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The Nigrescent Beyond
Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness
Ricardo A. Wilson (Author)
9780810142046
Paperback / softback, published 30 July 2020
160 pages, 7 black & white images
22.6 x 14.9 x 1.2 cm, 0.24 kg
“With The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness we are at once given a subtle new radical voice in thought and a sustained and necessary new exposure to the emplacement of matters of ‘Blackness’ across the hemisphere, by way of a wholly other experience of all that is Mexico.” —Nahum Dimitri Chandler, author of Toward an African Future: Of the Limit of World
Despite New Spain’s significant participation in the early transatlantic slave trade, the collective imagination of the Mexican nation evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand itself as devoid of a black presence. In The Nigrescent Beyond, Ricardo Wilson proposes a framework for understanding this psychic vanishing of blackness and thinks through how it can be used both to productively unsettle contemporary multicultural and postracial discourses within the United States and to further the interrogations of being and blackness within the larger field of black studies.
Wilson models a practice of reading that honors the disruptive possibilities offered by an ever-present awareness of that which lies, irretrievable, beyond the horizon of vanishing itself. In doing so, he engages with historical accounts detailing maroon activities in early New Spain, contemporary coverage of the push to make legible Afro-Mexican identities, the electronic archives of the Obama presidency, and the work of Carlos de SigÜenza y GÓngora, Octavio Paz, Ivan Van Sertima, Miguel Covarrubias, Steven Spielberg, and Colson Whitehead, among others.