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• 1 2017-11-13T09:48:47-08:00 Opacity 2 plain 2017-11-14T00:53:50-08:00 While literature is often considered most effective in the way it communicates its message to a broader public, the speculative works of writers of color seem to complicate this presumed accessibility and mass attention. If we consider the speculative works of writers of color writing about race, or even discussions of race alone, the issue of legibility is a politically rife one. What does it mean to make an issue as nuanced and complex as race palatable and accessible to a broader public? Who are we addressing when we consider this public?
   
  This project refers to Edouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity” in response to abstract demands of transparency. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant argues for the political and aesthetic move to opacity as a means of refusing the easily translatable, to rebut the assumption that all things can be known through facile translation. He states:

  "The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity.
   
  Because the writer, entering the dense mass of his writings, renounces an absolute, his poetic intention, full of self-evidence and sublimity. Writing’s relation to that absolute is relative; that is, it actually renders it opaque by realizing it in language" (p. 115)

  By embracing opacity, a quality that Glissant argues is part and parcel to the process of writing and literary production, we can channel our engagement in literature quite differently from the goal of making language easily recognizable and quickly understood.
   
  Opacity has speculative dimensions as it relays a specific relationship to language and the future of literary engagement. It points to what experiences of race one has access to and what experiences are closed off to us, and considers the production of literature that operates between and around these possibilities.
  
  
  Consider the premise of Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele’s imagining of a horrific scenario where a white community kidnaps and lobotomizes black people who display certain skills and talents that they covet. The film takes the notion of opacity to its literal extreme where the coupled affects of white anger and inferiority towards blackness makes for a terrifying hellscape in which its main protagonist must try to get out of alive. Rather than reifying the centrality of white fear and insecurities, the film creates an inverse of mainstream representations of threat by exposing the horrors of liberal white racism. As an opaque speculative work, Get Out considers the underexplored affects of liberal white racism in mainstream media through the experience of black fear and horror.
   
  Peele’s Get Out is one example of speculative work that channels opacity to implicate the complicated affects of liberal white violence. In other speculative works, including literature, it can help determine the formal and content challenges of making work that prizes affective density over easy conclusions.