Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the newly released book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at The New School, Bennington, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.
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BlackspaceOn the Poetics of an AfrofutureFrom"Paradigms for Liberation"
Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.
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BlackspaceOn the Poetics of an AfrofutureFrom"Blackspace"
To propel myself is to stand for something else besides this world as a terrible, terrible place. To go further than my idea of myself extends.
There is the happiness I feel within the limits of my current self-conception, then there’s the happiness of seeing my self-conception has fallen apart, yet another time. The former kind of happiness happens when reality aligns with my opinions about how the world ought to be. The latter happens when my beliefs about how the world ought to be are destroyed by an inescapable reality. The latter kind of happiness is always precipitated by intense fear.
When this kind of world-shattering happiness takes place, beauty itself runs out and there’s only after-beauty. Language runs out and there’s after-language. After runs out—
I was taught from a young age it was important to perform. As I work through my taboos, letting go of performance is most difficult.
Even “forward” seems to fall apart. What I am is what is the future.
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BlackspaceOn the Poetics of an AfrofutureFrom"Blackspace"
To move toward freedom is subtractive. Less do I resonate with a piecemeal version of my self-concept made up of what I like, what I don’t like, my political ideas, and the historical memory of my people—all monsters on the other side of a window: they look real, I can see them, they are frightening, they appear to be close, they can never touch me.
The antidote to chronic loneliness isn’t to seek people; it’s to dig into what it means to be alone.
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“It would be a gift to read the brilliance of Blackspace in any season, but it feels especially thrilling now. This is futuristic work ― work that doesn’t just serve as a reminder that there will be black people in the future, but work that mines for an understanding of what that future will look like. In form, in shape, in language, and in endless vision.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“Here are poems that revel in post-hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs.” —Major Jackson [on Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus]
“Duplan skillfully models radical listening in the relationship he cultivates between the text and its audience, prompting us to reimagine our interactions with artistic tradition and our lives in language.” —Kristina Marie Darling, Ploughshares [on Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus]
Selected Works
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Most criticism aims for an authoritative finality of statement. The joy in reading Anaïs Duplan’s capacious and incisive writings is seeing his thought in the process of its own radical and inclusive making; he refuses to have the last word. This is criticism as pleasure, community, experiment. Duplan’s sinuous and improvisatory work devotes itself to the work of others, and reveals a writer attuned to the infinite possibilities of human art and identity.