This seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking — to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion — Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a homogenizing claim, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness — in its queer heterogeneity — in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.

In Hartman’s text, the chorus of minor figures is not simply given but conjured through her method of critical fabulation. Although they are all real historical figures, Hartman excavates their lives from the erasures of state and other disciplinary archives. As such, critical fabulation can be understood as Hartman’s mode of communing with the ancestors. This unflinching tarrying with the archives of slavery and its afterlife opens her — and her readers — to visitation from these spirits. As her attendant mode of “close narration” places the voice of the narrator in “inseparable relation” with those of the chorus — whose “errant paths” shape and arrange the text — Hartman’s poetics of enclosure yield a spiritual encounter in the flesh. Here, following Hortense Spillers, the flesh is “a praxis and a theory, a text for living and for dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.” Accordingly, with this spiritual-encounter-in-the-flesh, via Hartman’s chorus, a different kind of (potential) reader is conjured in a “willingness to lose oneself and become something greater — a chorus, swarm, ensemble, mutual aid society.”

This seminar invites proposals that consider — directly or indirectly — the chorus as a paradigm for Black Study. Guiding questions include but are not limited to:

• How can the chorus yield a way of thinking “social life” and “social death” nonoppositionally?
• How can the chorus yield a way of thinking blackness in its singular pluralities/plural singularities?
• How can the chorus — in its classical function as a direct address to the audience — shape our understanding of the relationship between Black radical poetics and “readers” (broadly conceived)?
• How can the chorus as a method of poetics trouble the Western memoir’s and lyric’s single subjectivity of the I-voice/speaker?
• How can the chorus enable our thinking of song and dance as collective/participatory practices of, in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s words, difference-without-separability?
• How can the chorus serve as a paradigm for (communing with) the ancestors?

We welcome papers that consider intersections between any combination of the chorus, blackness, visitation, poetics, or enclosure across all periods, places, traditions, mediums, and disciplines.