Form and Black Studies. A few things. A radical Black Studies has always considered form as both problem and freedom. Form and its considerations is why Du Bous wrote novels, essays, etc and not just disciplinary type books. Form & discipline is a central problematic of Blk Std.

It remains interesting to me then that folks claiming to do Black Studies have not studied the field of Black Studies. They don’t seem to know the historical formation and trajectory, the multiple debates about what it should do, mean and who it should speak to. Disciplines have

always been a central critique in Black Studies for what disciplines cannot produce about the fullness of Black life. But also how disciplines are fundamentally implicated in the production of Black life as a non-life. Thus it is ironic to see so many Black scholars desiring to

correct, make right, or return to various Black scholars, thinkers & artists to various disciplines. What this signals to me is that studying Black figures, texts, etc does not mean nor is it necessarily Black Studies. So let me return to form. For more than two decades Cultural

Studies has called for a radical subversion of academic form. Rarely have scholars heeded this call. Even Cultural Studies as it became institutionalized largely abandoned the call for the deformation of academic form. Cultural Studies slide right into it for resources etc.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives and Christina Sharpe before, in In The Wake has enacted the cultural studies call for new forms in academic work most forcefully in contemporary Black Studies. However, the experiments their work represent do not stand alone. From Nataniel Mackey

to Kamau Brathwaite to Gloria Watkins aka bell hooks form has been continually deformed in Black Studies. I am only naming a few here. hooks lower case name is central to the claim. When hooks engaged a different writing style and citation practice she was accused of being a

light weight thinker. I recall the claim distinctly. The point though is that the problem, challenge and practice of form or should we say disciplinary anti-form is where Black Studies and cultural studies meet. Now both Hartman and Sharpe have a “writerly style” that many of us

do not have the talent for. What their art of form does though is require us to think about what the particular use of our form cannot reveal. The challenge is an embedded praxis of Black Studies if you know its history. We all don’t have to write like them, I simply can’t, but

we can be conscious about our form, we can do battle with it. We can recognize and be clear about the ways in which our form obscures and reveals simultaneously. Anyway all of this is really to get at the point and to forcefully reiterate that Black Studies was in part founded as

a war against disciplinary form. Since the early 1990s and the establishment of diaspora studies programs at the graduate level especially doctoral programs you would have thought that the deformation Black Studies requires would proliferate more than we have seen. It remains a

failure of the academy that if more than two people do something similar that the only way the a academy can make sense of it is to turn it into a discipline. Scholars like Sharpe and Hartman and even Gumbs and Gill are enacting the Black Studies praxis beyond disciplinarity.

So we all don’t have to write like them. I know I should not. But we should use their form to think about the limits of ours and theirs too. It is both thinking the limits and the possibilities of what our form(s) can and cannot do that reveals something about the nature of

Black existence.