African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life [1 ed.] 9781498596213, 9781498596220

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African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life E. Lâle Demirtürk

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Permission to reprint the following selections is gratefully acknowledged: From LISTEN TO THE LAMBS: A NOVEL © 2016 by Daniel Black. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All Rights Reserved. From A MOMENT OF SILENCE by Sister Souljah. Copyright © 2015 by Souljah Story, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Emily Bestler/Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. Excerpt(s) from CHARCOAL JOE: AN EASY RAWLINS MYSTERY by Walter Mosley, copyright © 2016 by The Thing Itself, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and The Orion Publishing Group, London. All rights reserved. From STAND YOUR GROUND by Victoria C. Murray. Copyright © 2015 by Victoria C. Murray. Reprinted with the permission of Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2015 by Victoria Christopher Murray. Reprinted with the permission of Liza Dawson Associates LLC. All Rights Reserved. From Down the River unto the Sea by Walter Mosley, copyright © 2018. Reprinted by permission of Mulholland Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc., and The Orion Publishing Group, London. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-9621-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-9622-0 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to those authors, scholars, and activists whose beautiful spirit is never broken to create justice and freedom for all black people and people of color.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life

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Embodied Spaces of Transformative Change in the “Homeless” City: Affective Possibilities of Becoming Black in Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs (2016) Performing Transgressive Silence as Strategic Resistance to Whiteness: Progressive Spaces of Black Male Subjectivity in Sister Souljah’s A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015) Toward New Performatives of Blackness as Embodied Praxis: Affective Shifts in the Carceral Spatiality of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016) Reframing the “Scripted” Vulnerability of Whiteness as Violence: The Praxis of the Wake in Victoria C. Murray’s Stand Your Ground (2015) Strategic Interventions in the Carceral Spaces of Whiteness: Subversive Politics of Black Male Criminality in Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea (2018)

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Afterword: The Kaepernick Moment as Critique of Everyday Life: Transgressive Practices of Blackness as a Strategy for Change

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

Contents

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Acknowledgments

I finally realized while writing this book that my academic work on the African American novel is my protest, not on behalf of but together with the African American people and with all people of color across the world. It took a while for me to understand that in the white dominant American society where the narrative of upward mobility counts, it is quite common for African American people (and for people of color) to be vulnerable. We, the literary critics, have to remember that literature has the power to change the world, and hence, how we talk about those black people who are labeled as vulnerable may, indeed, effect that change. These novels act on us to shape our refusal to live in a democratic experiment that functions as an empire. Examining African American novels, which demonstrate black individuals’ everyday unyielding struggles and bold courage, has become personal to me as a tribute to my father, the late Ahmet H. Demirtürk, a formative intellectual influence. When we were growing up, my sister and I discovered that our father’s material poverty in his youth, and what he learned from it, has been our spiritual wealth. My father was invested in learning in a way that is disconnected from the material benefits it is supposed to provide. And I definitely picked up on that. I am attracted to studying those African American characters who live and experience life at the fringes and who, like me, always intend to remain, and simply hang in there, while making a difference. I am a dreamer, because I had a father who encouraged me to dream. He taught me the world was tough, and I as a woman academic, in what is marked as the Third World, had to be tougher to fight it. We are in a world in the twenty-first century where we witness the poignant experiences of white police and vigilante killings of unarmed black men (and women). It is the political function of literature to make a response to how these black

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people’s public absentization does not necessarily mean legitimacy, requiring all human beings to engage with their political commitment. I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who generously supported this project with an unyielding intellectual guidance and encouragement. Even though writing this book has often meant spending long hours at the computer, a solitary affair, it has frequently involved a network of friendships with other scholars, writers, artists, and activists who inspired me. This book is deeply shaped by the critical thoughts and responses of George Yancy and W. Lawrence Hogue, two scholars and intellectuals, among many others, on whose shoulders I stand intellectually. Both have shaped my thinking, encouraged and taught me in myriad ways, and their work continues to challenge and inspire me. Special thanks to George Yancy for being a mentor, colleague, and friend. His thoughtful questions in the early stages of planning the book project helped to sharpen my focus. I want to extend warm thanks to W. Lawrence Hogue, who has continued to push me to carefully think through different ways of approaching the novels studied here. I have reaped innumerable benefits from their work in this long and difficult journey. I am indebted to a network of colleagues, friends, and allies who gave me a platform to present my work. I have presented parts of some of the chapters in this book in African American Literature and Culture Society (AALCS) panels in the United States in annual conferences organized by the American Literature Association (ALA) over the years. I am grateful to my “overseas mates,” colleagues and literary activists, for their belief and engagement in my work. Special thanks to Wilfred D. Samuels, the founding president of AALCS, whose suggestions still provide me with a deeper insight. Leading members of AALCS—Grégory Pierrot, president; Keith Leonard, first vice president; Belinda Waller-Peterson, second vice-president; Keith Byerman, treasurer and past president—are also appreciated for providing me with a sense of intellectual community and collegial support. In unbounded gratitude I thank my role models Anna Everett, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Pennsylvania State University, who have always encouraged my work in an effortless friendship that simply flows out of them, and in intellectual comradeship in their struggle to change the world for the better. Heartfelt thanks go to my family, friends, and allies who shared and pushed my thought process. Above all I want to thank my sister, my close friends, and two of my students Elvan Aytekin and Eylül Tolungüç for encouraging me with their warm support in spite of the time this project took away from them. Special thanks to the anonymous readers for Lexington Books who meticulously read the entire manuscript and offered solid critical perspective on

Acknowledgments

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enhancing the power of the focused study, never losing the grasp of particular issues that I held pertinent to the manuscript. My gratitude obviously is beyond words to my Lexington Books “literary comrades” for sharing the joy of working together and for being incredibly helpful along the way. Jessica Thwaite, the associate acquisitions editor at Lexington Books, deserves special thanks for her continued support of my project, and for her guidance in helping me work more efficiently through its various stages of development. Katherine Mullineaux, the production editor, has also been incredibly diligent, patient, and helpful in providing her meticulous editorial skills. Many thanks to Cher Paul for doing a professional job in copyediting, and coming through the problem of time constraints for my project, and to Connie Binder, a long–time indexer, who has done an incredibly superb job in preparing the index. There are many people I would like to acknowledge by way of inspiration and support during the past few years while I gestated this work. I want to dedicate this book to the late Muhittin Ergüneş, my father’s closest friend and one of the family, who passed away this year, before seeing the completion of this book. He has always shared my excitement for discovering parts and parcels of my hidden potential in myriad ways. Many heartfelt thanks go to those activists, artists, and writers in what started out as the Black Lives Matter movement for bringing alive the promising hope for an alternative society where the spirit of solidarity continues to forge local and global cross alliances to create a better world. Finally, I want to extend my gratitude to these distinguished scholars, poets, writers, and literary activists—Melanie E. L. Bush, Evie Shockley, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Asha Bandele—whose work continues to inspire me in shaping my belief that the power of literature to reimagine the future world starts with changing ourselves in the present. Their literary activism has made me feel deeply that the words I use in my work not only offer me and my readers, hopefully, new ways to see the present in dedicated commitment to fighting inequality and injustice, but are also forms of action to provide the world with a deeper sense of common humanity in the prospect of a more liveable, shared future.

Introduction

African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life

In his response to W. E. B. DuBois’s notion that “the problem of the Twentieth century is the problem of color line,” Henry A. Giroux conceives that “the problem of violence has become the problem of the 21st century” 1 (2018b, 97). Recently, the letter “Dear White America,” published by African American professor of philosophy George Yancy, made white racist Americans angry enough to unabashedly send letters of racist insults and death threats to him, using even n-words. These acts of “white terror” (2018a, 45) did not merely reduce Yancy to a black body, but also exposed how discursive practices of whiteness have direct implications for a black man’s life in the current conjuncture. Even police killings of black men such as Eric Garner in 2014, after deliberate aversion of his plea, “I can’t breathe,” are based on the discursive practices of whiteness that “foreclose the black body from the realm of personhood” 2 (Yancy 2015e, 103). Angela J. Davis reminds us that tragic deaths of black men such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, among many others, killed by police violence, mark that the lives of black men “continue to be devalued and destroyed with impunity at the hands of the state” (2017a, xii). One also has to suppose that the police, particularly, turn their killings of black unarmed men into a public spectacle as a justification that blackness and equal access to public space are indeed incompatible, a claim that evokes “the disavowal of disappearing bodies” (J. Butler 2017b). 1

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Introduction

The police and vigilante brutality and violence, targeting black men (black women and people of color) gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013 as a protest of the acquittal of the racially mixed vigilante George Zimmerman, who performed cultural whiteness to make his neigborhood a safe space under his watch, killing Trayvon Martin in 2012. The organizational work was founded by three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors, and Opal Tometi, in Ferguson with an understanding that the pervasive “police and vigilante killings of African Americans can best be understood as political violence,” as African American sociologist Noel Cazenave suggests, and some political measures have to be taken “to force the changes needed in race relations in the United States and elsewhere to truly make ‘black lives matter’” (2018, 246). Alicia Garza defines Black Lives Matter as “an ideological and political intervention in a world” that violates black lives, and it stands for “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (qtd in Cazenave 2018, 263). The Black Lives Matter movement, in this respect, mobilizes the politics of ongoing black vulnerability, fueled by “the present policing crisis” (J. T. Camp 2016, 149), in the face of police (and vigilante) brutality, which functions “to indict those responsible for their deaths” 3 (Gilson 2016, 54). The current crisis that emerges out of the present moment is a highly complex one that converges both hopelessness and hope: The Black Lives Matter movement is an ongoing public response to “police brutality and other state-sanctioned violence against black people” during which we witnessed the rise of Donald Trump to presidency despite his blatant racism (H.A. Giroux 2018a, 30). Howard Winant believes that there is a crisis both in the United States and in various other countries between “established racism and white supremacy,” while the states “need race to rule” (2015, 320). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in the recent edition of his Racism without Racists, claims that the “new racism”—a phrase he uses for post–Jim Crow racism—continues to work through a “color-blind racism.” He stresses the fact that Donald Trump’s electoral and presidential politics continue to legitimate “the more overt version of racism in America,” whereas “the colorblind version is still hegemonic” (2018b, xiv, 203). Similarly, we bear witness to how the crisis of whiteness has “cracked” open, manifested by Black Lives Matter, as we move toward the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the rise of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency stood for “a victory for white supremacy” in the American racial police state under the “pretense of democracy.” On the other hand, “African American community has shown no inclination to back down from their insistence that, indeed, Black Lives Matter” (Cazenave 2018, 175, 25). As the movement has evolved into a larger one, the Movement for Black Lives, that continues to push back in the Trump era,

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Henry A. Giroux celebrates the open resistance against the rise of the police state in a broad coalition with other organizations “to build the political insurgency required to compel change” (2017, 189). Such a coalition highlights how all oppressed and marginalized people’s “shared vulnerability becomes a basis for achieving political agency by way of public performances that serve to represent the common interests” (Schram 2015, 62). Christopher J. Lebron points to the need to face the consequences of the failure to acknowledge our common humanity: We need to remember James Baldwin’s call for black people “to love themselves,” and even white oppressors, demanding that Americans, as in the case of today’s Black Lives Matter movement, become aware that “blacks’ humanity was under constant threat” (cited in Lebron 2017, 112, 113). In a similar vein, the organizers, activists, and news reporters related to Black Lives Matter have brought up a connection with James Baldwin’s views, which offer a critical lens to talk about the current call to political action against white supremacist violence. Alicia Garza, like Baldwin, extends the need for “ethical obligation” not only to black people but also to white people to stand in solidarity with them “in defense of our humanity” (cited in Beard 2017, 339, 341). The expansion of love for black people to change American society and the world, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. believes, is the domain Baldwin’s “democratic perfectionism” revisited, as the discursive register that Black Lives Matter works through (Glaude 2017, 369). Baldwin’s views on the racial politics during his lifetime talk back to the current crisis in the present, because he stresses the need for white American people to see that “the value of whiteness has historically derived from its distinction from a degraded sense of blackness” (cited in Balfour 2017, 38). Baldwin’s view can be used to understand how, in this sense, the law enforcement system, using law “as a fundamental instrument of terror,” renders black people vulnerable (C. L. Warren 2018, 108). Alicia Garza, in her recent essay “Black Love—Resistance and Liberation,” sees the political function of black love in similar terms to Christopher J. Lebron and James Baldwin, as “a liberatory act and an act of resistance” (2015, 22). The instrumentality of a shared sense of black love to building power against the state-sanctioned anti-black racism and violence enhances their ability to claim more public and social space “than we are given” 4 (as contrasted with the spatial imaginary of whiteness) (Garza 2015, 23). In a recent interview, Patrisse Cullors draws attention to the criminalization of black people, seen as a threat to white public spaces and lives, and to the need for a new discourse in black communities to develop “clear alternatives and new visions, new imaginings of our public safety” (2016, 35). Even though Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele write, in When They Call You a Terrorist, their reservations about the rise of white supremacy in the wake of Trump’s presidency, they express their faith in young black people,

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Introduction

for they “are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like” (2018, 253). The political implications of their hope for the future alert us to how social change starts in the present with the will “to establish new material relations that will allow us to challenge whiteness” (Monzó and McLaren 2017, xvi). Since Trump’s America has kept producing “a public space defined by white supremacy” (H.A. Giroux 2018b, 29), we need to understand “the ways in which violence and space interacted” 5 to forge white identity (V.T. Watson 2013, 109). This book, African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life, emerged out of a need to interrupt and intervene in the ongoing operations of the ideology of whiteness in the era of Donald Trump, who was elected as the forty-fifth U.S. president at the time of this writing. It aims at revealing the black people’s transformation of the power of racialized vulnerability into a political strategy for social change to enhance democracy. If vulnerability, as David Theo Goldberg suggests, “is the new modality in which [white supremacy today] is expressed” (2014, 5), then what happens when blacks shift their own socially constructed vulnerability into personal (and communal) power? The scope of the book entails the examination of interrelated topics such as the embodied whiteness, the critique of everyday life, and black vulnerability. Hence, it is imperative to explain those dominant theoretical views in the fields of critical whiteness studies, everyday life studies, and vulnerability studies that pertain to issues raised in the discussions of the novels. While writing the book, and exploring insidious manifestations of whiteness, whiteness became too visible to ignore, because Trump embraced values of “neo-confederacy” 6 (Bolden 2008a, 230). The rise of neo–Jim Crow racism in Trump’s presidency has created the circumstances wherein “not only is the public in peril, it is on the brink of collapse” 7 (H.A. Giroux 2018b, 1), shifting critical perspectives in critical whiteness studies, a field that emerged out of a need for critical examinations of structural and personal whiteness to expose and subvert the power of whiteness. Several scholars’ works have been published in critical whiteness studies across different disciplines, and have explored the social construct of whiteness and its material consequences for social interactions (Doane 2003, 3) by taking their cue from W. E. B. DuBois, the first sociologist who explained, in his article “The Souls of White Folk” (1910), that whiteness takes its power from its invisible operations, as contemporary African American sociologist Aldon Morris informs us, for “it is, like blackness, an invented category deserving analytic scrutiny” (2015, 219). The major concern of the scholars in the field since the 1990s has been to render visible the “invisibility” (M. Hill 1997, 2) of how whiteness works as an “unmarked” center of power (Dyer 1997, 70), which operates from an “invisible” domain on the basis of “its presumed ahistorical

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stability” (Yancy 2004, 109). While the normalization of phenotypical whiteness reinforces the discursive equation “that American equals white” (Jensen 2005, 89), Michael Omi and Howard Winant define “racial formation” as an arbitrary construct (1994, 71), for it operates through “discursive practices” (Shome 1999, 108). In other words, it constitutes its normative status and power through the “disavowal” of black people by way of its “performativity,” which Judith Butler defines as “a reiteration of norms” (1993, 171, 234). Drawing on Butler’s theory, John T. Warren uses the lens of performativity to reveal whiteness as a discursive construct (2003, 34), for it is through the reiteration of norms that “notions such as whiteness and blackness are in fact produced” (Chadderton 2018, 111). Hence, it is only after we uncover the subtle operations of whiteness that we can hope for a change. However, few works published in critical whiteness studies explore the white embodied practices in everyday life: Bridget Byrne’s White Lives: The Interplay of “Race,” Class and Gender in Everyday Life (2006), Shelly Tochluk’s Witnessing Whiteness: First Steps toward an Antiracist Practice and Culture (2008), Karyn D. McKinney’s Being White: Stories of Race and Racism (2004), and Melanie E.L. Bush’s Breaking the Code of Good Intentions (2004), whose second edition came out recently as Everyday Forms of Whiteness: Understanding Race in a “Post-Racial” World (2011). Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014), a collection of essays edited by Emily S. Lee, Clarissa Rile Hayward’s How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (2013), and Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions (2015b), a collection of critical essays coedited by Veronica Watson et al., add new critical perspectives on everyday performances of whiteness. All these works treat the constructions of whiteness in everyday social encounters, whereas my books—How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness: Characterization through Deconstructing Color (2008), The Contemporary African American Novel: Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities, and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters (2012), and The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life: Blackness as Strategy for Social Change (2016)—are the only books that study everyday interracial encounters in African American novels, exploring how they “undo” the discursive practices of whiteness. There are also scholars who investigate the hidden tenets of whiteness in their most recent works in the field, which need different focuses and multiple critical perspectives. Lee Bebout sees how critical whiteness studies actively work to make whiteness “visible and strange,” while it is ironically “often hypervisible only to its potential targets.” A collective multiracioethnic solidarity cannot succeed, he argues, unless white people give up on their “demand to be saviors” in order to “advance the collective struggle together” (Bebout 2016, 8, 153). Neda Maghbouleh explores how the second-genera-

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Introduction

tion Iranian Americans in the United States are positioned at “the limits of whiteness,” because the power of whiteness is not only achieved through force but also through its fluidity, “its ability to bend over time, and to define itself simply by defining what it is not” (2017, 173). Mixed race studies scholars also do valuable work in decentering whiteness with the hope that “in the future we will all be more mixed, and therefore better off,” and hence, “we must look not only back, but also beyond” (Sharma 2017, 228). Whereas race is a social construct, considered as “a false category,” racism prevails as “a social fact” (Spickard et al. 2017, 6), for American society is, what Michael Omi and Howard Winant defined as, a “racial democracy” (1994, 109). Hence, “oxymoronic whiteness” seems to operate in contemporary American society, one that appears “in the coexisting presence and absence of whiteness as a racial category” (Kennedy, Middleton, and Ratcliffe 2017a, 9). Ronald A. Kuykendall asserts that critical whiteness scholars fail to initiate a “meaningful dialogue” on white privilege, because “the logic of whiteness” by its nature occludes dialogue, which is “indispensable to the preservation of whiteness” (2017, 295). Shannon Sullivan points out that there is a considerable value in studying “physiological habits” and in not seeing biology as antagonistic to “an ethics of social justice,” for it can help “in order for oppression and domination to be eliminated” (2015, 184). Shelly Tochluk, on the other hand, advocates that the people’s search for their inner voice enables them to uncover their “unconscious motives and habits” for the sake of racial injustice (2016, 172). Michelle M. Wright observes the importance of seeing how blackness intersects with “other bodies, other times, and other histories” across the globe, “because in any given moment we are in the hearts of all sorts of human diasporas” (2015, 35). It is impossible, then, to deconstruct whiteness without addressing white people’s feelings about race, for whiteness functions as a kind of imagined community. Since the emotion is inevitably tied to ideology, it is important to critically examine “the relational nature of affective whiteness [and] how emotions arrange social, political, and economic structures that have serious implications for cultural practices, public policy, and law” (Watson, Howard-Wagner, and Spanierman 2015a, xvi). Hence, we need to acknowledge that deconstructing whiteness through affect is an effort to dismantle and understand its construction with the hope for a democratizing social change. The events of Ferguson, Missouri, followed by an increasing number of police killings of unarmed black men, continue to press the urgency to deconstruct how whiteness operates in twenty-first century U.S. culture through the legitimization of the discourse of anti-blackness with its material consequences. The white supremacist regulation of everyday life requires the absentization of black bodies, and its critique must address the racialized social relations in order to elucidate or transform them. In this context, the African

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American novels studied in this book—namely Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs (2016), Sister Souljah’s A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015a), Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016a), Victoria C. Murray’s Stand Your Ground (2015b), and Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea (2018)—came out in the current moment of Black Lives Matter, with only a few of them dating to the Trump era. The timely impetus of the publication dates of these novels in twenty-first-century America addresses the primary context of an ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, which is located within a larger context of long decades that have witnessed post-9/11, post-Katrina, (post-)Obama, and above all the Trump era. Since they came out at this moment, along with an explosion of interest in and support for black affectivity and resistance against the ideology of whiteness, they make this book project, I believe, extremely timely, for the problematic of everyday life has become more intensely a direct challenge to the right of black Americans to a life that honors and privileges their humanity. As the novels depict “the pain of racist effect on black bodies,” they articulate “love’s sociopolitical power” (Glass 2018, 98, 8); they argue for a politics of love that advocates the dignity of black people, while the characters’ affective responses to antiblack violence demonstrate “the experiential effect” of racism (Ngo 2017, 42). They render black people’s self-reflexive moments of refusal to be complicit with the white supremacist discourse as that which determines everyday life. Henri Lefebvre, in Derek Schilling’s view, deconstructs the everyday by showing that within everydayness there exists some moment of excess, and to act otherwise is the moment at which a challenge can begin. The everyday designates both the “alienating aspects of life” and “the utopian idea that collective praxis can transform relations” (Schilling 2003, 31). Even as Lefebvre reminds us of the political implications of everyday life, for the state both creates and “even moulds it” (Lefebvre 2008b, 126), he still strongly believes in the potential inherent in the critique of everyday life, because the unpredictability will always guarantee the possibility of a radical transformation. He claims that the purpose of studying everyday life bears “the project (the programme), of transforming it” (Lefebvre 2008a, 2). It is difficult for us to see, in real social life, how “understanding our place within cultural, historical, and global contexts is more important than ever” (Newman 2014, 14). Even though there is a limit to what each individual can achieve in striving for social change, Judith Butler argues, there is always room for “subversive agency,” in Barbara Applebaum’s words, because s/he can enact “the possibility to disrupt the repetition of social norms” (cited in Applebaum 2010a, 64). Hence, observing interracial social encounters in everyday life, in the novels studied in this book, reveals how black individuals’ radical performativity of blackness through cultural whiteness produces fissures in the discursive practices of whiteness. Their performative reiterations of black-

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Introduction

ness constitute the reconfiguration of “[b]lackness as blueprint for social transformation” (Vargas 2006b, 215), enhancing the particularity of blackness with “a progressive meaning” 8 to avoid its reducibility to victimization (Badiou 2002, 110). Since the non-normative, unscripted performativity of blackness allows the emergence of everyday resistance, these fissures reveal the possibilities of opening new spaces of intervention in whiteness. The multiple ways of being black enable us to value the implementation of an actual alternative, which is for George Yancy celebrating “the lived interiority of what it means to be black” (2012a, 4). In doing that, these twenty-first-century contemporary African American novels generate new meanings about the critique of everyday life in their production of potential and alternative spaces of action. Les Back argues that everyday life is a dynamic entity that reveals taken-for-granted aspects of the society, overlooking the “hope in which a livable life is made possible.” Indeed, the examination of everyday life matters as social critique, for it makes it possible to identify “the public issues that are alive in the mundane aspects of everyday life,” and it offers “the opportunity to link the smallest story to the largest social transformation” (Back 2015, 832, 834). These African American novels employ what Paul Clements calls a “creative underground” in forming “cultural resistance” against the white status quo (2017, 1). Since norms and social structures do not completely determine us, “we do have scope for microresistant tactics that contribute to socio-cultural change” (May 2011, 370). Although Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, sees resistance and agency in the quotidian practices, he makes a distinction between “strategies” that belong to those in power and “tactics” that are used by the ordinary people (Goldfarb 2012, 118). However, contrary to de Certeau’s conception, the black male protagonists in the novels use strategies of white people in power—such as, police officers, state officials—as their extra-legal tactics to disrupt the power relations, which cause the legal oppression of black people. Resistance to white supremacist practices is embedded in the different practices of resistance “by evading and manipulating official bureaucratic, disciplinary and repressive systems,” which can be considered performative and quite intrinsic to everyday struggle (Clements 2017, 178). It is quite obvious that democracy requires actual democratic social relationships, and the domain of interpersonal (interracial) social encounters is where democratic social change begins. Hence, in their critical examinations of everyday life, these African American novels are interested in addressing everyday life from different perspectives. Since everyday life, from the normative perspective, may assume the form of “becoming integrated in society” (Bou 2015, 176), we need to expose the everyday practices that sustain the experiential and concrete manifestations of whiteness to problematize whiteness. How social processes in American society are mediated in everyday life are manifested in “the every-

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day mechanisms that reinforce and reproduce dominant narratives about race, racism, and racialization” (Bush 2004, 244). Joe Feagin observes that the “white racial frame” is deeply embedded in everyday life, for it “both generates, and is reinforced by, a myriad of discriminatory actions in everyday life” (2010, 123). Michael Gardiner argues that it is of crucial importance to problematize everyday life, “permeated with political and ideological qualities, and constitutes the crucial terrain for both the exercise of domination and ‘utopic’ resistances to it” (Gardiner 2006, 27). According to Henri Lefebvre, in his seminal work Critique of Everyday Life, however, Gardiner notes, the individual body’s manifestations of “inarticulate desires and impulses [are what] cannot be fully colonized by rationalized systems” (cited in Gardiner 2000, 15). It is this exact space of hidden potential that allows the individual to gradually accomplish social change, for, in W. Lawrence Hogue’s words, “it is the change in individual lives as a consequence of individual actions that transforms society” (2003, 110). Hence, the novels subvert, here, the white dominant colonization of black experience through myriad forms of affective and alternative views of the social imaginary, produced in the black characters’ search for liberating experience. African American novelists’ critique of everyday life, in this case, emerges out of racialized social spaces, implementing strategies of intervention as “resistance to vulnerability” (J. Butler 2016, 26), which are built into how everyday life as “a living structure of feeling” (Y.S. Lee 2013, 21) is rendered as the domain that registers social change. Reading these novels in the discursive “cracks” between the rise of white supremacy, “neofascism” (Cazenave 2018, 179), and Black Lives Matter’s employment of the radical politics of black vulnerability during the Trump era makes them all the more important. There is an urgent need, in the real social world, for an active cultivation of new affective connections to be forged so that “a general desire for other ways of being in the world can emerge, and can be built into new political causes” (Amin and Thrift 2013, 158). These novels reveal that black male characters’ attempts to break with the white supremacist discursive regimes of control entail acts of troubling normative constructs that posit their subjectivity “in terms of sovereign free will” and of understanding that “the political performativity of vulnerability” as a strategy is never “inherently at odds with political agency” (Athanasiou 2016, 273, 274). Their resistance to the violent regime of whiteness and its affective implications is an act of refutation of conformity to that sovereign will, imposing itself in the form of “normalized social expectations” (Medina 2006, 169), juxtaposed with activism that is “capable of changing social structures and relations” (Medina 2013, 314). In this sense, these novels claim their literary space to represent hope for democratic change wherein they cultivate new affective alliances based on solidarity and empathy. At a time when racist affect is manipulated by the U.S. president himself in mo-

10

Introduction

bilization of white supremacist groups’ investment in making black people (and all American people, as in the Charlottesville, Virginia, events) vulnerable to their formation of racial hatred, Black Lives Matter mobilizes the politics of black love, not exclusive only to black people but to all the oppressed across the color line. In their effort to create a newly imagined American society where democracy is no longer totalitarian or even racial, there is the need for recognition that love is pivotal to the strategy of building community. In her emphasis on the necessity of black self-love and love for others to rejuvenate the American democratic ideal, Isabel Wilkerson revisits the individual and collective strength and resistance of black people to racialized vulnerability: “And we must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything” (2016, 61). Paula Ioanide, in The Emotional Politics of Racism, argues that the whiteinduced narrative of vulnerability seems to be an integral part of the ideology of colorblindness, because feelings can intricately work to masquerade the facts, for “[t]he widespread social panics over the perceived threats of criminality” can dismiss the facts of racism out there (Ioanide 2015, 14). It is obviously the case that Donald Trump reinforces the crisis of whiteness in banning immigrants from geographical regions connected with terrorists and deporting undocumented immigrants because he appropriates “the vulnerability of whiteness” (Evans and Reid 2014, 169), an affective narrative against the people of color. While Trump makes use of the narrative of white vulnerability to erect new walls and boundaries of whiteness to avoid “the possible collapse of an entire white supremacist enterprise” at the foundation of the white American empire (Yancy 2018a, 107), these African American novels represent those black male characters, who work through the racialized vulnerability narrative in order to heroically wrestle with the embodied practices of whiteness, like their counterparts in the real social world. This book focuses on black men with no intention of trivializing the black women’s experiences, but black men are increasingly targeted in the recent decades by police and vigilante killings in public spaces and in mass incarceration even more than the black women. In recent years, different forms of (state-sanctioned) violence against black men demonstrate the political ramifications of vulnerability, which as an ongoing racial project carries “normative undertones about constrained human agency, [and] potential or actual injustice” (K. Brown 2017, 667). Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay argue that the dominant conceptions describe “paternalism as the site of agency,” contrasted with vulnerability as “victimization and passivity.” Hence, they provide an alternative to this habituated discursive approach in revising the concept of vulnerability in their political frameworks as the one that bears the potentiality of resistance. In that case, we see that the representation of racialized

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vulnerability in these African American novels is also linked with “the role of vulnerability in strategies of resistance” (Butler et al. 2016a, 6). The “strategies of resistance” used by the black characters in these novels involve subversive acts against the white normative discourse of black vulnerability, based on the discursive construct of black criminality, subverted for “the constitutive vulnerability” (2). In doing that, the novels produce a diverse group of black characters who blur the traditional boundaries between vulnerability and resistance. Hence, conceiving vulnerability as part of resistance, I argue in this book, the radical black performativity of vulnerability, employed as a mechanism of subversion of the power of whiteness in these novels, bears the potential for resistance to make a livable life. In privileging resistance attached as such to vulnerability, something inherent to all aspects of human life, we can open up spaces of idealizing resistance through vulnerability as an ultimate value. This consideration of resistance provides new modes of alliance and collective agency, “characterized by interdependency and public action,” never denying vulnerability as an aspiration “to equality, freedom, and justice as their political aims” (7). These black characters “overcome their vulnerability,” to adapt Judith Butler’s view, not at the expense of negating vulnerability that still exists, but “assuming a different form” in resistance (2016, 23). However, while they practice political resistance in solidarity with others, they accomplish a deep political and affective split in the normative ideal of whiteness, predicated upon the racialized binary of vulnerability (read: black) and agency (read: white). In this respect, once we understand “the way vulnerability enters into agency,” then the conception of “the binary opposition” between vulnerability and agency “can become undone” (25). The white supremacist power both visibly and insidiously operates to establish black bodies as vulnerable, and hence, Judith Butler defines vulnerability “as a paradoxical nexus of constitutive possibilities,” for she sees that the reiteration of the norms that shape us opens up spaces of the possibility for resistance (cited in Michel 2018, 92). In the face of the racial scripting of black men, what Tommy J. Curry calls the “Man-Not” (Curry 2017, 7), as a threat to the public to rationalize the criminalization of blackness, and hence, their vulnerability, racial norms that shape black bodies can also be reiterated in doing blackness otherwise, disavowing the dependency on the white normative expectations. Drawing from Judith Butler’s view, Erinn Gilson sees a distinct relation between vulnerability and normativity: “It is only given this co-constitutive relation that norms are also ‘vulnerable’ to destabilization and alteration through reiteration” (2014, 47). If vulnerability can be considered “a sign of social transformation in relation to which the life and agency of individuals is put into question,” then it can be conceived with a potential “to serve as basis for a radical alternative to the modern [white supremacist] individual” (Rozmarin 2017, 35, 69). It is in this discursive context that these African American

12

Introduction

novelists explore in their novels how vulnerability can be employed as an effective and affective mode of alliance to make it work as political resistance at both personal and collective levels. They introduce those black characters who turn their eyes inward, while they act on the world, “daring greatly” (B. Brown 2012, 56), and “rising strong” (B. Brown 2015, 5) with troubling subjectivities positioned against white normative spaces of governmentality. These black characters’ “small acts of resistance” (Crawshaw and Jackson 2010, 210) articulate what can be called “transformative activism” (A.Y. Davis 2016a, 127). We need to consider how these African American novels in the twenty-first century address challenges of facing the real social world—one that not only perpetuates the “‘climate’ of antiblackness” (Sharpe 2016, 106), but also has produced the upheavals in Ferguson and Charlottesville, and above all the Black Lives Matter movement—in their confrontations with the disciplinary practices of whiteness as a form of antiracist praxis. These novels negotiate their black male characters’ “spaces of identity” (Borelli 2014, 68) at a moment in the society when white supremacist “danger narratives” about black male criminality serve to justify forms of violence “to assert the ‘rightful’ place of White men in positions of power” (Rondini 2018, 60). African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era explores the implications of what happens when discursive threats of whiteness cannot manage to deprive the black person of his dynamic and interior subjectivity, as well as his agency. Acutely aware that the white dominant public discourse on “black pathology” has pervasively constituted the backdrop “against which all representations of blacks or blackness take place,” as Fred Moten reminds us (2018b, 140), the contemporary African American novels, studied here, represent black characters who are complex personalities. Radical revisions of black vulnerability in these novels, I argue here, register black characters’ “resistant vulnerability” (Hagelin 2013, 88), combining two counterimages, which bring the aspect of the intricate relationship between the black interiority and the white (exterior) social world, notwithstanding the examination of what it means to transform black everyday life, determined by racialized social control. Myisha Cherry notes that the state of vulnerability provides us with “vulnerable solidarity,” based on the shared vulnerability to “state racism” (2017, 360). In other words, Cherry’s critical lens is similar to what Timothy Kearney believes in, that is, “the transforming power of vulnerability” (2013, 244) as a strategy for social change, mobilizing vulnerability into action, or what I prefer to call vulnerability-inaction, in order to make an impact on the world. Judith Butler argues that vulnerability assumes a political meaning when it is recognized, because when we posit the other’s vulnerability, it becomes a form of recognition, which “manifests the constitutive power of the discourse” (Butler 2006, 43). These African American novels elaborate on the representations of black

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characters who transform their “problematic form of vulnerability” into resistance not from a subservient position but “from a position of equality” as they align themselves “politically in solidarity with the most vulnerable” (A. Cole 2018, 119, 123). In other words, these characters’ empowerment and resistance are political moves, for in Cornelius Castoriadis’s account, “the political exists in the questioning of the existing institutions of society” (cited in Ferrarese 2018b, 88). These novels employ what Noémi Michel calls “critical black politics of vulnerability” (2018, 90) in their refusal to be shaped by the preexisting racial norms—thereby vulnerable. Indeed, critical examinations of black characters’ everyday lived experiences point to political values of studying what is implicated in “the political notion of vulnerability,” which in and of itself “works to undo the world such as it is” (Castel 2018, 17). In this context, African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era opens new avenues of articulation to a radical anti–white supremacist racial praxis as that which speaks through what Alexander Weheliye calls “new forms of humanity” (2014, 14). The African American novels studied here appropriate the normative conception of black vulnerability “as a political fiction” (Ferrarese 2018b, 75) in response to the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement in the social world. The black characters in these African American novels reiterate the racialized forms of vulnerability in their radical performativity of blackness, while on the contrary, developing subversive strategies of resistance that eventually disrupt the discursive power of whiteness that “always-already interpellat[e]” 9 (Althusser 2014, 132) them as racialized subjects. “Only by departing from a solely negative understanding of vulnerability,” Erin Gilson comments, “can we conceive of vulnerability as being a resource for ethical response and political resistance to oppression” (2014, 93). These African American novels articulate the politics of vulnerability in the sense that Jacques Rancière calls “the naming of the wrong” (qtd in A. Cole 2018, 122). Hence, they address the need to interrogate the embodied discursive practices of whiteness through the construct of racialized vulnerability, deemed integral to the white normative absentization and denigration of black people in everyday life. The contemporary African American novel, in a similar sense, captures the vitality of the everyday, representing an “indeterminate blackness” of complex black characters (Stallings 2013, 201). African American literary texts have always been diverse in the sense that they “neither protested racial oppression directly nor showcased the achievements of prominent African Americans.” While genres such as street and hip-hop literature have reached a high level of popularity, they refuse “to be bound by monolithic and imaginary notions of authentic blackness or respectability” (King and MoodyTurner 2013b, 2, 4). These black writers produce nonstereotypical representations of ordinary black people, employing the black countergaze, “deeply

14

Introduction

informed by black lived experience” (Flory and Bloodsworth-Lugo 2013, 9). The shifts in the locus of African American subjectivity in pre- and post1970s African American cultural tradition have helped shape these contemporary literary depictions of whiteness and blackness. The early decades of the twentieth century, influenced by the effects of Harlem Renaissance, witnessed such powerful writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, whose works directly responded to racial oppression. Their political and aesthetic achievements fulfilled the goals set out by Alain Locke and Langston Hughes earlier during the Harlem Renaissance, positing them as the leading writers, along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry, to resist normative values. 10 While they worked within black cultural traditions, they represented African American subjectivity within interracial social encounters, in contrast to the Black Arts Movement a few decades later. Even during the Cold War period, as Mary Helen Washington discusses in The Other Blacklist, of the CIA-directed surveillance and censorship of the leftist spaces of the Black Popular Front, African American culture “was debated, critiqued, encouraged, performed, published, produced, and preserved” (2014, 17). The Black Arts era in the late 1960s and early 1970s became a period of growing artistic productions of black authors in the spirit of the Black Power movement, and celebrated black liberation by means of “the vibrant, versatile rhythms of African American expressive culture” (Smethurst and Rambsy 2011, 405). The black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, and Margaret Walker, among many others, defined a black aesthetic via a cultural redefinition of African American subjectivity in the wake of the civil rights era, followed by the post–civil rights era’s black writers, who employed the themes, styles, and issues of the Black Arts era. Paying tribute to W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of “double consciousness” (1999, 11), which has shaped studies of African American identity throughout the twentieth century (Dubey and Goldberg 2011, 567), many writers in the vogue of black postmodernist literature, which marked the end of the Black Arts movement, produced prolific work; these writers include Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Albert Murray, and Gayl Jones, among others. Their constitution of African American subjectivity and the southern folk aesthetic, in some of their works, stand in contrast to the new black aesthetic elaborated by Trey Ellis in the 1980s in its refusal to draw the normative association of poverty with the authentic black community “as a reaction against literary paradigms of black authenticity” (Dubey 2003, 183). From the 1980s to the present, African American literature has employed textual fragmentation to explore differences within the construct of blackness in an attempt “to subver[t] monolithic conceptions of black culture” (Dubey and Goldberg 2011, 570).

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Black writers from the 1970s well into the early decades of the twentyfirst century, including the members of the hip-hop generation—named the “post-soul generation” by critic Mark Anthony Neal (qtd in Grassian 2009, 7)—have investigated the intersections between racial identity and other modes of identification such as class, gender, and sexuality. However, it is difficult to make a clear-cut distinction between past and present works and genres in the history of African American literature, for “the hip-hop underground signifies on much of [the] historical, political, and literary energy” of the earlier black literary writers’ uses of the subterranean space, “a space that facilitates the subversion of White supremacy” (Peterson 2014, 139). Many black novelists—including Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Reginald McKnight, Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Sherley Anne Williams, the late Octavia Butler, Martha Southgate, Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Allen, Keenan Norris, Sister Souljah, Nikki Turner, Kwan, among several others—have problematized the white dominant racial representations by employing diverse embodied black characters. All in all, most contemporary African American novelists’ works explore, Bernard Bell notes, a social order where individuals realize “their full human potential” (2004, 387). André M. Carrington, in addition, suggests that we need to look at “what Blackness can do,” for instance, through the help of speculative fiction, while hoping that more black authors and artists will define “the relationship between speculative fiction and common knowledge” (2016, 241). In this context, twenty-first-century African American literature has offered an abundance of new terms such as “post-black, post-soul, the newblack” (Li 2017, 631). Marc Anthony Neal writes that the term “newblackness” implies “a radical fluidity” across “socially constructed performances of ‘black’ identity” (2004, 122), while Paul C. Taylor sees diverse characterization as a powerful response to “an unduly limited narrative of soul culture or civil rights politics” (2007, 635). Starting with the first decade of the twenty-first century, as Stephanie Li indicates, African American literature has flourished in a domestic and international context that witnessed the catastrophe of 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession, followed by an optimism of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and Barack Obama’s presidency. Hence, the first decade defined the era “by horror and anxiety if also by the hope of new possibilities” 11 (Li 2017, 632). The publications of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” (2016), and Evie Shockley’s Semiautomatic (2017), among many others, have shifted paradigms on the present moment. The second decade of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, seemed an overwhelmingly painful era of both increasing police (and vigilante) killings of unarmed black civilians and increasing black mass incarceration, making “[t]he need for political action [even more] urgent than ever now”

16

Introduction

(Li 2017, 633). African American literary history has incorporated the political demand for social change into its expressive forms, as Toni Morrison reminds us: “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time” (2008, 64). In this era, the political response to black vulnerability is revisited in contemporary African American novels that work against the conflation of blackness with victimization—or vulnerability, for that matter—rendering the everyday creative “subversion” (Clements 2017, 100) of discursive practices of whiteness. Despite the fact that black life is in the current moment “bounded by vulnerability,” being a black person is shaped by “contradictory but mutually constitutive experiences” (Jenkins 2017, 788) of vulnerability and joyful life that the African American novels studied in this book voice in many ways. The contemporary African American novels demand that it is necessary to move beyond the culture of fear, produced by 9/11, shifting “the spatial imaginary of African American literature” that can be called “The New Black Novel” (Edwards 2017, 666, 664). Kevin Young, in The Grey Album, resents the term “post-black,” and instead experiments with new configurations of blackness: “More than post-blackness, I am concerned with pre-blackness—what made and makes up blackness” (2012, 283). Stephanie Li asks, “What then will we call the current era of African American literature?” (Li 2017, 632). Instead of using Edwards’s term “The New Black Novel,” or Young’s term “pre-blackness,” I would prefer to coin the term “neo-resistance novels” to define the Black Lives Matter era novels, which celebrate multiple facets of blackness (read: pro-blackness). As we move to the third decade of the twenty-first century, there is an urgency to reading African American novels within the context of the problems of the current conjuncture, as Black Lives Matter reinvigorates black life as marked by “the perpetuity of crisis” during the time of heightened anti-black racism and “the increased militarization of urban spaces and national borders” (Abdur-Rahman 2017, 687, 685) in the terrain of overt racism in the Trump era. The African American novel as a public discourse, more intensely than ever, lays out the horrors of “living while black,” Darryl Dickson-Carr notes, as the ideology of white supremacy “criminalizes even the most mundane aspects of black lives.” Even though this is the case, we need novels that go beyond “the standard Civil Rights narrative” to celebrate the plurality and fluidity of blackness (Dickson-Carr 2017, 791, 797). Fred Moten, on the other hand, grapples with a different form of black complexity with the belief that thinking about the relationship between black “political despair” and the “utopian political aspirations” 12 constitutes the representation of a complex humanity of black people in the anti-black world (qtd in Crawford 2017b, 803). It is the collision of narratives that shape black life and that allows one to think, as Fred Moten does, of black political despair and aspirations, or pessimism and optimism, as inseparable. I argue that the

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African American novel in the twenty-first century, particularly, has become a narrative form of radical politics in the sense that the term “politics of literature,” in Jacques Rancière’s view, implies that “literature does politics simply by being literature” (2011, 3). The African American novel as a contested space represents what the contemporary black artist Theaster Gates’s work does in producing common everyday spaces to “amplify unacknowledged wealth” of blackness in denial of “the reactive negation of reification” (cited in Moten 2017, 162, 166). This is the discursive context that African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era responds to: The African American novels studied in this book shift the sense of where we stand, in talking back to that very relation between hopelessness and renewed hope. They represent the black interior world as part of the public discourse, and hence, locate “black social life and imagin[e] a future that entails black life and living,” never at the expense of the black interiority (Colbert 2017, 175). Self-reflexivity and self-transformation are inevitably political, for James Baldwin, because “the interior life is a real life and the untangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world” (qtd in Turner 2012, 92). This is another way of saying that although blackness is not merely “an effect of the coercive brutality of the state, its self-making is only visible against the backdrop of the state and its coercive legal apparatuses” 13 (Moten 2018a, 19). The depictions of black interiority provide a lens to see what is at stake in the embodied practices of whiteness, and make political intervention in the everyday life, “a kind of embodied action” (Scott 2017, 29). The novels open a conceptual and affective space that challenges the regime of whiteness, positioning the white individuals “as a problem space” (Yancy 2015b, 203). The resistance put forth by African American men in these novels provides us with an insight that the interior space of these black characters is radically bound by the spatial politics of everyday life. Although interiority constitutes a space, in Stuart Hall’s words, “where identity ceases to hold with certainty” (qtd in Gates 2017, xxiii), it can never be “apolitical or without social value” (Quashie 2012, 6). Since caring for the inner life of black people is integral to political action, these African American novels focus on those black characters, who “thin[k] dangerously,” which functions, in fact, as “a generative force in the production of everyday life” (H.A. Giroux 2018b, 262). We need to understand the black characters’ struggle against discursive violence as a radical social praxis, “as a transformation of the everyday” (Ronneberger 2008, 134). Their political mobilization of affect enables black vulnerability-in-action to function as a critical lens. Since everyday life is lived on the level of affects and impacts, 14 affect is the medium with which these novels produce the political relationality of affect and everyday life. We see how the black protagonists dissociate themselves from the white regimes of control in the face of “systemic racism”

18

Introduction

(Feagin 2006, 1) and make affective alliances to decolonize their everyday life and live in a domain that falls outside the discursive constructs of blackness. 15 In this respect, the effect of the black characters’ narrative acts on the social imaginary can be seen as acts of “practicing a counter-politics of the production of affective facts” (Massumi 2015b, 244). Brian Massumi explains that he uses the concept of affect to address “that margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we might be able to do’” in every present situation (2015a, 3). Since affect involves a person’s situated response to his/her immediate context, it is an effective way of building “affective solidarity” 16 (Hemmings 2012, 148). At a time when “the invention of new ‘everyday’ forms of democracy” is closely related to the intersection of the personal and political, Nigel Thrift observes, opening up new political and social domains constitutes an important issue to think about “the politics of affect” (2008, 182). I hope, in the way Sharon Doetsch-Kidder does, that “the identification and growth of these emotions [will be encouraged] in activist work” (2012, 10), in the way the novels discussed in this book do. Hence, knowing “the primacy of affect [and emotion] in perpetuating gendered racism, nativism, and imperialism” can also be utilized “to unhinge the embodied and unconscious dimensions of oppression” (Ioanide 2015, 3). As these African American novels address the reality of everyday life, the effort to see affect in the characters’ actions enables us to see how they enter into “new ways of relating to other bodies” 17 (Lim 2010, 2407) without falling into performative reiterations of racialized acts and scripts. In the era of Black Lives Matter, an era of politics of racialized affect in its full force, the African American novel obviously does not exist in isolation from the present, reminding us of W. E. B. DuBois’s advice to his students: “We have got to do something about race. We have got to think and think clearly about our present situation” (qtd in S. S. Giroux 2010, 403). The black lived experience in everyday life manifests how the killings render visible the violence of whiteness: “White gazing is a violent process” (Yancy 2016b, 243). In Nathaniel Mackey’s novel Late Arcade, N. says in one of the letters to the musician known as the Angel of Dust: “A certain someone not present, the present itself not present enough, seems a lament for the present, not the past” (2017, 131). It is not easy, as Mackey’s novel shows, to talk about the twenty-first-century African American novel: At a time when we witness the present absentization of black men as “a lament for the present,” Black Lives Matter opens discursive cracks in whiteness because it ruptures the imposed silence on the wasted black lives. The role of the African American novelist during the era of deliberate acts of erasing black male bodies from public spaces is a significant political act of configuring new spaces, which makes it possible for a radical performativity of blackness. How can we talk about blackness, then, in this contemporary moment, in

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terms of these absentized/missing black men who are made either vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence, or to incarceration? The Contemporary African American Novel: Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters (2012) explored the need to understand how whiteness works, what it forecloses, and what it occasionally opens up in everyday life. However, in The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life: Blackness as Strategy for Social Change (2016), black transformative change is itself “the critique of everyday life” in the ways in which its interventions shift the prevailing conceptual registers of whiteness. The present book takes up where the 2016 title leaves off, considering how black transformative change takes place in black characters’ efforts to work through the criminality-posited-as-vulnerability script in the social world. It positions “neo-resistance novels” of the Black Lives Matter era as a critique of everyday life in alternative spaces wherein they embrace life. Black everyday life is determined by that vulnerability in the face-toface confrontations with both the ordinary white people, and white law enforcement people, who employ control mechanisms by means of physical and discursive violence. What happens, then, to whiteness, as a site of contingency on the negation of blackness, when it is interrupted and challenged by the very script of black criminality as a pretext of white vulnerability? In other words, I am now interested in seeing those practices of ordinary black people that help transform their racialized vulnerability through subversive acts in interracial social encounters, building an alternative everyday life in their own terms of value. Examining white-black social encounters offers a useful critical lens that reveals the inherent contradictions embedded in the insidious operations of whiteness. These novelists problematize whiteness simply because black lived experiences articulate to a broader context of sociocultural implications of anti-blackness. It is precisely through the black male characters’ practices of “the subversive potential of political performativity” that a radical critique of everyday life is enacted (Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014, 27). The black man’s (or black woman’s) self-definition as a person, capable of agency for resistance to subjection, helps to identify the sociocultural processes and embodied practices by which whiteness is “constructed and reproduced on an everyday basis [that] can provide the means to interpret them” (Bush 2011, 205). Hence, everyday forms of resistance against white racializing governance strategies turn, in Michel de Certeau’s view, “the quotidian into a sphere of invention” (cited in Sheringham 2010, 361). What are the ways in which these novels make an intervention in the present through the politics of radical performativity of blackness? The book examines the contestations of the contemporary everyday life (read: a domain to die), as black characters establish a livable life in an alternative domain of human relationality in their own terms of value. Hence,

20

Introduction

there is a tremendous value to expose the white-black binary to deconstruct the sociocultural space of whiteness, for whiteness itself “sustains this binary, through its transcendental status in relationship to Blacks in the US and other people of color” (Yancy 2016a, 10). This focus on the white-black binary also speaks to my own subjective experiences in my encounters with some of my American colleagues at Bilkent University, where I work in Turkey. At one time, one of the American “nativist” scholars on an occasion when I was present commented that we need more “native speakers” of English who will be great “teachers” to speak “correct English” to our undergraduate students. The implication was—despite all my published work in the United States and in Turkey—I did not count as a teacher/scholar at all, because I was not a native speaker. Even though he has no real notion of pedagogy and his scholarship was weak, he believed that being a native speaker made him “white.” This situation reveals how whiteness is not just an ideological stance but an embodied discursive practice, reinforcing the power of whiteness in a similar vein to what Lilia D. Monzó and Peter McLaren write: “Thus to be an Other,” for the colleague, who fails to think that he is a foreigner in my homeland, “is to be less than human” (Monzó and McLaren 2017, xv). He was not even aware that he has claimed my space by socially excluding me in a symbolic white American safety zone. John Hartigan Jr. suggests that whiteness and blackness are “the registers in which ‘differences’ are frequently associated with ideas and narratives about whiteness and blackness” (2015, 15). Since the “processes of racialization in the United States have been and still are structured around the black and white binary” (Medina 2013, 209), the binary has always been used as the lens through which black people have been racialized. Even though some recent works argue that binary thinking polarizes the society by creating “boundary lines” 18 (J.L.S. Chandler 2017, 158), Trump’s rise to presidency has made it clear that the binary still continues, and ironically enough, we are living at a time when any justification for using the lens of white-black binary is no longer a necessity. Trump has associated criminality with black people on many occasions with an insistence “to reinstitute racial profiling” 19 (H.A. Giroux 2018b, 54). Hence, we need to use the white-black binary by no means to reinforce racial or racist thinking, but rather as a strategy to mark whiteness in order to demonstrate how the radical performativity of blackness can bear “transgressive potential” (Catanese 2011, 43) as the possibility of excess. We live in the current moment of a social world in which the streets are spaces where black male bodies are made to disappear to open up safe spaces for whiteness, showing that black people “are not truly safe in America” 20 (Yancy 2018a, 3). The racial dictates by which black male subjectivity is discursively constructed is very much related to the notions of space, for the reproduction of whiteness in everyday life, normalizes anti-black violence in

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a domain, Judith Butler commented in a recent interview, “within which certain lives are made to matter less than others” (2017a, 59). The deadly impact of white supremacist norms on black people shows something further, Lindon Barrett suggests: “The dead black body may be an ultimate figure of regulation” with an indication of “a highly useful social valence” (2018, 237). Black men’s struggle against the violence of this state-sanctioned regulation, then, compels them to, in the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo’s words, “an endless struggle to conquer space” whereas space “is what makes life possible” (qtd in Enriquez 2017, 56). In a society that absentizes blackness by means of violence from the public spaces, we also read about the interiority of these characters, or what Elizabeth Alexander recently called “volcanic interiors” (2018, 1). Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s view that bodies produce social space, we can say the “sociospatial experience is the generator of new geographies, both contestatory and imaginative”—a view that also marks how black interiority, for our purposes here, is situated beyond the white gaze (cited in K. Jones 2017, 262). Determined no longer to be defined by their vulnerability, their interiority reveals that “the criminalization of black social life” does not allow the violent real world to see who they really are, and the logic of their actions in a world of white privilege. It draws attention to the fact that “blackness indicates a phenomenality, a lived experience, that exceeds the visibility of the color” (Moten 2018a, 125, 9). The contradictory nature of everyday life, produced by the clash of narratives of the American democracy and anti-blackness, figures into the African American novels. It forms a literature of social critique of everyday life, in conversation with the current spaces and crisis of whiteness with an intensified concern about “spatial politics” (K. Mitchell 2015, 32) embedded in social encounters, “shaped by whiteness” (V.E. Thompson 2015, 178). These novels inspire change in an uncertain world, where the black characters in these novels use their agency to shape the normative everyday life that threatens their sense of blackness, raising those particular issues the novels enable us to examine: If racial vulnerability is what black people experience in everyday life as a reiteration of the racial norms imposed on their bodies, then how do they change the domain of their everyday life to live life at its fullest, rather than to die? In this context, the book consists of five chapters that address the responses to these questions in different ways, as they explore how black characters’ performative acts of blackness subvert the discursive mechanisms and practices of whiteness. Chapter 1 discusses Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs (2016), which negotiates the normative criminalization of the homeless, predominantly black. When the black male protagonist, Lazarus Love III, loses all his savings in an economic recession, he decides to live as homeless and poor. His refusal to operate in a system that perpetuates injustice is an act that disrupts the ideology of racial uplift, and helps deconstruct the everyday mechanisms

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of whiteness. In Chapter 2, Sister Souljah’s A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015a), when Midnight, a young black Muslim Sudanese immigrant, kills the man who stalks his sister, and is soon arrested, he refuses to confess to protect his family members against being used as leverage. In a society mediated by a broken criminal justice system, Midnight’s practices during the interrogation and incarceration help deconstruct whiteness. Chapter 3 examines Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016a) in which Easy Rawlins is hired as a detective by the black criminal Charcoal Joe to help clear the name of a young black man, Seymour, who is unjustly accused of murdering two white men. Easy’s subversive acts of “undoing” whiteness reveal how the carceral spatiality of whiteness, which operates in everyday life, can only be challenged by means of extra-legal practices. Victoria Christopher Murray’s novel Stand Your Ground (2015b), in chapter 4, addresses the injustices that spring from the Stand Your Ground law in exploring the killing of Marquis by a white vigilante. During the legal battle Janice and Tyrone, Marquis’s parents, start with the murderer, and Janice reluctantly joins the public demonstrations with the black community, realizing that her love for Marquis can be used as a weapon for a transformative change. Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea (2018a), in chapter 5, explores the issue of black resistance and activism. The black protagonist, ex-cop Joe King Oliver, who now works as a private detective, takes the case of A Free Man, a black journalist, who is sentenced to the death penalty for killing two corrupt cops in selfdefense. When he realizes he cannot exonerate A Free Man, as a cop killer, he collaborates with a criminal in arranging for a prison break and saves his life. These African American novels mobilize “the mark of criminality” as an “affectively charged” discourse on blackness in ways that resonate with lived experiences of racial oppression, offering “alternative modes of affective investment” (McCann 2017, 90, 95). The black characters occasionally undergo moments of inward turn, or moments of anti-sociality, in their “private, transdescriptive experience” (Moten 2017, 203). While the novels provide the space for vulnerability as a political act, the black characters shift discursive registers of blackness as criminal in their appropriations of “criminal” strategies outside the normative structure. In doing that, they open cracks in whiteness by exposing how institutions and the white embodied practices enact those very acts and practices against the law. They engage in “the process of disidentification” (M.G. Davidson 2017, 141), refusing to reiterate the racial(izing) norms of whiteness, altering their “affective world” (Ramos-Zayas 2012, 143) as the space of becoming black in “vulnerable solidarity,” or rather, what can be considered “affective solidarity” as a way of employing “modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance” (Hemmings 2012, 148). Their refusal of “the consent to what has been imposed on them” is a claim to what is “normatively disavowed” for black

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people, positing their acts of criminality as a revelation of “the continual refusal of normative individuation” (Moten 2018a, 243, 266). The novelists’ valorization of the criminality of black vulnerable individuals verifies the injustice in the criminal justice system. Since the law fails to protect and respect their rights, they can only make justice happen in their transgression of the law. In that case, criminality is reconfigured “as a capacity or propensity to transgress the law as such, to challenge its mystical authority with a kind of improvisational rupture” (Moten 2018a, 138–39). While these novels make an effective and affective critique of everyday life, they interrogate whiteness as a discursive construct by breaking through and into the black (vulnerability constructed as) criminality script. Each initiates the problematic discourse of black criminality by means of the black male protagonist’s transgressive leap against the law, appropriating the racial script of “crime” as a form of dissent against the white normative institutions and structure. Following Evie Shockley’s view that colorblindness suppresses “black experience and black subjectivity as discursive matters” 21 (2017a, 40), we can say that these novels register blackness as nonnormative fluid performativity. The depiction of resistance by a black male body against what Henry A. Giroux calls “the spectacle of post-racial violence” (2016, 124) in the current moment revises the notion of racialized vulnerability as a symbolic act of subverting the discursive power of whiteness. NOTES 1. Stuart Hall sees “the problem of the twenty-first century [as] the problem of living with difference” (2017, 86). Naomi Murakawa comments that “the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness” (2014, 7). I personally agree with all of these three intertwined responses to DuBois’s conception of the twentieth century, for the problem in the current century also continues to be the problem of racialized violence as a strategy to living with racialized difference on the one hand, and with colorblindness, on the other, masquerading itself as anti-black racism. 2. What makes it impossible for the white police to emphathize with Garner is what their distorted vision compels them to see, which is “the racial production of the visible” (Yancy 2015d, 6). One is reminded of his fatal cry for help, Bryant Keith Alexander and colleagues suggest, “as emblematic of the construction of restrictive mobilities, unquestioned intentions, and denied possibilities” (Alexander, Huffman, and Johnson 2018, 315). 3. As Bryan Stevenson similarly suggests, people in America should commit to “engaging the past that continues to haunt us,” because black people need to “be afforded the same protection, safety, and opportunity to thrive as anyone else” (2017, 26). 4. In the American society of militarized police presence, Black Lives Matter activists produce a crossalliance of “love and power speaking truth to injustice” (Walton 2018, 348). While the white officials who believe they have “the power to kill a person’s body or their dreams” (W.D. Jones 2018, 90), Black Lives Matter has made a public move “to transform this country” (K. Y. Taylor 2016, 219). 5. Even during his presidential campaign, Trump employed divisiveness through “make America great again” rhetoric” (A.H. Powell 2017, 19). 6. Barack Obama’s presidency took place in the context of “a most-racial political era” in a highly polarized political environment (Tessler 2016, 206).

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7. It is obvious that democracy is not enough to protect freedom, to adapt Colin Woodard’s view here, when Donald Trump and his supporters “endorse terror, tyrants, and dictatorship” (Woodard 2017, 20). It is simply horrifying, Joel Olson writes because “white tyranny does not contradict the democratic will but is an expression of it” (qtd in Yancy 2017a, 7). 8. The poet-activist E. Ethelbert Miller, similarly, conceives that a radical configuration of progressive blackness can be done “if we consider blackness as ‘process’ and not person” (2012), in similar terms to seeing blackness as engagement with “always becoming black” (Vargas 2006a, 477). 9. Louis Althusser argues that ideology, in fact, “‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing” (2014, 131). 10. Richard Wright rendered in Native Son (1933, first published in 1940) the oppressive reality of an urban black family in Chicago’s South Side, leading “a Negro way of life in America” (1994, 100) in order to dismantle “the white symbolic order” (Tuhkanen 2009, 1). James Baldwin similarly employed a critical perspective on white supremacy with a strong faith in black people’s agency to change “the history of the world” (1995, 104–105), and he revealed “the effects of white supremacy” (Schlosser 2013, 489). In similar terms to Baldwin’s hope for black people’s collective action, Ellison, in Invisible Man (1952), developed a “politics . . . of love” (452) with a view of “the complexity of American experience” (qtd in Conner and Morel 2016b, 6) in refusal of a redundant view of black people “in keeping with certain sociological theories” (Ellison 1995, 730). 11. Those works such as Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2014), and Teju Cole’s The Open City (2011), among others, introduced diasporic perspectives on a white dominant American society. There has been other work by writers like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), and by established writers like Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) who “reimagin[e] familiar historical experiences of slavery and escape” (Li 2017, 632). 12. Joseph R. Winters, in his Hope Draped in Black (2016), argues that the sense of emphasized understanding of black people’s pain must take place “in the spirit of melancholic hope” (qtd in Crawford 2017b, 803). 13. In other words, the black characters’ “commitment to [their] own personhood” does not in any way occlude the vision of “radical futures” (Freeburg 2017, 117). 14. Kathleen Stewart suggests, there is a “politics of ordinary affect” related “to being/ feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not)” (Stewart 2007, 9, 16). 15. Being an American is not reducible only to “citizen status,” but even more to “affective attachment” to the history, the land, and the people (Hayward 2013, 9). In this sense, even Trump’s figuring as both “the crisis” and “a solution to the empire of chaos,” in Lawrence Grossberg’s words, can be explained in “affective rather than ideological terms” (2018, 10). 16. Even though both affects and emotions constitute who we are, affect can be preferred to emotion because emotion implies an opposition to reason. Hence, circulations of affect such as fear or hatred “contribute to political outcomes” (A.A.G. Ross 2014, 32). In relating to affect as a force in politics, Sara Ahmed’s view of “affect as an impersonal force,” Jason Lim notes, can make clear “how affect can open up ways of doing something different” (cited in Lim 2010, 2393). The concept of affect helps us “to grasp the changes that constitute the social and to explore them as changes in ourselves” (Clough 2007, 3). Since affect is transferred from one body to another in intersubjective encounters, affect can also “serve to drive us toward movement” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1). 17. Nigel Thrift says, “An undeniable part of this act of reimagining community and individuation as non identitarian is affect” on account of “the affective practices that bind strangers to each other” (2010, 2428). 18. American society is not yet ready for “the rendering inoperative of the old binary logic of belonging” (Spanos 2017, 159), and hence the binary reinforces the boundaries between “(white) subjects and their (racialized) objects” (Ngo 2017, 166). For Nicholas Powers, the police killings reproduce the binary “as the line between criminal and citizen” (qtd in H.A. Giroux 2018b, 5).

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19. Trump’s hate speech on Mexicans as criminals was represented in mainstream media as the remarks of “a fearless billionaire” (H.A. Giroux 2017, 27). 20. The black body, just like other bodies, is not merely material, because it “is never divorced from perception” (B.K. Alexander 2016, 272). 21. These black characters do not settle for “race-neutral” depictions, but on the contrary, challenge the unmarked whiteness of “a moment that is being called ‘post-racial’” (Shockley 2011, 198).

Chapter One

Embodied Spaces of Transformative Change in the “Homeless” City Affective Possibilities of Becoming Black in Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs (2016)

The current changes at the turn of the twenty-first century have continued to mark a period of contestation about how the concepts of the American Dream function while reconfiguring whiteness in a post–9/11 era, which has expanded the racialization of black people to include Middle Eastern or Arab people, “the new enemy threat” (Hayden 2008, 529), revealing blackness as merely a discursive construct. The American Dream, whose main tenets, as Melanie Bush contends, reinforces the white public discourse as based on “the racialized nature of the Americanization process” (2007, 305, 307)—the one that defines the notion of success as a product of hard work, and failure as that of laziness or the lack of effort. Having said that, there is also a flipside of the coin on personal ramifications of what the American Dream is all about. In their recent book Tensions in the American Dream: Rhetoric, Reverie, or Reality (2015), Melanie Bush and Roderick Bush explain how the American Dream is also about a person’s ideals and fighting for his/her beliefs, “rather than achieving material comfort.” Seeing it as not merely achieving material comfort, but as reaching out for “human possibility and human solidarity,” the affective dimension of the American Dream has to be considered in the everyday context of the United States. “We must get on the right side of history,” Bush and Bush argue, building community, based on the “collective human dream, which is not simply about the redistribution of wealth but also about our collective responsibility for each other” (2015, 209–10). Hence, they remind us that such a struggle begins with every single 27

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act and encounter in everyday life to stop the discursive violence, caused by the differential treatment of human beings. Similarly, there is a need to undo the discursive practices of discrimination that target the poor and the homeless, which are often enacted by seemingly invisible disciplinary mechanisms. The sociological scholarship on homeless people has revolved around the analyses of how their lives are governed by regulatory strategies and resistance. There is now a need to reconsider, Randall Amster articulates, that the study of homelessness merely “as a social issue” is highly problematic, for what is missing in such a formulation is “any regard for agency” (2008, 7). What is often neglected in the scholarship on the homeless, in this case, is “the affective experiences and relationships that constitute everyday spaces of homelessness” 1 (Daya and Wilkins 2013, 358). Hence, the nonnormative rendering of homeless people needs without doubt to include their subjectivities and constant struggle, in Stuart Hall’s words, “to construct subjective possibilities and new political subjectivities for themselves” (2016, 206) not provided by the white power structure. In this context, Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs (2016) critically engages the problematics of belonging and homelessness in the white dominant American society, which calls for a transformative social change through the embodied practices of the democratic impulse of collective responsibility. The novel deconstructs the normative racialized characterizations of the “homeless” body as an embodiment of contradiction, because it is expected “to conform with the configuration of an urban geography designed to exclude it” (Kawash 1998, 319). Whereas the discourse and social practices of homelessness are represented through everyday lived experiences, the novel seeks to develop an understanding of the performative and affective spaces of not-belonging that allow social change to happen. At the same time it implies that those authorities, who reinforce ordinary people’s unequal sharing of, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “the right to the city” (1996, 147), must take into account their “right to inhabit the city” (D. Mitchell 2003, 220). The novel depicts these homeless characters with feelings of belonging and connection with each other, as complex humans, rather than as “socially and spatially excluded Others” (Daya and Wilkins 2013, 373). Their affective worlds are deemed visible, similar to their counterparts in real life, as they reconstruct spaces of hope with each other as places made meaningful by embodied interactions. It is crucial, then, to explore these “performative and affective geographies of homelessness” (Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2008, 245) in order to understand the role of racist (and sexist) affect in the lives of these people. Hence, these homeless characters are set against the white supremacist regulations of the everyday, “opposed to the ‘authorized’ organization of life” (Driscoll 2001, 381).

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The novel produces new contexts for exploring everyday practices of resistance, intimacy, and nonracialized relationships as a means for understanding the mechanisms of white supremacist domination, as well as what being human means beyond the public/private divide. Set in the twenty-first century during the Barack Obama campaign in 2008 as the narrative present, twenty years after Lazarus Love III, a black man, becomes homeless, we learn that he was a wealthy and successful man in business, who had achieved the American Dream, living a happy life with his wife, Deborah, and his children, Quad and Lizzie. When he loses all his savings in the economic recession, he realizes that soul-killing materialism in corporate America, has drained his humanity. He has long secured his children’s future in savings he deposited in bank accounts for their tuitions and lives, but since Deborah does not share his decision to start anew with a life of material poverty, at her demand he leaves his house and family for good. He rejects the upper–middle-class American mainstream life, realizing that he was not cut out for this life, and he chooses to live as a poor and homeless man below an overpass, a shared space with the other homeless that connotes his symbolic transgression. Even though he occasionally goes near his house or near their school to see his children from a distance, they are too brokenhearted by his abandonment to talk to him. Deborah divorces him and remarries a man who shares her values based on a conformist life. Lazarus’s homeless group of friends, The Family, as they call themselves, include Cinderella, a white middle-aged woman whose only possession is a prized set of red shoes; Elisha, a young African American man, who fled the foster system; Legion, a black transsexual, abandoned by family for whom Black uses “e,” as genderless pronoun; and The Comforter, a black middleaged woman and spiritual healer whose ethereal presence brings spirituality into the material lives of the others. When Lazarus is arrested for the alleged murder of a rich white woman, Mrs. Dupont, and he is finally proven innocent in court, he is able to reunite with Quad, Lizzie, and his own father, Junior (Lazarus II), with the help of The Comforter. Home, according to bell hooks, means the safe space where “the me of me mattered” (2009, 215). However, the novel problematizes the notion of conventional “home” and belonging through Lazarus’s decision to quit an American Dream–oriented lifestyle. His boredom with status quo mentality demonstrates that home can easily become “a space of exclusion” (Ortega 2016, 200), because he has lived as a cultural insider, “who long[ed] to be [an] outside[r]” (Thrift 2008, 4). His alternative life, the one lived in sharing with The Family, on the contrary, teaches him to appreciate the lived experiences of “multiplicitous selfhood,” that is, “a self in process or in the making” (Ortega 2016, 63) belonging in the here and now. In fact, he, as a black, strategically chooses a different identity marker (homeless man), that does not fit normative expec-

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tations. As he ventures into a self-reflexive self, similar to his fellow homeless people, he will soon learn to act with them through his “quiet.” Kevin Quashie, in The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), severes the white dominant stereotypical “equivalence between resistance and blackness” (3), because he sees a significant value in thinking of the concept of quiet in the face of seeing black subjectivity only through a public lens, “as if there were no inner life.” In line with Quashie’s view, the novel does not construct blackness only as mere resistance against whiteness, but rather it reveals blackness as the dynamic interiority. Although I agree with Quashie about working against the reductive view of blackness as mere resistance, I also want to ask, what if we take his concept of quiet as/with publicness, for he himself reminds us that “the interior is not unconnected to the world of things” (Quashie 2012, 21). The novel constructs Lazarus as one who explores the complexity of his inner life in relation to the exterior world. He feels his inner self has been exiled in the midst of the social signifiers of American Dream ideology, because he has lost his grip on what it is to be human. While Lazarus steps outside of a discourse of progress that defines his social identity to negotiate his inner self, the novel employs vulnerability in an indeterminate present, one that Lazarus himself wants to experience, as opposed to the one dictated by the white power structure. It is from this domain of subjectivity, “this limbo of the interior,” that Black’s novel studies black humanity (Quashie 2012, 86) in its multiple forms of performativity. In this context, Lazarus changes his life by not only leaving his family and giving up his house, but also by changing his everyday habits in entering into a different interaction with the social space that he himself produces. This notion of polyvalent social space points to Henri Lefebvre’s suggestion that as “everyday life remains in thrall to abstract space,” then the drive to change life “would be no more than an arbitrary political rallying cry,” shifting in accord with “the mood of the moment” (1991, 59–60). His changing life and habits enable him to consider that black interiority allows him to feel the need to risk failure to become free to develop “the radical black imagination” from a socially unacceptable domain (Randolph 2016). Lazarus acts against the white supremacist regulation of black subjectivity in the city, which operates as “a space of exclusion” (Paula 2014, 100). Even though all the members of The Family are by no means black, they are equally marginalized in relation to white-dominant, hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity; as a black man (Lazarus), as a white woman (Cinderella), as a young black man who feels unprotected as a son of a prostitute (Elisha), as a black transsexual (Legion) who fails to fit into “his” father’s expectations of a straight boy, and as a black woman (The Comforter). Being an individual, each character, then, as the prominent contemporary African American poet C.S. Giscombe says in Border Towns, is a “border individual” inhabiting “border spaces.” The borders between private and public, and between law

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and crime are blurred by the homeless, for living on “the street” as homespace means that to live “in ‘a border area’ is a fact of consciousness” 2 (Giscombe 2016, ix–x). Lazarus’s rejection of the commonly accepted ideology of respectability, a construct of white supremacy, in favor of poverty, repositions him in the “border area” where he performs his agency to inhabit the location of an outsider. Since the poverty issue is “inherently political,” to use Robert Walker’s words, because “it poses a threat to the status quo” (2014, 49), a black man’s choice of not-belonging, is a challenge to the white dominant culture. As he redirects his agency, transforming a life of waste into that of meaning, he evidently privileges a liberated sense of black subjectivity. In a white supremacist society where the nationalist ideology relies upon racial hierarchies in organizing the nation “as a ‘home’ and its people as a ‘family’” (Shockley 2011, 9), it is not surprising that Lazarus’s nonconformity truly means a refutation of racialized limitations imposed on his personal freedom. The novel starts with Lazarus’s affective recollection of how the life of capitalist excess had killed his soul before he became homeless, because he was caught in a kind of model of the individualist upward mobility narrative without knowing how to break through it. Although he cannot align himself with a solely consumerist notion of progress, he is also quite aware that the homeless body is seen as devalued. Since homelessness in America is a pervasive social problem related to poverty and social inequality, “the dominant culture heavily stigmatizes poverty as an ‘individual pathology’ more than a structural phenomenon” (Amster 2008, 80). His “downward mobility” (McBrier and Wilson 2004, 285) entails that he has to cope not only with poverty, but also with “the stigma of being homeless” 3 (Parker, Reitzes, and Ruel 2016, 201). Knowing he has to bear the burden of “preserving and protecting a sense of self-esteem” (Parker, Reitzes, and Ruel 2016, 201), he counteracts the stigma of homelessness with a respectable appearance, subverting the negative homeless stereotype: “Being homeless is one thing,” Lazarus always says, “looking homeless is quite another” (2). Instead of using “identity talk,” 4 a strategy David Snow and Leon Anderson explore in the homeless (cited in Parker, Reitzes, and Ruel 2016, 201), to enhance his self-esteem, he lets his neat-looking black body affirm a positive attribute to those who see him on the street. Losing more than 70 percent of his savings overnight with the economic recession, has made him aware that nobody understood “what was at stake for a black man who had risked everything, who had trusted America, who had done the right things” (4). The reversal of the purposive action for a wealthy life, built into “a discourse of rationality,” which has produced the “displacement of self” (Watten 2016, 40, 43), enables him to quit his job and property ownership to live “another life” (3) at the age of

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forty, for he realizes that he sacrificed living a simply “human” life “in exchange for comfort and security” (4). Seeing hardwork as a “futile effort” (4), he sets out to teach his greedy kids, who live on “name-brand items” (7), a different lesson, “something different now, something contradictory to the way they’d once lived” 5 (5). In doing that, he both challenges the traditional conception of home as place “we can ‘be ourselves’” (Desmond 2016, 293), and that of homeownership as “a key component of the ‘American Dream’” (Mills and Fischer 2015, 23). For Lazarus, the roles dictated by white dominant culture’s organization of the everyday life “acts as an ideological determinant of the subject” (George 1996, 2), making him feel that he can never be his own self in a house, even though abandoning his kids hurts them a lot—an experience he had with his own father, Junior. Since discourses “shape subjectivities, or how individuals understand themselves in relation to the world,” Lazarus wanted Quad and Lizzie to break free of the discourse of whiteness to become aware of their “inherent dignity,” as he has claimed his own (Oeur 2016, 3–4). He deliberately acts on what Cathy Cohen would call “a politics of deviance” (qtd in Cacho 2012, 167) and stops working in business, “diligently deferring or sabotaging what was supposed to be his ‘American Dream’” (Cacho 2012, 167), an act of intervention in the ideology of whiteness that has imbued him with security. 6 He deals with the complexity of black life “outside of limited and essential categories” (Hogue 2013, 55), refusing to embody the “black masculine ideal” in a devastating everyday life. His renunciation of his ties to the corporate culture of white supremacist capitalism is an act, in Henry A. Giroux’s words, that makes it imperative for “a new vision that refuses to equate capitalism and democracy, normalize greed and excessive competition” 7 (2018a, 303). He no longer feels subjected to the white supremacist regulation of black lives because he realizes that conformity, as Thomas J. Scheff puts it, “blinds most individuals to their own inner visions” (1994, 162). His embrace of the alterity of homelessness interrupts the present, while it paradoxically shapes his racial subjectivity as a “homely” site, privileging the “new” black subject-position on the border of the white dominant society. Lazarus, as the protagonist, speaks “from,” literally, the street as a discursive space where he now feels his inward strength and freedom as a black man, who violated white dominant expectations of fulfilling, what W. Lawrence Hogue calls, the “sociopolitical mission of racial uplift” (2003, 9). I personally argue that Lazarus was bored living through a “white epistemic authority” (Yancy 2016b, 251) at the foundation of the upward mobility narrative that kept shaping his choices. As Lazarus is looking for a lifeline, he claims his human dignity by staying true to himself, an embodied critique of racial capitalism, as he recognizes that “blindness to the everyday undermines our ability to live fully and freely” (A. Epstein 2008, 478). His discontent with the pursuit of affluence serves as

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a radical critique that pertains to “a dimension of experience whose value we relinquish at our peril” (Sheringham 2010, 397). He quits the everyday life, embedded in “the hegemonic present” (Adams 2006, 55), as he revisits the memories of Lazarus I, his grandfather, whose poor life in the countryside was shaped by his disaffiliation with material ownership. His father, Junior, who left the land at the age of twenty-one, convinced Lazarus that there was something in the world “out there” that belonged to him, that he should claim. Having been left with his grandfather, who called him Trey, in Swamp Creek, Arkansas, in the summers, he observed how his grandfather thought of the sheep, whom Trey loved and fed, as “the chosen lambs of God” (11). His recollections of his past include his mother, Zeporah, a nurse practitioner, who stayed with Junior while he wasted himself away on drugs and women; Trey’s graduation from high school; his mother’s death; his Morehouse College years in early 1970s; his marriage to Deborah; and his job on Wall Street, while he helped Junior deal with his crack addiction at rehabilitation centers. He also remembers how Junior wanted to reunite with his own father, Lazarus I, but he grew reluctant, for his father’s disciplinary approach caused his loveless life of failure beyond repair. 8 When we see Lazarus III in the present moment, he moves to his space— he “claimed the space as his own” (18), and he forms a group with other homeless people—Cinderella, Elisha, and Legion—soon to be joined by The Comforter. They call their group “The Family” (18), a name that both designates “a space of mutual legibility” (Palumbo-Liu 2007, 197) and attests to the positive experience of their peer group cooperation, each of whom has a different personal story. Cinderella misses her father, a farmer, and she still wears the red shoes he gave as a gift for her high school prom. She and Lazarus believe they live “on borrowed time” and on “borrowed land” (20), while they stand on the borders of the society as outsiders with no permanent home, yet quite satisfied with becoming perpetual refugees. They occasionally have dinner at Hosea Feed the Hungry ministries, and the intelligent talks and discussions between them, including on the classics she lets him borrow, subvert the homeless stereotype as ignorant. The twenty-three-year-old African American man Elisha—whose mother was a crack user and a prostitute, and who never knew his father—grew up in foster homes, from which he finally fled. Legion, a young black transsexual, was born with “two representative organs of both sexes” (26), decided to become a woman, disappointing “his” father, who wanted a boy. Since her family abandoned her, she became homeless, prostituting herself to earn a living and bring food to her friends. Lazarus’s area, or what they call The Upper Room, serves as a family room, “a home away from home” (McIntyre 2003, 314). The Upper Room can be considered as community space through which the conventional space

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of home is problematized and comes to mean, what Melissa Mean and Charlie Tim would call, a “micro public spac[e]” 9 (qtd in Warner, Talbot, and Bennison 2013, 305). Claiming the right to public space demonstrates “the transgressive tactics” they employ, aiming at “re-drawing the boundaries of public and private” (Daya and Wilkins 2013, 359). These embodied affective ways in which they make space meaningful also articulate what is at stake in their everyday lives. If the makeshift homespace is where these people can be themselves (not a material home), it is a severe critique of the white dominant cultural narrative of home. 10 The self-naming as “The Family” points to how notions of home and belonging are social constructs and embodied practices, even though they are still affected by “the discursive regimes that circulate through it” 11 (P. Simpson 2011, 416). Samira Kawash writes that “there is no place in the contemporary urban landscape for the homeless to be,” and hence the issue of homelessness is always “a question of public space—of who the public is . . . and of how such space will be constituted and controlled” (1998, 326, 325). It was in one of The Family–gathering moments that Lazarus informs them that there is the possibility of having a black president, Barack Obama: “He seems promising. Harvard grad. Community activist. Family man. Handsome” (31). For Lazarus, this view of a black man, who is on the verge of inhabiting a “public” presidential space, the White House, as his homespace, belies the racial stereotype, as a way of performing blackness otherwise. Lazarus, who came “from privilege to the streets” (29), hates seeing the devalued image of the homeless with carts, a symbol of poverty and helplessness with “no dignity” 12 (29). He defines his self-worth, and his dissociation of his being from the experience of homelessness becomes a way for him to preserve his self-esteem. 13 Lazarus breaks through the stigma of homelessness, because for him living a life of lack does not necessarily make respectability and homelessness incommensurable. Similarly, Cinderella hates the cartpushers, and being associated with “a homeless buggy” (30) whom others simply pity. Both Lazarus and Cinderella believe that homeless people cannot be regarded as passive subjects within the prevailing social order; they are capable of establishing a sense of their agency. The Comforter, a black woman healer, who soon joins them, feels her decision to have “the freedom to be herself among the living” (35) is now fulfilled. Since The Comforter came, she “prophesies” that their communal bond will save them through a crisis they will experience soon. It is a scene that demonstrates how the homeless people produce “spaces of inclusion” to the degree that “the material and the affective are always already one dimension” (Daya and Wilkins 2013, 359, 361). Her prophecy includes her spiritual vision of seeing The Family crying and rejoicing, meaning that individualism will be their doom, but their communal bonding and solidarity will save them: “Our success will be collective. None of us will survive alone. Cover-

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ing yourself only will be the doom of The Family” (39). The Comforter’s spiritual vision implies that they will have to be prepared to fight a battle to protect one of their own, the lost lamb, quite similar to how “[t]he discourse of battle presupposes processes of rupture, agency, and the capacity to resist,” George Yancy writes, “certain processes of white racist interpellation” (2016b, 255). The moment of crisis, The Comforter predicts, starts with an article in the newspaper, which Cinderella reads aloud to all The Family in Lazarus’s absence. A rich white woman, Elizabeth Dupont, is found dead on her kitchen floor in the family house in Buckhead, and her husband, famous attorney Steven Dupont, declares that the only person of interest is “a homeless man the family hired recently to perform yard duties” (40) and his name is Lazarus. This criminalization of a black homeless man intimates “personal failing, laziness, and moral decay,” and exposes homelessness as a discursive location of precarity that promotes a favored understanding of the condemnation of the homeless people “who violate norms” (Kyle 2005, 101). However, precarity causes a rupture that enables an undoing of attachments to gendered and racialized configurations of social identities and the emergence of transgressive acts. The undoing of a racialized, regulative ideals and norms can enable the redemptive aspects that operate within, what Ritu Vij calls, “the affective domain of precarity” (2013, 123) in the social world. This act of undoing reminds one of, to adapt Lauren Berlant’s inquiry here, the possibility of overcoming “cruel” (2011, 227) attachments to the white negative views of a black homeless man, thereby generating an affective terrain of intelligibility within which racial(ized) hierarchies privilege white over black, rich over poor. In this respect, Elisha thinks of Lazarus: “As if homelessness meant he could be treated any kind of way” (41). However, the affective normalization of the homeless people’s precarity produces the experience of vulnerability, which itself can provide a “crack” in whiteness, for Lazarus, bearing a potential space for change. Elisha, who had not realized the extent to which Lazarus had filled “the internal voids” (44) in him, searches for Lazarus, panic stricken, brings him to The Upper Room, and informs him of the news. Lazarus assures The Family he is innocent and gives the account of what actually took place: When he was in front of Whole Foods three weeks ago, he met the Duponts, who hired him to work in their garden, but he neither went inside nor saw Mr. Dupont in the whereabouts at the time he worked. Mrs. Dupont gave her scarf to Lazarus as a gift after payment for gardening, and he gives it as a gift to Cinderella, whose love for him “was unrequited” 14 (53). When Cinderella claims that Lazarus needs a lawyer because he is black, Lazarus agrees that blackness designates him as a potential criminal: “The law won’t be on my side” (56). His black male body is the site that rich white people can, indeed, dump their crimes on, for the idea of black criminality, Khalil Gibran Mu-

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hammad reminds us, “shaped the ‘public transcript’ of the modern urban world” (2010, 273). The police soon come to where he lives, including the black police officer, who arrests and beats him violently out of the public space: “Like a pack of starving wolves, they descended upon him,” as if they were “taming a beast that had apparently terrorized their consciousness [in order] to assure Atlanta of its safety” (58). It is a scene that demonstrates how black and homeless people such as Lazarus face police violence, because “they are simply dehumanized in the bigoted minds of violent offenders” (Levin 2015, 1726). Lazarus was beaten severely “in exchange for” the murder he never committed, but which he is, “by virtue of [his] Blackness, always already about to commit or cause” (Yancy 2016b, 249). The black police officer’s beating of Lazarus, till he bleeds, in front of the precinct and in the presence of the crowd, is a scene of punishing the black body not only to re-create the spectacle of, what Elizabeth Alexander calls, the historically enslaved and displaced “black bodies in pain for public consumption” (qtd in Sharpe 2010, 123), but also to enact everyday transactions through, what Christina Sharpe calls, “the violence of the law and the gaze” (Sharpe 2010, 11). The black policeman uses the power of social entitlement as an officer against the urban black poor, and he disavows commonality with Lazarus out of the “politics of respectability”: “Fearful of the ‘white gaze,’ ‘righteous’ middle-class African Americans sought to curtail behaviors among the poor that would perpetuate stereotypes and undercut middleclass claims of equality” (Fortner 2015, 15). Apparently, the black police officer becomes “white” as he sees Lazarus as “challeng[ing] the police’s competence to control space” (Amster 2008, 111), for racialization, as Alexander G. Weheliye considers, is “ongoing sets of political relations” that require “the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human” 15 (Weheliye 2014, 3). Legion, who tried to stop Lazarus from violent beating, was tossed to the ground by the police, “the uniformed mob” (59), ridiculing her as a drag queen. This insult shows that not all the lives matter, in contrast to what the Black Lives Matter movement has advocated recently—especially those of blacks and transsexuals. This racist view causes “the exclusion of racially gendered bodies from public spaces—and from public discourse around profiling and policing” (Ritchie 2016, 87). While Legion tries to find a lawyer for Lazarus, Cinderella, as a white woman, is terribly affected by the police brutality during the arrest of Lazarus, treated “like some exiled refugee suddenly dispossessed of his land” (60). She is quite taken aback by affective sentiments about racism, for she sees closely for the first time in her life of the criminalization of black people in everyday life. In this moment of crisis, we do not only see what Lazarus meant to his friends, but also witness the “quiet” in all the members of The Family, who delve into the recollections of the painful lived experiences in their past, an

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act that serves as what Barrett Watten calls “compilation of microhistories” with its “discontinuous moments” (Watten 2016, 119), intersecting with the present. Treated all his life as a nobody, Elisha feels privileged that not only a man but especially a black man, whom he calls “Daddy” (47), has found him worthy of attention, even sharing his bread with him. When he is arrested for a crime he never committed, Lazarus misses his father and his grandfather, for they were the men who knew “how to replace painful memories with reconstructed history” (52). Legion remembers how her choice to live as a woman represented to her father an example of his born son’s “deformity,” “spoiled masculinity,” and “sexual indiscretion” (65), while understanding her father’s rage at her rejecting the patriarchal privilege of masculinity. Meanwhile, Lazarus’s interrogation by a black male officer whose internalized “white” racist expectations that he must have killed Mrs. Dupont because of sexual desire enact how “the rapist mythoform is already inscribed upon the Black body” (Jackson and Balaji 2015, 246). The scene is an implicit reminder that Lazarus is discursively ambushed by Jim Crow racist view, demonstrating how “the cult of true womanhood” precipitated “the ‘justified’ violence and lynching of black men” (Harwell 2016, 99). The black interrogation officer, who embodies intracultural bias, finds shelter in confirming his loyalty and “attachment to the system and thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel bound to it” (Berlant 2011, 227). Cinderella’s whiteness saved her from being assaulted by the police, when she reacted to their violence to a black man. Having inhabited the normative culture, she has never learned that “the socially situated epistemic insights of people of color are indispensable” (Yancy 2014, 48) to seeing through the operations of whiteness. As she gradually sees that the black body, as Dionne Brand remarks, “is a space not simply owned by those who embody it, but constructed and occupied by other embodiments” (qtd in Sharpe 2010, 121), she grieves for the fact that, as she observed, people were not treated as mere people. Bruised by the police for defending Lazarus, a moment that generates affect in the crowd, Elisha, who longs for his mother’s presence on the scene, wants to see a social movement “to teach Americans how people of color always suffer at the hand of whites” (61). When he goes to Piedmont Park and sees the young woman, Lizzie, whom he earlier saw talking to Lazarus, and tells her about Lazarus’s arrest, he is surprised to hear that Lazarus is her biological father. The Comforter considers white police as “the descendants of those who’d perfected human bondage” (70). As she withdraws into her spiritual realm, she calls on angels and the spirits of all her relatives to help and attend Lazarus to make his soul feel that he is not alone, “to conjure company for one who had been stripped of the family he’d made” (71).

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After his arrest, Lazarus is accompanied by a new role model, a much older black man, Moses Johnson, whom he met in the jail cell while waiting for interrogation. While Moses makes him aware of police violence against black male bodies, Lazarus shares Moses’s grievances on how black men are considered criminals, while white men commit similar crimes. Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow (2010), elaborates on how mass incarceration, in similar terms to slavery and Jim Crow racism, defines “the meaning of blackness in America” by deploying the image of black men as criminals (192). For Moses, the problem can be resolved to a large extent, when the roots of racial subjectivity have to be defined within black people’s connectedness with each other, as in slavery times. He believes African Americans lost their self-worth because of the impact of the ideology of whiteness in internalizing white hatred of black people: “We think African spirituality is devil worship. Really, the devil taught us that. We worship him by hating ourselves” (80). His words point to the centrality of self-love that recognizes, in Bettina Love’s words, “the humanity of being Black,” for Moses believes that it is through self-love that black people can find the strength for “inner resistance” (Love 2016, 323, 320). Hence, Love suggests that, like Quashie, every black person has to learn to balance the public and the intimate through self-love in order to live a full human life, in similar terms to what Lazarus, who learned to love himself, wanted his kids to learn. Moses also articulates Lazarus’s feelings about the type of threat a black male body holds for white people, especially when he acts independently of normative expectations: “And ain’t nothin’ more dangerous in America than a black man who knows he don’t owe nobody nothin!’” (82). Moses, in fact, implies the danger of the breakdown of racial solidarity in order not to become one of, what Daniel Moynihan called, the “black silent majority” (cited in Fortner 2015, 169) in complicity with the white embodied gaze. Meanwhile, The Family members act in nonracialized solidarity to help Lazarus to be freed from jail and come clean in their own ways. The Comforter, whom her mother considered “The Comforter of the world” (106), ended up in her youth, projecting her self-love to healing others: “She worked overtime most days, rebuilding people’s self-worth and teaching them how not to measure success in material terms” (107). Her vision of the lambs during her visit at the zoo makes her realize that “the lament of the lambs” she keeps hearing means that she had been sent to save Lazarus, “the lost black lamb” (114). The Family gathers in The Upper Room in the evening, sitting in silence and thinking to plan how they will act to help Lazarus. Their “quiet” (Quashie 2012, 1) seems to be shared by each member on “spiritual cue” as they reach for one another’s hands, “nudged by an instinct to touch and create harmony in a difficult, affective place” (115). Brian Massumi’s concept of affect is useful in this scene: In an interview with Mary Zournazi, Massumi explains that affect is fluid, as it works both ways:

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At the moment when one affects something, that person is also opening “up to being affected” bringing up a change. “You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity” (Massumi 2015a, 3–4). The Family decides to act on The Comforter’s belief that they all have to take risks to save him: “Each of us must do our part to bring Lazarus home” (117). Cinderella, for instance, decides to lead a protest with picket signs and slogans, just like they did in the marches during the civil rights movement. The protest will be in front of the precinct where Lazarus got arrested with the hope of bringing out news stations and reporters: “Publicity always makes people more conscious of what they’re doing” (117). Legion informs them that she got a lawyer Aaron Freeman, an old friend, for Lazarus, to the joy of The Family. The Comforter shares with them her insight that Lazarus needs to reconnect with someone—Quad, as we soon see—in order to repair what is broken in his life: “We need the universe to bend in his favor, and it won’t budge until he repairs what’s broken” (119). Elisha, on the other hand, also determined to do something for Lazarus, goes to his old neighborhood where he and his late mother, Sorrow, lived, and he gets from the social worker the deed and the land he inherited from his mother and her family. 16 Elisha wants to sell the land to pay for Lazarus’s bail. In the meantime, we also see how Legion sacrifices her dignity in her prostitution with Aaron, a bisexual black (married) man, to help Lazarus. 17 The Comforter and all pray in The Upper Room to thank God, as they form “a circle of healing” (140) before the day Lazarus appears in court, treated like a “captured” slave (read: new Jim Crow), shuffled into the court “like a defiant bull at auction” (141). Lazarus knows he has to outsmart the public by not performing the racial stereotype, while also knowing the people would always fall for a negative image of a black man. His performativity of “cultural Whiteness” (Nielsen 1994, 15) enables him to speak up for himself when his state-given lawyer in the courtroom hesitates to defend a black man’s rights, because he has the self-acceptance that he is not merely black but a man—“an innocent black man” (144). Feeling that the homeless are not necessarily the helpless, he does not feel homeless, for he has a home on the street, much like pilgrims who founded America. Identifying with pilgrims, who had also chosen space and “made themselves a home” (144), he also claimed space and made himself at home. What defines Lazarus’s homeless life becomes the spatial equivalent of pilgrims whereas the notion of American identity, to use Stephen Bottoms’s words in a different context here, as “built around the WASP-ish notions of individualism, capitalism, and family values” (qtd in Westgate 2011, 46), seems to locate his body against the law. A feeling of dissociation from the whiteness of pilgrims comes with agonizing consequences of feeling “out of place” with this vision of America. Even though the systemic revision of

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pilgrims is built upon the painful denial of self for black people, it still offers a deliberate break from normativity. They are all involved in a violation of norms: transsexual resisting heteronormativity, spiritual resisting material, individual resisting abusive family values. These characters all broke with authority, at some point in the past, disrupting normative values. Lazarus seems to wake them up from their dead lives in a space of “the outsiderwithin” (Collins 1991, 11), where transgression has come to mean transformation at the personal and social level. Lazarus and Moses Johnson are regular cellmates in Fulton County Jail, similar to slaves in slave ships, whose survival depended on brotherhood in moments of “unspeakable distress” (148). The “cell” talk between Moses Johnson and Lazarus exposes how their lives are bound up with a racializing white gaze rooted in U.S. chattel slavery that overdetermines blackness as criminality, or what Dan Berger calls “prison slavery” (2016, 14). Saidiya Hartman contends that black lives are currently devalued by the same racial lens in “the afterlife of slavery,” because black people are still disadvantaged by “incarceration” (2006, 6). Similarly, Stephen Dillon and Allison Page agree with Hartman’s account of the racial logic common to both slavery and the current moment: “It also makes visible the centuries-long devaluation of black life that manifests itself in the biopolitics of everyday life” 18 (2015, 284). White supremacist society’s patriarchal discourse on blacks, built upon oppressive constructions, must be challenged with, what Jose Estaban Muñoz calls, “disidentificatio[n]” (1999, 1) with the normative script of blackness in the white cultural imaginary. Sticking together, Lazarus, with Moses’s help, understands now, “an unspoken pact, a silent contract” (148) was still needed among all black men and women in contemporary America. Lazarus remembers how he quit the family so his children would learn “to live with less” as humble people who “might alter the course of the world in some significant way” 19 (148). Moses helps him develop a social awareness as well, as he compares police to “modern-day slave catchers” (150), for their “denial of personhood” is similar to how “enslavement” was enabled in the past. Similarly, Angela Y. Davis writes that she is seriously concerned with “the rise of the prisonindustrial complex that is turning our people into slaves again.” 20 Moses, similarly, talks about African American history and that black men are locked up in jail because of their racialized identity. Robbed of their history and agency, black men are reduced to “slave” status, Moses explains, for the white supremacist system is built upon the “racial criminalization” (Muhammad 2010, 3). His warning to Lazarus against the distorted view of history is important because the multiple interpretations of historical events are necessary “if the hegemonic present does not blind us to them” (Adams 2006, 55). He sharpens Lazarus’s perspective about the way the white institutional practices such as “mass incarceration” and “the criminalization of the homeless,”

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Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge explain, clearly demonstrate how “global capitalism” (2016, 154) works. Moses contests white elitist appropriation of a common-sense view of black criminality in “the construction of the neoliberal carceral state” (J.T. Camp 2016, 147). With Moses’s help, Lazarus recognizes the roots of his fractured self, and also the truth that black men, like Lazarus’s grandfather, are treated as embodiment of “scapegoat blackness” (Mackey 2000, 283). Moses warns him that the officials want to break black men’s spirit, an act pivotal to maintaining the power of white supremacy: “They been tryin’ to break us from the beginning. They got most brothas. Don’t let them get you” (151). Even though Lazarus is still afraid, he is determined more than ever to win over his enemies in court to clear his name. Even though Legion does not love Aaron, she continues the relationship, “performing” love for Lazarus’s sake, for her hope is placed “in the present” (155) and not in the future that people keep thinking about. In the meantime, Cinderella, Lazarus’s “white ally” (Yancy 2008, 235), wants to gather whites, especially white women, for the protest demonstration, because the police do not beat white women. Even though she does not bear much hope for Lazarus, she gathers eight white women, one white man who wants to help people out of violence, and a black woman, called “The Empress” (164) by her friends. Cinderella had volunteered to work with them at a women’s shelter in the past and had kept in touch all these years, and they spread word to other shelters for more people to join their supportive demonstration for Lazarus. She helped many of these women, and they appreciated and respected her, feeling the joy of their “reunion” (161) for a common cause. Cinderella’s struggle in the present is much different from the one she made in the past, because she is fighting both for justice and for her loved one. When media people come to report on this “bodily public action” (J. Butler 2015, 72), a reporter from Channel 2 asks her about her relationship to Lazarus. Cinderella’s response is very affective: “He’s a human being who’s done nothing wrong! . . . It’s about justice! And fighting for the rights of the poor” (166). Alex Altman remarks, “Protest is a performance that can make the unseen visible” (qtd in K.J. Powell 2016, 255). Cinderella and her fellow homeless use their constitutional right to use streets “for the purpose of assembly”: “Any social struggle requires space,” and much like the Occupy Wall Street movement, in Don Mitchell’s words, these characters also create “a new kind of public space” as much as they create “a space for a new kind of world” (2003, 239) in claiming “the right to the city.” The fact that white, black, and brown people come together to provide publicity and demand justice for Lazarus’s case is significant, for the movement organized by a white woman, calling all people to action, means that “black life is made to matter” (K.J. Powell 2016, 255). In the meanwhile, The Comforter starts her project of reconnecting Lazarus with his father and his own children, writing anonymous notes to Quad.

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As Quad receives a business envelope in his mailbox in Buckhead, we witness his “quiet,” which is all about pent-up anger and hatred for his father’s “abandonment” of them. Since the moment he read about his father in the paper, he realizes this letter is not from Lazarus: “Your father’s in trouble. Only you can save him. He needs you now. And he’s sorry” (169). After twenty years of neglect, he in the visiting room of the jail, is unable to stare at Lazarus with anger and hatred, as he planned, “the longer he gazed, the more he loved the man he’d hated” (171). Quad wants him to find a new lawyer, because as a black man his life is on the line: “You ever heard of a black man defending himself against a white woman in court?” (172). As they start communicating with each other for the first time after two decades, Quad is not convinced by his father’s explanation that he did not want to struggle for a better life any longer: “The house was big enough for us to hide in and that’s what we did. We hid from each other. But I wanted you” (174). The novel resurrects Lazarus, like his namesake, from a soul-killing living death he has suffered; he searched within himself for nurturance in the face of his challenges as an African American man. Homelessness is a productive challenge to the limitations of “an illusion of upward mobility or token whiteness” (A.X. Smith 2016, 65). Since black people have been bound by white dominant constructions of the “real,” Elizabeth Alexander notes, they have struggled to identify “complex and often unexplored interiority beyond the face of the social self” (2004, 4–5). For Lazarus, being a black man has meant “a process of self-creation in a society that has already defined [him],” to use Mychal Denzel Smith’s words, for he has resisted “that definition because it denies [his] humanity” (2016, 218). Since Quad, living an affluent life, is totally oblivious to the meaning of self-awareness, lost as he is in the success myth, we see Lazarus’s frustration that he had failed to raise his children’s consciousness, feeling like a total failure. When Aaron comes to jail to meet Lazarus and work as his new lawyer, they start immediately working on the case: Lazarus reconstructs his memory of the day of murder, and mentions Mrs. Dupont’s gift of one of the two identical scarves and how he felt like he should return it. Since it is now evidence, Aaron wants it back for use in the courtroom. Otherwise, Aaron is concerned that “it would destroy your credibility” (177). Lazarus, like his grandfather, listens to the lambs, to see through his wrongs, envisioning himself in his grandfather’s porch, and prays to God to show him what to do. Once again, we bear witness to his “quiet,” which is by no means wishing away the exterior social world, but a return to the complexity of his inner life: “He’d heeded a call to life, to living, to meaning, and in the process found God” (180). His grandfather never verbalized his affective self-knowledge, which Trey “comprehended” but could not explain: “Every man is responsible for every man. Everywhere” (181). He senses that the shifting melodies of the lambs now enables Lazarus to comprehend their full message. He also

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realizes that if he does not reconnect with his father, his son and daughter will never have a grandfather in their lives: “Perhaps that was the message of the lambs—that no man is dispensable, no Lazarus insignificant, no son complete without a father, no human erasable” (181). In contrast to his grandfather’s failure to save Junior from addiction, Lazarus wants to bridge the gap between Junior and his grandson Quad. 21 Like his namesake, brought back to life from the dead by Christ, Lazarus in this affective moment feels like “a dead man resurrected” (181), and sits up on his bed in the jail cell. Once the crying of the lambs is over, for he has heard their message, he sees through Quad’s anger and frustration for having had to live without a father by his side, and realizes that Junior walked away, out of love for Trey, unable to bear “the look of shame lingering in his son’s eyes” (183). In his self-reflexive space, he understands how it is difficult to measure the consequences of one’s decisions without being able to make his life represent “the truth of his heart” 22 (183). Junior’s interiority enters the moment when Lazarus remembers how Junior was beaten up by Lazarus I to punish him for “mediocrity” (186)—for the fear that he will fall short of white normative expectations. The effort to place the black body “in need of white discipline” (Yancy 2016b, 252) under control causes Lazarus I to pacify Junior into an entirely nonthreatening body to the state, and thereby keep him safe. 23 Reflecting on this, Lazarus now wants to reunite with Junior, and asks for Quad’s help. Unlike his grandfather, who heard but never listened to the lambs, Lazarus has decided to listen and obey the message in order to have “his freedom” 24 (190). The Family prays together for Lazarus with a sense of strength in their togetherness, for they replace the spiritual with the greed-oriented values and dreams that cannot harbor personal integrity, feeling “like a band of fugitive slaves” (195), who take refuge in each other. Elisha sells his family’s inheritance, and proposes to use it for Lazarus’s bail. Cinderella works with the homeless picketers as media coverage continues, increasing the public interest in the case against Lazarus. Legion keeps bringing lunch for the protesters, revealing her emerging “radical interiority” (Dunn 2016, 171), and she also tells Cinderella that she needs $50,000 for the lawyer, for which Elisha is willing to pay. Even though they can play through what James C. Scott termed “hidden transcript,” and they are up against the wall, they may still defer in the face of the white oppressive system, “speaking the lines and making the gestures [they know] are expected of [them]” (1990, 4). When The Comforter wounds herself to appear as such to get what she wants, she can be considered an embodiment of, what Gloria Anzaldua calls, “spiritual activism” (qtd in Ortega 2016, 42). After she slit her left check with razor blade, she goes to jail, pretending she is Lazarus’s mother, and tells the officers that he is innocent, managing to bring Lazarus home with her. 25 Clearly, The Comforter’s appropriation of a racial stereotype—an old black

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mother in need of white officers’ help—is also a performance of “the interaction of disability and race as processes of constructing otherness” (C. Bell 2012, 19). Lazarus goes to see his son, and as he waits at the door, he sees that Quad is surrounded by a life of excess. The white upper–middle-class mothers’ anxiety about the embodied presence of an “iconic black ghetto” (E. Anderson 2011, 3) simply means that “a strange dreadlocked black man” (213) is racialized and marked as intruder in their safe neighborhood, for they draw the color line, especially when there is a visible class divide. 26 In view of the white gaze, Lazarus feels “human, but only human—not superhuman, as they were, or divinely human, as their religions confirmed” (213–14). These white mothers’ need to shield themselves from the presence of embodied blackness demonstrates that the black body is “imprisoned by ideological frames of reference that reduce the Black body ontologically to the level of the criminal” (Yancy 2008, xxi). On the contrary, Quad’s class identity positions him as safe, for even his house and yard display “the signs of upward mobility” (214). Feeling his whole effort has been “a dismal failure” (215), Lazarus wishes Quad would have the consciousness to see through the emptiness of his life. As Quad comes home from work in his BMW, Lazarus tells him in the house once again that he wanted them to see that they did not need to have an extravagant life to be happy: “I wanted you to be free” (216). He did not want them to be slaves to acquiring material culture, spending their life “working and paying bills just so others could be impressed. I wanted to show you how to live” (216)—to invest in themselves. Lazarus means that he wanted all his family to live a different life, to invest in their subjectivity and in each other, as opposed to a self-destructive life of conformity. 27 The faceto-face situation enables Quad to tell his father that he knows he is not a murderer. As they embrace each other in silence, they live a moment through which they transfer their “quiet” to each other. Once back in The Upper Room, Lazarus questions his decision to live with The Family, when all he wanted was to know life “unadorned, unmasked” (228) through an unmediated experience. Knowing the heavy cost of hurting his children, he sees why the black men in jail carry a look of longing in their eyes: Since American society never meant home to them, they were in constant search for home, where people assumed they were not potential criminals by virtue of their skin color: “If they had only believed they were inferior, if they only could have swallowed the myth of their futility, they could’ve been free” (228). That is, if they gave up on their human agency, and performed the racial stereotype in the public imaginary, they would have been left alone by white people. In other words, they would not be considered truly American in a society where poverty is considered “as a nationality,” to use Paulo Freire’s words, because the poor are made to

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feel guilty, “accepting the guilt the system has attributed [them] for [their] lack of success,” and hence, “not American” (2016, 56). When The Family and Lazarus are done with the meal, Lazarus walks downtown to meet Aaron at his office, for he is not yet legally free. Claiming “the right to his own black body” (Coates 2015, 68), he is dressed in good clothes, walking from The Upper Room “like a real American citizen, as if his homelessness had been a mere social experiment from which he’d been released” (234)—except for his worn out shoes. Lazarus resents giving the impression of the filthy homeless, for such apparent look causes, in turn, the objectification of the black body that “hail[s] and fix[es] the white body as normative” (Yancy 2008, xvi). Aaron believes Lazarus’s nonstereotypical appearance, “not the regular, desperate, mentally challenged homeless man looking for a handout” (237), will help his defense. Aaron’s perception, which sounds like a cynical assessment, is hurtful to Lazarus although it may play effectively against the jury’s presumptive assumptions about a homeless man. Lazarus knows what he is up against: “Everyone knew a black man, of any station, was guilty before proven guilty” (237). Aaron needs the names of Lazarus’s character witnesses to his personal integrity. Cinderella is one of his obvious choices not only because she is white, but because she witnessed how blacks are treated by the police. She also organized a protest movement and expressed a strong desire for a social change “to dismantle once and for all this ugly thing called racism in America” (239). In reality, Aaron, an embodied American Dream ideology adherent, discriminates against the poor and homeless people, including blacks. He has his reservations about Cinderella, as a homeless person, being on the witness stand, believing she may harm their case because the jury may not consider her “credible” (239). Aaron explains to Lazarus that homelessness is related to the social class issue, and that putting Cinderella on the witness stand will not help with the case. Since Lazarus’s other friends are both “homeless and black” (240), Aaron offensively remarks that they would not be credible to the jury. Even though Aaron is a black lawyer, he performs the ideology of respectability, an embodied whiteness through his class arrogance to the poor, which offends and makes Lazarus furious, leaving his office right after this comment. Aaron’s insensitivity is not geared only to black men, who failed in upward mobility, but also to black “women” such as Legion, whom he urges to love him, 28 fulfilling his homoerotic desire in his relationship with Legion, not regulated by the white normativity. Lazarus is deeply disappointed to see another black man humiliating him and looking down on lower social class members so carelessly. His association of Aaron’s treatment with white slave planters’ acts to break the spirit of “his people” (241) clearly demonstrates that Aaron “acts white” in similar terms to how the slave owners saw blacks as less than human, “as if their humanity

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were a parody of real, live human beings,” (241) because they presumed blackness “an aberration forced upon the world” (241). Identifying with the degradation of slaves, when he leaves Aaron’s office in rage to walk on the streets, Lazarus cries not only for his grief-stricken soul, but for all the homeless people, seen and treated as less than human: “These are people!” (241). Aaron’s attitude implies “how alienating material structures of white domination originally created by human causality now, in reified and coercive ways, distort the senses” (Mills 2014, 37). Ironically, his confrontation with white people’s multiple stereotypes of the (black and) homeless continue in the public sphere. His performativity of “ordinary affect” (Stewart 2007, 9) is perceived by the passersby as affective moment of a black man in need of a white savior. This is a crucial moment in the novel that demonstrates one of his, to use Nigel Thrift’s words, “nonrepresentational practices of being-in-the-world” (cited in Cloke et al. 2008, 246). His affect exceeds the white supremacist regulatory discourse in the sense that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s view of affects as “becomings” (qtd in Thrift 2008, 116) figure into the black performativity of affect as a practice of becoming in this scene. The passersby who pity this sobbing street bum, as they see him, drop nickels, because all they see is the fallacious association between race, poverty, and pain. Lazarus’s crying on the street is a scene that explores the black body within the public context of whiteness, where the white people treat him with a discursive violence. All they see is the physical manifestation of pain, without the emphatic understanding of his inner self, his “quiet,” without thinking how “the weight of prejudice and discrimination, stereotypes and cultural myths, had finally gotten the best of him,” and that he was crying “for a dying world” (242). When a little white girl points her finger at him, her mother is angry at her impolite gesture, reminding her to be grateful she is “fortunate enough” 29 (242). The white mother acts as one of those “good white people,” who “pass down habits of whiteness” to their children “through their conversations and silences” (Sullivan 2014, 3, 115). As she conveys the social stigma to him, she perpetuates “the distortion of [his] Black body” as needy, pointing to the broader issue of “how Whiteness gets performed every day under the banner of ‘good intentions’” (Yancy 2008, 22, 35). The imposed shame on Lazarus implies that shame is used by the dominant culture as “an important mechanism of social control” (Pellissery and Mathew 2015, 148). Lazarus’s performativity of affect makes it clear for us to see how, in the words of Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “the complexity of an interiority that always-already occupies a social and political space, a claim to personhood in the midst of social determinism” (2012, 286). The white woman pities Lazarus as if his “unfortunate” state of being can be used as an investment in “successful consumption” of paying to avoid his suffering in public, transforming the homeless into “the ‘lamentable sight’ of homeless-

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ness against the spectacle of capital” (Gerrard and Farrugia 2015, 2231). Unable to stop crying, this moment of realization makes him understand the color code even more deeply: 30 If he were born white, he would never be homeless, and hence there would be no conflict of interest with his wife and kids, “who were happy being white alone” (243). Being black, in contrast, means that he has to face a difficult search for his life’s meaning on his own terms, while he can be easily electrocuted for a crime he never committed. His life on the line, this affective truth almost gets hold of his whole body, and he is unable to stop crying. Following this scene, Lazarus goes to the Homeless Shelter, and inquires if anyone, who hangs out in Buckhead, saw anything on the day of the murder, and learns that Mr. Dupont’s car was seen at Metropolitan at 3 a.m., which was strange, for no white man would be around in that part of the town after dark. At about the same time Lazarus met Aaron at his office, Cinderella and her fellow picketers keep marching and receiving media attention. They are also exposed to reporters’ questions, suspecting his acting in line with “black men’s historical desire for white women” (249). Their witnessing the humiliation of black men, reduced to nobody, was named by Cinderella “the Zero Coefficient of Negroes” (250) following the police assault on Lazarus. The marchers felt like Martin Luther King Jr., a spirit that evolved the transition of their motive for participation “from simple consent to active desire for a new social order” (250). Similarly, Marc Lamont Hill, in his book Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (2016), explains that “to be Nobody in twenty-firstcentury America” means “to be vulnerable” (xvii). Hence, Cinderella and her fellow activists, representing “Nobody,” know very well that there is a need for resisting “market values” and reinvesting in the power of the community to “imagine the world that is not yet” (M.L. Hill 2016, 180). In a similar vein, Elisha and The Comforter work for this very purpose: After Elisha finds Lizzie at Piedmont Park, he explains that Lazarus’s real motive in leaving them was “to figure out another way to live” (257), for he wanted kids “to notice the important things in life” (258) without being caught up in trivial things. He also advises her that she should give her father a second chance— a second chance that people like Elisha have never had. When the day of Lazarus’s trial comes, the courtroom has a multicultural audience—predominantly white, also black and brown people, some of whom are media people. The Upper Room residents joined forces with “local civil liberties activists, come to ward off yet another black male lynching” (268). After Aaron asks Lazarus to take the witness stand and give an account of what he did on the day of murder, Lazarus faces the white female prosecutor’s prejudiced questions and attitude toward him. His calm and confident posture of innocence evokes the anger of the white female prosecutor about the twin scarf he allegedly stole: “Isn’t it true that you have the

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other . . . somewhere in safekeeping, hoping to sell it for a lot of money after all this is over?” (273). The false accusation exposes the failure of the law, reinforcing “performative (his)trocities” 31 embedded in Harvey Young’s theory of “phenomenal blackness,” a term that describes white “essentialist interpretations of knowing blackness” (Cowin-Mensah 2015, 252, 249). The white female prosecutor, in this respect, tries to turn the case against him, because he is always already a damaged person; apparently, she practices her whiteness within a public space to control and police “the ‘thug’ body” (Yancy 2016b, 250). The prosecutor and Mr. Dupont want to reduce him to a vulnerable citizen to feel their whiteness as comfort. Their claim that Lazarus must have entered the house is a way of reinforcing the black image in the white imaginary; that is, his “mis-placement in a ‘white’ space” as testimony to his status as an intruder and murderer (Light 2015, 297). Even though she has not looked for smoking-gun evidence to indict Lazarus, the white prosecutor never doubts Mr. Dupont’s insistence that his wife had two identical scarfs, the one he shows to the court and one he claims is missing: “He has the scarf! I’m telling you he has it! It was him! I know it was! Who else could it have been?” (273). This reveals the discursive “crack” in whiteness, evoking the black masculinity as a symbolic register in the sense that “the ‘ghettocentricity’ of Black masculinity contrasts with public spheres in which Whiteness dominates” (Jackson and Balaji 2015, 245). While Lazarus hears the lambs, he is shocked to see that Quad 32 brought Junior to the courtroom where Lazarus and Junior reunite, and the moment of healing is without measure: Lazarus tells his father that he loves him, and he repeats to his kids in the courtroom that he needed another way to live, because he felt he was “dying in corporate America” (280). Character witnesses testify that his character is not a morally questionable one. Cinderella testifies that Lazarus is “a man of character” (289). Even though she does not know that Lazarus can easily place his life on the line by hiding that he gave the scarf, Mrs. Dupont’s gift, to Cinderella, and he never asks her to bring it back to the court as evidence for fear that she will get hurt, she finally takes the second scarf out. Legion, on the witness stand, confronts the prosecutor, who wants to intimidate her, and does not give up on defending Lazarus. 33 She challenges the prosecutor’s stereotype of a prostitute in saying that she has sex with men for pleasure, not for money, and she disrupts the jurors’ stereotypical views, forcing them to “reconsider cultural stereotypes of people unlike themselves” (303). Caught up between the judge’s sympathy for her and the prosecutor’s “intimidating presence” (303), Legion performs her despised identity effectively in the courtroom. When the prosecutor calls her “a liar, a thief, and a prostitute” (303), Legion mocks her. Legion’s act of undoing her whiteness causes the prosecutor to experience an affectivity, and Legion rises from the witness stand as an achiever: She performed herself as a trouble-maker, who subverted “the prosecutor’s attempts to discredit” her

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(303). In addition, she broke the association between her homeless identity and her racial/transsexual identity with “bold,” “confident,” “intelligent” (303) responses, acting against the stereotype. Aaron, to Lazarus’s dismay, calls Lizzie to the witness stand to make the jury verify that “this homeless man was indeed human” (304). Even though Lizzie, who is now twenty-seven years old, resents Lazarus’s commitments to a life outside her family, she calls her father “a man of integrity” (306). Once Junior and Lazarus are in Quad’s house, following the court session, the healing process begins. 34 Knowing that a black man is always already guilty in the American judicial system, Lazarus fears that he may be sentenced to death. He stays the night with Junior at Quad’s house, but “in his heart he knew he wasn’t home” (322). Back in court, the prosecutor calls Mr. Steven Dupont to the witness stand, who accuses Lazarus of murdering his wife. As Aaron questions whether he is a racist because he keeps accusing this black man, Mr. Dupont claims that he is an anti-racist. Jeff Ferrell argues that the stereotyping of the homeless figure into the regulatory discursive frames in an attempt “to control public identity and public perception” (qtd in Amster 2008, 85). Even though Mr. Dupont claims he is not a racist, he has a racialized perception of the black male body, seeing Lazarus as a felon because he is black and poor. While he may not be consciously racist, his criminalization of a black homeless worker in the garden reveals that “the suggestive power of racist and racial signifiers is present” (Yancy 2016b, 248). Mr. Dupont’s defense soon starts falling apart: Aaron confronts Mr. Dupont’s account, noting that he, strangely enough, filled up his car the day before, whereas he should not need gas that often, living in Buckhead. The evidence points to the fact that Mr. Dupont hired someone, whose car he bought gas for, to kill his wife, a diabolical act that can be articulated as “criming while white.” 35 Once that person finished the job, Mr. Dupont met him, after he left Whole Foods, and filled his tank. Legion, on the witness stand, testifies that as she was “walking the streets” (334) she saw Mr. Dupont fill the tank of a black Mercedes, but he drove away in an old blue Ford Taurus instead. A rich white man in their part of the neighborhood was unlikely, and since there is a dent in the bumper of the black Mercedes, she recognizes the car in daylight, and that is why she never mentioned the car before and that she saw Mr. Dupont talking to a short, thin black man at the gas station. Mr. Dupont is called back to the witness stand, for it is evident that he bought gas at the Shell Station on Metropolitan on the night before the murder. Mr. Dupont starts lying and accuses Lazarus again, because “someone like that” (336), meaning a black homeless person, cannot be trusted—a statement that reveals his performance of anti-racism as fake. The image of a white body (Mr. Dupont) is demystified by Aaron with the help of Lazarus’s friends, subverting the discursive power of whiteness. His white

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body’s status as the site of innocence and purity is exposed as the site of performing, in Marilyn Frye’s words, “whitely” 36 (qtd in Yancy 2008, 47). After Mr. Dupont has a moment with the prosecutor, he decides to drop all the charges against Lazarus, who is now “free to go” (338). Lazarus cries, saying to The Family and to his family that they are all his “angels”; as they all hug each other, Lazarus thanks Junior and his children for giving him “a second chance” (338). Since Lazarus refused to dismiss “the transgressive potential of the mundane” (LeMaster 2014, 59), he has managed, in collaboration with The Family, to appreciate the everyday “as both medium and narrative of social transformation” (Yoka and Paschalidis 2015a, xi). When The Family gathers in The Upper Room, they believe they need Lazarus back with his “optimistic spirit” (339) to continue surviving: “He’d provided what none of them had ever had—a home all their own with people who wouldn’t give them away—and they wanted him back” (339). Elisha, especially, feels that Lazarus has made it possible for him to endure the loss of his mother: “He could never suffer this world alone” (339). Cinderella undergoes a moment of conversion, which helps her disrupt her sense of certainty—first by encountering Lazarus as human, rather than as a black, and later by witnessing police brutality against him. She acts on the “cracks in the wall of whiteness” (Bush 2011, 2) that her white body experiences, and hence, she becomes committed to doing whiteness differently. Even though fellow protesters congratulate Cinderella, before returning with all her allies to their lives of “public anonymity” (340), she sees it as the achievement based on their “collective effort” (340), for these forms of mutual assistance, in the words of Catriona Mackenzie, “foster and promote autonomy” (2013, 55). The Comforter keeps dancing in the courtroom and finally down the steps to the street, an act that causes the observers to think she is a crazy drunk old lady, refusing to accept her bodily articulation as an everyday form of “self-aestheticization” (Hewitt 2005, 34). In fact, since the dance in and of itself is “an art of the now,” The Comforter’s dance is “a way of expressing herself—her private space and her ‘real’ identity” (Thrift 2008, 139). Her dancing also represents a form of public expressiveness of “the spirituality of quiet” (Quashie 2012, 130). In Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World, Sudhir Kakar, the Indian psycholanalyst and writer, reminds us that the spiritual incorporates “the transformative possibilities of the human psyche” (2009, 5). All in all, The Family members challenge the white racist social world with its attendant discursive power relations, and they attempt “to forge new habits and new forms of self-knowledge” (Yancy 2008, 246). When the Love family (Lazarus, Junior, Quad, and Lizzie) enters The Upper Room, The Family welcomes them wholeheartedly, as if they were part of royalty, making the Loves realize that they are now in “a holy place” (340)—a scene that gives the sense that it is “[i]n most unlikely places we

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find loving and transformative touches” (Gillett 2008, 218). The Upper Room is now The Family’s own cultural space of communal identity, “free from the tyranny of the white gaze” (Yancy 2008, 133). Once Legion brings rich food and they have their lunch, they appreciate each other’s company, as we see how homelessness taught them to enjoy the ordinary joys of life: “By midafternoon, with bellies full and hearts relieved, they sat silently, looking at the universe from down under, posing it seemed, for a collective family portrait” (340). Arrested for an armed robbery in the late 1970s in Chicago for a crime he never committed, the black male artist John H. Sibley, in his book Being and Homeless: Notes from an Underground Artist, explains how this tragic experience, in a similar fashion to Lazarus’s, has haunted him in his entire life. Having said that, he also acknowledges how being homeless taught him to enjoy the basic pleasures in a human life, “[b]ut, most importantly, it taught me that it is more important to be a man first than an artist” (Sibley 2011, 141). ***** Listen to the Lambs offers a vital space of regeneration and resistance to the corporatization of the poor and the homeless, not to mention to that of everyday life, shaped by the disciplinary regime of white supremacy, through “the search for deeper reflective awareness of the meaning of [their] lives and of [their] relationship to others” (Cottingham 2005, 5). We do not have to understand the everyday life of the homeless “in the shadow of poverty and drug dealing” (Duck 2015, 137). As Lazarus regains his agency with the help of The Family, homelessness is deemed as a possible space for change to stand against conformity to “the predominance of the state as an ordering instrument” (Robinson 2016, 34). They may not fit into a respectability narrative, but these flawed people are determined to succeed in alternative ways to normative expectations “to rise strong” (B. Brown 2015, 214). Homelessness for Lazarus and The Family, then, comes to embrace the eternal state of dispossession as an ideal mode of being. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, in their book The Undercommons, share their opinion that “being together in homelessness” can mean “to be among his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything” (2013, 96). Even though Lazarus’s family has had rough edges, at the end of the day the family sticks together, and his children join Lazarus, Junior, and The Family. Their social and affective encounters offer a similar hope for the future that Lazarus’s children will learn “to dare greatly on their own” (B. Brown 2012, 240). They establish new forms of alliances with The Family to provide them with self-reflective views to become “active agents in building the world we live in” (Staples 2014, 207). Since identity is central to building a sense of community, their

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investment in the wholeness of the self provides “a major impetus for individual and collective empowerment” (Collins and Bilge 2016, 135). The need for the mobilization of the empowered self and community, further, entails, what Anthony Reed calls, “affirmative difference,” 37 which “shifts the locus of politics, figuring blackness and black culture as something people do, rather than something that is” 38 (Reed 2014, 138–39). The homeless community in the course of the novel also develops a politics that exceeds the discursive boundaries in order to configure new ways of conceptualizing the present, defined “in opposition to the present” (Grossberg 2005, 307) in order to become free. As the critique of the present, then, Listen to the Lambs complicates black subjectivity in a white dominant social order, which always already reifies it. These homeless people make an intervention in the anticipated future of the normative expectations, allowing to produce different discursive registers, for in the face of constant uncertainty in the neoliberal present, Anthony Reed argues, “the politics of affirmative difference reopens our attention to the nonsynchronism of our present” (2014, 170). Thus, The Family members break free of the normative constraints, including their traumatic experiences with, and past allegiances to a conventional family, in an attempt to become, instead, a community with each other, an experience that indirectly responds to Barrett Watten’s question, “What does it take to crack [the norms]?” (2016, 88). The novel is, indeed, invested in its characters’ collective responsibility to render the past as “memoryspaces” (Demirtürk 2008, 132), or more precisely, the counternarratives of characters’ traumatic pasts that disrupt and resist the linearity of white domination. 39 Allan Pred notes how remembering “as situated practice in a particular but constantly shifting present, can shatter everyday taken for granted sensibilities” (cited in Katz 2015, 299). The intervention in the present can be considered together with the need to reconfigure an alternative location for blackness. Similarly, as Lucius Outlaw “looks elsewhere for alternative foundations for black subjectivity,” he introduces the notion of “racialized biodiversity” (cited in Braidotti 2006, 63). For Rosi Braidotti, Outlaw’s notion of “human biodiversity reasserts the positivity of a notion of race that is deprived of essentialist attributes and recognized in its singularity.” 40 The Family members, in similar fashion, live through an embrace of “human biodiversity” by treating and celebrating each other as human with subjectivity beyond identity. Lazarus relocates his blackness in a notion of the affirmative ethics of “nomadic subjectivity” (Braidotti 2006, 64), because he is determined to remain perpetually homeless. He chooses, in other words, to live in a seamless space of crisis (not to be safe), an act that allows opening the “cracks” in whiteness as a breakthrough in the normativity of the present. The novel goes beyond racial conflict and compels a different engagement with an intersectionality across race, gender, sexuality, and class in the

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lives of these homeless people, inviting a new set of interrogations. None of the homeless is free of racialization at some point; even the white female prosecutor implied that Cinderella might be intimate with Lazarus (read: nigger-lover), and that Legion, a black transsexual, must be a prostitute (read: sexual deviant). Blackness is situated within the affective changes brought about by the incommensurability of the bodies and the normative spaces, and hence the crisis stays with each character in relation to the society. The socially constructed stigma of homeless people as deviants seems to suggest that their presence among the privileged in urban spaces “can undercut the very ideology of the postindustrial city itself” (Cloke et al. 2008, 244). In this respect, the “cracks” in whiteness can offer a possibility of change, regarding “the right to the city,” for David Harvey claims that “the dispossessed [bear] their right to the city—their right to change the world, [and] to change life” (2013, 25). Henri Lefebvre’s view is worth quoting in full here: “The city is not only the context in which industrial capitalism developed most fully, but it also contains the seeds of the destruction of capitalism. Moreover, the city is already producing, here and there, the beginnings of an alternative society beyond capitalism” (cited in Purcell 2014, 148). Hence, belonging can be considered to be located in the everyday dynamic realities of people, and thereby, social change starts with people’s gradual alterations of “their habits, routines and ways of thinking” (May 2011, 374–75). While Lazarus employs “hometactics” 41 (Ortega 2014, 173) as a praxis to enact resistance in everyday life, he leaves the house he owned, 42 an act that indirectly responds to cutting through Henri Lefebvre’s underlying view that what seems to be “natural” can indeed be changed (cited in Westgate 2011, 5). This corresponds to Daniel Black’s powerful sociopolitical critique in the novel: Lazarus’s act of withdrawal into the “quiet” of his (black) interiority is not just about the personal, but also about “the political implications of withdrawing, the political possibility of the space away from dominant culture” (Randolph 2016). Blackness is no longer connected with displacement in social spaces, because Lazarus, in the first place, determines the spatial boundaries of his subjectivity. The experiential reality of homelessness, shifting through “quiet” as an active state of being, enables The Family members to change their identities as they become, what Gloria Anzaldua would call, “shape shifter[s]” (cited in Ortega 2016, 45). By helping each other in their different forms of vulnerability, they collaborate in their pursuits of becoming their true selves, experiencing “multiplicitous becomings” (Ortega 2016, 145). The Family, with Lazarus, finds new ways of enacting freedom as a performative act of unfolding “what it means for us as humans to realize our humanness” 43 (Eudell 2015, 242). Here, The Family’s communal relationship is based on the instrumentality of love, which Richard Iton has called a “subversive gift” and “an important public good.” In this respect, love “is a

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significant political act” 44 in The Family’s discursive practices of resistance in the act of sharing their “quiet” in becoming otherwise. The novel challenges the white supremacist ideological framework, as the characters transgress the prescriptive boundaries of being, 45 sometime collapsing the discursive boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds. It is only when Legion, Elisha, and Cinderella bond with The Comforter to help Lazarus, we see that “quiet can be collective,” simply because “it inspires connection” (Quashie 2012, 101). In this respect, I argue that the characters’ “quiet” standing resonates with Kevin Quashie’s view, to use what Michael Boyce Gillespie contends, in his recent book Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, that “quiet can act as a mode of black resistance that is indistinguishable from silence and connotations of something repressed.” He explains that “Quiet Becoming,” as a significant part of Quashie’s notion of quiet, represents “a nonpublic expressivity, a sense of interiority” (Gillespie 2016, 119–20), which is at the same time both political and agential. The novel disrupts the normalizing claim to the context of whiteness, as it resituates the notions of home and family in nonnormative spaces of the American society. Since an understanding of “common human vulnerability” (J. Butler 2006, 30) opens up new (social) spaces for the articulation of new alliances, Daniel Black, once again, does not construct blackness as mere resistance, but as a domain of human complexity. In his revisionary construction of the normative representation of black masculinity, he complicates blackness as the dynamic interiority of a black man. We see the building of an activist community of the homeless, based on performing their interiority through this connectedness, making possible an alternative configuration of everyday life. Hence, the black characters, through Lazarus’s effort, come to perform “quiet” as possibility of being, while the white character (Cinderella) experiences “becoming black” (Vargas 2006a, 477). Since they are all homeless, the white character is also deemed “black,” because she stands outside the normative expectations of “being.” Focusing on how Anna Deavere Smith’s performance art complicates the monolithic configuration of race, Debby Thompson suggests that once the subject, “produced through performative reiteration of norms,” performs, then that assigned identity can shift “those norms with a difference” (qtd in Gillespie 2016, 55). Since Lazarus’s performativity of refusal to comply with the racial stereotype evinces a “crack” in whiteness, the novel challenges the racial script to deconstruct the mechanisms of whiteness. As Lazarus resists “self-accumulation’s violence” (Harney and Moten 2013, 89), his quitting his job points to Daniel Black’s deeper critique of the ideology of whiteness; “the disdainful attitude” toward regular work ideologically functions as “a serious rejection of core societal norms and values” (Watkins 1998, 211). Homeless living reveals how Lazarus and his fellow homeless are “entitled to time that is not consumed by meeting the

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necessities of life” but to the commitment to a new life based on “shared free time” 46 (Rose 2016, 2, 92). Hence, these predominantly black characters have no “consent” to “the hegemony [of whiteness],” because, to draw on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas, they choose not to enact “[t]he self-interested drive and passionate chase after value” in order to let themselves become “a new form of subjectivity” (Fonseca 2016, 87). The novel makes a strong critique of the white dominant power structure, seeped in the quagmire of the capitalist waste that creates spiritual poverty. It does this precisely by depicting the search of a single person, Lazarus, who struggles for a communal life in which an empowering subjectivity can be realized, wherein a truly multiracial society emerges as the family of “homeless” subjectivities. The novel reveals a black man’s generative touch with the family and the world, while creating a sense of wandering in different walks of life. His willful choice of failure, vulnerability, and powerlessness makes it possible to be true to himself in the white supremacist capitalist society with a belief that he cannot achieve self-realization, “while exploiting others” (Turner 2012, 36). His choice to become and remain homeless can be considered a “corrective experienc[e]” 47 in the sense that he establishes a relationship to the everyday life in an unexpected way (Friedlander, Lee, and Bernardi 2013, 454). The novel’s construction of new social spaces where the homeless become the alternative community generates an exploration of new possibilities of agency and action. As they forge alliances to keep their commitments to one another, they reconstruct the everyday life of their own making outside the white normative prescriptions. These relational fluid spaces present “homelessness,” or rather what I call, a willful “homeless” blackness, a “nomadic subjectivity” in its own right, as an embodied praxis that fosters an effective social and transformative change. NOTES 1. Daya and Wilkins write that “ignoring these aspects of everyday life in fact reduces the subjectivity of homeless people,” denying their “feeling capacities” in the overemphasis of their agency (2013, 359). 2. Lazarus’s deliberate choice to inhabit a position of marginality, in a way, activates what the black poet John Keene calls as “the destabilization of boundaries” (qtd in Giscombe 2015, 7), because the “below overpass” spaces are border areas or makeshift homespaces, merely those “urban hybrid spaces” (Perry 2013, 432) where the contradictory sites of being act on challenges. 3. He becomes intelligible to the people, who see him through the lens of demonization, only when he is perceived “as dirt on the clean image of public space” (Gerrard and Farrugia 2015, 2231). The white supremacist public view of the homeless as the embodied filth marks, as Samira Kawash notes, “the danger of this body as body to the homogeneity and wholeness of the public” (qtd in Amster 2008, 83). 4. Parker, Reitzes, and Ruel explain that David Snow and Leon Anderson proposed that “homeless men and women use ‘identity talk,’ to enhance and protect a person’s self-esteem, in general, and a positive identity as a homeless person, in particular” (2016, 202).

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5. Having lived an empty spiritual life, he wants to live the rest of his life constructing “a life of meaning” (5) to set his spirit free. 6. He gains “the freedom to feel unmarked” (Berlant 2009, 109), while at the same time contesting the construction of the African American as deviant “homeless” Other. 7. Similarly, the consumerist obsession with materialism “transfers into an objectification of the individual” (Fain 2014, 185). 8. Lazarus I never expressed his love for him and continued to beat him violently all through his childhood and youth even for getting B+, for his “imperfection” had to be punished to make him work harder to fit the norms. His grandfather always believed that country folk were better than city people, for they never judged anyone, knew “how to struggle and live well” (15). 9. Like all the homeless people in the real world, they are all confronted with the new reality of placelessness and the desire to feel at home, while at the same time they create “homelike places within public spaces” (Rennels and Purnell 2017, 490), an act that blurs the boundaries between private and public space. 10. As a result, they become a real family, “freed from the intermediation of familiar institutions” (Sassen 2014, 11). 11. Like all the homeless “faced with micro-level struggles for basic survival, as well as macro-level pressures of ostracism and regulation, the construct of ‘community’ becomes a necessity” (Amster 2008, 28). 12. Lazarus, in fact, subverts the degrading meaning of homelessness by actively constructing a distinct identity that undermines “the symbolic burden of homelessness” (Farrugia 2011, 85). 13. Erving Goffman, in his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), argued that “individuals eventually manage their stigmatized identity through a variety of strategies including only selectively disclosing their identities to sympathetic others” (cited in Parker, Reitzes, and Ruel 2016, 206). 14. For The Comforter, what this boils down to is that people “give money too much power” whereas the “[r]eal power is in people” (55). 15. He becomes “white” as he beats Lazarus, for he distances himself from a racial stereotype in implementing “the militarization of policing in regulating mainly black and brown life” (Goldberg 2015, 130). 16. He remembers his childhood with his crack addicted mother, and how the social worker, Harriet, across the street called the officials to provide him with a better future. He learns from her in the Division of Family and Children where he visits her now that his mother died in the house two years ago, and that she left a package for Elisha with her before she was gone. Feeling terrible for his mother, “a waste of human flesh” (125), Elisha goes to Harriet’s house in the evening to pick up the envelope, which contains the deed to the house, which his mother owned and left to him, and the land inherited from his grandparents in south Georgia. 17. She does not represent a stereotypical prostitute/transsexual, partly due to Aaron’s masqueraded coercion, and she vomits across the sidewalk as Aaron’s Mercedes “disappeared into the night” (103). 18. Wanda S. Pillow and Family, in their article “Mothering a Black Son,” continue with Hartman’s earlier view that blackness is still a reminder of the slave-based economy that continues to produce “racialized discourses” (2015, 318). 19. He knows he interrupted his family’s life, and wonders if they learned the lesson and became “free from things” and from social expectations, as he has learned “to be true to himself and them” (149). Being in jail provides him with time and space for self-reflexive thinking, and he regrets that he had not struggled more to save his father from using substances to help him return to his family. 20. She is also concerned about “the repression, the police brutality, violence, the rising wave of racism that makes up the political landscape of the US today” (A.Y. Davis 2016a, 110). 21. Even though he struggled to save Junior’s life shaped by rehab and crack house, he now feels that listening to the lambs is also listening to God’s message about understanding and righting his wrongs. He remembers how his grandfather cried after listening to the lambs,

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calling his son Junior’s name, feeling guilty that he could not reunite with his son and save him from drug addiction. 22. His experiences have shown him the wide gap between his real intention and his practice: “Maybe [Junior], too, had meant to teach one life while living another” (183). 23. Junior called him after receiving the pictures of the kids Lazarus had sent. Lazarus’s well-meaning inquiry about whether he is clean made him feel “his dirty, worthless life” (185) even more unbearably. He did not want to talk with his grandchildren on the phone, and hung up after he was through talking with Lazarus “with regret and guilt too heavy to carry” (185). Junior believed he would not be able to face another “failure” (185), similar to the one with his son, by violating their image of a “happy, playful grandfather” (185). Even though Junior’s demand for love and respect is denied at home, his mother, who disproved the brutality, never intervened for fear of ruining her husband’s design for Junior’s manhood, bringing him up as an “obedient, upright son” (186) to fit the success myth. Seeking his father’s affection, Junior took Trey, the newborn baby, to his grandfather, who felt the shame for what he did to Junior; Lazarus I held and hug the baby as he never had Junior, indirectly expressing an inarticulate apology for his brutality. Junior sent Trey to spend the summers with his grandfather, but he never went except once again, for he could not bear seeing how Lazarus I loved Trey. 24. Since Quad keeps receiving anonymous notes from The Comforter about his father’s need to see him and have his forgiveness, he meets his father in jail. Lazarus wants Quad to find Junior in New York City; the address is in Deborah’s phonebook. 25. She gets them to let Lazarus sign papers and to come home with her, and The Family gathers in The Upper Room, looking like “a lost tribe of vagabonds” (202). 26. The white imaginary renders the black male body as a site of threat “to be avoided,” to “not be trusted” (213), carrying the assumption that this black man would definitely envy them—a motive for hurting them. 27. When Quad explains that the root of his anger at his father made him emotionally too numb to start a distinctive life of his own, Lazarus draws on the distant past to explain to Quad his summers with his grandfather and how he grew up in the absence of a father to realize the unresolved problem between his father and grandfather—“Something that made it impossible for them to face each other” (220). 28. Aaron senses that Legion, who expresses her gratitude for taking Lazarus’s case, does not love him: He, unknowingly, makes Legion feel she has been, all along, “the garbage receptacle for the world,” and for Aaron as well, who treated her as an outlet to transfer his unfulfilled “frustrations and dreams” (253). She has wanted to be someone Aaron cared for, to be his companion, but she has always walked away “bearing someone else’s grime” (253). 29. With Lazarus mistaken for a beggar, the phrase “fortunate enough” makes one ponder how this phrase marks the class difference, to guarantee the white girl’s socialization, growing up not “to be concerned with human struggle” (242). 30. “By focusing on the deficits of individuals living outside the American Dream, the culture of poverty fails to account for broader societal structures and historical processes” (Kaplan 2013, 45). 31. Michelle Cowin-Mensah, in “An Act of Terrorism,” situates performative (his)trocities within the framework of “phenomenal blackness” (2015, 249). 32. Quad, to Lazarus’s distress, sees Lazarus’s homeless friends as “vagabonds” (276), wishing them away. 33. In response to the prosecutor’s inquiry that Lazarus is a thief, Legion says he never desires material things: “He’s on the street because he hates what money has done to him. To us. To all of us. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s chosen to live like angels live” (300). 34. Junior confesses to beatings by his father, and now Lazarus understands why the lambs wept for the abused one, “too young to fight for himself,” for it was “a call to the first Lazarus to go back and reclaim what he had destroyed” (315). Junior, who always resented his father’s loving Trey instead of him, apologizes to Trey; Junior has confronted the demons in his abused and drug-addicted self in order to start the healing process. 35. “On December 3, 2014, a grand jury elected not to indict Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. Almost immediately, another wave of protests began around the country in response to this decision” (R. Jackson 2016, 317).

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36. Marilyn Frye distinguishes white skin color from “whitely” as a way of being: in contrast to being white skinned as a physical characteristic, being whitely is “a deeply ingrained way of being in the world’” (qtd in Heldke 2010, 84). 37. Reed uses “affirmative difference” as a more general term for “performative intersectionality” to articulate the sense of shift and fluidity of historical difference (2014, 137). 38. Hence, it unsettles the seemingly unproblematic basic tenets of the white supremacist ideology, because it challenges a monolithic notion of black experience, celebrating “the groundlessness of ‘blackness’” (Reed 2014, 150). 39. Their memory and recollections have the potential “to disrupt the linear temporality on which sovereign power depends” (Edkins 2013, 149). Veena Das asserts that “recovery from trauma takes place through ‘descent into the everyday’” (cited in Conrad 2014, 74). However, we see that all the members of The Family seem to employ “both modes of engagement as they struggle to achieve healing” (Conrad 2014, 89). 40. Braidotti sees a significant value in Outlaw’s dissociation of racialization from a white/ black binary and sees, as Outlaw does, “human biodiversity” as a useful lens into “an affirmative process of becoming, or self-affirmation” (Braidotti 2006, 64). 41. Mariana Ortega explains her “hometactics,” different from Michel de Certeau’s view of creativity, regarding “tactics” as distinct from strategies, and criticizes de Certeau for missing the significance of spaces as connected to tactics (2014, 181). 42. It is a “space” whose existence in his life facilitates capitalism with an influence on “practical matters relating to space” (Lefebvre 1991, 9). 43. In doing so, they all become aware of how “[o]ur uniqueness lies within us and in our situatedness in our social and physical environment—not in our race, gender, or place of origin” (J.A. Powell 2012, 233). 44. For Richard Iton, “loving is a significant political act, particularly among those stigmatized and marked as unworthy of love and incapable of deep commitment” (qtd in Reed 2014, 169–70). 45. It takes place through what Walter Benjamin calls “the ability to exchange experiences” (qtd in Lipsitz 1988, 99), and create space for differences. 46. Drawing from Cedric Robinson, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten suggest that racialization is present “in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement” (Harney and Moten 2017, 85). 47. In explaining the meaning of such experiences, Myrna L. Friedlander and colleagues note that some psychotherapy researchers agree on this common definition: “Corrective experiences are those during which a person comes to understand or affectively experience an event or relationship in a different or unexpected way” (qtd in Friedlander et al. 2013, 454).

Chapter Two

Performing Transgressive Silence as Strategic Resistance to Whiteness Progressive Spaces of Black Male Subjectivity in Sister Souljah’s A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015)

The American homeland, as the lived site of “penal democracy,” has been closely connected with the American prison and police mechanisms, and hence “the United States wages war not just against criminals but also against people it constructs as such” (James 2007, xiv). The narrative of black criminality both exposes and problematizes the white normative mechanisms that inevitably produce an interplay between white power and racialized difference. The idea of black criminality, which “shaped the ‘public transcript’ of the modern urban world” 1 (Muhammad 2010, 273), enables the civil society, then, to operate through the destruction and absentization of the black body. Since a different form of social extermination, now, alters the network of social and affective relationships in civil society, the prison, “in the lineage of the slave vessel, has become essential to the production of a new social formation” (D. Rodríguez 2007, 54). As a result, the normative distorted representations of black urban men as criminals, Michelle Alexander suggests, “has produced racial stigma” (M. Alexander 2010, 192), insisting that black men use their agency to be on the wrong side of the law. In the twenty-first century, then, mass incarceration in the United States has not only replaced, but also employed violence “as an expression of the way white society chooses to affirm itself under the cover of being ‘lawgoverned’” (Martinot 2008, 71). Even though homicide, in the form of police killings particularly, in the words of white American writer Jill Leovy, has “ravaged the country’s black population for a century or more,” its affective 59

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reverberations on the lives of black “ordinary people” (2015, 5) went unnoticed. The “discriminatory state apparatus,” indeed, George Yancy suggests, plays a significant role in many forms of crime-related operations and everyday discursive practices that cause in black men, in particular, “a lot of traumatization and psychic scarring,” for they are often forced to experience their bodies “as objects” (Yancy 2017c, 592). There is a clear need, then, for developing “a politics of solidarity guided by our respect for difference and commitment to dialogue—a politics that creates the space for us” in which we are “mutually transformed” (Bergoffen 2012, 383). African American counter-public, in this sense, has long utilized black people’s everyday conversations that circulate as counterdiscourses to resist white supremacy. Since there is no fixed definition of “what constitutes the boundaries of black public space,” as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell succinctly argues, black people have often believed they can feel free in these spaces “to talk to one another” beyond the white gaze (Harris-Lacewell 2004, 9). In this sociocultural and political context, we can see Sister Souljah’s urban novels as “a black counter-public,” for “its thematic reach and affective frame” contribute to “our understanding of discursive constructions of black communal gender politics” (Bragg with Ikard 2015, 63). Her novels, contrary to the white supremacist public discourse, do not define the street and black urban people’s lived reality merely in terms of crime, but also in terms of the inviolable individuality of black wo/men (and wo/men of color). Whereas the white supremacist public discourse often represents black working class vulnerabilities as primary identity markers of black inner-city experiences, Sister Souljah refuses to limit her representations of urban blacks as pathological, poor, and criminal. This act of refusal to draw the normative association of poverty and crime with the authentic black community demonstrates how black characters—and particularly black men in the inner city— need to learn how to live more empowered lives. Ronda C. Henry Anthony looks forward to future generations of writers and scholars to problematize the white normative fears and discursive frames that must be challenged by progressive “constructions of black masculinities” (Anthony 2013, 178). Sister Souljah’s achievement in her novel, A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015a), is an indirect response to Ronda Anthony’s call to writers and scholars for unique representations of the “humanization” of the black man: Souljah’s constructions of Midnight’s inner world, with his self-reflexive thoughts and memories that exceed the public space, privilege the reader to have a deeper understanding of his motives and actions as a man. The plot summary of the novel is simple, while it is also connected with the other novels in the Midnight Series. A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (2015a) is the third book, the sequel to Midnight and the Meaning of Love (2011), in the series that started with Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008). Midnight appears as a character as early as Souljah’s The Coldest

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Winter Ever (1999), and later in A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story (2012), the Santiaga family saga. He is a young black Muslim Sudanese immigrant who is both observant and intelligent. His father taught him how to use guns to protect his family and to have the will and strength to claim his own soul, while he always reflects on his past actions to become a better person. In the first book, Midnight: A Gangster Love Story, we learn that Midnight is born into a wealthy family in Sudan, and his father has power and authority as the advisor to the prime minister. When his father disappears, after his empire was attacked, he migrated to the United States with his mother and sister in 1979, when he was seven years old, and they lived in Brooklyn projects. 2 From then on, Midnight grows up into a young man whose priority is to protect his family and their honor. In the second novel, Midnight and the Meaning of Love, he continues to have various adventures and struggles, and marries an Asian woman, Akemi. 3 In this third book, A Moment of Silence:Midnight III (2015a), Midnight, who is both the narrator and the protagonist, lives with two wives, Akemi and Chiasa, under the same roof with his mother and sister. Having gone a worldwide journey to reclaim his wife Akemi, kidnapped by her father to Japan, Midnight returns to Brooklyn. However, when he kills the man who targets his sister Naja, trying to hurt her, he is soon arrested and incarcerated at Rikers Prison for over a year, when he is suddenly transferred to a prison, but he is abducted by soldiers and brought to the General, his father-in-law. The General, upon his daughter Chiasa’s request, realizes that Midnight’s crime is a defense of family honor and, hence, makes an arrangement to trade his place in prison with another black man. Midnight has to attend a military school to do his time by preparing to serve the state. At a time in post-9/11, when Muslims are dehumanized, Souljah’s novel explores a dignified black urban Muslim immigrant man’s subjectivity. She addresses dichotomies, frequently employed in constructions of urban contexts in sociological work, where blackness is associated with “stereotypes of Black culture as pathological” (E. Anderson 2008, 166). She refuses to collapse Midnight’s lived experiences into the monolithic representation of a stereotype, a mere ghetto thug. She seems “to disentangle blackness from captivity, and race from place” (S.M.H. Camp 2004, 141), while exploring how Midnight uses his agency to employ his “moment of silence” in his social encounters with the white authorities. In a culture of noise during the police killings of unarmed black men as an ongoing current issue in twenty-first-century American society, Midnight’s choice for silence in the narrative present of 1980s, signifying the discursive “strategy-as-practice” (Kornberger and Clegg 2011, 136), is a political act. The failure of the state to protect its black (urban) citizens’ rights from criminals causes Midnight to commit crime calls for critical inquiry: If law is differentially enacted to veil injustice, then what happens to whiteness? In a

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culture where racism is expressed with words, silence is a form of undoing the power and authority of whiteness. Since silence and secrecy are “performative,” because they are about “the ‘doing’ of identities and positioning” (Phoenix 2010, 162, 173), the novel makes the readers confront the “uncivilized ‘nature’ of Whiteness” (Watson 2013, 67). Souljah, in her nonfiction book, No Disrespect, described racism as a disease that seriously affects black-on-black relations in the urban areas: “It is black-on-black hate, created by racism and white supremacy, that is killing us” (1996, 350). As she explains in an interview, she loves this character, Midnight, for he is a man, who is “capable of love,” helping “instead of hurt[ing],” and who “heal[s] instead of destroying” (Souljah 2015b). She sets him up as a positive role model for the black urban youth to see ways of developing themselves into better men with meaningful lives, full of love and respect for their women and families. Sister Souljah, in a different interview, sees this latest novel on Midnight as a timely one in view of police killings of unarmed black men on the streets even during Black Lives Matter when “the issues remain the same,” for the police violence, based on “a false sense of unlimited authority rooted in racism, is ongoing” (Souljah 2015c). It is crucial to remember that the novel is published not only in the context of police violence, targeting blacks, but also in the wake of the atrocities of 9/11, which expanded the discursive boundaries of blackness to (Middle Easterners and) Muslims, and culminated in “the emergence of an Islamophobia that has become the defining form of today’s politics of hate,” or what can be called “anti-Muslim racism” (Patel and Tyrer 2011, 129). Ironically enough, since nobody, including the police officers in the novel, except his family and close friends know that Midnight is a Muslim, his inner truth is not contained in the racial stereotype imposed on him. His blackness certainly causes him to be coerced and brutally treated, because his act of silence enables the police to see it as, what Giorgio Agamben calls, “a state of exception” that gives them the license for the exclusion of the “bare life” 4 (Agamben 1998, 7). Blackness as “the state of exception” exposes the sovereign violence of whiteness that opens a “zone of indistinction” between violence and law, and hence in the politics of “inclusive exclusion” 5 (Agamben 1998, 64, 8). In a society which reinforces normative strategies of “bare life” through the exclusionary mechanisms, Midnight stands against the state “as an ordering instrument” of black bodies, selves, and lives. Cedric J. Robinson calls for a transference of authority from “those of force . . . and control to cohesion, integration, and ‘fit.’” This would replace the sense of individualization with the “celebration of the ‘whole’ personality” that would pave the way for “the social integration of community” (Robinson 2016, 34, 70). Midnight seems to embody that “whole personality,” immersing himself in his Sudanese culture, and in his family, rather than in “the cultural quarry of white supremacy” (Wheelock 2016, 128).

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Muslims are deemed, what I prefer to call “post-9/11 blacks,” and hence “the newest unruly threat,” conceived as “not quite one of us” through the prism of “cultural differences” 6 (Sheth 2009, 87, 112). In this context, however, Sister Souljah uses a black (African) urban Muslim immigrant man (Midnight) as a critique of white supremacist American society with its imposed conceptions and regulations of space on black male subjectivity. His subversive acts in the social space seem to demonstrate Henri Lefebvre’s implied view of spatial practice that “individual spaces are the localized instantiations of a larger spatial logic inherent to a given society” (cited in Quayson 2014, 20). The novel engages with space and explores “the affective register” 7 (Thrift 2008, 171) of the black male body in the city, compelled to construct a reflexive subjectivity beyond the white supremacist regulated spaces. In the process of growing up through this type of racialization, Midnight’s affective world seems to have altered his sense of himself, providing him with the performativity of an “excessive subjectivity,” situated within “the excess of everyday life” 8 (Rothenberg 2010, 10, 1). The narrative present of the novel is told through the experiences and fractured memories of Midnight, whose silence is ascribed cultural and spiritual meaning. Souljah represents Midnight’s inner world as a powerful means to immerse us, the readers, in the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural realities of African immigrants in the diaspora, as well as black urban men. Following Osizwe Raena Jamila Harwell’s discussion of Bebe Moore Campbell’s activism in her books, I similarly utilize how “the concept of framing” 9 (Harwell 2016, xvi) is also employed by Souljah, who engages issues in African American urban experiences to further engage a broader context of black people in positing black masculine marginality as a possibility. The novel starts with Midnight’s inner thoughts, in this third novel in the Midnight Series, about his love for his second wife in a polygamous marriage, an African-Japanese woman, Chiasa Hiyoku Brown, a ninjutsu-trained warrior who became Muslim at sixteen. 10 In spite of polygamy, Midnight, a man who lives by his Muslim faith, equally respects the personal differences of his wives: Chiasa, deeply in love with Midnight, is a woman whose intellect inspires Midnight, who is also on the alert for any potential threat to his mother, sister, and wives: “But I am a man born and trained to observe, detect, and perceive all potential threats” 11 (5). He has killed people in confrontation, whereas Chiasa, who “fought, poisoned, injured, and intercepted some enemies in real-life conflict” (5), has never killed anyone. Now that they are married, Midnight believes, being a man puts him in charge of his family’s protection: “I’m here for the sole purpose of protecting and providing for and loving my woman” (5). Since he believes he is worthy of love, he claims his worthiness, because his family’s shared commitment to each other is the way he “cultivate[s] authenticity” (B. Brown 2010, 49).

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Chiasa, who turns seventeen years old in a week, and Midnight moved into their new home in the borough of Queens, State of New York. She has a close relationship with her father, an African American general in the American army, who calls her from whatever country he happens to be in. He has been prejudiced against Midnight as a Muslim born in Africa (read: intraracial prejudice), and hence, he threatened Midnight, before he left for Asia, that he would kill him if he ever failed to take good care of Chiasa, practicing a discursive form of “affective empowerment” (Grossberg 1997, 164). Following these recollections, Midnight, in the present moment, sees that a sixteen-year-old Sudanese girl, Sudana, is at the door of his Brooklyn project, and she expresses her love for him. A moment of crisis interrupts Sudana’s confession, for Chiasa tells him that she saw Naja from the window, running, and his trust for Chiasa’s “perfect vision” (16) of what has taken place causes him to realize that Naja lied to cover up her meeting with the man she goes to meet, and he immediately heads down with his gun to the street to murder him. He chases the man into the middle of a Brooklyn block party community concert where the cops shut down the sound system, and the young men of the ghetto shoot into the air as a protest. He shoots the man with his silencer without harming anyone, but when some people see the dead body, Midnight wears his hood low, and walks away without being noticed. Even the thought of losing her to brutal men makes him feel terrified: “The terror of her becoming ruined and raped and unprotected like too many fatherless American girls. The terror of her losing her honor, of me failing my father, my culture, and my faith” (22). His hood attracts the cops, but Midnight lived in the hood for seven years without letting anyone know who he is except his nickname, Midnight, as a precaution to make sure that nobody will be able to reveal his family to the cops. When cops start to chase him, he skillfully leads them out of his hood to protect other lives by getting on the train with a cop, who shoots firecrackers with the fuses and lets off a stink bomb. Midnight remembers that his sensei taught him to remain calm in extraordinary situations, because “only the hibernated heart will allow the fighter to prevail” (24). In the confusion after the stink bomb goes off, he drops down from the last train car onto the tracks. Three NYPD officers arrest him in the subway and get him into the police car. From then on, he follows whatever his training with the sensei taught him, keeping his silence with the police to avoid their brutality. Even though the officers try to aggravate him with racist slurs and humiliation, he never abandons his silence—the real power he exerts on them with his embodied practices of “performative agency” (B.K. Alexander 2006, 74). When the white police officers use the word “nigger,” Midnight is “reduced to [his] black bod[y]” (Yancy 2017c, 596), a mere racial stereotype; their authority seems to evolve into an “ethno-spatial chauvinism” (T. Simpson 2012, 182),

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based on normative masculinity. Awad Ibrahim claims that when the population of political refugee and immigrant continental Africans come to the United States, “they become Black” in accord with the social constructions of black people in America (Ibrahim 2014, 4). Midnight realizes that as an African, his silence, even during the arrest, appears very un-American, “a nation of chatterers, speaking even when there’s nothing good, right, or true to say” (27), because even in a tragic situation, they observe only “a moment of silence” (27). While he imagines himself into transcultural spaces through his “constructive engagement” (Robolin 2010, 141) with his native Sudan, he is aware of what his subversion of the white power of cops means to him: “Now the black leopard of Sudan will show them the true power and meaning of silence” (27). He starts to perform his microresistance against the police, who genuinely believe they caught him, a word he sneers at in his thoughts: “Even after just having been electrocuted with the Taser, I was clear that I had walked right down into their nest on my own two feet, of my own free will” (28). He is represented here as a nonstereotypical black man, who committed a crime (definitely not innocent), enacting “street justice” (E. Anderson 2008, 11) to stop a potential criminal from ruining the life of his sister, a black woman, whom no law enactment officer would even care about. He remembers his beloved family, biological and married, and his two close friends, Chris and Ameer, while at the same time feeling that “a true man” never leads “a trail of pain or war to his own house or to the homes of his loved ones” (28). Since “Ninja-trained warriors burn their trail and all traces that jeopardize their team, territory, or goals” (28), he believes he did the right thing, for it is a “real” man’s responsibility to his family and women to defend and murder—“I made a conscious and clear decision” (28). It is evidently clear why he feels that way, not only from his embodied African Islamic values, but also from an earlier novel, in Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008): 12 James Peacock asserts that Midnight never sees himself as an American, for he resists “viewing blackness as an essential category and as an automatic symbolic cue to global solidarity and community” (2016, 185). His perceptive remark applies to A Moment of Silence: Midnight III, in which we continue seeing Midnight as a black man who never essentializes blackness as the only mark of collective identity. However, he cares about his sense of loyalty and respect for those black and Muslim brothers, who achieve living as “real” men and who share his values of honor, filial responsibility, connecting with the vulnerable, whoever they are. He is concerned with performing the patriarchal notion of male autonomy in the service of his shared commitment with his loved ones. He fits into Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the subject as “multiplicity, assemblage, a mass of desires moving in different directions in life” (cited in Aryal 2013, ii). Judith Butler, in discussing Frantz Fanon’s claim that “the black is not a man” in the white public imaginary, explains that “the human in its contem-

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porary articulation is so fully racialized that no black man could qualify as human” (J. Butler 2004, 13). In the context of Souljah’s novel, if Midnight, for the police and related officials, is a black and not a man, then we need to ask the question Butler suggests: Who is Midnight the narrator when he reflexively thinks about his acts and tries to correct and develop himself with, and openly reveals, his inner world to us? It reminds us of the rhetorical question, posed by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his recent book, Between the World and Me: “How do I live free in this black body?” (2015, 12). Midnight lives free in his black body whose conception of manhood is based on his African cultural identity: What is encoded in his Islamic faith and cultural belonging in Sudan, but not fully here in American society, is a message that is quite incompatible with the sociocultural array of white patriarchal neoliberal capitalism, for he will never be the “‘ghetto-looking’ black male” (E. Anderson 2011, 217). In his anticipation of “the terrorizing practices of white supremacy” (Ioanide 2015, 75), Midnight maintains his silence during the ride in the cruiser to the precinct. He is one of those people who does not trust the law enforcement officers, because he does not expect “justice from the law” (28), seeing “just bandits with authority versus bandits without authority” (29). When he is insulted by the police, who “broke the silence,” he goes by his ninjutsu training to stay “blank-faced,” to not even “flinch” or “move” (29), avoiding any reactionary attitude. Unlike the cops who use words to humiliate him, assuming he fears them, he believes: “Silence is discipline. Even while being provoked, lied to, lied on, insulted, and maligned” 13 (29). He does not speak, even when he is brought to the seventy-seventh Precinct, cuffed and seated by force, and kept in custody before the interrogation. Their racist insults about his skin color, related to whether his ethnic identity is Spanish, are also directed to their fellow officer Ruiz: “They ain’t got no Spanish people that black! No offense, Officer Ruiz” (32). This scene is reminiscent of the white American writer Thomas Mullen’s Dark Town (2016), in which the Atlanta black police officer Boggs is often confronted by the white cops, who enjoy “trying to run over their colored colleagues” (Mullen 2016, 5). Here, their racist remarks demonstrate how far they will go to enact “the performative violence of whiteness” (Martinot 2008, 67). Midnight thinks about the cultural ignorance of the officers, who do not know the “global circuits [of blackness]” (Forte 2010, 176), resulting in culturally diverse black people all over the world. Officer Ruiz maintains his silence, for his experiential knowledge about how he has to play safe within the ideological framework of whiteness is no different from the views of a black officer in a similar context. James E. Cherry’s Shadow of Light (2007), for instance, is set in a Tennessee backwater town, Forrest, in the New South, where Walter Robinson, the town’s senior black cop, tells his white partner Detective Hardegree that he has no problem in working with a white man: “My problem is with a system that puts more value on the color of your

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whiteness than it does on life itself. Matter of fact, so much value has been given to it that whiteness is a God masquerading as Christianity” (J.E. Cherry 2007, 59). Similarly, when Midnight keeps his silence within the domain of whiteness, which is indeed, “masquerading” as the God-like absolute power, police violence is reduced to the minimum for some time, although the verbal threats continue. However, the white gaze, or what George Yancy calls “[w]hite gazing,” in and of itself, is a “violent process,” one that comes replete with “a racist episteme regarding the Black body” (Yancy 2016b, 243). Since he never carried his identity card, his address, or any document to prove his identity or residential location, he refuses to answer their questions about his identity or the crime. Oddly enough, since he physically neither resisted arrest, nor defended himself—“I had been silent and still” (34)—his silence breaks the association in the white imaginary between being black and a “thug.” Once he is put in the cell, he tries to empty his mind and heart of anger, because his survival depends on following his sensei’s advice to quit thinking about time in the present, but instead to reconstruct and relive his “memories of the past” in order not to give in: “A man with no memories of happiness and pleasure, or family, friendship, and adventure, will be conquered by imprisonment, conquered by time, and conquered by his captors” (35). Starting with this moment, the present is continually interrupted in the course of the novel with his memories from his past life, reducing the importance given to the linear temporality of the present at the expense of the past. Midnight’s willful “memory spaces” (Demirtürk 2008, 132) serve as counter-narratives to his deliberate act of “not-belonging” within the American culture as a “small ac[t] of resistance” (Crawshaw and Jackson 2010, 1). He resists mental disintegration in the face of soul-destroying atrocities, grounded in the anti-black racism that fails “to create a communicative hetereogeneity” (Bergoffen 2008, 85). His thoughts become a critique of white American norms, questioning the “all men are created equal” principle, boldly suggesting the homogenization of all people. For him, there is nothing except personal differences, and hence no one person can even be equal to another: “A man who protects is not equal to a man who offends and assaults women, children, and defenseless people” (36). His inner thoughts are in direct contrast to how the cops perceive him as a nobody with no intrinsic value or agency. Doing business on his own, he sees great irony in the white stereotype of the black inner-city man as a potential criminal. While he uses his agency as a black prisoner, he is cynical deep down that cops render monolithic all the black men under arrest, believing their tactics would work “equally” on every one of them. His intelligence and perceptive thoughts exceed the imposed racial stereotype in the sense that he is never easily scared of anyone, even of the law.

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Midnight remembers how he and Umma never trusted anyone but each other, since they arrived in the United States more than seven years ago. The sounds of Brooklyn street life at night, his mother’s experiences, and Chiasa’s words that he has to calm down to do “what’s best to survive” (57)—all boil down to feel his inner strength as a Muslim. He privileges believers (Muslims) over nonbelievers (Christians) who would not use women for sex, but marry them in order to be rewarded with “peace of mind, peace within our family, and also, Allah’s mercy and protection” (59). He sees the distinction between trained ninja-fighters and ghetto blacks, “niggas with weapons” (60), who present themselves as “[a]cting ghetto” (LeBlanc 2002, 387). Unlike black ghetto youth, he does not define himself as a “streetwise individual” (E. Anderson 1990, 231), and he articulates “new spaces of self-definition” (Slatton 2016, 119) through love and solidarity with his family, defining real home as a site of, what Stuart Hall calls, “performances choices” 14 (cited in M.L. Hall 2012, 203). However, the police intervention in everyday life makes Midnight vulnerable and disrupts his sense of content with the present, but not his inner peace, for his own mind governs his body, because he lives staying true to himself as a man of integrity. Even though his identity is unknown, Midnight is brutally beaten for using his constitutional right to remain silent against the police’s “hegemonic attempt to construct [their] whiteness” (Patel and Tyrer 2011, 157). He is beaten because the logic of whiteness structurally operates through “normative binary implications,” a nonspeaking, cuffed passive black male body “is still a violent body” (Yancy 2017c, 596). The police acts of threatening and beating Midnight, the mute Other, seem, in the words of Anne Anlin Cheng, to be the closest that these white police officers bring into being what can be associated with “Americanness” (Cheng 2001, 75). In this respect, his deviation from “the hegemonic present unhinges the restraints and creates an openness to the world in the interest of imagining alternative strategies of becoming” (Eng and Kazanjian 2003a, 14). They try to provoke him to talk by employing the black male sexual threat stereotype to break his spirit—“Fucking animal, I’d put a bullet between his eyes if he ever glanced at my wife” (61). Midnight continues with his resistance by keeping still even though the cops get him on his feet. They believe he is a drug dealer, whereas his unbreakability aggravates one of the narcotics cops, who punches him on his jaw, bleeding, and lands one blow in his stomach: “Still silent. Still standing” (72). While their continued good cop–bad cop ploy aims at turning Midnight into an informant against his imaginary drug-dealing lords, Midnight is too intelligent to swallow the bait for this bogus charge, seeing how dirty cops themselves are “criminals” (74). However, Midnight is aware that he subverts the stereotype in their eyes by his unexpected acts and responses: “My silence, I know, caused the good detective’s doubts and his threats and his offers to intensify” (76). Midnight subverts and challenges the racial stereo-

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type of the black man with his embodied values as an African (biological) American (cultural) Muslim (religious) man with full self-governing strategies (ninjutsu warrior) to claim himself. His inviolable individuality “destabilize[s] normative [boundaries of] black and inner-city masculinities” (Norris 2014, xxii). Even as his inner strength emerges out of his being “a Muslim, a true believer” (77), he pays tribute to his male lineage: “If I were not my grandfather’s grandson and my father’s son, he might have convinced me. But I am” (77). Unlike an ordinary urban black from the hood, who could have been broken enough to accept a deal as an informant, Midnight enacts his black (Muslim) identity as “an alternative performative masculinity” 15 (B.K. Alexander 2006, 92). His silence both defies the legitimacy of the verbal culture and functions as a critical space that carries the transformative potential to effect social change, for he is “decentering the place from which [he] speaks” (Bhabha 2006, xviii). The police officers keep responding (verbal) to his silence (nonverbal) out of an inability to cope with their failure to govern his black body. The police brutality and racist insults help us decipher how they reinforce the white supremacist notion of “who has the legitimate right to authoritative speech” (Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014, 7). When the police fail to set boundaries of whiteness to “extract” a confession from him, they feel betrayed, because he acts outside the norms of “social intelligibility that encourage particular performances” (Nelson 2014, 90), and hence, they falsify his language in their fake reports to speak for him. False police reports on Midnight expose “the distorting effects of white supremacy on justice and morality” (Flory 2008, 5). This false confession marks “cracks” in whiteness, because “racial microaggressions” (Sue 2015, 225) are used to get him to talk their frame of truth, but not his own, to simply make their racial construct real. 16 The police officers’ conspiracy against alleged criminals is a manifestation of how the discursive power of whiteness is constructed. While the authority of white police officers and detectives rests in verbal assaults and threats (discursive violence), his embodied and willful verbal absence marks an indifference to what otherwise could be deemed the power of whiteness. Midnight’s intervention in their verbal assaults with the mechanism of silence as a symbolic “counter-speech” makes clear their inability to colonize his inner world. Midnight’s silence is, to adapt from bell hooks, “a counterhegemonic act” (qtd in K.K. Epstein 2012, 73), which manifests “the idea of turning silence into an active resistance,” Alison Suen would argue, because secrets may seem to serve as “nonsovereign power” (Suen 2013, 185) as a subversive strategy. It is highly crucial, as Sister Souljah demonstrates, that the ways in which silence can signify resistance (for Midnight), and that breaking silence (for police to talk out at Midnight, but not with him) can serve the white dominant culture’s oppressive discourse and politics. In her discussion about the normative speech/silence binary, Patti Duncan claims

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that most critics have interpreted silence in binary opposition to speaking, that is, as “antithetical to the liberation of oppressed groups of people,” for these critics have failed to recognize “the ways in which speech acts, too, are limited and constrained” (2003, 13). It is crucial, in this case, to remember that, “not all silences are equivalent: nor are all speech acts equal in their implications and effects” 17 (Mix 2005, 204). Unlike their racial stereotypes of the black man, he is not violent, verbal, a potential snitch, and hence, he is not, what Elijah Anderson succinctly calls, “the iconic ghetto” (2012, 16). His inner world reveals to us, the readers, a complex and varied black individual full of contradictions, a convict by choice, who is deeply involved in gaining self-knowledge. The “quiet” opens up his imaginative spaces to various human possibilities, to a different way of thinking about the personal and the urban spaces. Sister Souljah reframes a black man, outside the “prevailing racial stereotypes,” unlike those inner-city black men, who “are often met with suspicion and avoidance” 18 (E. Anderson 2011, 100, 281). Midnight experiments with stillness and quiet, when we witness his reflections on his past, present, and the external world as critical awareness. His silence, as deemed by others, can be considered as the state of quiet, which enables us to understand, as Kevin Quashie remarks, “the activism involved in being aware, in paying attention, in considering” (Quashie 2012, 72). Following Quashie’s notion of quiet, we can say that Midnight also negotiates his inner life, racialization, his choices and practices, and his sense of humanity. Midnight can deal with racial profiling by his ninjutsu training through his “excess” beyond a black stereotype, when the white people “refuse to see [him]” (Yancy 2017c, 591). He revisits his memories of the afternoon hours before the murder: Chiasa helped Naja in a heartbeat, and told Midnight that she sent Naja home to keep her safe, while he was looking for her for three hours. He has absolute trust in her words, for “she is my shadow and my heart and my love” (79). She is represented as a woman who can reason out solutions to problematic situations and use an “autonomous agency” (Scully 2013, 212). She can do her domestic chores with a willingness to act with deep strength, sacrificing herself, “her time [and] her gifts for others.” Since she is “a problem solver, not a victim or a problem” (83), Midnight takes Chiasa at her word when she, further, explains that she found Naja in the basement of the other building, and the man was threatening to kill her cat unless she did what he wanted. Chiasa stabbed the man on his left eye, and he let the cat go but it was dead. Chiasa saves Naja’s life, but later sees the people in the lobby, too indifferent to their screams to help them. Chiasa starts crying because she, like Naja, knows that sooner or later Midnight will kill this man, and will get into jail for it. Midnight’s memory sustains him in the present, as he sits with his hands and feet cuffed to twelve other men in the vehicle. In contrast to physical proximity, he thinks of what true brotherhood of men meant in the hood,

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“each of us related by action” 19 (87). He feels different from the other black brothers, because his material body is here, while his “mindset is from the other side of the world” (88). He defines being a Muslim man as learning from the Quran to become useful to himself and his family and to his hood. He cares about honor, because it is part of being a dignified strong man, who can make possible, what the contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito calls “thought in action” (2013, 157). For Midnight, “honesty in action, fairness in action, and integrity in action. Integrity meaning a man has a set of guiding principles or beliefs that he bases his movements, decisions, and actions on” (89). He believes in the need for boys to grow up with role models: Other black men, even non-Muslim men, “living and acting with honor” (89). He reconsiders the code of honor back in Sudan, where a man who chases and traps another man’s little girl would be executed by a man in her family, while all the men in the brotherhood were expected never to mention the foul offense, believing that such “unlikely violations can only be overcome through silence” (90). Having said that, these forms of social relations (male bonding) in Sudan, unlike the black ghetto men, who belong to “a culture without honor” (91), reveal how social arrangements, indeed, facilitate richer forms of autonomy, while being careful not to reveal the secret, for otherwise it would generate “higher levels of vulnerability” 20 (J. Anderson 2013, 134–35). In contrast to that past, he is critical of how dishonorable men such as racist police officers are accepted and even assigned authority over others’ lives. 21 On the car ride back to the precinct, the police officer, who cannot handle Midnight’s silence, threatens to kill him and “call it self-defense” (107). His silence definitely exposes “how silences around Whiteness” can be explored (K. Davis 2010, 159). As he reaches the destination, the court-appointed white woman attorney, Ayn, confronts the officer’s humiliating treatment of Midnight, insisting that his wounds should be treated at the Long Island College Hospital. As he waits to be treated at the hospital with the officer, Midnight’s memories of Chiasa and Akemi as well as how he did business with the drug lord of the hood Ricky Santiaga for transporting vending machines from Asia demonstrate the shifting sense of vulnerability and autonomy. 22 As Catriona Mackenzie argues, it is a mistake to use the oppositional discourses of vulnerability and autonomy because they reinforce “paternalistic and coercive forms of intervention” (Mackenzie 2013, 33). Following Joel Anderson’s notion of interdependence of vulnerability and autonomy in similar terms, we see the complex dynamics within which Midnight develops an autonomy in critical situations, while at the same time he experiences vulnerability, revealing that “autonomy and vulnerability are sometimes interwoven” (J. Anderson 2013, 136). In this context, the present moment challenges Midnight when he genuinely sees that his lawyer Ayn conducts her responsibility and autonomy in a

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businesslike manner, using her power to prove that his injuries had to be medically examined. When she insists he tell her his name, he names himself Jordan Mann, knowing very well that his fingerprints cannot be traced in the criminal system. After six days of silence, he starts talking with her, as she shares the newspaper account of Lance Polite, the man Midnight murdered without even knowing his name, as “a convict, a repeat sexual offender and a public nuisance” (168). The racial discourse offers a black male inner-city criminal stereotype, relating the murder to “a drug-related execution” 23 (169). He tells all the details of why and how he murdered the man and entered the laundromat to wash off the evidence of the murder, writing a letter to his mother Umma. He explains that the laundromat was “a front for some drug gang that was run, owned, operated, and/or protected by some dirty cops and some Jamaican gangsters” (181). He also explains that the cops slandered him because “the dirty cops and the Jamaican gang” could not find the drugs they were looking for, and they thought he stole them. “If I would’ve talked during the interrogation, which I did not, there would be one or two or three teams gunning for me: the dirty cops, the hustlers, or the stick-up kids. But the murder I committed and my silence had zero to do with any of that” (181). Midnight remembers his first wife Akemi as a sixteen-year-old artist who had an appointment with the director of the Museum of Modern Art. He also remembers how he loves both Akemi and Chiasa in quite different ways. His marriage with Chiasa has been difficult for his father-in-law, the General, an African American man, who wanted Midnight to be examined by a psychiatrist to see if he is good enough for his daughter. Aunt Tasha finally supports and encourages them for marriage, standing up to the father. He now realizes in the prison that he has not been trained as a ninjutsu warrior “in the art of the kill” (247): “I did not come here, however, to kill” (247). Yet he sees all people as complete strangers to him, whom he simply cannot trust. In his discussion of “the carceral imaginary,” Marlon Ross conceives “the prison as an apparatus of state power” 24 (qtd in McDowell, Harold, and Battle 2013a, 16, 15). As he reads the conclusion of the Rikers jail rule book, Midnight learns that the inmates have a right to in-house jail hearing—but he does not believe they would receive justice at a hearing. That is the reason why he never speaks up in the presence of authorities: “Silence suits me. Solitude is my preference, and is also my premeditated plan” 25 (252). His memories revisit his family members, but also how he tried to change his friend Chris’s views of women; that is, only by knowing a woman as a full human being, not a mere sex object, could Chris “develop a real love for her” (315). He invites Chris to take marriage seriously, for being a man and the father of another man. “That’s where you get to prove what kind of man you are, by how you raise your son. Just think, you’ll be in your father’s position” (316). Midnight makes clear that since Chris’s father controls all the family

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and their lives, he will keep doing that “as long as you delay your manhood” (316), for Midnight considers manhood as doing, as “Black masculine performativity” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 7). Midnight claims that as long as Chris does not perform his manhood, he will be considered “a boy without options,” for any boy’s life will be governed by his parents who “respect us when we begin to put into action all of the lessons they took the time to teach us, and when what we put into action brings about real results” (316). For Chris, who finds it strange that a Muslim man is polygamous, Midnight explains it as a serious marital relationship, seeing women as “diamonds” (317), precious gifts from Allah, and not disposable sex objects. The conversation between Midnight and Chris reveals a conflicting view of manhood and masculinity. Keith Clark draws a distinction between masculinity, based on a configuration of manhood in accord with the normative social construct, and subjectivity, as an articulation of agency. In a similar vein, Midnight sees his native Sudan as an inescapable part of his embodied subjectivity, inhabiting “multi- and intersubjectivities” (Clark 2004, 131). He defines himself in terms of a black transnational immigrant in a white dominant culture that delimits the multiple narratives of fluidity, of being and becoming, that exceed the constraining discourse of white supremacy. While Midnight enacts alternative, nonhegemonic “progressive black masculinit[y]” (Mutua 2006b, 7), which seems to be what is called by Mark Anthony Neal, “NewBlackMan” (qtd in Anthony 2013, 15). In this respect, Midnight is represented through the black epistemology, the one that is positioned outside of the discursive framework of the white gaze, for he is an introspective, self-reflexive black man with his claim to his privacy. It reminds us of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, in which Estebanico elaborates on the significance of his nonverbal stance: “Silence taught me to observe. Silence made me invisible to those who speak” (Lalami 2014, 35). The representation of a young black urban man’s inner feelings and thoughts is a political act of enhancing black masculinity beyond the monolithic stereotype that emasculates it. Souljah creates an extraordinary inner depth in this black man to compel us to reconsider the black male (urban) masculinity. He reflects on the social and moral aspects of life with an agency to take seriously all the choices we face, thinking about “the myriad ways in which they affect our fellow human beings” (Flory 2008, 253). Following Butler’s view of performativity for tranformative possibilities, and Carrie Noland’s view here, we can see that Midnight’s self-pride is rooted in his African cultural (Muslim) identity and in his self-perception as an outsider (immigrant) to the American society, “simultaneously living the body as a plethora of other possible meanings [he] could be” (Noland 2009, 204). Hence, his full claim to his interiority is an oppositional stance, in line with Frantz Fanon’s assertion, to his racial “bodily schema” (Fanon 1968, 110), for his ninjutsu training enables him to restore a sense of belonging that

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sets him free. Midnight’s gesture of silence allows him an alternative space of subverting the discursive practices of whiteness, which ignore his difference as a person, refusing to be “diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of [white] others” (Yancy 2017c, 596). Midnight’s reflections now go back to two other crimes he committed in the hood to protect the honor of the inner-city girls. 26 He remembers how Marcus, Chiasa’s cousin who had a thing for her, wanted to fight and kill him in an alley, whereas Midnight got stabbed and refused to kill Marcus, only crushing his kneecap. Umma at home disinfected and stitched Midnight’s wound, while Akemi, who was an expert in “wrapping wounds without questioning” (333), soothing Midnight with her loving care. Midnight has developed significant autonomy skills in all walks of life, as he enacts many forms of autonomy: He does not fight, like ghetto boys do, without a reason, and he does not have sex with girls whom he will not marry. The police are blind to the ways in which their autonomy, as Joel Anderson would say, is ironically “threatened by [Midnight’s] vulnerability”: His willingness to become vulnerable, in maintaining his silence to police and to the lawyer, demonstrates how he takes risks with the knowledge that “the realization of certain forms of autonomy requires a degree of vulnerability” (2013, 151). For Judith Butler, Erinn G. Gilson notes, there is a reciprocal relationship between normativity and vulnerability: “Vulnerability enables the functioning of norms and norms can render us vulnerable. It is only given this co-constitutive relation that norms are also ‘vulnerable’ to destabilization and alteration through reiteration” (Gilson 2014, 47), thereby opening space for action. Similarly, Midnight’s sense of himself shifts and changes in his relations with his mother, his sister, and his wives, for whom he accepts the state of vulnerability. He breaks from normative expectations of black behavior, and he embraces his black subjectivity as a site of complexity, and he resists “false consciousness” 27 (Scheff 1994, 120). Since truth, Judith Butler notes, “is the product of language or discourse from which there is no outside” (cited in Tolasch 2010, 254), Midnight liberates his true self from the imposed racial frames through his silence. All through the novel, what becomes clear with Midnight’s silence (with white authorities), as “strategic choice,” is that what he chooses to silence is definitely his voice of dissent, because resistance often takes “the form of silent acts/performances in daily life” (Parpart 2010, 24, 23). Midnight does not only employ “actual silence” with the white police but also “veiled silences” 28 that “discursively mask [his] silence on a particular issue” (Morison and Macleod 2014, 695, 696) in his encounters with the many strangers, because he never trusts anyone except his own family. Midnight refuses to let the white police or Ayn coerce or manipulate him to inhabit the white authoritative language “with the words, ideologies, and perspectives” (Monzó and McLaren 2017, xvi). His silence may still have potential as political “resis-

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tance” (Chubin 2014, 190) to the ideology of whiteness, because even if it may be compromised, it bears “the possibility of activism” (Bhattacharya 2009, 371). He performs “discreet silences,” those silences “that avoid stating sensitive information” (Huckin 2002, 350, 348) to protect loved ones from the harassment of the state officials. 29 In a society where one’s ability to make choices and speak one’s mind is conventionally considered as proof of power, Souljah posits silence as a legitimate empowering strategy for dealing with difficult situations. However, he also challenges “racialized relations of power” (K. Davis 2010, 158) as a form of social injustice against his black body. This “silent performance of resistance” (Parpart 2010, 22) against probable police violence demonstrates that Souljah privileges silence and secrecy over voice, for she privileges the (in)visible, (non)measurable behavior of a black man to address less obvious strategies for change that the white dominant society fails to see. We, the readers, listen to “the sounds of silence,” 30 as he builds a “wall of silence” 31 (Hallsworth and Young 2008, 133, 134). Instead of aligning himself with American cultural whiteness, he chooses to render himself as foreign by “constructing otherness of place and consciousness” (Tsalach 2013, 73). Sister Souljah does a superb job of enabling us “truly to hear silence” (G.M. Schwab 2016, 112): He not only maintains silence (in police scenes) in an effective way, but talks back (in the scenes with the attorney) in unexpected ways. His self-censoring speech acts are juxtaposed with his counter-speech, both of which constitute an effective act of resistance against prevailing forms of power. 32 The present moment with the corrections officer, CO, the “she-officer,” makes her intrigued by his quiet: “You’re the quietest one” (334). Learning she is a single mother of a son, he tells her that a son should have filial responsibility to work at two or three jobs, not to let his mother work at this place. His memories of Chris and Ameer provide him with “the energy of our friendship” (337) to sustain himself in the hostile environment of the prison. 33 His reflections are challenged by the arrival of the lawyer, Ayn, who informs him that the nine-millimeter gun that killed Lance Polite was found, cleared with no fingerprints, and that Lance was stabbed, not knowing it was Chiasa. Disappointed by Midnight’s silence, she explains her belief that the one who stabbed and the one who shot were not the same man. Midnight sees the irony that the lawyer is angry at the murdered man, not because he harassed Naja but because he abused animals, “the serial abuser of animals and children was dead” (345). She warns Midnight about his silence, that he has to trust that she is working to defend him, but he is not cooperating with her. Midnight proceeds to explain to her that if the police have gone to all this trouble of making false charges, then it is clear that they want to see him in lockdown. He determines how much he will share, lie about, or hide even from the lawyer, because language “can be an instrument of violence”

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(Schlosser 2016, 17), violating, to adapt Adam Knowles’s words, the “register of [his] harmony with his place” (2015, 4). Even though the lawyer, unlike the police officers, seems to be one of those “good white people” (Applebaum 2010a, 33), her production of “victim-defendant” binary makes Midnight uncomfortable, for this casts her role as “my savior” (347), or rather as “white savior” (Schultz 2012, 22). The lawyer employs the black victim stereotype when she wants all the charges to be dropped: “I painted you as the misunderstood African-American youth,” documenting medical records of brutality by police, who held him “for an illegal and inordinate six days of questioning without a parent, lawyer, or an arraignment” (350). She reports that his past involvement in a riot among black inmates in the Robert N. Donovan Center at Rikers Prison was caught on the prison cameras, showing that Midnight tried to save the lives of a few fellow inmates whereas the officers never intervened in the riot. This pivotal scene reveals that the prison culture “actively ‘makes race,’” providing “continued justification for racial profiling” (Saperstein, Penner, and Kizer 2014, 119). The lawyer tells him frankly that if he does not cooperate with her, the officers will construct his image “as a monster,” play the race card with “the fear of the young black male,” convincing the trial jury that Midnight’s black male body is a threat to the public from which “they need to be protected” (352). He is acutely aware that the black body is never completely free from the racializing perception, while his reflections go back to the warmth of his family relations, when Akemi is pregnant with his twin daughters, and that Chiasa is pregnant with his first son. While he makes it clear to Chiasa later that he has no trust issue with his wives, but it is “this place” 34 (372) that he bears no trust for, she starts writing a book on their marriage and her husband, for Midnight is “definitely not ordinary” (379), while she regularly prays “to be good” and “to be true” (383). His memories shift to the place, the projects, where he arrived eight years ago for the first time, and to his school days. He remembers the significant role of his teacher, Karim Ali, a Muslim man, in his GED history class, who invited students to “subversive space” (Helfand 2008, 182). Ali employed critical pedagogy to develop critical thinking in his students, asking them to bring their personal experiences into the classroom. During the class discussion on the roots of American revolution, Emilio applies it to everyday racial profiling in the hood, when cops make the young boys put their hands on the police car or lay facedown on the ground, while they search the boys’ pockets and take their money, because “they want to . . . have it even though they didn’t earn it” (399). When it is Midnight’s turn to respond to the teacher’s question of how to describe these students’ accounts of everyday life, he answers: “A complete loss of freedom and control over your life” (399). The denial of young black men’s employment of agency in the ghetto seems to create a colonial situation, similar to American revolutionary times. Karim

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Ali’s classroom practices demonstrate his understanding: “Citizens who are their own historians, willing to identify lies and distortions and able to use sources to determine what really went on in the past, become a formidable force for democracy” (Loewen 2007, 362). Although Midnight is impressed by the teacher, he disapproves of his overreactionary political view on the white-man-as-devil philosophy. 35 According to him, true Muslims (unlike the teacher in this scene) believe that all human beings are capable of both good and evil: “And it seemed to me that that war around the world is always about power, money, land, gold, and women” (414). He applies his critical perspective to his own acts: He apologizes to his friend Lavidicus, for instance, for damaging his jaw in a fight for mentioning his mother in public, and wants to make it up to him. His focus momentarily turns to the present moment and thinks of the warning of the she-officer, who said that authorities might send an inmate as “an informant” to them, but “known as snitch to any prisoner” (416). He realizes that some inmates, who cannot face their fear of conviction, accept being an informant, and they simply “trade another inmate’s freedom to secure their own” (416). This masquerade does not suit a man of honor, Midnight, who executes his own will fearlessly: “Whatever the truth is in my soul, heart, or mind, I take action over words” (417). He utilizes challenges to achieve selftransformative change, and given that, he behaves as a type of community activist, who puts his “self-reflexive consciousness” into action (Schrag 2003, 123). His silence and his becoming his own person seem to feed into governing himself and given situations “through alternative practices” (Hackett 2013, 221). He goes back to the scene with Lavidicus, when he learns from his friend De Sean that Lavidicus is a victim of sexual abuse by a man called Lance. Midnight’s murdering Lance, “a predator” (418), seems to be in place to stop this young perverse boy, with murder as self-defense. According to Islam, Midnight knows “we do have the right to defend our lives and loved ones from oppression and mischief and evildoers” (419). Seeing that Midnight is a person of “active tolerance” (McCarty 2009, 179), Lavidicus wants to learn how to be like Midnight, and Midnight challenges him that he has to learn to be himself: “You can never be another man” 36 (421). Midnight, who does not emulate anyone, advises the same to Lavidicus. Midnight defines himself as a set of his own choices, knowing that “the person who is me would not exist if those choices had been made differently” (Gillett 2008, 61). He suggests that Lavidicus should make his first prayer by watching Midnight’s prayer with open eyes “in complete silence” (422). Once he learns how to make a prayer, he can close his eyes and make his first real prayer on his own. He feels responsibility for the vulnerable so that nobody, including the women and even boys such as Lavidicus, will be mere victims. Since the state fails to create a nurturing social structure wherein all citizens

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enjoy “a collective responsibility to care for each other” (Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, 2013a, 25), Midnight develops and operates through what Judith Butler calls “an ethics of vulnerability” (cited in Gilson 2014, 51). His helping Lavidicus as atonement for his violent attack, challenges the normative view that “autonomy is all about independence” (J. Anderson 2013, 151). In this respect, he performs his “autonomous agency” (Scully 2013, 212) for the good of others, such as inner-city girls, Lavidicus, and his family to make effective change happen in human life for the betterment of society. All the urge for resistance against the imposed vulnerability seems to be channeled into being, in Kevin Powell’s words, “an agent for change” (2015, 159). As he shares space with the other prisoners, he studies very hard, earns his GED, and takes the SAT exam. The she-officer reminds him that she cannot understand why young black boys fight with each other, rather than beating the white racist boys from Howard Beach—who murdered Michael Griffith, who was chased by and confronted the white gang members in the white neighborhood, causing him to be killed by a vehicle. She says that all the COs are warned to protect the “white-boy inmates, the murderers, from getting mobbed and hurt” (434)—and her statement makes him realize that some people still cared about the honor of black people. He listens to his fellow inmate Butch (a.k.a. Broadcast) who, recruited by DeQuan, explains that there are more than two thousand prisons in America and more than a million prisoners. He remembers Ricky Santiaga, who organized or invested in a black team to be the champions of the junior division of the Hustler’s League. While playing chess, Santiaga talked him into working for him and let him win the game—something Midnight was aware of. Santiaga says: “It showed me your character. You’re a man who is capable of keeping your ego in check, and not showing your best hand when there’s nothing in it for you. Great strategy, awesome timing—I like that” (456). He revisits his memories of how Chiasa’s family gave him a hard time, having him examined by Dr. Clementine Moody, the psychiatrist, as if he were a patient, and revealed that Marcus was in fact the General’s son, but then Chiasa insisted she would marry him. He thinks that a true Muslim man is culturally misunderstood by the American people, for his act of submission to anyone other than Allah is considered “as arrogance” (478). He observes, while in prison, the way “the carceral state” (J.T. Camp 2016, 148) operates on black men from the ghetto: “The projects were pouring into the prisons and the men were getting more-tougher. The crowded streets emptied the street crowd into the cells” (479). He is surprised that Ricky Santiaga visits him, with respect: “I felt in my soul that more than any man, Ricky Santiaga knew I had murdered a lesser man, for the right reasons” (480). Since he has to serve two more years, Santiaga wants to know when he will be released so he can send his limo. The cooperative act between them earns other inmates’ respect for Midnight. He reads in the newsletter that Lavidicus, who is also

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doing time at Rikers Island, Robert Donovan Adolescent Jail, got permission from the administration to marry his eighteen-year-old girlfriend in 1987. DeQuan acknowledges that Midnight had a deep impact on Lavidicus and was a positive role model for him, teaching Lavidicus how to master himself and his life. Souljah’s attitude to the urban space on the distinction between the real and the possible in the characters’ lives can be considered in line with the distinction made by anthropological approaches of Eric Hirsch to landscape “between the actuality of place—with clear subject positions (‘what we are’)—and the potentiality of space—with non-subject positions (‘what we might become’)” 37 (cited in Bertelsen, Tvedten, and Roque 2014, 2755). DeQuan lets Midnight know that the community activist Sister Lisa, 38 the literary twin of Sister Souljah, is coming to the prison to talk. Since Sister Lisa is a guide and encourages the young male inmates not to repeat crime, she gives advice to them in a personal way: “We need you to be home. We need you to be strong. We need you to be capable and above all to be true. We need you to be loving us, the women, as we work together with you, side by side” 39 (485). Sister Lisa, in fact, articulates the notion that these young black ghetto men have to practice compassion and connection in their everyday life. Sister Lisa tells them she is “a fighter” and repeats her well-known four words, “We are at war!” 40 (486). In calling the prison system in America “cheap forced labor” (488), she directs her criticism to the state that harbors the real criminals “in the government and the corporations,” which are sometimes “one in the same” (488), economically exploiting them all. She wants the black sisters to love black men and see them “in a better light,” while she urges black men “to be a better man” (489). “Work hard! Strive hard! Fight hard! Love hard! Man and woman, woman and man, let’s build a nation where we can thrive. Where the police don’t reign supreme and the slaughter of our children isn’t sport. Where white is just one shade of skin without melanin, not to be worshipped or imitated or served” (489). Midnight is impressed by her words, “a machine gun” (490), and when she leaves, DeQuan tells Midnight that the Minister guaranteed protection for her “so the streets don’t touch her” (491). Many changes take place: Bryan Jones, the community relations counselor, who let DeQuan host speakers, was gone, and Karim Ali disappeared after teaching American history with a critical perspective. “Inmates got shifted and shipped out and cells changed. . . . The unspoken truth: no one wanted us to learn or grow or change. They needed us to remain in physical stagnation and bondage and in a criminal state of mind” (492). Midnight is notified he will be moved to a different prison just before the New Year’s Eve in 1987, when he was supposed to stay two full years at Rikers, not seventeen months. Riding away from Rikers, he remembers Butch Broadcast’s words about how an ex-convict is never free to get equal treatment in a

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job application, as he becomes a potential suspect in everybody’s eyes: “Everything a black man say or do, even how we talk and walk or sit and chill is considered a crime” (498). His cautionary tale of what is awaiting Midnight in the future makes clear to Midnight that inhabiting the black body “has always already exceeded the boundaries of white legality” (Yancy, Miller, and Johnson 2014, 2). He realizes that Sister Lisa was absolutely telling the truth: “We are at war. Not because we want to be, just because we are” (500). When, on the day of transport away from Rikers, the truck has an accident, the guard unbolts the back door and Midnight faces M16 assault rifles held by men wearing snorkels with hoods covering their faces. But the unarmed man who walks with the hooded ones saves him as the truck falls backward, and they have to walk in the presence of guards to get on another truck. It stops after half an hour, and Midnight is made to get on a helicopter, which lands on snow-covered flatlands, and he is led to a house where he finds Chiasa’s book manuscript, My Shahada, on the table. He reads how Chiasa asks her father to bring her husband back to her. Now, on January 1, 1988, as Midnight faces Chiasa’s father, who had “the full authority of the United States military” (515), he is unable to figure out whether or not he is free. He hears the Hummer, and goes to meet the General, who wants him to climb in to catch an appointment for Midnight to attend the academy. His father-in-law explains that last night he was supposed to be taken to a maximum security, Clinton Correctional Facility, as a reminder that he has to accept the terms of his negotiated release. 41 Knowing his father-in-law’s resentment of the Islamic lifestyle, even after Chiasa became a Muslim, he understands the deeper prejudices of American citizens, who stereotype him as “violent,” while he thinks they are “uncivilized” (522). He reads in Chiasa’s manuscript that she asked her father, who looked down on Midnight as a murderer, how many men he, her father, has killed—“Shall we count them?” (523). While the state’s legitimization of the “lawful killing” positions the General on the right side of the law, she asks a rhetorical question about whether or not it matters to her father that Midnight killed a man “defending his sister” (523) out of filial duty. When his father-in-law explains the deal, he calls Midnight “a prisoner of war,” losing the battle with his father-in-law, and the best outcome for a loser, he explains, is to become “a hostage, a servant, a slave, or a dead man” (527). He tells Midnight that a private corporation “purchased your sentence and your servitude. Now they own you” (528), pointing to the commodification of legal rights. Midnight confronts his father-in-law to negotiate as a businessman; he is lawful because he wants to serve his time, whereas Chiasa’s father says he had to clean up a mess for him to clear his name, to separate him from his fake identity, Jordan Mann. He provided another man, who assumed this fake identity, to serve the rest of Midnight’s sentence,

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“doing your time in your place” (529). The deal is that Midnight will go to the school in Switzerland for one and a half years, including summers. When he graduates, he will serve the remaining three and a half years under contract as a member of a secret mercenary army, the Elite Global Organization of Soldiers, a private company his father-in-law owns, where he does not have to wear a uniform: “You will not be a part of the United States military. But you will be under my management and command. I’ll contract you out to elite customers and move you to countries all around the world. You’ll be highly paid. And when your time is up, you walk away” (530). It is quite evident that the state or private corporations commit unlawful acts in unprecedented ways with viable strategies, and hence his father-in-law positions himself within the white power structure to allow him a space of “governing” Midnight’s body and life. Midnight identifies with Karim Ali’s definition of a criminal, who is “a person, network or institution, business, or system that violates and operates and participates in activities outside of the established laws of the legitimate government or recognized governing body of a city, state, country, or territory.” Given that, Midnight realizes that his murdering Lance was criminal, while at the same time “the General is a criminal, and the U.S. military is criminal too” (530). He now understands why Ricky Santiaga said, “There is no such thing as a bad man” (530), for, as Midnight reflexively thinks now, crime is intrinsic to the white power system: “Because of the system we live in, we all fit the criminal definition perfectly. The only way out of that truth it seemed, was to change the system, completely” (530). For him, the social and legal system produces criminals, so there is a need to make structural changes to eradicate white supremacy. Midnight realizes that there is no better way out: When men have to work hard to protect their loved ones and family, they have to humble themselves and settle for losing something “to gain something much better and much greater” (531). He is sorry that his freedom is traded for that of an innocent man, whom the General calls “a slave, a prisoner of war” (531), for it is part of the criminal justice system that the prisoner is whom, to use Robin D.G. Kelley’s words, “the state sacrifices for capital” (2017, 255). The General continues: “In the prison system, son, you are just a body, a number. You’re human waste” (531). Reduced to an Agambenian “bare life,” the incarcerated black people must “face the suspension of their ontological status as subjects” (Follis 2013, 95). Hence, the sovereign power of the state is not confined to the life outside the prison; on the contrary, it deploys its power by colonizing the space of action in black everyday life. The General explains to Midnight that he ran into some trouble in his youth, an experience that made him figure out that the world is divided into winners and losers. Since the winners “have authority, a license to hold, a license to kill . . . and get away with it” (532), he asks Midnight to side with

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the winners to enjoy power. In a moment of reflection, Midnight remembers the capital letters “HWM” from the past in the early years of his marriage with Chiasa, when he was on the private yacht, owned by its captain Dr. Clementine Moody, who was the General’s brother-in-law. While Clementine had kept questioning Midnight about his past, he had handed Midnight a note on a small notepad embossed with “HWM.” As he now asks the General about the meaning of these letters, he learns that they stand for “Human Waste Management” (533), Midnight’s sponsors. The General is surprised that Midnight knows this, which was in fact highly classified information, because they were stamped on the uniform, the coat and the boots they gave him the night before. The General reveals that HWM is an upcoming powerhouse corporation: The world is at the verge of “the privatization of every service available,” including “the privatization of prisons and the military and even the privatizing of the individual” (533). He also ended up creating “a global private army,” for the HWM corporation is “owned by a black man” (533) who uses his vice president as the face of the corporation. Midnight is now aware that the General and his brother-in-law have their own separate corporations, feeding one another, storing “the inventory known as ‘human waste’” (534). Midnight does not approve of the General and his brother-in-law’s business of fraud, commodifying human life with its implications of biopolitical agenda: “The entire globe was their marketplace” 42 (534). Midnight comes to understand that Clementine believes those who fail to stand within the narrative of the American Dream ideology are a waste, “disposable bodies” (H.A. Giroux 2006, 11). Given that Midnight’s father-in-law (and his brother-in-law) choose to stand within the domain of militarized society, they are not aware how much they miss while pretending to be in control. Chiasa’s father, who arranges Midnight’s abduction and relocates him within the state’s system, is an African American man himself whose rank-power makes it possible for him to whitewash Midnight’s crime of murder to uphold white supremacy—an unlawful act. In other words, the General practices the discursive power of whiteness, performing with no “corresponding concern with the evils of [white] hegemonic power” (Cooks 2017, 209). Midnight is determined not to comply with the dictates of white supremacy in a society where “[b]oth white and nonwhite bodies may perform Whiteness” (Kennedy et al. 2017a, 5). His mother, sister, and two wives never perform whiteness, and make an alliance against white patriarchy in their attempts to promote “the affective interpersonal boundary-crossing” (Jay 2017, 40). Since the General tells him that he will come to learn Midnight’s decision the next day, Midnight goes to the house, and sees his baby on Chiasa’s back, whom she places in the drawer and covers with a blanket. Doing time in prison stole the time and happiness from him: “I had missed watching all of that happen” (535). The novel ends with Chiasa’s expression of how much

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she missed him, and wants to have sex with him. The scene reminds one of Diane’s feeling, in Marita Golden’s The Wide Circumference of Love, that she is “lodged in this space, the wide circumference of love that took in everything, all of them” (2017, 263). Even though Midnight seems to be deprived of his autonomy, almost becoming a pawn in the hands of his father-in-law—whose design of Midnight’s future signifies his embodied practices of whiteness. However, he also allows time for Midnight to think over his proposal for his future, and hence this act is the recognition that Midnight has “autonomous agency” (Scully 2013, 212). His experiences with the police officers, in the earlier scenes, whose imposed vulnerability myths of the black criminal man are challenged by his attitude that demonstrates his ability to “micro-manage the people around [him]” (B. Brown 2012, 55). We understand that it is out of a need to be with Chiasa and his newborn son that he seems to be willing to temporarily accept the offer, while keeping a critical eye on his father-in-law’s business transactions, and hence his “objectionable paternalism” (Mackenzie 2013, 56). He indirectly destabilizes the norms, embodied by police officers who faked his real crime, and his fatherin-law’s vision for a free future to open up a transformative space of action. ***** In the course of the novel, Sister Souljah uses a polyvalent approach to Midnight’s silence, which implies indifference to white expectations and assumptions about himself, a sense of wholeness and self-reliance. Sister Souljah attributes positive meanings to his silence, because that is how we, the readers, get to know who he really is: an embodiment of a dynamic interiority. Performing blackness as excess is “building a counternarrative and changing how the past is lived in the present” (Schlosser 2016, 20). Midnight’s silence is contingent on discursive frameworks of various people he encounters. Following Gayatri Spivak’s view in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Roi Wagner argues, in a different context, that the performativity of silence in a given situation is made possible not because the subject fails to have a capacity to speak up, but on account of “the discursive mechanisms that render [his] oppositional statements senseless” (Wagner 2012, 101), because his verbal account would fit into the white police’s crime narrative of a black man, involved in drug dealing, followed by killing as payback. But his persistent silence renders impossible the invisibility of white discursive power in an attempt to undo it, for his later talks with the lawyer, where he partially discloses the facts about what happened, can be described with the notion of “cloudy visibility” 43 (Schwab et al. 2016, 289). Midnight’s memories during interrogation and incarceration, his critical thoughts about the arbitrary law enactment where innocent people have to serve time, and his silence even to his father-in-law are attempts at watching

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for the right moment to move toward the aim of “living in truth” (Havel 1985, 41). At the end of the day, if Midnight has to transform his crime into valuable action through and within the state, then he has to attain power. His seeming captive state of being is a long struggle, while “America is at war with itself, and the atrocity of war is apparent in the ever-increasing flood of intolerable corporate crime and state violence” (H.A. Giroux 2017, 189). The novel ends with Midnight’s sense of empowerment, while assuming a critical perspective of the masqueraded criminal practices of the U.S. government, situated within the State’s paradigm in a “non-complicit identification” (Farris 2017, 42). In a society mediated by a broken criminal justice system, racialized and criminalized vulnerability affects Midnight’s body, but not his soul: His reinvention of himself, distrust of American people, and particularly his deliberate acts of silence as noncomplicity with the police are his personal and profound acts of civil disobedience. Midnight is equipped with the embodied values of “democratic individuality with the sensibilities needed to confront America’s racial constitution” (Turner 2012, 86), and its attendant race and gender inequalities. Midnight makes sense of what Cathy Cohen calls “a politics of deviance” (qtd in Cacho 2012, 167). As Lisa Marie Cacho explains: “A politics of deviance makes sense of deviations from the norm differently rather than defensively. Such a politics would neither pathologize deviance nor focus most of its energies on trying to rationalize why people choose deviant practice over proper behavior” (2012, 167). Souljah’s novel seems to be an indirect response to Martin Glynn’s question, “How do black men acquire and tell their own authentic narrative when their voices are conspicuously absent at a strategic level?” While Midnight is “being sucked into the very machinery that grinds [his] energy down” (Glynn 2014, 155, 9), his father-in-law’s arrangement is reassuring that he will not go back to prison, while ordinary everyday life is, ironically, governed by the coercive domination of “the carceral state” (Camp 2016, 148). His counter-narrative of interiority is pushed into a strategy for transformative change that has the potential “to create a more equitable and empowering way to function and live in a society” (Glynn 2014, 9) that ultimately bears the hope to disrupt the privileging of whiteness over black bodies and lives. NOTES 1. “Blackness is a positionality of ‘absolute dereliction,’ abandonment, in the face of civil society and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions” (Wilderson 2007, 23). 2. In the mid-1980s, he goes to school and works with his mother, and even murders a man who is attracted to his mother—a perfect murder case that is never solved by the police. He is later hired by Ricky Santiaga, the druglord of Brooklyn, to do business with him, for Ricky respects Midnight’s intelligence, business mind, guarded attitude, and professional manners.

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3. But her father, a prejudiced man against Midnight, has her kidnapped to Japan, even after the marriage was consummated. Midnight makes several trips to different countries to look for Akemi and finally brings her back home. 4. Agamben argues that “this exclusion is always already an inclusion, an embedding in the structure of the city” (cited in Nichols 2008, 461), where the threat of “bare life” is paradoxically contained. 5. Following upon Agamben’s argument, the role of “bare life” of the black citizen is at the heart of the ideology of whiteness. Much like the contemporary scene he alludes to, there is a sense in which the white police officers in the novel could easily kill any innocent black man under suspicion “without the act being considered as a murder or sacrifice which falls within the scope of [Giorgio] Agamben’s conceptions of bare life and sovereign power” (Patel and Tyrer 2011, 155). Being constructed as racialized others, the black bodies, reduced to “bare life,” are a discursive part of “broader spatial narratives” (Fleury-Steiner, Dunn, and FleurySteiner 2009, 9) in the city. 6. In Umm Juwayriyah’s urban fiction The Size of a Mustard Seed, an ordinary traffic accident exposes the post-9/11 othering of Muslims, as a white American driver approaches the two Muslim women, Jameelah and Khadijah, in the car that caused the accident, and addresses them as “those freaking foreigners” (2009, 25). 7. The novel reveals that Midnight’s lifelong quest as a black person, employing “the everyday practices of resistance” (S.M. Hall 2015, 856) for empowering his subjectivity, is closely tied to living in shared space with his family as a bonded community. 8. Even though neoliberalism has caused an intensification in “the cultural standardization” of sentiments, his feelings go against “everyday evaluations of racial difference and ongoing processes of ‘racial learning’” (Ramos-Zayas 2012, 283). 9. Harwell argues that this is “a central concept in the area of social movement theory. Framing considers that leaders help people understand an issue or cause in such a way that draws greater participation and sustains this participation over time” (Harwell 2016, xvi). In a similar vein, Souljah’s activism and/in her work is also effective in her transformation of sociopolitical concerns and issues specific to African American communities. 10. Even though polygamy is linked with Muslim beliefs here, Souljah’s A Deeper Love Inside: The Porsche Santiaga Story (2012) presents how Porsche, the druglord Ricky Santiaga’s daughter, ends up sharing her husband with another woman who is in love with him, in a reproduction of African-based collective authority of women, against the Western colonial system of gender. 11. Chiasa is a devoted Muslim who enjoys reading the Holy Quran for her self-development to become a better person. She does not like Midnight’s American practice of carrying guns, because she believes that a gun “is a weakness, a type of excuse not to use your hands and mind to the furthest degree” (4). As Chiasa says, the Muslim belief that a man can have more than one wife, given he treats them all equally, would call for the erasure of personal differences between the wives. Instead, she says: “No woman wants to be treated ‘equal’ to another, because we are each different” (3). The American notion of respecting each individual woman for who she is seems to coincide with her religious consent to polygamy. 12. In the first book of the Midnight Series, we learn that he went to a ninjutsu school in Brooklyn where he had his official training. His sensei, a Japanese man in his thirties, taught them about how ancient Japanese made weapons to fight their enemies. Being an immigrant, Midnight identified with them: “Coming from a foreign land, I did not trust the United States’ authorities. I didn’t even trust the American people” (Souljah 2008, 32). He did not trust his new black neighbors, because their ways of living, talking, and acting were totally different from one another: “Now I was mastering an ancient martial art form and converting myself into an urban ninja warrior” (Souljah 2008, 32). Even though he never socialized with the criminal ghetto boys and men, who “thought they knew me,” he never responded back to those, who talked to him about the events in the hood, other than “listening and nodding” (Souljah 2008, 44). His critical view of black ghetto thugs made him feel that he was constantly at war with every boy and man living or working on his block, because they were not his true community: “I was either at war with them with my mind, my ideas and my beliefs, or my fists, my feet and my weapons” (Souljah 2008, 45).

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13. Midnight’s keen perception is based on how he observes these “big white-boy cops” (30) as coming probably from poor families with low intelligence. 14. Darren Goins also uses a similar term to Hall’s words, while he uses it in singular form as “performance choices” (Goins 2007, 254). 15. Since blackness is “a performative experience” (Cowin-Mensah 2015, 249), Midnight never performs his black body as a mechanism of “governing through crime” strategies (Simon 2007, 261) with the belief that “something must change” (Martinson and Jackson 2015, 277). The affect of “carceral power” (Shabazz 2015, 45, 17) continues to be performed every day, as the police officers in the precinct violate his rights, for the police attempt to reinscribe their own power on his black body. Hence their construct of his black male body as aggressive in custody positions him outside “a presence marked by the word” (Knowles 2015, 12). Midnight’s silence in interrogation grows ambivalent in a society where racialized “place-making” is manifested “through identity-talk,” and his revelations of silence are “small everyday acts of resistance” (Piacentini 2014, 183). 16. The forced confession, at the same time, exposes how their verbal accounts and views of black male criminals are far from being adequate “to the task of capturing the reality of blackness” (Thurston 2012, 11). His extra-linguistic act complicates blackness, and it reminds one of the ex-police lieutenant Thomas Nolan, who argues that the police build an identification of what can be called “the blue wall of silence” as a configuration of a form of masculinity that endorses a falsity of statements, and privileges “hegemony, and secrecy” (Nolan 2009, 251). 17. The police officers ironically misunderstand Midnight’s silence as the disempowered black criminal’s impulsive act of self-protection unless the police cut a deal with him. Ironically, for the racist officers, his silence means, on the one hand, an ambivalent sign of both presence as the “script[ed]” black body (R. Jackson 2006, 53) and of absence as not sharing “equal adulthood” (Field 2014, 11) with them. 18. Much like Mason, in Clarence Major’s My Amputations, a complex African American who belongs to America and Africa, Midnight also lives within himself since there is not “space worthy outside” (Major 1986, 36). As bell hooks points out, experience, and personal testimony in particular, produce liberatory praxis, forming the basis of knowledge (cited in Ibrahim 2014, 5). 19. He now realizes that every man needs “an army of real men” (88). However, the value of this male brotherhood, he admits, rests in “the value of each of the men it is made up of” (88). 20. Midnight’s memories of how men were expected to behave and act in Sudanese culture clearly show that men were allowed space to enhance their autonomy (extending to that of their women, not at their expense), unlike in the black urban spaces in the United States, where black men (and women) are expected to be and act as victims. 21. While he regrets that he failed to build an army of brothers with his close friends, he takes the murder and his arrest as a test decreed by Allah—a challenge, he hopes, that will move him closer to Allah. 22. He remembers meeting Chiasa for the first time. Chiasa needs a partner for her vending machine and negotiates with him playfully, upon using her “spiritual sword” (119), for she wants to be a Muslim woman just like Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad: “This is the kind of Muslim woman I strive to be. Like Khadijah, I want to make wise choices and investments. I want to be an active and useful and loyal wife” (120). He also remembers his first wife Akemi and his respect for her intelligence as much as her beauty: “She doesn’t speak English but her emotions, body, and gestures speak my language” (122). He defines true wealth as having a freedom of faith, loyal wives, land, property, and secure children, and he remembers how his life changed when he agreed to do business with Santiaga. 23. She is surprised that there is a police officer’s affidavit about Midnight’s confession to having murdered the sexual assailant, but he tells her the truth that he neither assaulted a police officer nor resisted arrest; he never did armed robbery or joined a gang, or worked as a drug dealer; and he never confessed to murder. 24. Midnight feels his autonomy, maintaining his calm attitude during the naked search in front of the corrections officers: “I felt despite my present situation that I was still above all of the men hired to do what they were doing right then” (251). He remembers that men in Sudan

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felt no shame in naked bodies in public baths, for they were “solid” (251) men, knowing they were bonded with each other to protect “our women, our land, our animals, and our culture and beliefs” (252). 25. As a mother Umma feels that, while Midnight and Chiasa are “both quiet” (265), their feelings for one another are powerful enough to be felt by others even in silence. In their daily life, Chiasa believes that Naja, as a born Muslim, can teach her more about Islam; for Chiasa, life is a journey of learning and self-development. She tells Naja that she has been training since she was five years old in martial arts for self-protection: “We train because we should and because we want to be prepared for any and all situations that life might show us” (277). 26. In one, he confronted a ghetto “dude” (322) in an alley in the hood the night before his flight to Japan on business (vending machines). In the second, he took down an older man in the alley to protect the honor of a young black girl, named “Bangs,” a pretty Brooklyn girl his age who loved him. His Muslim identity determines his relationships with women: “If you want her, don’t play with her. Marry her. Take care of her. Love and treat her good” (323). He is highly critical of the African American young ghetto boys’ cultural performativity of manhood: “They all seemed to be comfortable with sex, yet fearful of love. Most of them seemed to be completely against marriage at any age” (329). He is equally critical of young African American women in the ghetto, who use their agency to do all the things that dishonor or violate their dignity as women, “humiliated and disrespected good guys who actually loved them, while they worshipped and chased and loved guys who ran through and abused them. They feared pregnancy and hated the thought of babies, and had already decided on abortions even before they conceived” (329). 27. Thomas J. Scheff explains that Karl Marx used the concept of false consciousness in an attempt to understand “the acquiescence of subordinate classes to systems of stratification which are patently unjust” (Scheff 1994, 120). Here, Scheff expands Marx’s use of the term to include classes subject to racial and gender oppression. 28. Tracy Morison and Catriona Macleod consider silence “as more than merely the lack of the spoken word.” They expand and address the post-structuralist scholar Lisa A. Mazzei’s concept of “problematic of silence” in their research via interviews (Morison and Macleod 2014, 695). 29. His employment of memories make it possible to deal with his “I-positions” as a son, husband, and Muslim (Prokopiou, Cline, and Abreu 2012, 506). Prokopiou et al. continue: “Cultural identities consist of a rich repertoire of I-positions which are . . . always already to be engaged in dialogue with the external positions of self” (Prokopiou et al. 2012, 506). Midnight’s silence is “meaningful and constitutive” (Pagis 2010, 311), for he has full control over the new modes of agency, while he negotiates “non-normative everyday practices” (Phoenix 2010, 173). 30. Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young claim that criminology has studied the evil actions of men, but not “the constitutive role that silence and inaction performs in the aetiology of crime” (2008, 131). 31. Hallsworth and Young believe that a “wall of silence” is significant in examining “the constitutive role silence performs in sustaining crime” (2008, 134). 32. The disciplinary interpellation of black bodies is challenged by Midnight’s agency in determining his moments of silence and counter-speeches, for all meanings are “haunted by the possibility of subversive rearticulation” (Nealon 1998, 21). 33. The CO shares her relationship with a married man, another corrections officer with a noncaring attitude to her, even though she had a son from him, conceived in jail. Midnight warns her that she “uses” her son to make up for the love she lost, but instead, she should let him be a man: “She was protecting her son, financing her son, spoiling and serving her son” (339). He disapproves of her irresponsible actions with a married man, for she confuses love with guilt, punishing herself “for her choices and deeds, and working herself into danger and death to reverse them” (339). He makes a cross-cultural comparison about manhood, as he believes she would never even understand that in his Sudanese culture, her teenager son is considered a grown man. 34. He believes that women and children should be protected, kept outside of man-on-man disputes: “A real war is a brutal, man’s space” (373). He supports the separate spheres for men

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and women: “Umma had her own business in Sudan, same as she has one here in America” (376). In Midnight’s view, these separate spheres do not hinder the women from equal participation in public; Chiasa, who looks up to the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife Khadijah as a role model, believes it would be awesome if she wrote a book on “how she saw and experienced the Prophet” (379). 35. He believes that being a true Muslim means “politics is not the criteria for Islam” (402). Having no experience of love in the past and the present, as he sees, the young black boys are unable to solve their problems, for they are not taught to invest in themselves. The teacher also makes them think seriously about the contradictions of the American Revolution, and he lets a student, nicknamed Mathematics, explain that the “hidden lie” was that both the British whites and the white American colonist freedom fighters, whom he calls “white devils” (414), supported slavery and profited from “the enslavement of the black man and woman in Britain in the American colonies and all around the world” (415). 36. Lavidicus now realizes Midnight is not forcing him to do any evil act for him, and drops a note “Teach me” (420) on Midnight’s desk. Midnight sees him as a young boy without “spiritual protection” (420), and that he suffered from “his own unawareness” (421). Defiantly, he asks Lavidicus why he has humbled himself to others and submitted to their demands, instead of submitting only to “the One who created your soul and gave you life, to say a prayer of appreciation, a prayer for guidance, a prayer for vision, a prayer for protection” (421). 37. “This tension—between the physical, experienced landscape (the urban order of the everyday) and the discourses and imaginaries of (and in) the urban (dynamics that may reveal simultaneously the political, the colonial past in the ‘present) . . . can be approached analytically” (Bertelsen et al. 2014, 2755). 38. Sister Souljah’s real name is Lisa Williamson, who decided to call herself Sister Souljah about the time Chuck D of Public Enemy asked her “to become the first female member” (K. Powell 2015, 182). 39. She continues: “A person should always know who they are and what purpose they serve. A person should also know who they are not, and what they will and will not do or allow to be done with them or to them” (485). 40. She claims, in furious passion, that they, including her, have been “wronged,” but they have also been “wrong” (487). She encourages all the brothers and sisters to get their minds right—to read “the right books,” to write “the right words,” and to fight their enemies but not their wo/men or family, “not your people” (487). 41. Before Midnight listens to the deal, he thinks that life, unlike a chess game, is never predictable: Life is “random, hostile, and impulsive,” for even the weakest man might do “the most unexpected, deadliest, and horrific thing” (521). 42. “They were even buying what Allah had gifted each of us in varying degrees, our time on Earth. Furthermore, the learned Clementine Moody had the balls to name his business Human Waste Management” (534). Clementine believes “he could do more with people’s lives and deaths than people could do for themselves. And he believed that people who were not pursuing Ivy League degrees and the status he achieved were actually ‘waste’” (534). 43. It is a phrase that points to those engaged men, experiencing a stressful life event “in simultaneously visible and invisible ways.” Visibility, here, attests to “expressing to another person the inner emotions experienced when confronted with a life difficulty” (Schwab et al. 2016, 289).

Chapter Three

Toward New Performatives of Blackness as Embodied Praxis Affective Shifts in the Carceral Spatiality of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016)

American people live at a precarious time in which “the destruction and violence waged by neoliberal capitalism” brings about “not just the crushing of the human spirit, mind, and body, but the abolition of democratic politics itself” (H.A. Giroux 2018b, 291). Neoliberalism, when considered as a social and cultural formation that ignores the past and reconstitutes experience in the present, can explain the contemporary turn to punishment in the American society. The carceralization of society in the present moment marks a crucial instance that unravels the intrinsic relationship between racism and capitalism that has long enabled an ongoing war, both at home and abroad, not merely against criminals, Joy James argues, but also against “criminalized peoples” (2007, xiv). Although the association of the carceral state with neoliberalism is not an entirely new formation, what we see in the current conjuncture are the emergent forms of repression in new social domains: “The global racism of neoliberalism acts directly on beings and bodies through forms of surveillance, interrogation, and detention, as much as through the ideological work of constructing friends and enemies” (De Lissovoy 2013, 744, 751). In this context, it is helpful to remember how Doreen Massey, a leading thinker in human geography, remarks in all her work, including For Space (2005), that she mobilizes a spatial perspective, regarding “the politics of place, [and] the question of regional inequality” (2012, 1). Since space, as she has always insisted, is “the product of relations and is always unfinished 89

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and under construction,” then it is always possible that “spatial relations can be articulated and generated in different, potentially antagonistic ways” 1 (Featherstone and Painter 2013a, 3–4). The act of understanding locations offers insight into the “complex totalities of social life and power,” Massey writes, for there is always a flux of “making and re-making of the spaces and places” (cited in Grossberg 2013, 42). In an interview, Massey expresses her strong belief that there is a need to “take responsibility for the inevitable boundaries” of place to problematize the ways in which they are constructed (2013, 256). This notion of hybrid places, Alexia Panayiotou argues, enables the hope that black people can, indeed, remake spaces “through their practices,” and hence, they can resist the racial order, functioning as “the [white] symbolic spatial order” 2 (Panayiotou 2015, 438). Anthony Kwame Harrison, studying “skiing” as a racially segregated space, points to how racist discourses are based on “the perception that certain racialized bodies are expected to occupy certain social spaces” (Harrison 2013, 317). These insidious operations of white power that can be seen in all areas of life promote the “imaginary spatiality” (Kabir 2015, 277), or what I prefer to call the carceral spatiality of whiteness, which shapes racialized punishment of incarcerated “black and Latino Americans” 3 (Goodman 2014, 354). This carceral logic of social control is made possible through “the social and spatial mechanisms that the carceral state uses to remove unwanted bodies from public spaces” (Annamma 2016, 1213). In the twenty-first century especially, there has been an incredible increase in the number of black prisoners in the U.S. prison population, a phenomenon the sociologist David Garland has called “mass imprisonment” (cited in A. Goffman 2014, 3). In addition to Garland, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander have also drawn a strong correlation between incarceration in the present and earlier oppressive systems of slavery and Jim Crow: Wacquant points to the presence of a “penal state” (2009, 55), and Alexander claims that mass incarceration helps “to define the meaning and significance of race in America” (2010, 18). Since race and space are co-constitutive of each other, considering space, in particular, as a discursive lens makes us understand that “there is considerable microlevel variation” in how race is “experienced, and negotiated” in diverse everyday social contexts (Goodman 2014, 389). Carceral power in the form of policing considers racial exclusion as white society’s, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, “dispositif” 4 (2009, 194), an apparatus of organizing racialized social spaces. We can say that racial policing is “also a mechanism to access and consolidate whiteness” 5 in the city, and to regulate black masculinity (Shabazz 2015, 11). The intrinsic relationship of the body to the space is worth noting here: In view of what the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre called “the production of space” 6 (1991, 68), it is crucial to consider how the multiple “carceral spaces ultimately work together to create the carceral society” (E.A. Brown 2014, 386).

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In this respect, racial profiling can be considered a spatial(izing) practice, for D. Marvin Jones suggests that race “has become space,” 7 for in a carceral regime, people are not arrested for what they have actually done, but rather because the penalizing logic intersects with “race as space” (D.M. Jones 2016, 5). On the other hand, the racial profiling of urban blacks as thugs indicates that they are not only racialized but criminalized: No longer seen as citizens, urban blacks, particularly black men, represent the “ontological threa[t]” (Yancy 2017c, 592). Laura J. Khoury, in addition, claims that racial profiling not only exposes the racializing regime of rationality, but also “reinvents non-whiteness, the ‘new black,’ as a signifier to criminality,” while it functions as a “taming instrument (dressage)” in the constitution of the black person (Khoury 2009, 70). One need only remember that blackness, like gender, is not only about space, but it is “also a performative practice” (Panayiotou 2015, 428). Here, I bring the black (male) body into a discussion of white power and space to examine both how the black body is inscribed in “white space” (E. Anderson 2015, 10), and how its performativity of blackness transforms that very space. However, mentioning “only exclusionary discourses” often runs the risk of limiting the possibility to challenge exclusionary practices, opening the need for “alternative narratives” (Strohl 2015, 164). In this context, Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe (2016a) presents “alternative narratives” of blackness, embodied in, in Michel Foucault’s words, “counter-sites” 8 (cited in Bailey and Shabazz 2014, 317) of normative expectations in everyday life, for crime fiction “as a format is especially suitable for the incorporation of everyday topics” (Hedberg 2017, 19). As Easy Rawlins, the black male protagonist, claims the right to a shifting relationship in the carceral spatiality of whiteness, and hence transgresses the discursive regimes that underpin and maintain the racialized boundaries, he is aware that racial profiling is based on the use of race as space. The breakthrough challenges can be possible, as Easy’s acts of resistance demonstrate, because alternative performativity of blackness can be employed as an effective mechanism to work through the discursive practices of whiteness. Charcoal Joe (2016a) is the fourteenth novel in the Easy Rawlins Series, 9 whose plot summary revolves around how Easy struggles to make the world safe for a young black man, Dr. Seymour Brathwaite, who is unjustly accused of murdering two white men. After all the experiences he has had in the novels before this one, we see that Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, forty-eight years old, started the WRENS-L Detective Agency with the money he has taken from the Rose Gold case, depicted in the preceding novel Rose Gold (2014). Set in 1968, three years after the Watts Riot, while the black neighborhoods “are still simmering with rage” (Stasio 2016), the novel also demonstrates the fragility of respectability politics for black people. The white LAPD captain, Melvin Suggs, with whom he has cooperated over the years in previous novels in the series, and his friend Fearless Jones, a black man

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from Fearless Jones Series, help him, but he still has to work through the insidious forms of racism both at a personal and an institutional level. In an interview about Rose Gold, Mosley says, “Easy’s experience of racism in Los Angeles in the late 60's is the explication of the murders and subsequent rioting in the streets of the 21st century United States.” His experience is still lived in the real social world in which “[y]oung black men are still gunned down for their rage,” and that prejudgment “governs” courts, police departments, and “the expectations of our leaders” (2014a). What Mosley says about Rose Gold also applies to the issues explored in Charcoal Joe, because his comment is directly related to our act of reading the novel in the context of the present. The novel centers on the crucial moment where a black male body (Seymour) is racialized as the discursive space, deemed as “the distorted racist imago of the Black body in the white imaginary” (Yancy 2016b, 246). The difficulty of Easy’s ordeal lies in trying to prove the innocence of a black man who achieves upward mobility, or what W. Lawrence Hogue calls “racial uplift” (2003, 36) in a society governed by the white embodied habits of “the violence and pain of racialized corporeality” (Yancy 2017c, 588). The novel makes a critical inquiry, through their persons, into the everyday consequences of whiteness as the space of “exceptionalism” at the foundation of the American Dream ideology (Bush and Bush 2015, 32). Charcoal Joe starts with how the narrator/protagonist Easy Rawlins works as a professional detective in May 1968, in his company WRENS-L Detective Agency, with two other detectives: Saul Lynx, a Jewish detective, and Tinsford “Whisper” Natly, a Negro from St. Louis, assisted by a young biracial receptionist Niska Redman. Having been equal partners in business for three months with Saul and Whisper provides Easy, who is about to propose to Bonnie Shay, his longtime partner, with a solid sense of belonging. He feels proud that he has survived all kinds of violence, from white police officers to black gang members, and has managed an upward mobility over the years from being a poor black man from the deep South to becoming an independent businessman in Los Angeles. Easy’s “detective work” makes visible the real story of black people’s lives, particularly in the Watts area that often figures into his recollections of his past. Having almost died in the last year, as depicted in Rose Gold, he feels at the peak of joy that he is given a second chance, finding his way into “a world that seemed new and hopeful” (Mosley 2016a, 6), emotionally supported by his two (adopted) kids, Jesus, a.k.a. Juice, and Feather. His success depends not only on his doing his job extremely well and having close friends, who watch his back, but also having “access to powers that most people in Los Angeles (white or black) didn’t even know existed” (7), while being deftly aware of obligations to the vulnerable. Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, his closest friend, an outlaw, who is a violent murderer with illegitimate moneymaking activities, comes to his of-

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fice to ask a favor for a black man, Rufus Tyler, nicknamed Charcoal Joe, an underground criminal and a gambler. Mouse explains that Joe wanted Easy to prove the innocence of his friend’s son, a young black man Dr. Seymour Brathwaite. Two white men, Peter Boughman and Ducky, were killed the night before in a house on the beach of Malibu. Seymour, who went there by accident, found their bodies, and when a neighbor called the police, he became the victim of racial profiling. He was arrested at the crime scene as the primary suspect, even though no smoking gun evidence was found, because the murder weapon was missing. Seymour has proved himself to be a genius: A twenty-two-year-old black urban man, raised in foster families, he completed his PhD in physics, doing postgraduate work at UCLA. Even though he has earned social respectability, he now faces charges for “[m]urder, conspiracy, breaking and entering, and resisting arrest” (12), all crimes he never committed. He, indeed, suffers from “racial criminalization,” which functions as “the ideological currency of black criminality” (Muhammad 2010, 3). After he and Mouse visit Joe in the jail, 10 Easy goes to have lunch at Marvin’s Eats, a diner where he notices the white woman waitress Inez looking at him with “a fearful questioning gaze” (21). She unconsciously commits “discursive violence” through an enduring construction of “white fear” as if being black is “an ontological crime” (Yancy 2013, 246, 248). In the meantime, we see that Easy is tactful, using “the pseudonym Sugarman” (22) when he calls Melvin Suggs about Seymour’s unlawful arrest, knowing the prevalent racism inside the LAPD: “It didn’t look good for a police officer in Captain Suggs’s position to be sharing information with a Negro like me” (22), sometimes employing silence as “his resistance” (22) to cooperation. When he hangs up the phone, Easy is confronted by a white motorcycle cop, called by Inez, who suspected even the presence of a black man at the diner. It seems that “racial paranoia” delineates how white people like Inez here “confront social differences in their lives” (J.L. Jackson 2008, 7). In response to the cop’s inquiry about his presence in the white neighborhood (read: out of place), he explains that he has business in Pasadena, and emphasizes quite smartly that his daughter goes to Ivy Prep (read: not a thug). He avoids being perceived as black people are—in the words of Elijah Anderson, as “the iconic ghetto” (2012, 8)—for blackness stigmatizes them as lacking a rightful claim to space. The long history of negative stereotypes “about black criminality and violence,” particularly about the ghetto poor, reveals the role of the state “in creating and perpetuating these stereotypes” (Shelby 2016, 249). Just like Seymour, Easy’s wealth does not count as success, for the white embodied gaze distorts his “Blackness as problematic” (Yancy 2008, 21). Easy challenges the cop, who asks for identification for no visible reason, with his awareness of his rights as a citizen: “I haven’t even bent a law” (23). The cop is surprised to see Easy’s PI ID card, “a special

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card that instructed LAPD officers to call a certain number before detaining me” (23), and Anatole McCourt’s number, “special aide” (24) to Melvin Suggs. But Easy’s daring to tell him to call the number upsets the cop, and he marks Easy as a mere racial stereotype, warning him not to “get smart” (24) with him. The white cop’s attitude demonstrates an embodied habit of how whiteness reinforces “spatial boundaries that sustain white insularity” (Yancy 2014, 47). The acts of “undoing” whiteness are lived manifestations of the fact that racism is not only defined by reflection, but is “intuited and assumed” (J.L. Jackson 2008, 17). Easy subverts the cop’s discursive power as the authorized performance of whiteness, saying that he either has to call Anatole or simply arrest him. His courage enables him to act as a man, who does not let a cop violate his rights as such: “He was used to being the boss on the street; especially with people like me—as if there actually were people like me” (24). The cop’s presumptive view of Easy’s embodied criminality demonstrates that the act of racialization is challenged by Easy’s strategic enactment of racial performative. It obviously constitutes a radical resistance to the white perception of “performative Blackness,” which means the doing of blackness “that is recognizable in place and space” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 23). Hence, his cultural enactment of whiteness disrupts the racial script, conjured by the embodied white gaze, for it exposes the normative power of whiteness as discursive. When Inez brings food to his table with a sulky face, he directly confronts her, asking what exactly makes his looks suspicious to her, knowing it is his blackness. Inez loses her seeming authority as a white woman over him, unable to face her own “habits of whiteness” (MacMullan 2009, 5), and she cannot come up with any reason: “Nothing, I guess” (24). His confrontation makes her personality more revealing, for her bodily affect almost reinvokes the Jim Crow fear of black men “as threats to white women’s safety” (Shabazz 2015, 22–23). Her vulnerability is affective here, in the sense that her “racial paranoia” does not come out because she is white (being), but because she is habitually “engaged in a performance of Whiteness” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 37). In contrast to the tensions in the public spaces, Easy finds sanctuary in civilized relationships with nonracist white people and with his loved ones that make a real family. 11 He holds the hope that Bonnie, who has always mothered Feather as if she were her own, and he will make a happy family: “We’d make a life for Feather and maybe our own children—and society would change; it would have to” (25). When he now comes to visit Bonnie, he is devastated that she married Joguye Cham, the African tribal prince, who is involved with a political struggle in Africa to unite his people in Nigeria. 12 Easy realizes that he learned from Bonnie about “humanity right then” (35), for Joguye and Bonnie were exemplary people, “digging their hands into the mud and making life: everyday pedestrian Christs—both frail

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and omnipotent” (35). Apparently, not only do they experience vulnerability as courage, but they also use their agency to engage with the world to bring about change. 13 In doing that, Easy’s anti–white supremacist subversive politics enables him to indirectly become part of a cross alliance with Joguye and Bonnie for the good of the anti-colonialist African people, an act that reveals “how affective investments and shared vulnerability produce articulations” that call into question “the hegemonic borders of the body politic” (Sabsay 2016, 297). He later calls Jackson Blue’s wife Jewelle to make sure that they would hide Bonnie and her husband for a while until he finds a permanent place for them, and also keep Feather till he pulls himself together, after the poignant experience of losing Bonnie. He goes to the Black Door Bar in Watts to get information and help from a man named John to ask if he is familiar with Charcoal Joe. He explains that Joe, who was born in New York City, becoming at seventeen an expert in gambling, who could beat anyone. 14 Easy believes that many black men’s lives, including his own, are success stories, for they survived, while black people kept dying in the social world “with appalling regularity” (49): “I had come a long, long way to get there: from Jim Crow through Hitler’s war to a place that would seem deadly to most but was like a refuge to me” (49). Recalling his days as a black soldier in Europe during World War II, and during 1960s urban segregation in white America’s cities, especially Los Angeles, unfolds the “spatial constriction” (Shabazz 2009, 291) of blackness as carceral space. Easy’s memories of the past and self-reflections in the present articulate a severe critique of white systemic forms of social inequalities, as he often remembers the Jim Crow racism during his youth down in the South. 15 Ironically, Easy’s memories of racism continue to shape his lived reality of racial profiling: As he walks to Venice Beach and sits there, the two white police officers inquire what he (a black man) is doing on the beach. Knowing how all black men are vulnerable to racialization—“an enemy within” (D.M. Jones 2016, 163), he lies that he enjoys watching the ocean before he visits his cousin at the Avett Detainment Facility (read: I am not a stereotype). One of the cops racializes him even further to warn him to keep “out of trouble” (50), treating him as a living embodiment of an urban thug or criminal. This moment of racial profiling, sitting while black, exposes how Easy as a black man engages with “spatial politics” (Featherstone and Painter 2013a, 17) in his everyday life. The other side of the coin is the cops’ performativity of whiteness, which creates a life of “safe” closure against the black body, “closed off from any risk of crisis in one’s white identity” (Yancy 2017c, 588). Considering Easy’s black body as out of place in the “white space,” the cops fail to understand what it means to live in a black body, always already deemed a threat. Once he is at the Avett, Easy, who uses a false name, lies to the guard that he is listed to see Rufus Tyler, and that the lawyer Milo Sweet, who is in fact

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no longer a lawyer, must have called them. The racist guard’s insistence that Easy must have been incarcerated at Chino five or six years ago, could put Easy in a cell “for no reason except his faulty or fabricated recollections” (52). This implied form of racial profiling and abuse of power by white officers and guards reveals the arbitrary employment of justice, because the state ascribes “the oppressive discriminatory experience” (Yancy 2017c, 592) to the black body. Since they send Easy to the guard in the main building where there is no record of him, he is sent to see the assistant to the administrator, Dorothy. Deemed as a nonthreatening black man, he is allowed to talk to the administrator Desmond Bell, explaining that he was sent to Rufus by his lawyer to ask a few questions, which he refuses to disclose out of “client-attorney privilege” (57). Easy’s performativity of a docile racial stereotype helps him, for Bell finally gets the white guard to let him in. The situation speaks to the fact that while racial performativity cannot change the materiality of the black body, “it can establish new imprints on the practice of human social relations mediated and modulated by the subject of race” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 167). Joe reminds Easy about the vulnerability of poor people, mostly black and brown, in the city with “no protection, no recourse, and no relief” (65), complaining that a young black man, Seymour, became the suspect: “He had gone to Stanford and UCLA, got himself a PhD in physics before his twentysecond birthday, and still they arrested him, charged him” (65). Easy realizes that even a black man with no shady background is not immune from racial profiling, hence, from “the corporeal and spatial policing of the Black body” (Yancy 2016b, 250), and Joe wants him to find evidence to exonerate Seymour, for his former foster mother is Joe’s close friend. Joe, a gambler and a killer, admits that there is a huge difference between black men like Seymour and the ghetto thugs like himself: “He’s teachin’ at UCLA right this semester while he finishes his postgraduate work. Now how’s a man like that gonna be some kinda niggah like the people you and me consort with?” (66). Joe informs Easy that he can get the necessary information from Jasmine Palmas-Hardy, who was Seymour’s foster mother until he was about eleven or twelve years old, and gives her address to Easy. We see Easy’s human side not only in his empathic understanding of a black man’s vulnerable position, but also that of anyone, particularly women, across the color line, while he tries to be “responsive to the ethical dimensions of the actual world” 16 (Haliburton 2018, 227). When he pays a visit to Jasmine and Uriah Hardy, her husband, answers the door, he sees that they live separately on two different floors of the house. Jasmine says she loved Seymour like her son, but he had to go to live with a foster family of scientists, while handing Easy a bag of $18,000 to get Seymour out on bail. When Easy checks with Mr. Hardy downstairs for help to find evidence to prove Seymour’s innocence, he explains that Seymour lived with his mother, who had a gun, upstairs, and he

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warns him that Joe is a dangerous man. 17 The black barbershop of Angelo Broadman is his next stop, because barbershops, the counter-public sites where people shared secrets, “were like telephone poles carrying the intelligence of a whole community at their stations” (91). Melissa Victoria HarrisLacewell argues that a “tradition of defiance” is central to black political culture, revealing the agency of African Americans “to retain a sense of selfhood . . . in the face of constant subordination and dehumanization” (2004, 207–8). When Easy enters into this discursive space of black community and asks about Charcoal Joe, Angelo informs him that Joe wants to move to Canada, and warns him: “You know Charcoal Joe is a tombstone just waitin’ for a name” (92). He next goes to Milo Sweet’s office, and Easy gives Milo, lawyer turned bail bondsman, the $18,000 to bail Seymour out, and wants Loretta the receptionist to do the search on the two murdered white men, and bill him. 18 He has a confrontational moment when he drops by the building where Jackson Blue has his office: Even though Jackson has a memo telling all the guards and interns to let him in whenever he came, the white guard makes it clear that he has entered the iconic space of whiteness, putting his body in the doorway to block his way and placing his hand on Easy’s shoulder—“This is private property, soul brother” (103). Since the normative identity has in its historicity “long been spatially constituted,” the everyday whiteness here assumes “the ‘command of space’” (Wendland 2016, ix, 40). The discourse and space of whiteness as the constructed vulnerability, in need of protection from black men resonates with the legacy of slavery, which “continues to produce a specificity of racialized discourses about Blackness in the United States” (Pillow and Family 2015, 318). Being exposed to this pervasive act of racial profiling all his life gives Easy a broad compass to work from, and he thinks: “I noticed all these things because in the United States you had to fight for your freedom every damn day; and sometimes that struggle was keeping from hurting somebody—no matter how good that hurt might have felt” (103). Even though another white guard remembers Jackson’s memo, and interrupts the situation, Easy’s subversion of the first guard’s attitude with a verbal payback—“Get out of my way” (103)—demonstrates his racialized spatial awareness, while his subversive act partakes of social norms that are preserved exclusively for white people. He abandons the fixated black stereotype, which he performed back at Avett, and instead presents a dynamic racial performativity, expanding the range of performance possibilities as a radical form of resistance in spatial terms. Asiette Moulon, the young French woman intern who has a noncommitted relationship with Easy, invites him to wait for Jackson in her office, upon observing the first white guard’s racializing attitude. While she is “white,” Easy likes her deeply simply because she does not perform whiteness. Bryant Keith Alexander suggests that once “the materiality of White bodies [is sep-

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arated] from the enactment of Whiteness,” it makes sense to build an argument that the black people may also perform whiteness, while some white people “do not necessarily perform Whiteness” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 32). Jackson, on the other hand, who never performs whiteness, is a black man like Easy, who exceeded normative expectations of urban blacks: “Jackson was an odd product of the American ghetto. He was a genius and he was small. Impoverished and outcast, he was also afraid of almost everyone and everything” (105). When Jackson arrives, he explains how he wanted to hire him to start a science project, but Seymour preferred to stay and work as an academic at the university. But what Jackson observed in Seymour is that he looked “pretty innocent and sheltered,” and more importantly he did not “even talk like a brother” (106). From his point of view, Seymour is obviously acting by the social sanctions of white normative culture, articulated in his defiance against performing the script of black masculinity. Easy leaves Jackson’s office and building with Asiette, to spend the night together, while the first white guard at the door demonstrates an affective response. He “shifted a bit,” making clear his “discomfort” (108) in the presence of the black body, an intruder, who has managed to enter the symbolic “white space” he is expected to guard. Easy’s subversive reconstruction of social space “as the product of [social] relations rather than as a fixed surface” (Featherstone and Painter 2013a, 3) is animated by his commitment to equality in social encounters in everyday life. When Asiette and Easy ride in his car, he feels that any policeman who saw this black man with white woman, would likely do racial profiling, based on the vulnerability myth of white women. 19 This affective moment unravels white people’s sense of “spatial vulnerability,” ignoring how they “do violence” to black people’s integrity even by means of disciplinary practices about “driving while black” 20 (Yancy 2017c, 588, 592). After they have sex that night at Easy’s house, Asiette wakes him up in fear: Seeing three white men, two with guns, in his backyard, he goes downstairs to divert their attention to him so that Asiette would be safe in the house, and finds they had broken the backdoor lock. In the morning Easy goes to the county courthouse to be present at Seymour’s trial, and sees the inmates, who are brought on a bus, “chained hand and foot and to one another” (115). Fearless Jones, who comes to help Easy, says that seeing chained black inmates reminds black people, unlike whites, of captivity of a different sort: “We thinkin’ ‘bout a whole different circus” (115), an effective strategy of ongoing “state violence on black bodies” (M. Cherry 2017, 356). This criminalization of race remains integral to how “black lives are still imperiled and devalued,” in the context of what Saidiya Hartman calls, the “afterlife of slavery” 21 (2006, 6). Hartman’s remark inevitably makes visible the historical devaluation of black life: In this context, the white dominant society’s disposal of black people as “black waste,” because black life does not matter, “through mass incarcera-

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tion and densely populated segregated spatial-temporal arrangements,” in the words of Janine Jones, “has provided some relief for white waste management” 22 (J. Jones 2017, 329). It is only when Mrs. Dora Dubitsky, a white woman, behind the small window in the prison, gives Easy the release card, that Seymour seems to be temporarily bailed out of representing the “black waste.” Even though Fearless talked to him about it, Seymour has no notion of how much Easy went over his head to help him; the denigration of the black male body is a new experience to Seymour, who fails to grasp that he has become an embodied black subject, as constructed by the neoliberal ideology which conceives racism as “the effect of individual choices” (De Lissovoy 2013, 742). He is not aware that as long as black male agency is used “to reiterate white masculine ideality, it keeps in place the very forces and systems that oppress black people” (Anthony 2013, 9). Assuming himself as culturally white in 1960s American society, Seymour is forced to become aware of the affective reality of his black body, scripted to pay for its mere being. Easy explains that he and Fearless represent a client who wanted them to get Seymour out of jail and “help with the defense” (117). Easy starts the conversation with Seymour over lunch with all three of them: Seymour entered into the white space of the murdered white bodies, where his presence made that space “the ‘site’ of social stress” (Ahmed 2007, 161) to the police officers, who refused to see beyond his skin color. The criminalization of the black body also rekindles the positionality of the “‘[w]hites as victims of Blackness’ trope” (Jackson and Balaji 2015, 246) whereas Seymour, who is wrapped up in an “achievement ideology,” is “blind to the effects of racism” (Hartigan 2015, 140). Even though Seymour, as a true believer in the American Dream ideology does not give a crap about what is happening, his criminalized black body serves “white investment in black body extraction” (J. Jones 2017, 329). The novel’s serious problematic, then, starts with the problem of the black male scientist, who is on the verge of incarceration, regardless of how he has always performed blackness as excess. Mass incarceration of black men guarantees that white and black people would never share the same space. Hence, the carceral power is not all about “regulating masculinity,” but about “constructing Whiteness” in spatial terms (Shabazz 2015, 19, 17). When Easy uses Joe’s real name, Rufus, then Seymour identifies him as his Mama Jasmine’s friend, both of whom he used to hang out with on holidays. Seymour explains that he could neither find Mama Jasmine at her house, nor had she answered his phone calls, and he remembered her several jobs, included being the housekeeper in the house where Peter Boughman was killed, so he went there, but could not find her. Fearing that Mama Jasmine’s body could be there, he was about to call the police, when they showed up after a neighbor’s call and arrested him: “They made me lie down on the floor in the blood, and later they said that I had a dead man’s blood on me as if that proved I was the killer” (119).

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Being an educated black man, who found his way out of his tough neighborhood, his epistemic ignorance prevents him from registering how he cannot escape the threat his skin color represents to white people. Seymour’s performativity of cultural whiteness unveils “intricate racial nuances embedded in everyday life” (Matias 2016, 139). When he wants to go home, Easy gets on edge, and warns him that it is impossible, because the white male criminals who broke into his house may return to take care of their unfinished job. When Seymour still cannot see the connection, Easy gets angry in the heat of the moment; he is at the end of his rope. Since he never sugarcoats the reality, he lays the naked truth of the matter in a tough attitude: “There is no other suspect that I know of. If the police find anything that ties you directly to the crime, like for instance your foster mother was somehow involved with Boughman, then they’ll come to your residence and drag you off with no bail offered” (121). Easy lays out the conditions of what Harvey Young calls “phenomenal blackness” (qtd in Cowin-Mensah 2015, 249), for Seymour and many other black characters’ material body is conceived as “devoid of humanity” (249) in the white imaginary. Seymour is made vulnerable by the projection of the racial stereotype, he realizes for the first time that his life is on the line, and that Easy has constructed “a safe space of care” for him (Partridge 2015, 125). Knowing that using public transportation may cost Seymour and Fearless their lives, Easy takes both to Primo’s Garage 23 to rent a car for Fearless to drive Seymour around safely, but Primo makes it a generous gift as a payback for Easy’s help and friendship over many years. Since the state apparatus fails to ensure legal protection to black citizens, Easy wants Fearless to take Seymour to his own home, because the suspicious men who chased Easy will not be able to find the new address. Easy calls Melvin Suggs to arrange for a face-to-face conversation with him: He considers Melvin his friend, while at the same time being cautious that “he represented law and order in a city where the police often crossed that line” (132). They meet at the China Box, where they can both eat and share confidential information, but Easy is discreet about his relationship to Peter Boughman, and Seymour’s foster mother, hiding his connection with Joe. Melvin provides him with information on the two white murdered men. Although LAPD has no information on John “Ducky” Brown, there is evidence that Peter was involved in criminal activity, from extortion to murder, and did money laundering through “a multimillion-dollar transaction when he was killed” (134). Melvin knows that Peter and Ducky were shot by the same gun, but the police could not find the weapon, and asks if Easy knows Charcoal Joe; Easy lies that he does not. Easy’s discretion about black people’s informative accounts is a call to enact subversive acts of blackness. Melvin makes it clear that Seymour may even face a death sentence with the consent of the prosecutor, because a call to the police was made from a phone booth about how a black man had broken into

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the house and shots were heard. “Boughman and Brown had been dead at least an hour when the call came in and there was no gun on the kid, in the house, or out in the sand” (135). Easy knows by experience that even though Seymour is innocent, “innocence was rarely the deciding factor for a black man on trial for his life” (135). It is evident that even a discursive form of “spatial racism” provides “the necessary space and boundaries for whiteness to continue to flourish” (J.A. Powell 2012, 147). Easy digs for more information, and Melvin shares that there are only two people who knew about Peter’s current money laundering dealings: Tony Gambol, whose files Melvin hands to Easy, involved with gambling and the Santa Anita racetrack, and Willomena Avery, a saleswoman at Précieux Blanc in Beverly Hills. Easy is shocked to learn that Joe owns the beach house, and the LAPD believes he occasionally rents it to people to do their illegal business. Melvin wonders where the money Peter handled disappeared to, and he makes a sweetheart deal with Easy that if he brings the real killer with the money, Melvin will set Seymour free. After he picks up Feather and takes her to Jackson’s house, 24 where she will stay until he gets his business done, he goes to the Santa Anita Park racetrack to meet Tony Gambol, and tells Gambol’s men that he is sent by Charcoal Joe. He explains later to Tony himself that he has to save a young black man from a false charge of murder, and he needs to learn about Peter, but Tony, lying, denies knowing either Peter or Willomena. As Easy leaves the gate, Gambol’s three men try to attack him; Fearless, who appears out of nowhere, shoots two of them and fights with the last man, even before Easy takes out his pistol. Fearless and Easy meet Willomena Avery, learning of Peter Boughman’s involvement in a double-cross: Getting a huge sum of money, and rather than “moving it down the line he took a sidetrack—a detour which happened to be a dead end” (155). Willomena takes Easy for a racial stereotype, and talks down to him, while she is surprised to hear words such as “candor” from him: “My use of language was as unexpected as a flock of sudden hummingbirds” (156). When she admits to doing business with Peter, occasionally converting his cash into diamonds, Easy leaves his business card with her for contact. Easy takes Fearless to Fearless’s house to see Seymour, who reads books of white scientists such as Charles Darwin and Richard Feynman, for he scripts discursive space to “ignore oppression” (Joseph 2016, 305). His employment of respectability, then, evinces a distinct vantage point, proclaiming his “compatibility with the ‘mainstream’ or non-marginalized class” (M. Smith 2014). Seymour is left uncertain as to what racism really means, and is just as unclear about where he stands in a white supremacist society. He bluntly expresses his surprise that Easy (read: ghetto thug) knows Jackson Blue, “an important man” (159), without knowing that Jackson owes his job to Easy’s fake recommendation, depicted in Little Scarlet (2004). Sey-

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mour, an overachiever against a yardstick on which black people are measured, has exceeded the white social expectations of his racial identity as “a space of entrapment that limits the performative range of Blackness” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 19). Easy gets angry at this unconscious intimidation, and subverts his snobbish attitude, for the scene is similar to an interrogation: He keeps asking Seymour what happened in the beach house, for any of his memory about the day has to be taken with a huge grain of salt, because Easy knows that memory is affective, involving thoughts and feelings. As Easy does more digging into what happened at the Malibu house, Seymour finally starts telling the truth. A white woman, who looked Eastern European, came to see him, saying she was a friend of Mama Jasmine, and that she “had something for her” (161). Mama Jasmine was about to leave town, and the white woman left a little red diary for her, written in a foreign language, which Seymour left behind, sewing it into the curtains behind his desk. Since he does not answer Easy’s questions on people like Uriah, 25 Easy finally shakes his self-confidence by telling him that his having a PhD does not make him “immune from your skin” (163). Ibram X. Kendi, in his recent book, Stamped from the Beginning, indirectly talks back to Easy’s response in his emphasis that black Americans who have “uplifted themselves” have, quite ironically, been routinely despised by white people for defying “those racist laws and theories that individuals employed to keep them down” (2016, 505). Kendi’s statement can also be considered to lay out how the enduring penalizing logic is directly connected with the fact that white identity formation is built upon ascribing personhood to whites, marking black people “ineligible for personhood” (Cacho 2012, 6). Even though Easy reminds Seymour once again that he has to tell all the facts if he does not want his life to end with execution, Seymour still feels like a complete outsider to the possibility of legal conviction. He even asks Easy to bring from Jasmine’s house the three-volume set, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, to help prepare his notes for the class he will be teaching in the summer. In contrast, Easy is a socially engaged man, deeply conscious of black people’s problems: “Since the days of slavery black folk have been crammed into slave quarters and ghettos, same-race marriages and schools segregated by neighborhood” (166). The white Western notion of science that signifies a promising progress to Seymour can be seen, in Alexander G. Weheliye’s words, as “a technology of Black humanity” 26 that has become affective labor. This notion of cultural whiteness enables Seymour to perform a social identity, to adapt John L. Jackson Jr.’s words, to earn “an unproblematic ontological existence and a valid place in the racial order” (2003, 190). In fact, his desire to be as such is a transgressive strategy of evading the problematic space of blackness, because he naively believes himself to live in a meritocratic society. Seymour does not seem to be aware that he has “solid

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Black figures,” 27 as Mallory says to McNeil in Gil Scott-Heron’s novel The Nigger Factory, “to ally [himself] with.” Seymour is still “inside the educational womb” of the white dominant culture with “only token interest” (Scott-Heron 1996, 156, 223) in black people’s problems, for he believes in a color-blind world where science will make a difference for humanity. Seymour’s fascination to find out more about Richard Feynman’s lectures is bound with his vision of future, based on change, that seems to be exhilarating to him as he builds a narrative for himself. 28 The Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman took pleasure from how “scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things” (Feynman 1999, 142). Following Feynman’s focus on the value of paradigm shift in denial of living by fixations, Amit Goswami points to the importance of “shedding the self-image and becoming who we really are—our authentic self,” rather than forcing ourselves to meet the normative expectations (2014, 177). Similarly, the black poet A. Van Jordan’s poems in Quantum Lyrics seem to observe Feynman’s perspective on the connectedness of the self and the world which seems to be revisited in Seymour’s experience of the “broken symmetries” 29 (2007, 102) in his shifting sense of becoming in everyday life. Seymour seems to choose to live on the “cultural capital” of the white dominant society—“He expected to receive a fair trial from color-blind justice” (166)—while also supposing that black men such as Easy and Jackson Blue are positioned in different locations. This classist view exposes the assumption pertinent to how jobs are meant to spatialize “the relations of capitalist production” because of how space and power are interrelated (Massey 2013, 257). Given Seymour’s desire for cultural whiteness, Easy, in contrast, is what Quincy Troupe would call an “unreconstructed black man” in the sense that he does not submit to “the white power structure’s patronage” (2002, 167). Easy goes to Seymour’s house, and finds The Feynman Lectures. As he reads Mama Jasmine’s letter on the desk, saying that she is leaving Los Angeles to go to South America, the two white men who entered Easy’s backyard break into the house. Since Easy left his gun in the car, both sides fight throwing pieces of furniture at each other: After Easy receives a blow to the back of his head and a fist on his jaw, he wakes up later to find himself tied tightly to a chair in a dark room. The leader of the two white men, Gregory, slaps Easy for pretending not to know Seymour, and threatens him with payback for breaking Arnold’s (one of three men) finger with a chair. Knowing that the clock is ticking and his life is on the line, Easy chooses to act within what Kenneth Chan calls the “spatial confines” (qtd in Haupt 2017, 208–9) of whiteness. Easy tells Greg that he is hired by Charcoal Joe to save Seymour, and he does not know where the person who protects him is. He lies that he is told this person is Mary Donovan (Melvin’s lover’s name), a man who assumes a woman’s name, and whose phone number he can call. 30 His call

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enables Melvin and the cops to save him: When Easy regains his consciousness after fainting and finds himself in a hospital bed, he gives Melvin the full account of what happened. Melvin explains that Gregory Chalmers, the white men’s boss, works for another white man, Eugene “the Cinch” Stapleton, a “[t]roubleshooter for the eastern mobs” (180). Once again, Easy does not share all the truth with Melvin, and lies that he is working for Seymour’s foster mother. Easy, who has barely recovered, goes to Seymour’s apartment, and cuts the seam to get the small red book of about eighty pages, written in Yiddish. He then finds a translator, Mania Blackman. 31 Eugene drops by to talk to him as a man who “stood there alone and assured, as American as redwoods and Manifest Destiny” (195). Easy’s engagement in his investigations enables him to explore the complex processes of being black in a white world, the one in which white racist people cover up their “spatial vulnerability vis-à-vis black bodies and bodies of color” (Yancy 2017c, 588). Eugene, known as “the Cinch,” apologizes to Easy for having sent three men to break into his house to question him, who later grabbed him out of Seymour’s apartment. When Eugene learns that Easy wants to exonerate Seymour, and not the money, he is curious about who hired Easy; Easy does not mention either Joe or Melvin, because Jasmine’s life will be at peril if he does. 32 Augusta Tryman, the prostitute Easy called earlier, comes to talk to him. 33 Augusta shares with Easy that Jasmine gave Uriah a house, allowance, and a new car every couple of years, while also paying for his prostitutes “to hear if he was schemin’ against her” (206). When she warns Jasmine that he wanted Augusta to rob her, offering $5,000 to get the bag she kept under lock, she immediately changes the lock. Augusta remembers that after doing a job with Charcoal Joe, Jasmine never worked again. Easy goes to see Mania, who says a woman named Julia wrote in the red journal for three months about John, whom she fell in love with. He did not have enough money, but he wanted to run away with Julia, who was about to meet a man to help John out. After a pause for ten days in the journal, Julia wrote a fable about the little owl hiding the green-eyed serpent’s eggs inside “the red apple of wisdom” to inform someone she knew “where to look for something” (213). Mania and Easy decipher the fable’s coded meaning that Julia and John, who made her steal something valuable, were running away from California. Easy then calls Melvin Suggs to arrange a meeting at a hot dog stand, where Melvin informs him that the man at the hospital, not Arnold, died. Learning from the prosecutor that he could be tried for the murder of his men, who were all involved in felony and kidnapping, Greg asked for witness protection rather than being punished with “first-degree murder and a death sentence” (216). During the conversation, Melvin expresses his empathic understanding of Easy’s life, being aware of the difficulty of a black man’s day-to-day life where cops do racial profiling: “And I know that

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people in my department plow black men like you into the dirt every day. I often wonder how you can even stand it” 34 (216). Melvin explains that Eugene was in charge of taking and moving the mob money out of the country, determined to rob Peter to run away. Peter, who held a meeting to trade the cash for diamonds, was scared of Eugene and hence hired Ducky to protect him. Melvin remarks that the possibility of exonerating Seymour depends on getting hold of Eugene, who is “in the wind searching for the mob’s millions” 35 (217). He does not disclose to Melvin that he met Eugene, for Easy knows the ins and outs of how to handle criminals, whereas Melvin, as a cop, is not capable of working off the book. Easy gathers information from Loretta about where Peter’s wife Denise lives. Peter, as Loretta relates to Easy, revealed this information about her only to his lawyer Adolpho, for “he wanted her taken care of in case he died unexpectedly” (221). Easy also calls Fearless to thank him and let him know that they will have to visit Joe again at Avett soon. After Easy calls Denise, under the false name Ted Waters, to have a face-to-face talk about her husband, she reluctantly agrees to meet at her house where she unexpectedly directs her pistol to him, but he lets her know that Peter is dead. She “accept[s] defeat with dignity” (224), but she does not know Peter’s real job, for he told her that he worked for a gambler named Rigby in Gardena, “a floor manager in a poker parlor” (225). Easy tries to enlighten this young white woman about the amount of money Peter was after, which “belonged to some very bad men” (225). Even though she does not know anything about the money, Easy finally tells her outright that her husband “was plotting against people that will kill anyone that gets in their way” (225–26), for they will not stop searching for the money stolen from them. His protective attitude, regardless of color line, in driving her to a safe place, is something she has not been accustomed to, and she wonders “why a black man would go out of his way to help a white woman” (227). Before he lets her out of the car, she remembers that Peter left a small but heavy package with her eight months ago to keep it for a few days, and then get people, who worked at the market close by, to mail it to Beulah Edwards. When Easy goes to Beulah’s address in West L.A., he finds the house abandoned but manages to get inside, where he finds bags full of nearly a million dollars. He makes the front door appear untampered with, picks the mail, and waits for long hours but nobody shows up, and finally he puts all the money in the trunk of his car and drives home. Dorothy Stieglitz at Avett says to Easy, who is with Fearless, that administrator Bell gave her permission to let Easy see Joe. As Fred, a brown guard, leads them down the hall, he enacts embodied discursive practices of whiteness. He heard that Easy is Mouse’s friend, which makes Easy a crook in his eyes. However, Easy subverts Fred’s relational authority, confronting him that if he passes judgement on his own people, they will do the same, whereas black people need to depend on each other, because the white people here

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will not watch his back “if anything goes wrong” (235). Easy realizes that there is power struggle over space in interracial encounters, regarding “the class nature of social institutions” (Wendland 2016, 40). The idea that black people are invested in each other’s future is relentlessly challenging to Fred, who is intrigued, Easy observes, by either the tone of his voice or the minilecture “that put a question into the young man’s face” (235). As Easy explains to Joe that the cops want to scapegoat Seymour to close the case, he adds that he has learned Joe is the owner of the Malibu house, and suspects that Jasmine is also involved: “Seymour is your son and Jasmine his real mother” (236). Easy believes Peter and Eugene met in order “to launder mob money,” while trying to rob each other. Tony was the one who moved the money, but a woman called Willomena transformed the cash money into diamonds, while she was caught up in a deal. Joe admits that Seymour is his son, and confirms that Jasmine and he changed their plans about leaving; he is proud of his son and wants to see him exonerated and have his life back “as a scientist and a teacher” (237). Easy confronts Joe for putting his life in danger, because Joe never told him the crime scene of the double homicide was his own house, but he finally concludes that “I would not set you up because I know what’s what” (238). Joe finally confesses to Easy that all his life, his mother, Jasmine, and Seymour were the three people he loved, but Seymour’s arrest proved that all his “careful planning went out the window” (239). Easy tells the truth about how Seymour got a little red journal in Yiddish to be given to Jasmine, which was the sole reason for him to go to the Malibu house. Joe gives several names of people who use his house for illegal business: Jasmine, Peter, Tony, Eugene, Willomena, and even Uriah, who has fixed the plumbing. When Easy checks on Seymour’s information that Jasmine has disappeared, Joe says he got people to take her to a safe place. Easy digs further, and learns that Joe’s mailman, who gets his messages to the outside world, is Tom Willow, the racist guard, who went missing, replaced by Fred. Since Easy never believes anyone, he goes to Jasmine’s house to check and see if Joe told the truth and does a meticulous search in the house. Feeling the effect of Mama Jo’s potion in his body, he enjoys being in danger, because it forces him “to appreciate life; to understand its frailty, transience, and its incalculable value” (241). When he goes to Jasmine’s house, he climbs up the steps only to find Jasmine’s door open, and Tony Gambol’s dead body on the floor, and more than $6,000 in his pocket, and later Uriah’s corpse in another room. Smoking a cigarette, he feels the delayed affective reaction to his separation from Bonnie, but he had to let her go, because she was a born queen “trying to save her peoples” whereas he is “a commoner” (242). He does a crime scene investigation on his own. He assumes three people must have been in the house at the time of murder, and

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goes down to Uriah’s “lowland abode” (243), where he sees old newspapers and broken objects. 36 The moment Easy arrives at his office, Niska tells him that Sergeant Trieste called, left his number, and needs to talk with him as soon as possible. Easy’s perception of the white cops is always negative, for they like to keep black men down and justify their racial profiling: “It was the duty of the police to keep men like me down and out, so scared that we were liable to make a slip, then to clap us in chains and lock us away from love, laughter, and light” (246). When he calls Trieste, the relay officer does not put him through the line, suspicious of how Easy knows the special number, and Easy hangs up with no patience for racist attitudes. But Trieste calls him back in no time to ask for a face-to-face meeting at a specific location. Easy gets there only to find that it is a crime scene with lots of squad cars, parked around a house. Again treated as “out of place” as one of the cops does not want to let him in, Easy, who has all the pent-up anger, swears at him. The white police officer, who demands “What did you say?” (248) with a “stunned look” on his face, cannot believe that a black man talks back to him “like that” (248). Easy’s embodied practices of “undoing” the power of the whiteness exposes the racist people’s ignorance, not knowing their role “in the embodied psychic wounds that they leave behind” (Yancy 2017c, 592). Seeing the problem, Trieste asks another cop to send Easy up, while he feels as a threat, a feeling Frantz Fanon painfully articulated, for he knew that “[i]n the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema” (1968, 110). Trieste leads him into the house to see Tom Willow’s corpse, who was killed a few hours ago, and checks what Easy knows, because his WRENS-L Detective Agency card was found on the floor. In response to Trieste, who adds that Tom’s letter of resignation from Avett was left unfinished in the typewriter, Easy says that he remembers Tom mentioning that he wanted to move to North Carolina “to open a commissary store out among the Negro tobacco sharecroppers” (251). While Trieste checks on Easy as a probable suspect, Easy says if he were the killer, he would not show up to take the risk of being identified. He knows very well that white police officers promote the discursive white carceral spatiality not only in relation to the inner-city projects or the ghetto, but even more so to the black body in the white space. When Trieste indirectly insults him—“Crooks are stupid”—Easy challenges his authority, slamming back with how the crooks and the cops “make a matching pair” (252). In the meantime, he drops by Fearless’s house and talks to Seymour again. Easy observes an incredible change in Seymour, whose “arrogance and trepidation were gone” (254), and he lies to Seymour that Willomena told him a fairy tale, giving an account of the journal to see if he makes sense of it: “She said that there was an owl that lived in a tree and that there was a green snake that was rumored to be able to climb trees. The owl worried that

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the stories about a climbing snake might be true, so she took her crystal eggs and hid them in the apple of wisdom” (255). By the time Seymour asks for The Feynman Lectures, and Easy brings it from his car, he feels that “something was off” (255) about Seymour. He is sure that Tom was Willomena’s lover whom she mentions in her journal, because he remembers “the thick platinum and Sapphire pinky ring he had on when he died” (262). Knowing that the ring was “more than a year’s salary for Tom” (262), he pulls all the details he gathered so far and reflects on them: “Augusta had told me that Uriah wanted her to break into Jasmine’s aerie, and Willomena had been seen multiple times with Tony Gambol and Peter Boughman. Tom Willow was Charcoal Joe’s mailman and so he’d likely know about the Malibu house” 37 (262). Easy tells Melvin, who neither knows about Tom’s murder nor Trieste’s crime scene investigation, that he should check out Trieste to see if Tom had a gun; if the gun was checked against the bullets Melvin pulled out of the bodies of Peter and Ducky, he will probably “find a match” (263). When Melvin wonders how Easy worked the case out, Easy hides the truth, and says that he did a lot of rational thinking about these men, and put the pieces together. In addition, he now believes that if Tom heard about the events in Joe’s house and his people at Avett, then he might have gone into business for himself, and “he’d be a cinch for a hit” (264). Melvin is willing to do that, but he wants to find the money Tom stole. Easy lies that he does not have it, and that Melvin should get LAPD work through clues to lead him to the person who has it. He calls Dorothy at Avett, who agrees to make an exception for him to have Joe call him: He asks Joe for Jasmine’s number, and even threatens to quit the job, for if she answers his question Seymour will be exonerated. When Joe gets Jasmine to call Easy, Easy asks for Willomena’s address with one condition: He warns her that if she lets Willomena or Joe know he is coming to Willomena’s house, Seymour “would be the one paying the price” (267). When Easy asks Corky, a white gas station attendant, for directions to Willomena’s address in Santa Monica, Corky is reluctant to help him go to the white neighborhood. Easy performs the role of an insurance salesman, and Corky gives him the directions. Easy often performs multiple identities in his encounters with white people during his investigations, because his assumed identities along with the stories he fabricates are his strategies of protection both for himself and for others whose lives depend on secrecy. His constructed identities demonstrate how his “intersectional identifications affect [his] access to power” (C. Smith 2011, 242) in a given situation. As he waits for a few minutes before Willomena opens the door, unwillingly, he thinks about the murders, knowing the charges against Seymour would be dropped if he could prove his line of rational thinking: he is sure Tom killed Peter, for he acted as the intermediary between Joe and “the other crooks involved” (269), including Willomena. Willomena, who answers the door, is

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surprised that Easy found her address. Learning her real name is Irena Król, Polish, Easy reveals his suspicion that she may also be Jewish. He refuses to go in, but instead, he takes her out to a coffee shop to talk the case over. Standing at the door, he tells her that he knows she gave Seymour that journal for Jasmine, but wonders how she managed to put back The Feynman Lectures on the coffee table in Jasmine’s house “without her knowing” (270), while he assumes that Tony had been looking for the same book. She does not answer his question about Jasmine’s house; they go to Cha-Cha’s Grill and Diner, where Irena asks what Easy wants from her. Easy makes it clear that he needs answers; Irena explains that her father was not Jewish, but her mother was, who married him “to get us out of the ghetto” (271). The white waitress, Missy, is bothered by seeing the black man with a white woman, whose attitude reminds Easy of Corky and the normative conception of blackness as fixed notion of bodily space. Easy asks her why she killed Tom, and he tells her that he deciphered the two people in the fairy tale, written in the journal, as John, representing Tom, and Julia, representing Willomena. Even though she denies being present when Tom killed Peter and Ducky, Easy thinks she was. Easy asks if she loved Tom, but for Willomena it was all sexual until Tom decided to kill Jasmine and she felt that “I had no choice” (271). Willomena says that she told Tom that she already gave Jasmine the diamonds, which Easy discovered “[p]acked neatly inside The Feynman Lectures” (272). Since he deciphered that the fable was about the book, he realized that Jasmine gave Willomena a copy of the book “to smuggle diamonds in”; she would not have to ask Seymour for another copy, unless Willomena “carved out the pages to contain the diamonds” (272). Easy cannot figure out how Willomena got the diamonds since it was Peter who had the money, and she explains that Sol Hyman, who owns Précieux Blanc, was in on it: “He’d get diamonds and then the bagman would turn over the money” (272). Easy finally says he had figured out that Willomena knows Jasmine, because they “both worked for Doris back in the day” 38 (272). His intelligence causes Willomena to appreciate what a good detective Easy is: Once Jasmine met Joe, and quit the business, she introduced Willomena to one of her clients, Sol, to hire her at Précieux Blanc. Easy learns from Willomena how Uriah fits into this scheme, for he kept breaking into Jasmine’s house to search for the money, knowing Jasmine moved money for Joe now and then. Jasmine never told Joe about this, because Uriah was a client, but he offered to marry her so that his house and retirement pension would be Jasmine’s. Jasmine and Willomena were whores, “disposable women” (274), and Jasmine readily accepted the marriage proposal, even though she never took Uriah’s love seriously. Willomena explains that Uriah offered Jasmine money, property, and respectability, and told her that “he was saving his money to take her to Jamaica and buy her a house” (274). However, Willomena also says that Uriah’s money was not

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enough, and therefore Jasmine had to keep working for Doris, which is how she met Joe. Since Uriah was heartbroken that Jasmine went with Joe, she felt so guilty that she asked Joe to make Uriah her gatekeeper. Even though she never shared Uriah’s bed, she wanted to protect him, because “he was the first man that had ever tried to save her” (274). Willomena finally admits that she held the packages Jasmine moved for Joe, and Jasmine used Seymour’s book as a ledger when Joe’s customers “made big deals where large sums had to be turned into diamonds” (275). Willomena remembers that there was a big transaction coming, and Tom knew about it, because he was passing information from Joe to Peter and Tony. Joe ran his illegal business smoothly without any trouble with the police, who always saw him as a mere racial stereotype, “as some kind of petty criminal, just a low-level gambler” (276). Ironically enough, Joe exceeds that stereotype, while utilizing the stereotype imposed on him to his own advantage to acquire wealth. But Eugene, “the point man for the Cincinnati mob that was moving the cash” (276), had a plan to play Joe. Hence, Easy realizes that Eugene went to the meeting with his three men, and killed the dealer and Peter to run with all the money and diamonds, but Willomena told Tom everything, choosing Tom over Eugene, because Tom set his mind to “steal the money and the diamonds” (276) and then they would run away together. Tom, who arrived at the Malibu house six hours before the meeting, hid in a closet, but Peter was there with Ducky, talking about how they would steal the diamonds, and when they wanted to hide in the closet, Tom shot Ducky and then beat Peter and killed him, for he did not have the money. When he was done searching Peter’s car, he saw a black man (Seymour), going to the beach house, and he found it convenient to call the police so that “they would think a Negro had broken in” (278). Once Willomena realized that Tom would kill Jasmine to get the diamonds, she killed Tom, and she could get the diamonds and run, but Jasmine was inconsolable that Seymour was in jail so she stayed to help her, feeling she could get the diamonds later. Easy stops at Corky’s gas station to call Fearless from the pay phone and ask him to go to Jasmine’s house to “take a book off of a glass table” (280). He tells Fearless that there are two dead men in the house, and he has to make sure nobody found them yet. If it is clear, Fearless should wrap the book in brown paper, write Easy’s name on it, and drop it “in the slot of my office” (280). As he thinks about the huge amount of money in the trunk of his car, and the five murders, in addition to Eugene’s men, he drives back to his house, thinking that the killer of the murderer (Tom) was a woman, “scorned and desperate” 39 (281). As he crosses the threshold to his house, he decides to move out soon. Charcoal Joe is waiting for him with his guard Ox Mason from the jail, who tells Easy that he was allowed to get out of Avett for a few days because of a prisoner release policy. As he tells Easy that $2 million are missing, Easy realizes that all the information Willomena gave

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him is also a fact known by Joe, and he admits having a conversation with her. He tells the whole story but leaves out Willomena’s part to ensure the protection of her life. Easy promises to find Joe’s $2 million, and he evades Joe’s persistent question about the real killer of Tom, saying that the LAPD will find the killer. But he informs Joe that he will have a lead to his money, which he will give to Jasmine “within the next two days” (284). Joe promises that he will let Easy have $75,000 from the cash. As Easy plans how to give Joe’s money to Jasmine, Eugene calls him to explain that he has got Easy’s partner Irena Król in the next room. In this sudden turn of events, Easy has few options: He cannot go to Melvin, because he would confiscate the money, and he would have both “the mob and Charcoal Joe after me” (287), and he cannot go to Mouse, because he would be tempted to take the money. Instead, Easy offers a plan to Eugene to ask Irena about who would buy the diamonds, and then they can all meet at the bank Eugene uses to split the money. Then Easy calls Melvin, who informs him that the gun that killed Peter and Ducky had only the killer Tom’s prints. When Melvin gives the good news that “[t]he prosecutor dropped the charges against your client” (288), he still wants to find the money and has no interest in identifying Tom’s killer. Easy goes to the safe at the WRENS-L office, withdraws $6,000 of his money, and takes an unregistered revolver that Saul kept in the closet. He goes to the Torrance Arms Hotel and is approached by the white police officer Smiley, who takes him to talk to Greg. Since power changed hands, and Greg is vulnerable, Easy, who “capsized his entire life” (290), offers more than $3,000 to Greg if he tells Easy where Eugene and his men hide. Easy warns Greg not to play him, because if he gives a wrong address, he will tell officer Smiley that diamonds are in Greg’s room. Knowing that Eugene will use Willomena to get back at him, Easy decides to dance with the devil, even if it takes “going into a white neighborhood and facing three armed men” (294). When he goes to the address of the two-story house, he hits the guard, enters the house, and shoots Eugene dead. He goes upstairs and finds Irena “tied to a chair and unconscious” with “burns up and down her arms” (297). He realizes that her tormentors beat her and “gagged her while applying the cigarette butts. They wanted the diamonds but only got my name” (298). Easy doses a little chloroform to Irena, takes her to her house, suspecting that she might have tried “to betray me, or maybe the Cinch was after her all along” (298). He goes to Jackson Blue’s house, where Feather runs to him with joy, and he takes her to Ivy Prep. He goes to his office to get the diamonds in the brown paper parcel Fearless left for him. Since Joe called and left a note with Niska about his address, he gets there, and one of the two black guards takes him to a room where Fearless is sitting with Jasmine and Seymour, for Easy was the one who called Seymour and Fearless to wait on Jasmine. When Jasmine and Easy go to the garage of this ultramodern house to talk all alone,

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he pulls out “the sacks of money” (302) that Peter had stolen and hands her The Feynman Lectures. Jasmine knows that Willomena was behind it all, but Easy’s account is that Peter was running with the money that Eugene wanted, and when Tom was involved, Willomena became part of it too. He adds that Willomena has been “kidnapped, tortured, and betrayed” (302), having already paid her dues. When Jasmine pays Easy his share of the money, she tells him that she and Joe decided not to leave the country, because “[w]e realize that Seymour deserves to have a family he knows” (303). She asks on behalf of Joe who stole the money; Easy says it was Eugene, who is now in the wind, hiding the fact that he killed him. Seymour thanks Easy for saving his life, while he apologizes for his arrogance, “acting like I knew so much” (303). Erinn C. Gilson, in the process of exploring different forms of vulnerability, argues that vulnerability is fundamentally “corporeal,” while she claims, however, that the “epistemic vulnerability” bears a positive meaning, for it makes possible learning. Seymour undergoes, in this sense, a significant change, because “[u]ndoing ignorance involves cultivating the attitude of one who is epistemically vulnerable” (Gilson 2014, 93). It is through the help of black people, particularly Easy, that he learns to transform his vulnerability into strength. His gratitude to Easy demonstrates that he has accepted his vulnerability, and his avowal unravels as he starts “thinking of [himself] as ‘black’” (Scott 2017, 108). His former oblivion of racism is somewhat akin to what Darieck Scott calls an “embodied alienation” (qtd in McMillan 2015, 9), but he moves beyond his comfort zone, where he has been feeling and acting white. Easy has been tough with Seymour, because he wants Seymour to become aware of how the power of whiteness affects him, for those who are “knowledgeable about dominant forms of power and how this power affects them can better move from self-blame to informed efforts at change of the system” 40 (Anyon 2014, 173). After he walks to his office in late morning the next Monday, still not getting over Bonnie’s absence, he finds Mouse waiting for him. Mouse resents that Easy has not fulfilled his fantasy of the massive windfall of the $2 million, but Easy says that it is Joe’s money. Even though Mouse reminds him of how Joe has lied to them, Easy, being a father himself, has an empathic understanding: “He wanted to get his son off the hook but there was money involved too” (305). Mouse informs him that Greg was killed at the Torrance Arms Hotel, found “shot to death at the bottom of the fire escape out back” (305). Joe told Mouse that this was a payback “for tryin’ to steal mob money and that you don’t have a thing to worry about” (305). The novel ends with Easy’s sense of “affirmative precarity” (J.C. Davidson 2013, 128) that even though he worries about the precarity of black life, nothing would stop what is coming; “that wouldn’t stop that hammer comin’ down” (305). His life has been all about fighting the unpre-

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dictable troubles, produced by the discursive practices of whiteness that mark the black body as the site of spatial vulnerability. ***** Easy’s subversive acts of “undoing” whiteness are a manifestation of his articulation of agency to disrupt the way systemic racism touches the black body in interracial encounters in everyday life. He certainly challenges and subverts the racial stereotype in the white imaginary, acting as a man with agency who not only cares for black people, but stands for all those vulnerable across the color line. Being located within the dangerous narrative of the overdetermined black male body, he is conscious of the potential of fundamental relationality produced by vulnerability. For Easy, then, racialization—or racial construction of vulnerability, for that matter—is not so much about how the black person experiences that vulnerability, but rather what he makes of that experience. Hence, Easy cannot merely look the other way, for he will not let Seymour’s bright future be taken abruptly by the law enforcement officers, and he gives Seymour back his life. Walter Mosley seems to locate “the ‘good’” in a black man such as Easy in the novel, published in an era of heightened racial tensions “where blackness is always already demonized or made dangerous,” because criminalization of black body “has discursively handcuffed the black masculine” (McCune 2012, 123). Racial profiling, in this respect, is a mechanism that not only reinforces the carceral spatiality of whiteness, but also denies black men the power to act or be “recognized” as agents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson’s three markers of agency, “choice,” “rationality,” and “recognition” (2017, 12), seem to be embodied by Easy, who as a private detective, makes difficult choices, acting as a black man whose rationality is often fused with affective sensibilities. Easy carves out a space in which he engages agency to contest the white epistemic notions of his social space as fixed by phenotypic blackness. If we think of his new performatives of blackness as affective intervention in the carceral spatiality of whiteness, his subversive acts as embodied praxis, in some ways, reveal his ability to contest the conception of space as fixed in order “to bring space alive,” and even more importantly “to bring it alive politically” in his confrontations with white racist people and institutions (Massey 2013, 264). Easy reconceptualizes and performs blackness as vibrant space, and his embodied challenges of relational space to the discursive practices of whiteness can be considered as a crucial spatial dimension of his strategy of resistance. Easy believes there is a value to “learning how to think relationally” about space that may indeed prove “to be a powerful political challenge” (Dell’Agnese 2013, 124). In this context, Charcoal Joe challenges how the precarious discourses and practices of incarceration bear the affective impact on black men’s bodi-

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ly scripts in a social world where white supremacist “discursive and ideological structures consistently prove inadequate for the project of preparing them for the everyday repetition of violence and repression” (Reid-Pharr 2016, 175). All in all, the pervasive socioeconomic destruction of black people’s lives, which figures into “the most stereotypic images of thuggish, dangerous black and brown bodies” (Roberts 2013, 284) in urban spaces, is a fact that Easy and Jackson Blue counter through the refashioning of their lives on their own terms, making transgressive interventions in the discursive spaces of whiteness. Easy’s performativity of blackness, through his subtle embodied practices of cultural whiteness that shift the racial(ized) boundaries and spaces, produced by social relations, is “one of flux and flow—of possibilities” (E.P. Johnson 2003, 218). All through the novel, Easy works through shifting practices, and he performs his blackness always in flux beyond regulated spaces. Hence, he feels compelled to construct a reflexive and vibrant subjectivity, which undermines the white normative construction of black men. As such, Easy’s struggle in and through white spaces enables us to see that Easy’s commitment to a relational construction of space has also been shaped through an important challenge to white dominant constructs of blackness as spatial(ized) vulnerability. It is inevitable that social change starts with the individual “as a consequence of individual actions” (Hogue 2003, 110) that set out with the hope to transform the society. There are moments in the novel when Easy needs a little time and space to clear his head, such as after breaking up with Bonnie, and disappears into himself in self-withdrawal; he drills deep, and he knows that he cannot be free if he does not connect with and reorient himself in the social world. Knowing that anti-black racism is the fabric of the society, and understanding the complexity of black people’s relationship to space, he makes an emotional investment in humanity: he pulls Seymour out of darkness in helping him renew his faith in his future goals, as he becomes the person he always wanted to be; he helps Bonnie and Joguye out at a point when they seem to have exhausted all their options; and he makes the brown guard, who keeps his intraracial biases against blacks, see new ways to forge a relational identity. Easy, who constantly refuses to be located in the white-constructed racial script, not only creates, but even more importantly acts upon, “a revolutionary interior in the outside space of collective resistance” with his friends and white allies (Crawford 2017a, 170). He embodies, in this sense, what Walter Mosley articulates as the need for “socialism in our lives” to be connected with each other, because it offers common “agreement to support one another” (Mosley 2016b, 120, 122). Hence, Easy’s connectedness with his authentic self, enacted in an embodied praxis of blackness, is articulated as the black person’s right, in the words of the contemporary black conceptual artist Theaster Gates, in a recent interview, “to live fully, govern thoughtfully” (2015, 20). Easy’s subversive acts of resistance to how the carceral

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spatiality of whiteness operates in everyday life, through his negotiations of raciospatial boundaries, reveal the need for black people’s agency in order to produce multiple sites where the performativity of blackness as fluidity and excess emerges. NOTES 1. Conceptualizing the multiplicity of contexts requires working on space itself, and hence the contemporary understandings, Lawrence Grossberg suggests, begin with Henri Lefebvre’s argument that “space is both made (emergent) and given (real)” (Grossberg 2013, 34). 2. It is also the margin, what bell hooks calls a “space of radical openness,” which counts as the dormant site of resistance and possibility, for the constructs of space “are political acts” (hooks 1990, 149, 152). 3. Philip Goodman argues that we do not seem to know how prisons are “sites of literal race construction” (2014, 354). 4. Laura Basu explains: “The term dispositif usually refers to a constellation of hetereogeneous elements within a system, and the relationships between them, which produce a particular ‘tendency’” (2011, 34). 5. Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that black men who live in the postindustrial city are “urban prisoners” (Collins 2004, 90). 6. It ironically operates merely as a penal space here. The racialized constructs of blackness helps us to explore how “Black quotidian space and prison space interact” (Shabazz 2009, 277). 7. Space in and of itself “is a product of interrelations” (Massey 2012, 10), an instrument of constructing a hierarchical relational space. It is an epistemic violence, necessary to white people in some ways, because the excessive black subjectivity reminds them of how they have lost control of racial boundaries, more precisely, “the expectedness of who and what those bodies do: constructions of racial performance or performatives” (B.K. Alexander 2012, 4). 8. In theorizing blackness, gender, sexuality, and space, Marlon Bailey and Rashad Shabazz consider Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias helpful in understanding how deviance is marked as unregulated. In his essay, “Different Spaces,” Foucault points out that “heterotopias are the spaces that each society creates to manage populations that are cast as deviant,” for they are “counter-sites” in which the dominant culture is “contested” (cited in Bailey and Shabazz 2014, 317). In this respect, the black male bodies represent in the white public discourse not only the prisons and the inner city, but above all, the spaces by which the white normative world constitutes itself through “creating its other and then spatializing it” (Bailey and Shabazz 2014, 317). 9. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series include the following novels and fiction: Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), Gone Fishin’ (1997), Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), Six Easy Pieces (2003), Little Scarlet (2004), Cinnamon Kiss (2005), Blonde Faith (2007), Little Green (2013), Rose Gold (2014b), and most recently, Charcoal Joe (2016). 10. Joe is incarcerated in the Avett Detainment Facility for ninety days, because he shot twice over a man’s head when he made a racist remark, and was arrested for using a weapon “within city limits” (13). Even though Easy never approved his friend Mouse’s ready-to-kill acts, Mouse has always put his life on the line to save him; “black men in America had learned centuries ago that the devil not only offered the best deals—he was the only game in our part of town” (13). 11. When Easy goes to Feather’s gated school, he has no problem with the white nonracist guard, and enjoys seeing that Feather socializes with three white girls, who do not have race issues. He is proud that his adopted son Juice moved to Alaska with his common-law wife and daughter, working on a salmon boat. 12. Being an Oxford graduate and a man of great wealth and power, he made alliances with the white owners of oil companies, for he wanted his people in Nigeria to have access to

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weapons to rise up and “contribute to the world” (30). However, his cousin Malik shot him several times for allying with white men, and they married before she brought him to America. Bonnie rushes out of the house to explain that the reason for their marriage was to get him out of the country: He is “a revolutionary and a king who is willing to fight for his people. He’s become the man he was supposed to be” (34). Learning that Easy was planning to make a marriage proposal to her, she confesses that Joguye’s manhood is gone, and all he needs is her company. 13. He tells Bonnie that he will ask Mama Jo, the witch doctor, to help to find a place where they would be safe from both FBI and his African tribal connections. His altruistic offer amazingly shows his true and deep love for Bonnie, for he realizes that he is the best version of himself when she is around. 14. A white man Foner found that it was profitable to use race to challenge white men, owners of oil companies from Oklahoma, with “a nigger” (46). When one of the white oil men threatened to kill Foner and Joe for losing his money in the game, Joe cut a deal with Foner and the oilman’s wife to kill her husband for $20,000. 15. As a matter of fact, he still lives with the affective sensibilities as a result of ongoing oppression of “institutional and structural forces that were systematically killing the vibrancy of community” at the same time as black people were deemed as dangerous (Roberts 2013, 285). 16. Easy goes to Mama Jo’s house; she wants him to find a young white woman nicknamed Coco who lived with her, before she disappeared. In the meantime, Easy asks if Mama Jo can find a hiding place for Bonnie and Joguye: Even if Easy knows how to engage with his demons, Mama Jo’s herbal tea seems to heal Easy’s heartbreak from losing Bonnie. 17. As he has time and he feels for Mama Jo, who feels sorry Coco is gone, because she needed a young woman to feel “the strength of her womanhood” (72), he investigates the whereabouts of Coco to make Mama Jo happy. But when he finds Coco, who lives in a house where white and black people enjoy the hippie lifestyle, she wants to live here in total freedom: “That was the hippie age, and truth was in movement and bodies and actions. History had been obliterated and the future was just a waste of time” (131). He later calls Mama Jo to inform her about Coco. 18. Loretta Kuroko works for Milo because she hates white people; as a child, she “spent three years in a detainment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II” (95). 19. He supposed that he would then even say in the court that the white cop “was suspicious of white slavery from just seeing us cruise down Wilshire Boulevard” (108). 20. Since Easy occasionally transgresses the discursive markers of race and gender in his sexual relationship with Asiette, he problematizes the everyday social world, revealing how his intervention both affects and is affected by “the discursive regimes” (P. Simpson 2011, 416). 21. Kelly Macias points to the current breakup of black lives in American society: Given the greater access to the American Dream, “our reality is one that is colored by our national heritage as the descendants of slaves, victims of Jim Crow laws and segregation, systems of economic marginalization, and White supremacy” (2015, 263). 22. What Jones succinctly argues here is that the white supremacist denigration of black people have been all about “a waste management problem” (J. Jones 2017, 319). 23. It is the place where Primo and Easy’s friend Peter Rhone, a white male character who appeared in Little Scarlet (2004), works. Peter, who now stays at Etta Mae’s place, owes his life to Easy, who cleared him, following LAPD’s misconducted investigation during the Watts Riots, of the murder of Nola Payne, with whom Peter was deeply in love and planning to divorce his wife to marry her. Believing him to be a “white ally” (Yancy 2008, 235), Easy sees Peter as the only white man he knew in America “who was trying to work off his people’s sins with humility and service” (124). 24. Since Easy wants to satisfy Feather’s curiosity about her biological mother and have closure, he calls Sarah Garnett, Feather’s biological grandmother from Chinatown. She is not in, and her husband, a lawyer, is reluctant to listen to Easy, feeling vulnerable to a fraudulent black man who is ready to intimidate them for money. Easy leaves his phone number and name for Sarah to call him back, using an authoritative tone and voice, sounding like “an unexpected threat” (139) the man cannot refuse. When they hang up, he realizes that Mama Jo’s herbal tea

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“made every moment into an absolute present where my feelings were thrusting forward—not, for the most part, dwelling on the past” (140). This moment of affective change is what he needs to feel connected with himself, as he walks down to Ivy Prep to pick up Feather, while wondering whether or not Inez would call the police on him if he went to Marvin’s Eats. Since he has enough to do today, he postpones “the reeducation of the white race for sometime later in the week” (140). Easy feels white racist people have to face the challenge of being selfcritical about their racist habits and learn to live with the “discomfort of critique” (Applebaum 2015, 10). 25. Easy reminds Seymour that being a black man, he will be racially profiled by police officers, who will constantly see him as “armed and dangerous” (163). Keeping his distance from the mundane embodied reality of the black male body, Seymour, who does not have “critical awareness” (Roberts 2013, 283), thinks that he cannot be implicated in a crime with circumstantial evidence. 26. Alexander G. Weheliye says Sylvia Wynter argued that modernity had made the “local humanity specific to the modern West” into a universal one, promoting the equation of “white, western, Man with humanity.” Weheliye also believes that posthumanism repeats the same error in repeating this equation of “white, western, Man with humanity” (2015). In a racially divided country, black people have to accept normative categories: “In other words, in order for individual Black lives to be recognized as full humans by the law, their Blackness must be killed” (Weheliye 2015). 27. He does not even know the black success stories in science during America’s struggle in the space race, starting from World War II: three NASA black women mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, whose calculations helped to send Alan Shepard and John Glenn into orbit and bring them back to Earth again, making possible “a story of hope” (Shetterly 2016, 240). 28. Perhaps what Rashad Shabazz calls “imaginative spatialities” to describe how prisoners reimagine carceral space in prison literature, can also be applied to Seymour’s attraction to Feynman’s views to “create new maps by repurposing the geography of the prison” (2014, 583) the black body represents—what Seymour deliberately ignores. 29. It is also a way of observing “the shifting notions people hold, including how easily love can be lost and slip away that we come to intimately know just what the concept of relativity really means” and how we can see the constant state of being in flux in experiencing social relativism (P. Hayes 2011, 164). 30. Easy is untied only for the phone call, and talks to the imaginary Mary (actually, Melvin) in front of Greg and Arnold, whose pistol is pointed at his head. He acts as “a man of strategy” (175) when he says on the phone that Joe asks him to bring Seymour to where he is, giving Greg’s address. Greg tells his men not to kill Easy, who is again fully tied up, and tells Arnold to let “that man alone” (177), not calling him “a nigger” (178). This attitude ironically makes Easy feel that he has “transcended racism because they were going to kill me for the danger I posed, not the color of my skin” (178). 31. She is the one who can help him with the Polish language, “heavily influenced by Yiddish” (184). Mania’s address is a motel where he meets her in the morning; she is a Polishblack woman who lives on the third floor with her mother: Since her mother, born “in a shtetl in central Poland” (188), was unable to remember Yiddish, Polish, or French but spoke a “gibberish” (188) language, Mania is capable of translating the journal, which she completes for the next day. Ready to go home and feeling safe because the intruders are either killed or in jail, he receives a phone call from Bonnie, who already regrets leaving Easy and Feather behind. Even though he is totally into her, Easy tries hard not to be affected, and feels happy that he has a date with Asiette next week. Then he receives another phone call, this time from Sarah. Easy reminds her of how her first husband Vernor murdered their daughter Robin, and placed her baby with foster families, after which Easy took her to live with his son, Juice. When Sarah checks if Easy demands money with no concern about her racially mixed granddaughter, Easy tells her that her husband was a monster, but she is “just as much a demon” (194). After she hangs up, Easy thinks of his deep love, and concern for Feather: “She was my child and I could not understand how her own blood could turn on her because of pigments in the skin” (194).

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32. Instead, he lies that it is Raymond “Mouse” Alexander who hired him, for he wanted Easy to talk to the LAPD about Seymour because of his connections there. Eugene offers $15,000 to Easy if he learns who Peter’s killer is and leads him to the money, or $5,000 if Easy cannot find the money but only Peter’s killer. 33. While she takes a shower upstairs, he cooks for her and calls Mouse to inform him of the lie he told to Eugene, identifying Mouse as the man who hired him. Mouse knows Eugene would be too scared to come after him, and tells Easy that he “did the right thing” (204). In fact, Easy admits to Augusta that he did not call to spend the night with her, but to ask questions about Uriah. 34. Even though this is the case, when Easy checks if Greg already gave sensitive information, Melvin does not see any plausible reason why he would ever violate the secrecy his job demands. However, Easy manipulates him into it; he reminds Melvin that he never leaves Melvin in the dark in helping him do his job, which “will open doors that you don’t even know are there” (217), and Melvin comes around to share a few details from Greg’s testimony. 35. Eugene brought Greg and his men into the deal so that they would kill Peter and Ducky, who never showed up, and the next morning they were found dead with no trace of money at the scene. As a result, the eastern mob put a hit on Eugene, who kept running for his life: “That’s why his men were on you. Because he thought he could get a line through Seymour” (217). 36. He also finds Jasmine’s marriage license, an expired driving license, and a passport with no picture for Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bartel. Seeing that Uriah “secreted his escape document with his precious printed materials” (244) and died for it, Easy cannot find any trace of the money. He asks Fearless to keep an eye on Seymour all the time, and he will raise his payment for extra work. 37. As Melvin’s partner Mary, who now works at the Santa Monica Public Library, answers the phone and gives it to Melvin, Easy reflects on how the role of love in his life has made Melvin protective of Mary: “In turns she had been a grifter, a con woman, a counterfeiter and probably worse” (263). 38. It was Willomena’s idea to give the journal to Seymour for Jasmine, for Jasmine would ask Willomena’s people to translate the Yiddish text for her. He asks how Willomena managed to switch the two books—one with the diamonds, one without. Willomena called Doris to tell her that Jasmine asked for a girl for Uriah, and she herself made an appointment with Jasmine for the same time, going upstairs to switch the books. Easy lies that he understood all this because the weights of the two books were different, for he needs Irena to believe that “the jewels were in my possession” (273). Willomena does not know if Tom is the one who killed Tony; Tony called her at the store after Peter’s murder to meet her and Tom, because everybody seemed to be suspect with “the money missing” (273). Tony and Tom decided to talk to Uriah, thinking he must be the one who robbed Peter. Since the money was moved through the track, Eugene relied on Tony to tell Tom and Willomena within a day if the deal went down. 39. Even though he knows that he can use the $2 million in the trunk for Feather and Juice, his previous talk with Sarah on the phone reminded him that his personal responsibility was “to keep Feather’s life as smooth as possible,” and that “the currency she needed was stability and love” (282). 40. After Easy goes back to the Torrance Arms and pays Greg $3,000, he picks up Feather and drives her home to meet Fearless at the restaurant, where he hands Fearless $10,000 of Joe’s money. Easy decides not to tell Feather about his plans to move to another house, and about her grandmother’s insensitivity and neglect: “Time enough for the barbs and arrows. For the next few weeks everything would be about her smile” (304).

Chapter Four

Reframing the “Scripted” Vulnerability of Whiteness as Violence The Praxis of the Wake in Victoria C. Murray’s Stand Your Ground (2015)

The manifestations of ongoing criminalization and police killings of unarmed black men in the contemporary “postracial” American society attests to the fact that “the Black presence in the United States remains precarious” in everyday life (Madhubuti 2016, 41). The dynamics of the racialized precarity unravels, without doubt, “[t]he contemporary crisis of whiteness,” as the sociologist Howard Winant writes, with “its dualistic allegiances to privilege and equality, to color consciousness and color-blindness” (qtd in Hughey 2012, 185). When considered that all these victims of violence were unarmed, their untimely deaths reveal both a serious threat hovering over young black men and the racial fear that is implicated in the ideology of whiteness, constituted by “complex material, social, epistemic, and affective racist arrangements” (Yancy 2017c, 594). Recent racist violence targeting the black male body, marked Trayvon Martin’s body, for instance, murdered in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a vigilante of white-Latino descent, assuming even an unarmed young black man, “whom he characterized as crimina[l]” (Cazenave 2018, 223), posed a threat to him in his white neighborhood watch. Zimmerman’s violent policing of the black body was rewarded by the jury’s acquittal in 2013, which meant that Trayvon was found guilty for being black. “[R]endered bare life,” Trayvon became an embodied reminder of “the brutal territorializations of race that constitute the present history of America” (Roy and Crane 2015a, xi). Perhaps what lies at the foundation of the legal construction of the black male bodies is the racialization of crime: The 119

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practice of “doing whiteness” takes place by means of “establishing whiteness as the norm for the human, and Blackness as a deviation from the human or even as a threat to the human” (J. Butler 2017a, 57–58). However, the increasing number of (police) killings of unarmed black men—including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, among many others since Trayvon Martin’s murder—in the current real social world, Katrina Thompson points out, is a racial trajectory that reveals “the hostile racial climates African Americans have experienced for almost two centuries” (2016, 12). It is in this context of precaritization of the black body out of white racial fear that the Stand Your Ground law, passed in Florida in 2005, came to be used in several other states, including Pennsylvania. Since it offers protection to individuals from arrest if they are able to prove they acted in self-defense, it has come to mean to anti-black racists that personhood granted as embodied whiteness became a right to be defended within a discursive domain of “the necropolitics of life-in-death and death-in-life” 1 (Fishel and Wilcox 2017, 348). American self-defense law, Joshua Reeves writes, “momentarily places [Americans] beyond the reach of American criminal law, endowing them with full legal sanction to kill other subjects” (2015, 288). Stand Your Ground, then, is also practiced by vigilantes, such as Zimmerman, who act like a police officer, as “Do-It-Yourself-Defense.” In that case, young unarmed black men, “whose mis-placement in a ‘white’ space made them ‘reasonable’ targets” become, Caroline Light suggests, “expendable collateral damage in a war on crime that privileges the right of a white man to ‘shoot first’ over the rights of citizens to live free of violence” (2015, 297). Even as the Stand Your Ground law exposes the sanctioned violence of normative whiteness, it requires the public to confront “the law’s consistent rejection of black self-defense” (Sexton 2017, 3). This form of repeated justification of “lethal violence,” Judith Butler considers, “is reserved for those who have a publicly recognized self to defend,” positioning blacks, deemed as a threat “to the only kind of life, white life, that is recognized” (2017a, 54, 56). In this context, the killing of black men, or what Nathaniel Mackey calls “alchemizing a legacy of lynchings” (1997, 62), exhibits the concern about the precarity of being black. The ways in which these acts of white violence keep targeting black people produces a traumatic “embodied black experience” (H. Young 2010, 5). It is the terrorism of whiteness that leaves “its devastating affect on Black life” (Madhubuti 2016, 43), which inspires a politics of mourning, manifested through the resistance in Black Lives Matter. As a major crisis for the nation, but especially for the black community, such a “pattern of extrajudicial killings has motivated a public outcry against racial injustice from various quarters of the society with calls for social and racial justice” (S.C. Johnson 2017, 214).

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From the beginning, Black Lives Matter has framed the unlawful killing of black people, starting with but not exclusive to Trayvon Martin, “as an ongoing national narrative in which all citizens have a capacity for involvement” 2 (S. Bell 2016). Simon Stow, an African American studies scholar, draws attention to the double typology of public mourning, in the forms of “romantic mourning” based on “an understanding of democracy as consensus,” and “tragic mourning,” 3 a political act that takes place in public (2010, 682). Taking a critical stance, tragic mourning, in contrast to romantic mourning, in Stow’s view, responds to the conditions in the real world that produced the tragedy. Shavon Bell believes that Black Lives Matter has successfully employed “tragic mourning,” producing a “democratic discursive environment” 4 (2016) that renders the public recognition of African American humanity. As they celebrate blackness as a site of empowered action, working through, Alessandra Raengo argues, the “generative capacity of black social life” (qtd in Linscott 2017, 78), and fight to build the world they have envisioned for so long, these activists have employed “maternal grief” 5 as a powerful strategy (Stafford 2016). Given that Black Lives Matter can be considered, the poet Claudia Rankine suggests, as “an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness” 6 (Rankine 2017, 33). In an indirect response to Rankine, Christina Sharpe, in her book In the Wake, distinguishes between mourning and what she calls “the wake work” in the “afterlife” 7 (2016, 7) of slavery in the present. Since living in the wake means that black people are considered sites of danger, “the praxis of the wake” by black artists and writers, “positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events,” constructs “the orthography of the wake” (Sharpe 2016, 19, 21). Sharpe finds in the climate of anti-blackness both “disaster and possibility,” because while “‘we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability’ to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves but to each other by that force” (Sharpe 2016, 110, 134). Victoria Christopher Murray’s novel Stand Your Ground (2015b), in similar ways to Sharpe’s argument here, “contains Black being as it has developed in the wake; Black being that continually exceeds all of the violence directed at Black life; Black being that exceeds that force” (2016, 134). Murray inscribes in the novel “the wake work,” then, in which she renders the affective register of the everyday being, agency, and resistance of black people. The novel, in many diverse ways, is directly “positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events,” in a fictional account of “the orthography of the wake.” In her essay, “Why I Wrote Stand Your Ground,” Victoria C. Murray explains how she remembers the moment, six months after George Zimmerman’s acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murder, when the jury in the case of Michael Dunn (white), who murdered Jordan Davis (black), could not reach a verdict. Unlike many others whose misplaced anger targeted the jury,

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she believed that the Stand Your Ground law had to be repealed. “It was that night and those reactions that started the seed of this novel growing inside of me. I so wanted to get people to understand that the law was the problem” (Murray 2015b, x). In the process of writing the novel, Eric Garner was killed by a police officer’s chokehold, followed by Michael Brown’s killing by the white police officer Darren Wilson on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. She now hopes that her novel works through that anger she felt at the moment “in a way that will help to change America—for the better. And that begins with repealing Stand Your Ground” 8 (Murray 2015b, xii). Since the novel is directly related to the lived experiences of black people in contemporary America, it addresses the crisis of the present moment in the real social world. The novel has four parts, before an epilogue, and each one has a different person narrating the part. The plot summary is simple: Janice and Tyrone Johnson are heartbroken when they receive the news that their seventeen-year-old son Marquis is killed by a white vigilante in Pennsylvania. While he is in his car with his white girlfriend, Heather, Wyatt Spencer comes out of his house to make sure the girl is safe with him. Marquis confronts Wyatt, and gets out of his car to talk back to him, when he is shot and killed on the spot. The novel gives the account of the few days following their loss during which the parents deal with their grief, as they also cope with problems in their married life. However, when the case ends in a mistrial, Wyatt is beaten to death late at night by a vigilante group’s enactment of street justice. The novel’s centering on the everyday problems victims’ families are forced to face, opens up what has so far been “rendered invisible” (Gray 2016, 10), kept outside of the public statements. While doing that Murray renders a problematic depiction of how the Stand Your Ground law is used by white racist people as a pretext for depriving black people of their right to live, as “merely a legal camouflage for an open season of killing African Americans” (Ferguson and McClendon 2013, 41). What Murray examines in the novel is not merely racial(ized) justice through police investigation and trial, but rather the black mother’s interiority, offering maternal grieving “as a frame for understanding and healing” (Fishel and Wilcox 2017, 349). Murray’s novel employs its confrontational space, to use Fred Moten’s words here, “as a kind of resistance to aversion [of the white gaze]” (Moten 2003, 233). Even though Marquis is dead when the novel starts, he can still be considered the protagonist in some ways, because, to use the narrator’s words on Saeed, in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, he “became present without presence” (2017, 40). As Stand Your Ground decenters whiteness as the dominant ideal of being, it interrogates its impact on the lives of black people in the domain of legally sanctioned violent practices of anti-blackness. Part One is narrated by Janice Johnson. Married for sixteen years, Tyrone and Janice Johnson have a troubled relationship due to Janice’s infidelity,

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while their deep love for each other helps them to slowly recuperate from the tenuous situation. 9 Their life, a day after the Mother’s Day, is interrupted by the doorbell, rung by two policemen, one white and the other black. Tyrone, who was raised as a tough black boy on the streets of Philly, resents the presence of any policeman, “never an invited guest” (10). The black officer, Detective Ferguson, informs them that their son Marquis was shot and killed on Avon Street in Haverford. While Tyrone and Janice never receive any satisfactory answer about what really happened to their son, even later in the precinct, the detectives’ interrogation focuses on what Marquis was doing on Avon Street, positioning him as a misplaced black “thug” and reinforcing “race as space” (D.M. Jones 2016, 5). Detective Ferguson is surprised to hear for the first time that Marquis had a white girlfriend, Heather Nelson, whom he might be dropping off at the spot he was killed. They seem to be more concerned about whether he is “a member of a gang” (17), a question that makes Tyrone angry, for they imply a negative racial stereotype without answering his repeated question, “What happened to my son?” (17). Furthermore, Janice observes the officers’ stereotyping of her husband as a submissive subject with no agency: “They had mistaken my grieving-andin-shock husband for a passive black man” (17–18). Rather than giving a full account of what happened before his son’s death, Tyrone is asked about whether Marquis carried “a firearm” (19). Tyrone’s anger rises at the implication that Marquis must be a gang member, thinking another black boy killed his son: “Because that’s the first thing you think of when you see two black boys, right?” (19). Tyrone confronts Detective Ferguson for asking whether Marquis carries a weapon, at least a baseball bat, by negating all the markers of an urban stereotype: “My son wasn’t violent; he was probably eight the last time he had a fight. He wasn’t in a gang, he didn’t sell drugs, he didn’t carry any weapons of any kind” (20). Knowing that her son would never hurt anybody, Janice is unable to believe hearing that the killer claims it was self-defense, and that the recent killings of black men—represented similarly on the news, including one in Florida, implying Trayvon Martin in real life—can ever happen here: “But that was down south. In Florida. That kind of thing couldn’t happen here. Not in the North. In Pennsylvania. And it certainly was never used when one black man shot another” (21). Toward the end of their interrogation that lasts for long hours, one of the officers explains that Pennsylvania is also “a stand-your-ground state” (22). Although she still believes a black boy is the killer, she suspects, in complete distrust of a racially biased law enforcement system, that they will let the killer off the hook, because “this was just some black-on-black crime to them” (22). The black mother’s grief soon becomes a political issue, as the ongoing investigation prevents them from seeing their son’s body until the medical examination is over, as if “my son was the property of the state” (23). It is nerve-racking for her to feel that her son’s body is “more important as evi-

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dence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest” (Rankine 2017, 34). Holding her tears with difficulty, she goes to see Heather to understand what really happened, even though she never liked Heather, whom Marquis has dated for a year. She had hoped that when Marquis was enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in a year, and Heather would be at MIT, then the long-distance relationship would not work out. She encounters Heather’s mother, Agnes Nelson, who does not welcome her: “So our disdain and the reason for it was mutual” (29). The fact that they are the two mothers who would never socialize with each other has to do with the residential segregation based on the class distinction: “She’d been born and raised right here in Haverford, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Philadelphia. . . . Of course, I was on the other side” (29). Even though Agnes is reluctant to let her see Heather, Janice insists on talking to her, for she was “the last person . . . to see my son alive” (30). Heather gives the first full account that the man, who tapped on the window while she and Marquis were sitting in the car, asked if she was okay. Even though she answered in the affirmative, he kept asking similar questions, which put Marquis on edge, and he told him “to mind his business and get away from his car” (32). When the man wanted him to get out of the car and say it “to his face,” she remembers him jumping out of the car, and hearing immediately the shot fired. Fearing for her life too, she calls 911, and cries now saying that “Marquis didn’t even do anything. . . . The man just shot him as he came around the car” (32). Agnes does not want Heather to answer Janice’s question about how the killer looked, a question Janice asks “in the politically correct way” (33). It is only when Heather identifies the killer as white, that Janice understood why the officers refrained from telling the truth: “My son was murdered simply because he was black. I’d wanted to know why; I’d wanted to understand. Now I did” (34). The white man’s killing makes it clear that it is the ultimate degree of white racial anxiety, because Marquis’s body seems to disrupt in the white man’s mind “the harmony and symmetry of white space” whose unexpected presence has to be “stopped dead” (Yancy 2016b, 250). Janice cried all the way, while driving back home, where Tyrone’s mother, Delores Johnson, waited for her and held her tight. Janice remembers how, in her early youth, Delores, who was out with her church members tending to “the downtrodden and forgotten” in Love Park, which had been “my home for about three weeks,” found her after she had run away from her foster home, indicating how the trauma of white supremacy in black lives “is not limited to police brutality” 10 (hooks 2017, 19). Delores’s inquiry into how she really feels pulls her “from the memories of my dire past into the torment of this present” (37), and her vulnerability is gradually transformed into the will to resist. In this context, the novel employs a strategy of, what Hortense Spillers calls, “the interior intersubjectivity,” a term she coins “to

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designate as the locus at which self interrogation takes place” (2003, 383). As Kevin Quashie agrees with her view, he sees a form of dialogic interiority in such moments of “quiet,” which subverts the white dominant culture’s episteme of the black person as always already knowable, and hence, through vulnerability opening up the conceptual domain of “quiet” (Quashie 2012, 119, 129). Such is the case with Janice; she is drawn to her inner world where she seems to live with the memories of different moments of love and affection between her son and herself in, what Aldon Nielsen calls in a poem on Trayvon, “the widowed world” (2017, 111). Caught up in her emotions about what may have taken place at the moment of his murder, she remembers his considerateness to her, particularly on Mother’s Day, the day before, when he planned to cook breakfast and serve her in bed, “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama. And may we share many more” (49). Memories of Marquis posit an intersection between the real and the imaginary one, locating him “where the actuality of what surpasses representation is caught up in mourning and repetition” (Rayner and Elam 1994, 456). We see what is beyond the police officers’ view of Marquis through these memories that make us imagine the man Marquis would have become. Unlike Janice, Marquis is “stripped, so to speak, of the ability to render actionable his interior knowledge of his own identity” (Yancy 2013, 242). Janice and Tyrone inform Delores, who wants them to make funeral arrangements, that they cannot get Marquis’s body until the police investigation is over. When Janice tells them the truth, that a white man killed Marquis, it all becomes clear why Marquis’s death is not on the TV news channels. Knowing that the police are apparently reluctant to publicize this murder story to avoid the issue of racism, Tyrone calls Detective Ferguson in a rage to ask if they arrested the white man who murdered his son. Having lived within “[t]he destructive consequences of the black crime discourse” (Muhammad 2010, 273), Tyrone believes that the killer’s name cannot be publicly disclosed, sensing that the real motive is the white man’s protection. Frustrated as he is, Tyrone wants to seek street justice, and calls his brother Raj, a troublemaker in Janice’s view, so that his group, the Brown Guardians, will restore the justice. Janice gets a cold shoulder from Tyrone when she expresses resentment toward the Brown Guardians, and tries to persuade him that they have to do things in the right way, because she does not want Marquis to be remembered “for anything besides the wonderful young man that he was. I didn’t want Marquis to be part of a movement that led to looting and lunacy; I just wanted to hold on to his memory” (43). Delores, to Janice’s dismay, supports Tyrone’s view that the men will have to take care of the case, while Janice yearns for the support of her closest friend Syreeta, Raj’s ex-girlfriend who, after being physically abused by him, moved to Germany to teach in a high school. All the black folks who crowd into their house in emotional support of Janice and Tyrone are not aware that Janice

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wants to have some space to grieve her son in private, for she shields herself against the public not to fall apart. When the guests learn that the killer is white, they want to organize public rallies, a situation that confirms Janice’s concern. She does not want to be part of a public demonstration where she would have to live her grief in public: “I didn’t want my son to be remembered for how he died; I wanted the world to know how he lived. And I didn’t want my son’s death to be used as any kind of excuse for any kind of violence” (47–48). The guests remind each other of how the Brown Guardians, a neighborhood protection group that seemed more like a vigilante motorcycle gang to Janice, had organized the “six-car pileup on the interstate that killed that cop” (48), Nicholas Watson, who shot a black boy. Raj’s visit upon Tyrone’s call to share their grief causes Janice to warn Tyrone that she does not want Raj to cause any trouble. Tyrone explains that Raj is no longer violent or even vindictive, for he was changed by the collective solidarity provided by the Brown Guardians, whom Janice knows are always for violence; “they were nothing more than motorcycle thugs, outlaws at best, terrorists for real” (57). Raj’s questions at home about Syreeta increase her guilt for having introduced them in the first place; they lived together as lovers for years, before Syreeta ended up with a broken nose and arm. In their conversation with Delores, who believes in street justice as the only means for retaliation, Janice resents that the Guardians can create an inconvenience that will make the current situation with the police worse. When Delores asserts that it is inevitable to have casualties in a struggle, for “violence is the only language that white folks understand” (67), Janice realizes that the Guardians’ propaganda infected many people’s minds. She goes out of her house, and drives away to the morgue just to stand outside, while she calls Syreeta to break the news about her son’s death to learn that she and Raj have kept in touch over the years. Janice’s anxiety that Tyrone organizes an action earns a similar response to Delores’s from Syreeta, who replies that the Guardians will handle the killer: “You’ve got to let those men do what men do” (74). When Janice returns home, she sees that Tyrone heads back to Raj’s place to make plans for rallies and protests: “We need the police to release the name of the man who murdered Marquis. They were supposed to do it right away, and we’re going to make sure that happens” (77). Janice wants to persuade him not get involved, but Tyrone’s words reveal that there is no longer a distinction between the personal and the political: “I’m already involved. It was my son who was murdered” (77). Her disagreement that the Brown Guardians’ organized action is to get the police to do the right thing compels Tyrone to question if she wants justice for Marquis: “I want justice for my son. But I want my son more than I want justice” (78). At a deeper level, Marquis is killed out of his refusal to be “complicit with a white supremacist system of ‘interpellation,’ a system that [white people]

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help to perpetuate and, by extension, a system that diminishes the humanity of black people and people of color” (Yancy 2015a, xxv). Marquis’s resistance to white interpellative hail of Wyatt, who takes the role of police upon himself, is, and should be remembered as, “detached from, the action [by means of murder] whose agent [he] is supposed to be” (Moten 2017, vii). However, Janice’s fear that the public rally will agitate the police not to give Marquis’s body to them, is what Tyrone responds to: “Janice, our son is already gone. None of that is going to bring him back, but if I can do something about why he’s gone, then I’ve got to do it” (79). Janice’s grief as a mother overrides her feelings about the good the community action can achieve, as opposed to Tyrone’s repeated emphasis of the anti-black racism of the police department. It is quite clear that the boundaries of whiteness within a racialized system inevitably expose that “the spatial and the social are mutually constitutive” (J.A. Powell 2012, 147). Before he leaves the house, Tyrone says that he knows exactly what they will do: “They’re protecting the man who murdered our son. So there’s nothing inside of me, as a black man in this country, that will let me wait” (79). She calls Caleb, the black pastor she had a brief affair with in the past, who lets her know that Marquis’s murder is on the TV news. As one of the main reporters on inner-city issues in Philadelphia, Clarissa Austin interviews Raj in the front lines of the rally, who says that what they want is justice for their family and for Marquis: “We want to make sure that murderers stop getting a free pass to kill black boys because of this racist law called Stand Your Ground” (82). Tyrone comes home unexpectedly, and he is convinced that the media interest in the Brown Guardians will help them with “a better chance of everything going our way” (85), because their involvement will keep the police in line. When Tryone and Raj drop by at night, Janice is overjoyed that Syreeta came from Germany to support her. Tyrone informs her that the Brown Guardians got the police to release Marquis’s body to Marshalls Funeral Home, where she goes with Tyrone, Raj, and Syreeta to see her son. Since she cannot hold the wake, she just wants to have a moment with Marquis, before attending the funeral at the church the following day. It can be argued here that the lack of visible public expression of her grief and pain is “still part of the mode of expression, just as we say that silence is still part of language” 11 (Dauphineé 2007, 150). She holds Marquis to her chest, as her heart almost “cracked” 12 (97), while the sad moment helps Tyrone and Janice to reconnect. To Janice’s surprise as they leave the funeral home, Clarissa Austin, ready with her crew, holds the microphone to Tyrone and asks if the Brown Guardians “force[d] the police to release the name of the man who shot your son” (104). Even though Tyrone explains to Janice and Syreeta that the police are soon expected to name the killer, Janice gets uncomfortable, when she sees Raj joining a few other Guardians, riding in a car “in full regalia, looking like they were going

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to war” (106). She, as a mother, wants “a mother’s justice” that will expose Marquis’s selfhood, without seeing him reduced to a corpse: “The kind of justice that will show that Marquis was a wonderful young man who had his life stolen” (108). Unlike Janice, Syreeta shares Raj’s view that the Guardians’ killings were never proven, and even if they were, they can be justified as a retaliation, but for Janice, this is vigilante violence. Janice, who tries to calm down before Marquis’s funeral the next day while having dinner with Syreeta, 13 sees her mother-in-law, Delores, on TV, telling Clarissa that she is glad to know the identity of the killer, hoping that there will be justice. Clarissa turns to the camera and says that Marquis’s parents have not commented on the situation, but the Brown Guardians asked her to respect their privacy a day before the funeral—a moment that slightly eases Janice’s negativity about the Guardians. While Clarissa announces the name of the killer and the photo of this white man is shown on the screen, Janice thinks “Wyatt Spencer had taken our son away” (119). The next day Janice and Tyrone enter Delores’s church, Harmony Hearts Baptist Church, seeing all the newspeople “with camera lights flashing behind us” (121). Janice can hardly hold herself together, as the procession is led by Reverend Davis, and she sees that all two thousand seats are filled with mournful strangers, including Heather, who is in tears. While she rests at home, following the service, 14 Tyrone lets her know that the Guardians are organizing protests, one being now at the Montgomery courthouse, despite her concern that “the world would judge my son by those thugs” (133). All Janice wants is that his solid reputation among friends and family is not lost “in the public discourse that seeks to dehumanize them, criminalize them in ways to justify the behavior of those who murder them” (Henderson 2016, 86), but concerned with the larger issues about injustice done to black boys, Tyrone is determined to work with the Brown Guardians. He sees value in protests to show the police, the district attorney, and the world that the black community stands together to demand justice, adding further that Raj guaranteed the Guardians will make the effort “to stay within the system” (133). When Syreeta assures her, the next day, that the Guardians decided not to enact any violence in the protests out of respect for her, Janice is still aware that they will “turn Marquis into a cause” 15(137). Janice is not satisfied, for she wants her son’s case to be handled only in court, rather than on the streets, and she is absolutely sure Syreeta will soon see the Guardians’ “true colors” (138). As she turns on the television to see if the protest has started, she sees the photo of Wyatt, whose brother speaks to the cameras that he will be exonerated upon the completion of the police investigation, because Marquis, beyond doubt, “was the aggressor” (141). She is astounded to hear him claim that Marquis attacked Wyatt, busting his nose with “a baseball bat” (141), for his deceptive account legitimizes the coping strategy of white men as justification for violent assault. His descrip-

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tion of Wyatt, a Christian who is “a good man, a devoted husband, a loving father,” and “an asset to this community” (141), is what he measures against Marquis, “a known thug” (141). His self-serving rhetorical question directed on TV to white people is a representation of “racial criminalization” (Muhammad 2010, 3), because it reinforces the narrative of white vulnerability: “If you find yourself face-to-face in the middle of the night, with a known thug holding a baseball bat, what would you do?” (141). Charles W. Mills says that the majority of whites believe that “whites are the race most likely to be the victims of racial discrimination” (2017, 192). Marquis is already discursively shattered by Wyatt’s white gaze even before the bullets entered his body to keep the black male body within boundaried surveillance. Marquis seems to be “killed by a stereotype” (Pitts 2016, 275) because of the stark intervention of power in the form of a white stranger. This racist discursive violence to Marquis’s true selfhood mobilizes Janice’s anger, who dresses in black to join the Guardians’ protest. She tries to keep her head in the game: “I wanted America to see me in my black. . . . This was not a fight that I wanted, but I would fight to the end now. That man had spoken my son’s name in vain” (142). The violence does not only pertain to the killing, but Marquis’s image is on TV news as public spectacle, which signifies the precarity emerging from what Saidiya Hartman calls “hypervisibility” (1997, 36). This hypervisibility calls into question the problematics of “the stagedness of the violently . . . quotidian,” embedded in black everyday life (Moten 2003, 1). Janice’s sense of ambivalence at the dissemination of her son’s image as uncanny lies in the violent domain of conflation between racial consciousness and self-consciousness where blackness is an embodied affect, “a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity” (Moten 2003, 1). Janice drives her car near to the Montgomery County courthouse, where she has a hard time getting through the crowd. She feels it is unbelievable that all these people acted on Wyatt’s brother’s distorted depiction of Marquis: “Just an hour ago, the news cameras showed empty courthouse steps. But now there were throngs of folks. Mostly black, but a lot of white people, too” 16 (143). She is moved by how the masses respond to Raj’s demand for justice in his speech not just by arresting the killer, but by helping the Stand Your Ground law to be repealed. As he reminds that the law gives people “a license to kill!” (144), the crowd backs him up with shouting “Enough!” (144). He affectively adds that the law motivates people to “act on the emotion of the moment,” which he calls “legal murder!” (145). Raj addresses the lived material consequences of racial scripting of black boys to make the protesters understand that justice is not only about Marquis but about all the other black boys who have been killed in the streets: “And so this is the time. Wyatt Spencer must be put on trial for murder and this law must be repealed” (145). When Raj and the crowd all raise their fists in the air, they all chant

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together, “Enough. Justice for Marquis” (145). This moment of awareness constitutes Janice’s sense of “solidarity as weapon and practice” (Milstein 2015a, 138). The collective praxis of “rebellious mourning” (Milstein 2017a, 4) as intervention in everyday life becomes even more affective as Janice joins them: “I chanted that over and over, even as I cried” (145). She realizes that this moment of sharing, when her “pain [is] transformed into weapon,” is employed by the caring community as a strategy in a relentless struggle to help bring justice in a white supremacist “police state that grants itself exemption from any culpability” (Milstein 2017a, 5, 6). This part is followed by Part Two, which is narrated by Meredith Spencer, a white woman, married to Wyatt, a highly wealthy man and the owner of the Cheesesteak Castles. Being young enough to be his daughter and a mother of a young child, she easily identifies with the grief of another mother (Janice). Temporarily taking residence at a hotel with her husband for safety, she learns the details regarding Marquis, as Wyatt’s brother Wally and his attorney Newt are happy to feed the TV news, representing Marquis as “a known thug” (149) to shape the white public opinion and win their case in court. Newt says to Wyatt, who also watches the news with them, that “thug” is “the new N-word,” hoping that all the white people will remember Marquis as a thug, “that big black boy in a hoodie with his pants sagging and music blasting from a cell phone that’s more expensive than theirs and probably stolen” (150). Wyatt is glad that they invoked the racial stereotype of the black male body, and they managed to scare “every white person sitting in front of their TV” (150). This scene also shows that “[e]motions shape the ways that people experience their worlds and interactions” (Ioanide 2015, 2). The news discourse exposes an expanded conception of whiteness, and thus Marquis’s death reveals “the importance of race in the construction of politically ‘grievable lives’” (Pool 2012, 208). Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “‘Thug’ works to both criminalize and dehumanize the dispossessed while masking the violent operations of the state and capital.” Wyatt and his men call Marquis a thug to “delegitimize grievances” (Kelley 2016, 17) of Marquis’s family and friends. When Meredith overhears the whole hate talk, she feels like throwing up, and prevents Wyatt from disturbing their three-year-old son Billy, now asleep, remembering how she always declined to let Billy see how his father behaved. Wyatt expects to seal the public opinion in his favor by showcasing Meredith, a beautiful white woman whose relational status sustains his normative masculine identity: “That would show everyone that I’m not a killer” (153). Meredith, who never shares her disagreement or opinion with Wyatt, instead thinks, “But you are!” (153). Wyatt’s racist mind-set becomes even more obvious to Meredith as she listens to how he blames his victim when talking to Newt and Wally: “What happened was that thug’s fault” (153). They see a black man, who says on TV that Marquis “did nothing wrong.” He claims that the police know this,

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and that “Wyatt Spencer must be arrested and brought to trial just like any American who takes the life of another for no reason” (154). The crowd cheers at the black man’s words, and Meredith realizes that it is the Brown Guardians, “a herd of angry black men” who scare her even from a distance: “They always talked about justice, but many in our circle called them homegrown terrorists who kidnapped and murdered, and who terrified me” (154). She realizes from the grieving tone of Marquis’s father that he is not one of them, and his wife beside him is a mother just like her. This moment is in contrast to Wyatt’s hate language, who calls Detective Ferguson “that nigger cop” (155) when Newt receives a call from him. While Meredith keeps feeling like throwing up every time her husband uses a racist slur, Newt warns Wyatt never to use N-word in private or public, and Detective Ferguson is on his way to conduct another interrogation. Their room in the hotel in Springfield makes her feel both angry at “hiding out because of what my husband had done” (158), and guilty for “uprooting my son so suddenly and completely from his life” (159). Wyatt wants Meredith to be present when Detective Ferguson comes to the hotel room, which makes her feel even more vulnerable. She remembers how she met Wyatt, a businessman, when she, raised by a single mother, worked as a waitress in restaurants after she graduated from high school, and how he helped her financially to get through college. 17 Even though she is used to Wyatt’s utilization of her beauty as “a trophy” (170), she resents his demand that she use heavy makeup and his picking the dress she should wear to look almost seductive to Detective Ferguson. Before Detective Ferguson comes, Newt helps Wyatt rehearse his account of what happened as a “salable” (174) story, and he corrects Wyatt’s ways of racializing Marquis so that he will not be seen as a racist. Newt wants Wyatt to claim in his confession that Marquis came with a baseball bat, and Wyatt got scared, “fearing for my life and I didn’t have time to think and I shot him” (173) in an effort to show his motive as “justifiable homicide” (Light 2015, 292). As Wyatt makes Meredith open the door for Detective Ferguson to impress him, she is aware that Wyatt, Newt, and Wally assumed that she “wasn’t very bright” (175), a gender script she uses to her advantage. This scene reveals Wyatt’s appropriation of blackness through his racial stereotyping of black men with a natural sexual desire for white women. Ironically enough, while she is a good-intentioned white person, she also has a mental hang-up on racial scripts, having failed to deal with her “unconscious habits” of racism (Sullivan 2006, 22). She racializes Detective Ferguson, whom she expected “to be more athletic than intelligent, because he was black” (175). In the routine interrogation, Meredith observes how Wyatt’s words reveal his racial bias, such as “lad” (176) out of his habit of infantilization of blacks. His minimalization of killing a black boy becomes quite obvious, when he is shocked to hear that Detective Ferguson will turn his case over to the state

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prosecutor. As Newt checks if Ferguson thinks Wyatt will be prosecuted, he says there are procedures that need to be followed, and Wyatt loses his confidence in getting away with murder. He tells Ferguson once again what happened that night, as he describes his shooting as a legal right for “selfdefense” (177), and Newt wraps up his client’s account in legal discourse: “Wyatt was standing his ground. And in this state, as long as he saw a weapon and feared for his life, he could protect himself” (177). Detective Ferguson, who has an eye for details, questions the loopholes in Wyatt’s testimony and checks if Meredith called 911, but Wyatt takes over, saying that he called from his cell phone “[w]hen I went back outside” (179). When Ferguson asks if he first left the house to check Marquis, forgetting his cell but not his gun, Wyatt loses his self-control, shouting in a frenzy that Marquis’s death is not his fault, because he deserved it, for he needed to protect his wife, as a corollary to how “the protection of white womanhood has been a core principal of white supremacy” (Cazenave 2018, 226), and his son—an act of deviance immediately stopped by Newt. However, Wyatt replaces his “white talk” with, what Alison Bailey calls, “a discourse of vulnerability,” justifying his murder as a strategy of protecting Meredith and his son. Bailey adds that even though fear is at the root of white anti-blackness, “what drives the conversation is not fear itself but how vulnerable we feel in the face of this fear” of blackness (2015, 41, 50). This hate talk and lack of remorse, masquerading as racial fear, reveals that Marquis is killed by Wyatt not only because he was with a white girlfriend, but for not knowing his place simply because he “consents not to be a single being” (Moten 2017, 67). When a black individual of self-respect such as Marquis stands up to “the agen[t] of white racism,” there is an inevitable “disastrous clash of narratives and negotiations of personhood” (Mills 1998, 92). If “the racialized subject is invented in the process of encounter” (Browne 2015, 162), then killing the materiality of being as such exposes the white desire to relocate blackness in a space of public invisibility. Wyatt responds emotionally to “the constituted meaning of the black body as problematic” (Yancy and Jones 2013a, 21), whereas Ferguson focuses on the facts and asks where the cell phone was, and Wyatt, panic stricken, says it was on the table, by the door. After the interrogation is over, Ferguson stops at the door to ask Meredith if she witnessed any part of this, but Wyatt nervously jumps in that she did not. Ferguson keeps looking at Meredith and repeats the question, and she tells the truth that she was in the house, but did not see anything out of the window. Ferguson’s insistent attitude in asking if she saw “anything at all” causes Wyatt to make another blunder in speaking for his wife: “She has nothing to do with this. I shot that boy” (181). He is taken by surprise that Ferguson, who is not one of his silverspoon boys, responds to him boldly, “Yes, you did” (181), making it obvious that he sees through the façade of truth in a well-planned testimony that already starts

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cracking. Clearly, Wyatt has acted as “a white male citizen who felt justified in patrolling—and protecting—the racial divide” (Henderson 2013, 255–56). Meredith observes that her husband was not smart enough to see that he failed to intimidate the detective, a black man who exceeds Wyatt’s racial stereotype: “This man wasn’t like the black teenagers who stuffed cheese steaks between bread or senior citizens who swept the floors at Wyatt’s Cheesesteak Castles” (181). Once the detective leaves, Newt tells Wyatt that his flawed account was a result of Ferguson’s setting him up: “You forgot what you said when they taped you down at the station. You said you went upstairs to get your cell phone. That’s why your call went in to 911 three minutes after the girl’s, remember?” (182). Wyatt’s shrugging this off causes Newt to tell him where this forgotten detail in the rehearsed testimony will lead them in court: “Why was there that big gap of time? And if your cell phone was right by the front door, there wouldn’t have been a three-minute gap” (182). Given the contradiction and his temper, Newt already anticipates that they will end up in a legal fight that they will most likely lose. Married into what her money-loving mother Gloria Harris called “highbrow,” Meredith now recalls good times when Wyatt was considerate to her. 18 After revisiting her past, she is surprised to see that her mother, Gloria, came for a visit with resentment, talking about Marquis as a black boy who “came upon the wrong man this time” (209). Meredith discloses that she may have witnessed something totally different about her husband, while not giving out her secret—the truth about Wyatt’s act the day of murder. She recognizes the danger of losing status both for herself and Gloria, who owes her wealth to Wyatt. 19 Meredith realizes that since she has been married with Wyatt, she “no longer noticed all the symbols of wealth,” while she ironically cannot avoid seeing now that “the signs of our affluence were everywhere” (215). Meredith has lived a privileged life in a predominantly white social environment, what Rich Benjamin calls “whitopia” to mean living in areas that are predominantly, “even extremely white” (qtd in M.G. Davidson 2013, 33). Given her devastation that her husband, Newt, and Wally repeatedly use racist slurs and lies about Marquis, she shows an affective response. She actually starts throwing up, but she also suspects she may be pregnant, and decides to see her gynecologist, keeping the real reason from her husband. As she goes to Wyatt’s office to talk with him, 20 she pretends to Wyatt that she had forgotten she had an appointment with her gynecologist, Dr. Leach. He wants to make sure she will not be bothered in public and sends his black driver Andre with her as a guard, revealing an act of tokenism. Ironically, black lives matter to Wyatt Spencer as long as they, like Andre, know their place and serve “the interests and desires of white power” (Yancy 2016b, 254). After Dr. Leach examines her, her unwanted pregnancy becomes a fact. She thinks in the SUV about Janice, for whom she feels empa-

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thy for the tragedy of losing a child: “Right away, tears came to my eyes. I had wanted to do right, but now, there was no way that I could” (228). Even though Meredith identifies with Janice’s tragedy as a mother herself, she still experiences affective fear when she sees Marquis’s image on TV as a creepy one, “regarding the black body as a site of criminality” (Yancy and Jones 2013a, 21). Seeing him with the hoodie that he wore, she continues to think how his image generates negative affect: “Every time I saw that photo, I trembled. In the daytime, it scared me; I could not imagine what it would be like if I’d seen Marquis at night” (230). It is as if her “sense of lived spatiality” unfolds her affective racial fear of “the differential body schemata of racialized and white bodies” (Ngo 2017, 77). She then appreciates Janice, who always stood in dignity by her husband’s side, whenever he spoke on TV: “And it was in the way she carried herself, she moved with grace, looking as if her feet barely touched the ground. She held her husband’s hand. Every time. He never walked alone” (230). In her vulnerable life, she admires Janice as “the kind of woman that I wished I knew, the kind of woman I wished I could help” (230). She knows her own mother drops by every day to check on her as a pretext to ensure her own status will not be jeopardized. Meredith feels sorry that Newt wants to dig up everything about the Johnson family to manipulate the public against them, including Tyrone’s possible affairs. When Wyatt suggests they can pay money to Marquis’s girlfriend to buy her testimony in the court, Newt warns that there is “the penalty for witness tampering” (233), while they can use in court the information on Wyatt’s “Raising Up Boys foundation” (233) to prove that Wyatt is not “this white man hunting black boys that the media is making you out to be” (234). Meredith feels that Newt’s strategy with the foundation might work, because Wyatt and she started the foundation, doing good work together: They “train[ed] teenagers so they could find jobs in the fast-food industry” 21 (234). Her view of their philanthropic help still depends on the discursive regimes of whiteness wherein black people will always be situated as employees outside the narrative of upward mobility. Even though Wyatt and Newt never ask Meredith’s opinion about the case, she silently does not approve of their effort to prevent Heather from standing as a witness in the court and “going after the Johnsons, people who had already suffered” (235). She finds their reasoning flawed, and as Newt weighs their options she stays tuned. As they leave the house to go to Wyatt’s office, Meredith thinks they are not aware of what she witnessed: “And they didn’t even know it” (236). She sits at her husband’s office at home on another day for a strategy session with the two other lawyers and she is disgusted with “a whirlwind of hate” against the Johnsons—something Newt calls “exposing people to all of the facts” (237). Newt’s research on family secrets led him to find that Marquis was suspended from school in April for “possession of marijuana” (238). Wyatt believes this is not enough, but Newt

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wants to come up with a narrative to link this to evoke a suspicion that he may be selling drugs to other students in order to connect him to one of top drug dealers in Philly. When Meredith finally expresses her disapproval of Newt’s plan to lie in the court, he calls it “spinning” (239). The news anchor speaks Newt's exact words, representing Raj as a member of the Brown Guardians, and as a black man with a record “for domestic violence” and a suspect “in several unsolved murders in the Philadelphia area” (239). The news linked Raj to Marquis as a suspicious black boy, that he was training his nephew to become a gang member, giving the distorted news that some Guardians say that “Marquis was on his way to a meeting the night that he was shot and killed” (240). When Meredith sees the same photo of Marquis, she again perceives him as dangerous, and she ponders the possibility that perhaps her husband “had been terrorized that night” (240). It is an affective moment that speaks volumes to “silent racism,” which refers to “unspoken negative thoughts, emotions, and assumptions about black Americans that dwell in the minds of white Americans, including well-meaning whites” (Trepagnier 2006, 15). The photographer Ayana V. Jackson argued, in a recent interview, that the history of photography since colonial times has been in complicity with the reproduction of racial stereotype as “grotesque” (2018, 8). Similarly, as Newt and Wyatt chuckle over their role in the spinning in the news, Wyatt’s actions seem to be “part and parcel of a larger white racist regime that is designed to control/stop black bodies” (Yancy 2013, 241). In the next couple of days more news comes out on Tyrone and Janice: that Tyrone’s automechanic shop was suspected as the site of illegal activity, and that Marquis may not even be Tyrone’s son, because of Janice’s affair with her pastor, Caleb. Overall, this becomes a part of the discriminatory white public discourse, representing “the irreducible pathology of black social life” (Moten 2008, 188). Wyatt laughs out loud at the news as if it were pure fun, revealing “the primacy of affect in perpetuating gendered racism, nativism, and imperialism” (Ioanide 2015, 3). The Johnsons are made to experience what the narrator, in Bernice L. McFadden’s The Book of Harlan, says: “Without benefit of judge or jury, they were found guilty and condemned to . . . harassment” (2016, 272). Meredith gets uncomfortable, for it is inhumane to hurt a family who already lost their son: “But no one working for Wyatt cared about that. It was all about winning at any cost” (241). Devastated by her husband’s violence, she cries at her mother’s thought that maybe Wyatt had to kill Marquis, saying knowingly, “No. He didn’t!” (242). Becoming aware that she is telling the truth, her mother tries to silence Meredith. Gloria’s whitewashing the crime against blacks exposes how the white material and discursive practices privilege white man as an embodiment of virtue and relegate black bodies to criminality, a notion which “denies black men’s interiority” (Clark 2004, 62). Ten days later Newt and his team inform Wyatt and Meredith that the state

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prosecutor pressed charges against Wyatt for first-degree murder, and he has to turn himself in the next day. Newt ironically interprets this unexpected turn as an outcome of black favoritism in “this political climate” (246) during Barack Obama’s presidency. Strongly believing that Wyatt will not be in jail more than a few hours, Newt goes over Wyatt’s testimony, emphasizing that he has to focus on self-defense as a legal defense. Although Newt suspects a problem will arise because of how Wyatt contradicted himself in his interrogation by Detective Ferguson, he also thinks about having Meredith testify for her husband. Meredith declines that she would be too nervous to do it. After they leave, she sits alone in the bathroom, remembering exactly what she saw. On the day of the murder, saw Wyatt running toward the front door of the house, which was open, and he slipped, dropping “Billy’s baseball bat” (249). Wyatt’s staged crime scene shows that he constructs the black body as a mere racial stereotype, and she assumes he did not see her as he rushed out the house. She also remembers the rest of what she saw, as she came downstairs to peek out the door: “Just in time to see Wyatt trot to the end of our driveway, then watch him roll Billy’s bat under a car parked in front of our home” (250). A few seconds later, she saw him talking to the police officers, who helped a young girl out of the car. In response to Meredith’s inquiry about what happened, Wyatt who deliberately took a position that blocked Meredith from seeing the dead body, said: “I was trying to help a girl, and this thug came after me. With a baseball bat” (251). Knowing that this is not true, she watched as Wyatt left in the squad car to go to the police station, and she now thinks: “I wondered about that baseball bat. And I wondered if Wyatt knew that I’d seen him” (251). Since the day of the murder, she associates him with a militarized white male presence, asking herself whether Wyatt knew that “I’d seen him” (251). When Wyatt comes back, he enters the bathroom to check if she is well, and he intuitively knows she is pregnant. “I hope it’s a girl this time,” he whispered. “That would complete our family. A girl and a boy” (251). Wyatt’s overly kind attitude in the present makes her aware that he wants to use her pregnancy in court as an investment in the jury’s nonindictment. Sanctioning his murder in religious terms, he takes her pregnancy as a sign that “God doesn’t want me in jail, that God knows my heart, that God knows what I did was right” (252). As he peers into her eyes, she now understands that his voice and his words are meant to be a warning, for he reminds her that “a wife cannot testify against her husband” (253), an implied message that scares her. In Part Three, her reflections switch to the narration of both Janice’s and Meredith’s feelings about their own problems and about each other, shifting their side of the story between interlocking narratives in an interactional discursive context. The public revelation of Janice’s past affair on TV, known to Tyrone, who forgave her, causes Tyrone to suggest that it will be better if she does not testify, guessing how Wyatt’s lawyers will take advan-

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tage of it. The district attorney, on the other hand, had already told her she needed to testify “to bring Marquis alive in a truthful manner” (258). Janice thinks back to herself: “I needed to be on the stand to combat the thug-living, drug-dealing, juvenile-delinquent boy the defense had made Marquis out to be. I had to fight their lies with the truth that could only be told by a mother” (258). Since the media “perpetuate[s] the myth of black criminality” (M. Cherry 2017, 353), and feeds on truth mongering, Janice realizes that if she remains quiet, as an outcome of intimidation by the white gaze, she may be doing violence to her son. Tyrone is frustrated that the whole effort has been in vain, because he does not believe that Wyatt is going to be convicted. Given the media’s representation of her marriage with Tyrone as “broken,” she is also totally at a loss that Wyatt’s defendants can leak false news and get away with it. Janice tries to encourage Tyrone that all the trust he invested in the Guardians and his effort of doing public action—to use Judith Butler’s words here, “acting in concert” (J. Butler 2015, 9)—truly means something. Knowing his loss guided him to action, she reminds him of how he participated “in the marches and protests and interviews” to make him remember that “what we’d been through was worth it, even if it was just to get our time in court” (259). Her words do not help Tyrone, who hurts, having believed in vain that he lived in a free society where “there was justice for all” (259). His disbelief in equal justice reminds one of the-taken-for-grantedness of whitewashing any homicide of black people in a racist society; “Stealing Black lives at gunpoint is the most visible and violent evidence of history repeating in the present,” Nicholas Powers observes, for being black in America means “to know white supremacy is a culture of theft” (2016, 11). Janice is determined to testify for their son—to take that opportunity to tell the truth as over against the distorted version of him. She recalls how they stood with the NAACP leaders on the steps of the courthouse, and later with the members of the Urban League where Tyrone spoke to the thousands of people who gathered there to protest against the way Stand Your Ground was handled by racist people: 22 “How can this country in good conscience continue with this law?” (261). In a gathering of undergraduate students from all the colleges in the Philadelphia area, Tyrone makes an affective speech on how the murder interrupted Marquis’s opportunity to excel in “relational becomings” (Massumi 2015c, 201) to be one of them at UPenn: “But if Wyatt Spencer hadn’t taken his life, I know that my son would have grown into a man who would have made a difference. Now he will never have that chance” (261). This issue brings up a different aspect of loss: The current treatment of young unarmed black men in the real social world constitutes, in Patricia Hill Collins’s words, “a failure of the democratic possibilities of the American Dream” (2017, 33). As Janice remembers these moments when they have stood together with Tyrone, she has watched Marquis become “a national

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symbol of injustice,” in contrast to Wyatt, who has represented the “face of all that was wrong with the Stand Your Ground law” (261). Believing her son Marquis lives on in her life and in the lives of everyone he had touched, she experiences “the power of the wake” as embodied praxis (Sharpe 2016, 10). On the other hand, while Wyatt builds his public image as a good man to validate the imperial dynamics of whiteness, Meredith always trembles in fear whenever she is with Wyatt. 23 Although absolutely sure his warning implies that he knew she saw him with the bat on the night of the murder, she remains uncomfortable complying with Wyatt’s wish to appear in a fancy dress to look like “the wife of a man who would never murder a kid on purpose” (265). As she walks behind Wyatt and Newt to the front of the courtroom, she exchanges glances with Janice; they smile at each other as if they understand what each is going through: “I felt like I knew her” 24 (267). When one of Wyatt’s attorneys directs the jury’s attention to how Wyatt’s self-defense was a necessary act for the safety of his son and “his pregnant wife” (269), she nervously waits if they will ever call her to the witness stand. She gathers strength from how Janice holds herself in her pain of loss: “Even with tears falling from her eyes, her head was high. If she could sit through this, then I could sit through it, too” (269). Janice and Tyrone are worn out, as they reach home: Janice recalls Heather in the witness stand, who particularly stressed the fact that they were scared of Wyatt, and Marquis did not have a bat or a weapon. Her testimony reveals how blackness means in the eyes of the racists being “up to something” (Gordon 2013, 86). While Heather explains how she calls 911, after the gunshot, because she is scared that Wyatt will shoot her too, the defense attorney pushes her to testify that Marquis has been in jail, which she denies, but she confirms his suspension from school for using marijuana. This scene demonstrates that Marquis refuses to do “performative Blackness” in fitting the stereotype (B.K. Alexander 2012, 20). Wyatt finds Marquis’s performance of his blackness in a strategy of engagement with Heather as a threat to his whiteness, a collective identity he shares with Heather merely as a phenotypical marker. Apparently, Heather does not see her whiteness as a binding identity with Wyatt, who represents the real threat that makes her vulnerable to him. Wyatt enacts “performative (his)trocities” to presumably protect Heather and his family from Marquis as the targeted site against which he could commit violence (Cowin-Mensah 2015, 249). Meredith, who believes the credibility of Heather’s testimony, listens to how one of Marquis’s teachers testifies that Marquis “was not a thug”; on the contrary, he was “on his way to UPenn on an academic scholarship” (278). Detective Ferguson testifies that there are inconsistencies in Wyatt’s testimony. Even though Newt does not think Wyatt’s problematic testimony will cause a problem, Meredith rightfully thinks that “it revealed to the jury that my husband was not only a murderer, but he was a lousy liar” (279). It is

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apparent that Wyatt acts before killing Marquis as if he inhabits the street, as Shannon Sullivan would say, “as a corporeal entitlement to spatiality” (qtd in Yancy 2008, 15) of his whiteness. The scene underwrites how the white male vigilante killing of a black man, based on “highly racialized emotions,” Noel Cazenave would suggest, exposes the struggle for “dominance and respect”—in other words, “to assert masculinity.” This “power-status encounte[r]” can be taken “as masculinity contes[t]” (Cazenave 2018, 73, 66). In a similar vein, Wyatt scripts Marquis’s body in a negative way, violating his right to use even his voice against the verbal violence of a white man. In response to the state prosecutor’s questions, Janice honors Marquis by holding herself up, and she needs to step up to honor her son. She rejuvenates her son and illustrates his worth in describing how he had undeniable assets as a good person: “He was a good kid. He loved to read, loved to write poetry, he played two instruments, the piano and saxophone, and he loved to play golf” (281). In other words, she renders his humanity and subjectivity, ironically after the white man’s violent erasure not only of his body but of the young black man’s intrinsic possibilities, now lost to the society. She disrupts a habit in discursive regimes of whiteness, for she lets everyone in the courtroom see what is in excess of “what is caught in the frame” (Sharpe 2016, 117). Her desire to make Marquis’s death to mean something is similar to Sybrina Fulton’s hope that, after the death of her son Trayvon Martin, “the killing will someday stop and the healing will begin. So that our children, and all children, can live in peace” (Fulton and Martin 2017, 331). Since Marquis was a smart student at school, Janice refuses the “thug” label for her son, implying crime and drugs, for she never believed her son was going off the rails. This response in a way reminds one of how Elisha Oliver rewrites the word “thug,” as she uses each letter to mean “talented, humanistic, unique, gifted” 25—refilling the content of the concept to make sure that young black men “should be valued” (2016, 105, 111). In a similar manner, Janice values Marquis, in her description of how it hurts her to realize every day that she is “no longer a mother” (282). When the prosecutor’s questions are over, he allows her to sit in the witness stand so the jury can see “the image of a grieving mother who was filled with a pain that most of us would be blessed to never experience” (283). What is significant here is that she challenges the stereotype of a strong black mother, for her state of being as “[t]he impossible strong” would never allow her any “space to think about [her] own vulnerability” (Khan-Cullors and Bandele 2018, 178). There is a need to acknowledge, Traci C. West writes, “the specificity of each mother’s loss and mourning process,” against “the racialized pressure” to act as “the strong Black mother,” while honoring their full subjectivity requires the recognition of their right to feel weak “in the wake of these devastating murders and societal betrayals” (2017, 333). Wyatt’s attorney’s questions about her affair, on the contrary, are meant to dishonor Janice’s loss and

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dignity under the pretext of questioning her credibility as a witness, who cheated on her husband. When he rips her apart on the witness stand and he comes out at her, she has to swallow his accusations and her pride. When Janice is exposed to personal questions, forced to admit “I had an affair with my pastor” (284), Meredith, who can no longer stand the humiliation this grieving mother is put through, walks out of the courtroom. “Affective numbness” 26 (Sullivan 2015, 158) now seems to replace her physiological and affective fear of Marquis in media representations with her experience of vulnerability. She moves away from fear of Marquis’s image and toward “racial emotions such as productive guilt and empathy” (Spanierman and Cabrera 2015, 23) for Janice. Once the interrogation is over, Janice is able to turn her vulnerability into strength, as she sees that the defense attorney is as worn out as she is: “I marched past the defense table, the prosecution table, through the gallery of spectators, and out into the hall. I had done what I had to do for our son. Now I had to do what I had to do for my marriage” (286). Delores, who is terribly distressed about this part of the testimony, hugs her and says that Raj is keeping company with Tyrone in the car waiting for her. 27 Meredith, on the other hand, is far from a loving relationship in her growing emotional distance from Wyatt, even feeling embarrassed to be his wife: “It had been bad enough watching what he allowed, what he encouraged the attorneys to do to Janice Johnson on the witness stand” (304). She feels ashamed of his viciousness to another woman, especially when she sees, as Newt drives them home, their joy in breaking down the credibility of Janice’s testimony. They also feel they can easily invoke in the jurors’ mind the myth of the black rapist in relation to a white girlfriend, “a strong black boy, a frightened white girl, and rape” (305). She is equally frustrated to see how her mother laughs with them, while they were trying to destroy a dead young man’s reputation. Even though Newt insists that Meredith should testify on Wyatt’s being a good husband and father, Meredith rejects the offer for good, backed by Wyatt because of her pregnancy. Despite her fear of Wyatt, she is determined to stand up against Wyatt and his attorneys: “I may not have had the guts to stand up and tell the truth, but I could stop them from using me” (307). When they go back to the court, and Newt ruthlessly breaks Marquis’s friends apart on the witness stand, Meredith, who can hardly stand this, rushes to the restroom where she sees Janice, who hands her damp paper towels. Meredith finally tells her how she feels: “I’ve been praying for you. . . . Every day” (309). Having also suffered from her husband’s domination, Meredith has exposed different “ways of being attuned to inter-corporeal existence” (Yancy 2016b, 259). Janice gently presses towels to Meredith’s forehead, then walks toward the door, when Meredith says she is sorry. Janice thanks her before she walks out, making Meredith feel that these were the “best words I’d heard in a long, long time” (310). It is as if

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Meredith and Janice develop an emotional connection, positioning them in an affective form of cross alliance. Even though the jury has not yet reached a decision, Delores invites Tyrone and Janice with many others to her house for celebration, for they believe that they made real headway—at least the case is in court, believing, in the words of Blanche Radford-Curry, that “[t]he essence of life fulfilled— a succession of actions undertaken in righteous causes—is a victory itself” (Radford-Curry 2016, 129). During the celebration, when Janice sees Raj and five of the Guardians, she thanks them, which indicates that there is certainly a visible change in her attitude: “But how could I hate when they had abided by my wishes, and had not caused any kind of trouble for Wyatt Spencer and his family? And how could I hate now that I knew that they had protected me and Tyrone when I didn’t even know that I needed protection?” (314). One of the Guardians tells her that they are the ones who control the streets in the area, but since she did not want any trouble, “we made sure of that” (315). Their attitude makes her now feel that perhaps there was a place for groups such as this one: “Maybe our neighborhoods needed them” (315). Her rejection of the Brown Guardians’ strategy of violence has helped her to reconstruct the public image of Marquis as worthy of “the right of refusal to wear blackness as victimization” (Vargas and James 2013, 194). Her later appreciation of their help becomes a means by which “the question of what constituted an appropriate political intervention into private space was resolved” (Pool 2012, 209). Delores asks them to come with her to the church on Sunday, which is the next day, to find peace. Janice feels happy, for “love was poured all over us from the moment we walked into that church. Neither Tyrone nor I saw ourselves as heroes—I would have given anything to have Marquis back and have no one ever know our names. But I was glad that we had stood up because maybe we could prevent just one child from being murdered” (317). Janice refuses to make her son and family the public spectacle “by showcasing maternal grief” (Stafford 2016). Since Janice and Tyrone remain empowered, their shared grief produces “compassionate solidarity” (Milstein 2015a, 144). Janice and Tyrone, in some ways, become agents of change, for they bear the affect of “belonging while mourning” (Fleetwood 2011, 69). After having some space, Janice’s extending her experience of grief into the public may be considered as the activation of an interiority, blurring the spaces of inside and outside, of grief and mourning. Tyrone’s emotional speech is followed by Janice’s speech to thank God and all of those present for their support, while she experiences “the praxis of the wake and wake work [as] modes of attending to Black life and Black suffering” (Sharpe 2016, 22). She also makes a careful analysis of what she learned from this tragedy, which is that “we need to be careful with our words,” a response to what a woman said to her in a rally: “This was God’s will” (319). In defiance of a

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normative culture saturated with anti-blackness, she makes a distinction between a loving God and white men, who deliberately kill black boys: “God’s will is not for white men to hunt black boys like they’re target practice” (319). The act of mourning together for Marquis opens up a discursive space of performing “rebellious mourning” (Milstein 2017a, 4) as embodied praxis. Hence, Janice learns the value of mourning in “vulnerable solidarity” (M. Cherry 2017, 353) with the black community where she talks as an activist: “So, if there is anything that I would love for us to get out of this, it’s that we really need to start praying for God’s will. Because that’s the only way that men like Wyatt Spencer will pay for their crimes, and that’s the only way we can get Stand Your Ground repealed” (320). After her speech is over, Tyrone’s holding her in deep love implies that they will stay united. Tyrone remakes his masculinity in a way that promotes an act of liberation from “psychosocial chains that limit the capacity to heal” (Ginwright 2010, 121). She now understands the meaning of the true value in sharing loss, when it is worked through “in common, on commons: spaces that we create and sustain to use, share, and find comfort in, but also spaces that are ours to selfdetermine” (Milstein 2017a, 6–7). Public mourning also constitutes a moment of rupture in which the construct of blackness is used “strategically” against a differential deployment of justice, in an attempt to employ, what William V. Spanos calls in an interview, the “strategic appropriation of identity in the cause of resistance” (Spanos 2016, 152). Janice’s and Tyrone’s open refusal to conform to the white racial norms in public generates new ways of conceptualizing blackness in nourishing relations with family, friends, and community as a counterpublic “freedom space” (Kelley 2002, 197). Moreover, Janice attains critical awareness of how her feelings of grief can open spaces of solidarity, which may even produce an affirmation of life. This is in complete contrast to Meredith’s sense of uncertainty, upon being called to the court to hear the verdict, believing her husband will get away with murder. She is afraid of Wyatt’s freedom, knowing his “cocky” attitude will intensify, becoming a self-claimed “invincible” person, namely “a dangerous man” (322). Since the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision, the judge declares a mistrial—yet another acquittal of white killers, as John Edgar Wideman says in his book on Emmett Till’s father: “Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter” (2016, 4–5). Meredith smiles at Wyatt, but when he holds her, she again trembles, knowing her husband’s “feeling invincible” (323). As her husband says they will celebrate with all the supporters, who always stood in front of the courthouse, Meredith sees Janice in Tyrone’s arms, envying that they are “a couple in love, surrounded by nothing but love” (324). She almost senses Janice’s pity for her, knowing there is a bond between them: “We were two women. Two mothers. One with a son and one without. We were two people whose lives were forever

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linked and forever changed. We were Janice Johnson and Meredith Spencer. Forever hopelessly connected” (324). She almost lets her whiteness recede by feeling in solidarity with Janice against injustice, even if it is only at the affective level. Part Four gives Wyatt’s account, revealing his thwarted sense of himself as a white supremacist. 28 He knows that she saw him with the bat, but he reasons out back to himself that he did it “to protect her” (328). He also believes the black driver, Andre, functioned as “a firewall around me” (328), an act that convinced black people that he was not a bad man. In reality, what saved him from prosecution was his wealth, “having millions kept me out of jail, and now it kept the peace” (329). He is now invited for celebration to a restaurant, and on the way, he shares with Andre his opinion that he will not be retried in the court. Wyatt “[r]eproduce[s] the racial order through discourse” (Foster 2013, 4) in believing that “as long as there’s one white person on my jury, I will never be found guilty” (331). Even if Andre’s critical attitude, “a sad commentary on America” (331), intrigues him as acting radical, he takes comfort in Andre’s playful tone. As they drive to a restaurant called Big Red’s, which oddly seems multiracial from the outside, Andre tells him to go in while he finds a parking space. Wyatt is surprised that the saloon is full of strange people, but he feels rejoiced when the two men, Buck and Chuck, thank him with white supremacist pride “for standing up for all of us” (333). Buck asks how it feels to be “a national hero” (333). Wyatt replies that he just did “the right thing” (333), while another man sees him as a hero for putting Stand Your Ground law “on trial again” (333); Buck is also in favor of the law, calling it “the American way” (334) of defending their right as (white) Americans, and another man shouts that they have to protect themselves “against these thugs!” (334). Wyatt’s inner thoughts reveal him as delusional, for he genuinely believes that he is not a racist and he simply had to shoot Marquis for a reason, disapproving how these men see blacks “as target practice” (334). Wyatt cannot admit even to himself that he hates blacks who do not know their place; he is comfortable that there are blacks like Andre, who is a good “dude” (335). Buck warns Andre, who appears at the front door, that he is “in the wrong place” (335), but when Wyatt steps in to say that he is “my friend” and “my driver” (335), they tolerate his presence for a short while. Wyatt acts as one of “the beneficiaries of racial micro-kindnesses,” which support his “well-being” in public as a white gentleman (Sullivan 2017, 339). He appreciates Andre, who knows his place in the presence of white people, when he responds that he will be outside, ready to drive Wyatt home when he is ready to go. Wyatt’s belief that he would do the same if he were in Andre’s shoes signifies his conviction that where they stand is not the same. This mode of racial thinking unravels the impact of whiteness on the white man himself, for the lack of racial hierarchy instills the fear that his own identity

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“would be lost if the exclusionism that generates that identity and membership were discarded” (Martinot 2015, 172). Buck and Chuck are disgusted to hear Andre call out to them “Nice meeting you, fellas” (335) as if they were equals, before he leaves, because in the spaces of comfort “white people are easily unsettled when black folks fail to adhere to the master narratives of Blackness—when they are insistently present” (Watson 2013, 137). Wyatt thinks that he does not believe every black person in America is bad, but he hates “thugs”—ironically a racially coded word. It is also a form of racial thinking that seems to be at the basis of his discursive violence, for “when it comes to policing black bodies, whites are actually policing images produced by their own fears” (Yancy 2013, 239). Sociologist Elijah Anderson explains that white American people’s fear of stigmatization as racist causes them “not to say anything that may be perceived as racially insensitive in spaces where they must see and physically interact with black people” 29 (cited in Bradley 2016, 5). Wyatt does not openly express his disgust for black people in a white social context, where he does not have to perform the power of whiteness. Instead, he expresses pity for black people, “a more socially acceptable emotion that still objectifies and sentimentalizes the Black Other while deflecting racist culpability” (Matias with Zembylas 2016, 25). Finally, as the crowd gets bigger with more people coming to celebrate what he did, he starts feeling something is off, and we feel that this group may not be a genuine white supremacist group but a setup, especially when Carlos, a hispanic man, comes in. Wyatt thinks that the whole so-called white supremacist group is an ill match with Carlos, whom he racializes, feeling “every group had to have a token” (337). Carlos goes to great length to stress that blacks had to pay the price for crossing the line against the law: “I bet you Marquis Johnson’s parents got that message. Especially his mama” (337). While Carlos performs cultural whiteness, he is the only one who makes Wyatt uncomfortable—“that dude made me the most uneasy” (337). Wyatt’s insecurity lies in his fear of losing his power to a man of color, and hence, his acting the role of a gentleman in the bar reveals the problematic nature of whiteness, because he is still performing “the habits of whiteness” (MacMullan 2009, 5). As Wyatt rushes to leave, saying his wife is pregnant, Carlos strangely disappears. As he says goodbye to everyone, he assumes a disapproving manner on their articulation of “our world” to mean a whiteonly notion of America: “I agreed with their views—America was our country and there was too much changing. But I wasn’t trying to put anyone else down or out. I just believed that as white Americans, we should be lifted up” (338). However, even though he is fully embedded in white supremacy, his rhetoric and practice fall apart as he ironically enacts “white ignorance” (Applebaum 2015, 9). As soon as Wyatt goes out the back door, the discursive power of whiteness no longer stands with his white body, for he is

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beaten violently, “I heard death coming” (340), while someone leans over him and whispers “Enough” (341) into his ear. He can no longer open his eyes at the verge of dying, feeling “and then my world ended” (341). The scene ends with Wyatt’s murder by presumably the Brown Guardians as an “interruptive challenge to the social order” (R.M. Brown 2016, 154). In the “Epilogue,” the district attorney announces that the State v. Wyatt Spencer case is officially closed, three weeks after Wyatt was found “fatally beaten” behind the club, Big Red’s. Clarissa Austin reports on TV that the police could not figure out why Wyatt Spencer was in the back, while his driver was waiting for him in front of the club. Even though Wyatt’s wallet and cell phone are missing, there is no indication of robbery. Clarissa continues: “But there is still that question of the baseball bat that was found near his body . . . [which] was a curious piece of evidence at Big Red’s that just might be a coincidence” (342). Clarissa’s report also mentions Meredith’s good news to the employees of the Cheesesteak Castles that the business will continue. She also thanked them for their support, and announced that she is pregnant with twin boys: “So though she is still in mourning, the widow does have those new lives to look forward to” (343). This hopeful moment exposes that Meredith remains aware of the value of living in a social world, shaped by “corporeal interconnectedness” (Yancy 2016b, 258). Meredith starts to think in a way that problematizes “the idea of entitlement” in her marital status (Aanerud 2015, 107). However, she does not go very far with anti-racism as a project—“practicing a reflective Whiteness” (Owen 2015, 164). Meredith fails to discern that her husband’s patronizing attitude is caused by the ideology of whiteness. However small her moves are, Meredith does not act “whitely” in relation to Janice— and her employees—at the end. While Wyatt acts “whitely,” on the other hand, the terrorizing power of whiteness produces double ambivalence in his discursive shifts between power and vulnerability. He operates within a discursive domain where he appropriates whiteness as “spatial privilege” (Watson 2013, 106) co-opting the narrative of whiteness-as-vulnerability. One need only remember his presumptive inquiry to Heather on the day of murder, if she was “okay” (272), reinforcing the racial assumption that white women and black men would never experience a mutually shared space, one no other than a precarious one unless a white man intervenes. This is implicated in his performativity of whiteness in his feelings of vulnerability to a black man: in making Meredith feel vulnerable to him, in alerting Heather to her vulnerability to Marquis, and finally in putting Janice, Tyrone, and Marquis in vulnerable positions on media. In this case, if I adapt Saidiya Hartman’s view of the fashioning of identity as white embodiment and its production of terror, what concerns me in the novel, in a totally different context than Hartman’s, is “the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism and property.” Her depiction of “slaves coerced to dance in the marketplace”

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(1997, 4) can be applied to Meredith, even as a white woman because she is oppressed by Wyatt (read: her master), to examine the contradictory logic of normative whiteness in the form of paternalism. We see Meredith’s moments of subjection to a white patriarch, who “coerces” her to literally “dance” her “propertied” white body through the “marketplace” (read: courtroom and media) of white female script in the service of his interests to symbolically “exonerate” his virtuousness. Joe Feagin explains that the hardest thing to see in white racist people, such as Wyatt, is “reinforcing the idea of white virtuousness in a myriad ways, including superior white values” (2017, 100). Meredith’s refusal to ally with Wyatt’s utilization of values and not to testify starts the small act of rupture in the discursive power of white normative masculinity in her everyday life. Erinn C. Gilson warns us that the virtues of vulnerability can be used “to develop status and social capital, especially when these virtues are regarded as having instrumental value” (Gilson 2014, 178). At the end of the novel, there is a sense that there is no space for Wyatt, for he is entrapped by his discursive prison of whiteness-as-vulnerability. This highly unsettling retaliation speaks to the urgency to build a shared vulnerability with the hope that white racist people could develop a critical awareness, in Robert F. Reid-Pharr’s words, to free the whole world “from the unrelenting nightmares of racialism and white supremacy” (2016, 23). ***** What makes the novel remarkable is the absence of “spectacular blackness,” because it breathes life into Marquis’s absent (dead) body by means of his mother’s (articulation of) memories in the courtroom and in the public demonstrations that bring him back to life, helping visualize black subjectivity in the imaginary, or what Nicole R. Fleetwood calls “its fleeting, multitudinous incompleteness” (2011, 34, 70). One is reminded of the black conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s philosophy and art, based on a positive engagement with self as “the place for a radical disruption” (Cervenak 2006, 115). Piper’s rupture, which Sarah Jane Cervenak sees as radical performativity of blackness, can be adapted to how Murray, in a somewhat comparable way to Piper, honors an abstraction of Marquis’s self from the specificity of the racialized body. As Janice grieves for her son as a human being she loves, the “suspension” of his body that “leave[s] this ground” is also a moment of “unmooring [his] blackness from the body” (Raengo 2017, 11). This situation enables us to realize that Janice is the agent through whom Marquis’s body-less presence creates a new domain of blackness, which is “the ‘absented presence’ in the world,” referring not only to exclusion: “It serves its function in the world by being radically outside of it” (Cramer 2017, 152). Since the novel literally begins with Marquis’s death, he seems to be everywhere his mother looks, because a racist act of violence has

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produced his unauthorized access to the material world. Hence his body and his blackness, inseparable in the white imaginary, to use Lisa Yun Lee’s words, is “‘nowhere’ and ‘no place,’ an intangible site that cannot be located in a spatial sense” (2015, 99). In a somewhat similar manner to the contemporary black artist Theaster Gates’s radical representations of blackness, Marquis’s absence is a memoried presence in the mother’s space of interiority. Murray in a way, through Janice’s memories, “makes space,” as Theaster Gates would say, and “then once that space is made, things can [and do indeed] happen” (2015, 28). In other words, the blackness (of Marquis) seems, to adapt Fred Moten’s view of Theaster Gates’s art, to be “a literal absence of location” (cited in Moten 2017, 158). It helps Marquis’s black body to transcend a situation that otherwise would indicate that the “focus on visibility” still maintains “a normalizing gaze,” and as such, the white gaze “reinscribes systems of privilege and violent hierarchies” (Havis 2009, 748). The conceptualization of this absence invokes the material presence in severing his lived experience from his spatial location as a discursive marker of a life taken—a challenge Murray poses to the materiality of racial framing. It, in other words, enables us to imagine Marquis’s invisible presence as an affective space, demanding action where “things can happen” in a world deprived of him in terms of the spatial practices of “critical intervention into everyday life” (Stracey 2014, 122). Murray renders the incalculable loss in her novel in the most affective and tragic way without any possible compensation except in mourning, registering what Judith Butler, in her talk on the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo’s art, “Shadows of the Absent Body,” would call “the lost materiality of the body.” 30 How does this space of Marquis’s empty room in the house as uninhabitable space represent (if in any way) the absent body as remnant of the instrument, the baseball bat, which belongs to the son of Wyatt, who uses it as a relic to justify his capability of evil? Reduced to an ordinary object that Wyatt claims to be used against him, Marquis’s absence still problematizes the white killer, who devotes time and money to narrativizing his right to the power of whiteness. It reminds one of the theme of mourning in Doris Salcedo’s political art, which is centered upon “the refusal to excise the past from that present” 31 (Bal 2011, 3). Reading the implications of the past in the present of Janice’s loss along the lines of Salcedo’s art seems useful here. Although the novel’s affective power is located in the reality of the present, we witness the empty space (read: his room) where Marquis was supposed to be in contrast with the tension between the Brown Guardians’ urge to mobilize communal power to make him savagely visible, and Janice’s resentment of “the political” as such (Bal 2011, 12). Chantal Mouffe identifies the distinction between “the political” and “[racial] politics” 32 as meaning, in Mieke Bal’s view, that while “politics is the organization that settles conflict, the

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political is where conflict ‘happens.’ Yet it is by virtue of the political that social life is possible” 33 (Bal 2011, 10). Since the politics of race menaces the political, Janice understands that there is value attached to conflict in view of a legal system that “produces and requires Black exclusion and death as normative’” (Vargas and James 2013, 193). When she joins the public demonstrations with the black community, she comes to see that the street as a social space fulfills its function for the political. Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose’s concept of “‘performative space’ or the notion that the production of social space is the materialdiscursive effect of performative practices” seems useful in that it serves as a significant reformulation of Judith Butler’s “non-spatial account of performativity” (Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014, 15). This conception of “performative space” is important, to adapt the geographer Gill Valentine’s words here, for it problematizes the presumed white dominant spaces of the everyday, while “slippages may occur in their production” with the result that dominant discourses are “done differently” (qtd in Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014, 15–16). Given that, we may argue that even though Janice does not want to join forces with the Brown Guardians, she is not aware that she indirectly conforms to the white dominant expectations of black people’s silence in the face of the violent practices against unarmed black men. Hence, she gradually comes to discern the complicity in what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “the violence of [her] silence” (qtd in Bal 2011, 27). Hence, Janice’s “praxis of the wake” (Sharpe 2016, 22) in collaboration with the black community is an effective political act against cultural amnesia of the singularity of Marquis’s murder. This situation is, in some ways, similar to Doris Salcedo’s installation artwork, as she explores the productive power of pain, both personal and collective, to evoke that “in the political by which we live, change is possible” (Bal 2011, 237) with art, or in our case here, with the novel itself. Marquis lives in his parents’ and black people’s demonstrations “within the horribly beautiful irony with which [his] deat[h] def[ies] such disappearance” (Moten 2018a, 153). The power of loss functions as the means by which affect produces a moment of transition, “this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity” (Massumi 2015a, 4). Hence, the politics of affect in the sense of, or more precisely, “the lived texture of experience” (Grossberg 2018, 11) demands that there is a need for us, the readers, to mobilize the possibilities inherent in the change in our capacity to stop that which causes mourning. If public mourning can be considered as a means to restore humanity, then the novel affirms life, as it demonstrates how “spaces of mourning” to honor the dead can indeed unite us in honoring life. Its construct of blackness (of Marquis) is dissociated from the (dead) stigmatized body, and hence ironically no longer a threat to the white man. In doing that, it locates Marquis outside the binarist system, determined by the material power of white-

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ness, as Doris Salcedo would say, in order to “to render visible the experiences of the most vulnerable” 34 (2017, xvii). In this respect, the novel addresses the societal loss overridden by Marquis’s death, while it poses discursive challenges to the materiality of the pervasive anti-black violence “which distorts everyday life” (Enriquez 2017, 20). At a point when Marquis establishes a relationship with a white girl his right to an alternative social world is violently interrupted, “when ‘blackness’ is embodied” in a racist society (E.P. Johnson 2003, 2). The paradoxical situation is that in a white supremacist social order, which is based on a binarist system of racial hierarchy, it is difficult to deal with the racialization of the absent body (totally invisible), for Marquis’s eradication from the material world functions as the means of making the normative binarist system inoperative. The novel, in similar ways, shifts the focus of the unrepresentable violence from the site of the black male body (read: victim) to the black (mother’s) interiority (read: excess), where “the terror of the mundane and quotidian” (Hartman 1997, 4) cannot be discerned in public, and where blackness and humanity are no longer dissociated from each other by way of the racial script. Since Marquis has no testimony, and becomes, what Giorgio Agamben would call, a “limit concept” (2002, 85), he emerges in a space where the discursive dichotomy between human (read: white) and inhuman (read: black) collapses. While situating “unlocatable maternal and material motif of black radicalism” (Moten 2003, 231), the novel focuses on the complex interiority of the black mother, and hence we can feel the life of Marquis is at the center of the text. Janice learns to use her agency, as manifested in her gradual agreement to the organized effort of the Brown Guardians, because she disregards the experiential knowledge of racially scripted subjection to an (anti-black) discursive frame in the wake of violence. In similar ways to Fred Moten, I am also concerned with “the discovery of this knowledge and its secret location, concerned that this knowledge is locatable, that it is, as it were, held somewhere” (Moten 2017, 68). This concern allows a more complete understanding of, to adapt the French anthropologist and political thinker Sylvain Lazarus, the black praxis-oriented “politics in interiority” to mean “a politics as thought” (Lazarus 2016, 130). She realizes that the violent context of antiblackness, which devoured her son, can still bear its own condition of possibility. Her role in the public demonstrations enables her to engage in her interiority, through which she performs dissent in public simply because she discovers that there is no possibility of “distancing of an autonomous interiority from external social forces” (Pham 2013, 35). Since her act of disavowal is also an act against the knowledge of her scripted subjection, it is an intervention in whiteness as a social construct. As Janice experiences her “dignity as a weapon of love” (Walton 2018, 339), she also reowns her loving knowledge, in private and in public spaces, of Marquis, for she experiences bell hooks’s view that the effective way to

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transcend racial hatred can be done “through the will to humanize” (2017, 16), a view that resonates with Martin Luther King Jr.’s claim that the work of love is pivotal to a transformative impact. Drawing upon King’s advocacy of the transformative impact of love in community action, George Yancy says: “We believe in a love that remembers the humanity that binds us together, that opens us to hear the other’s voice, the other’s mourning” (Kim and Yancy 2017). James Baldwin, as Clevis Headley reminds us, believed in how the “redemptive affectivity of love” functions as “a politics of love” (Headley 2018, 291). Similarly, Janice, in the course of the novel, wants to keep herself and others “in this space of loving Blackness” (hooks 2017, 22). Much like what Patricia Hill Collins sees in the leaders of Black Lives Matter in real life, Janice realizes eventually, as her speech at the church indicates, that she and Tyrone “cannot sustain political work that is not fueled by love” (Collins 2017, 33). Janice and her husband breathe life into the idea of social justice: Wyatt and his legal crew may have the “weapons” of spinning the legal discourse, but the black community activists have the power, for “nonviolence is the language of justice” (Walton 2018, 348). We do not only witness in the person of Janice here that loving black sons is “transformative and transforming” for their mothers, “conscious of being agents of change” (Griffin 2016, 189), but also the absented black male body emerges as the true agent of change that enables embodied action, and not only in the form of resistance. We are engaged with his symbiotic presence, for it is as if his “absence itself is endowed with a sinister agency” (Moses 2000, 33). In this context, public demonstrations transform Marquis’s death into an event bearing new possibilities for hope. These demonstrations do not only challenge the social order, but also bear the hope for a democratic society of self-determined individuals. Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, in their recent book When They Call You a Terrorist, a Black Lives Matter memoir, write: “We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts . . . are minimized as much as humanly possible,” in order to achieve the goal “to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter” (2018, 148). Even as the novel, in a similar vein, urges that the crisis of the present moment has to be understood affectively with a deeper insight, it can, indeed, be considered “as part of a critique immanent to the black radical tradition” that constitutes the “refusal of closure” (Moten 2003, 85). In doing so, it is imperative to embrace an ongoing process of embodied blackness as excess in order to activate that refusal of closure as the politics of mourning. In this context, Murray’s novel is, fundamentally, never finished, as it calls for a future recognition that black lives do indeed matter, because it awaits our embodied “praxis of the wake” to meet the challenges of our equal rights to live fully in the real social world.

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NOTES 1. Drawing upon Alexander Weheliye’s book, Habeas Viscus, Fishel and Wilcox explain: “Habeas viscus, or the concept of the flesh, thus pushes us to think not in terms of the biopolitics of life but of the necropolitics of life-in-death and death-in-life” (2017, 348). 2. Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013 as a protest movement against the acquittal of Zimmerman, who “seemed to hold dear the halcyon days in America when violence was freely committed in the name of racism” (Lebron 2017, 2). 3. “It is built on, and generative of, an agonistic understanding of democracy in which conflict and disagreement are recognized as central to democratic politics” (Stow 2010, 682). 4. “By placing this collectivizing strategy of tragic mourning at the forefront of its struggle, Black Lives Matter has successfully cultivated a very public site for the discussion of AfricanAmerican humanity” (S. Bell 2016). 5. Even though their grief takes its toll on them, “maternal grief has been a powerful weapon in the fight to show the world that black lives [do indeed] matter” (Stafford 2016). 6. Black Lives Matter demands “a more internalized change,” which is one of “recognition” that the legacy of black bodies represent being less than human in the white racist imaginary: “To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it” (Rankine 2017, 33). 7. She explains that “the wake work” is about “the persistence of Black life,” which enables black people to open up spaces of joy with an understanding that anti-blackness is “the ground on which [they] stand, the ground from which [they] attempt to speak” (Sharpe 2016, 7). 8. In an interview, Murray explains that the Stand Your Ground law masquerades the sanctioning of a “license to kill,” and she hopes the readers come to understand that it is “a dangerous law” practiced in several states, including Florida. She truly believes that people have to act on the situation, because there is a need “to repeal this law state by state” (2015a). 9. Janice cannot understand why their son Marquis dates a white girl, but never black girls, unlike Tyrone, who only cares about his son’s future. While Tyrone wants Marquis, who is on his way to college next year, to be a straight A student to achieve upward mobility in the future, Janice wants her son to have “the fullness of the life that I prayed Marquis would have” (6). 10. Although people considered living on the streets to be dangerous, Janice felt that “the outside was safer than the inside” (36). She had fought and won her battles with grown men, and although she was never raped, she was occasionally beaten and left starving. As she grew older, she could not stand foster home, which she left along with the system and met Delores, who saved her physically and spiritually in 1996 by letting her live at Harmony Hearts Home, run by the church. With Delores’s guidance, she becomes one of the teen counselors, and lives and works there until she graduates from high school. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that the expression of pain “is part of the experience of pain itself” (cited in Dauphineé 2007, 150). 12. Hence, when they get there, Janice asks the morticians to let her see her son before they prepare him for the funeral: “I wanted to see Marquis, hold Marquis, kiss Marquis before they drained the blood from him. I had to see my dead son for myself” (95). 13. As the two women talk about Janice’s past infidelity, Syreeta explains that once Janice’s overprotectionist attitude to Syreeta in reporting Raj’s violence against her caused him to be arrested and charged, Raj got back at Janice by coercing Tyrone to move out to stand by him. Syreeta believes that Marquis’s death, showing how life is “too precious to waste on being mad at people you once loved” (113), taught her to learn to love Raj again, as Janice and Tyrone tried to do. 14. Following the service, she needs privacy, and Tyrone tells the driver to take them home: “In my home, I’d have peace. No, let me rephrase that, because I would never have peace again in this life. But I’d have peace’s partner. I’d have quiet. That’s what I wanted” (129). 15. Syreeta tries to persuade Janice that they have not employed any threats or violence in their organized effort, unlike what they would have done in the past: “That man’s house would have been firebombed already” (137).

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16. One of the Guardians helps her to where her husband stands, who whispers to her: “They’re all here for Marquis, baby. This is all about our son” (144). 17. Coming from Twin Peaks, she felt she had to be grateful enough for his financial support to accept his marriage proposal, thus marrying into wealth and class. She has been long aware that Wyatt, who complained about the exploitation of women, has come to exploit her image in his business transactions: “He’d drag me to all kinds of business meetings, using me to close a deal with financiers, or to negotiate better prices with suppliers, or even to hire a top employee away from a competitor” (167). 18. He gave her “the opportunity to be cherished by a surrogate father, [I felt] loved for the very first time in my life by a man” (194). However, she now thinks of the precarious situation the murder placed her in: “The problem was if I stood up and told that truth, my husband would be in prison for the rest of his life” (194). 19. She is “no longer a woman on welfare, no longer on food stamps,” and “a ‘kept motherin-law’ with a condo, a car, and a credit card” (210). Even though Gloria selfishly thinks of not losing her own privileged status and future, she presumes to change Meredith’s mind by suggesting that she may lose custody of her son to Wyatt’s family. 20. She sees the caption “Tyrone and Janice Johnson” below their images on TV. Tyrone speaks to the cameras that they will continue public demonstrations until Wyatt is arrested: “There will be justice for our son” (221). Wyatt reacts that he cannot figure out why Tyrone and the Guardians have to say his name so often, with no idea about Meredith’s inner thoughts: “My inside voice said: Because you killed his son” (222). 21. They were “teaching them how to be good employees, and after they held a job for two years, they could enter a special program that prepared them to own a franchise, if they could ever raise the money” (234). 22. “This law says that the natural order of a dispute is that first, you kill the other guy. Then, you claim self-defense. Finally, because the only other witness is dead, you walk away” (260–61). The following week they stood with the members of the Urban League, where Tyrone talks fiercely about the killer of his son: “When you’re white and you kill someone black, you have a much greater chance of having that murder justified if you say you were standing your ground” (261). 23. As she gets in the car with Wyatt and Newt and Andre driving, she trembles. It has become a habit for three months, since her husband found her in the bathroom, making it clear that “he knew what I’d seen without saying those words” (264). 24. The prosecutor’s opening speech describes how Wyatt had no reason to shoot Marquis except he was angry that “this boy would get out of his car” (267). He also adds that after he shot him, “he planted a baseball bat at the scene. And he lied to the police and said that Marquis had attacked him with the bat” (268). 25. Oliver advocates that the mothers’ black sons are not thugs “whose lives bear no value”: “Ours are Talented, Humanistic, Unique, and Gifted Sons that are in a class of their own. They should be valued and afforded the same civil liberties as others that differ phenotypically. The time to stand against inequality is now. The time to protect our sons (and daughters) is now” (2016, 111). 26. “Affective numbness is not the only form that the emotional aspects of white ignorance can take. White ignorance also can manifest itself through strong emotions, . . . for example, . . . by [one’s] intense fear of black men” (Sullivan 2015, 158). 27. Tyrone, to her disappointment, is not in the car, and Janice hopes he will truly forgive her just as Delores has: “I just prayed that he still wanted me to be his wife” (287). As she drives home, stopping to check if Tyrone is in any of his usual places, she bumps into Caleb, who is concerned that she almost chokes on her tears. He leads her to his car where she cries in the passenger seat, and she backpaddles to their affair, explaining that she, who was alone after Tyrone had walked away, “needed to be comforted” (294). Raj rushes to get her out of the car, before Tyrone, who is sitting in Raj’s truck, sees her. He explains that the Guardians have been following Janice and Tyrone because of the threats that were coming in. Janice cannot understand why people would threaten grieving parents, but Raj says that this is “how Americans handle people they don’t know and they don’t like” (298). When Raj promises not to mention to Tyrone seeing her with Caleb, they reconcile with each other, for Raj confesses: “I’ve

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changed, you changed, and everyone deserves a second chance” (300). Both Janice and Tyrone finally reconnect at home, sharing and dealing with their hurt: “This was love. With all of its ups, and all of its downs, this was what love was meant to be” (303). 28. Since he cannot quite understand why his wife trembles out of fear—“I loved her, really loved her” (327), he thinks of asking her “what she thought she saw” (327). 29. Anderson also claims, in his article “White Space,” that “[d]efensive whites in these circumstances may be less consciously hateful than concerned and fearful of ‘dangerous and violent’ black people” (2015, 14). 30. Judith Butler, “Shadows of the Absent Body” (2017b). 31. Mieke Bal, in her book, Of What One Cannot Speak, makes a critical analysis of the Columbian artist Doris Salcedo’s work, known mostly for her political installation art and sculpture, commemorating those massacres and killings in an ongoing war in her country. 32. “By ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (Mouffe qtd in Bal 2011, 10). 33. The negation of the conflict is also in contradiction to the lived social reality, and Mouffe “allies the political with both the possibility of conflict and with the powers, structures, and choices that constitute the field of possibilities for action” (cited in Bal 2011, 12). 34. Salcedo addresses political violence through art, “creating a material presence that evokes . . . the absent, unnamed victims of civil war [in Columbia]” (Enriquez 2017, 1).

Chapter Five

Strategic Interventions in the Carceral Spaces of Whiteness Subversive Politics of Black Male Criminality in Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea (2018)

The carceral spatiality of whiteness in neoliberalism and its articulation in the criminal justice system as a form of racial domination has manifested in the form of authoritarianism and punishment in contemporary American society, a process De Lissovoy calls “the carceral turn” (2013, 740). The turn to punishment, allows us to understand the legacy of the penal system in slavery times as the hidden agenda embedded in the utilization of the prison industrial complex through the “[d]isciplinary mechanisms of anti-Blackness and white supremacy” (Smith and Vasudevan 2017, 211). The carceral state’s investment in “the economic importance of prisoners as coerced consumers” highlights “the biopolitical reality of neoliberalism” (Deckard 2017, 3, 4). The French sociologist and Marxist scholar Loïc Wacquant locates the “police and vigilante killings of African Americans” in the current moment within “the larger political-economic context of the exploitation they have faced throughout American history” (cited in Cazenave 2018, 180). Starting from the time of slavery and lynching, continuing through racial profiling, incarceration, and police anti-black violence in the contemporary era, the connection between race and crime “has been central to white supremacy” 1 (Leonard 2017, 91). Given that, it is not surprising that mass incarceration is an integral part of the broader culture of “racialized social control” (Phelps 2017, 53) by means of which the logic of American racism “governs” the black everyday reality. To put it more succinctly, the impact of colonialism persists in that “[c]rime and criminal justice are not immune to 155

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its effects” 2 (Steinmetz, Schaefer, and Henderson 2017, 69). It is imperative, then, to understand the contemporary reality of incarceration by using colonial strategies to deconstruct the normative view at the basis of control mechanisms deemed “necessary in prisons in an age of punitiveness” (Turner and Peters 2017, 111). The ways in which the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow has caused the political, economic, and social marginalization of black people is manifested in the existing juxtaposition of race and crime, serving the justification of state-sanctioned violence wherein “criminality is viewed as an inherent Black characteristic” (Owusu-Bempah 2017, 29). In his discussion of racialized mechanisms, Noel Cazenave claims that the police and vigilante violence, which served “racial control systems” in the past, can be considered today “a criminalization-justified mechanism that serves similar economic, social status, and power functions” for the sake of a covert racial project (2018, 75). Michelle Alexander sees a basic parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow simply because both have shaped “the social construction of the ‘criminalblackman.’” In this way, the (un)conscious anti-black fear evokes the racialization of crime, which “is essential to the functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system” (M. Alexander 2010, 194, 195). Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins writes: “The controlling image of Black men as criminals or as deviant beings encapsulates this perception of Black men as inherently violent” (2004, 158). “The criminal justice system polices black men,” Angela J. Davis explains, and hence, impacts their lives in “devastating ways” (2017c, 178). Ibram X. Kendi joins the conversation with Michelle Alexander, Patricia Collins, and Angela J. Davis in absolute agreement that racism is integral to the criminal justice system: “But as Americans have discarded old racist ideas, new racist ideas have constantly been produced for their renewed consumption” 3 (2016, 509). As the killings of African Americans have moved to the center of the American conscience, the state violence against black (unarmed) men demonstrates that the construct of public safety is predicated upon the discursive construct of black male body as threat. 4 However, the construct of racialized criminality is undermined occasionally by the criminal practices enacted by violent and corrupt white police officers, prosecutors, and forces with a hidden agenda of deliberately targeting innocent blacks. Ultimately, there is an urgent need for a radical restructuring of American society, because, Paul Butler suggests, the current system ensures that “black lives matter less” (qtd in Cazenave 2018, 283). In the current critical conjuncture of witnessing how the disciplinary mechanisms of white supremacy operate, the Black Lives Matter movement “articulates the centrality of anti-Blackness to United States racialization” in its negotiation of how alternative futures rupture the present, “revealing the untenability of the biopolitical violence that undergirds this world” (Smith and Vasudevan 2017, 211, 216). At a time when Black Lives Matter chal-

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lenges the violent power of whiteness, the black counterpublic discourse exposes the falsely constructed narrative of criminality that is embedded in the law enforcement system. The hope that we are now witnessing a new civil rights era demands us to enact activism even more fiercely against the racist and arbitrary applications of the law, because, “the system of racial apartheid in the United States,” D. Marvin Jones writes, “has been replaced by a kind of spatial apartheid, driven by a culture of fear” (2016, 173). Jones’s view reinvokes the political implications of space, as Doreen Massey aptly argued, that “different ways of thinking space have [political] consequences and effects” (cited in Featherstone and Painter 2013a, 3). Drawing from her view, there is the need to address, even further, the discursive constructs of carceral spaces of whiteness in different walks of everyday life, because they rely on racialized power relations through which spaces are restructured with political implications. In this context, Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea (2018a) astutely demonstrates how carceral regimes of control both inside and outside prison are employed to uphold the social construct of white safety and justify the ongoing regulation and domination of black male bodies, including even black cops, who refuse to serve the white interests of the normative social order. The novel explores the issue of black resistance and activism, revolving around a black police officer who is framed to ensure that he will not be a threat to white criminals in higher offices. He is reduced to the embodied narrative of black criminality in his constructed downfall from an authorized to a nonauthorized space, or rather, from success to failure in a novel that deals with “a poetics of failure” (Bailes 2011, 39). However, he soon employs his agency against injustice in a novel that links the U.S. carceral state to prisons in an intensely racialized regime of control. The plot summary is simple: Joe King Oliver, the protagonist, is a black ex-cop who was framed for the rape of a white woman while he was a detective in the NYPD. Divorced by his wife Monica, and released from the police force in disgrace after spending three months in prison, he loses his job and money. Emotionally broken by the brutality he experienced in prison, he now lives and works in Brooklyn Heights as a private detective, while he still hopes to exonerate himself and return to the police force. When his alleged rape victim Nathali, an ex-prostitute, who now lives a moral life as a born-again Christian, married woman and mother in Minnesota, sends him a letter of confession about her guilt for being coerced into framing him, having been set up by people related to the NYPD. The next day he takes a big case, similar to his own, about a black radical journalist, A Free Man, facing the death penalty for murdering two corrupt police officers, as they were trying to kill him for digging into their illegal business. He takes the case, because he realizes that A Free Man’s case is not different from his own case, involving corrupt institutions and people who abuse the law.

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The novel has a positive ending, which can be considered as, what Steph Cha calls, “an optimistic noir” (2018). In an interview with Jay MacDonald on the novel, Mosley questions the political consequences of law and order narrative on both the individuals and American society’s future. “You’re living in a world that’s moving on, it’s leaving most people behind, and the thing to figure out is, what does that mean?” (2018c). Lloyd Sachs says that it was long before the Black Lives Matter movement started that Mosley “was addressing the violent treatment of African-Americans by police,” while his latest novel seems to problematize the demarcation “between corruption and business as usual if you are a beneficiary of the former” (Sachs 2018). In a recent interview, Walter Mosley says, “I wanted a person who I thought was not guilty,” but once a black policeman gets “deeper and deeper into [his case], he begins to understand that everything is not what it seems.” While the novel invites a highly sociopolitical critique of the criminal justice system, Mosley also adds that he does not mean to condemn the police force: “So what I’m actually trying to do is say, here’s a guy who took actions who’s never going to get a fair shake . . . because of the way the system is set up around him” (2018b). Drawing upon this critical inquiry, the novel starts with the implication of the corruption of police by the account of how Joe King Oliver, a black excop, opened his private detective business eleven years ago on Montague Street. 5 He remembers that when Gladstone Palmer, his former dispatch sergeant gave Joe the assignment to arrest Nathali Malcolm, a white woman car thief, he was reluctant; Joe, an idealist and dedicated policeman, was involved every Wednesday on a longtime case, watching the criminal called Little Exeter on the port for his heroin shipment to bring him and his associates to justice in a year. Joe had graduated from the academy with Gladstone, and their working relationship “never affected our friendship” (5). Since the police are promoted once they “make enough arrests” (Lamberth 2010, 35), Gladstone’s warning him that making more arrests would help him in the administration’s evaluation for his promotion, feels right to Joe’s mind: “Criminal arrests and convictions, the retrieval of stolen property, and competent investigation that leads to crime solution were what our professional careers hinged on” (5). Joe goes to Nathali’s house, in front of which the stolen car was parked, to recite her rights and arrest her, but her flirting attitude instead encourages him to have sex with her. Arrested the next day for the allegation of sexual assault and rape, based on Nathali’s complaint, he is sent to Rikers where he becomes the victim of physical brutality. He is attacked by four convicts in two days, one of whom even slashed his right cheek with the edge of a tomato can lid, leaving him with a lifelong scar on his face. It is, apparently, only when Joe is criminalized (“rapist”) and deauthorized (“ex-cop”) that whiteness is associated with safety and security. When his union-appointed lawyer Ginger Edwards, a white woman, shows

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the tape Nathali recorded that showed him forcing her to bed, he realizes that the tape was doctored, but Ginger advises him to take a plea “with no jail time” (10). To protect himself in prison, he deliberately gets into fights with other convicts including Mink so that he will be given a private cell, for the guards ignore the brutality. 6 Since it is obvious that police authority “comes primarily and legally from an officer’s ability to detain and arrest” (Moskos 2008, 184), Joe is deprived of autonomy, for he is now relocated within the domain of governmental control. The police, including Gladstone and others, are the primary agents of “the production of space” (Lefebvre 1991, 68), which ironically operates merely as a penal space. They simultaneously authorize whiteness as their only source of power, removing “the control of their everyday lives” (Lefebvre 2009, 203) from black people. The guards’ ruthless embodied acts of whiteness function as “the guardian of difference” (Felman 1992, 222). In a racialized context, the policing strategies that protect the white people’s right to freedom are employed even more so in prison to protect the sovereignty of whiteness. In retaliation, when Mink leans forward to see Joe, Joe gets him in the chokehold through the bars, and he wants to kill Mink so that no convict will ever lay his hands on him. But once the guards open his cell door to save Mink’s life and “pummeled [him] with a truncheon” (11), Joe becomes aware that if he does not control his rage, he will become a man who has “switched allegiances from cop to criminal” (11). The next afternoon four guards treat him brutally as they escort him to the interrogation room, as a punitive mechanism of an authoritarian white dominant nation-state where Gladstone tells him about the complaint from the prison that his fight with the convict and the three guards resulted in their hospitalization, because he broke one man’s nose and another man’s jaw. The prison in this context constitutes a “strategic space” (Lefebvre 2009, 190) of blackness, for white dominant interests are built upon the maintenance of the racial politics of space. The space is ideological, in Louis Althusser’s view, because “it plays a mediating role between the social totality (our ‘real conditions of existence’) and the representations of our relationship to that totality (‘ideology’)” (cited in Goonewardena 2004, 168). Since ideology determines Joe’s lived experiences in spaces, the crime he allegedly committed can be considered “as a way of exploring the self-legitimation of authority” (Greenhouse 2003, 279–80). The carceral power that constructs whiteness, in fact, causes Joe not only the experience of, what Rashad Shabazz calls, “spatialized blackness,” 7 but also that of “prison masculinity,” which seems to be “constituted through embodied performances of prison manhood” 8 (Shabazz 2015, 2, 96). Once his crime is racialized as a sexual threat to a white woman, Joe is dehumanized by the convicts and ignored by the guards, and he repeatedly lives with the experiential horror of violence.

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The prison, as a corollary of the city, which sustains the notion of “panopticon” (Foucault 1995, 201), or what I call, the panopticon of whiteness emerges here, functioning as “the spatial means of social control” (Soja 1996, 235) over black men, who are taught to become “docile bodies” (Foucault 1995, 194). Criminality, “compatible with governmentality only when the criminal is . . . a manageable subject,” suggests “a failure of those technologies of [white] power aimed at producing docile bodies” (J. Martin 2003, 174). The racialization of black people through dehumanization constitutes the reality of falling outside of, what Helen Fein describes as, a “universe of obligation.” Hence, when a group experiences that, she explains, offenses against them are no longer considered “violations of the normative order” (cited in Owusu-Bempah 2017, 27). This scene of ruthless brutality shows the negative consequences of incarceration when such a professional and good black cop as Joe, who never used violence in his entire career, is turned into a brutal man for the sake of selfprotection and survival. 9 Joe’s declaration that he did not rape the woman does not mean much, for Gladstone racializes him by stating that the white woman’s racial fear of his “big and black [penis]” (13) will count more than his confession. Even though Joe tells the truth to Gladstone, he discovers later what Gladstone already knows because of his role in it: “They framed me!” (13). But the white normative interpretation of the video recording of Joe’s pulling the white woman by the hair and her testimony are enough to prove him as “a predator.” Gladstone explains, “It looks like she was begging you to stop” (13). Gladstone makes him aware that the situation is serious, for “you got powerful enemies who can reach in here and snuff you out” (14). Obviously, the framing is built upon the white stereotype of black rapist, which has prevailed “as a powerful weapon in White backlash” (Jackson and Balaji 2015, 246). The racialized “spatial politics” (K. Mitchell 2015, 32) is quite clear, for the disciplinary mechanisms of whiteness operate in the context of spatial dynamics. The doctored video positions Joe as a man in “white space” (E. Anderson 2015, 10), where he does not belong. In addition, his framing pushes him into a nonnormative domain, where his performativity of cultural whiteness ceases to be significant. The “fetishism of boundaries” (Pieterse 2001, 221)—that Joe, as the alleged rapist, transgresses in his interracial encounter—articulates the need to focus on the role of white power as central to crime control strategies. Joe’s incarceration invokes the past lynchings of black men for allegedly raping white women; black men, as Ann DuCille notes, “have been lynched because someone said they looked at, spoke to, or thought about a white woman” (qtd in Yancy 2008, 10). The political implications of the nature of the frame reveals how the insidious power of whiteness operates in the everyday lived experiences of black people. The stereotype of the black rapist of white women that became “the justification for

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racist mob violence” in the South, and in the North, continued well into the twentieth century, slowly replaced by Jim Crow racism and criminal justice system (Shabazz 2015, 22). The legacy of the historical practices of “experiential racism” (Bolton and Feagin 2004, 18) and their political implications demonstrate how Gladstone’s advice to Joe to maintain his discretion reinforces the carceral mindset behind it. The guards’ and inmates’ coercive treatment of Joe is evidence that they lost their sway over him as part of an ongoing racial project, namely, that of policing the spatial authority of whiteness. Gladstone uses his contacts in the office of chief of detectives, and Joe is put in solitary confinement to keep him safe from assault. 10 Divorced by his wife and left on his own, Joe performs his blackness differently, when his blackness is dissociated from the materiality of his body as a cop in “police discourse” (Keith 1993, 224). After three months of the prison experience, which almost turned him into a potential “unrepentant murderer” (16), the charges have been dropped and he is released. When he gets off the bus at the Port Authority on Forty-Second Street, however, he realizes “how hollow the word freedom really was” (17), for he has lost all the life he had before doing time. Real freedom rests in the urgency to disembody the racial stereotype of criminality, and reclaim his sense of himself and the kind of man he used to be. His memories are unforgettably painful because the prison experience shook him to the core, but he receives constant emotional support from his daughter Aja-Denise, a young high school student who works as his assistant in his new job as a private detective. 11 It is very difficult for Joe, who is still traumatized by the brutality of his prison experience, feeling vulnerable, to have closure. He constantly lives on edge, and he even checks his mail with the fear of receiving false evidence that will send him back to prison. Gladstone has been a friend, helping him out, and seeing him regularly at their card game with the usual group of friends. He knows he owes Gladstone: “Getting me put in solitary rescued me from becoming a murderer, and then later, when I couldn’t raise enough money for rent and child support, he came up with enough cash for me to start the King Detective Service. He even guided the first few clients my way” (20). Since his career in the police department is over, and his reputation is on the line, he does not know where he fits in, for he no longer has an anchor, while work gives him a sense of purpose. Frustrated with his feelings of rage and fear from the injustice he had undergone, he has not fully recovered from processing the emotional scars; he needs to harness his thoughts about retaliation, for framing is not innocent of racism, discursively constructed within the ideological domain of whiteness. In other words, “whiteness comes replete with its [racist] assumptions” that are implicated in the configuration of the black male body as the embodiment of criminality (Yancy 2008, 3). Even his connection with his daughter and his few friends reminds him “of what I could lose” (23), always

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living on the verge of losing human connection in constant need for some space to pull himself together, for his authentic selfhood to unfold on his own terms. 12 Before Joe opens his mail—a small pink envelope from Minnesota, and a brown envelope—Gladstone visits him to tell him about a job in Hawaii, but Joe does not want to leave Aja. 13 He also adds that Joe was “one of the best investigative cops New York ever had” (26) whereas their ongoing friendship bears hidden tensions beyond the façade of interdependence. On the one hand, Gladstone acts as if he were the white savior of this black man; his paternalistic attitude represents his whiteness as an embodied goodness. On the other hand, he has contacts, he tells Joe, who can readily help him with a better job, but ironically he did not use them to help him when he was being framed. Apparently, at that time, white forces resented a black cop’s perseverance in attempting to stop a big drug-dealing business that would cost them the loss of their privileges. Hence, Gladstone is trapped by his blindness to his own complicity in the white power structure that vivifies “the discriminatory use of state power” as a “tool to repress blacks” (Garland 2002, 55). Ironically, all he could boast of was keeping Joe alive, while Gladstone’s friendly attitude exposes the contradictions implicated in the ideology of whiteness, which blurs the connections between “dispossession and racism, violence and culture, preventing [him] from making sense of the events” (Merrill and Hoffman 2015a, 2). Despite the deep resentment of the past, Joe continues to work as a dedicated private investigator, following the white Representative Bob Acres to report on his nighttime activities on behalf of a woman, who hired him by claiming to be his wife, Cindy. 14 As he waits in his car, he remembers the reason why his father, Chief Oliver, an ex-convict, named him King to make sure that “no one could denigrate me by using my first name as if I was some kind of servant or something” (29). His childhood memory demonstrates that “everyday racism” has an ideological basis “that has long been built on white notions of black personal, social, and cultural inferiority” (Bolton and Feagin 2004, 255). The pink envelope contains an unexpected letter from Nathali, whose real name is Beatrice Summers, now a born-again Christian with a family of her own. She confesses that she was forced to frame him for sexual assault by a policeman called Adamo Cortez of the NYPD. Since he caught her with a large amount of cocaine for which she would get a long prison sentence, she had to go by his orders to be let off the hook. She still bears guilt for what she had done, and she is ready to testify in court to exonerate Joe, a victim of conspiracy. 15 After he wakes up the next morning, Aja calls to tell him that a woman named Willa Portman made an appointment for the late afternoon to hire him to do an investigative work. He follows Bob to the Gucci Diner, sits at his table, and asks him who informed him that he was being followed, because he noticed that Bob put his lights on a timer. 16 Bob

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says it was a woman who warned him: Since Joe makes a deal that he will tell this “Cindy” that he could not find any dirt on Bob in return for Bob revealing her identity, Bob promises he will send her phone number to him. Joe gives his word to Bob not to hurt his reputation, because he respects Bob, an honest man whose political career has been based on “brotherhood rather than superiority” (29). Joe checks through the facts in Nathali/Beatrice’s letter, and even though he has access to the NYPD database through a Haitian acquaintance’s son, Henri Tourneau, a cop, he cannot find any Adamo Cortez. What Beatrice’s letter reveals is that she has been a victim of Cortez, but she is oblivious to how she is discursively trapped by her embodied white racist imaginary. She does not reflect upon the fact that, despite her coercion to testify against Joe, her performances “reiterate the myth of the proverbial white victim at the hands of the Black predator” (Yancy 2008, 19). Even though she unwillingly contributed to the complicity within the white racist context, she is not aware that whiteness operates as a strategy, rather than as an authentic identity in order to generate “the mechanisms and processes by which it practises power in social relations” (Levine-Rasky 2002a, 321). Beatrice, quite similarly to Gladstone, does not realize how she discursively distorted the black male body as a potential criminal. In other words, she is unaware that, as a white woman, she enacts racist practices as “the vehicle through which such practices get performed and sustained” (Yancy 2008, 22). When Willa Portman, a young white woman, meets with Joe in his office, she explains that she is an intern doing research for Stuart Braun, a dedicated activist lawyer, who helps ordinary people. Joe learns that Braun is a radical lawyer, who represented A Free Man, né Leonard Compton, a black radical journalist who had been arrested for killing two police officers, Valence and Pratt, three years earlier. He was found seriously wounded close to the scene of the shoot-out with the murder weapon, but the bullets passed through his body, making it impossible to be matched with the gun. “He was facing the death penalty, which New York State provides for cop killers. He showed no remorse and, in general, refused to cooperate with the police or prosecutors” 17 (45). He learns that Willa chooses to work for Braun, rather than on her own, for she knows that A Free Man is innocent, whereas Braun is about to “sell him down the river” (46), even after gathering all the evidence against the cops. Willa explains that A Free Man killed the two corrupt cops, who were criminals trying to kill him to prevent his exposing their criminal activities: “They were stalking him. They’d already murdered three of his blood brothers and paralyzed the other one. They were after him and he just protected himself” (47). Willa and Braun, knowing this, were about to meet a lady, Ms. Mudd, a middle-aged black woman, from the church who agreed “to testify that Officer Valence received payments from Deacon Mordechai to provide access to

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young homeless people for the purpose of forced prostitution” (47). This reveals that the arrangement is run out of a church, the Last Rite of Christ Baptist Church, which “ran a charity that was supposed to help runaway and orphaned girls and boys. Mordechai and some of his friends had the access. Valence, Officer Pratt, and others ran the business” (47). A Free Man’s defense would be based on this testimony, which is that he and his team “were fighting a prostitution ring” (47). Willa adds, in similar terms to Abel’s account, that the cops were involved in a variety of criminal activities that were overlooked in the NYPD, including “stolen merchandise, drugs, and murders” (47). Giving an inside view of the black officers in the NYPD, in his book The Black Shields, Roger L. Abel describes a similar situation, where brutality is perpetrated by white male officers, mostly in groups, targeting vulnerable people, “killed, maimed and scarred for life,” whose “misconduct and brutality go unpunished” (Abel 2006, 561). Willa tells Joe that Braun became cold, losing interest in the case, and did not want to see Ms. Mudd, claiming that A Free Man’s account was a total lie, acting “whitely” 18 (Yancy 2008, 24). However, Willa’s suspicion is based on the sudden disappearance of Ms. Mudd, for she learned from her son Rondrew that she has been missing since she went to meet Braun. Joe thinks that there is a connection, an indirect link, between Beatrice’s confession letter and A Free Man’s case, to which he feels drawn because “the similarities might be a way for me to solve a case close enough to my own so that I might feel some sense of closure without returning to Rikers” (49). He identifies with A Free Man: “If Man was innocent and I freed him, then it would be, in some way, like freeing myself” (49). As he warns Willa that his involvement with the case will bring danger, he realizes that Willa is in love with A Free Man. Since Marin, the mother of A Free Man’s child, and A Free Man are not legally married, Marin could not visit him and Willa had to record his deposition. She had copied all the evidence in documents, adding up to seven thousand pages, before Braun shredded all of them. She offers Joe $19,000, all the money she has, to prove the innocence of A Free Man, a man who is definitely “caught up in the prison industrial complex” (Owusu-Bempah 2017, 28). Willa trusts Joe because of Jacob Storell, a case that Joe remembers vividly, because Jacob’s parents asked him to defend their son. 19 Arrested for robbery, he was in fact set up by a girl, Sheila, who said to him that her father has a store, asking him to take the money from the cash register. Joe told the arresting officer Buddy that Jacob was a special needs high school student, and he would get him home before the police department was sued. The scene with Jacob demonstrates that police officers’ racialized investment in the young black man is bound up in the form of “a certain mechanism of power,” which “exert[s] itself directly on bodies,” for it is all the more “strengthened by its visible manifestations” (Foucault 1995, 57). After

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his memories of this event are refreshed, Willa adds another name whose son Joe freed from jail after only a few hours—another moment that provides Joe with support of those whose lives he had touched. While Joe and Aja are having dinner, Aja says she learned from Willa that Joe could prove a man’s innocence, but Joe asks her not to mention the man’s name to anyone, including her mother. A white man who sees them on the street takes it for granted that he, the sexual predator, harasses and sexually exploits this young black girl, and tries to protect her—a reckless act that leaves the white man embarrassed to learn that Aja is his daughter. Invoking Joe’s experience with Nathali, the white man immediately suspects him as a potential rapist, simply because whiteness as a normative ideal operates in the spatial materialization of black bodies. In this context, racialized encounters deploy “[r]acial panopticism,” which functions as a mechanism of “racial surveillance” (Hintzen 2003, 130). In the context of whiteness, the black body, always already deemed as criminal, is considered to disrupt law and normative order. When they go to Monica’s house for Joe to speak alone to Monica, her new husband Coleman, a light-skinned Negro, is uncomfortable. When they are alone, Joe warns Monica not to send threatening letters to get back at him. He still holds her responsible for his scarred face, because she did not bail him out, also accusing her of calling Bob Acres. He threatens her for the first time that if she ever intervenes in his work, he will “make you regret it” (66). Joe starts reading at home the records Willa brought him, and learns about A Free Man’s personal history and his political involvements, including the events that led to his confrontation with Officers Valence and Pratt. Under his real name, Compton, A Free Man was a decorated master sergeant in the Rangers. After graduating from City College, he became a high school teacher in Upper Manhattan, working with boys and girls to keep them out of trouble, doing community activism. He published articles in the local newspaper, including detailed accounts of “crimes done to young people in and around the black neighborhoods of New York City” (68). He then started a group called the Blood Brothers of Broadway (BBB), consisting of five men and two women who were able to make transformative changes in their lives with his guidance and help. He realizes that three of the men had been murdered long before A Free Man killed Pratt and Valence during the shootout, and few were still alive. Lamont Charles, a suspected con man led a triplegic living in a nursery home on Coney Island. Lana Ruiz, a Dominican, was convicted of attempted murder. Tanya Lark dropped off the grid. It was obvious to Joe that BBB was “a militant political group” (69–70). A Free Man’s leadership of this group positions him against the social order not only because he is a cop killer, but even more importantly because he is a militant black man, fitting into the public image of those black men who “‘choose’ to be criminals” (M. Alexander 2010, 192). Since the state failed to protect a black man’s life, A Free Man had to take the law into his hands, and killed

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the two cops in self-defense, but no state official cares about why he had to defend himself from them. He ironically had to protect himself from the uniformed criminals in the police department, who abused their badges, because dehumanization makes black people vulnerable to state violence. Joe starts reading the records based on witnesses’ testimonies that the dead cops were involved in criminal activities, and they opened fire on A Free Man. While Joe has some questions about their confrontation, and about Braun dropping the case, he suspects that Adamo Cortez, who is not an NYPD cop, might be using an alias or might be an informant. Reading parts of these records as an investigator, he decides to take both cases, “my frame and A Free Man’s murder conviction” (70). Joe still feels like the cop he used to be, and his willingness to help another black man seems like that of the actual Rev. Dr. John H. Johnson, the NYPD’s first black chaplain, who served in the NYPD for thirty-three years until his retirement in 1972. One of his messages to police officers was that their “primary obligation is to protect people against violence and dishonesty” and to let that “bring out the best” in them (Abel 2006, 65). Clearly, it is not only his own life, but all black lives that matter to Joe, and he realizes that he needs a partner to work with him. 20 Henri Tourneau, a Haitian-born cop, whose father had asked his help earlier to prepare Henri to get on the force, might be a better choice in his unquestionable loyalty to Joe. Henri, a young married policeman, has always helped him with access to databases, and thus became a hidden partner in his investigations. Joe also needs the help of Melquarth Frost, known as Mel, even though he is a vicious criminal who “had executed some of the most daring robberies of the twenty-first century so far” (72). Joe knew him when the FBI asked a few city cops, including Joe, to take down the Byron gang, who carried out around eight bank burglaries, taking Mel with them. Because he arrested Mel without doing him any harm, he earned the Medal of Exceptional Merit. Joe gave an honest testimony—“Law for me was scripture” (74)—and Mel was exonerated. 21 He later figured out that it was only Joe, a cop who played by the book and treated him fairly, not only because he did not wound or kill him, but because he honestly testified that Mel never mentioned the bank robbery, contrary to the expectations of his superiors. Hence, Joe refuses to comply with the white officers’ authoritative expectations, but instead acts as an autonomous person to protect even criminals’ rights, refusing to commit “crimes of obedience” (Kelman and Hamilton 1989, 23). Joe, as an ex-cop, still does not hesitate to connect with criminals as simply human, for he has experiential knowledge about the blurred boundary between law enforcers and criminals. He goes to play chess with Mel on Mondays at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village during the two years that followed, and even took him out for a meal.

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As Joe thinks about his relationship with Mel, he takes a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with mixed emotions, for he has always lived the life of an honorable cop with a deep sense of lawfulness and morality, left with a frame that erased the possibility of having done “one thing to be proud of” (79). He visits his maternal grandmother Brenda, a very clever black woman, who complains that his friend Roger Ferris, a billionaire who owns most of the silver resources in the world, keeps inviting her to listen to music at Lincoln Center, but she turns him down because she does not want to date a white man. 22 When Roger joins them for breakfast, he wants Joe to give him a call whenever he needs his help. After parting with them, Joe calls Beatrice to ask about Adamo, and she describes him as a short brown man with a New York accent. Even though she is ready to come to New York to testify on Joe’s behalf, Joe believes this is not necessary, for he can track the name of Chester Murray, the man with whom she was arrested. Beatrice makes a choice to act on the situation that she was coerced to produce. While there is no indication that she thinks about the ideology of whiteness and racism, her sense of guilt enables her to affectively “perform [her] whiteness differently” (Yancy 2008, 242). Now, she subverts the former power relationship between herself as a white woman and a black man: Her act of deconstructing and struggling against her complicity in the frame is also an act that creates discursive cracks in her performativity of whiteness. On the other hand, Gladstone, by way of comparison with Beatrice, takes limited action to provide Joe with a job and money, but he does not care to exonerate him. Since he has been seduced by the privilege of whiteness, he fails to see that he is produced “through certain power relations,” as Alecia Y. Jackson notes, while his white body is “also a site for reworking [them]” (qtd in Yancy 2008, 245). When Joe calls Henri Tourneau, he learns that Henri’s call to someone claiming to be a CI, a confidential informant, in the past for a detective Adamo Cortez, drew suspicion, and Inspector Dennis Natches and Captain Omar Laurel (“Cumberland”) threatened Henri with a review, implying he should have detained the suspect, meaning Cortez. Joe asks Henri to drop the whole issue, for a black man’s life is always in danger, and that Henri’s father bought a pistol the day after he was born, because “he had to be ready to die for his son” (97). Joe writes an email to the lawyer Braun, identifying himself with a fake name, Tom Boll: 23 When Braun learns that “Tom Boll” is a private detective working for those who want to find Ms. Mudd, he claims that she is not in danger and asks to meet with him at Liberté Café on Hudson. As a young lawyer, Willa sees through how law can be applied to the innocent: “I never really knew how much a man can be a victim of the law until I met Manny. He’s a killer but he’s no criminal” (102). Willa’s com-

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ment is closely related to how blackness and the death penalty have historically interacted in the cases involving race “in which Black defendants were legally condemned by all-White juries” 24 (Girgenti 2015, 308). Nick Petersen, for instance, draws attention to the existing racial bias in the American death penalty system: “Homicides involving White victims are more likely to be prosecuted capitally” (N. Petersen 2017, 9). The white terrorism of lynching, Bryan Stevenson explains, “in many ways created the modern death penalty” in an effort to make sure “black men would still pay the ultimate price” (Stevenson 2015, 299). In other words, police violence, mass incarceration, and the death penalty embody “the new consumerist captivity” (Sasse 2017, 155), which function as racialized control mechanisms. The executions of African Americans through the death penalty reinforce the racial stereotype of black man as threat, justified by the ideology of whiteness “to protect good ‘white’ people from dangerous ‘black’ criminals” (Cazenave 2018, 116). After Willa leaves, he tells Aja that from now on, she should never take any files home, where she lives with her mother and her stepfather, for he knows her mother looked at his files. When Coleman confronts Joe on the street about talking with Monica, Joe threatens his life if he ever comes near him again, an act reflective of how his “embodied performance of prison masculinity became central to the performative script of Black masculinity outside prison” (Shabazz 2015, 95). Since Mel agrees to help Joe with a few cases, Joe takes him to Liberté Café to wait for Braun’s arrival: But when he sees few men come in, including a man Mel calls Porker, Joe understands that Braun sent them to ambush him. Mel believes that “modern law in the United States was based on economic class and what the popular opinion classified as evil” 25 (113). He now decides to use Willa’s money to pay for investigating Braun’s case on A Free Man. When Aja tells him that Joe might find past criminal activity of Coleman to send him to prison, Joe refuses to do it, even as leverage, for he knows exactly “what it’s like and I’m just not that evil” (124). He refuses to utilize “strategic whiteness” as the discursive power employed in everyday life to control black men in carceral spaces (Projansky and Ono 1999, 152). He goes to the bar to find his former CI Pop, and he learns that he died. When Joe found out about a regular marijuana delivery, he ran down at the docks, because he wanted Pop to report on Little Exeter Barret. As Joe is about to pay the bill and leave, he sees Little Exeter walk in, and hides outside in the shadow of a doorway, waiting for Little Exeter to come out. He knocks him senseless with a fist, drags him into an alley, addressing him as “Mr. Barret” (129), and asks for the name of the police officer he answered to fourteen years ago when he used to run heroin out of the docks, and gets that name, Hugo Cumberland. 26 He challenges the racial norms of a brutal social world, which has determined his social vulnerability, but norms, Judith Butler argues, may implicitly or explicitly operate as “the

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normalizing principle in social practice,” while they can be discernible “in the effects that they produce” (2004, 41–42). Hence, Joe resists imposing the violence of norms on those who become vulnerable to him. Joe knows that Hugo Cumberland, who dealt heroin, was a man involved in his downfall, and he uses Henri’s passwords to access the police and informant files of the NYPD, but he cannot find the name. 27 He checks on Chester Murray’s name, and Henri’s access code helps him find Chester’s whole history in NYPD: Arrested occasionally for theft, pimping, and (sexual) assault, he worked as CI with some officers, but his arrest record ended three weeks before Joe was framed, working since then as a witness in several drug and prostitution cases. Even though he, as black man, was “considered a predator” (137) by the detectives he worked with, he still complied with the authorization of unlawful practices of police officers. Joe calls Braun from a pay phone, and threatens him that his clients will take Ms. Mudd’s disappearance to the police, then hangs up when Braun protests. He goes to an address he got for Chester, a store called Niles Aquariums and Fishes. He identifies as Tom Boll and pretends that he is looking for a job—a request that serves as “a pathological disruption” (Moten 2018a, 133). Since he is taken for a poorly educated, pitiful homeless man, he is immediately hired to take care of the junk in a storeroom in the back, a job that makes him work at the curb and “easily watch Chester and his men” (145). Once he is paid and Chester’s men are gone, he hits Chester, alone in his office, in the back of his head with a pistol, and asks why they let Chester off, unlike Nathali, even though he had twenty pounds of cocaine in his trunk. He asks for the name of the cop Chester talked to after the arrest, and learns it is Cortez, whom Chester thinks was Puerto Rican, making the deal with Nathali because she had information he needed to learn. When Joe returns to his office, he learns from Aja that Mel wants to meet him at Laniard’s Wine Bar, where Mel tells him they have to go to Staten Island, and they stop on the way at an abandoned church in a station house. Mel bought the building as a refuge and for business, after learning that it was the station house used by the Underground Railroad to free slaves: “People should break the law if it doesn’t suit them” (155). As they enter a room behind the altar, Joe sees a man, Porker, chained and bloody, a violent criminal whose real name is Simon Creighton, who Mel has been interrogating and torturing. Joe interrupts the torture, demanding Mel to ask him why he was at Liberté Café. Porker says he was hired by William James Marmot for him, Fido, and Vince “to catch a man with a red flower in his buttonhole, but he never came” (157). He confesses that they wanted to grab and question him about the name of his boss, for Marmot, a private security analyst, worked with a man named Augustine Antrobus, who works with private contractors. Joe redefines his embodied black masculinity, “emphasizing an ethic of responsibility” (White and Peretz 2010, 418), and he prevents Mel

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from killing Porker. Since he is reticent about using power that makes people vulnerable, Mel gives an injection that will put him to sleep till morning, leaving him at a rest stop for car and truck drivers. As Joe keeps reading the records Willa left with him, he reads the file on Lamont Charles, whom he visits. Lamont is in a wheelchair, and Joe introduces himself by his real name, explaining he is an ex-cop turned private detective, involved with the conviction of A Free Man, “set up to be killed and then, when that failed, framed” (165). When Lamont learns that Joe wants to prove that Valence and Pratt were dirty cops who tried to kill A Free Man, he explains that he himself was shot in the back by a man who must have worked with Valence and Pratt, for he constantly won by cheating at cards, thereby risking their profit. He says that the members of BBB that these cops could not kill included Lana, in prison, and Tanya, who went missing. Lamont continues that the two cops sold drugs to children and sold the children to child molesters: “Then they blackmailed the child molesters. They took over private business like gamblin’ and killed anybody [who] asked why” (166). Their vigilantism against the civilians they are supposed to protect evokes Lonnie Athens’s radical interactionist theory, in which he asserts that “interpersonal violence results from ‘dominative encounters’ over which an individual or group prevails, through the use of force, in asserting their will over another” (cited in Cazenave 2018, 239–40). Lamont believes that when A Free Man, who “was a war hero and schoolteacher” (166), opened a clubhouse where the kids could play and get help with their homework, he messed with these cops’ business, because BBB talked to the boys and girls they prostituted, and “organized marches in front of stores they protected.” Manny even hired a lawyer to sue the city, because he thought this was the only way “that would keep us safe from reprisals” (167). His community work offers “a transformative space” to the children and young people without compromising the integrity of black masculinity (Belle 2014, 299). But his lawyer is killed, which shows that A Free Man, indeed, challenged the power of whiteness in the city, disrupting the discursive association between the white power structure and the inner city, which is required to reinscribe the colonial strategies in policing: “To fully understand the colonial implications of contemporary policing, it is first necessary to describe the rise of one of the most significant internal colonies today: the urban ghetto” (Steinmetz et al. 2017, 71). Hence, the inner city serves as “an important tool” for isolating poverty, crime, and violence, a space identified with blackness, “causing African Americans [to be] targeted by the police and the broader criminal justice system” (Owusu-Bempah 2017, 27). At the end of their conversation, Lamont appreciates Joe’s attitude in asking “the right questions” (169) to save A Free Man, and gives Joe the address and a phone number of Miranda Goya, the girl for whom A Free Man put his life on the line to save her from prostitution.

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After Joe leaves Lamont, he stops at the building owned by Citizens Bank of Eastern Europe to see Jocelyn Bryor, who showed the doctored video to his ex-wife, but the black guard refuses to let him in without an appointment, treating him, another black man, as suspicious, doing “performative whiteness” 28 (Demirtürk 2012, 7) in the manner of a white racist. When Joe gets confrontational with him—“I didn’t come here to answer your questions, son”—the guard gets angry, “I’m not your son” (172). Joe uses his agency to force the guard to do his job professionally, identifying blindly with the cultural whiteness of the business world, rather than being a black ally: “But you are their bitch” (172). The Asian sentry interrupts the confrontational moment and calls Jocelyn, who agrees to see him, and as Joe walks into the elevator, the white guard respectfully presses the button for Jocelyn’s floor. Joe tells Jocelyn that she was the cop who handled his investigation before his incarceration, but he realizes that Jocelyn has felt guilty ever since. She was told by her old supervisor to forget about the case, for he was fired with no pension and the union could not help, which made her finally realize that he was set up as much as she was: “They used me to go after you because they knew how I felt about cops and sexual misconduct” (177). Hearing this, Joe realizes that Gladstone was given the assignment, but Nathali had been set up with no option. When Joe feels bad that Jocelyn never called him to tell what they had done, she tells him she thought they put him in jail to have him killed there. It dawns on him for the first time: “They were trying to kill me at first but then changed their minds. This rendition of my experience actually made sense. With a decent lawyer I had a good shot at getting the charges dismissed” (178). Even though he came to Jocelyn to blame her for framing him, and to get the names of the people with whom she worked, she says that they can still get killed: “[S]he was right. Whoever set me up like that wouldn’t hesitate at murder” (179). She hesitantly confirms the names of the men he gives, Adamo Cortez and Hugo Cumberland, but clarifies that there is only one man: Cortez was, in reality, Cumberland, “a private specialist sometimes used by the department” (179). When he insists on digging into the matter further, she finally discloses that she wanted to ask the woman in the office, who used to talk to Cortez, but that woman was replaced by Captain Holder, whose assistant told her that Cumberland was “just a name he used and that his real name was Paul Convert” (180). After Joe leaves the building and walks on the street, two official-looking SUVs stop, and men in dark uniforms put a black bag over his head and force him into the car. When the car stops, he guesses in Queens, he is chloroformed, and he wakes up in a basement with his hands cuffed behind him, but his legs are unfettered so he can walk around. He knows that his captors were after him for the frame, rather than A Free Man: “In both cases I was the pariah and they the judgment if not actually the law” (183). He falls

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asleep again and wakes up on the stool, and is surrounded by armed and masked men in black, and Cortez questions him about why he and “the Haitian cop” (183) talk about him, asking questions of Jocelyn and Little Exeter. These questions make it clear that Cortez and his men have had surveillance on him all through the investigation. When Joe answers him boldly that he never mentioned Cortez’s real name, in his inquiries, as “Mr. Paul Convert” (184), Cortez becomes vulnerable and exposed to Joe. He goes upstairs, leaving Joe alone: Joe knows that he made a huge mistake in revealing his knowledge of who Cortez really is, for he subverted the cultural whiteness, discursively embodied by Cortez and his bosses. Even though Cortez is not a white man, he works through the white power structure’s “panoptical strategies” (Bauman 1998, 50). However, Joe challenges whiteness by using his agency through employing, what I call “strategic blackness” (Demirtürk 2012, 23), meaning that he performs his self-identity: “But there comes a time when a man has to stand up and be heard, a time when their threats do not outweigh his freedom” (184). Joe acts quickly to escape from the place before they kill him. He shatters the stool to use one of the legs as a club, then deliberately makes the alarm go off. He hits the man who comes down the stairs, and manages to retrieve his automatic in time to shoot another man twice. He gets from the dead man the keys to his cuffs, a phone number, and a cell phone with his identity card for Security Managers Inc., “a worldwide prison, prisoner transport, and mercenary provider” (186). He finds a briefcase full of money, as “[p]ayment for my demise, no doubt” (186); he then handcuffs the unconscious guard to the table, getting his keys, and drives away in one of the SUVs. Knowing by experience that the state institutions, or their private entities, “rely on coercion to control behaviors” (Steinmetz et al. 2017, 70), Joe calls Aja, as he drives, to warn her that her mother, her stepfather, and she have to be out of town in an hour to be safe. He tells Aja he will talk to her later by texting the number using the code they made up, for such moments of crisis. Then he calls to tell Mel that people connected to cops abducted him with paid soldiers, planning to kill him. Mel tells Joe to ditch their car and phone, which he does at an underground garage in Midtown, and takes the subway to reach Name-it Storage, where he has a record under the name Nigel Beard. He feels at peace, knowing that he did not commit a crime, but had “every right to defend myself” from criminals “who would kill you just for wanting to reveal the truth” (189). Joe had taken a makeup class, and he now attaches a wig and a mustache, and uses make up with glasses to appear totally different, then goes to visit Antrobus Limited on the Fifth Avenue and identifies himself as Nigel Beard with a fake ID. When he tells the security guard to tell them it is about William James Marmot, he is allowed to ride the elevator to their floor, “experimenting with my new, disposable personality” (192). He meets with

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Antrobus, telling him that he brings some intelligence and wants to do business: “I’m a private agent who does work for those who need to stay in shadow. . . . Somebody representing a man named Stuart Braun hired me to bring him hopefully incriminating information on another man—William James Marmot” (196). Joe/Nigel tells Antrobus that Braun believes Marmot is leaning on him and needs leverage, for Joe says Braun knows Porker, who knows a man who claims that Marmot worked for Antrobus. Joe/Nigel makes a deal with Antrobus that for $6,000 in cash, “Mr. Marmot falls off my radar” (197). As Joe rides the ferry to Saint George dock, he knows that his deal will force Braun “to have to deal with me sooner or later” (198). He notices that a short white man came on the deck and asks, after Joe’s pay phone call, if he is “the niggah they call Cueball” (199). He tries to remember the last time somebody used the N-word to him, thinking even his “black male acquaintances had mostly given up that tag” (199). As the scene demonstrates, he experiences the moment of “being collapsed into the phenomenological or lived experience of the nigger” (Yancy 2008, 109). The word “nigger,” to use Stanley Cohen’s words, insulates racist whites “from experiencing fully the meaning of what they are saying,” and this form of ideological language “functions as a form of social control” (1985, 273). Joe feels his gun in his pocket, but an older man, Ernesto, warns Junior, “Leave him alone. He’s not Cueball” (200). When Junior leaves, Joe learns from Ernesto that he “lost his girl to a black man named Cueball” (200). Joe meets Mel at the subway station, 29 and as Mel cooks a meal, Joe shares his fight to prove a conspiracy against A Free Man and against himself. Mel understands why he wants to help A Free Man but cannot understand why Joe wants to prove he was framed by the cops. Joe explains that he wants to be exonerated—“I want the union to take my case and have me reinstated” (203)—and he wants to get Natches to admit he worked with Convert to frame him to end his career. 30 He goes to the campaign office to talk to Bob Acres, and he asks for help to call an NYPD inspector, Dennis Natches, to meet him at the English Teacup off Broadway in the afternoon, and to tell him that he gave a sealed envelope to Bob “to register with the Library of Congress” (208) without reading it in order to remain safe. He gives his fake name Nigel Beard for Natches, whom he wants Bob to tell that he does not know what the envelope contains other than that it has something to do with Adamo Cortez. Knowing that he has to operate outside the conventionally accepted frame of a detective in order to help decent people, he tells the congressman to give him a call whenever he needs any help. His performativity of blackness no longer represents the docility that white officers, guards, or inmates have assigned to black bodies, which he never internalized in prison, for his bodily enactment of race takes place in terms of an agency, found “paradoxically, in the possibilities opened up in and by that constrained appropriation of the regula-

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tory law” (J. Butler 1993, 12). Hence, his embodied subjectivity subverts the power embedded in the panoptic gaze of whiteness, for he chooses responsibility to another person, be it a white man Bob, who refuses to perform his whiteness as privilege to Joe, or a black man, A Free Man, who performs his blackness as solidarity with young black people. Joe/Nigel sits at the English Teacup, waiting for Natches, while Mel is in a specially designed van with firepower. Joe places listening device under the table, and sees that Natches’s man sits a few tables away. Mel also enters the restaurant and sits close to Natches’s guard, and Joe asks Inspector Natches, who sits at the table with a negative attitude, why he had to go through the experiences of brutality, “beaten, scarred, disgraced, imprisoned, and had my marriage torn apart by [them] without even a word of explanation or warning” (212). Natches feels uneasy but talks down to Joe, humiliating him as a disgraced cop whom he will never allow to be reinstated. Joe sees that his anger is a result of his fear, and humiliates him by making him aware that he has seen his bodyguard a few tables away. All he wants to learn is why they let Paul Convert frame him; they tried to murder him twice, an act that implicates “sites of power” 31 (Katz 2015, 310). Mel in the meantime goes and sits at the same table with Natches’s bodyguard. Finally, Natches explains that Joe was an ordinary man, acting beyond limits, and they should have taken care of him in the past. He seems to enact his embodied whiteness, to use Shannon Sullivan’s words, “as a corporeal entitlement to spatiality” (qtd in Yancy 2008, 15). Even though Natches wants him dead, Joe lets him turn around and see that both of their men are eyeing each other at the same table, because power always changes hands: “You should know that, Dennis. Your man over there with my man’s gun on him should know that” (214). Natches and his bodyguard leave defeated and intimidated, for Joe knows that they would never be able to open fire on them in a public place. 32 Joe, who wears a mustache to look different, goes to the actors’ co-up to visit Miranda Goya, whom Lamont was going to inform about his arrival. After explaining that he is concerned about the defense of A Free Man, they compare notes. Joe tells Miranda that he heard there was a conspiracy against A Free Man and the BBB, and suspicious people are still trying “to make sure his story is silenced” (221). Miranda is a makeup artist; she was sent to school by the BBB, after A Free Man, “Manny,” freed her with almost a hundred other children who were forced to do dirty things for Valence and Pratt. 33 She feels guilty that she cannot help Joe out, for Manny does not want her to come even for a visit to protect her from trouble. When Joe asks her to try to remember anything that may help A Free Man’s defense, she mentions a man called Burns, who was with her when A Free Man busted in and saved him too. Burns’s real name is Theodore, who is on heroin, for “the only way he stays alive is to be high” (224), having been burned by a sadistic client. He realizes that both had gone through the same type of harassment

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and rape, and feels that “I was as serious as a slave who said no more to his chains” (224). As Joe leaves the building, he believes that there is an abundance of evil in the world, feeling that is “my responsibility if not my fault” 34 (225). When he goes to a coffee shop, he calls Andre Tourneau to ask him to get his son Henri to call his number from a pay phone. Joe tells Henri on the phone that he talked with Natches and wants him to check a street name for him. When Henri calls him “uncle,” this sense of closeness touches him: “The days I followed down my expulsion from the police and the Man conviction I was also learning that I had a multifaceted life with many planes of beauty to it” (229). Then he receives a new text that Burns, a junkie, lives at the Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter in the East Village. 35 When he goes to the shelter to find Burns, Hester, who manages the place, suspects that he is asking for Theodore, and she calls a black man, Mikey, to lead him to a shed up on the roof, and she follows them to introduce him to Theodore. Joe explains to Burns that he was hired to prove that A Free Man was victimized by a conspiracy, directed against him by Valence and Pratt. In spite of the fact that Hester does not want him to talk to Burns, acting overprotectively because he is still “vulnerable” (238), Burns says that, on the contrary, he is “strong” enough to survive that life he has to live: “I could take it” 36 (239). Joe takes him to a coffee shop to talk with him, and he asks what Burns remembers about A Free Man to help Joe clear his name. Burns remembers how he was forced to suck Pratt’s penis at least once a week, while Pratt held a gun to his head and threatened to kill him if he ever told Valence, which might be called, as an act of, what Noel Cazenave calls, “institutionalized hypermasculinity” (Cazenave 2018, 241). He has been running away from childhood sexual abuse until it caught up to him; even though he was saved by A Free Man three times, knowing his addiction, Valence and Pratt still continued to abuse him. Burns discloses that he was the one who “set up Manny for gettin’ killed” (243), though the court would never believe a junkie’s testimony. Since A Free Man used to mess with their business, the two cops wanted to “talk” to him, a coded word meaning to “kill” (244), offering money and his freedom in exchange for setting up A Free Man, saying he “had dirt on them and to meet me at the Seagate Pier down on the West Village side” (244). Burns also had to help them carry a dead body to an abandoned church, and he leads Joe to the courtyard, but Joe notices that the hinges were well oiled, indicating some people recently used the iron door, and they come into “a room piled with the corpses of at least a dozen souls” (247), most of whom were shorn of flesh by rats. When Joe recognizes the fresh corpse on the top as Ms. Mudd, who was recently murdered, Burns tells him that people who caused these cops a problem were murdered and their bodies were disposed of. Burns had to help carry the corpses here, a confession that demonstrates how these two cops converted “coercive into

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legitimate authority” (Wrong 1997, 86). Burns believes the business is over, but Joe reminds him of Ms. Mudd’s body, which means that someone knows the place to dispose of her body. When they part, Joe feels shaken by the impact of “the mass-murder gravesite” (249), an act that can be viewed through the lens of “necropolitics” where the dead bodies not only remain “outside the normal state of law,” but are also reduced to the status of “meaningless corporealities” (Mbembe 2003, 13, 35). Since the “[urban] palimpsest” almost hides the traces of the black holocaust in the subtexts of the city, as a “multiply coded text” (Huyssen 2003, 52, 63), it is difficult to speak about the horror of these police murders at the subterranean terrain. Here, Joe seems to speak “from these sites of unspeakability” (D.L. Martin 2007, 17) in urban spaces, governed with a colonial rationality of violence as integral to everyday life. After having a nightmare, Joe decides to meet with Lana in prison, and goes to Ray Ray Wanamaker and Company in Central Park to take the bus. 37 When they get to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Joe asks to see the assistant warden Lauren Bachnell. 38 When he finally meets with Lauren in a room, he asks to see Lana Ruiz to get information from her for a job. Joe meets Lana and tells her that he has talked with Lamont, Miranda, and Theodore, and asks if she can tell him anything about Valence and Pratt. She says that Valence told Bill Makepeace that if she keeps quiet, she will be released before her daughter, now four years old, gets to high school. Learning that Billy is the cop who is the father of her daughter, a relationship that guarantees her safety, Joe wants to talk to Billy about Valence and Pratt. Joe gives $700 of Antrobus’s money to her, saying “I have a daughter. I love her more than this life or the next” (263), and he turns down her desire for sex. Joe calls Billy as a friend of A Free Man, and asks if he is willing to testify against the two dead cops, “set the mother of your child free, and maybe keep an innocent man from getting executed” (264). When Billy warns him as an officer of the law about his threats, Joe mentions that Billy also committed a crime for hiding the truth about the corpses of people killed by the two cops and “if there’s even a shred of a suspicion that you knew what they were up to” (264). He also implies that his having a daughter with Lana explains why “she wasn’t dead like the rest of her friends” (265), but Billy immediately hangs up. Mel, who does not trust the law, calls him to say they need a plan to save A Free Man, because Mel predicts the reality most likely to take place: “Man is dead no matter what way you look at it. And the police department is never gonna admit to cops as bad as Valence and Pratt. Neither will they admit to framing you” (270). He proposes to kidnap A Free Man, for he knows a man in Panama who could help him disappear, but they need some money for a plane in order to make it happen. Joe gets drunk and barely wakes up to find Gladstone in the room, who says he learned from Lauren on Facebook that Joe left Bedford on Ray Ray’s

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commuter line. Gladstone waited for him and followed him to where he stays to explain that the framers still want Joe dead. Gladstone clarifies his position, that he was in need of money because his nephew was in law school and he bought a house for his wife. When he told his friends what Joe was doing on the docks, the people involved with the heroin business wanted to kill him. Joe never knew who gave the order for framing and killing him, and how high it went in the office, but he realizes Gladstone, who gave them “a better choice” (273), admits to helping frame him with a white woman, to keep him alive. But Convert planned it in such a way that Jocelyn got the case, turning Monica against him, whereas Gladstone had planned it so that Joe would be bailed out, but once Joe’s face was slashed, he put him in solitary. When Joe feels free to speak out and accuses Gladstone of destroying his life, believing Gladstone is now sweet-talking him, Gladstone replies, “I saved your life” (273), ignoring his repeated question about whether he is now sent to kill Joe. Gladstone tells him that the people with whom he did illegal business even know that he’s renting Thurman’s basement. This information exposes Gladstone’s continued relationship with the people who framed Joe, and that fact raises the question of whether Gladstone would have sacrificed Joe’s career and life if he were white. Gladstone’s disclosure of his continued surveillance of Joe’s activities functions as the “Controltalk” (Cohen 1985, 275). It is clear that Joe is seen as an intruder, making noise, while he works through the white power structure, and uses a subversive strategy to challenge the discursive mechanisms of whiteness, never giving up on gathering information to exonerate himself. Joe and Gladstone speak different languages in fact: When Joe accuses him of having done wrong, Gladstone casually answers, “Maybe. But . . . the brass now is all new. The people I worked with are off the force” (274). When Joe tells him that Paul Convert is still around, Gladstone, who has been aware of the incident in Queens, says that Convert is in trouble, knowing that the police department “can’t afford a scandal” (274). Gladstone’s indirect revelation of the truth about Joe’s plight makes Joe recognize the fact that he will never be exonerated, “much less reinstated” (274). He realizes Gladstone knows about his investigation into A Free Man’s case, carrying the implication that he has had him under constant surveillance. Gladstone explains that rumours are always shared in the police force, meaning the corruption of Valence and Pratt was known in the NYPD. His comment reflects the day-to-day reality that police officers have almost “limitless discretion,” which they use “in ways that disproportionately affect black men” (A.J. Davis 2017c, 178). Despite their corruption, which he admits earned the two cops a lot of money, it is the rule that “nobody kills a cop unless it’s the last resort” (275). What Gladstone voices here is that the institutional approach to criminal cops entails “inaction,” reinforcing an underhanded approval of policing as a “violence-centered racial control

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mechanism” (Cazenave 2018, 116, 122). Joe falls asleep out of exhaustion, knowing that he can exonerate neither himself nor A Free Man; however, he remains determined to fight for the truth: “All I had was the truth and the certainty that I had to do something about that truth. If that meant breaking the law, I was ready. If it meant missing my child’s graduation, that would have to be” (275). This determination even to break the law to save a black man’s life is shaped by how his framing teaches him “not to want to be governed” (Foucault 2007, 46). Hence, in order to do that, he has to transgress the white supremacist norms of behavior that imprison his true self in their discursive conception of the black body as the criminal. In other words, he is becoming aware that he has a dynamic embodied subjectivity beyond Gladstone’s white gaze, which sees him merely as a victim who is in constant need of help. Joe’s reminding Gladstone, in their conversation before he sleeps, of how he has been vulnerable to violence and injustice intensifies Gladstone’s sense of guilt, undoing his whiteness. Shelby Steele, in fact, describes how “white guilt” introduces “a new mechanism of power,” not pertaining to “a guilt of conscience,” but to white people feeling—or fear being, in Gladstone’s case here—stigmatized by racism; they feel a “lack of moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not” (Steele 2007, 8, 7). He fails to see that Joe’s framing and incarceration are what exposes his ignorance of how the white identity is contingent on the discursive construct of blackness as criminality. His surveillance of Joe on behalf of the people he secretly collaborates with shows that Gladstone engages in a covert racist act, still siding with the white sites of power to maintain his relational authority, reinvoking the history of white brutal practices, which have long aimed “to discipline Black bodies” (Yancy 2008, 8). While he tries to justify why he acted that way, Gladstone sees himself on the right side of the law, even as he serves the white influential men who resort to lawlessness. His allegiance to the white power structure, based on his ambition for having wealth and status, exposes how the ideology of whiteness functions in everyday context. Even though Gladstone does not seem a racist and acts as Joe’s best friend, something Joe himself recognizes, Gladstone enacts “unconscious habits” of whiteness (Sullivan 2006, 22). He does not see race when he is with Joe, and he is sorry for what happened to Joe, but firstly, he did not do anything active to stop the framing itself; in fact, he played along with it: “His normative whiteness was expressed through his maintenance of the status quo” (Yancy 2008, 38). Secondly, he is sorry for A Free Man too, but he keeps his surveillance on Joe as a show of power over him, that Joe cannot go behind his back. Thirdly, he helps Joe, while he also reminds him repeatedly of how he saved his life, a patronizing act that points to the larger issue of how whiteness gets performed by the “good white people” (Applebaum 2010a, 33). Anna Stubblefield links white supremacy to white identity in the

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sense that “the social norms experienced by white people in American society pressure white people to prove that they are ‘good’ white people by stigmatizing black people” (2005, 143). What all this boils down to is that Gladstone “governs” Joe’s life and actions even as a friend, and his continued surveillance of Joe proves suspicious to constitute the power of his embodied whiteness. Gladstone’s expression of his “resentment” toward Joe’s plight is “largely irrelevant for the maintenance of white privilege” (Bonilla-Silva 2018b, 7). He avoids admitting, even to himself, how invested he is materially and institutionally in whiteness, which informs his social location. As the friend he often claims to be, he never even thought about risking his normative status: On the contrary, he used it, because his primary concern is not in “promoting [police] legitimacy, [and] enhancing police-community collaborations” (Kochel 2011, 368), or even tending to Joe’s traumatic experience that affects his present life, but rather is about his own survival. Gladstone’s guilt concerns feeling sorry for Joe, and later for A Free Man, but he is totally oblivious to how criminal justice works so poorly for black people. Rebecca Aanerud observes that guilt “tends simply to reinscribe the centrality of the white subject, producing a self-serving paralysis,” because it hardly leads “to a commitment to social change” (2015, 103, 107). From Gladstone’s view, Joe and his acts have to be knowable, measured by white normative assumptions. However, Gladstone does not fully know how Joe allies with people outside the law (read: Mel) in order to make justice happen, and hence, Joe reclaims an embodied autonomy. We see those aspects of Joe’s personality, or his lived interior self, in a way that Gladstone cannot: Joe embodies the black body as a site of resistance, just like Beatrice, for instance, opening up a space for shift and change, for “the Black body is a process,” and hence Joe’s performativity of dynamic blackness “is ontologically excessive” of the white gaze (Yancy 2008, 111). Revisiting the past and hearing Gladstone’s revelation of his involvement with the forces he submitted to fills Joe with a desire for retaliation. Even though he swings in the dark about Gladstone’s secrets, his anger with the lawless power of the people gives him courage to try fake ways to take away their false judgments. He calls Braun again, as Tom Boll, and says that his real motive was not to find Ms. Mudd, but to prove his previous case that A Free Man was innocent. Joe subverts his “autonomous agency” (Scully 2013, 212) through his lie that his clients heard he backed away from the case, and informs Braun that Ms. Mudd is dead, and her corpse was found among other corpses of people killed by the cops, for whom A Free Man faces the death penalty. Joe does not believe that Braun had anything to do with Ms. Mudd’s murder because he knows Marmot was sent by Braun to kill Joe, and he also tells Braun that he told Marmot’s boss that he knows he was hired by Braun “to indict him” (278), but Braun says Joe in reality turned

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their attention not to himself but to Braun’s daughter. Braun admits that he backed down in the A Free Man case because his daughter was abducted: “They have her somewhere and they said unless I do as they instructed that she’d be hurt and then killed” (278). Joe wants to save Braun’s seven-yearold daughter, but makes a deal with Braun to get a court date set for A Free Man, who warns him that it is impossible “to change the verdict unless I prove that he didn’t pull the trigger” (279). Joe calls Gladstone to check what he knows about Augustine Antrobus and William James Marmot, and Gladstone knows this is about A Free Man, whom he cannot exonerate because he killed two cops. Joe tells Gladstone that he will stop trying to exonerate A Free Man if Convert leaves him alone, and with that condition Gladstone promises to email all the files they have. So now it is Joe who reverses their power relationship, because he uses Gladstone’s influence for a better purpose, even if Gladstone thinks otherwise. He forwards the emailed files to Mel, and calls his grandmother’s friend Roger Ferris, whom he encourages to take his grandmother to a music event that night, where he will join them. When he asks a big favor from him, an item for A Free Man, Roger says, “I’ve been a crook all my life, Joe. It’s nice to know I could use that talent to do something right” (282). Joe meets Mel at Pleasant Plains, Staten Island, because he needs a crazy man like Mel to help him through righting “[m]y world [that] went crazy a dozen years ago” (283). Mel appreciates his integrity as a good cop in the past, and feels he is like a brother to him, providing “the friendship I could take for granted” (284). Mel takes him to the building where he tortured Porker, where Marmot sits nervously, for Mel could not grab Antrobus, being an extremely dangerous man. When Mel asks him where Chrissie Braun is held, and Marmot pretends that he does not know. Mel shoots him in the left foot and pistol-whips him when he tries to fight back. Mel asks where Ms. Mudd is, and Marmot tells the truth that she is buried in a church in the West Village, and that the cops he had worked with “used it to hide the bodies they made” (286). When Mel threatens putting holes in his body until he bleeds to death, Marmot gives an address in Yonkers where Chrissie was “guarded by two women he knew” (287). As they prepare to go out to find her, Joe, who hates Marmot, feels an empathic understanding, for a few days ago he was “in a similar situation, desperately struggling to survive” (287). Mel makes Marmot write a confession for the murder of Ms. Mudd, the kidnapping of the girl, and “the subsequent extortion of her father” (288). Marmot confesses that he helped the dead cops with their drug and the sex slave distribution, that he threw “a wrench in Man’s appeal just to keep all that quiet” (289), and that his men murdered Ms. Mudd and kidnapped Chrissie. In short, he names everyone, including Porker, Valence, and Pratt, except Antrobus to guarantee that he will not get killed by his men. Mel gives an injection to put Marmot to sleep, and tells Joe that he will leave Marmot,

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while unconscious, in a place to be found by cops, with the confession pinned to his vest so that the cops will find Chrissie and the graveyard, knowing that sooner or later Antrobus will not let him live. Mel and Joe’s lawless practices bring justice: Since the criminal justice system does not work well for black people, these lawless practices serve as “the intervention of choice” (Steinmetz et al. 2017, 72). Joe attends the concert with Roger and his grandmother, who are getting close. Roger discreetly lets him know that he made the item Joe has asked for earlier, and Joe says his friend’s friend will handle it. Joe also calls Aja to let her tell her mother and Coleman that it is safe for them to return home, but he cannot satisfy Aja’s expectation to prove the dangerous people wrong: “That will never happen. But I know now how to turn my back on all that” (291). In his ability to question himself, he experiences black interiority as the critical space of challenging the normative values that otherwise reduced him to a criminal. Joe achieves a sense of closure, and self-affirmation as a form of (self)liberation in his use of “performative agency” (Rothenberg 2010, 99) to connect with others, here Mel and Roger, to make a difference: “In my life I’d been slashed, stabbed, and shot. I’d broken bones and had bruises that went so deep they never fully went away. But I was feeling . . . young and hopeful” (292). Joe calls Willa to ask her to come to his office that afternoon, and calls Braun to let him know that he kept his word: Since Marmot’s unconscious body was found and reported in the newspaper, and Chrissie was found and brought to her father, he expects Braun to do what he promised so that Chrissie will never know the dirt of her father and continue to be proud of him. Joe stands up for himself even more strongly than before, as he admits to himself: “My time in the prison cell, Gladstone Palmer’s betrayals, even the loss of my shield no longer had a hold on my soul” (294). His constant act of disembodiment from the discursive construct of the black male body as “potential murderer” enables him to unleash his sense of being an autonomous man of agency. He seems to respond indirectly to Michel Foucault’s notion that “the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (qtd in Allen 2008, 2). Amy Allen finds space of autonomy implicit in Foucault’s statement in the sense that it demonstrates “the capacity to reflect critically upon the state of one’s self and, on this basis, to chart paths for future transformation” (2008, 2). Given that, Joe seems even more tactful in his meeting with Willa, pretending to share her surprise at reading in the paper about the abduction of Braun’s daughter with an insight into his loss of interest in A Free Man’s case. Joe wants Willa to get the note from a man (Mel), who will come to his office, and bring it to A Free Man, for there is “an item in the note that is vital to his case” (295). He wants her to take the item to A Free Man, and in

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the room reserved for private meetings with lawyers, tell him to hide it until he is back in his cell. He convinces Willa that if she follows these instructions, A Free Man will have a chance to be saved. After Willa leaves, Mel arrives at Joe’s office, and they share information about a medical clinic that deals with law enforcement. They mention a powder, the item in the packet, that is called “a derivation of the shigella bacteria [that] targets the appendix but has a short life span, just long enough for our purposes” (298). Mel has contact with Russians in prison, and tells Joe that this item comes from KGB laboratories. Joe promises to get the plans of the clinic, for the security is weak and its existence is hardly known by people. Joe reads in the paper that Marmot, tortured by a masked man and forced to write a note, disappeared from the hospital where he was treated for his wounds. Meanwhile, Joe has all of Sunday for self-reflexive thinking, wondering “how I kept my lawless side down for so long” (300), a thought that makes him realize that he “no longer missed being a policeman” (300). Although his acts of “lawbreaking” are meant to assume the form of “civil disobedience” (Cazenave 2018, 262), he also knows he was not a real criminal, but “those flexible rules of law could not bend as far as I was willing to go; as I needed to go” (300). When he goes to his office, he finds a message on his office line from a Reggie Teegs, who calls himself an “unofficial representative of the parties that you’ve been negotiating with.” He continues: “We would all like to keep this matter outside the legal system, and so if you call me we can meet and I will offer you a settlement on behalf of my clients” (301). He keeps it as a secret from Mel, because he senses that what seems to be a request is really “an immediate threat” (301). Joe calls and sets up the meeting, at a wine bar in Columbus Circle in thirty minutes, and Teegs will be identified by his orange bow tie. A man of olive skin color who could even pass as a white man, Mr. Teegs’s pompous and arrogant behavior—assuming a colonial attitude in, what Mary Louis Pratt calls, “contact zones” 39 (cited in M.M.O. Rodriguez 2011, 63)—unnerves Joe, because he acts much like those criminal justice people, the police and their proxies who break the laws that provide them with the authority to maintain it. Teegs apologizes for their “regrettable decision to end your life” (303), and Joe realizes that Teegs worked for those people “who used Gladstone to frame me back in the days when I was a cop” (303). Teegs implies that the agent who made the decision to carry it out—Joe knows this was Convert—has been dealt with, an act which reveals how it is not only white police/officials’ performativity of whiteness that is “saturated with power,” but also “the spaces that are brought into being through these performances.” Gladstone and embodied discursive practices of the “shady” people who set up Joe establish power relations “that are constitutive of performative political space” (Schurr 2014, 98, 99). When Teegs offers compensation for Joe’s bitter experiences in the form of $450,000 in untraceable bills, Joe thinks about how he can use the

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money to put Aja through college, and for the costs of the jobs involving A Free Man’s case in the next day. The true identity of the people Teegs represents remains a mystery, but their complicity implies how “the expansion of the ‘shadow state’” (Phelps 2017, 55) directly affects lives of people who want to follow the law, rather than break it. Teegs wants him to feel hopeful about the future, for he has managed to stay alive despite their plans to kill him—an ironic statement on the biopolitics that is inherent in black everyday life, fueled by “the logics of the white racist imaginary” (Yancy 2017a, 5). As Joe spends the evening in his office, he thinks about the bodies of the victims he has uncovered, some of whom he avenged: “I thought about the truth that undergirded the lies circulated by the institutions of governments, large and small. That was, I knew, my excuse for taking the payoff” (305). The next day when Joe meets Aja for lunch, he gives her a small brown envelope, telling her to keep it in a safe place, and to open it only if he is hurt or “in big trouble” (308). He does not tell her that three hundred thousand dollars of “my bribe money would be in a safe-deposit box where only she and I were signatories” (309). Joe meets with Mel to talk about their plans to get A Free Man out of the clinic. Mel says there is a space on the sixth floor between the back of the clinic and the Kershaw and Associates building where they can transfer A Free Man to the Kershaw building and exit the building on the side door where there are no security cameras. They also place a tiny transmitter under the hospital bed so that they can hear whatever happens in the room. Joe expects that A Free Man will read the note, take the powder, and call the guard when he feels the first symptoms of abdominal pains and fever. He thinks back again that he was not a rapist, while being busted with Nathali, and A Free Man was not a criminal, even though he killed the two cops, who were trying to murder him: “We were both mostly innocent men slated to take the fall for the real criminals. We would never receive justice from law enforcement or the courts, and so the only thing that could be done was to take the law into our own hands” (312–13). Although his turn to lawlessness makes him feel that he is doing wrong by collaborating with Mel for a “prison break” (313), he knows that this is the only way to accomplish the task in the face of what the narrator in Shannon Holmes’s Never Go Home Again calls “a legal form of lynching” (2004, 17). Joe now has the opportunity to disrupt the vicious cycle of punitive practices to produce space for change for another black man. Joe uses his agency not only in saving a brother, but in becoming a full person by building, with a black man whom he does not even know personally, an affective “embodied relationality” (McCarthy and Prokhovnik 2014, 19). As they hear A Free Man being brought in and chained to the bed, Joe is “no longer worried about right and wrong because it was a time for action” (313). When all is quiet, Joe and Mel go to the clinic from the Kershaw

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building, wearing dark ski masks, and they cut the bolt that chained A Free Man to the bed. Joe rushes into the hall to get a wheelchair for A Free Man, since no sentry or camera was used for VIP clients, then Mel goes to Kershaw to pick up the stuff they left. As Joe takes A Free Man to the elevator, he thinks that Man could be “a radical historian college professor” (317), if he had not been robbed of his career and the freedom. Once they are safely outside on the street, they leave the wheelchair and carry A Free Man into Mel’s van with a fake sign, “Hobart and Sons Construction” (317). While Mel drives them to a private airport, Joe feels that he had done “something real” (317), unlike when he worked as a cop. Since Mel will go with the pilot, he wants Joe to keep living his everyday life, not to arouse any suspicion. Joe gives Mel the duffel bag and $25,000 to cover his costs, out of the $150,000 for A Free Man. Considering A Free Man “one’a my people,” Mel sees Joe “on the other side of the wall doing what’s right” (318). When they are gone, Joe parks the van in an underground parking lot, and goes back home, hoping that he would not be recognized in his disguise with the hat and whiskers. The newspapers give the account of the prison escape, while the people on Braun’s list of visitors to A Free Man were all interrogated to no avail. After going through all the trouble that pushed him to walk on the edge of the law, Joe is happy to stand up for A Free Man, but as far as the NYPD is concerned, A Free Man slipped through their fingers. Mel brings a small memory chip that recorded A Free Man’s message for his wife, and Joe gives the address of his mother-in-law for his wife to receive it. Gladstone visits Joe in his office, feeling guilty for his part in ruining Joe’s life and career, and he confesses to saving his life, as a coping mechanism, despite Joe’s belief that he sold him out: “I couldn’t have stopped them from doing something. I tried to tell them to pay you off then, but they said they couldn’t take the chance” (321) with a cop then, serving under oath. Gladstone’s claim of saving his life reinforces his belief in “the saving powers of whiteness” (Yancy 2008, 201) and reinforces his lack of acknowledgment of his complicity, and hence, he deploys what Barbara Applebaum refers to as “distancing strategies” (2010b, 10). Despite his thinking in terms of “guilt and blame” seeming “to recenter and privilege white feelings,” we never see Gladstone ask for his retirement, for instance, instead of living a dishonorable life with no agency in his continued allegiance to the white vicious people of power, seeped in an “epistemic closure” (Applebaum 2015, 15). Being a white ally is problematic, particularly when Gladstone is motivated by his paternalism, but he does not see how the ideology of whiteness “makes tyrants out of human beings” (Yancy 2008, 247). Even though Joe is completely in the dark about Gladstone’s secret deals, he now comes to understand and forgive him, because he himself also transgressed the law, although for different reasons: “I get it now. Back then I didn’t understand. I thought I knew the rules, but now I see that the rules don’t cover every damn

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thing” (321). Gladstone, who never considered various ramifications of the situation, wants to make sure he does not lose Joe as a friend, and Joe assures him he will continue to attend the regular poker game: “After all you did, I should let you win a little of that money. And you’re right, you did save my life” (322). Late at night, Joe watches A Free Man’s message on the memory chip to his wife, who looks happy that he is now absolutely free and holds a glimmer of hope for the future. He tells them he loves them without giving a hint of where he is right now, and promises that they will be together “as soon as I can make that happen” (322). He also tells them that he did not do anything wrong: “Don’t listen to what they say. Your heart knows the truth” (322). This moment brings peace and closure to Joe, at the end of the novel, although he is still hurting for the injustice done to him: “I felt that I was set free along with Man. It was a deep grinding feeling that hurt but at the same time felt like the hand of some momentary apparition of God” (322). A Free Man’s escape, arranged by Joe and Mel, is an intervention into the state of his imposed vulnerability in prison, for escape reveals the core of “the social conflict, and it constitutes a form of creative subversion capable of challenging and transforming the conditions of power” (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008, 56). Hence, Joe’s criminal acts of prison break and escape to another country are not signs of weakness, but on the contrary, they are subversive strategies to transform black vulnerability to embodied and institutional violence into a challenge against “the law’s consistent rejection of black self-defense” (Sexton 2017, 3). ***** Disengagement is not an option for Joe, and his resistance involves questioning how the criminal justice system operates by means of the racist assumptions that deny the complexity of black interiority. His insightful, but sometimes reckless, practices help him open, to use Melanie E.L. Bush’s words, discursive “cracks in the wall of whiteness” (2011, 2) to interrupt the white normative gaze, implicated in the racial script of black man. He contests and intervenes in the carceral spaces of the racial politics of violence as he celebrates living in the interstices of his blackness as an ongoing embodied process, his interior subjectivity, and the normative expectations of his “framed” criminality. Like A Free Man, Joe has had to break the law in order to access a space to retain his humanity and lead a livable life outside the discursive prison of injustice. He has skin in the game, for he goes through remarkable shifts and walks on the edge of the law. He is an insightful but flawed character, but he has no family to watch his back except his daughter and a few friends. He figures into an imperfection at times, doing extra-legal practices. As Ibram Kendi notes that black individuals are not race represen-

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tatives: “Black people need to be their imperfect selves around White people, around each other, around all people,” because “it is those imperfections that make Black people human, make Black people equal to all other imperfectly human groups” (2016, 505). Joe starts to change as a person, entangled in, what Iceweasel describes, in Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, as a “war of norms” (2017, 330). Joe stops himself or Mel from killing another man, an act of breakthrough that interrupts the “vicious cycle of stereotyping, killing, and the racial oppression,” an act that reveals his refusal to let “negative emotions set the stage for such fatal dominative encounters” (Cazenave 2018, 245, 282). Joe ultimately stands for what he believes he has to, because to be a flawed human is something more important than being an exonerated heroic cop. By refusing to be limited by racist identifications, he opens cracks in the law enforcers’ regulating acts of his social space and exposes the carceral regimes of control. He mobilizes against the persistent racialized vulnerability to resist the interruption of the social relations of blackness through physical and discursive incarceration. Even as the criminalization of black everyday life demands that we think about social change, we also see that Joe liberates himself from white racist norms into those lived experiences of his deliberate choice on his own terms, an act of self-transformation that elaborates “a dynamic space that is always becoming” (Jackson and Mazzei 2013, 267). Elizabeth Alexander, in her interpretation, articulates how the black man is an ongoing project of becoming, striving “to enter the philosophical space of the articulated ‘I am’” (2004, 69). It would be unrealistic to think that Joe can change the white supremacist normative social order, or the criminal justice system, while it is his activism that shows that he performs his blackness in living his everyday life, not only based, as Fred Moten would say, on “an experience of interiority,” but even more so, it is “an experience of exteriority, it’s an exteriorization” (Moten 2015). His everyday life is no longer dominated by the anxieties of vulnerability, governed by the white dominant culture’s discursive “production of everyday space” (Lefebvre 2008b, 134) for black men. In looking to A Free Man “to model courage” (S. Chandler 2018, 6), Joe comes to discover the rich complexity of being human, infiltrating his self-perception that black people do not have to live as discursive objects of the white gaze. He develops a distinct formation of blackness that invites a critical examination of whiteness, while he resists “the everyday mechanisms that reinforce and reproduce dominant narratives about race, racism, and racialization” (Bush 2004, 244). Noel Cazenave argues that Black Lives Matter, which has expanded over the years into the national Movement for Black Lives, can exploit the vulnerabilities in many institutions of the racial state, while African American individuals can also mobilize to target specific government and private entities. In saving A Free Man’s life, Joe certainly employs such subversive

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strategies as his “refusal to co-operate with police and investigative bodies” by not sharing the full information or truth with the people and institutions he tries to partially cooperate (Cazenave 2018, 281). Since he, with the help of Mel, takes A Free Man’s body from the hospital without even Gladstone’s knowledge, their act is not a simple prison break—a crime against the law, indeed—but an effective act of intervention in racialized power relations. Even though there is a limit to what any individual, such as Joe here, can achieve in striving for social change, Judith Butler argues that there is always room for “subversive agency” because he can, in Barbara Applebaum’s words, enact “the possibility to disrupt the repetition of social norms” (cited in Applebaum 2010a, 64). The truth of the matter is that Joe, as an individual, has already made the move that constitutes “an effective force in making black lives matter,” reinforcing what stands for Mosley’s indirect response to the central concern of Black Lives Matter, which is “the basic human right to live” including the lives of A Free Man and himself (Cazenave 2018, 286). In this context, Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea asks us to constitute the black male body outside the framework of normative conception of racialized crime to make possible a rupture in the present, rather than believing that change will come in the future. Producing the space for radical alliances to fulfill the two black men’s common dreams of freedom in “dissent” bears the hope that an alternative political imagination can, indeed, be developed within the existing strategies of policing and incarceration, even if it takes criminal acts to envision freedom as part of a liberatory praxis. By mapping the carceral state’s racialized spaces, then, the novel situates the politics of the criminalization of blackness within broader systems of violence and dispossession, while it challenges the systemic dehumanization of black people, who, as Floyd W. Hayes suggests, “may have no alternative but to undertake new strategies of political protest, popular resistance, and armed self-defense” (2015, 885). Situated in politically and culturally black spaces of incarceration and violence, the novel’s deconstruction of the insidious operations of whiteness help us, the readers, who live through the joy of dynamic activism in the Black Lives Matter era, to negotiate the discursive regimes of racialized control in the face of black people’s subversive politics in their reinscriptions of shifting construct of black criminality in the service of justice in everyday life. NOTES 1. David J. Leonard, in Playing while White, addresses the racism issues, regarding black and brown athletes whose arrests are always connected to “larger discourses surrounding sexual violence, or masculinity inside and outside of sports” (Leonard 2017, 91).

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2. Because one is only reminded of the colonial era in U.S. history when the police, like the military, act as law enforcers, who represent “the interests of the dominant classes” (Steinmetz, Schaefer, and Henderson 2017, 70). 3. Kendi continues: “To undermine racial discrimination, Americans must focus their efforts on those who have the power to undermine racial discrimination” (2016, 509). 4. It is a striking fact to see it in “the criminalization and overrepresentation of Black and Latino communities in the criminal justice system” (Omori 2017, 36). 5. A man named Kristoff Hale offered him a twenty-year renewable lease simply because another cop, Joe’s former dispatch sergeant Gladstone Palmer, had overlooked his son Laiph’s getting away with sexual assault of a woman. Joe, who was a cop thirteen years ago and would gladly have put Laiph in prison, knows by experience about the unlawful behavior in subjective applications of the rules: “The law is a flexible thing—on both sides of the line—influenced by circumstance, character, and, of course, wealth or lack of same” (4). No longer influenced by his sexual drives, Joe remembers that his sexual desire for women caused him to forget his responsibilities. 6. He realizes that he is not safe even in a private cell, when a convict, Mink, splashes a bucket of urine through his cell door. The guards do not even care to get his cell cleaned, for he is conceived as a black body, who somehow deserves to be demeaned. 7. Rashad Shabazz, in fact, uses the term “spatialized blackness” to underscore black life as a discursive prison, pointing to how “mechanisms of constraint [are] built into architecture, urban planning, and systems of control” (Shabazz 2015, 2). 8. Much like in real life outside the prison, white men feel he deserves violence—including one inmate, who even knows his name and threatens him, shouting from his cell, “when I get outta here I’m’a do the same to your wife an’ little girl” (15). 9. Gladstone signed the official complaint papers of Nathali, which was sent as an email from the chief of detectives. 10. But Monica does not want to see him or bail him out, and files for divorce, because the detective on the case, Jocelyn Bryor, showed her the tape. 11. His sense of himself is destabilized by realizing he could not even rely on his former wife Monica, who never considered that he had been set up and took him to court to ban him from custody or even visitation with Aja-Denise, then fourteen, and later sued him for failing to pay child support—all these acts of revenge against his allegedly “raping” a woman resulted in his losing all his money. 12. He knows through affect that “solidarity and care alone cannot raise the self to the level not only of being the subject but also the author of a coherent life-story” (Benhabib 1992, 198). 13. He feels honored that Gladstone watches his back, understanding how Gladstone was angry that “I was treated with disrespect by our brothers in blue” (25). Gladstone acts as a true friend to get him to move on with full force: “There’s no charges pending against you and the department is legally prohibited from saying what you were suspected of. I know three captains would give you glowing references” (25). 14. Since being framed and arrested, he questions even the apparent facts, and learns that she is, in fact, Janine, who changed her name after being convicted for fraud in Ohio, and started working for Ossa James, “a political ‘researcher’ from Maryland” (28), who recently signed a contract with Albert Stoneman, a candidate for congressional office. 15. He now sees Bob is entering the limo, and follows them to a motel where Joe gets a room right next to Bob’s to listen to his conversations, while he watches his sexual relations with transgender prostitutes with the help of a digital camera system connected to his iPad. 16. In replaying the last night’s sex party on his iPad, Joe tells him that a woman who claimed to be Cynthia Acres hired him, but she in fact is hired to pose as his wife, by an anonymous third party “to gather dirt on you for Albert Stoneman” (37), employed by Ossa James, “a paid political adviser to Stoneman” (38). Bob finds it suspicious why these people are playing him indirectly, whereas Joe asks the name of the person who warned Bob about him (Joe). 17. Braun managed to have an appeal granted, after he showed that the evidence against his client was circumstantial, belying the publicly assigned lawyers’ accusations. Newspapers wrote that a new self-defense plea was on the way, and protests “proclaiming ‘Free Man’ were

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being held from coast to coast” (46). Even though he is no longer a cop, Joe feels like one, and identifies first with the murdered cops because he knows that when cops put their lives on the line, no official seems to appreciate it: “They had no idea how much we cared about them, their lives” (46). 18. Joe knows the factual details that Eugene “Yollo” Valence and Anton Pratt, actually killed by A Free Man, were “decorated uniforms who often worked as bodyguards for the mayor and visiting dignitaries” (48). Joe mentions to Willa the possibility that Braun may be right, because he thinks to himself how he has been one of those discredited cops. 19. At the time of his divorce when he was totally broke and in desperate need for a job, Tom Storell’s wife found his King Detective Service ad in the yellow pages, and asked him to defend their son Jacob, who was arrested for robbery. After Jacob emptied the cash register in a stationary store in the East Village, he was arrested almost immediately. When he was in the interrogation room, Jacob, who had been beaten brutally and whose face was beyond recognition, immediately offered to confess to whatever Joe wanted. Joe identified with him; “I had been him not long before. There were moments when I would have said anything to stop the fear of what might happen next” (55). He comforted Jacob: “Here you get arrested for something you didn’t do and then they beat you for tellin’ the truth” (56). 20. Even though Gladstone had helped him following his discharge from NYPD, at two different security jobs, lending him the money “to start the detective service” (71), he would be at a disadvantage when some of those people he worked for would be hurt in the process of clearing the name of a cop killer. 21. Two years ago, his office assistant Tara (before Aja) said that Mr. Johnson, a fake name Mel used, wanted to see him to discuss a case. Mel explains that he was shot in the back by another robber, while Joe, then a cop, had saved his life, though he could easily have shot him. But Mel’s carrying an illegal weapon cost him five years in solitary confinement, an experience that almost broke him. 22. When Joe shares the information in Beatrice’s letter to ask her opinion, she suggests that he, a man who was himself “done wrong,” has to try “to make it right” (85). 23. Willa comes to see Joe with the whole amount of money, which Joe promises to keep in a safe place and to use it to solve the case, but he also shares his suspicion about why Braun would suddenly back down from the case. In the middle of their conversation, Braun responds to Joe’s second email from his burner phone that cannot be traced. 24. This indicates that “the longer sentences received by young Black males may be due in part to stereotypes that identify these men as dangerous and dysfunctional” (A. Petersen 2017, 62). 25. Joe calls Effy, a professional masseuse, who used to be a prostitute and killed her pimp—a homicide charge from which Joe had spared her by letting her go. Effy’s massage relieves his stress, and they have sex in their noncommitted relationship, both of which help him to have his first deep and long sleep in a very long time. Ironically, he trusts a criminal, Mel, and an ex-prostitute, Effy, because they watch his back and care about him, unlike his former law enforcement colleagues. 26. He wants to kill Little Exeter, knowing that the prison turned him into “a murderer-inwaiting” (130), but he decides not to kill him. He calls Effy, confiding in her like he does in Mel, that people broke him in Rikers. While he confesses he believed he was tough, “everything I knew and believed in just slipped away” (131), and he has a moment of realization that “I felt alone almost all the time . . . because no one else seemed to know what was in my heart [except Mel and Effy]” (131). When Effy insistently asks if he killed the man he was following, and learns he did not, she calls him “a good man” (132). 27. When he googles the name, it points to a carpenter, married with four children, who died more than twenty years ago. His youngest child is named Adam, and Joe wonders if that might be Adamo Cortez and Hugo Cumberland, believing that he may be the original Hugo Cumberland’s son, but he does not get very far with that. 28. I coined this term to distinguish it from the “performativity of whiteness,” a phrase I discussed in an earlier book. Please see E. Lâle Demirtürk, How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness (2008).

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29. He alerts him to the short white man waiting for revenge, and Mel gives his cell to Junior to talk to Genaro, “one of the connected guys on the island” (202), who told Junior to mind his own business, causing him abruptly to leave Joe alone. 30. He texts his new number to Aja’s stepfather so that Aja can call him, but Monica gets the phone, before he talks to Aja, and blames him for their hiding. Unlike in the past, he stands up for himself to remind her of how her thoughtlessnes has cost him, destroying his life, and causing the trouble with Acres and government men against him. 31. Joe ignores Natches’s lies and says that it was clear he was on a case on the docks for which Natches felt that he had “to stop me” (213). His question is about the present moment: “But now that I know the game and the players, why don’t you just let me back in?” (213). 32. Mel had taken the precaution of sending photos of Natches and his guard to his own three men, who were waiting outside fully equipped, just in case, “when an ambush is set up” (215). Joe decides to stay in the storage unit in the West Village to be safe, and says he will call Mel when he needs help. 33. So as she fixes Joe’s mustache, which was coming off, she remembers being harassed by a white man in the back room of a massage parlor until Manny came in with a gun, which scared him away. She has grown stronger, owing to him as a role model, employing her agency ever since: “And nobody has done nuthin’ to me I ain’t said yes to since that night” (223). 34. Mel texted him an address, and Joe pays a visit to Thurman Hodge, identifying himself with a fake name Smith. He wants to rent the basement from Thurman. When they go down to the cellar, “transformed into a studio apartment designed for men and women on the run,” Joe remembers what the Underground Railroad meant to Mel, making him think that “I was fighting a war beyond the laws that once claimed my allegiance” (228). 35. Joe then goes into the fortune-telling parlor to talk to Kierin, a white man, whom he had saved from being framed for a crime that would result in a long sentence. Kierin in return provided Joe with information about “the heroin connection at the Brooklyn docks” (231), and he explains that Burns is a troubled young man, but he enjoys two hits whenever he has money to pay, which Joe buys to build his trust with Burns. 36. Once Joe and Burns are on the street, Joe gives him the two hits from Kierin, and Burns takes Joe to a place where Burns injects himself, feeling better. 37. He remembers how Ray Ray’s brother, Brill Wanamaker, who was a bus driver for the city of New York, decided to save his brother, who was incarcerated for various crimes in Attica. During Ray Ray’s imprisonment, Brill bought five defunct buses and rebuilt them to provide his brother with a job as a bus driver upon his release. Joe is inspired by Brill’s love for his brother: “Love is a powerful tool. I believe that Ray Ray rehabilitated . . . because of the idea that his brother worked all those years just for him” (251). 38. But none of the sentries seem to be helpful because he pushes them to do things quickly, challenging their sense of independence. When Mary, a black woman, feels reluctant and he threatens to tell on her to Lauren, he feels that the reason why Gladstone helped him become a PI must have been because he understood that Joe has been “completely in charge of whatever I did” (255). But he is also aware that he needs help from others: “No man is an island; no man can control his fate” (255). 39. What Mary Louis Pratt has defined as “contact zones,” Maria Mercedes Ortiz Rodriguez suggests here are “places of colonial encounters in which people who were geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish among themselves relations based on coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (M.M.O. Rodriguez 2011, 63).

Afterword

The Kaepernick Moment as Critique of Everyday Life Transgressive Practices of Blackness as a Strategy for Change

As I was writing this book, Donald Trump took the office of United States president, soon threatening “to wall out Mexican and Latin American migrants, expel or register Muslims, and restore white nationalism,” labelling migrants, Muslims, and others, including millions of refugees from Syria over the years, “as security threat,” a problem generated by U.S. geopolitical strategy in foreign policy (Smith and Vasudevan 2017, 210). His racist positionality, not to mention his xenophobic and sexist attitude, is “not unlike the cardboard shields held by Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville,” in the sense that both “signal a position of defense against a supposedly dangerous enemy on behalf of a purportedly threatened majority” (Rondini 2018, 62). Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Trump “the most dangerous president,” for those white people who charge him with extremism “cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it” (2017, 366). Michael Eric Dyson describes his election as more than a nightmare, “a whitemare,” for it was “all about whiteness,” however, he continues that we should not give up hope that “we can make a difference, can make the difference” (2017, 219, 223). Even though I absolutely agree with Dyson, it goes without saying that the Trump era represents an occasion that has enabled everyone to see how the ideology of whiteness gained momentum in horrifying proportions that had serious material consequences. I am intrigued by the open public articulation of whiteness, for it provides a vantage point and lens through which I, a nonWestern woman academic who lives in Turkey, can affectively relate to the 191

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issues raised in the field. Trump’s electoral, inaugural, and subsequent speeches mark whiteness as savagely visible, and they make it clear to us, critical whiteness studies scholars, “the continued relevancy of whiteness studies in the twenty-first century” 1 (Kennedy et al. 2017a, 1). While Cornel West defines the Trump moment as the “neo-fascist era,” he praises the current black activist protests that keep the same “revolutionary” spirit of resistance fiercely alive in the black tradition of resistance, exemplified by the struggles of W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr. (2018b, 335, 337). One need only remember how white supremacists expected Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights movement activists to wait for the right time to be given their rights. Hence, the scheduled time of history, imposed on “the range of possibilities available to black political agency” (Gooding-Williams 2018, 33), is something King and his fellow activists challenged. Martin Luther King Jr. writes: “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right” (qtd in GoodingWilliams 2018, 33). In a similar vein, we also need to remember how Cedric Robinson addressed the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Chicago in 2013, as Robin D.G. Kelley informs us, and warned the audience of “the moral catastrophe we face if we succeed in the academy while those who insisted we be here continue to suffer premature death, in the streets or behind the bars” (cited in Kelley 2017, 255). Even though we are situated in a moment of crisis of whiteness when partisan interests still endanger U.S. credibility in global citizenship, and Trumpism has become a new configuration of twenty-first-century whiteness, we need to explore “the various ways in which political spaces are both materially and discursively performed” (Rose-Redwood and Glass 2014, 2). We also need to take a step further to see through the white embodied politics of everyday life and struggle relentlessly to dismantle the ideology of whiteness so that black vulnerability will cease to be reproduced. It is impossible for white people to become acutely aware of how living in a white supremacist social world “has produced a deep whiteness that may not be seen as such even by ‘antiracist’ whites,” but it is important for critical whiteness scholars to investigate it, for we cannot change the world “if we do not know how deeply the practice of whiteness has affected those we wish to transform” (Bonilla-Silva 2015, 81). Many challenges are exposed in the recent emergence of discursive cracks in whiteness, particularly in, what I prefer to call, the Kaepernick moment, whose reverberations still permeate the globe as an intersectional matrix of resistance to anti-blackness, and to spatiality of whiteness that produces the critique of everyday life. Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, sparked a movement, “#TakeAKnee [that] became a new high-profile manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement” 2 (Heaney 2018, 43), in his refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem before the NFL games to protest police violence and system-

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ic racial injustice against black people. His act of resistance “started one of the most visible protests for social justice in modern sports history” (Weffer et al. 2018, 66), echoing the activism of the two black male athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists during the medal ceremony of 1968 Olympics. Hence, Kaepernick’s “ruptural performance” (Perucci 2017, 280) in the form of silence in public is a deliberate choice of a black man who contributes to “the circulation of radicalism” (N. Thompson 2017, 96). Knowing in his heart that “[t]he black counterpublic must once again become a transformative space” (Dawson 2011, 169), Kaepernick’s controversial act, which has cost him his job in NFL, indeed earned disrespectful remarks, to say the least, from white supremacists, including Donald J. Trump. He even called him an SOB, words that both reveal his “crass whiteness” (Dubrofsky 2019, 170), and activate the discursive construct of any black man who resists vulnerability and takes a stand against white state-sanctioned racism. He is insulted as a black man because he confronted whiteness in everyday life in an unexpected space and created “a critical slippage,” revealing how “racial spatialization” and “stigmatization” are interrelated (Yancy 2012b, 7, 21). He constructs a performative politics as an intervention in the present, transforming an affective articulation of black vulnerability into a space of action with a strong belief that we “must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power” in order to “choose a different future” (C. Anderson 2016, 164). Ironically enough, once his nonverbal act spoke truth to power in a public space, Kaepernick had to go through a different form of racialization (read: SOB), stigmatized by the pervasive stereotype of “the criminal black man” (M. Bell 2017, 166, 175). Michael Bennett, three-time Pro Bowler and longtime activist, involved with the Black Lives Matter movement, among other social justice causes, protests police shootings of unarmed black men in his recent book Things That Make White People Uncomfortable (2018) in which he sees the NFL owners’ punishment, as based on their view of Kaepernick’s act as “threatening to white society” (Bennett and Zirin 2018, 50). He remembers how he refused to accept the invitation to go to Israel with a group of NFL players, after learning from an Israeli newspaper that upon their return to the United States, they would be called upon to help change the negative perceptions of Israeli violence against the Palestinian people. His reading of Angela Y. Davis’s Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2016a) helped him learn that Black Lives Matter activists had created alliances with Palestinian people, “and that there was a mural of Michael Brown on the Palestinian side of the separation wall that Israel built around Gaza” (172). Talking to Angela Davis about her personal experiences during her travels to Palestine regarding how Palestinians were treated, and to Noura Erakat, the Palestinian-American scholar, Bennett develops “empathy and identification with the Palestinian people” regarding how Palestinians’ being “collectively punished” and African

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Americans’ “dealing with police violence here” made him feel totally connected with them (173). One of my fond memories as a child about my father, in a similar vein to Bennett’s and Davis’s global connection, was how he prayed to God during boxing games that Muhammad Ali would win, for he never saw him as a black man in the United States but as his Muslim brother. It demonstrates the significance of mobilizing “shared vulnerability” into what Rosi Braidotti calls “affirmative politics grounded on immanent interconnections, a transnational ethics of place” (2016, 36). A similar connection figures into Kaepernick’s statement, which manifests an affective alliance as a political act: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder” (qtd in Bryant 2018, 6). Kaepernick’s political act of taking a knee showed a different form of allegiance to all black people, for he refused to ground his self in white American oppression, but rather was determined to defy the “complicity with the whims of the [white] dominant elite” (Bush 2007, 286). Kaepernick’s act bears the subversive strategy of using his agency in “speaking from elsewhere” (Medina 2006, 116), and opens “cracks” in whiteness in a so-called postracial society. It simply shows what is at stake when the black male body performs his blackness in the public space differently, because for him, transformative politics starts with “embracing blackness, not transcending it” (Joseph 2013, 90). His act publicizes a deep skepticism toward “the reiterative assertions of the sovereign performative” (Glass and Rose-Redwood 2014a, 253). Evaluating his act through the lens of performativity as a discursive breakthrough of reiteration in a public space, helps to reveal that black people are not considered free in redefining their allegiance to the state. Kaepernick’s act is not much different from, as Judith Butler would say, how illegal immigrants in Los Angeles during the 2006 demonstrations sang the U.S. national anthem in Spanish, which may not exactly mean freedom: “But to make the demand on freedom is already to begin its exercise and then to ask for its legitimation is to also announce the gap between its exercise and its realization and to put both into public discourse in a way so that that gap is seen, so that that gap can mobilize” (Butler and Spivak 2007, 68). While Kaepernick’s political performativity contests white regimes of control, it enacts an alternative form of defiance to fit into governable spaces of blackness in a culture in which black presence “has different ethical, psychological, and phenomenological implications than the presence of a white person” (P.C. Taylor 2016, 51). Discussing Judith Butler’s politics of the performative, Gill Jagger argues that what is needed is “to cite and recite the meaning of ‘blackness’ or ‘African American’ in non-conventional, more positive ways” (2008, 134). It articulates Kaepernick’s act as that of the critique of the present, in Michel

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Foucault’s view, drawing attention to the juxtaposition of social and personal critique: “The critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (qtd in Tazzioli, Fuggle, and Lanci 2015, 1). Foucault’s concept of the critique of the present includes a revolution that will change the present, for instance, in both an individual (read: Kaepernick here) and a collective move (read: Black Lives Matter) to make a difference in the present. This view seems to articulate to how the Kaepernick moment and Black Lives Matter are acting in and on the present: Even though both appear to be “outside of the state,” it is quite possible that “their actions may also come to shape the state” (Cooper 2014, 226). The act of taking a knee is a manifestation of how the critique of everyday life can be “expressed in acts” in order to consider “how to transform it” (Wark 2013, 12). Much like how Michel de Certeau’s view of how resistance is embedded in the practices of everyday life, Kaepernick’s act reveals the site of everyday bearing “the potential for change” (Pink 2012, 12). Kaepernick’s insurgent move marks an affective performative, which can be considered, in Dylan Rodríguez’s words in a recent interview, as “a praxis of human being against White Being” (2016). His resentment of unequal citizenship implicated in the national anthem, to use James Tully’s words, sustains “alternative worlds by acting otherwise” (qtd in Norval 2014, 196). In the contemporary scene, the anti-black violence that dominates the white public domain, Veena Das would say, has become “part of everyday practices through which relations are negotiated” (2011, 134). Despite the current precarity that constitutes black men’s vulnerability and defines their lived experiences in relation to the anti-black violence, the African American novels studied in this book do not render black lives merely in terms of victimization. Given this contemporaneity of violence against black men, the question can be raised on the kind of work we do, or to put it more succinctly, the kind of work the African American novel does in capturing the larger possibilities embedded in the singularity of ordinary black lives. Perhaps, following Veena Das in her Life and Words (2007), life is recovered “through a descent into the ordinary”: When the state-sanctioned violence is experienced in the everyday life of black men and communities, then the dignity of being black is “betrayed by the everyday” itself (2007, 7, 9). Against this backdrop, these five novels manifest how, even when the criminal justice system fails to achieve a fair legal process, those black characters’ struggle for justice still “shapes the state processes in some ways” (183). The violent absentization of black bodies intervenes in the very fabric of everyday life, and hence, the novels allow characters to “descend” into the everyday, rather than ascend above it, for it is the context of “making the everyday inhabitable” (90, 216).

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These black characters cultivate resistance to the mainenance of their lives as vulnerable subjects when moments of “transformative vision” (Coles 2016, 1) are also integrated into the immediate urgency of everyday life. While the white-oriented discourse in real life exposes the public spaces as the site of black vulnerability that sustains the normative everyday life, these African American novels explore racialized spaces of vulnerability as transformative spaces to elicit social change. These novels, contrary to the socially constructed vulnerability of black people, render those black characters who offer challenges with complex subjectivities, capable of asserting agency as “creative agents” (K. Brown 2017, 678). Even though the power of the black characters comes from their ability to dare to exceed social norms to boldly assert their agency not to belong, but rather to meet challenges, the overemphasis of “everyday agency,” Lila Abu-Lughod warns us, may cause us to overlook “everyday forms of oppression” (cited in Alves 2018, 261). Hence, these novels meet the challenge to expose the oppressive social reality that affects black people’s lived experiences. We can thereby believe, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci insisted, Joan Cocks argues, that ordinary people “were not mere living labor machines but were intellectuals, too, with concepts, values, and understandings of the world that added up to a spontaneous philosophy of the multitude” (cited in Cocks 2018, 194). These novels help us see that African American representations of the interracial encounters have political significance, particularly in the Black Lives Matter era, because they explore the possibility of an interracial dialogic communication to build transformative social change. But they also explore how to cultivate new possibilities of configuring and performing blackness beyond racialized vulnerability, in the form of small acts “to bring about the larger changes in power relations” (Cazenave 2016, 194). As the novels provide the space for vulnerability in the politics of the racial performative, the black characters shift discursive registers of blackness as criminal in their appropriations of “criminal” strategies outside the normative structure, the one that uses it as the basis for black vulnerability narrative, opening cracks in whiteness. They engage in the practices of disidentification with racial scripts as excess, experiencing “internal multiplicity” (Dorfman 2014, 177) in their refusal to reiterate the racial(izing) norms. We witness, what Rudolph Steiner calls, “inwardly sustained harmony” (qtd in Roy and Cusack 2016, 11), while they negotiate their relationality to others in the process of discovering the power of their black interiority. David Scott defines practice as an act about “how to intervene in the present as opposed to merely submitting to it” (2017, 83). This is exactly what the black male protagonists (and also Janice reflecting on Marquis) do in their moments of “quiet” while they undergo self-reflexive thoughts; in the face of racial hurt in the social world, they affirm themselves, in Austin Channing Brown’s words, “I am human. And I am still alive” (2018, 157). The black interior space lives beyond the

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social world, while their inner thoughts are rendered in embodied action, that is, in conjunction with social encounters of their “interruption of stereotype” (Larkin 2015, 3), which depicts the will to shift the white public discourse on blackness. As the black protagonists in these novels cope with the everyday reality of anti-black hostility, they refuse to define themselves in terms of white people and they remain stubbornly themselves. As the critique of the present, Daniel Black’s Listen to the Lambs demonstrates that Lazarus’s willful choice of failure, vulnerability, and powerlessness makes it possible to be true to himself; he comes to embody an affirmative sense of vulnerability as a mobilizing source of communal power to reconstruct everyday life outside normative expectations. In Sister Souljah’s A Moment of Silence: Midnight III, Midnight risks his life even to the extent of becoming vulnerable to protect his family against injustice and violence. In a society mediated by a broken criminal justice system, his inner strength enables him to dissociate himself from complicity with the police department, and hence with the state, as an act of disobedience. Easy, in Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe, takes the law into his hands and even kills people to “clean” the world of brutal men, because law enforcement fails to protect vulnerable people. He is willing to become vulnerable to save another black man’s life; his transgressive acts and performances of embodied blackness make interventions into the everyday life. Janice, in Victoria C. Murray’s Stand Your Ground, accepts being vulnerable during her testimony to prove her son’s innocence, while Tyrone’s political guidance in public action helps her to transform her vulnerability into a terrain of power. While the novel urges that the crisis of the present moment has to be resisted together with the community, it calls to meet the challenges of the black man’s rights. In Down the River Unto the Sea, Joe saves a black man’s life posited in perpetual vulnerability on the verge of execution by using subversive strategies to transform black vulnerability to embodied and institutional violence into a challenge against the criminal justice system. His reckless struggle with the state officials makes possible a rupture in the present through his performative acts of criminality to bring about justice in everyday life. Lazarus, Midnight, Easy, Janice, and Joe do not dismiss vulnerability while they invest themselves with alternative forms of individual and collective empowerment; they bear in mind, in Alice Walker’s words, “real change is personal” (2018, 356). While these black protagonists problematize resistance through occasional moments of willful vulnerability, their resistance anticipates a transformed everyday life, quite “at odds with the tyranny of the present” (Montgomery 2010, 78). These African American novels allow a transformative space without compromising the integrity, dignity, and humanity of black masculinity. The black male protagonists (and Janice, fighting for Marquis) enter into a conflict with the law, transforming vulnerability

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into empowerment. While they affirm the state, but not the status of black vulnerability without making it a part of who they are, dissociating themselves from, as Herman Beavers would suggest, “stereotypes” (Beavers 2018, 8), their undoing of the normative ideals of success designates whiteness as a problem in a political sense. The black characters in these novels do not have a fear of vulnerability, for they are shifting and transforming the black criminality narrative into a strategy of performing blackness as radical dispossession of racial scripts. These novels cultivate spaces where black people confront white racist individuals, and they transform their vulnerability into strength in such scenes as Lazarus III and Mr. Dalton in the courtroom; Midnight and white detectives in the interrogation room; Easy and the white guard in Jackson Blue’s office; Janice and the attorney in her testimony; and Joe and deep state officials. The novels produce the potential social space to prove that black vulnerability is, in fact, a myth created by white supremacy, establishing a discursive relation to the present as “an active and collective relation” with a collective sense of “we,” characterized “not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (Hardt 2011, 21). These black characters go against the grain and transgress the law, in the process of which we see personal success stories of these ordinary black men (including Marquis in Janice’s account), who beat the odds to accomplish the extraordinary. Performative subversions of whiteness in extra-legal activities, or what Saidiya Hartman in a different context calls, “unlicensed movement” (1997, 67), inform the potential for unfolding the discursive “cracks” in the ideology of whiteness. The subversive acts can never be considered in isolation from ordinary black people’s reimagining blackness in radical forms so as to start “inhabiting them differently.” The act of opening cracks in whiteness involves doing blackness by way of working through diverse modalities of black “radical individualism” (Medina 2013, 252). It is, indeed, our choice not to read these novels, but their credibility stays with us in an Obama-to-Trump shifting society and the world in their refusal to settle down for an emotional and cultural poverty masqueraded by the Trump-ish notion of success, solely defined in materialistic terms. But once we read them, we can no longer claim innocence to these black persons’ selves, experiences, and lives, just like in real social world, for blackness is “a dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-force in which lines of flight present possible modes of freedom and sociality” (Kline 2017, 63). The black male characters, including (Marquis and) Tyrone, employ “progressive black masculinities,” which means that they “take an active and ethical stance” against all forms of domination, both personally and in collective action with others (Mutua 2006b, 7). They act in commitment to self and others, rejecting the normative association between black men and weakness, to use Patricia Hill Collins’s words, “redefining black male strength in terms

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of relationships with others” (2006, 93). Whereas a normative discourse of black punishment permeates the contemporary culture, these black male characters form cross alliances in opening “the potential anticapitalist spaces of becoming” (N. Thompson 2015, 133). In the current state of affairs, one might ask, in what direction are these novels pointing? Evie Shockley’s response, in her recent Semiautomatic, would be “black to the future/ . . . / where no [wo/man] has gone before!!!” (2017b, 47) to help create a liveable world. They shape the way we can transform everyday life by means of embodied social praxis, positioning us against the eerie erasure of black life. African American novels in the Black Lives Matter era start a public conversation in response to the issues raised in the growing movement impacting the public imaginary. They navigate the black men’s affective experiences in the contradictory present, when we are caught between “progressive racial justice movements and newly resurgent right-wing white nationalism” (Sexton 2017, vii). There is a sense in which, unless we understand the black male psyche situated in the white patriarchal society, we cannot dismantle the ideology of whiteness as a regime of control at the root of antiblackness, in favor of expanding their scope beyond “a limiting White construction of Blackness” (Avilez 2016, 178). These novels sanction the indeterminacy of the black individual not only “to oppose reductive iterations of blackness” (C.B. Davis 2015, 106) but to locate blackness in the spirit of “a politics that exceeds the ideological confines of its moment” (Reed 2014, 139). They capture the flux of blackness, woven into the fabric of everyday situations, in order to explore an alternative unfolding of blackness into the present. However, the current conjuncture in which we are living in the Black Lives Matter era forces us to see that each of these novels registers its own sociocultural and political critique, and what Phillip Brian Harper calls “experiential Blackness” (2015, 14). Although today’s African American literary texts cannot be remembered only for the political issues they raise, Aida Levy-Hussen argues that “it remains un-realistic to imagine an African American literature that wholly supersedes or divests from the political” (2016, 169). Having said that, we need to go deeper into the inner self of each individual in order to grasp the contradictions in the real social world, where unarmed young black men’s futures are perpetually interrupted. In this respect, these authors’ novels each designate a site of blackness that is not reified and hence humanizes their black characters with their shifting identities and complex humanity. In other words, blackness is represented as a “blueprint for social transformation” that functions as “a model for openness, for the invention of new identities that recognize the necessity of moving beyond the normalized boundaries of blackness” (Vargas 2006b, 222). These writers refuse to dismiss everyday life as quotidian, but rather explore it with the hope of understanding wider structures, experiences, and contexts. Since whiteness is the formative mechanism that shapes everyday

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black life, African American novelists’ standpoint produces an alternative perspective because, as Devorah Kalekin-Fishman would say, “that is the standpoint which problematizes the everyday world” (Kalekin-Fishman 2013, 718). They undermine the performative actions of white people “seeking to claim a monopoly on legitimate forms of spatial inscription” (Glass and Rose-Redwood 2014a, 259). If the ongoing physical and discursive antiblack violence reinforces the consolidation of white supremacist power, then it is inevitable that everyday life with its attendant social relations has to become “the very object of critical reflection” (Balibar 2016, 11). Since these black characters are aware of the affective dimensions of white racializing norms, what they feel and are affected by is not only in the present, but constitutes the present itself. It is not enough to read and make critical analyses of interracial encounters of black characters in these novels, who make personal and social change possible, but we, the readers, must also see these characters with “empathy” (Roszak 2014, 154), or even with “difficult empathy” (Leake 2014, 175), which Martha Nussbaum defines as “positional thinking,” or “the ability to see the world from another’s viewpoint” (qtd in Hammond and Kim 2014a, 7). In doing that, these novels of social critique refuse to territorialize the critique of everyday life from the normative perspective to explore the malleability of racial norms. Their rendition of blackness in non-normative spaces is similar to the philosopher Lucius Outlaw’s notion of looking to the “characteristically human” to relocate blackness in “alternative foundations for black subjectivity” (Braidotti 2006, 63). Hence, these novels produce those black protagonists, who work against the black vulnerability script, while appropriating it through the discourse of whiteness. More importantly, they claim the right to excessive practices of undoing whiteness in shifting their multiple subjectivities to the radical performativity of “neo-resistant” blackness as a space of possibility and action. Michael Omi and Howard Winant claim that we need to think about race and racism “as continuing encounters between despotic and democratic practices” in which individuals and groups locate themselves “in the constant racial ‘reconstruction’ of everyday life” (2012, 327). As Brian Klaas observes, Trump acts “like a despot’s apprentice” whose authoritarian tactics damage democracy, and he warns us against the fragility of democracy, which can be “eroded gradually” (2017, 5). In discussing “the art of living democratically,” H.L.T. Quan’s reference to Cedric Robinson’s view that marronage—that is, runaway slaves’ flight and fugitivity, as the proof of “the existence of Black radical consciousness and praxis”—still articulates the living embodiment of “the willful refusal to be governed as confirmation of democratic sensibility” (2017, 175). Such urge for social change, as Naomi Klein rightfully suggests, starts with our determination for self-transformation, “to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share” (2017, 185). This reminds one of Mohandas Gandhi, who engaged in

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“practices of self-transformation,” which he spread into the outside world in his bold way of speaking truth to power, in order to initiate “mutual struggle and self-transformation” (Nichols and Singh 2014a, 5). In this context, Stephen White’s A Democratic Bearing (2017) is “perfectly tuned to the political moment” in the Trump era, for it suggests that committed citizens with “a democratic bearing” can help improve society to make it “a better one” (Krause 2018, 131, 134). White introduces a new vision of citizenship as a democratic bearing in order to establish democratic values, activated by each citizen’s willingness to risk comfort “to engage in the contentious life of a would-be more democratic polity” (2017, 208). There is a sense in which this hope in the activation of democratic sensibility reminds one of how Judith Butler’s notion of the necessity of “reiteration of norms” is closely related to democratic identification, for the “repetition of practices,” Aletta J. Norval argues, “may in the long run fail to sustain democratic identification” (2007, 138). Considering democracy “as a form of life rather than a regime” helps us understand the meaning of democratic relations “between subjects.” Since developing a “democratic subjectivity” is embedded in seeing through how “[a]versive identity” is based precisely upon the problematization of prevailing norms, the contestation of the given in the fluctuations of social relations speaks to how “our democratic freedoms and responsibilities are to be found and constituted” (185, 213–14). In this context, as Cornel West explained in a recent interview, that we all should have “a radically democratic soulcraft” that will provide us with the joy of telling the truth, and with that of “engaging in critique” (2018a, 10). In this respect, there is an ethical disposition with which these African American novels talk back to the significance of “democratic subjectivity,” or more precisely “democratic soulcraft,” in a way that demonstrates how the ordinary black people’s engaged lives, Elizabeth Alexander explains, move “toward what we love and not just toward the destruction of enemies” (2007, 167). While these authors’ politics of love figure into how they reimagine democracy, the novels represent acts of discursive political resistance as sites for the mobilization of the construct of vulnerability in anti-racist praxis. Black sociality is shaped through the democratic commitment, built on the sense of a shared humanity, to use Robert Butler’s words, “that makes possible both American democracy and racial integration” (2016, 51). In this context, Isobel Armstrong relates her concept of “democratic imagination” to John Dewey’s view of democracy, which means “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living” (2016, 6). I believe it is possible to see the “democratic imagination” Armstrong sees in nineteenth-century American fiction as equally true and important for the twenty-first-century African American novel, in which hope represents “a greater political possibility,” even in the most desperate conditions, which may still help to “ultimately bring democratic ideas into being” (2016, 263).

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The ability of African American literature, Gene Andrew Jarrett claims, “to transform society on multiple ideological, cultural, and political levels [has] not yet been treated carefully enough” (2011, 5). These African American novels, as I argue here, have the power to effect democratic change in transforming the society, as they present black characters who invest in themselves and in the social relations, but not in the norm and ideals of white supremacy. While they deploy the concept of radical performativity of blackness, they boldly challenge the white embodied practices and racially construed values of white racist people in the social world into a form of realization, in the words of Clevis Headley, “to critically work through their whiteness” (2017, 290). Considering the “performed resistance, activism, and protest” as a response to the current climate of Black Lives Matter in the era of Trumpism, these African American novels articulate the subversive narratives that penetrate, to use Bryant Keith Alexander’s words, “the sensibilities of the [racialized] other—in ways that touch the mind, heart, and spirit; helping others to deepen their commitment to belief, and being critical and responsive citizens of the world” (Alexander et al. 2018, 316). Since democracy cannot be sustained without informed citizens, it was Allison Davis, one of the first black American anthropologists, who believed that it was crucial to train students “to think critically and socially” so that American democracy could “be made to thrive” (Varel 2018, 225). In touching on the democratic value of collective collaborative action, Angela Y. Davis, in an interview, says that it is absolutely necessary “to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms” (2016b, 49). In talking about the recasting of imperialism as “reactionary intercommunalism,” John Narayan notes that we need to remember the view of Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, which speaks to the political urgency in Trump’s America, for his prediction on the future bears the hope of black collective resistance through the formation of “intercommunal solidarity and the creation of alternative forms of life” (2017, 11, 14). In an indirect response, George Yancy finds the current racist divisiveness, reinforced by Trump, as a crucial moment to decide whether we will “raise our collective voice” to racism or close off any possibility of “becoming our better selves” (2018b). This rhetorical question reinforces Martin Luther King Jr.’s determination for black people to “struggle for a new world” (qtd in Ellsberg 2017, 350), not without his strong hope that “the spirit of conscientious citizenship” (Moody-Adams 2018, 289) remains alive in its full force in the pursuit of social and global justice. This anticipation embodies the will “to create a world free of oppressive violence, fear, and perpetual disruption” (Samudzi and Anderson 2018, 116). Perhaps what we must reimagine is “a politics of humanity,” Achille Mbembe writes, “in a context in which what we all share from the beginning

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is difference” (2017, 178). At a time when Black Lives Matter, we see that authors, artists, and activists provide us with new ways to see the present to address inequality “now,” Jeff Chang observes, for “our shared future depends upon it” (2016, 8). In these African American novels, which render “a possible way of living in a time of crisis” (Negri 2015, 110), we witness the articulation of the will to enact new relations to the social spaces. There is an urgent need to produce new spaces of anti–white supremacist politics to undo our relationship to the carceral spatiality of whiteness in an attempt to open new avenues for radical reenactment of “the political spaces of performative action that are always in-the-making” (Glass and Rose-Redwood 2014a, 263). The hope and optimism for a shared future in collective action enables us to learn to live as part of the global humanity, which Alain Badiou defines as “colorless” (2017, 104), in order to be with a deeper sense of becoming, because there is all the more reason not to give up on dreaming for ourselves, and more importantly, for the whole world. NOTES 1. George Yancy writes: “It should be noted that when Donald Trump became presidentelect, America didn’t suddenly become a nation predicated upon white supremacy. For those of us [black people] who have endured the [white anti-black] hatred . . . we didn’t unexpectedly enter into a new and unforeseen nightmare” (2017a, 6). 2. During his speech when he was given Amnesty International’s highest prize, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, on April 21, 2018, Kaepernick remembered James Baldwin’s statement that being a conscious black American meant to “be in a rage almost all the time.” He demands: “Why aren’t all people? How can you stand for the national anthem of a nation that preaches and propagates freedom and justice for all, that is so unjust to so many of the people living there? How can you not be in a rage when you know that you are always at risk of death in the streets or enslavement in the prison system? How can you willingly be blind to the truth of systemic racialized injustice?” (Democracy Now! 2018).

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Index

Aanerud, Rebecca, 179 Abel, Roger L.: The Black Shields, 163 Abreu, Guida de, 87n29 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 196 “An Act of Terrorism” (Cowin), 57n31 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah, 24 affect: as becomings, 46; black performativity of, 46; concept of, 38; vs. emotion, 24; ordinary affect, 46; politics of, 18 affective empowerment, 64 affective solidarity, 18, 22 affirmative difference, 52, 58n37 African American subjectivity. See black subjectivity Agamben, Giorgio, 62, 81, 85n4–85n5, 90, 149 agency: autonomous, 78, 83, 179, 181; collective, 11, 130, 202; everyday, 8, 195, 196; of homeless, 34, 55n1, 197; markers of, 113; political, 3, 12, 95; shared vulnerability as basis of, 3, 11, 12, 95; silence as, 64, 66, 83, 87n29, 87n32; subversive, 7, 187; white allies, 11 Ahmed, Sara, 24 Alexander, Bryant Keith, 23, 98, 202 Alexander, Elizabeth, 21, 36, 41, 186, 201 Alexander, Michelle: on mass incarceration and Jim Crow, 156; on

mass incarceration and race, 90; The New Jim Crow, 38; racial stigma of black men as criminals, 59 Ali, Muhammad, 194 alienation, 7, 112 Allen, Amy, 181 Allen, Jeffrey Renard, 15 Althusser, Louis, 24, 159 Altman, Alex, 41 American, meaning of, 24 Americanah (Adichie), 24 American Dream: black believers in, 99; black reality of, 116n21; discrimination and, 45; disposable bodies and, 82; failure of, 137; fight for ideals, 27; homeownership, 32; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 29, 32, 45; reinforcing white public discourse, 27; whiteness and, 92 American identity, 39 Americanization process, racialized nature of, 27, 65 American Revolution, 76, 88n35 Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award, 203n2 Amster, Randall, 28 Anderson, Elijah, 70, 93, 144; “White Space”, 153n29 Anderson, Joel, 71, 74 Anderson, Leon, 31, 55n4 Anthony, Ronda C. Henry, 60

237

238

Index

anti-blackness, discourse of, 6 anti-black racism. See racism anti-racism, performativity of, 49 Anzaldua, Gloria, 43, 53 Applebaum, Barbara, 7, 184, 187 Arabs, racialized as black, 27. See also Muslims Armstrong, Isobel, 201 Athens, Lonnie, 170 athletes: protesting injustice, 192–193; racial disparity in sexual assault charges, 187n1; shared vulnerability, 194; #TakeAKnee movement, 192 autonomous agency, 78, 83, 179, 181 autonomy, 71, 74 Back, Les, 8 Badiou, Alain, 202 Bailey, Alison, 132 Bailey, Marlon, 115n8 Bal, Mieke, 147; Of What One Cannot Speak, 153n31 Baldwin, James: Black Lives Matter movement and, 3; call for black people “to love themselves”, 3; “democratic perfectionism”, 3; Harlem Renaissance and, 14; on interior life, 17; on rage of conscious black Americans, 203n2; on redemptive affectivity of love, 150 Bambara, Toni Cade, 14 Bandele, Asha: When They Call You a Terrorist (with Cullors), 3, 150 Baraka, Amiri, 14 barbershops, 97 “bare life”, 62, 81, 85n4–85n5 Barrett, Lindon, 21 Basu, Laura, 115n4 Be, Shavon, 121 Beatty, Paul, 15 The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Mengestu), 24 Beavers, Herman, 198 Bebout, Lee, 5 Being and Homeless (Sibley), 51 Being White (McKinney), 5 Bell, Bernard, 15 Benjamin, Rich, 133 Benjamin, Walter, 58n45

Bennett, Michael: Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, 193 Berger, Dan, 40 Berlant, Lauren, 35 Between the World and Me (Coates), 15, 66 Bilge, Sirma, 41 Bilkent University, 20 binary thinking. See white-black binary biodiversity: human biodiversity, 52, 58n40; racialized biodiversity, 52 biopolitics, 183 Black, Daniel. See Listen to the Lambs black allies, 171 Black Arts Movement, 14 black (male) body: absented, 150, 195; black people claiming right to, 45; criminalization of, 49, 59, 99, 113, 181; dehumanization of, 65, 100, 102; disciplinary interpellation of, 87n32; docility assigned to, 173; exceeding boundaries of white legality, 80; foreclosed from realm of personhood, 1; imprisoned by ideological frameworks, 44; “in need of white discipline”, 43; pain of racist effect on, 7; perception and, 25; performing whiteness, 82; as problematic, 132; as process, 179; as racialized other, 85n5; racist violence against, 119; resistance by, 23; sexual threat stereotype, 37, 47, 68, 94, 131, 159–160, 187n1; spatial vulnerability, 113; stereotypes of, 43; as threat, 57n26, 76, 91, 93–94, 95, 100, 156; as violent, 68; vulnerability of, 11; white terror reducing men to, 1 black counter-gaze, 13 black humanity: black and white solidarity in defense of, 3; as under constant threat, 3; death of blackness as necessary for, 117n26, 149; recognition of, 121 black interiority: in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 30, 53; power of, 196; in Stand Your Ground (Murray), 135, 149 Black Lives Matter movement: acting in and on the present, 195; alliances, 23, 121, 193; Baldwin and, 3; challenging violent power of whiteness, 156;

Index defined, 2; emergence, 2, 151n2; expansion, 186; fueled by love, 10, 150; goals and concerns, 150, 151n6, 187; grief and mourning, 121, 151n4–151n5; persistence, 2; as resistance movement, 120; as response to state-sanctioned violence, 2; subversive strategies, 186; #TakeAKnee movement, 192. See also The Movement for Black Lives black love: Baldwin’s view, 3; Black Lives Matter’s mobilization of, 10; political function of, 3; self-love, healing power of, 38; self-love and inner resistance, 38; shared sense of, 3 “Black Love—Resistance and Liberation” (Garza), 3 black male characters: overcoming vulnerability, 11; resistance, acts of, 9–10, 12; spaces of identity, 12; transformative action, 12 black male criminalization: as social construct, 156; subversive politics of, 155–190n39; of victims of vigilante violence, 128, 130, 134–135, 138, 140. See also black body, criminalization of black masculinity: criminalization of black body and, 113; ethic of responsibility, 169; progressive black masculinity, 198; regulation of, 90; as symbolic register, 48 black men: mass incarceration, 10, 15; state-sanctioned violence against, 10; targeted by police and vigilantes, 10; white supremacy’s “danger narratives” about, 12 blackness: as absented presence, 146–147, 149; alternative narratives of, 91, 199; as blueprint for change, 199; criminalization of, 11, 22; degraded sense of, providing value of whiteness, 3; as deviation, 120; as discursive construct, 27; as dynamic force, 30, 198; embodied in racist society, 149; embracing, 194; equal access to public space as incompatible with, 1; experiential blackness, 199; flux of, 199; groundlessness of, 58n38; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 54; as nonnormative fluid performativity, 23; in

239

nourishing family relations, 142; performative, 86n15, 91, 94, 113, 173–174, 179, 194; performative blackness, 21; phenomenal blackness, 21, 48, 57n31, 100; as positionality of abandonment, 84n1; as problematic to white gaze, 93; as process, 24; radical performativity, 7, 202; reconfiguration of, 24; as something people do, rather than something that is, 52; spatialized, 188n7; as state of exception, 62; strategic blackness, 172; subversive acts of, 101; as suspicious, to racists, 138; as vibrant space, 113 black people: criminalization of, 3, 12, 35, 38; embodied whiteness through class arrogance, 45; legal oppression of, 8; Trump’s criminalization of, 20 black political culture, tradition of defiance in, 97 Black Popular Front, 14 black postmodernist literature, 14 Black Power movement, 14 black public space, 60 The Black Shields (Abel), 163 black subjectivity: alternative foundations for, 52; colorblindness and, 23; cultural redefinition of, 14; deprived by whiteness, 12; discursive construction of, 20; human biodiversity and, 52; liberated sense of, 31, 55; personal investment in, 44; progressive spaces of black male subjectivity, 59–88n43; public lens, 30; reflexive construction of, 63, 85n7, 113; roots in slavery, 38; shifts in locus of, 14; sovereign free will and, 9; space and, 20, 30, 32, 53; subverting white power, 173; white supremacist regulation of, 30, 52, 63 black victim stereotype, 76 black vulnerability. See vulnerability of black people “black waste”, 99 black-white binary. See white-black binary Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo: Racism Without Racists, 2 The Book of Harlan (McFadden), 135 border spaces: fetishism of boundaries, 160; homeless spaces as, 30–31, 33,

240

Index

55n2; militarization of national borders, 16 Border Towns (Giscombe), 30 Bottoms, Stephens, 39 Braidotti, Rosi, 58n40, 194 Brand, Dionne, 37 Breaking the Code of Good Intentions (M.E.L. Bush), 5 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 14 Brown, Austin Channing, 196 Brown, Michael, 1, 120, 122, 193 Bush, Melanie E.L.: on American Dream, 27; Breaking the Code of Good Intentions, 5; on discursive cracks in whiteness, 185; Everyday Forms of Whiteness, 5; Tensions in the American Dream (with R. Bush), 27 Bush, Roderick: Tensions in the American Dream (with M. Bush), 27 Butler, Judith: on acting in concert, 137; on differential value of life, 21; on norms, 168, 201; on performativity, 5, 73, 148, 194; on racialization and humanity, 65; on self-defense laws, 120; “Shadows of the Absent Body”, 147; on subversive agency, 7, 187; on truth, 74; on vulnerability, 10–12, 74, 78 Butler, Octavia, 15 Butler, Paul, 156 Butler, Robert, 201 Byrne, Bridget, 5 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 84 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 63 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 83 capitalism: cities and, 53; corporations as criminals, 79, 80–81; creating spiritual poverty, 55; facilitated by homeownership, 58n42; killing one’s soul, 31; privatization of services, 82; racism and, 89; spatialization, 103; as white supremacist, 32. See also materialism carceral state and spaces: affective shifts in, 89–118n40; black body and, 86n15; blackness as, 95; carceral imaginary, 72; constructing whiteness, 99; creation of, 90; defined, 90; economic importance of prisoners, 155;

imaginative spatiality, 105; neoliberalism and, 89, 155; policing as, 90; race as space, 91; reinforced by racial profiling, 113; removing unwanted bodies from public spaces, 90; resistance to, 115; strategic interventions in, 155–190n39; upholding social construct of white safety, 157 Carlos, John, 193 Carrington, André M., 15 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 13 Cazenave, Noel, 2, 139, 156, 175, 186 Certeau, Michel de: creativity, view of, 58n41; everyday forms of resistance, 19, 195; The Practice of Everyday Life, 8 Cervenak, Sarah Jane, 146 Cha, Steph, 158 Chan, Kenneth, 103 Chang, Jeff, 202 Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 89–118n40; alternative narratives of blackness in, 91; black male body racialized as discursive space, 92; in Easy Rawlins series, 91, 115n9; plot summary, 91; racial paranoia in, 93–94; racial profiling in, 92; setting, 91; vulnerability transformed to strength in, 197, 198; white allies in, 116n23 Charlottesville, Virginia, 10, 191 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 68 Cherry, James E.: Shadow of Light, 66 Cherry, Myisha, 12 Chuck D (rapper), 88n38 CIA: Cold War surveillance, 14 cities. See urban space civil disobedience, silence as, 84 Clark, Keith, 73 class issues: false consciousness, 87n27; homelessness and, 45; human struggle, lack of concern for, 57n29; racism and, 44, 57n26. See also capitalism; materialism; poverty; upward mobility narrative Clements, Paul, 8 Cline, Tony, 87n29 Coates, Ta-Nehisi: on Trump, 191; Between the World and Me, 15, 66

Index Cocks, Joan, 196 Cohen, Cathy, 32, 84 Cohen, Stanley, 173 The Coldest Winter Ever (Souljah), 60 Cole, Teju: The Open City, 24 collective agency, 11, 130, 202. See also white allies Collins, Patricia Hill, 40, 115n5, 137, 150, 156, 198 colonialism: colonial encounters, 190n39; legacy, 155, 188n2; in policing strategies, 170, 176; urban ghetto, 170, 176 colorblindness: ideology of, 10; of justice, 103; masquerading as anti-black racism, 2, 23; as problem of the twentyfirst century, 23; of science, 103; suppressing black experience, 23 color line, problem of, 1, 23 community: of homeless, 29, 30, 33–34, 36, 50, 51–52, 53, 56n11; identity and, 51 “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” (Rankine), 15 contact zones, 182, 190n39 The Contemporary African American Novel (Demirtürk), 5, 19 Controltalk, 177 corrective experiences, defined, 58n47 Cowin-Mensah, Michelle: “An Act of Terrorism”, 57n31 crime fiction, everyday topics in, 91 criminal justice system: abuse of power, 95; America as penal democracy, 59; black exclusion and death as normative in, 148; blacks as guilty, 45, 49; carceral spaces of whiteness in, 155; colonialism’s legacy, 155, 188n2; corruption in, 157–158, 170, 183; death penalty, racial bias and, 167; extra-legal actions by blacks, 181, 183, 185, 187; failure to protect black citizens’ rights, 61, 100, 165; false confessions, 69; incarceration as slavery, 38, 39, 40, 90; informants, 77; injustice in, 23; as instrument of terror, 3; mass incarceration, 90, 155, 156; overrepresentation of black and Latino communities in, 188n4; prison as

241

racialized space, 159; prison as site of race construction, 76, 115n3; prison as slave vessel, 59; prison system as cheap forced labor, 79; privatization of, 82; protection of “white-boy inmates”, 78; racism as integral to, 156; sentencing differentials, 189n24; slavery’s legacy in, 155, 156; stagnation of prisoners, 79; stereotyping black people, 20, 22–23, 59, 123; struggle for justice, 195–196; whiteness, sovereignty of, 159. See also carceral state and spaces; police; policing, aggressive; racial profiling; Stand Your Ground laws Critical Ethnic Studies Conference (Chicago, 2013), 192 critical subjectivity. See under subjectivity Critical Whiteness studies: continued relevance, 192; emergence, 4; exploration of white embodied practices in everyday life, 5; making whiteness visible and strange, 5 Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre), 9 cross-alliances, 23, 95 Cullors, Patrisse: Black Lives Matter, founding of, 2; on criminalization of black people, 3; When They Call You a Terrorist (with Bandele), 3, 150 cultural whiteness: in Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 102, 103, 113; in Down the River Unto the Sea (Mosley), 160, 171, 172; in Stand Your Ground (Murray), 144 Curry, Tommy J., 11 dance, as public expressiveness of identity, 50 Dark Town (Mullen), 66 Darwin, Charles, 101 Das, Veena, 58n39, 195; Life and Words, 195 Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe, 113 Davis, Allison, 202 Davis, Angela J., 1, 156 Davis, Angela Y., 40, 202; Freedom Is A Constant Struggle, 193 Davis, Jordan, 121 Daya, Shari, 55n1 “Dear White America” (Yancy), 1

242

Index

A Deeper Love Inside (Souljah), 61, 85n10 Deleuze, Gilles, 46, 65 De Lissovoy, Noah, 155 Demirtürk, E. Lâle: The Contemporary African American Novel, 5, 19; How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness, 5; The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life, 5, 19 democracy: citizen activism and, 201; conscientious citizenship, 202; democratic imagination, 201; democratic soulcraft, 201; as form of life, 201; requiring democratic social relationships, 8; shared humanity and, 201; white tyranny and, 24, 200 A Democratic Bearing (White), 201 deviance, politics of, 32, 84 Dewey, John, 201 Dickson-Carr, Darryl, 16 “Different Spaces” (Foucault), 115n8 difficult empathy, 200 Dillon, Stephen, 40 disidentification, 22, 40 dispositif, defined, 90, 115n4 dispossession, as ideal mode of being, 51 Doctorow, Cory: Walkaway, 186 Down the River Unto the Sea (Mosley), 155–190n39; black resistance and activism in, 157; Mosley on, 158; plot summary, 157; police corruption in, 157–158, 160, 162, 163–164, 170, 171, 175–177, 183; positive ending, 158, 185; setting, 187; vulnerability in, 175; vulnerability transformed to strength in, 197, 198; white savior in, 162, 184 Du Bois, W.E.B.: advice to students, 18; “double-consciousness”, 14; “the problem of color line”, 1, 23; resistance struggle, 192; “The Souls of White Folk”, 4 DuCille, Ann, 160 Duncan, Patti, 86n19 Dunn, Michael, 121 Dyson, Michael Eric, 191 Easy Rawlins series (Mosley), 115n9. See also Charcoal Joe; Little Scarlet (Mosley); Rose Gold (Mosley)

economic recession (2008), 29, 31 Ellis, Trey, 14, 15 Ellison, Ralph, 14; Invisible Man, 24 embodied alienation, 112 The Emotional Politics of Racism (Ioanide), 10 emotion vs. affect, 24 empathy, 200 Erakat, Noura, 193 Esposito, Roberto, 71 Everyday Forms of Whiteness (M.E.L. Bush), 5 Everyday Life studies: purpose of, 7 experiential racism, 7, 161 exteriority, 186 false consciousness, 74, 87n27 Family (author), 56n18 Fanon, Frantz, 65, 73, 107 Feagin, Joe, 9, 146 Fearless Jones Series (Mosley), 92 Fein, Helen, 160 Ferguson, Missouri, 2, 6, 122 Ferrell, Jeff, 49 Feynman, Richard, 101, 103, 117n28; The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 102, 103, 108–109, 112 Film Blackness (Gillespie), 54 Fishel, Stefanie, 151n1 Fleetwood, Nicole R., 146 For Space (Massey), 89 Foucault, Michel, 91, 115n8, 181, 195 framing, 63, 85n9, 147 Freedom Is A Constant Struggle (A. Y. Davis), 193 Freire, Paulo, 44 Friedlander, Myrna L., 58n47 Frye, Marilyn, 50, 58n36 Fulton, Sybrina, 139 Gambetti, Zeynep, 10 Gandhi, Mohandas, 201 Gardiner, Michael, 9 Garland, David, 90 Garner, Eric, 1, 23, 120, 122 Garza, Alicia: Black Lives Matter, founding of, 2; “Black Love— Resistance and Liberation”, 3; on solidarity, 3

Index Gates, Theaster, 17, 115, 147 ghetto: as colonial situation, 76, 170; iconic, 70, 93; interracial marriage as escape strategy, 109. See also urban space Gillespie, Michael Boyce: Film Blackness, 54 Gilson, Erinn G., 11, 74, 112, 146 Giroux, Henry A., 1, 3, 23, 32 Giscombe, C.S.: Border Towns, 30 Glaude, Eddie S., Jr., 3 Glenn, John, 117n27 Glynn, Martin, 84 God Help the Child (Morrison), 24 Goffman, Erving: Stigma, 56n13 Goins, Darren, 86n14 Goldberg, David Theo, 4 Golden, Marita: The Wide Circumference of Love, 82 Goodman, Philip, 115n3 Goswami, Amit, 103 Gramsci, Antonio, 55, 196 Gray, Freddie, 1, 120 Gregson, Nicky, 148 The Grey Album (Young), 16 grief and mourning: in Black Lives Matter movement, 121, 151n4–151n5; “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” (Rankine), 15; maternal grief, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127–128, 130, 133–134, 139, 141, 146, 151n5, 151n14; public mourning, 121, 127, 142, 148, 151n3; rebellious mourning, 130, 142; romantic mourning, 121; solidarity in, 141, 148; tragic mourning, 121, 151n3–151n4 Griffith, Michael, 78 Grossberg, Lawrence, 24, 115n1 Guattari, Félix, 46 guns, as weakness, 85n11 Habeas Viscus (Weheliye), 151n1 Hall, Stuart, 17, 23, 28, 68 Hallsworth, Simon, 87n30–87n31 Hamid, Mohsin: Exit West, 122 Harlem Renaissance, 14 Harney, Stefano: The Undercommons (with Moten), 51 Harper, Phillip Brian, 199

243

Harris-Lacewell, Melissa Victoria, 60, 97 Harrison, Anthony Kwame, 90 Hartigan, John, Jr., 20 Hartman, Saidiya, 40, 56n18, 98, 129, 145, 198 Harvey, David, 53 Harwell, Osizwe Raena Jamila, 63, 85n9 Hayes, Floyd W., 187 Hayward, Clarissa Rile: How Americans Make Race, 5 Headley, Clevis, 150, 202 heterotopias concept, 115n8 Hill, Marc Lamont: Nobody, 47 Hip Hop literature, 13, 15 Hirsch, Eric, 79 Hogue, W. Lawrence, 9, 32, 92 Holmes, Shannon: Never Go Home Again, 183 home: concept of, 29, 32, 33–34; search for, 44; on the street, 39 homeless and homelessness: agency and, 34, 55n1, 197; appearance of, 45; as choice, 29, 30–31, 52, 55, 55n2; class issues, 45; communal bonding and solidarity, 29, 30, 33–34, 36, 50, 51–52, 53, 56n11; creating homelike places, 33, 56n9; criminalization of, 21, 35, 49; dehumanization of, 45–46; discrimination against, 28; dispossession as ideal mode of being, 51; everyday experience of, 28, 54, 55n1; identity, 29, 31, 55n4; inhabiting border spaces, 30–31, 33, 55n2; as pilgrims, 39; placelessness, 56n9; race and, 47, 49, 54; self-esteem, 31, 34, 55n4, 56n12; slavery comparisons, 45–46; sociological scholarship on, 28; stereotypes, 33, 49, 57n32; stigma of, 31, 34, 35, 45, 46, 53, 56n13, 57n29; white supremacist view of, 55n3. See also Listen to the Lambs (Black) homeownership, 32, 58n42 hometactics, 53, 58n41 homicide, ravaging black population, 59 hooks, bell, 29, 69, 86n18, 115n2, 149 Hope Draped in Black (Winters), 24 hopelessness, relation to renewed hope, 16–17 How Americans Make Race (Hayward), 5

244

Index

How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness (Demirtürk), 5 Hughes, Langston, 14 human biodiversity, 52, 58n40 humanity, politics of, 202 hybrid places, 90 hypervisibility, 129 Ibrahim, Awad, 65 iconic ghetto, 70, 93 identity: access to power and, 108; community and, 51; construction of, 56n12; dance as public expressiveness of, 50; “double-consciousness” concept, 14; in Hip Hop literature, 15. See also blackness; whiteness identity talk, 31, 55n4 ideology, interpellation, 24 imaginative spatiality, 90, 117n28 immigrants and immigration: in Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (Souljah), 61; mistrust of authorities, 66, 85n12; mistrust of others, 67, 72; in A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah), 22, 61; racialized as black, 65; singing U.S. national anthem in Spanish, 194; subjectivity, 73 imperialism. See colonialism incarceration. See criminal justice system inclusive exclusion, politics of, 62 institutionalized hypermasculinity, 175 interior intersubjectivity, 124 interiority: complexity of, 46; maternal grief, 122; as oppositional stance, 73; in quiet, 125; volcanic interiors, 21. See also black interiority interpellation, ideological, 24 In the Wake (Sharpe), 121 intraracial prejudice, 64 Invisible Man (Ellison), 24 Ioanide, Paula: The Emotional Politics of Racism, 10 Iranian Americans, at limits of whiteness, 6 Islam. See Muslims Islamophobia, 62 Iton, Richard, 53, 58n44 Jackson, Alecia Y., 167 Jackson, Ayana V., 135

Jackson, John L., Jr., 102 Jackson, Mary, 117n27 Jagger, Gill, 194 James, Joy, 89 Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 202 Johnson, Charles, 14 Johnson, John H., 166 Johnson, Katherine, 117n27 Jones, D. Marvin, 91, 157 Jones, Gayl, 14 Jones, Janine, 99 Jordan, A. Van: Quantum Lyrics, 103 Juwayriyah, Umm: The Size of a Mustard Seed, 85n6 Kaepernick, Colin, 192–195, 203n2 Kakar, Sudhir: Mad & Divine, 50 Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, 200 Kawash, Samira, 34, 55n3 Kearney, Timothy, 12 Keene, John, 55n2 Kelley, Robin D.G., 81, 130, 192 Kendi, Ibram X., 156, 185, 188n3; Stamped From The Beginning, 102 Khan-Cullors, Patrisse. See Cullors, Patrisse Khoury, Laura J., 91 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 150, 192, 202 Klaas, Brian, 200 Klein, Naomi, 200 Knowles, Adam, 75 Kuykendall, Ronald A., 6 K’wan, 15 Lalami, Laila: The Moor’s Account, 73 language: as instrument of violence, 75; racial stereotypes, 101; racist, 131, 144, 173; silence as part of, 127 Late Arcade (Mackey), 18 law enforcement system. See criminal justice system; police Lazarus, Sylvain, 149 Lebron, Christopher J., 3 Lee, Emily S.: Living Alterities, 5 Lee, Lisa Yun, 147 Lefebvre, Henri: on capitalism and the city, 53; Critique of Everyday Life, 9; on everyday life, 7, 30; “the right to the city”, 28; on space, 90, 115n1; on

Index spatial practice, 21, 63; what seems natural can be changed, 53 Leonard, David J.: Playing While White, 187n1 Leovy, Jill, 59 Levy-Hussen, Aida, 199 Li, Stephanie, 15, 16 Life and Words (Das), 195 Light, Caroline, 120 Lim, Jason, 24 Listen to the Lambs (Black), 27–58n47; agency in, 34, 55n1, 197; blackness in, 54; black self-love in, 38; characters, 29, 30; class issues in, 44, 57n26, 57n29; criminalization of the homeless, 21; critique of ideology of whiteness, 54; as critique of the present, 52; home, concept of, 29, 32, 33–34; homeless as complex humans, 28, 33; marginalized people in, 30; materialism, rejection of, 29, 30–31, 32, 55n2, 56n19, 57n33; police violence in, 36–38, 56n15; quiet in, 30, 36, 38, 42, 44, 50, 53–54; rejection of materialism in, 29, 30–31, 32, 55n2, 57n33; setting, 29; vulnerability as mobilizing source of communal power, 197; white allies in, 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 50 literature, politics of. See politics of literature Little Scarlet (Mosley), 102, 115n9, 116n23 Living Alterities (Lee), 5 “living while black”: dining while black, 93–94; driving while black, 98; racial paranoia, 93–94; sitting while black, 95 Locke, Alain, 14 Los Angeles: 2006 demonstrations, 194; in fiction (See Charcoal Joe (Mosley)) love: instrumentality of, 53; as political act, 53–54, 58n44; politics of, 7, 24, 201; sociopolitical power of, 7, 10; transformative impact of, 150. See also black love Love, Bettina, 38 lynchings, 120, 160, 168 MacDonald, Jay, 158 Macias, Kelly, 116n21

245

Mackenzie, Catriona, 50, 71 Mackey, Nathaniel, 120; Late Arcade, 18 Macleod, Catriona, 87n28 Mad & Divine (Kakar), 50 Maghbouleh, Neda, 6 Major, Clarence, 15; My Amputations, 86n18 manhood: African American cultural performativity of, 87n26; as black masculine performativity, 72; crosscultural comparisons, 87n33 “Man-Not” concept, 11 marginalized people, 3, 30 Martin, Trayvon: Black Lives Matter movement and, 2, 121; criminalization of, 119; legacy, 139; literary parallels, 123; poem about, 125; Zimmerman’s acquittal, 121 Marx, Karl, 87n27 masculinity: compared to subjectivity, 73; institutionalized hypermasculinity, 175; manhood and, 72–73; prison masculinity, 159, 168; vigilante violence and, 139. See also black masculinity Massey, Doreen, 157; For Space, 89–90 mass incarceration. See criminal justice system Massumi, Brian, 18, 38 materialism: dispossession as ideal mode of being, 51; objectification of the individual and, 56n7; rejection of, 29–31, 32, 55n2, 56n19, 57n33; Trumpish notion of success, 198. See also capitalism mathematicians, black women as, 117n27 Mazzei, Lisa A., 87n28 Mbembe, Achille, 202 McFadden, Bernice L.: The Book of Harlan, 135 McKinney, Karyn D.: Being White, 5 McKnight, Reginald, 15 McLaren, Peter, 20 Mean, Melissa, 34 memories: I-positions and, 87n29; racial profiling and, 95; reducing importance of presence, 67, 70 memory, as affective, 102 memory spaces, 67

246

Index

Mengestu, Dinaw: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 24 Michel, Noémi, 13 Middle Easterners, racialized as black, 27, 62. See also Muslims Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (Souljah), 60–61, 65, 84n2, 85n12 Midnight and the Meaning of Love (Souljah), 60–61, 85n3 Midnight Series (Souljah). See Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (Souljah); Midnight and the Meaning of Love (Souljah); A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah) militarization of policing, 56n15 militarization of urban spaces and national borders, 16 Miller, E. Ethelbert, 24 Mills, Charles W., 129 Mitchell, Don, 41 Mixed Race studies, 6 A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah), 59–88n43; framing in, 63; plot summary, 60; positive role models in, 62; representations of urban blacks, 61, 63; self-reflection in, 60; vulnerability transformed to strength in, 197, 198 Monzó, Lilia D., 20 The Moor’s Account (Lalami), 73 Morris, Aldon, 4 Morrison, Toni: on art as political, 16; black postmodernist literature, 14; God Help the Child, 24; on silence, 87n28 Mosley, Walter: Easy Rawlins series, 115n9; Fearless Jones Series, 92; Little Scarlet, 102, 115n9, 116n23; on need for socialism in our lives, 114; on police violence against blacks, 158; Rose Gold, 91–92, 115n9. See also Charcoal Joe; Down the River Unto the Sea Moten, Fred: on black pathology, 12; on black political despair and aspirations, 16; on confrontational space as resistance, 122; on experiential knowledge, 149, 186; on Gates’s art, 147; on racialization, 58n46; The Undercommons (with Harney), 51

Mouffe, Chantal, 147, 153n32–153n33 mourning. See grief and mourning The Movement for Black Lives, 2, 186. See also Black Lives Matter movement Moynihan, Daniel, 38 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, 35 Mullen, Thomas: Dark Town, 66 Muñoz, José Esteban, 40 Murakawa, Naomi, 23 Murray, Albert, 14 Murray, Victoria C.: on Stand Your Ground laws, 122, 151n8; “Why I Wrote Stand Your Ground”, 121. See also Stand Your Ground Muslims: belief in self-defense, 77; belief that all humans are capable of good and evil, 77; honor concept, 64, 71, 74, 87n26; ideals, 86n22; polygamy, 63, 73, 85n10–85n11; post-9/11 dehumanization of, 61, 85n6; racialized as black, 27, 62–63; self-definition, 71; self-development, 85n11; separate spheres for men and women, 87n34; submission as arrogance, 78; violent stereotypes concerning, 80. See also A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah) My Amputations (Major), 86n18 Narayan, John, 202 national anthem, 192, 203n2 National Football League (NFL), 192–193 nationalism, reliance on racial hierarchies, 31 Native Son (Wright), 24 nativists, 20 Naylor, Gloria, 14 Neal, Larry, 14 Neal, Mark Anthony, 15, 73 necropolitics, 120, 151n1 neo-confederate values, 4 neo-fascism, 192 neoliberalism, 85n8, 89, 99, 155, 202 Neo-Nazis, 191 “neo-resistance novels”, 16, 19 Never Go Home Again (Holmes), 183 New Black Aesthetic, 14 “newblackness”, 15, 73 “New Black Novel”, 16

Index The New Jim Crow (Alexander), 38 “new racism”, 2 Newton, Huey P., 202 NFL (National Football League), 192–193 Nielsen, Aldon, 125 The Nigger Factory (Scott-Heron), 103 9/11 attacks: post-9/11 dehumanization of Muslims, 61, 85n6; post-9/11 expansion of blackness to Muslims, 62–63 Nobody (Hill), 47 No Disrespect (Souljah), 62 Nolan, Thomas, 86n16 Noland, Carrie, 73 nomadic subjectivity, 52, 55 nonviolence, as language of justice, 150 Norris, Keenan, 15 Norval, Aletta J., 201 Nussbaum, Martha, 200 Obama, Barack, 15, 23, 29, 34, 136 Of What One Cannot Speak (Bal), 153n31 Oliver, Elisha, 139 Olson, Joel, 24 Olympics (1968), 193 Omi, Michael, 5, 6, 200 The Open City (Cole), 24 oppression, 3, 196 Ortega, Mariana, 58n41 The Other Blacklist (Washington), 14 Outlaw, Lucius, 52, 58n40, 200 Page, Allison, 40 pain, experience of, 151n11 Palestinian people, 193 panopticon of whiteness, 160, 165, 172, 173 Pantaleo, Daniel, 57n35 Parker, Josie, 55n4 Peacock, James, 65 performance(s) choices, 68, 86n14 performative blackness. See blackness performative intersectionality, 58n37 performative space, 148 performative whiteness. See whiteness performativity, 5 performativity of blackness, as resistance, 97 Petersen, Nick, 167

247

Petry, Ann, 14 phenomenal blackness, 21, 48, 57n31, 100 pilgrims, homeless as, 39 Pillow, Wanda S.: “Mothering a Black Son”, 56n18 Piper, Adrian, 146 Playing While White (Leonard), 187n1 police: basis for promotions, 158; black officers, internalized “white” racist expectations, 36, 37, 56n15; blue wall of silence, 86n16; as descendants of slave owners, 37; lack of empathy with African Americans, 23; militarization of, 56n15; racialized investment in young black men, 164; source of authority, 159; stereotyping black people, 123 police state, 2, 3, 23 police violence against black people: “bare life” concept and, 85n5; Garner, Eric, 1, 23, 57n35; in historical context, 155; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 36–38, 45, 56n15; in A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah), 68; as political violence, 2; pressing urgency of deconstructing whiteness, 6; protests, 57n35; provoked by silence, 68, 71; as racial control system, 156; racialized precarity and, 119; racism as root of, 62; ravaging black population, 59; reproducing binary as line between criminal and citizen, 24; for silence, 68 policing, aggressive: colonial strategies, 170; as racial control mechanism, 177; silence as performative agency, 64, 66. See also racial profiling political agency, achieved through shared vulnerability, 3, 12, 95 political environment. See Obama, Barack; Trump, Donald political violence, 2 politics of affect, 18 politics of black vulnerability, 2 politics of deviance, 32, 84 politics of humanity, 202 politics of literature, 17 politics of love. See under love politics of race, 147–148, 153n32–153n33 politics of the performative, 194

248

Index

polygamy, 63, 73, 85n10–85n11 polyvalent social space, 30 poor people. See poverty and poor people positional thinking, 200 post-humanism, 117n26 postracialism, discourse of, 23, 25 Powell, Kevin, 78 Powers, Nicholas, 24, 137 The Practice of Everyday Life (Certeau), 8 Pratt, Mary Louis, 182, 190n39 precarity: affective domain of, 35; affirmative, 112; of homeless, 35; normalization of, 35; racialized, 112, 113, 119–120, 129, 195 Pred, Allan, 52 prison system. See criminal justice system problem of the twentieth century, color line as, 1 problem of the twenty-first century: colorblindness as, 23; living with difference as, 23; violence as, 1 Prokopiou, Evangelia, 87n29 Public Enemy (band), 88n38 public mourning, 121, 127, 142, 148, 151n3 public space, homeless and, 34, 41 Quan, H.L.T., 200 Quantum Lyrics (Jordan), 103 Quashie, Kevin: on activism in awareness, 70; quiet (concept), 30, 38, 54, 70, 125; on self-love, 38; The Sovereignty of Quiet, 30 quiet (concept): as active state of being, 53; of black interiority, 53; as black resistance, 54; as collective, 54; interiority in, 125; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 30, 36, 38, 42, 44, 50, 53–54; public expressiveness of, 50; Quashie’s concept, 30, 38, 70; selfreflexive thought in, 196; transgressive silence as resistance to whiteness, 59–88n43. See also silence race, homelessness and, 47, 49, 54 racial, black oblivion of, 112 racial democracy, 6 racial difference. See white/black binary racial discrimination, undermining, 188n3

racial formation: as arbitrary construct, 5; created by prison culture, 76; discursive practices, 5; as social construct, 6 racialization: barring nonwhites from category of human, 36, 65; of black people, to include Middle Eastern and Arab people, 27; of crime, 119; performative blackness as challenge to, 94; by police, 95; in possession-byimprovement, 58n46; processes of, 20; through dehumanization, 160; whiteblack binary and, 58n40 racialized biodiversity, 52 racialized precarity, 112, 113, 119–120, 129, 195 racialized space: black body in white space, 98; black love and, 3; black male body and, 91, 115n8; blackness as carceral space, 95; blackness’s problematic space, 103; black public space, 60; everyday whiteness, 97; imaginative spatiality, 115n2, 117n28; making and re-making, 90; normalization of anti-black violence, 20; policing and, 90; prison as strategic space for blackness, 159; racial paranoia and, 93–94; racial profiling as, 91; segregated space, 90; skiing, 90; stigmatization and, 193; as transformative space, 196; violence and space, 4, 21; white identity and, 4; whiteness, 3; whiteness as reinforcing boundaries, 94; white supremacy and, 4 racial paranoia, 93–94 racial profiling: in Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 92; denying black agency, 113; of educated black men, 96; implied, 95; justification for, 107; lifelong, 97; memories of racism and experience of, 95; in A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (Souljah), 76; reinforcing carceral spatiality of whiteness, 113; as spatializing practice, 91; Trump’s call for, 20; vulnerability myth of white women and, 98 racial terrorism. See lynchings racial uplift, 32, 92, 102 racism: anti-Muslim, 62; blackness as suspicious, 138; black-on-black

Index relations and, 62; capitalism and, 89; colorblindness masquerading as, 23; “color-blind racism”, 2; discomfort of critique of, 116n24; as disease, 62; experiential racism, 7, 161; governing everyday life, 155; ideological basis, 162; language, 101, 131, 144, 173; neo–Jim Crow racism, 4; neoliberalism, 89, 99; “new racism”, 2; post-Jim Crow racism, 2, 4; systemic racism, 113; white supremacy and, 2 Racism Without Racists (Bonilla), 2 Radford-Curry, Blanche, 141 radical interactionist theory, 170 Raengo, Alessandra, 121 Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y., 46 Rancière, Jacques, 13, 17 Randall, Dudley, 14 Rankine, Claudia, 121; “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning”, 15 rape, false convictions for, 157 rapist mythoform, 37, 47, 160 rebellious mourning, 142 Reed, Anthony, 52, 58n37 Reed, Ishmael, 14, 15 Reeves, Joshua, 120 Reid-Pharr, Robert F., 146 Reitzes, Donald C., 55n4 relativity (concept), 117n29 resistance: black vulnerability and, 9–10, 12–13; quiet as, 54; strategies of, 11; transgressive silence as, 59–88n43 resistant vulnerability, 12 respectability, ideology of, 45 Robinson, Cedric J., 58n46, 62, 192, 200 Rodríguez, Dylan, 195 Rodriguez, Maria Mercedes Ortiz, 190n39 romantic mourning, 121 Rose, Gillian, 148 Rose Gold (Mosley), 91–92, 115n9 Ross, Marlon, 72 Ruel, Erin E., 55n4 Sabsay, Leticia, 10 Sachs, Lloyd, 158 Salcedo, Doris, 21, 147, 148, 149, 153n31, 153n34 Sanchez, Sonia, 14 scapegoat blackness, 41

249

Scheff, Thomas J., 32, 87n27 Schilling, Derek, 7 Scott, Darieck, 112 Scott, David, 196 Scott, James C., 43 Scott, Walter, 1, 120 Scott-Heron, Gil: The Nigger Factory, 103 self-love, 38 Semiautomatic (Shockley), 15, 199 Shabazz, Rashad, 115n8, 117n28, 159, 188n7 Shadow of Light (J. Cherry), 66 “Shadows of the Absent Body” (Butler), 147 shame, as social control mechanism, 46 shared vulnerability, 3, 12, 95, 194 Sharpe, Christina, 36; In the Wake, 121 Shepard, Alan, 117n27 Shockley, Evie, 23; Semiautomatic, 15, 199 Sibley, John H.: Being and Homeless, 51 silence: agency in, 87n32; as civil disobedience, 84; as complicity, 148; as counter-speech, 69; cultural and spiritual meaning in, 63; as discipline, 66; as empowering strategy, 75; in etiology of crime, 87n30; lessons from, 73; meaning of, 86n17; in Muslim community, 71; as part of language, 127; as performative agency, 64, 66, 83, 87n29; police misunderstanding of, 86n17; police violence provoked by, 68, 71; as political act, 61; problematic of, 87n28; rendering one invisible, 73; as resistance, 59–88n43, 93; role in sustaining crime, 87n31; selfgovernance and, 77; as strategic choice, 74–75; subverting discursive practices of whiteness, 73; as un-American, 65; veiled silence, 74. See also quiet (concept) silent racism, 135 The Size of a Mustard Seed (Juwayriyah), 85n6 skiing, as racially segregated space, 90 slavery: afterlife of, 98, 121; American colonies, 88n35; black bodies in pain for public consumption, 36; blacks as less than human, 45; brotherhood of,

250

Index

38, 40; continued racialized discourses, 56n18; escaped slaves, 169, 200; homeless comparisons, 45–46; incarceration as, 38, 39, 40, 90; legacy in penal system, 155, 156; in literature, 24; marriage as, 145–146; to material culture, 44; prison as slave vessel, 59; self-identification with, 46; Underground Railroad, 169 Smith, Anna Deavere, 54 Smith, Mychal Denzel, 41 Smith, Tommie, 193 Snow, David, 31, 55n4 social change: everyday life and, 53, 196; racialized spaces as transformative spaces, 196; self-transformation as basis for, 200; starting with individual, 113, 197 social class. See class issues social relativism, 117n29 solidarity: affective solidarity, 18, 22; American Dream and, 27; in grief, 141; of homeless, 29, 33–34, 38, 50, 51–52, 53, 56n11; against injustice, 143; new affective alliances based on, 9; vulnerable solidarity, 12; as weapon and practice, 130 Souljah, Sister: activism in her works, 85n9; The Coldest Winter Ever, 60; A Deeper Love Inside, 61, 85n10; diverse embodied black characters, 15; literary twin, 79; Midnight: A Gangster Love Story, 60–61, 65, 84n2, 85n12; Midnight and the Meaning of Love, 60–61, 85n3; Midnight Series, 60; name, 88n38; No Disrespect, 62; representations of urban blacks, 60, 61, 70. See also A Moment of Silence: Midnight III Southgate, Martha, 15 The Sovereignty of Quiet (Quashie), 30 space: as emergent and real, 115n1; interrelationship with power, 103, 113; making and re-making, 90; penal space, 115n6; performative space, 148; politics of, 89, 95, 115n2, 157; power struggle over, in interracial encounters, 106, 113; production of, 90; as product of interrelations, 115n7; race as, 91,

123; relational construction of, 113; segregated, 90 space race, black mathematicians, 117n27 spatialization of race: black body in white space, 98, 160; black love and, 3; black male body and, 91, 115n8; blackness as carceral space, 95; blackness’s problematic space, 103; black public space, 60; everyday whiteness, 97; imaginative spatiality, 115n2, 117n28; making and re-making, 90; normalization of anti-black violence, 20; policing and, 90; racial paranoia and, 93–94; racial profiling as, 91; segregated space, 90; skiing, 90; spatialized blackness, 188n7; stigmatization and, 193; violence and space, 4, 21; white identity and, 4; whiteness, 3; whiteness as reinforcing boundaries, 94; white supremacy and, 4 Spillers, Hortense, 124 spiritual activism, embodiment of, 43 Spivak, Gayatri: “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 83 Stamped From The Beginning (Kendi), 102 Stand Your Ground (Murray), 119–153n34; author’s reasons for writing, 121; black being in, 121; black interiority in, 149; decentering whiteness as dominant ideal of being, 122; maternal grief in, 123, 124, 126, 127–128, 130, 133–134, 139, 141, 146; parts and narrators, 122, 130, 136, 143; plot summary, 122; protagonist, 122; racial framing in, 147; vulnerability transformed to strength in, 197, 198; wake work in, 121 Stand Your Ground laws: enactment, 120; as free pass to kill black people, 122, 127, 129, 151n8, 152n22; necropolitics and, 120; need for repeal of, 122, 129, 137, 142, 151n8; white supremacist support for, 143 Steele, Shelby, 178 Steiner, Rudolph, 196 Stevenson, Bryan, 23, 168 Stewart, Kathleen, 24 Stigma (Goffman), 56n13 Stow, Simon, 121

Index Stubblefield, Anna, 178 subjectivity, 73. See also black subjectivity Suen, Alison, 86n19 Sullivan, Shannon, 6, 139, 174 systemic racism, 113 #TakeAKnee movement, 192 Taussig, Michael, 148 Taylor, Paul C., 15 Tensions in the American Dream (M. Bush and R. Bush), 27 terrorism: lynchings, 120, 160, 168; post-9/ 11 treatment of Muslims, 61, 62–63, 85n6; of whiteness, 120, 145; white terror, 1 Things That Make White People Uncomfortable (Bennett), 193 Thompson, Debby, 54 Thompson, Katrina, 120 Thrift, Nigel, 18, 24, 46 Till, Emmett, 142 Tim, Charlie, 34 Tochluk, Shelly, 6; Witnessing Whiteness, 5 Tometi, Opal, 2 tragic mourning, 121, 151n3–151n4 transformative change: black male characters, 12; everyday life as medium and narrative of, 50; love’s impact, 150; racialized space as transformative space, 196; self-transformation as basis for, 200; vulnerability and, 4, 11–12, 112, 140, 185, 193, 197–198 transgressive silence, 59–88n43 trauma: caused by discriminatory state apparatus, 60; recovery from, 58n39 Troupe, Quincy, 103 Trump, Donald J.: authoritarian tactics, 200; as crisis, 24; divisiveness, use of, 23, 202; election, 2, 4, 191; endorsing tyranny, 24; hate speech on Mexicans as criminals, 25; immigration policies, 10, 191; on Kaepernick, 193; “make America great again” rhetoric, 23; materialism as success, 198; militarization of urban spaces and national borders, 16; neo-confederate values, 4; neo-fascism and, 192; presidential campaign, 23; racial

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profiling, 20; racism, 2, 4, 191; as solution to the empire of chaos, 24; white-black binary, 20; whiteness, reinforcing crisis of, 10; whiteness and, 191–192; white supremacy and, 2, 3–4, 9, 203n1 Tully, James, 195 Turner, Nikki, 15 The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life (Demirtürk), 5, 19 tyranny. See white tyranny The Undercommons (Harney and Moten), 51 Underground Railroad, 169 The Underground Railroad (Whitehead), 24 Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century (Watson et al., ed.), 5 upward mobility narrative: black people situated outside of, 134; in Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 92, 102; college as path to, 151n9; failures, 45, 55; homelessness as challenge to limitations of, 41; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 31, 32, 41, 44, 45, 55; racial uplift, 32, 92, 102; safety, 44; wasteful lives and, 88n42 urban space: actuality vs. potentiality of, 79; black men as urban prisoners, 115n5; black people as criminals, 72; black people as victims, 86n20; capitalism and, 53; as colony, 76, 170, 176; homelessness, 28; militarization of, 16; racial profiling, 91; stereotypes of black men, 123; white power structure and, 170. See also ghetto Valentine, Gill, 148 Vaughan, Dorothy, 117n27 vigilante violence: against black male body, 119, 121; criminalization of black victims, 128, 130, 134–135, 138, 140; in historical context, 155; as masculinity contest, 139; by police, 170; as political violence, 2; as racial control system, 156; in response to

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Index

killings of black men, 126, 128; sainthood of perpetrators, 134, 138; Stand Your Ground laws, 22, 120, 122; white supremacy and, 143–144. See also Stand Your Ground (Murray) Vij, Ritu, 35 violence: discursive, 93; everyday life, 195; interaction with space, 4; performative violence of whiteness, 66; as problem of the twenty-first century, 1; racist violence against black male body, 119; sovereign violence of whiteness, 62; state-sanctioned, 2, 21, 156, 195; vigilante, 2; and whiteness, 2. See also lynchings; police violence against black people; policing, aggressive; vigilante violence visibility, concept of, 83, 88n43 vulnerability: autonomy and, 71, 74; in Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 112; as corporeal, 112; discourse of, 132; epistemic, 112; ethics of, 78; forms of, 112; of homeless, 35, 53; mobilization of, 201; as mobilizing source of communal power, 197; “Nobody” and, 47; normativity and, 11, 74; as political act, 22; political notion of, 13; of poor people, 96; relationality produced by, 113; rendered visible, 149; spatial, 113; transformed into strength, 112, 140, 197–198; virtues of, 146 vulnerability, shared, 3, 12, 95, 194 vulnerability-in-action, 12 vulnerability of black people: agency and, 11; everyday life, 19; in law enforcement system, 3; as myth, 198; politics of, 2; racialized space as transformative space, 196; radical black performativity of, 11; resistance and, 9–10, 12–13; social transformation and, 4, 11–12; transformed into action, 185, 193 vulnerability of white people: fear as root of, 132; narrative of, 129; Trump’s narrative, 10; as violence, 119–153n34 Vulnerability studies, 4 vulnerable solidarity, 12 Wacquant, Loïc, 90, 155

Wagner, Roi, 83 wake work, 121, 141, 151n7 Walkaway (Doctorow), 186 Walker, Alice, 197 Walker, Margaret, 14 Walker, Robert, 31 Warren, John T., 5 Washington, Mary Helen: The Other Blacklist, 14 Watson, Veronica: Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century, 5 Watten, Barrett, 37, 52 Watts Riots (1965), 91, 92, 116n23 Weheliye, Alexander G., 13, 36, 102, 117n26; Habeas Viscus, 151n1 West, Cornel, 192, 201 West, Traci C., 139 When They Call You a Terrorist (Cullors and Bandele), 3, 150 White, Stephen: A Democratic Bearing, 201 white allies: agency, employment of, 11; black love, 3; in Charcoal Joe (Mosley), 116n23; in Listen to the Lambs (Black), 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 50; paternalistic motivation, 184 white-black binary, 19, 20, 58n40 white body, performing whitely, 49 white gaze: black interiority situated beyond, 21; blackness and, 93, 179; interrupting, 185; as intimidating, 137; violence of, 18, 67, 129 white guilt, 178, 179, 184 Whitehead, Colson, 15; The Underground Railroad, 24 white identity: contingent on blackness as criminality, 178; fashioning of, 145; spatialization of race and, 4, 143; white supremacy and, 178 white ignorance, 144, 152n26 whiteliness, whitely, 50, 58n36, 145, 163 White Lives (Byrne), 5 whiteness: American Dream and, 92; “bare life” of black citizen at heart of ideology of, 85n5; black performance of, 98; carceral spatiality and, 99, 113, 155; challenges to, 4, 17; as comfort, 48; contradictions in, 19; cracks in, 50, 52, 53, 54, 69, 198; crisis of, 2, 10, 119,

Index 192; cultural enactment of, 94; decentered, 122; discursive cracks in, 48, 167, 185, 192; discursive mechanisms of, 177; discursive power of, 49, 82; discursive practices of, 1, 5, 7, 13, 113; discursive violence of, 69; disidentification, 22; dismantling of, 199; embodied as entitlement to spatiality, 174; embodied by black people, 45, 82, 83, 105; as embodied discursive practice, 20; as good intentions, 46; ideology of, 54, 145, 178; as imagined community, 6; impact on white people, 143; as invented category, 4; invisibility of, 4; Iranian Americans at limits of, 6; masquerading as God-like absolute power, 67; material consequences for social interactions, 4; normative, 5, 120; oxymoronic, 6; panopticon of, 160, 165, 173; performative subversions of, 198; performative violence of, 66; performative whiteness, 5; performativity of, 5, 95, 145, 182; performed by “good white people”, 178; of post-racial moment, 25; preservation of, 6; privilege of, 167; as problematic, 144; public practice of, 48; racial fear in, 119; racist assumptions in, 161; reflective, 145; reinforcing spatial boundaries, 94; shaping everyday black life, 200; silence subverting discursive practices of, 73; social construct of, 4; sovereignty of, 62, 159; as space of exceptionalism, 92; spatial confines of, 103; as strategy of authority, 163, 168; subverted by performativity of blackness, 21; terrorism of, 120, 145; transgressive silence as resistance to, 59–88n43; Trump and, 191–192; tyranny and, 184; uncivilized nature of, 62; unconscious habits of, 178; undoing, 62, 94, 107, 113, 178, 200; as valued, 66; value derived from degraded blackness, 3. See also Critical Whiteness studies white people: ethical obligation to defend black humanity, 3; racial paranoia, 93–94

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white power structure: black criminality and, 59; crime as intrinsic to, 81; crime control strategies and, 160; discursive association with inner city, 170; discursive mechanisms of whiteness, 177; panoptical strategies, 172 white privilege, 179 white saviors, 46, 76, 162, 184 “White Space” (E. Anderson), 153n29 white supremacy: Baldwin’s perspective, 24; black people’s refusal to be complicit with, 7; black vulnerability and, 11, 198; capitalism as, 32; criminalizing black lives, 12, 16, 40, 155; as culture of theft, 137; denigration of black people as “waste management problem”, 116n22; disciplinary mechanisms, 156; homelessness, view of, 55n3; maintained through breaking black men’s spirit, 41; protection of white womanhood as core principal, 132; public space defined by, 4; racial hierarchy, 149; racism and, 2; regulation of everyday life, 6; resistance to, 8; respectability as construct of, 31; Stand Your Ground laws and, 143; as system of interpellation, 126; Trump and, 2, 3–4, 203n1; vigilante violence and, 143–144; white identity and, 178 white terror, 1 white tyranny, 24 whitopia, 133 “Why I Wrote Stand Your Ground” (Murray), 121 The Wide Circumference of Love (Golden), 82 Wideman, John Edgar, 142 Wilcox, Lauren, 151n1 Wilkerson, Isabel, 10 Wilkins, Nicola, 55n1 Williams, Sherley Anne, 15 Williamson, Lisa. See Souljah, Sister Wilson, Darren, 122 Winant, Howard, 2, 5, 6, 119, 200 Winters, Joseph R.: Hope Draped in Black, 24 Witnessing Whiteness (Tochluk), 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 151n11

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Index

Woodard, Colin, 24 Wright, Michelle M., 6 Wright, Richard, 14; Native Son, 24 Wynter, Sylvia, 117n26 Yancy, George: on battle discourse, 35; current divisiveness as crucial moment, 202; “Dear White America”, 1; discriminatory state apparatus causing trauma in black men, 60; on lived

interiority of what it means to be black, 8; on love, 150; on Trump and white supremacy, 203n1; on white gaze, 67 Young, Harvey, 48, 100 Young, Kevin: The Grey Album, 16 Young, Tara, 87n30–87n31 Zimmerman, George, 2, 119–120, 121, 151n2 Zournazi, Mary, 38

About the Author

Dr. E. Lâle Demirtürk is professor of American Literature in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches classes on modern American literature and African American literature. She earned her PhD in American Studies at the University of Iowa in 1986. She has published articles on the American and African-American novel in Turkey, and in the United States in such journals as Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, American Studies International, Mississippi Quarterly, Melus, College Literature, CLA Journal, Southern Literary Journal, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She has a book, entitled Modern African American Novel (1997) (in Turkish), published as the first book on the African American novel in Turkey. Her books also include How Black Writers Deal with Whiteness: Characterization through Deconstructing Color (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), The Contemporary African American Novel: Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities, and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP & Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), and The Twenty-First Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life: Blackness as Strategy for Social Change (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, May 2016). She has also been publishing newspaper essays and poetry (in Turkish), and has published a book, Critical Pedagogy: An Odyssey of Learning and Transformation in 2017 (in Turkish). She is currently working (in English) on the representations of whiteness in the contemporary African American urban novel, and writing articles (in Turkish) on a critique of global white supremacy.

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