The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic

This essay begins with the premise that Evelynn Hammonds’s highly cited “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” provides a reading strategy that has largely been ignored by subsequent scholarship. This work theorizes science as a Black episteme and addresses space-time as a self-reading strategy and an exemplar for how scientific analogies can illuminate analyses in Black thought. It problematizes the uptake of physical ideas without taking care to understand those physical concepts in conversation with Black scientists. The author shows how Black queer thought can and should inform the creation of intellectual links between Black scientific thinkers and Black thought outside of science.