What Was Post-Blackness? Postcontemporary Passé Historicity, Racial Metonymy, and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland

Abstract This article takes stock of how post-Blackness, as a historical formation, has been met with three distinct approaches to history: The historical turn suggests a model of continuity as a remedy for the post of post-Blackness, post-Black fiction turns to the passé in both relishing and wrestling with the post of post-Blackness, and Afropessimism turns to contemporaneity in diagnosing the possibility of (post-)Blackness as actually always already an ante-whiteness. These three divergent approaches to the post-Black Black past engage the question of historical time through three respective rhetorical devices: prosopopoeia, metonymy, and catachresis. Attending to these three models of historical time, and their attendant devices, offers an unexpected vantage on how we can understand the relationship between historical time and Black literature, culture, and criticism in the postcontemporary. The authors ultimately argue for the continued relevance of post-Blackness for our understanding of the postcontemporary, demonstrating that this relevance can, unintuitively, be most clearly articulated through a reading of a novel from 2008: Paul Beatty’s Slumberland.