The academic, philosopher, and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva's essay Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World, where she maps out speculative strategies for refusing categories of racial otherness by rethinking space, time, bodily materiality and relations by activating Black Feminist Critique thus creating the end of the world as constructed by Western philosophical and sociological terms. Ferreira da Silva's argument concludes with the revision of time, space, linearity, and being by unpacking the complexities of virtuality by activating the terms Transsubstantiality, Transversability, and Traversability. She turns to the Black female protagonist in African-American sci-fi writer novelist, Octavia Estelle Butler's book Parable of the Sower, Kindred, and Wildseed to illustrate her line of thought. I am interested in the term Traversabilty as she relates it to Butler’s character Dana from Kindred, who non-consensually is snatched back to antebellum Maryland to save her slave-owning ancestor from various scenarios of death to ensure her existence. Dana is a time traveler for the sake of her survival while being embedded in the total violence of plantation life. Ferreira da Silva establishes Traversablity as a methodology for world-building and the critical aspect of survival in a non-linear framework. In my paper, I will think through Traversablity, Transversability, and Transusbstantiality, as methodologies for worlding in Virtual Reality, Mixed reality, and immersive environments.   

Despite quibbles about Neanderthal genes, the concept of homo sapiens is a fairly stable and widely accepted one. The concept of the human is far more fluid and uneasy. Defining and recognizing the human appears to be a contextually determined process, consistently reshaped by parameters determined by both time and space. While this is regularly acknowledged, it is less commonly recognized that inventing the human is both a social process and individual one. In the contemporary moment, human identity may be moulded by both essentialist conceptions of identity and patterns of migration that challenge and complicate such simplifications. 

 

This tension is profoundly significant in the poetry of Chris Mann, a white South African of British descent, who yet openly acknowledged the importance for his writing of both Romanticism and the Zulu concept of the shades or guiding spirits. My paper will examine his use of this key aspect of Zulu spirituality and argue that its presence in his poetry allowed him to challenge the racial binaries prevalent in late twentieth-century South African culture. By affirming a prismatic identity for himself, it will be suggested that Mann both subverted the rigidly physical categorizations of traditional racial politics and created a third space in which he placed himself at once between and beside `the assumed “polarities” of conflict’ (Bhabha 1999).

 

By doing so, Mann attempted both to escape the restrictions placed on identity by rigid apartheid categorizations and also to reclaim a more complex and less divisive concept of the human by openly acknowledging that modernity has ensured that `many and probably a growing number of people are saturated by shades that originate in other cultures’ (1992, 9). By questioning the limitations inherent in traditional determiners of humanity, including culture and ethnicity, Mann thus echoes De Toro who has also observed that with the blurring of boundaries that once surrounded totalizing discourses, in the future we can only hope to position ourselves with regard to a ‘nomadic subjectivity in a nonhierarchical space, where discourses are being constantly territorialized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized’ (1995, 39).

 

When confronting violence in the ethical scene—the precise moment at which the shooting of an unarmed person is justified or condemned—it is the realm of interiority that guides our image of existence. That is, bearing on the question of justice in any deployment of violence is the presumption of the subject as a self-knowing thing that is separable from the conditions that anticipate that violence. Yet what if, as Denise Ferreira da Silva asks us to do in her 2022 book, Unpayable Debt, we attended to necessity ‘as [the] exteriorization of a formal determinant’? By naming necessity as an authorising force, Ferreira da Silva exposes how otherwise unconscionable acts of violence are resolved through economic and juridical conditions, rather than in the ethical scene.

 In this paper, I consider a moment of ethical circumscription in the 1934 execution of the Aboriginal Anangu man Yukun by the white police officer William (Bill) McKinnon. Yukun, unarmed and unconnected to the crime McKinnon was seeking justice for, was shot while hiding in a cave at the base of Uluru. In that incident, and with the emergence of new evidence nearly 90 years on, I find that necessity remains fully operative. That is, I locate necessity as a formal determinant that cannot be captured within the interior stage, and that works to justify and maintain ongoing settler-colonial violence in Australia. Further, I suggest that when Yukun’s relative, Abraham Poulson, names a tree overlooking the cave as ‘a witness,’ he provides an image of existence through which we might apprehend and halt necessity’s operations in the global present.