In recent decades, Black Studies has witnessed important work on the ways in which the overrepresentation of 'man' and the invisibilization of whiteness have functioned in service of a range of im/material violences. Our aesthetic and political investments, therefore, lie in arguments and examples that unsettle the imposed relationalities and the representational economy of what Saidiya Hartman calls the "racial calculus", Katherine McKittrick considers as the "mathematics of unlivingness" and Christina Sharpe terms the "orthographies of the wake". Struggling against this socio-symbolic order, this seminar is interested in investigating the perilous invitations to visibility/legibility extended to racialized minorities who attain representational status as exception or in abjection. In examining the intimate connections between racial formation, visuality, and knowability, Martinican writer Édouard Glissant proposes the right to opacity through which one can contest the imperialist forces that seek to capture, reduce, and flatten out one's complex subjectivity and humanity. Extending his argument, Denise Ferreira da Silva cautions against the "transparent Subject" as the basis for emancipatory aesthetics or politics. If the desires for visibility, legibility and meaning categorize, instrumentalize, and contain racialized being(s), how can opacity refuse the representational demands for transparency and knowability embedded in both literary/critical practice and social life?

Drawing from the insurgent practices of black, feminist, queer scholarship of Daphne Brooks ("spectacular opacity"), Simone Browne ("dark sousveillance"), Saidiya Hartman ("black noise"), Tavia Nyong'o ("crushed black"), and Tina Post ("opacity gradient") who reject desires for mastery of content and easy comprehension of subjects/objects, this seminar seeks presentations that engage with opacity: as creative strategy, as fugitive weapon, as methodological tool, as interpretive lens and/or as pedagogical resource. We might consider: how does opacity offer us ways to move against and beyond the binary of visibility and invisibility, without privileging either as liberatory? How do we, as readers, critics, and teachers engage with works beyond the analytic of (self-)possession and epistemic authority? How do works stage and refuse meaning-making, incorporation, coherence through their formal intentions and thematic content? How does opacity unmake dominant approaches to similarity, comparison, and difference? What are the aesthetic and political stakes of refusing transparency and focusing on mediation, formation, and entanglement? What alternate forms of being and belonging do modes of opacity allow us to gesture towards?

Taking seriously the tensions of appearance, interpretation, and contamination that opacity is enmeshed in, we invite papers from across disciplines, genres and objects of study. Abstracts of 250-300 words and short bios of 100 words (or less!) can be directed to [email protected] and [email protected] by Oct 2, 2025.