Hollowed Blackness

This chapter pursues an investigation of racial confinement and black affect via attention to hollows and black subjects who enfold themselves in and/or arise from them. Via the idiom of Black hollows/hollowed Blackness, this chapter dwells within (1) the material perimeters of caverns, ditches, basements, closets, attics that sometimes serve as sites of escape, momentary relief, or passage for black people fleeing racial and gendered horror, and (2) the emotional state of hollowness that indicates black shock, emptiness, fatigue, doneness. Taking seriously Black feminist theorizations of “garreting” as fugitive practice alongside Kevin Quashie’s mandate that black studies attend to quiet black interiors, this chapter reads together the visual art of Alexandria Smith, the poetry of Aja Monet, and the fiction of Colson Whitehead. In so doing, it foregrounds the experiences of the most vulnerable and aggrieved black subjects as it redirects the critical site of black fugitivity from (the expanse of) the outdoors to (the interstitial zone of) the hollow.