Architectural Non Sequiturs: Renee Gladman's Refusal to Stop Seeing

This article explores how writer and artist Renee Gladman uses non sequiturs to dramatize the racially gendered experience of being a problem for the sentence in her series of novels set in the fictional city-state Ravicka, and in her 2022 experimental book of drawings Plans for Sentences . Gladman's oeuvre demonstrates how experiments with syntax, which this article characterizes as non sequiturs, can activate modes of thinking that frustrate the inevitability of anti-Black racial regimes of representation. This refusal to stop seeing the shifting architectures of Blackness demands that we relent perspective the moment it overdetermines the possibility of change. By tarrying queer Black feminist approaches to architecture, literature, translation, and the body, this article considers the import of nonrealist aesthetics in the figuration of contemporary crises.