• Carre, David
  • Research Interests: Black queer ontology, hauntology, anti-Blackness, queer antagonism, antihumanism, counterhumanism, fugitivity, affect, worlding
  • Education: 2019, B.S., Florida State University, International Affairs and Economics

 

  

 

Bio

David Carré (They/Them/Theirs) is a doctoral student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Broadly, they are interested in the (in)commensurability of Blackness and queerness at the scales of form and ontology. More specifically, their research probes whether anti-Blackness marks a foundational precondition of violence against which queer antagonism is cohered and through which power is ritually consolidated. They endeavor to tease out the ways in which Blackness has come to be overdetermined by the specter of the nonhuman and worldly absence. Further, David’s research seeks to understand whether this obduracy is a necessary touchstone for the metaphysical and material positioning of the queer or imaginably human. They ask: can there be a sense of queerness or sex/gender difference within the world without Blackness to serve as the world’s negation, an entropic materia prima? Rather than to suggest the urgency of one form of violence over the other, David’s research attempts to index the anoriginary qualities of anti-Blackness and queer antagonism as two principal apparatuses informing the structure of the modern world as a humanistic relational container.

By critically turning to the epistemology of various humanisms and the divergent notions of time, materiality, life, death, being, and kinship which constitute them, David’s work interrogates the directional sedimentation of power within an image of the world that may, by ontogenetic necessity, bar from belonging those most marked by Blackness and, by design, those subjectified by queerness. Out of care for the Black queer, perhaps a malleable signifier of nothingness, David turns to modes of (non)being which appear tacitly contrapuntal to humanism, as in those evidenced by figures like the early modern Black Caribbean maroon, the indigene, or the contagion. They are inspired by the prospect of these figures offering a schematic for the ends of a violent world and the epistemologies which give rise to it. David’s work is heavily indebted to Black feminists, antihumanists, and counterhumanists alike.

David enjoys cooking for friends, writing auto-criticism of their meals in jest, and designing home interiors. More than anything, though, they adore and always welcome warm conversation.

Fellowships/Grants/Awards: 

  • 2022-2023 Rutgers School of Graduate Studies Dean’s Fellowship