The Whirl of Permutation

Abstract In The Red, White & Black, Frank B. Wilderson III uses a chess analogy to describe the way in which blackness is positioned outside of the chessboard of the human subject, thereby granting shape and substance to its integral pieces. Thinking alongside this analogy, this article examines the life and games of Theophilus A. Thompson, a black chess problemist (a composer of chess puzzles) born into slavery in 1855. The article focuses on Thompson's 1872 book Chess Problems, which is comprised almost exclusively of board diagrams and conditions for solving each problem. The article reads Thompson's work as a philosophical and gamic critique of the prevailing logic that regards play as a space of consent and escape. Contrary to Eurocentric theories and commonsense notions that align play with leisure, the article examines the racial duress that shaped Thompson's extraliterary work and his authorial position as a problemist. Furthermore, the article brings the archival resonances of this duress to bear on Thompson's work with the self-mate problem, in which one's king (the invaluable object of competitive chess) is systematically put to the sword. The article frames these self-mate problems as a black theorization of play, rendered in chess aesthetics, that imagines both game and world radically undone.