Forgetting

Recent works in and around Black feminist and queer studies have explored the figure of unbearable life through different forms of forgetting. A forgetting attends every act of conceptual or cultural invention, but forgetting also marks a range of cognitive deteriorations in and around experiences of disability, death, and dying. Working between the discourses of afro-fabulation, afropessimism, and Black feminism, the article details the ways every act of invention is also a form of forgetting, and every instance of loss is also a form of creativity. Afro-fabulation, as one name for a Black queer mode of invention, is at once a mode of creating bearable forms of life from abjection, and a form of forgetting. In their shared attention to cognitive deterioration and death as forms of loss, Black feminism and afropessimism open space for reckoning with the impermanence and indeterminacy central to the Black radical tradition

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Forgetting · Computer Science · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology