TOWARD THE NEW HUMAN: AN ANTI-HUMANIST READING OF BLACK FLESH IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Author

• Colin Bailey Madison, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2026

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Philosophy

First Advisor

Frankowski, Alfred

Abstract

This thesis project analyzes the notion of Black flesh as it appears in both African American literature and the philosophical traditions of Afropessimism and Posthumanism. The core problem this thesis project seeks to address is the revolutionary potential of politicizing Africana literary narratives of Black flesh. Thus, the guiding question of this thesis project is: What does it look like to politicize literary narratives of Black flesh? In answering this question, I argue that, by reading literary narratives of Black flesh through the lens of Afropessimist and Posthumanist theories of the flesh, a project of resistance emerges that seeks to abolish the somatological order of MAN and replace it with a praxis of the New Human. By the somatological order of MAN, I refer to the colonial categorization and treatment of bodies as human (i.e., white bodies), subhuman, and nonhuman (i.e., Black flesh). Further, I argue that this New Humanity is a praxis rooted in the social relationality of Black flesh. In making this argument, my interpretative analyses of African American literature focus on three texts across my three chapters: Shirley Graham Du Bois’s tragic play Dust to Earth (1940) in Chapter 1, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) in Chapter 2, and Rivers Solomon’s short story “St. Juju” (2019) in Chapter 3. Generally, I interpret each text utilizing Afropessimist and Posthumanist conceptions of Black flesh. Specifically, I draw on the works of Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Tommy Curry, Alexander Weheliye, and Fred Moten, utilizing their (converging and diverging) accounts of Black flesh. Chapter 1, a critique of Graham Du Bois’s Dust to Earth, sets the stage for the next two chapters by identifying Black flesh as an active site of resistance to antiblackness. Chapter 1 also pushes toward Black speculative fiction as the literary genre through which the relationality and resistance of Black flesh can be thought. Chapter 2, an Afropessimist appraisal of Morrison’s Beloved, argues that flesh in Beloved serves to conceptualize the site of de/un-gendered non-humanity attributed to Black (male and female) bodies throughout the history of Western colonialism. Further, Chapter 2 claims that Morrison, through Baby Suggs’s call to “love flesh,” provides the framework for resisting/negating antiblackness and performing a new humanity. Chapter 3, a Posthumanist reading of Solomon’s “St. Juju,” argues that the loving relationship between the characters Enid and Juju demonstrates a haptic expression of “new humanism” that works within, against, and beyond the somatological order of MAN. Methodologically, this project engages in close reading, historical contextualization, and philosophical analyses of African American literature through the interpretative application of Afropessimist and Posthumanist theories of the flesh. Overall, this project should be read as a contribution to the growing scholarship on Black flesh in Africana Philosophy and African American literary studies.