ABSTRACT
This is not a conclusion. A conclusion would imply some sort of closure, a language that fixes meaning and renders my subjects objects of an authoritative gaze. The narratives explored in this study lend themselves to a discussion of multiplicities, movements, and openings – or black spatiality as a search for ouverture:
[S]trolling was a fine art, an everyday choreography of the possible; it was the collective movement of the streets, headless and spilling out in all directions, yet moving and drifting en masse, like a swarm or the swell of an ocean; it was a long poem of black hunger and striving […] The map of the might could or what might be was not restricted to the literal trail of Esther's footsteps or anyone else's. Hers was an errant path cut through the heart of Harlem in search of the open city, l'ouverture, inside the ghetto.
(Hartman 2018, 468)