows. We see this all the time with the utterer’s deficits in lived experience. A brilliant scholar once remarked when asked about the moments when non-community creatives attempt to represent aspects of the experiences of a certain group: “My problem is that…they ain’t go deep enough. They…didn’t speak about what it’s like to be a parent; with its attendant actualities and responsibilities; to lose a child.”16 At black funerals, vision pulled upon the pall, some parents might shout “Oh lawd take me now!” If you have yet to witness this phenomenon of emotional excess, you might be the deficient one.

The duet Stein + Ligon are trapped in the ill-logic of the written word. While in his abstraction Ligon is able to open the term, might he still be enslaved, circumscribed by the inscription?17 Maybe the totality of the sexed-couplet ain’t go deep enough; far enough? Irretrievably out. What are the possibilities of a radical edge? Where is that boundary? Nathaniel Mackey suggests an archaeological approach: “a disinterment of the occult, heretofore inchoate arcana intuitively buried within the reaches – the wordless reaches – of the black singer’s voice.”18 Is there a location beyond, beneath, before the word? The fore-shadowing that is black anticipation, a blackness that predates language proper, is what we are after. We do not mean blackness in a primitive sense. We aim for an emotive or affective space; always already available in black material existence; constituted in black song. In Bodies in Dissent (2006), Daphne A. Brooks19 exposes the potentiality of black song, when analyzing Henry Box Brown’s heroic escape from slavery, and its theatrical restaging.20 Citing L.W. Levine,21 Brooks reveals how the creative captured cargo utilized sacred song in an attempt to develop “a new world by transcending the narrow confines of the one in which they were forced to live. They extended the boundaries of their restrictive universe…until it became one with the world beyond.”22  This is precisely what Mackey’s anticipatory belief in black vocals offers: to see in the dark, the expansive possibilities of a void. Like a Greek chorus, we hear the same artful, archaeological advocating in the depths of Mother Nina:

[Sing!]
In the dark
Now we will find
What the rest
Have left behind23 

The paradox is that we might find a glimmer of something within darkness, in the anticipatory shadow that is black experience. While the citation from duet Moten + Mackey seeks for the eternal flame in black voice, might we also stick with Ligon’s trajectory of abstraction (b)lackness to locate the possibilities of radical black expression? We merely intend to offer an artistic couple through which to exceed language’s edge, to touch an authentic black luminosity: Ellen Gallagher + Jack Whitten = black radiance. Thus far the couplet has alluded to the necessity of an Other to anticipate gaps in representation; Ligon’s light revised and re-filled holes in Stein’s efforts while enacting support as back-up singer in Nina’s prophetic progression. The author requires the reader. Might the duet, Gallagher + Whitten complement each other in ways mirroring representation + abstraction. What we are trying to get at is the acknowledgement of all limits, and the necessity for supplemental fore-shadows.

Paradoxically prefaced by performative doubling – eXelento, Pomp Bang, Double Natural, and Falls & Flips – Ellen Gallagher’s magazine works from early 2000’s linger on the mind, as they go where no language has gone before. In this issue on radiance and opacity, how can Gallagher – a cartographer of artistic renown – creatively project new territories for (b)lackness? When speaking about black publications from which the works presently considered emerge, she discusses distance narratives: 

But as I began looking through them, the wig ads themselves had such a language to them – so worldly – that referred to other countries, Leshiba, this sort of lost past…And then I realized that I also had a kind of longing for the other stories, narratives – wanting to bring them back into the paintings and wanting the paintings to function through the characters of the ads, to function as a kind of chart or a map of this lost world…24

Although Gallagher looks to a fore-shadow (previous blackness), what’s exposed in this speculative feminist geography is the radicality of historical subjectivity. Yes, the works advocate an obvious “over-determined”25 racialized voice, but what becomes more discrete/discreet is the relationship of blackness to abstraction. (B)lackness? The deficiency ain’t in black, but in words.

Now folks, in the beginning – there was darkness.26

This is how sacred texts reveal the world. Witness how darkness prefaces everything. Working with some “sacred texts” of black social life (Ebony, Jet, Sepia, etc.) Ellen Gallagher allows us to go where words – the literary ill-logic of Stein – can’t go. What Gallagher terms the “abstract ‘I’”27 is located in the dark. Ancient mariners employed knowledge of star location to orient their ships at night. In this way they found direction in the dark. Foreshadowing Mother Nina? Following a similar path, Ellen Gallagher studied celestial navigation and oceanography as an undergraduate.28 She deploys this navigational techne in the grid. The “abstract ‘I’”, as termed and defined by the artist, is “what it means to look at somebody who was eighteen in 1939…It’s impossible to know who that was. But try anyway to have some kind of imaginative space with that sign.”29 Our cultural imagination holds the impossibility of black subjectivity. Plotted as a past – “this sort of lost past”30 – her imagery is future. From the plasticine-yellow wigs and milky eyes, black bodies are imagined as other-worldly; despite Gallagher defining her initial encounter with black publications in physical terms. And this is precisely the abstract, other-worldly, extra-terrestrial, surreality of black ontologies that Gallagher’s grid plots for the imagination. The scary part, is that for black bodies and their attendant black psychologies, this is facticity, this otherworldly character is a material reality: black materialism is the dark – (b)lackness.

[Sing!]
In the dark
Now we will find
What the rest
Have left behind31 

Carbon dated within the period of Gallagher’s archive, 1920-1960’s, is a voice championing the possibilities within blackness. Embodied in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is an expression of dark electricity, black luminosity. Ellison’ protagonist boasts the energy of darkness: “In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights…An act of sabotage, you know…The truth is light and light is truth.”32 In this way, “truth,” is innate to disruptive darkness: black radical radiance is facticity. Blackness is always already challenging. Fred Moten reaches and extends the inevitability of the voice that cuts from the dark. When recording Aunt Hester’s scream, Moten brilliantly expresses the troublesome flame of blackness. The surreality of black life – that it’s an inevitable “engagement with the terribly beautiful music of Douglass’ recitations of the beating of his Aunt Hester,”33 – exposes the fire music embodied by the shriek; radiant reverberation is precisely how Hester’s scream labors: “The speaking commodity thus cuts Marx.”34 As commodity/object, Frederick Douglass’ surrogate mother, thought to have been rendered mute, determines another mode of speech – the shriek. Severing this silence, this primal aural response to whipping, undoes the ill-logic of an unspeaking object requiring an authority. Is Gertrude Stein still “negro whisperer”? She been off rhythm and shit. Make it plain:35 Is Stein’s narrative necessary, if the object/subject can sound herself into being? Through a primary utterance – where words ain’t never goin’ – the object turns subject turns human.

As Fred Moten reveals value in blackness through destruction and extraction of a word’s intelligibility – in some instances a grunt means more than to speak a term – artist Jack Whitten locates subjectivity as abstraction. Here we can imagine an ill-logic, by which we mean dope economy. Referencing the limits of language, and the object/subject binary, Whitten creatively explores how to materially expose the energy within darkness through abstract painting. Cited by curator Katy Siegel in Notes from the Woodshed, the publication of Whitten’s studio notes from 1962-2017, while in his studio the artist revealed to her a sheet of paper with the following text:

Abstract painting that addresses subject is what I want. Before Western abstraction there was subject. I want something that goes beyond the notion of the “formal” as subject. I want to use the formal as a means to arrive at subject.36 

Whitten’s words not only support our position on radical black thought – that before the word was darkness,37 expressed through our understanding of fore-shadow – they cut the conventional relationship between “abstraction=object/representation=subject.”38 He is seeking an anticipatory subjectivity that predates Modernism’s comprehension of black being, or in Stein’s case, being black. That’s why they call we schein. The sham of such diseased economy, again, is external to black plureality;39 black torches certify. Read through Fred Moten’s lens, we can see what Whitten is reaching for: the black subject prefacing the derogative shine; the subject that not only forces exposure, but is the very being that demands revealing the schein, by which we mean “sham,” of racialized coding – the white stranglehold on abstraction. Poiesis is when David Hammons arrives in a dream and tells you about yourself: “there will never be a famous black abstract painter.” As Miles whistles, Hammons’ haunts.

What’s most instructive here is not the hauntology, rather, the flipping of conventional binaries: abstraction=object/representation=subject. As Moten inverses the capitalist economy to witness subjectivity lacerate Marx, Whitten rotates non-representation, not represented, non-being to the status of subject, thus turning abstraction into a site for, and sight of subjectivity. This is precisely what he desires in saying, “Abstract painting that addresses subject is what I want…I want to use the formal as a means to arrive at subject.”40 Reading through Moten’s revelation of the darkness of embodiment, the embodiment of darkness, we can reimagine Whitten’s project as not just inversing binaries, but searching for a means by which to express black experience in extra-temporal41 terms. “Before western abstraction there was subject”42 is a radical historiographic summons for a haunting past; Gallagher haunts as back-up singer: “this sort of lost past.”43 Both artists search for the voices, noises, and grunts that anticipate and expose white authorities for being off rhythm. That’s why we call Stein schein. Anticipated by DuBois’ beacon, by way of Robinson, “Consequently, we have had a past, we can have a future…Black Sovereignty!,” Whitten extends this continuum of locating radiance, Moten’s “value,” in the dark, through abstraction. It seems appropriate that he explores black being through abstraction, since representation proper, like language, just can’t reach an accurate expression of the complexities of black materialism.

While we have attempted to consider the edges of logic through the limits of language, science is an occupation which continues to proffer itself as material fact; scientific empiricism produces results, which either is or ain’t. Beyond modernism’s “scientific racism,”44 might we end this essay approaching black brilliance through a scientific lens? In physics blackbodies are an appropriate closing example of internal dark energy. Whitten’s redefinition of the black body as subject, can help us redefine the black body as power reservoir. Black spirit? “Blackbody radiation” signifies how dark materials absorb electromagnetic radiation. Initially non-reflective, blackbodies absorb light from the environment, only to conversely project their excess energy outward. While we can’t sketch with equations the technical mechanics of blackbody environmental interaction, we can deploy it as a metaphor for the historical, social, and cultural life of black peoples – the black body. African Americans have, and continue to absorb all energy: slavery’s captured cargo, Reconstruction’s deracinated race, modernisms’ motile mortality…and the white off-beat goes on. As the black body, black peoples absorb all and project less;45 resulting in stores of surplus energy – black luminosity. Ligon, Gallagher, and Whitten exhibit the possibilities when the surplus is allowed to schien. Shine, Schien, Negro Sun! Our new title is meant to certify black brilliance, and not assent to an imagined inferiority embodied in darkness. This ain’t no cosign. Rather, it is meant as a radiant beacon to the creative potential circumscribed by the dark. Inside us is: energy, luminosity, sovereignty. Moten and Mackey find it in black utterance. Gallagher plots it through the inaccessible, becoming the imaginative in her “abstract ‘I’”. Whitten determines it as abstraction. Chasing us is Mother Aretha’s ghost. Spotlighting the spirit in the dark not only undercuts the schein (sham) of the Enlightenment project. What it contentiously acknowledges is the necessity of a call to embodied sovereignty. Coupling with Mother Aretha we can sing:

I’m getting the spirit in the dark.
Black power is most radiant.46