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<p><italic>Bodily Trespass</italic> situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial
production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic
in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction
that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the
contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial
crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense,
the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention
to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking
Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial <italic>Of One Blood, Or, The
Hidden Self</italic> as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic
as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir"
of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing
Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges
the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.</p><p>In the postwar years,
the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting
the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' <italic>The Real Cool
Killers</italic>, Ann Petry's <italic>The Street</italic>, and Gwendolyn Brooks' <italic>Maud
Martha</italic> depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed
psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy
for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"
and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for
refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority.
Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters
the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened
awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial
production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of
Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate,
in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject
formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.</p>
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