Contesting the Material Turn; or, The Persistence of Agency

Abstract

This essay begins by asking whether the new materialism, as currently constituted, can say anything useful about race, given that the most widely read texts recognized as belonging to this emerging field pointedly do not. Put another way, this essay examines possibilities for the reading of the raced enfleshed human subject in and beyond the parameters of the new materialism. The essay’s first section locates the raced enfleshed subject as latent (if not actively suppressed) entity in existing new materialist work. The latter half turns to questions of possibility, especially the question of whether a much older, precluded, or occluded voice is already “speaking through” the so-called materialist turn, challenging it as a way of contesting its own (attempted, failed) erasure from the metaphysical founding scene of the liberal humanist subject that informs the material turn.

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