Metallic capacities for response, inquiry, and agency derive from the many diverse layers of space and time that congeal in metallic nucleation. Although superficially uniform, the lattice of metallic molecular structure is in fact quite irregular. One of the most valuable traits of metal is its ability to react to manipulation, often using heat, transforming under pressure before reforming. But all of these processes—from refining to annealing to contorting—are recorded in a piece of metal’s granular structure, each of which is as diverse as a snowflake, a detailed body archive illegible to the human gaze. Influential historian of metallurgy Cyril Stanley Smith named this specifically material form of memory “funicity,” after Jorge Luis Borges’s famous character Funes the memorious. Like Funes, who is unable to forget a single moment or detail, these funeous metals persist in the world beneath innumerable layers of accreted memory, kneading together wholly disparate scales of time and space. Recalling their extraction and subjection under the regime of plantation capitalism, I turn to theorizations of cultural memory within the African diaspora to help understand these complex material memories and the agencies that germinate within them. Departing from Jared Sexton’s use of “dehiscence” to articulate the overlapping, ongoing ruptures and sutures of black bodies and cultures from the Middle Passage (Sexton 2011), chapter 5 addresses forms of collective agency that enable survival and ongoing resistance. Sylvia Wynter invokes the idea of “transplantation” (Wynter n.d.) to help explain the commingling of old traditions carried over and new ones reinvented. She identifies cultural creativity as a primary agent of suture, preserving memories while grafting them onto newly germinated seeds of survival and resistance. Hortense J. Spillers echoes this conviction, noting that spaces of “cultural vestibularity” (Spillers 1987) emerge from the lacerations of plantocratic oppression, and Rizvana Bradley similarly responds by invoking the enmeshed and unfolding before that is inseparable from black aesthesis—which she aptly names anteaesthetics (Bradley 2023). I read Bradley’s concept of ante through material funicity, examining how untreated lesions of extraction are retained in the voices of the bodies that bear them. Following Wynter’s insistence on the collectivity of this voice, I turn to her concept of the plot as both narrative device and cultivation site. Slave plots served as spaces of cultural resilience and resistance, occupying liminal spots of untameable land simultaneously engulfed by and isolated from the surrounding plantation landscape. As a space of material support for black culture as well as for the concrete actions of marronage or revolt, Wynter embraces the plot as a means to conceptualize the multi-generational enactment of cultural creativity that preserves the conditions and means for resistance. She extrapolates the plot further as a form of narrative agency—which she terms a science of the Word—, in which she outlines a conceptualization of human hybridity establishing “narration as a pillar of an alternate, non-Eurocentric genre of the human. This human as storytelling, or homo narrans, recognizes that in generating stories, humans are also generating themselves” (Alagraa 2018: 166-7). Wynter roots this autopoietic narrative agency in material declamation, revealing how the musical, dance, and religious traditions of the black diaspora excite the driving pulse of homo narrans and the drum it beats. Positing a kinship between the plot and the workshop’s bounded spaces of material fugitivity, I highlight the material strands that are threaded through the dehiscent creativity of the plot and propose a hylo narrans complementary to Wynter’s homo narrans. Hylo narrans asserts that material agency is a question not of reality but of awareness; it does not depend on our acknowledgment in order to voice its own story, but on our ability to assimilate that voice into the ongoing autopoietic narrative of homo narrans.
