Disrupting Anti-Blackness: David Walker's Fugitive Inhabitation of an American Grammar

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Walker's insurgency, arguing that his unique typographical performance usurps dominant grammatical and rhetorical forms (italics, em-dashes, negative questions, shifting pronouns, commas, metonymic slippages, and repetition) in order to scramble the governing anti-Black episteme, wherein language is variously deployed to suppress, elide, mask, legitimize, and normalize the violence of anti-Blackness. By stalling the normal interpellative operations of America's formal grammatical and rhetorical infrastructures, Walker advances a theorization of anti-Blackness as an ontological problem while simultaneously deforming its rhetorical structuring vis-à-vis an ungovernable, fugitive inhabitation.