From the shadows: An ode to Patricia J Williams's Alchemy of Race and Rights

Abstract

This multi-genre essay argues the importance of Patricia J Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor as a theoretical tour-de-force that bridges black feminist theory, critiques of rationalism, feminist jurisprudence, and literary studies. This essay mirrors Williams's own hybridisation of genre to take seriously Alchemy as a site of thinking-feeling that centres gender, blackness, sexuality, and genre to rupture the linguistic and material boundaries of Rational Man. Alchemy is written from the maddening and creative space of the unreasonable, the crazed, and the irrational; privileging, then, an affective-experienced-based epistemology that challenges the violence of rationalism. Ultimately, then, this is an ode to Alchemy as a blueprint for imagining other ways of feeling and being black feminist.