ABSTRACT: This essay stages an encounter between Foucault and black thought. It examines how Foucault has become a bad object in black studies while drawing attention to the fact that many of the problems that preoccupy black critical theory were also problems that Foucault engaged with—conceptual problems surrounding historicism, absent archives, and the genesis of worlds predicated on exclusion. Although Foucault ignored blackness and while black studies is largely critical of Foucault, this article argues that at the level of method and critical ethos, there is a generative resonance that remains underdeveloped. I explore this resonance and focalize the question of critique through different styles of writing used to tell stories silenced by history. The recurrent challenge is to find writing practices and experimental methods that work against the structuring forces of an antiblack social order. The intersection between Foucault's essay "Lives of Infamous Men" and Saidiya Hartman's rebellion against historicist practice—her "critical fabulation"—provide the initial point of contact for the exploration of these issues. The article further develops these conceptual linkages and critical exchanges as they take shape in the writing of Joy James, Angela Y. Davis, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip.
Daniel J. Schultz (Sun,) studied this question.