Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture [1 ed.] 1498583806, 9781498583800

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Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture Edited by Melvin G. Hill

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, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Octavia E. Butler’s KINDRED: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. KINDRED Copyright © The Estate of Octavia E. Butler. Adaptation copyright © 2017 Damian Duffy and John Jennings. Based on the novel KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler © 1979. Used by permission of Abrams Comic Arts, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. 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 978-1-4985-8380-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-8381-7 (electronic) 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.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities Melvin G. Hill  1  “European Mind . . . Engrafted upon the African Constitution”: Robert Southey’s Theory of Miscegenation in the Tranhumanist Context Md. Monirul Islam  2  The Mystery of the Invisible Drop: Pauline Hopkins’s Transhumanist Challenge to Race Science Sarah L. Berry

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 3  Arthurian Legend, Algorithmic Code, and Racialized Technology: Technocultural Allusions in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada 57 Myungsung Kim  4  Transmedial Posthumanisms: Unmaking the Black Body in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and its Graphic Novel Adaptation Nicholas E. Miller

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 5  “A Dangerous Idea”: Human Enhancement, Transhuman Desirability, Binary Identity Negotiation, and “Mistranthropy” in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More 101 Melvin G. Hill  6  Transhumanism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 119 Rae’Mia Escott v

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 7  Glossolalia: Lucille Clifton’s Creative Technologies of Becoming Bettina Judd  8  Soul in the Shell: Steven Barnes’s Aubry Knight Trilogy, Black Cyborgs, and Cyberpunk Investigations of Technological Black Bodies Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV

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 9  Revising the White Cyborg: The Interstitial Heroism of Del Spooner in I, Robot and Charles Gunn in Angel 177 Christian Jimenez 10  On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather: The Transhumanist Gynoid Performativity of Janelle Monáe Kwasu D. Tembo

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Index 209 About the Editor

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This book developed out of a personal interest that lead to research on transhumanism and posthumanism which, in most conversations, did not provide a landscape for blackness and black bodies within the discussion. I hope to establish voice that illuminates the unseen and unimagined presence and impact of black bodies within this philosophical discourse. I want to thank Dr. Ron Strickland who continues to offer his support and intellectual generosity which has advanced my thinking since graduate school at Illinois State University. Over the years, he has been a source of intellectual aspiration, and I am deeply appreciative of his friendship. I am especially grateful for several of my colleagues at the University of Tennessee, Martin who have shown genuine interests in this project and the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages for providing me a space for intellectual growth. Additionally, I want to thank The Faculty Research and Development Committee for awarding me the Hal and Alma Reagan Faculty Leave which provided the needed time away from the classroom to complete this project. I am fortunate to have Jessica Thwaite at Lexington Books for providing exceptional editorial support. Her endless patience and invaluable suggestions are no small measure, and I am grateful for all her hard work in making this project a reality. Equally, I want to thank Lindsey Falk for believing in the project from the beginning. I am fortunate to have family that provided their unwavering encouragement and unlimited support. My sons and daughter: Brandon, Brittney, and Chris for their intense conversation, infectious humor, and joyous relationship. Thank you to my wife, Darlene, who has enriched and challenged my thinking. She has not only provided advice, encouragement, and support but enables me to face the heaviness that weighs on my shoulders as a husband, vii

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father, and an African-American scholar. I am eternally grateful for your presence, patience, and unconditional love. I thank God, my Creator, for His love, presence, and blessings in my life. This book is dedicated to my parents, Marvin and Erma, who in their absence, continue to sustain my spirit.

Introduction Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities Melvin G. Hill

Black bodies have been victims of a disturbing history in the name of medical research and scientific discovery. This historical narrative includes the cultural memory of clinical experimentations and anatomic dissections of slaves in America, the grossly immoral Tuskegee syphilis experiment and others like it, the case of Henrietta Lacks, and numerous other unknown medical and scientific episodes involving Black bodies. Black subjects have been inhumanly displayed as dark origami figures for large and small public entertainment including circuses, exhibitions, fairs, museums, and zoos. Consequently, these notorious experiments with Black bodies have been imagined onto the pages of novels and short stories, most notably, Edward B. Foote’s Science in Story: Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and “Sponsie,” the Troublesome Monkey (1874). However, posthumanism, as a philosophical and cultural movement, has slightly shifted how the Black body is included within the grand narrative of humanity while offering a new historical path. Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture is chiefly rooted in classical and seminal works that offer new understandings of how the Black body transcends itself through science and technology. The works examined in Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture provide an opportunity to consider the subtle nexus between the Black body and transhumanism that engenders urgent existential questions.

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HUMANITY’S POTENTIALITY The future of humanity has been a vision of fascination with an anticipation of horror and uncertainty. On one hand, humanity’s future depends on modern scientific and technological advancements that extraordinarily extend and marginally enhance human life. On the other hand, humanity’s future unhesitatingly encounters uncertainties from advancements in science and technology where the normal turns into the abnormal and then back again. “Where does the human go from here” is the existential fear that compels considerable critical thought. For some time now, some futurists have concerned themselves with not only how the human being envisions its future, but also how it reimagines the development or construction of the self. Both have the potentiality to either knot or disentangle the threads woven into the fabric of human life. In the wake of navigating humanity’s future, numerous disciplines have emerged as a space of intellectual discussions, while art, film, literature, and music have provided a platform to ask the relatively essential question, “what if,” which is ontologically synonymous to a posthuman future. Scientific and technological advances in genetics, artificial intelligence, and human enhancements forge new perspectives and challenges of human beings and their posthuman future. Posthumanism and Transhumanism reconsider approaches to traditional concepts of what it means to be human while actively promoting ways in which humans can move beyond conventional notions of the human to pragmatically engage in human enhancement, supporting a reconfiguration of human possibilities and reshaping the potentiality of a future humanity. However, the initial impulse of the posthuman or posthumanism or transhuman or transhumanism invites a certain level of horror and uncertainty that seemingly makes the future of humanity look mysteriously dark and realistically frightful. In this light, it is worth recalling political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s view that “transhumanism is the world’s most dangerous idea.” N. Katherine Hayles echoes Fukuyama’s sentiments, observing narratives of the posthuman as a transformation [is] to be feared and abhorred rather than welcomed and embraced (Hayles 291). It is precisely at this “dangerous” and “feared” crossroad where the concept of the human being is reimagined, thus reproducing a new mode of theoretical thought toward subjectivity within the complex dynamics of posthumanism. Pushing this thought further, posthumanism lies in the canals of the human being’s imagination, giving birth to the transformation of the human condition through sophisticated technologies known as transhumanism. This controversial blending of body, science, and technology foregrounds and advances humanity’s possible future.



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POSTHUMANISM: MEANING AND INTENT In the past several decades, posthumanism has been analyzed, defined, redefined, and studied from widening perspectives. The essential vision of posthumanism is the idea that the human can transform or transcend its current state of being. However, the term “posthumanism” ushers in a wide range of contemporary theoretical perspectives. Several dictionaries and encyclopedias provide a gloss of the term. For example, The Oxford English Dictionary defines “posthumanism” as “the idea that humanity can be transformed, transcended, or limited either by technological advances or the evolutionary process; artistic, scientific, or philosophical practice which reflect this belief.”1 It is necessary to take the opportunity to provide the term’s heuristic value from several scholars who move beyond the common definition of “posthumanism.” Italian philosopher Francesca Ferrando makes clear that “posthumanism addresses the question ‘who am I?’ in conjunction with other related questions, such as: ‘what am I?’ and ‘where and when are we?” (168). These questions emerge in different and opposing meanings that are seen in contemporary critical discourse. In What Is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe suggests that posthumanism “names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world” (xv). Robert Ranch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explain in Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction that the concept of posthumanism “serves as a label for a new narrative, which may replace that of ‘the human,’ rather than one for a radically enhanced human being” (8). And, Pramod K. Nayar points out that posthumanism is a “new conceptualization of the human” that is labeled as “an ontological condition in which many humans now, and increasingly will, live with chemically, surgically, [and] technologically modified bodies” (3).This new conceptualization of the human refuses to see the human as a non-evolving species, suggesting that biological and technological systems will provide the tools necessary to continue their evolution. Regardless of the current diverse discourse of posthumanism, the essence of the vision remains the same. Although born from the wombs of futurology and science fiction, the essence of the posthuman is a state beyond being human. The effect of the human condition is the turn to posthumanism where the status of human subjectivity is reconsidered. It is clear that part of becoming for the human is disclosed within a process of redefining its sense of self while enacting a transformation of body and mind. Rosi Braidotti argues that “becoming posthuman consequently is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world . . . it expresses multiple ecologies of belonging”

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(25). Given Braidotti’s point, then, the posthuman is the transcendence of the human or humanness, geared to develop or create possibilities that require more “visionary power and prophetic energy” in which new questions and concerns might emerge. As such, does the posthuman assume a new, different, or same kind of meaning as the last or former human? And if we look through a critical race theory lens, does the Black body fit within this existential posthuman meaning-making life or does it descend back into the bowels of hegemonic, ideological discourse? TRANSHUMANISM: ORIGIN AND MEANING As a contentious notion, transhumanism continues to spark differing interpretations and perspectives on how the term should be defined. However, there are several common identifiable themes that are shared among scholars and transhumanists alike. Secular humanist Paul Kurtz suggests that transhumanism is not only a life philosophy but a nonreligious philosophy that rejects any specific fundamental beliefs and practices. Philosopher and futurist Max Moore underscores Kurtz’s point about transhumanism. He writes: “Transhumanism could be described by the term ‘eupraxsophy’ [. . . ] as a type of nonreligious philosophy of life that rejects faith, worship, and the supernatural, instead emphasizing a meaningful and ethical approach to living informed by reason, science, progress, and the value of existence” (4). Indeed, transhumanism emphasizes human progress by way of optimistically improving the human condition. Before continuing to outline the various perspectives of transhumanism, it is important to briefly note the origin of the thought and term. As the mysteries of the human being began to unfold, intellectual thinkers turned their attention to the human as a legitimate object of study. Some of them, as will be mentioned here, include traces of transhumanist thought— even though the term itself might not be mentioned—in their critical thinking of the human being. In Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola points out that humans are solely responsible for fashioning themselves. He writes: We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and honor, as though the maker and moulder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shall prefer. (xiv)

Other traces of transhumanist thought can be found in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) where he advocates that humankind uses science to improve their human condition. Enlightenment proto-transhumanist Marquis



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de Condorcet penned Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), in which he contends that reason and science could expand human intellect and moral faculties as a way to improve human life. As such, he was interested in and advocated for humans to acquire longer life, a transhumanist idea. Max Moore recognizes that “transhuman” is not a new concept or term. Moore points out that as early as the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri employs the term—transumanare—in his magnum opus Paradiso of the Divina Commedia (1312). Also, Moore recognizes that centuries later that T. S. Eliot used the form transhumanized in his most famous play, The Cocktail Party (1949). Eliot wrote: “You and I don’t know the process by which the human is Transhumanized” (147). However, most transhumanist authorities refer to the distinguished biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley who first coined the term in his 1957 two-part lecture entitled “Knowledge, Moral, and Destiny,” but contemporary advocate of transhumanism Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, an American sociologist and bioethicist, note that Huxley actually first used the term “transhumanism” in Religion Without Revelation (1927). Huxley coins “transhumanism” and explains its intention. He writes: The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. (7)

Sylvie Allouche treats the first usage of the word with Huxley but mentions that the word appears in an article that Huxley wrote in the journal Psychiatry.2 Although Moore, Bostrom, Hughes, and Allouche emphasize earlier accounts of “transhumanism,” it’s the Canadian philosopher William Douw Lighthall who points to “transhumanism’s” religious orientation. Lighthall references one of several biblical scriptures that suggests that the human—in particular the believer in Christ—will not only be spiritually but also physically transformed. This is the destiny of the Christian. Lighthall points to one of the Pauline epistles to establish his claim of an earlier manifestation of “transhumanism,” citing I Corinthians 2:9: “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Historians Peter Harrison and Joseph Wolyniak credit Lighthall for discovering this biblical reference to “transhumanism.” If Lighthall is correct, the Pauline biblical denotation of “transhumanism” would be the first sign of “Christian Transhumanism.”3 Regardless of its origin, transhumanism has a distinct identity that is shared among most prominent transhumanist contemporaries.

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The transhumanist narrative argues human modifications through technology and science advance their abilities and capabilities beyond their current physical and mental limitations. To further emphasize, transhumanism is both a “reason-based philosophy” and a “cultural movement” that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition with the help of science and technology (Cahill 81). Transhumanism emphasizes the potentiality to become. The premise of transhumanism reflects an intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the notion that human beings can transcend the limitations in their current state using technology to enhance all dynamics of the human. In this context, transhumanism fundamentally asserts that the human condition is improved through technology and reason. It is worth recalling Philippe Verdoux’s claim for transhumanism. He writes: Transhumanism is the descriptive claim that current and anticipated future technologies will make it possible to radically alter both our world and persons, not just by “enhancing” the capabilities that we already have but also by adding entirely new capabilities not previously had. (49)

The potential to “upgrade” the human and turn toward the notion of progressionism allows ideas of transhumanism to become an attractive means to transcend the human being. As such, humans can reshape themselves and improve their lives, reaching an autonomous individual status in society. However, transhumanism essentially revolves around concerns of whether technological enhancements enhance the mode of being for the human or weaken the very essence of human existence. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom emphasizes that “transhumanism is more than just an abstract belief that we are about to transcend our biological limitations by means of technology; it is also an attempt to re-evaluate the entire human predicament as traditionally conceived.”4 Another sufficient definition of “transhumanism” as defined by Moore: “The view that it is both possible and desirable to overcome biological limitations on human cognition, emotion, and physical and sensory capabilities, and that we should use science, technology, and experimentation guided by critical and creative thinking” (12–13). In the spirit of Bostrom and Moore, Italian artificial intelligence scientist Giulio Prisco notes that “transhumanism is an international, intellectual, and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition” (240). As briefly demonstrated, the core content of transhumanism is that it is a life philosophy. It is important to understand that there are some dangers and fears in our perpetual progress toward a “new” humanity. Posthumanism and transhuman-



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ism are the monsters and the monstrous that confront and discomfit human beings and their tomorrows. Shifting the fear to faith within a posthuman era relies on a decisive turn in thinking about the evolution of the human with science and technology, in which, it advances the human condition and produces new flesh in various forms. What must not be forgotten within posthumanist and transhumanist thought are the questions that provide an awareness to the so-called Other as humans reimagine their humanity. THE NEW (BLACK) HUMAN ON THE POSTHUMAN HORIZON In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis asserts that “posthuman theorizing, when executed with an awareness of Black humanist histories, acknowledges the significance of the past to present and future ideas of Black identity and simultaneously considers alternative temporal reference points for the origin of Black autonomy and authority” (6). Such cognizance of Black identity through a historical context consequently is a transcendence from expendable Black subjects toward ontological Black human status and exists within the domain of humanity. Bearing this in mind, the following questions should be considered: What does it mean to be posthuman as a Black body within a racialized hierarchy? How does the Black body engage with a posthuman interpretation? What is uniquely valuable about the Black body as it transcends to posthumanity? These questions investigate the interconnectedness between the Black body and post- and transhumanist thought. In Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (2008), George Yancy observes that the Black body has been “lynched, castrated, raped, branded, mutilated, whipped, socially sequestered, profiled, harassed, policed, disproportionately arrested and incarcerated” (xvi). Indeed, the Black body has endured a legacy of institutional and individual systems and practices that have determined how it is valued under the currency of whiteness. To this extent, racialized Black bodies as “others” struggle to become ethical subjects within a posthuman formation. However, the ethical imagination has the potentiality to envision the Black self to overcome hierarchical dichotomies that have consistently and persistently been a thorn in the Black body. The Black body becomes synonymous with posthumanist thought when both body and mind are reimagined in a range of scientific and technological contexts. As such, science and technology have contributed to the posthuman program involving Black bodies, deepening the meaning of what it means to be human and empowering the self to advance human evolution completely.

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The Black body itself has undergone an existential transformation as part of the agenda of human change. Historically, as it relates to the Black body, the core of the agenda of human change was the revolutionary consciousness known as the New Negro, a cultural and existential movement that occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century. The prominent transformation of the New Negro was centered on the death of the old Negro which the institution of slavery produced and the birth of a new consciousness that forged a radical assertiveness towards the “race problem.” The New in relation to posthuman transformation regarding the Black body gives rise to self-conception and an alternate identity narrative. Indeed, where the Black body has been historically redefined under the New Negro consciousness, the Black body has also undergone a biological shift and an ethnical reconfiguration through the racial amalgamation procedure. The amalgamation sequence was made possible through the biological grafting of both black and white bodies, creating hybrids called mulattos that served as new humans. The Black body fundamentally deviates from their previous state of being that indicates an ontological engagement with biological, psychological, and scientific evolution. The question that gives rise to the various ideas of how humans are defined is the question of what the human will become. This question is central to understanding past, present, and future human existence. The ideas of continuous human evolution are challenged by the concepts that define, mark and reshape human bodies. There are many ways to approach this essential question of what the human will become and what might present the human as a being of neoteric ontological flesh. As a starting point, three critical concepts are chosen to describe the human: new human, posthuman(ism), and transhuman(ism). These three concepts relate to how the human evolves and how human identity is continuously changing. The “new human,” as described by Mads Rosenbahl Thomsen in The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Change in Body, Mind, and Society after 1900 (2013), entails a broader sense of the human than concepts of the posthuman. Thomsen explains that the “new human” breaks from the embodiment of the last human. The change of mind-set can be seen in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Shelley, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf, among so many others. Thomsen points out that these “writers are fascinated with the idea of the ‘new human’ or a change in character of mankind” (The Posthuman Condition, 212). The “new human” is a cultural, political, and social project that begins with a change in mind-set. As Thomsen suggests, the “new human” is not only linked to technology, as seen with the posthuman, but refers to ideology of changes in the human mind-set and culture (The New Human, 3). Rhetoric of the “new human” has been envisioned within an antithetical consciousness as seen with



Introduction 9

the New Negro. This new version of the Self is profound in its visions of the Black body. To steer cultural, political, and social perspectives of the “new human” also requires a related blackness point of view that extends beyond mind-set as seen in several chapters in this collection. Kristen Lillvis first coins the term posthuman blackness in Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017) to “describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men developed through the coincident experiences in multiple temporalities” (4). Lillvis contends that “a black posthumanist approach to identity formation offers an alternative to deracialized and historicized theories of psychosexual development and posthuman subjectivity” (99). The key notion in posthuman blackness is, therefore, the transcendence of dehumanizing identity formations and conditions that black women and men experience. Posthuman blackness is a qualitative leap out of white liberal humanist notions concerning subjectivity. Lillvis transcends liberal notions about posthumanism to include blackness while employing a “post-woman” narrative. One of the newest terms offered to the study of the Black body in posthumanism is Myungsung Kim’s term “Afro-transhumanism.” Kim explains that Afro-transhumanism is the “extropic transhumanist ideals of biotechnological forms of human evolution, while extending the history of technical alteration of human capacities” (24). As such, Afro-transhumanism not only is a new concept mapped onto the Black body but also serves as an aesthetic and cultural movement. BLACK SUBJECTIVITY IN THE POSTHUMAN IMAGINATION Literature has been a valid medium to articulate and rethink visions of human evolution while critically examining the existential crisis of the human through post- and transhumanist thought. As Mads Roesndahl Thomsen suggests, “literature’s capacity to present a particular vision of conditions that are highly relevant to thinking about the new human, though its inherent formal potential, is perhaps its most important contribution to the field” (77). In fact, African American literature has demonstrated the nexus between black subjectivity, human enhancement, science, and technology and its increasing concern over time. For instance, Charles Chesnutt offers ideas of genetic engineering through biological reconfiguration or amalgamation as seen in his three-part essay “The Future American.” George S. Schuyler employs machine technology to disrupt the colorline and underscores the story with commentary on morphological freedom in Black No More. And Ralph Ellison probes the dynamics of technological imagery in Invisible Man.

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Black iconic speculative fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany’s literary canons vividly speak to issues of agency, gender, identity, race, and sexuality through the lens of science and technology. Many scholars have pointed out the implications and consequences of black subjectivity (or race) in the space of post- and transhumanism such as Ricardo Guthrie, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Kristen Lillvis, and Andrew Rollins, among others. These thinkers and writers above represent the ultimate concern of post- and transhumanist issues related to the specificity of black subjectivity. As such, ideas of post- and transhumanism are manifested in African American consciousness with clear distinction and, at times, with implicit subtlety. Several profound book-length projects investigate the nexus between Black subjectivity and posthumanist thought from various points of view. In Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2018), Cristin Ellis argues that the debates between liberal humanism and biological materialism began during the antebellum period. She demonstrates how abolitionists’ rhetoric underwent a severe shift in their argument; thus producing a new materialist strain to combat the ills of slavery. Ellis identifies and traces the emergence of antislavery materialism in mid-nineteenthcentury American literature, placing race at the center of the history of posthumanist thought. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis examines the future-oriented visions of Black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including, but not limited to, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe. Her theoretical exploration of black subjectivity demonstrates the importance of empowered Black women and their existence within time and space, and, equally important, their potentiality in the future. Several scholarly works examine the Black body in a Post- and Transhuman context, such as Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016) and Gregory Jerome Hampton’s Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday’s Slave with Tomorrow’s Robot (2015). In The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Chude-Sokei explores the historical link between race and technology through moments of American slavery, colonialism, and industrialization. Examining American, British, and Caribbean literature, Chude-Sokei shows that science and speculative fiction encompasses racial anxieties and links those apprehensions with thinkers and writers such as Herman Melville, Sigmund Freud, and Donna Haraway, to name a few. He extends his scope to include Harlem modernist writer Jean Toomer, who was interested in science fiction, technology, and robots as seen in the short story “Rhobert.” In Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture: Reinventing Yesterday’s Slave with Tomorrow’s



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Robot, Gregory Jerome Hampton interrogates how slaves are being reimagined as robots. Hampton makes compelling connections between black slaves and humanoid robots to demonstrate how the nation will become dependent on a more technological form of chattel slavery. Considering film, literature, and popular culture, Hampton illustrates how these particular mediums have normalized human relationships to robots and their mechanical function to improve human lives. Universe without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (2013) is another critical text when considering posthumanism and Black identity. Although Matthew A. Taylor provides an incisive reading of Henry Adams and Edgar Allen Poe, he investigates Charles W. Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston as well to demonstrate that ideas concerning the posthuman appeared in African American texts. Taylor’s timely engagement illustrates the significance of those writers and their text with the increasing attention of posthuman theory. Ellis, Lillvis, Chude-Sokei, Hampton, and Taylor contributions provide awareness to the ever-increasing scholarship to post- and transhuman thought in African American literature. Perhaps most interesting, as a few others have realized, is that Black bodies, as analogies and metaphors, have incrementally been connected to cultural production, critical movements, and, indeed, the posthuman future. Although the abovementioned authors frame their research to include the nexus between blackness and posthumanism in some meaningful way, it should be stressed, as Francesca Ferrando makes clear in “Is the Post-Human a Post-Woman? Cyborgs, Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Futures of Gender” that “within a posthuman frame, race and its intersections with gender, class, and other categories, have yet to be fully addressed” (43). As such, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities is an intersectional approach to Ferrando’s observation and a means to continue advancing the discussion of posthuman blackness from multiple perspectives. Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities stands as a complementary work because it adds new dimensions to understanding the intersection between science, technology, and the Black body through a transhumanist lens. It provides a brief historical and social framework for representation of the new human or new Black subjectivity throughout several centuries, based on the ever-evolving shift in ideologies, theories, and pragmatics concerning the Black body, science, and technology. Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities offers compelling perspectives in the debates regarding Black identity and the role science and technology play on systems of human evolution, and particularly, black subjectivity genetic drift to bring about ideas of evolutionary enhancement. The contributors in Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities discuss the role of African American literature and its potential ability to address questions

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about Black identity and how both are imagined and envisioned. This project builds on theories and philosophies of identity, race, science, technology, medicine, and the subtle boundaries of “new” human desires. EXPOSITION Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities is a representative portion of growing research related to Posthuman Blackness and Afro-Transhumanism. This collection is an effort to explore the Black body (Self) in transhuman realities from a multiplicity of literary and other artistic points of view. These various perspectives capture the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as a site of potentiality and possibility toward a transcendental Black subjectivity. Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities demonstrates that the Black body has increasingly not only been a realistic scenario of distorted images, but also a fleshly landscape in both post and transhumanist thought. Literature has numerous ways to explore with greater relevance the interpretations of the old human and visions of the new human. Many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are parallel to a philosophical and religious inquiry that has been traditionally addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. Furthermore, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities demonstrates how literature, based on its historical and social context, contributes to thinking about and imagining Black subjectivity transcendence in a posthuman framework. As a small yet significant representative portion of the current research, this collection includes several scholars who have contributed to the study of African American literature, philosophy, race theory, gender studies, and queer studies from various perspectives. They are linked with newer scholars who have produced significant promise to contribute to their specific fields of study. The essays in this collection are an engagement with rethinking the Black body within transhumanist thought. Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities contains eleven chapters that are unique and cover different aspects of the Black body through post- and transhumanist thought. The breadth of essays will assist educators and scholars to ensure a more in-depth exploration of the connectedness between the Black body, science, and technology while underscoring the impact of post- and transhumanist thought within African American literature, critical theoretical reflection, art, media, and music. At the same time, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities expands and challenges our understandings of the role that posthumanism and transhumanism



Introduction 13

have played in the past, present, and future human condition as it impacts Black consciousness. Amalgamation, Miscegenation, and Transhuman Tropes In the wake of racist science, biological arguments permeated American society with the erroneous idea of an innate “racialized ideology of Black inferiority” whereby the very nature of Black humanity is called into question. Decades following the 1830s, racial scientific accounts were at the crest of the systematic discourse of proslavery rationale, suggesting that African Americans—both free and enslaved—were not considered equal to white Americans. By its very premise, racial science became the central focus and the primary instrument used to examine and study the Black body positing it as a sub-creation, animal, beast, and in this sense, a nonhuman species. The impact that racial scientific discourse had on the American imagination produced influential publications that gave substantial “credability” to Black inferiority, and furthermore, it affirmed and solidified African Americans’ nonhuman status in the American consciousness. Scientific thinkers published short and full-length texts explicitly arguing Black inferiority from various points of view such as Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), Louis Agassiz’s “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Race” (1850), Samuel Cartwright’s Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race (1851), Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), Clémence Royer’s Preface to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1862), and Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883). These individuals helped to construct the image of the Black body in the white imagination. Other scientific thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer would later offer their perspective of the Black body which gave scientific and biological legitimacy to racial science, as well as, helped shape the attitude, behavior, and conversation about the Black race in American society. With this in mind, the scientific commentary about race, and more specifically the Black body, signified a clear division in humanity. To begin the collection, Md. Monirul Islam unfolds an interesting analysis of Robert Southey, whose theory of miscegenation is almost like the contemporary transhumanist project of reprogenetics. Islam focuses on Southey’s theory of miscegenation and the racial theories of the time which inspired Southey to conceive his thoughts, but also, it focuses on the issue of the possibility of failure of such a scheme taking into consideration some recent formulations on hybridity, race, and culture.

14

Introduction

Sarah L. Berry contributes to the second chapter where she argues that Pauline Hopkins’s story “Talma Gordon” advances a theory of post-racial humanism based on interracial marriage and “amalgamation”—the same means of eliminating racial difference that Charles Chesnutt envisions in “The Future American.” Hopkins’s vision of post-racist humanism was far ahead of its time; a brief conclusion will trace twentieth-century responses to race and reproduction (such as the eugenics and birth control movements) and twenty-first-century genomics (seeking to pinpoint genetic markers for race), showing that “Talma Gordon” is still relevant in race and racism studies. Neo-Slave Narratives in a Transhuman Context The traditional slave narrative was written from a first-person perspective based on the slave’s experiences in bondage. These narratives, often supported by white amanuenses, offered reading audiences, particularly white readers, an opportunity to look carefully at prominent and real accounts of slaves. However, neo-slave narratives are artefacts of imaginative recreations of enslavement that connect readers to the transatlantic past. Both literary traditions continue to be studied from various points of view, applied within different discourses, and examined from uncommon spaces. Both the slave narrative and neo-slave narrative can be employed to capture and engage profound transhumanist statements about the Black body. As such, the reading of neo-slave narratives through various critical perspectives of transhumanism make up the next two chapters. Myungsung Kim analyzes Ishmael Reed’s biocultural and computational tropes in Flight to Canada, which recast the fundamental relationship between a physical body and its informational construction in the epistemological frame of modern techno-culture. Flight to Canada describes how a physical body disturbs the dominant culture’s linguistic system, demonstrating how the storage and transfer of cultural information can be transcribed through a process of textual inscription within the material body. Nicholas E. Miller reads Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and its graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2017) as posthumanist narratives that make visible the “unmaking” of Black bodies through slavery. Miller draws on both posthumanist theory (i.e. Kristen Lillvis’s work on posthuman blackness) and Afrofuturist writings (i.e. Kodwo Eshun’s work on “previously inaccessible alienations”) to situate Butler’s novel within more extensive conversations about her oeuvre and posthumanist and transhumanist studies more broadly. Miller argues that the graphic novel adaptation takes the abstraction of blackness found in Middle Passage narratives and renders it



Introduction 15

concrete—making the historical trauma of slavery tangible through the literal unmaking of Dana’s body. New Transhuman Possibilities Arise through Human Enhancement Human enhancement is rooted in the imagination of transhumanism, which asserts that humanity can be transformed or transcended through scientific and technological methods. This reinvention of humanity plays a prominent role in identity formation whereby the individual can modify the body based strictly on the individual’s desires. Such desires of reinventing the human based on race composition has been identified in the works of central figures Frederick Douglass and Charles Chesnutt. Both Douglass and Chesnutt shared and supported racial amalgamation which would create a “universal human brotherhood” while continuing human development. Racial amalgamation can be cast within the genetic modification framework, a transhumanism of sorts, as it lends itself to early manifestations of genetic engineering. Douglass emphasized sexual mingling of freed Negroes and whites who would inevitably unify the human race and dismantle arguments concerning African Americans as subhuman. His racial amalgamation doctrine contained Christian undertones and principally relied on Acts 17:26. Understanding and recognizing the lived context of the Negro and the nation’s desperate necessity to unify the country, in the 1860s, he began his racial amalgamation campaign. Like Douglass, Charles W. Chesnutt envisioned amalgamation as a way to erode the distinctively broad colorline and potentially solve the race problem, suggesting that racial amalgamation would advance human progress and create a utopian landscape where racial differences and the “problem of the colorline” would be a dubious concern, and the Negro no longer being considered a “problem.” Chesnutt’s article series entitled “The Future American” published in 1900, in the Boston Evening Sun, can be considered a preservation of the rhetoric of earlier amalgamationists. Chesnutt’s “The Future American” speaks to the exploration of racial revisionary science as a fundamental way to “advance” the human race, and more specifically, the American. Thus, “The Future American” invokes several prevailing questions: What happens if amalgamated individuals through genetic engineering, a biological construction, were to become the normative practice? What consequences arise when undesired traits are present? How might this new American evolve existentially and still maintain their design? Perhaps, these questions, among others, are revealed thirty-one years later in George S. Schuyler’s satiric novel Black No More.

16

Introduction

Melvin G. Hill provides various transhumanist approaches in reading George S. Schuyler’s satirical classic Black No More. His examination of Schuyler’s novel offers a way to explore how the Black body shifts in socioracial categories, struggles with personal identity, and the dangers of being transhuman in a pro-White-biased world. Hill advances his argument of the novel by suggesting when the Black body encounters human enhancements based on transhuman desires, the Black body and binary identity negotiation between the natural- and transhuman is unavoidable. Also, the Black body, or the now transhuman body, encounters the complexities of what he coins “mistranthropy.” This unique perspective of Schuyler’s transhumanist novel provides a different insight in understanding the nexus between transhumanism and the Black body. In what follows, Raemia Escott takes Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as their case study. Their engagement addresses features of transhumanism regarding human modification and the ethical questions and existential dilemmas that it presents. Raemia Escott purposely draws attention to the characteristics of Morrison’s child character Pecola and mirrors them next to the concept of race to show that race will continuously trump the lesser genetic makeup of Pecola. The reason race holds an important distinguishing factor is because it is the most noticeable trait that people can use to categorize themselves. She uses Morrison’s Pecola to demonstrate how race, cosmetic enhancement, and transhumanism may be connected. Technological Blackness in Film, Music, and Television Technological blackness is concerned with the conflation between blackness and technology as a way to advance the Black body. Interconnectedness between the Black body and technology is not only detected in transhumanist thought, but also, its locality is evident in twentieth- and twentiethfirst-century art, film, literature, and music. Technological blackness shares its engagement with “Black technopoetics,” which, as Louis Clude-Sokei explains, is to “highlight the self-conscious interactions of black thinkers, writers, and sound producers” (11). As such, the next three chapters provide interesting perspectives of transhumanism in various mediums while keeping technological blackness and Black technopoetics in mind. Each author makes a case for the Black body through science and technology that enables them to offer something both unique and valuable as various discourses are considered. In doing so, they are able to reimagine multiple discourses related to identity formation. First, Bettina A. Judd takes her cues from Mae Henderson’s concept of Black women’s literary “speaking in tongues.” That is, the dialogical (at



Introduction 17

least) characteristics of Black women’s literary texts. She uses this concept to highlight the aspects of creative production that lay underneath Black women’s polyglossal art and argues that there are truths present that would otherwise remain hidden—Black women’s inner lives—without this peculiar “speech.” At the intersection of analog, digital, embodied, and spiritual technologies, this essay takes up the automatic and spirit writing of Lucille Clifton found in the archives at Emory’s Manuscript and Rare Book Library in Atlanta, Georgia as polyglossal sketches of her semi-autobiographic poetry that “crosses” dimensions of knowing: spirit and flesh, personal and political, Black and woman. Secondly, Alexander Brickler provides a close reading of characters in Steven Barnes’s 1980s/90s Aubry Knight trilogy of science fiction novels Gorgon Child (1989) and Firedance (1993). This intersectional racial and gendered identity stands as meaningful commentary about cyborg theorizing and Afrofuturist hybridity. He stages his readings through an approach in line with Carol E. Henderson’s framing of the Black body as a text (in Scarring the Black Body), with the understanding that the ideals of transhuman augmentation can potentially build upon initial ideas proffered by her use of “the scar” as signifier of trauma, rupture, remembered history. Thirdly, Christian Jimenez provides close readings of J. August Richards’s role of Charles Gunn on Angel and Will Smith’s performance as Detective Spooner in I, Robot to suggest that putatively colorblind performance racial markers persist with the obligatory white lover, white mentor, and even “white” cyborg ally—all presumably to reassure white audiences that the potential themes of radical rethinking of the Black body will not disturb white social hegemony. And finally, Kwasu David Tembo engages Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Metropolis Saga (2003–present). As an analytical framework, Tembo focuses on Monáe’s lyrics, liner notes, music videos, and sonic aspects of the Saga in conjunction with its latent themes of alternate times (time travel) as escapism, the onto-existentialism of class, gender, and the exploitation of both, nostalgia, and techno-organic amorousness/sexuality as a means of exploring how Monáe not only presents the concept of black Transhumansim as performance, but how that performance is intimately tied to both subjective dualism and becoming. This collection presents a framework that might encourage further research of Black bodies and its connection with science and technology within a transhuman context. The eleven chapters and authors provide an overarching reference of the Black body in various artistic and literary expressions. Also, the selection of works reflects the growing expansion of scholarship that continues to emphasize blackness and the many dimensions of transhuman thought. Black bodies are reimagined in various ways and challenge cultural,

18

Introduction

political, and social constructs as humans attempt to advance the state of humanity. It is our hope that this book resonates with readers to engage more deeply the past and future concerns related to transhumanism and the Black body. NOTES 1.  Visit https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/posthumanism. 2.  I should note that there is debate about the year in which Huxley first used “transhumanism.” For a brief overview of the debate, download “Notes and Queries” from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org. I should also point out that several scholars suggest that futurist and founder of UPwingers Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (1930–2000), who later changed his name to FM-2030, is actually the person to first use the term. 3.  Cole-Turner R. “Christian Transhumanism.” In: Trothen T., Mercer C. (eds) Religion and Human Enhancement. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017, p. 37. I should note that Giulio Prisco argues that defining transhumanism through a spiritual or religious lens would be incorrect. 4. https://nickbostrom.com/old/transhumanism.html.

WORKS CITED Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Oxford University, 2005, PDF File, pp. 1–30. Cahill, Jonathan. “Freedom For Life: Karl Barth, Transhumanism And Human Flourishing.” Ethics & Medicine, vol. 30, no. 2, July 2014, pp. 81–95. Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, Wesleyan University Press, 2016. Eliot, T. S. The Cocktail Party. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1950. Ferrando, Francesca. “Posthumanism.” Kilden Journal of Gender Research. 2. 2014, pp. 168–172. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, The University of Chicago Press, 1999. More, Max. “The Philosophy of Transhumanism.” The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, edited by Max More and Natasha More, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 3–17. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Translated by A. Robert Caponigri. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956. Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, edited by Max Moore and Natasha Vita-Moore. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 234–240.



Introduction 19

Ranisch, Robert and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Introducing Post and Transhumanism.” Post-and-Transhumanism: An Introduction, edited by Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Peter Lang Publishing, 2014, pp. 7–28. Thomsen, Mads Roesndahl. The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind, and Society after 1900, Bloomsbury Press, 2013. Verdoux, Philippe. “Transhumanism, Progress, and the Future.” Journal of Evolution and Technology. Vol. 20 Issue 2, December 2009, pp. 49–69. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Chapter One

“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” Robert Southey’s Theory of Miscegenation in the Tranhumanist Context Md. Monirul Islam At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British colonies in the Caribbean ran into a crisis of laborers in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade by England in 1807. The hot and humid climate of the Caribbean Islands was considered unsuitable for the White labourers and the general assumption was that only Africans could work in those conditions. Another issue fanning the British anxiety over the Caribbean colonies was the fear of slave rebellion. This apprehension was fueled by the slave uprisings in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (1791–1803). Robert Southey (1774–1843), who was earlier involved in the anti-slavery campaign, recommended a way out of this crisis. Sexual union of the White men and African women, he suggested, would give birth to a group of mulattoes who would combine the physical strength of the Africans and brain of the Europeans. The miscegens, thus created, would be able to endure the extreme climatic conditions of the colonies, and therefore, would solve the crisis of laborers. Additionally, it would hinder the “Negro” unity based on their skin color, and thereby, would eliminate any possibility of rebellion on the part of the slaves. Finally, it would help to curb the slave trade as there would be no further requirement for African slaves. Southey suggested that the French has failed to take advantage of miscegenation in Haiti; however, the British should adopt this policy to safeguard their interest. A careful look at Southey’s propositions reveals that he was advocating a new method of colonial subject formation to control and contain the British Caribbean colonies. The new subjects, the mulattoes, would replace the African slaves in the colonial hierarchy. Southey was not alone to propagate a system of forming a new group of able and obedient subjects for the British colonies. Thoughts on the process of colonization and how to maintain the colonies had been a chief concern among nineteenth-century British thinkers. 21

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Southey’s contemporaries, Charles Grant(1746–1823) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) put forward the theory of acculturation of the natives through Western education and Christianization to form a new class of colonial subjects in India. Southey’s proposal apparently differs from Macaulay’s in being primarily bio-centric. Southey, however, supplemented his biological theory with the proposition that a proper education policy requires to be installed for the miscegens to foreclose any possibility of their deviation from the desired model of subjectivity. This chapter explores Southey’s thoughts on miscegenation in terms of race theory and it examines the theories of cultural hybridity. As Southey’s theory of miscegenation is primarily premised upon biological determinism and bears some resemblance to the contemporary project of reprogenetics, this chapter also probes the scientific basis of Southey’s theory. For the convenience of discussion, the argument in the essay will be roughly divided into four parts: the first part will trace the British attitude to miscegenation and the Caribbean colonies; the second would lay bare Southey’s thoughts on miscegenation as they are revealed in his letters and review articles; the third part aims to assess the scientific validity of Southey’s scheme and its transhumanist nature; in the last section Southey’s theory will be placed visà-vis Macaulay’s. BRITISH ATTITUDE TO MISCEGENATION AND THE CARIBBEAN COLONIES The term miscegenation came into circulation after David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman used it in the pamphlet, “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races,” published anonymously in 1864. In the introduction to the pamphlet, it explains that the word is coined by combining two Latin words: “miscere” i.e. to mix and “genus” i.e. race (ii). The term was intended by the pamphleteers to describe a blending, or mixing of different races, replacing the word, “amalgamation” which was used at that time to describe interracial unions, but which they felt did not sound scientific enough. The term “miscegenation” may be a late coinage and American in origin, but the concern with racial amalgamation can be seen in English literature since the medieval period. During the medieval age, the encounter between Islam and Christianity resulted in a number of romances on exogamy that fantasized an erotic and material absorption of the East (Robinson 9). In The King of Tars, for instance, we find a Christian princess marrying an Eastern king to save her country and her people from destruction. The king is dark complexioned and



“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” 23

heathenish. A deformed child is born after their marriage. However, when the mother is permitted to baptize the child, its deformities are miraculously corrected. Inspired by the miracle, the king himself wishes to undergo the same process, and he too is transformed by it and turns White. The writers of the Renaissance harboured a fear and anxiety over the interracial union. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, the prince of Morocco is unsuccessful in his attempt to marry Portia. When Portia comes to know that the Moroccan prince is coming for her hand she reacts, “if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me” (1.2.127–128). The Prince himself suffers from complexion-complex and, fearing his rejection, says: “Mislike I not for my complexion/The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun /To whom I am a neighbor and near bred” (2.2.1–3). The possibility of an interracial union is also threatened and thwarted in Othello and The Tempest. Othello successfully marries Desdemona, but White Iago’s villainy destroys their marriage. In The Tempest, Prospero takes every care that Caliban is kept away from Miranda, and he is punished for his supposed attempt at sexual violation of her. Europe’s concern with an interracial union, however, could not prevent the growing acts of miscegenation. With the boom in navigational explorations and imperial enterprises, Europe’s contact with Africa and the Americas in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries resulted in an unprecedented growth of interracial mixing. The slave trade and the establishment of the plantations in the Americas and the West Indies brought the Europeans in close proximity to the Africans. The slavers, planters and colonizers living in the contact zones often had female slaves as their mistresses, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a sizable mulatto population in the British Caribbean islands (Drescher 42–53). There was a racial imbalance in the West Indian islands, but more importantly, there was also a gender imbalance among the Whites. The White settlers were a minority compared to the black slaves and there were fewer White women. Chiefly, young men came to the islands as the climate was considered unsuitable for the White women (Shepherd 21). Miscegenation, therefore, became a regular practice. Women slaves were often forced into sexual acts and it was assumed to be normal (Lufmman 114–15; McCallum 75). In Jamaica, James Stewart has observed, “every unmarried white man . . . has his black or his brown mistress, with whom he lives openly” (173). A similar remark has been made by Edward Long in his History of Jamaica: “[he] who should presume to show any displeasure against such thing as fornication, would for his pains be accounted a simple blockhead; since not one in twenty can be persuaded, that there is either sin; or shame in cohabiting a slave” (328). Although miscegenation was very common among the White

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settlers, the act was nonetheless condemned, and the West Indian climate was often blamed for the licentiousness of the White colonizers. The West Indies was seen as having a population most degenerate in nature and a most horrid climate that gave birth to vices and diseases. Edward Ward, for instance, described the Jamaican island as the “Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuse of the whole Creation, the Clippings of the Elements, a shapeless pile of Rubbish confus’ly jumbl’d into an Emblem of the Chaos. . . . The Receptacle of Vagabonds, the Sanctuary of Bankrupts, and a Close-stool for the Purges of our Prisons” (14). Richard Towne in A Treatise on the Diseases Most Frequent in the West-Indies warned that the climate was extremely unsuitable for the Whites and the humid air reduced activity among them (12). The misconception about the link between sexual behavior and the torrid region was strengthened as acts of miscegenation increased in the colonies and there was an increasing anxiety over the preservation of racial purity of the Whites. The situation led to an escalation of hatred for the Africans and the Creoles among the Europeans.1 In his History of the British West Indies, Bryan Edwards condemned those who slept with non-Whites as “a violation of all decency and decorum; and an insult and injury to society” (22). Edward Long’s influential History of Jamaica (1774), identified Creoles as an alternative species, “descended from British ancestors” but “stamped with . . . characteristic deviations” (262) that were the effect of their “contamination of [i.e., by] the negroes” (292). Even an anti-slavery advocate like John Thelwall had a mixed opinion of the mulattoes and defined them as a “set of people in whose composition the vices most atrocious, and virtues most rare and disinterested, are frequently so confused and blended, that it is sometimes equally difficult to condemn with sufficient abhorrence, or applaud them with sufficient ardour” (208). The growing anxiety over miscegenation has been identified as a major driving factor behind the emergence of the different theories on race during the eighteenth century. It has been contended that racism evolved in Britain as a result of concern over miscegenation imported from the colonies (Nussbaum, 2008). SOUTHEY’S SCHEME OF MISCEGENATION Like many of his contemporaries, Southey was deeply interested in the amalgamation of the races and was critical of racial intermixing. In November 1809, Southey wrote a letter to John May condemning the racial intermixing in Brazil. He contended that the mamelucos2 are “mulish” humans who had learned “the evil of both races, and the good of neither.” Southey saw them as an aberration of nature: “in the mule they have not their natural



“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” 25

determination; he is always in a different state of body from that of perfect animals” (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Three, Letter No. 1710). In an earlier letter, to Herbert Hill (17 August, 1810), Southey was more generous when he spoke positively of the mixed race generated through the sexual union of the Tupi people and the Portuguese in Brazil: “I suppose the Tupi mixture scarcely produces any perceptible change of complection, & that the pure Portugueze breed darkens there as in Africa­—for certainly a much greater mixture must have taken place there than in our islands” (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Four, Letter No.1802).3 Although Southey’s thoughts on miscegenation and mixed-race people are revealed in many of his letters from the first decade of the nineteenth century, he developed his theory of miscegenation as the means to address the problems of laborers in the West-Indian plantations only in the second. In a letter to John May, written on July 1, 1814, Southey proposed a solution to the problem of slave trade that outlines his theory of miscegenation. He suggested that where Europeans cannot survive there should be a mixed race—the “white father” will create an “other” by impregnating the African mother, and the offspring would take the position of the African slaves: The good in which the slave trade will terminate seems to me to be that of preparing for those countries in which European constitutions are incapable of that degree of labour which is “healthful and necessary, as well for the soul as the body,” a mixed race, uniting so much of the European mind and African conformation as may render them the fit inhabitants of a tropical climate. (The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Four, Letter No. 2453)

Such arguments were used by the pro-slavery lobby in justifying slavery and slave trade. Southey uses the pro-slavery logic to the opposite effect, but this also means his complete acceptance of the basic argument that the colonisers used to justify slavery. The full implication of this is seen in his review of A Chronological History of the West Indies in the Quarterly Review (1828). Southey further enunciated his thoughts on miscegenation: In those regions the only proper course of policy was indicated by the course of nature; that in the mixed breed, the European mind is engrafted upon the African constitution; and that if the French government had understood its own interest, it should have encouraged the growth of that race, capable by nature, as they are, of labouring under a tropical sky. (QR 38:75, 239)

The passages quoted above provide significant insights into Southey’s scheme. Firstly, it is worth noting that Southey’s thinking was closely aligned with the colonizers. He envisaged a future where slavery and the plantation system would persist. Only the slaves, who were difficult to come by, would

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Chapter One

be replaced by the mulattoes, who, as Southey thought, could easily be produced with complete sexual domination of the African women. The women of colour are, therefore, projected as machines/animals without an agency producing the objects/subjects as desired and designed by colonial authority. Secondly, Southey’s identification of the Africans with the body/physical strength and Europeans with mind/intellect clearly marks that he subscribed to the view that Africans were intellectually inferior to the Europeans. Southey’s theory, therefore, is both racist and sexist. Thirdly, Southey links climate, racial types and characteristics. As such, Southey strongly subscribed to the view that the tropical climate is not for the Europeans is proved by his article that discusses The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver, which includes an account of Beaver’s superhuman attempts to colonize the island of Bulama, off the West African coast, in 1792. In this article for the Quarterly Review (1829), replying to Beaver’s opinion that Bulama is a very fertile and happy island, Southey noted: “But not for white colonists!” Southey suggested that White colonisers would not be able to adapt to the extreme climate of Africa and, therefore, “It is from negroes and mulattos, trained in European civilization, that the civilization of Western Africa must come . . .” (QR, 41:82, 392). Colonialism is conceived by Southey as a civilizing mission and wherever the Whites are unable to perform their civilizing role because of the “adverse” climate, he suggests, they are to be replaced by the Africans trained to take up the role of the European colonizers. SOUTHEY’S THEORY AND THE (PSEUDO-) SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE ON RACE In formulating his ideas of the Africans as inferior and the possible link between climate and race, Southey seems to have been influenced by the scientific and pseudoscientific discourses of his time. In fact, one important area of scientific enquiry of the Enlightenment period was the link between racial types and climate. Buffon, for instance, in his Histoire Naturelle (published in 1749, translated into English from 1780s onwards), tried to establish a relationship between climate and human condition (Harris 85). Men of science and anthropologists came up with different theories of race. Linnaeus created the first scientific model of racial groups. Blumenbach followed Linnaeus’s line of thinking as seen in “On the Variety of Mankind” (1775), in which where he argued that “the white was the primitive colour of mankind, since it was very easy for that to degenerate into brown but much more difficult for dark to become white” (269). Blumenbach’s division of races according



“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” 27

to the color was not meant for defining the Whites as superior or the Blacks as inferior. He observed, “I am of opinion . . . there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro” (312). His arguments, however, were used by the colonialists and slavers to validate the superiority of the Whites, particularly because he considered white as the primitive color. In The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, French zoologist Georges Cuvier also pointed to the intellectual inferiority of the Africans based on their physical appearance: Cuvier claims that “the Negro race . . . is marked by black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism” (50). In Physiognomical Fragments (1775–88), Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98), and Aphorisms on Man (1788), Casper Lavater, the founder of physionomics, exercised much influence upon the theories of race. Lavater considered the Africans to be inferior based on their craniological studies. Some of the pro-slavery lobbyists went as far as to argue that the Africans were a different species. The notorious slave owner Edward Long in History of Jamaica (1774) and Charles White in Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (1799), for instance, argued that the Whites and Blacks are two distinct species.4 Southey, of course, did not subscribe to the theory of polygenesis, but like Immanuel Kant believed in the connection between climate and racial characteristics and thought that the Africans are far below the Europeans in terms of their intellectual ability. Kant believed: “Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples” (63). Southey’s was, therefore, a sort of philosophical racism like Kant’s based on contemporary scientific discourses on race. MISCEGENATION AND THE BLOOD THEORY OF RACE As far as Southey’s theory of miscegenation, of the equal mixing of two races combining the intellect of one and the physique of the other is concerned, it had no properly developed scientific theory to support his claim. However, there were theories that discussed the equal mixing of elements from both parents of the child. George Louis Buffon claimed that “formation of the foetus is . . . made by the union of the organic particles contained in the

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mixture of the seminal liquor of both sexes” (“Romantic Natural History”). Also, Southey might have drawn from the blood theory of race. In this theory, “blood,” as “distinct from its more common biological meaning, was the name given to the mysterious medium that carried hereditary materials, or that which defines particular individual attributes.” It “held that hereditary materials were infinitely divisible and children were the result of an equal mixing of the genes of the parents” (“Nineteenth-Century Biological Theories On Race”). Naomi Zack further explains in Race and Mixed Race, The widespread model of racial inheritance was some kind of an arithmetic mechanism which dictated the integrational transmission of racial characteristics through their division in the blood of offspring. For example, in the United States, in the nineteenth century it was believed that an individual with one black parent and one white parent was one-half white and one-half black. (13)

In formulating his theory of miscegenation, Southey must have been influenced by this widely held belief in the equal intermixing of racial characteristics in the mixed-bred child. However, this was a mere belief without any scientific basis. SOUTHEY’S SCHEME IN THE TRANSHUMAN CONTEXT Southey’s theory of equal mixing of the races, however, has a scientific facade, and in terms of its rhetoric, it sounds transhumanist, both in its philosophical and scientific dimensions. The provenance of transhumanist philosophy has been traced back to the Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism. Nick Bostrom contends that it “has its root in rational humanism;” it combines Renaissance humanism “with the influence of Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, and others to form the basis of rationalism, which emphasises empirical science and empirical reason rather than revelation and religious authority” (2). In other words, transhumanism is premised upon the Enlightenment ideal of progress based on science and rationalism. One significant dimension of Enlightenment humanism was the growth of anthropological discourses and different theories on race. The racial discourses led to the emergence of several categories of the human and some humans were considered “more human” than the others. The idea was to transform the “less human” that they might graduate as humans and to transcend the limitations of the human existence as a whole. Robert Southey, precisely made this point in reviewing Transactions



“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” 29

of the Missionary Society (1803) for the Annual Review, when he observed, “This is the order of Nature: beasts give place to man; savages to civilized man”(623). It is remarkable that the Enlightenment ideal of progress and the spirit of scientism that lay behind Southey’s theory of miscegenation, is also a prime factor in forming the transhumanist perspective on life. Transhumanism, as the extropian philosopher Max More observes, is: “Philosophies of life . . . that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and limits by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values, while avoiding religion and dogma.” Transhumanists believe that science and technology can effect a revolutionary transformation of the human body and help it transcend its biological limits. Southey’s project of miscegenation had the objective of overcoming the limitation of the White body which he believed was not capable of enduring the tropical heat. The “modified” humans, mulattoes, in whose feature the White brain would be “engrafted” upon the Black body, would overcome this constraint of the White body. Of course, the mulattoes, would not be the same (as the White), but a scientifically modified “other” in whom the White “self” will be combined with the Black “other.” Following the transhumanist notion of the posthuman, Southey’s mulattoes can be defined as posthumans or transhumans. As Max More puts it, the posthumans are “persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological ability, self-programming and self-defining, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals. Posthumans have overcome the biological, neurological, and psychological constraints evolved into humans.” Southey’s miscegens, therefore, would qualify as posthumans as they would combine great intellectual ability with physical strength. The tranhumanist nature of Southey’s scheme becomes further evident once we take a look at the contemporary project of reprogenetics. Lee M. Silver, a leading scientist in the field, has defined reprogenetics as the “use of genetic information and technology to ensure or prevent the inheritance of particular genes in a child” and thereby “enhance the child’s ability.” It is grossly understood as “the genetic engineering of man to create a human race according to scientific design” (Silver). The objective of the genetic scientists is to create designer babies by ensuring inheritance of certain “worthy” traits while preventing the “unworthy” genetic inheritance. Southey’s project of miscegenation has similar ambition of combining the supposedly best qualities of the African (physique) and European (brain) bodies. However, there is a huge political implication of the “designer baby” that Southey’s project aimed to produce and so it is with reprogenetics.

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CONTEMPORARY BIO-POLITICS AND COLONIAL HEGEMONY IN SOUTHEY Although reprogenetics has much to offer in terms of enhancing human abilities, questions have been raised about its implication for humanity in general. Silver expresses his apprehension that the “use of genetic enhancement could greatly increase the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ in the world,” because only the superrich can afford the cost of begetting a “super child.” He hopes that sometimes in the future the cost of reprogenetics might drop “as the costs of computers and telecommunications did, it could become affordable to the majority in Western and other industrialised countries.” However, the present is very bleak: the “only alternative seems remote today and it may never be viable: a single world state in which all children are provided with the same genetic enhancements and the same opportunities for health, happiness, and success. But politics are far more difficult to predict than science” (emphasis added). Silver is anxious about the political repercussions of the project of reprogenetics and it reminds us of Francis Fukuyama who sounded “a warning against unregulated corporate technoscience.” Fukuyama pointed out that “contemporary biotechnology may alter human nature and move us into the ‘posthuman stage of history’” but “the unchecked progress of corporate techno-science may alter the condition of our common humanity, and it will alter the material and biological basis of natural human equality and human rights” (Fukuyama 9–10; Islam 123–24). Similar warning has been sounded by Rosi Braidotti against what she defines as the opportunistic form of post-anthropocentrism in advanced capitalism. According to Braidotti, capitalism creates a perverse form of post-anthropocentrism and its bio-genetic technologies “engender a perverse form of the posthuman” where “all living species are caught in the spinning machine of the global economy” (Braidotti 7).5 Braidotti’s reference to the “perverse form” of the posthumanist practices evokes the memory of eugenics and its use(/abuse) against the weaker sections of the society. Interestingly, reprogenetics is sometimes referred to as new eugenics.6 Commenting on the difference between eugenics, Silver argues that one of the points of their difference is consent: eugenics was forced, reprogenetics is consented to. Seen from this perspective, Southey’s project bears more similarity to the scheme of eugenics; it is forced upon the African women and is racist in its application. He treats the African women as subjects without agency and ignores the questions of ethics. Moreover, Southey’s project was conceived to support the exploitative system of colonialism. Instead of bringing any positive change in the existing social order, the proposed project of miscegenation aims to perpetuate the already existing



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colonial hegemony. It prefigures the apprehensions of Silver, Fukuyama, and Braidotti about the hegemonic power appropriating genetic technology to advance its economic and political schema. THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POTENTIAL OF SOUTHEY’S PROJECT Southey’s theory, however, was not premised upon any empirical evidence or scientific experimentation. The fact that biological determination, which Southey conceived of, was not scientifically validated, could work against Southey’s scheme. Southey aimed to combine the “positive” traits of the White and the Black bodies, but there was every possibility of a reverse scenario. The “undesirable” or “unworthy” traits could well get combined in the figure of the mulatto as it turned out to be in the case of the mamelucos. Secondly, even if his scientific scheme thrived well, contrary to Southey’s expectation the miscegens could be a potential threat to the colonial hegemony. The mulatto offspring would be intellectually equal to the Europeans and physically stronger, and therefore, superior to the Europeans. In the colonial space of the West Indies, such a group could possibly overthrow the colonial authority and would like to govern for themselves rather than be governed. Success of his scheme, therefore, could possibly wreck the colonial hierarchy. Southey’s scheme to create the mulatto population was a disruptive strategy to counter the unity of the Africans and to subdue any possibility of a united rebellion on their part. However, as revealed in this analysis, Southey’s strategy was potentially counterproductive. COUNTERING THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC: CULTURAL HYBRIDIZATION Southey was aware of the possible failure of his scientific scheme and to ensure that the mulattoes turn into a “good breed,” he supplemented his biological theory with a cultural one. Southey proposed that they must be “educated, as they might, and ought to have been, in those artificial wants, which are the wholesome and needful incentives to industry, and in those moral and religious principles, which are the only safeguard of society” (QR 38:75, 239). The education of the mulattoes would be partial and limited to moral teaching to safeguard any slippage on their part. The partial training and selective access to knowledge, Southey believed, would make them fit colonial subjects of Britain.

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However, Southey’s policy of selective education of the mulattoes was also fraught with problems. Its problematic nature becomes obvious once we consider its relation to the education policy propounded by Grant and Macaulay for the Indians. The expansion of the dominion of the East India Company required a system of subject formation for maintaining its growing empire in India (Bhabha 124). To this effect, a debate ensued between the Anglicists and the Orientalists as to what would be the Company’s policy of educating the Indian natives. Grant pitched for introduction of English education in place of the traditional Indian education system patronized by the Orientalists. Additionally, he advocated introduction of Christianity to aid the creation of an appropriate subject community for the Company. Macaulay’s “Minutes” was a culmination of the arguments long forwarded by the evangelical lobby for introducing Christianity and English education as means of acculturation of a section of Indians. Macaulay argued that it is necessary to install a system of education which would produce “a class of interpreters” out of the Indian natives who would occupy a mediator’s space between the British and the millions they governed—“a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect.” Macaulay, therefore, promoted the idea of creating a class of Indians who would be different from the rest of the natives and they would bear and share the “white man’s burden.” The rationale behind Macaulay’s proposal was: “English language was vital to the reduction in the cost of governing India, to the elevation of Indian moral and intellectual standards, to the safety of British rule, and to the successful propagation of Christianity in India.” Inspired by the utilitarian ideals, Macaulay envisaged a cultural miscegenation. Put in place, the proposed education system would churn out a class of English-knowing native clerks of the Company, who would willingly serve the imperial cause. Southey’s theory of miscegenation was conceived with similar objectives in place, only the location was different. British were facing a crisis of laborers in West Indian sugar plantations as the slave trade was banned by England in 1807, and there was also a growing demand for abolition of slavery. Moreover, the successful Haitian revolution (1791–1804) of the African slaves against the French sent a warning to the other European nations having their stakes in the West Indies. As England wanted to maintain its strong hold in the colonies and keep the plantations running, it necessitated a system to form new colonial subjects. Responding to the situation, Southey formulated his thesis of White heads on Black bodies. Macaulay wanted to impress the Indian mind with British culture and education; Southey wanted that “the European mind is engrafted upon the African constitution” through miscegenation and additionally through cultural hybridization. The similarity of the



“European Mind . . . Engrafted Upon the African Constitution” 33

two projects warrants a reading of Southey in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s critique of Macaulay’s policy. THE SUBVERSIVE DIMENSION OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY Theorising on colonial cultural hybridity, Bhabha pointed to the problematic nature of the “mimic man” as envisioned by Macaulay in the Indian context. Macaulay, according to Bhabha, envisaged a “reformed” but “recognizable” colonial “other” who would combine sameness with difference. He would be what Bhabha calls the “mimic man”—almost the same but “not quite/ not white” “other” (131). The figure “mimic man” is very problematic and as Bhabha argues, is an “effect of flawed colonial mimesis” because mimicry is “a sign of double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline.” Mimicry, therefore, is “at once resemblance and menace.”“The menace of mimicry” as Bhabha puts it, “is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence also disrupts authority” (123–126). The “mimic man,” therefore, is a subversive space, a site of potential threat to the empire. Following Bhabha, one can thus recognize that Southey’s vision of the mulattoes as providing stability to the empire was problematic and like his (pseudo-) scientific project of miscegenation, his mission of cultural hybridization had a counterproductive prospect. In conclusion, therefore, we must note that Southey’s scheme of colonial subject formation had two pillars: the biological and the cultural. Southey primarily outlined a scientific scheme to modify the human body to create a group of able and obedient subjects in the Caribbean islands. Southey conceived a plan which science could validate only at a much later stage of its development. However, in its design and philosophy it is transhumanist. Like the contemporary transhumanists and extropians, Southey was driven by the anthropocentric ideal of human progress and the belief in the possibility of transcending the limits of the human body through scientific intervention. In its ambition to combine the best qualities of the White and the Black bodies, Southey’s thesis of miscegenation, therefore, anticipates the contemporary transhumanist project of reprogenetics, which aims to combine “worthy” traits in the human child through genetic programming. However, there was a flipside of Southey’s project. It was conceived to aid the cause of European colonialism and was racist and sexist in its application. This political implication of Southey’s project corroborate the contemporary anxiety over transhumanist agenda of mastering evolution. Southey’s project reveals that technology might be used by the hegemonic power to perpetuate its dominance over the subjugated class. However, there is a huge difference between

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Southey’s scheme and the contemporary genetic researches on the programmable child. Southey’s scheme had loopholes as it did not have a proper scientific basis, but reprogenetics has a strong scientific foundation and it comes with greater political implications. If only the considerably rich can afford to have genetically programmed babies with greater physical and intellectual capability, those who can ill afford it will be left out of the race. Therefore, there is a possibility of foreclosure of social mobility of the less affluent and the impoverished. 7 This means the possibility of an uninterrupted dominance of the posthumans/transhumans over those who would fail to transcend their human limitations. An analysis of Southey’s scheme, therefore, gives us significant insights into the bio-political issues of a world that looks forward to a drastic transformation of the category of the human. NOTES 1.  Similar concerns with the Indianized Englishmen troubled the British imagination. The mixed-breed Anglo-Indians and the British men, who made fortunes in India, were hated and feared. See Christopher John Hawes’s (1996) Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833. 2.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces earliest use of the word to Southey. It is used to refer to a “person with one white parent and one American Indian parent.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mameluco 3.  The spellings and punctuations in quotations from Southey’s letters are retained as they are in the Romantic Circle’s digital edition of them. 4.  Robert Young in his book Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) offers an excellent study of the racial constructions in the eighteenth century. He shows how the concept of different species of human beings was challenged by the Biblical origin of man, and how the pseudo-scientific writers like Blumenbach following the biblical account argued that white is the primitive color and the other colors are but the result of degeneration. 5.  “China is currently being rumoured as practicing mass reprogenetics to create a ‘super race’ of people who would dominate the world” (Islam 125). 6.  Reprogenetics is sometimes referred to as new eugenics. See Barbara H. Peterson’s “Transhumanism: Genetic Engineering of Man—the New Eugenics” http:// farmwars.info/?p=11212. It is also interesting to note that the term “reprogenetics” was coined by Julian Huxley, an advocate of eugenics. 7.  See Islam’s article “Posthumanism: Through the Postcolonial Lens” for a detailed overview of the political implication of the transhuanist scientific practices for the subaltern groups.



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WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Bolton, Carol. Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism. London: Pickering & Chatto Limited, 2007. Print. Blumenbach, J. F., Bendyshe. Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach and Hunter. London: Anthropological Society, 1865. Print. Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14(2005):1–25. Print. Braidotti, R. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Print. Buffon, Georg Louis. Histoire Naturelle. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1749. Print. Cuvier, Baron Georges. The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization. G. & C. & H. Carvill:1833. Print. Croly, David G and George Wakeman. Miscegenation; the Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & Co, 1864. Web. 16 Sept. 2016. http://archive.org/details/miscegena tionthe00crol. Drescher, Seymour . The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, vol. 2. Dublin:1793. Print. Fukuyama, F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Reprint). New York: Picador, 2003. Print. “George-Louis Buffon (1707–88).” Romantic Natural History. Web 21 Nov. 2018. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2011/06/07/george-louis-buffon/. Harris, Marvin. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. Walnut Creek: Rowman Altamira, 2001. Print. Hawes, Christopher John . Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773–1833. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1996. Print. Islam, Monirul M. “Posthumanism: Through the Postcolonial Lens.” Eds. Banerji D. and Paranjape M. Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. Springer, New Delhi, 2016. 115–129. Print. Kant, I. [1804]. “From Physical Geography.” Eze E. Ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 58–64. Print. “The King of Tars.” Auchinleck Manuscript—National Library of Scotland. Web. 26 Aug. 2018. https://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/tars.html. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of the Island: With Reflections on Its Situation Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. London : T. Lownudes, 1774. Web 15 Mar. 2016. http://archive.org/details/historyofjamaica02long. Luffman, John. A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua. London: 1789. Print. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1835. “Minute on Education.” Web. 19 Aug. 2018. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_min ute_education_1835.html. McCallum, Pierre. Travels in Trinidad. Liverpool, 1805. Print.

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“Mamelucu.” Oxford Dictionaries. “Mameluco” n.d. Accessed August 26, 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mameluco. Mooney, James. “Mameluco.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. Web. 15 June 2014. . Neff, D. S. “Hostages to Empire: The Anglo-Indian Problem in Frankenstein, The Curse of Kehama, and The Missionary.” European Romantic Review 8.4 (1997): 386–408. Web. 11 Feb. 2016. http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/neff.html. “Nineteenth-Century Biological Theories on Race.” Science and Its Times: Understanding the Social Significance of Scientific Discovery. Encyclopedia.com. Web. 19 Aug. 2018. http://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacstranscripts-and-maps/nineteenth-century-biological-theories-race Nussbaum, Felicity. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Peterson Barbara H. “Transhumanism: Genetic Engineering of Man—the New Eugenics” Farm Wars. Web. 11 Nov. 2018. http://farmwars.info/?p=11212. Pratt, Ms Lynda. Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism. London: Ashgate, 2013. Print. Richardson, Ronald Kent. Moral Imperium: Afro-Caribbeans and the Transformation of British Rule, 1776–1838. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Print. Robinson, Benedict. Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Jane Coles. 2 ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. ———. The Tempest. Ed. David Lindley. 2 ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. ———. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. M. M. Mahood. Updated ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Shepherd, Verene, ed. Women in Caribbean History: The British-Colonised Territories. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1999. Print. Silver, Lee M. “Reprogenetics: Third Millennium Speculation: The Consequences for Humanity When Reproductive Biology and Genetics Are Combined.” 2000. Web. 11 Mar. 2016. https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/503869. Sir Bevis of Hampton. Eds. Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury. Robbins Digital Project. University of Rochester. Web. 15 Jan. 2011. Middle English Text Series. Socrates. “A Transhumanist Manifesto.” Singularity Weblog. Web. 11 Mar. 2016. https://www.singularityweblog.com/a-transhumanist-manifesto/. Southey, Robert. Poems. Bristol: Woodstock Books, 1797. Print. ———. The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey. New York: Appleton & Company, 1857. Print. ———. Review “Chronological History of the West Indies.” QR, 38:75 (1828): 193–241. Print.



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———. 1829. Review. “Life and Services of Captain Beaver.” QR, 41:82 (1829): 375–417. Print. Southey, Robert. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Four: 1810–1815. Eds. Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer. Romantic Circle: 2013. Web. Romantic Circle Electronic Edition. ———. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Three: 1804–1809. Ed. Carol Bolton, and Tim Fulford. Romantic Circle: 2013. Web. Romantic Circle Electronic Edition. Stewart, James. A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica. Edinburgh, 1823. Stewart, John. A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica: With Remarks on the Moral and Physical Conditions of the Slaves. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1823. Print Swodne of Babylon (The Sultan of Babylon). Ed. Alan Lupack. Robbbins Digital Library Projects. University of Rochester. n.d. Web. Aug. 2018. http://d.lib.roch ester.edu/teams/text/lupack-three-middle-english-charlemagne-romances-sultan -of-babylon. Thelwall, John. The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times. Ed. Michael Scrivener et al., Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2013. Print. Towne, Richard. A Treatise on the Diseases Most Frequent in the West-Indies, And Herein More Particularly of Those Which Occur in Barbadoes. London: 1726. Print. Ward, Edward. A Trip to Jamaica: With a True Character of the People and Island, 3rd ed. London: 1698. Print. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York and London: Routledge,1998. Print. Zack, Noami. Race and Mixed Race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Print.

Chapter Two

The Mystery of the Invisible Drop Pauline Hopkins’s Transhumanist Challenge to Race Science Sarah L. Berry

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s story “Talma Gordon” is a blood and thunder tale—literally, a triple murder is committed by slashing jugulars during a thunderstorm. Apart from the gothic and horror tropes, the story also challenges U.S. racial hierarchies that had roots in English law and Enlightenment science and goes on to advance a vision of racial progress by playing on nineteenth-century literary conventions. The story features several mysteries nested like Russian dolls, which conceal a central mystery about Talma’s racial identity. The question of who killed Talma’s Mayflower-descendant father leads to questions of how Talma’s mother died, and of her own identity. Among these nested mysteries is an invisible “drop” of African blood that racializes the European-appearing Talma; she is accused of the murders and then acquitted. The final twist is that Talma has married the narrator, Dr. Thornton, a prominent white Boston physician. The most surprising element of this potboiler plot, however, is Dr. Thornton’s announcement that he not only believes in “amalgamation,” or interracial marriage, but that he practices what he preaches. Published in 1900 in Colored American Magazine, which Hopkins cofounded and edited in her home, the story’s overt advocacy of “amalgamation,” or interracial reproduction, voiced by a high-society physician is a radical response to the “question of the twentieth century: the question of the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois famously phrased it—who counts as a citizen, who is deemed fully human—that had taken center stage in U.S. social policy and law during Reconstruction. The story of Talma Gordon traces racial history from its earliest colonial origins in North America to the turn of the twentieth century. This time span parallels the cultural history of the concept of humanism that began in the early modern era, flourished during the Enlightenment era, and fueled the race, gender, and class reforms of the 39

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early nineteenth century before the backlash of Reconstruction reasserted with a vengeance the “color line” in law, medicine, and social custom. By the late twentieth century, after the post–World War II civil rights movement had secured some initial measures of social and legal equity for African Americans, cultural critics inspired by the technology boom began theorizing that humans, individually and collectively, could “extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and . . . improve their control over their own lives” (Bostrom 21). This concept, coined as “transhumanism” in the 1980s, posited that through such applied sciences as digital, robotic, genetic engineering, and cross-species enhancement, humans were capable of extending the lifespan and their cognitive and reproductive abilities, and even optimizing morality and behavior. While the cultural critics who coined the term emphasized the futuristic icons of their time—cyborgs, mutants, and alien species—eighty years earlier, African American intellectuals such as Charles Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins had proposed a low-tech but radical means of achieving transhumanist enhancement and, through it, social equity: “amalgamating” European and African racial types through intermarriage. “Talma Gordon” in particular, responds to U.S. race hierarchies upheld by law, custom, and science, which work together to produce a narrative about differentiated humanity. The story’s structure of nested mysteries accomplishes several challenges to this overdetermined narrative and its social consequences. For one, it overturns myths of “Anglo-Saxon” superiority, a founding myth of the nation, and its pillar of legal support for a segregated society, the “one-drop rule.” Other mysteries within the larger frame debunk nineteenth-century scientific theories that reinforced racial hierarchies already encoded in law. Its ultimate revelation that Dr. Thornton chose to marry Talma offers amalgamation as a transhumanist challenge to the social structure: by blending the races, not only will the playing field even out between “Black” and “white” people, making color distinctions moot, but also post-racial humanity will improve by blending optimal physical and moral traits from all people. This essay first outlines nineteenth-century scientific constructions of race (particularly racial types and the naturalization of perceived physical and mental differences) and then argues that Hopkins invalidates this science by altering traditional literary plots concerning racial identity. A significant contribution of this story is its illustration of the ways in which narrative, law, and science intersectionally reinforce each other in maintaining the U.S. racial hierarchy and also that the key to imaging a more equitable, amalgamated society lies in this intersection. Ultimately, this story remains relevant as twenty-first-century technologies for human enhancement have become more powerful than ever while the gap in social, physical,



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emotional, and educational advantages widens between white- and Blackidentified groups. Amalgamation as a means of eliminating racial inequality in the U.S. is an early iteration of transhumanism. Critic Joel Garreau defines the promise of transhumanism as the “enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of the life span” (quoted in Wolfe xiii). While optimistic, transhumanism does originate in the problematic concept of rational humanism of the Enlightenment (Wolfe xiv), a concept that utilized and reinforced the value of precisely coding differences in the practices of scientific reasoning (observing, classifying, measuring) and in the power deployment of imperial expansion. Thus, transhumanism has its roots in the bias-laden scientific construction of human types (such as the five races theorized by German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who followed Carl Linnaeus’s system). This construct arranges people by geographical origin along a spectrum of imagined somatic, psychological, and social characteristics, with the “Caucasian” race at the top of the order for physical fitness and beauty, intelligence, and “civilization” achievements; the “others” of empire—Ethiopian (African) and American (indigenous people of North America) races—were at the bottom. Because of the extremely profitable transatlantic slave trade, racial distinctions between European and African, Black and white became overdetermined in U.S. national narratives (including literature and public rhetoric), in scientific theory and experimentation, and in law. The United States drew upon English law, particularly the “one-drop rule” (any person with any African ancestor, no matter how remote, was legally considered Black) as well as Anglo-European scientific theories of race to ensure the income needed for nation-building through the profits generated by the chattel slave industry and the products of enslaved labor. Capitalism and scientific control over bodies (biopolitics) arose in tandem as European empires expanded during the early colonial era. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins knew that to examine the “problem of the color line” she and her racially progressive peers must go back to the laws governing race during the colonial period. British colonial chattel slavery was distinct from slavery in continental European colonies because of its binary distinction of Black and white. For example, Spanish and Portuguese colonies developed caste systems with a range of racial categories, in which people of various African, European, and indigenous mixtures were ranged along various steps of sociopolitical privileges. The British binarism, on the other hand, set a precedent for the extreme power imbalance enforced by race and slave laws throughout the expanding American colonies.

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One law, the one-drop rule, helped uphold a white/Black binary even when the binary was no longer reflected in the outward appearance of an individual. The rule identified anyone with an African ancestor, however distant, as “Black.” The one-drop rule refers to blood, in the pre-genetics era, as the physical medium of ancestral inheritance. Before the 1840s, “blood” and race functioned more or less interchangeably as metaphors for kinship, nationality, or ethnicity. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, these metaphoric terms took a different direction as theorists who were also physicians, such as Robert Knox, remade race in the essentialist terms of anatomically fixed types of humans whose differences arise from immutable qualities of blood. In the United States, race theory joined an emerging and extremely influential discourse of physiological differences between white and Black bodies. Dr. Samuel Cartwright used medical theory and scientific measurements to persuade a credulous proslavery audience that African blood was deficient in decarbonization (or removing carbon dioxide). This assertion upheld views of physical and moral deficiencies in all people of African descent. In 1854, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon published the immensely influential study Types of Mankind, which reinforced and augmented the scientific justification of an existing social and economic order by affixing social and anthropological characteristics to anatomy. As a result of scientific essentializing of racial types, Africans were viewed as incapable of self-government, dependent on lighter-skinned races for survival outside Africa, and lacking the intelligence to create a civilization. On the other hand, people of western European descent were termed “Anglo-Saxon,” shifting away from Blumenbach’s geography-based term “Caucasian,” in order to claim a perceived noble history of seizing freedom consistent with New Republic values. The “racial” traits associated with Anglo-Saxons included self-reliance, sternness, and an instinct for independence and equality that led to superior civilization-building. It is this designation for white people that Hopkins uses in “Talma Gordon.” This consolidation of supposedly immutable Anglo-Saxon traits, tied to anatomy, emerged in a reactionary climate during the 1890s and 1900s. This white nationalism climate featured increased xenophobia; stricter immigration laws; pro-nativism and active white supremacy organizations; an emerging eugenics movement that used medicine and surgery to suppress reproduction among people of color and disabled people; increased efforts to maintain segregation in public spaces and in civil government (Jim Crow); anti-miscegenation; and a dramatic increase in lynching throughout the nation, as African American journalist Ida B. Wells helped to bring to public attention. Race-based supremacy elides transhumanist impulses because it directs all resources to preserving a perceived perfection existing in one race. At the turn of the twentieth century,



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policing the color line always entailed, either explicitly or implicitly, policing reproduction. Amalgamation and miscegenation are both terms that historically refer to interracial marriage and procreation, but they have different casts. While amalgamation is a more benign term, denoting the “admixture” of two elements in metallurgy or two “distinct” races in social science discourses of the early 20th century, miscegenation is cast malignantly in U.S. cultural history and law. Anti-miscegenation law, on the books until 1967 in some states, prohibited cohabitation, marriage, and sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race (Merriam-Webster); the very definition in this U.S. dictionary reveals the white privilege and concern with racial purity, since it does not consider sexual relationships among people of different races other than white. In the policing of race through reproduction, mob law and the increased lynching of thousands of Black men each year during Hopkins’s lifetime frequently relied on justification narratives of the Black male victim’s alleged rape of a white woman. Whether a fabricated excuse or a falsified narrative to mask a consensual relationship, the narrative of Black men’s hypersexuality (paralleling the older narrative of Black women’s hypersexuality) was laid over the fantasy/fear of interracial sexual intercourse and its threat to a social order built upon white supremacist distinctions between the two races. In this incendiary context, and with race riots flaring around the nation, some African American intellectuals proposed amalgamation as a solution to race-based violence and inequality. Charles Chesnutt, a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed fiction writer, published his three-part essay “The Future American” in the Boston Evening Transcript in August 1900, just a few months before “Talma Gordon” appeared in Colored American Magazine. Chesnutt proposed that in three generations, interracial reproduction could homogenize the races into one “American” race (133). Indeed, he argued, that trend was already happening and had been in progress “for several hundred years,” since the early days of chattel slavery. Chesnutt’s concept of racial assimilation as a homogenizing trend will make the distinctions of race-based caste irrelevant. In this assimilation, he imagines color moving in both directions: the absorption of “dark races” into white, the “dark blood” already filling the “veins” of whites. His third part, provocatively titled “A Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur,” argues that “the steady progress of the colored race in wealth and culture and social efficiency will, in the course of time, materially soften the asperities of racial prejudice and permit them to approach the whites more closely, until, in time, the prejudice against intermarriage shall have been overcome by other considerations” (133). It is almost certain that Hopkins read the articles since she was living in Boston,

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and because a few years later, she conceived of a “future American” type as a multiracial person in another piece for Colored American Magazine, “Charles Winter Wood” (1902). In “Talma Gordon,” her treatment of amalgamation as a solution to the problem of the racist social order differs from Chesnutt’s in tone and implication, and she advances her vision of transhuman perfectibility through intricate plotting and deft reversals of U.S. race narratives firmly encoded in literature, law, and science. Most notably, Hopkins boldly chooses to voice her theory of amalgamation through a white male physician. Yet his explicit advocacy and practice of interracial marriage is only the most overtly political statement that Hopkins offers in this story. Her complex structure of nested layers of mystery, the ways in which she revises race-centered plot conventions in each layer, and the ways in which the mystery storylines interact all combine to assess U.S. race history and to advance a vision of transhumanist achievement, an ideal human in body, mind, and morality. Her narrative technique in relation to the social, legal, and scientific histories that accumulate around racialized “blood” and character types slowly unfolds this transhumanist vision: “Talma Gordon” is a call to dismiss the old, oppressive order of perceived immutable difference and to generate a humanity that exceeds itself only through universal racial mixing. Untangling the story’s intricate structure is key to understanding how each plot responds to U.S. narratives about race encoded in literature, science, and law (see also Figure 1, a diagram of the nested plot structure). The story begins with an anonymous member of the Canterbury Club, consisting of 25 professional men and the eminent Boston physician, Dr. Thornton, discussing “Imperial Expansion.” This is the frame for Dr. Thornton’s tale of triple murder, disappearing women, mysteriously reappearing West Indian patients who look “evil,” and the solution to the triple murder. The frame is extremely important, and I will return to it last, after all the mysteries are teased out and contextualized. The story immediately calls up racial lineage and its associated characteristics. Dr. Thornton, the family physician, begins his tale by giving the Gordon family pedigree. A descendant of Mayflower Puritans, Talma’s father, Captain Gordon, first worked in the East India trade, but when that company failed, he established cotton mills with the dowry of his first wife, Talma’s mother, Isabel Franklin. Hopkins carefully lays out Gordon’s character along with his “old Puritan stock” racial ancestry: “in the person of Captain Gordon the austerity of manner and indomitable will-power that he had inherited were combined with a temper that brooked no contradiction” (460). These are the “Anglo-Saxon” traits with which scientists and social theorists explained the rise and dominance of British civilization. Dr. Thornton then describes Talma



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Figure 2.1.   Diagram of nested plots in “Talma Gordon.” Author’s figure.

to his Club as charming and talented, a “fairylike blonde in floating white draperies . . . with clear blue eyes,” with “genius and passion in her face.” At this stage, Talma seems to be a study of the image of white womanhood (460–61). Next, his tale takes a dramatic turn as he recounts discovering the murdered bodies of Talma’s father, his second wife (Talma’s stepmother), and his son. Because a servant reveals that Talma had quarreled with her father and stepmother over her choice of a poor artist suitor, she is accused of the murders and put on trial. Her innocence is called into question, introducing a wrinkle into the narrative of the moral purity of white womanhood. Soon Hopkins begins to trouble the racial assumptions about womanhood by switching her color imagery from white to black. At the trial, we learn that Talma’s father had transferred most of her inheritance from her dead mother to his son by his second wife. When circumstantial evidence implicates Talma with motives, black imagery surrounds Talma: “the case was very

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black against her,” her “sapphire blue eyes were black with . . . anguish,” and she is arrayed in all black for “deepest mourning” (463). Her return to court for sentencing, however, introduces doubt about Gordon’s character. Sailors testify that they “had sworn to take his life, in revenge for injuries suffered at his hands.” At the sentencing, Talma appears “pale, but uplifted, spiritualized,” while her sister, Jeannette, shows signs of “rapid and premature decay” (463). Talma is acquitted because the evidence was circumstantial, but “moral presumption was against” her. “She was free; but her liberty, with blasted prospects and fair fame gone forever, was valueless to her” (464). After spending a large sum to find her father’s murderer, Jeannette and Talma go to Europe separately and effectively disappear—their names and images “blackened.” This murder mystery with its inconclusive trial invokes several race-specific plots and begins to destabilize them. Gordon’s Anglo-Saxon “purity” is established at the same time that his involvement with colonizing (East India company) and with exploiting slave labor (cotton mills) is raised. Further, his character is called into question by the sailors’ testimony. This frame also begins to proliferate the meanings of “inheritance”—of racialized character traits, of money, of family pedigree—and connects these ideas of inheritance with blood that is literally spilled when Gordon’s jugular vein is cut open. Further, black and white (or “fair”) imagery detaches from racially determinate phenotypes. As we have seen, the color of Talma’s appearance shifts according to the public perception of her womanly innocence and criminal suspiciousness; her pale face at the sentencing signals to readers her innocence, against public opinion, before she disappears. Her “blasted fair fame,” too, marks the moment in the story where she loses her identity as an AngloSaxon, as will unfold in the next few layers of mystery. When Talma returns to the U.S. a year later, her sister Jeannette has died, and she is ill and seeking Thornton’s medical help. A letter from Jeannette explains Talma’s illness and provides the next layer of mystery. Jeannette reveals a history of Gordon’s “disparaging hints and slurs concerning” the mother of Talma and Jeannette, and asserts that Isabel Franklin was looked upon “as an outcast, and her children subjected to every humiliation” and “monstrous injustice” (466). As Jeannette listens to her father’s story, her blood is invoked as a symptom of her rage at her father’s maltreatment and disinheritance: the blood rushes to her head and she bites her lips until the “blood came” (466). In this letter, Gordon next reveals that a racial secret, an invisible drop of African blood, nestles at the heart of the family. At the same time, the letter exposes Gordon’s monstrous misogynist and racist character. He is disappointed at the birth of Jeannette and Talma because they are daughters.



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When a son is born, he is overjoyed. But his joy is short-lived. The doctor announces that there is “something strange about this birth” and Gordon looks upon a baby “dark as a mulatto, with the characteristic features of the Negro” (Hopkins 466). The doctor announces that “‘there is Negro blood in this child.’ ‘There is no Negro blood in my veins,’ [Gordon] said proudly. Then [he] paused—the mother!” Instead of inquiring along parallel lines as to Isabel’s lineage, Gordon immediately accuses her of infidelity. At this outrageous double impugning of her character—not only for illegitimate sexual conduct but also for putatively crossing the color line, the innocent Isabel “fell into convulsions” and died—as did the baby. The idea of amalgamation as a transhumanist ideal of moral perfectibility is furthest from the reader’s mind at this point in the story; not only does Gordon’s accusation reinforce white supremacist perceptions of human perfection in his own “pure” race, but also the progeny of suspected interracial sex does not survive infancy. Gordon learns the truth from Isabel’s parents, whose story reveals the central mystery of the nested plots. The revelation of Talma’s maternal lineage is the mystery nestled at the heart of the story; it drives the plot and ties together legal, scientific, and literary narratives of race. Isabel was not, as Gordon was led to believe, the birth child of her parents. Instead, the Franklins befriended an “octoroon girl” during a trip south, whose illegitimate child by a white man they adopted and claimed as their own. Isabel’s invisible drop appeared when her son was born; consequently, we understand the reason for Gordon’s unkind treatment and disinheritance of his two older daughters—their secret invisible drops of African “blood.” Gordon declares, “This is the story, which, if known, would bring dire disgrace on the Gordon family” (466). This central mystery revises several narratives of racialized inheritance and begins the turn toward amalgamation as a solution to dehumanizing racial violence. In particular, the assumption of Gordon’s superiority because of his Anglo-Saxon bloodline is destabilized here by his unmanly behavior toward his daughters and wife. His presumption that his wife was sexually promiscuous is particularly revealing as to the degeneracy of his masculine character according to the period’s standards for gentlemanly conduct, for the story he suppresses because it would bring disgrace on his name and lineage ironically shows that Gordon himself is disgraceful. Indeed, Isabel dies as a result of his indecent accusation, as does the child who has the only phenotype of color in the story. By inverting Gordon’s expected Anglo-Saxon racial traits, Hopkins gestures toward the moral limitations of the old Anglo-Saxon race as a whole, in its treatment of women and children. Meanwhile, Gordon extorts Isabel’s inheritance from her father, effectively robbing Jeannette and Talma. Here, the “one drop” of Isabel, Talma, and Jeannette threatens to deprive all

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three women of their name and social status; Jeannette’s rage is righteous when she declares that she is “a Gordon, legally born” and that she “will not tamely give up her birthright.” Jeannette, then, resists the Anglo-Saxon exclusion of people of color from the rights and justice of the new nation. Overall, the family drama of inheritance, illegitimacy, and secret identities stands for a larger conflict in U.S. race relations throughout the history of the nation. At the center of all the story’s plots, the invisible drop drives the rest of the storylines. Once the secret of the invisible drop is disclosed, the rest of the plots resolve, one by one. The Franklins’ story about Isabel raises the specter of the “tragic mulatta” plot popular in the nineteenth century. Neither white nor Black in a nation that recognizes only two racial categories, mixed-race female characters serve to illustrate the pathos of not fitting into either white or Black communities; in fiction up to 1900, they either go mad and die or, in the 1890s, they sometimes claim an African identity. Jeannette follows the older plot convention when her rage at her father incites her to steal the will and to attempt murder. But her attempt is preempted, for someone has beaten her to the task. Jeannette dies of her shame at the passions incited by patriarchal disowning—a disowning that speaks to centuries of white men’s sexual exploitation of Black and biracial women. Her illness at her sister’s trial forecasts her suffering and death while playing into the belief reinforced by scientific discourse that biracial people were unhealthy and sterile (a notion that Chesnutt dismisses based on observations of the abundant evidence of “actual crossing,” or interracial reproduction) (Chesnutt 123). But Hopkins is not simply reproducing the “tragic mulatta” plot convention. The typical trajectories of Isabel and Jeannette serve as a sharp contrast with Talma’s arc, as we’ll see, and so with Talma, Hopkins reconfigures the status of the biracial woman in her vision of a “color question” finally resolved by self-determined interracial marriage. At first, it seems Talma will follow her mother and sister to the grave. Jeannette’s letter is read before Dr. Thornton and Talma’s ardent suitor, Edward. When Edward learns of her racial secret, he is stricken. He declares that if he were to marry into the Gordon family, he “could stand the stigma of murder, but add to that the pollution of Negro blood! No man is brave enough to face such a situation” (Hopkins 467). To emphasize Talma’s moral purity contrasted with Edward’s hallucination of tainted blood, Hopkins asserts that “tears poured over her white face” (467). Abandoned by her suitor, Talma, already ill, begins to “fail rapidly,” while Thornton himself “grows savage thinking of the injustice of the world” (468). He displays ideal gentlemanly characteristics; and although he’s white, he is not associated with a “pure” Anglo-Saxon lineage.



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The solution to the mystery of the triple murder is delivered in another mini-plot, the deathbed confession of one of Thornton’s patients, a Simon Cameron who claims to be English. This man murdered Gordon, his wife, and son as revenge for Gordon’s “blackest crime” of murdering Cameron’s father. Further, Gordon is revealed to be “no better than a pirate,” for he killed over stolen treasure. Not only is Gordon a thief and a murderer in cold blood, then, but also his real past collapses two aspects of the slave trade—stealing people and stealing the profits of peoples’ labor. Not only do these traits directly comment on Anglo-Saxon dominance through exploitation of Africans and “East Indians” rather than through innate racial superiority, but also his “blackest crime” and his true character reveal a racial degeneracy below even the era’s scientific and imperial beliefs about Africans. At the same time, the resolution of Gordon’s murder definitively exonerates Talma and restores her moral character. Back out in the frame narrative, Dr. Thornton’s colleagues ask what became of the ill Talma. Dr. Thornton replies, “Gentlemen, if you will follow me to the drawing-room, I shall have much pleasure in introducing you to my wife—nee Talma Gordon.” This final line of the story is also the ultimate surprise. In terms of the “problem of the color line” that Hopkins has carefully negotiated, her ending takes amalgamation to a bold level even among her peers like Chesnutt because she has a white male physician character advocate for it. This narrative is singular, offering a transhumanist solution, in its bold advocacy of interracial marriage within Boston’s elite class. To fully appreciate this transhumanist solution, we must return to Dr. Thornton’s remarks at the beginning, before he launched into his account of the murders. At the opening of the story, the Club’s debate of the topic “Expansion: Its Effect upon the Future Development of the Anglo-Saxon throughout the World” sets the stage for Thornton to assert, in an objective tone, his theory that sexual attraction prevails over racial prescriptions and prohibitions. He declares that he believes in “intermarriage with other races . . . when they possess decent moral development and physical perfection,” and adds that “we may make laws, but laws are but straws in the hands of Omnipotence,” and that humans obey a “god-implanted instinct that made Adam accept Eve as bone of his bone” (Hopkins 459). Therefore, Thornton reasons, “Given a man, propinquity, opportunity, fascinating femininity, and there you are. Black, white, green, yellow—nothing will prevent intermarriage.” The anonymous narrator, a member of the club, has already set up Thornton’s moral authority as a reputable professional and a man esteemed socially by his wealthy, educated peers. Because of his status, he gets a respectful hearing for his opinion, startling to his peers, that people of all “classes” (social

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status according to race and wealth), will frequently intermarry in the future. His tale proves his theory by endorsing Talma’s “moral development” (459). Her display of beauty in the drawing room at the end of the story is the implied final piece of proof with which Thornton’s peers will be persuaded. The transhumanist ideal of physical, intellectual, and moral perfectibility is embodied in Talma, the exceptional daughter of a mixed-race parent, Isabel. The consensual interracial marriage between Talma and Thornton then takes the means of perfectibility into the future with their children. In this story, Hopkins clearly proposes that the solution to the problem of the color line is progression from one interracial marriage toward an eventual universal amalgamation of races, making obsolete the one-drop rule and enhancing humanity, or at least the U.S. social body, in the direction of combining ideal characteristics such as beauty and moral purity. As part of imagining a new national race narrative, Hopkins invests the tragic mulatta plot with new political power. Dr. Thornton chooses to marry Talma, whom he knows to have African ancestry (or “dark blood,” as Chesnutt and his contemporaries conceived it). His acknowledgment of his wife’s invisible drop among his peers reverses the historical narrative of invalid marriages between white men and women of color. Furthermore, instead of dying, Talma regains her health and beauty, and she has two sons. As the story travels into the core mystery of the invisible drop, it refers to and begins destabilizing older narrative and social conventions that law and science repeatedly fix as immutable. As the story travels back out to the present, resolving the murder mystery and ending in marriage, it completes these destabilizations and writes a new plot of implied social health through moral, rather than racial, criteria of inheritance. In this imagined future, moral transhumanism, in which enhanced progeny transcend moral limitations of the parents’ generation, is achieved by combining the best qualities of different races. The story also gestures toward future generations who will intermarry on a larger social scale, suggesting a progressive narrative that moves past the present turmoil of the “color line” and institutionalized segregation. Through Dr. Thornton’s authorization, Hopkins intimates that his peers will adopt his views and ultimately follow his example in marrying for physical attraction and intellectual and moral superiority. Hopkins’s choice of a white doctor to advocate intermarriage is strategic. By contrast, Frances Harper, in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, had presented the idea of a progressive white doctor who proposes to Iola, a woman who, like Talma, has an “invisible drop” of African blood, but the would-be husband plans to keep her racial identity a secret among his family and peers. Dr. Thornton, because of his medical training, knows that his children could be born, through the laws of inheritance as they were understood in 1900, “dark



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as a mulatto,” like Talma’s infant brother (Hopkins 466). By choosing this, Hopkins’s Dr. Thornton is a huge advance in expanding the realm of possible thinking for white characters. As a result of this type of union of ideal traits between Thornton and Talma, and their peers, the question of color will become a moot point in the next generations. Another aspect of Dr. Thornton’s importance emerges in the context of the doctor figure in the era’s highbrow periodical fiction. Stephanie Browner has shown that in monthlies like the Atlantic, Harper’s, and Putnam’s, the doctor figure around 1900 validates themes not necessarily strictly related to medicine. With his elite status backed by education and scientific knowledge, he is immune to popular opinion and is authorized to adjudicate social problems. In Hopkins’s new Colored American Magazine, she is free to adapt the doctor figure to voice African American political ideas in a way that whiteowned and -edited monthlies—although they professed “liberalism”—would not allow. Finally, her doctor figure serves to delegitimize a century of race science. Through his scientific authority—his wonderful, nearly miraculous cures, his successful sanitarium, and his participation in professional clubs that debate current intellectual and political matters—Hopkins galvanizes her doctor’s rejection of scientific racial criteria to promote intermarriage based on divinely ordained sexual attraction. As the family’s physician, he is intimately familiar with the Gordons’ elaborate interracial genealogy in a medical sense and personally chooses to intermarry. Talma’s moral and artistic superiority and the doctor’s scientific abilities and a firm sense of justice for women and children will combine, the story’s ending suggests, to produce a generation of transhuman superiority. Although Hopkins’s visionary solution of “amalgamation” dismantles key assumptions upholding a racist social order, her story still raises some vexed questions for us today. For example, why does Hopkins give only Thornton the power—and perhaps more problematically, from a feminist standpoint, in the form of heterosexual attraction—to overrule contemporary race science? When Hopkins goes the to the trouble to introduce Talma as a talented artist, are the revolutionary effects of reversing the tragic mulatta plot compromised by having Talma’s marriage replace her artistic work? Perhaps most importantly, why must we hear her voice only through a nested series of men’s voices? In another whole register, a host of questions arise about U.S. imperialism—the story’s racial progress politics rely on imperialism without questioning it. These are all crucial questions that highlight the constraints faced by Hopkins (and Chesnutt, too) in imagining alternatives to racial binarism at the end of a century that first fomented civil rights reform for women and enslaved people and then witnessed a backlash during Reconstruction to

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the equal participation of women and freed people. The story must be studied in its social and political contexts for this reason. In addition to shedding light on the limits of imagined racial futures, Hopkins’s intricately plotted blood-and-thunder tale is relevant today in its exploration of the ways in which literary, scientific, and legal narratives work together to uphold a certain social order. At the turn of the twentieth century, Pauline Hopkins was perched between two centuries of science shaped by arbitrary social norms in the United States. In just the same way, the science that is cited by transhumanist and posthumanist theorists in the twenty-first century bears the impression of social values of its own time. Transhumanism offers an admirable enthusiasm for the enhancement of human life through scientific medicine and technology, both of which advanced rapidly following World War II. This rapid development occurred hand in hand with the stimulated postwar capitalist economy, leading to the increasing corporatization of medicine and assistive technology in the 1970s and 1980s. Philosopher Nick Bostrom theorized in 2005 that technological and medical enhancement of the human mind-body continuum “will become increasingly relevant and practical in the coming years,” and so far, his prediction is accurate (10). Bostrom lists examples like “virtual reality, preimplantation genetic diagnosis; genetic engineering; pharmaceuticals that improve memory, concentration, wakefulness, and mood; performance-enhancing drugs; cosmetic surgery; sex change operations; prosthetics; anti-aging medicine; [and] closer human-computer interfaces” (10). In addition to faith in technology as a tool to enhance or push beyond typical human limits, other transhumanist and posthumanist theorists borrow concepts from evolutionary biology such as mutations and hybrids to imagine humanity beyond the limitations of the typical human body and mind. These transhumanist visions are dazzling, but Hopkins’s story cautions us against an easy adoption of them without addressing the social order. The problem with unfettered optimism in transhumanist technological and medical enhancement is that it tends to ignore the very question of the color line that preoccupied people in 1900 and that persists. For example, preimplantation genetic diagnosis is fraught with a mostly unregulated propensity to privilege embryos that are neurotypical (Down syndrome embryos are disproportionately aborted). Even if there were regulations that protected atypical bodies, genetic manipulation of populations is racially uneven because people who have enough wealth to pay for genetic testing, selective pregnancy, and genetic therapies are disproportionately white compared with the population as a whole; in the United States, people of color are disproportionately poorer than whites and are less likely to have access to these technologies. What is more, people of African descent have often been the subject of genetic testing



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(Washington 272) and genotype-mapping in scientific efforts to continue to define race as biologically rather than socially determined (M’Charek 161). The example of genetic manipulation for human enhancement and consistent race-based ethical violations in the United States raises a larger question of biopolitics in Foucault’s sense of referring to the deployment of social and political power over life. According to Thomas Lemke, there are at least two branches of biopolitics: “naturalistic concepts . . . take life as the basis of politics and . . . contrast . . . with politicist concepts, which conceive of life processes as the object of politics” (3). For example, the former includes “racist modes of reasoning during National Socialism” in Nazi Germany and the latter configures biopolitics “as a domain of practice or a subdiscipline of politics, aiming at the regulation and steering of life processes” (3). Ongoing racial stratification in the United States really belongs to both categories. Throughout its history, the United States has sponsored state and local violence against African Americans; enforced harmful economic policies; and actively suppressed African American voters, all in order to keep the government by and for the dominant racial group (“life as the basis of politics”). The social and legal enforcement of stratification has also used science and medicine to actively disable and kill the Black body (“life processes as the object of politics”) (3). Transhumanist biopolitics, by contrast, promotes one aspect of biopolitics: the ideal of applying science and technology to extending and enhancing humans beyond their physical, emotional, intellectual, and lifespan limitations (Bostrom 3). Since the 1960s, this has branched into ecological biopolitics aiming to defend nature and bind politics to this conservative task, and, conversely, a “dynamic development and productivist expansion” (3). In literature and the arts, the promise of the latter has been embraced by the Afrofuturism movement. For example, new possibilities for biological citizenship abound in the novels of Octavia Butler, such as the moral enhancement of human-vampire hybrids as a result of their “multispecies citizenship” in Fledgling (Nayar 796). This parallels Hopkins’s ideal of amalgamation between morally and physically superior individuals of each race. But in other ways, Hopkins’s story helps point twenty-first-century readers to the limits of transhumanism in a nation where the gap continues to widen in social, physical, emotional, and educational advantages between whiteand Black-identified groups. The transhumanist biopolitics of “dynamic development and productivist expansion” echoes eerily closely the Club’s talk on imperial expansion. In addition to twenty-first-century understandings of the social determinants of health, which show that African Americans are disproportionately affected by preventable illnesses, medical colonization of the Black body continues virtually unabated from the days of enslavement. Over the centuries and up to the present day, Black bodies have dispropor-

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tionately borne the burden of scientific and medical research without reaping the benefits of them (see, for example, Harriet Washington, chapters 8–11). A century ago, racial hygiene, eugenics, and forced sterilization were gaining momentum even as Hopkins was writing this story. These practices belong to an asymmetrical reproductive justice history in which reproductive freedom for white women has focused on preventing unwanted births and suppressing births without consent in women of color, but has not addressed the ability of women of color to safely bear and raise children (Brown para. 1). In foregrounding this particular context, one of many in terms of medical injustice, the optimism of transhumanism that science and technology can enhance human life through “genetic engineering; pharmaceuticals that improve memory, concentration, wakefulness, and mood; performance-enhancing drugs; and cosmetic surgery” stands out as the desire of people who already have access to lifesaving drugs and medically necessary surgery and who have access to genetic therapies and the applied results of genetic engineering research. As for “antiaging medicine,” there is a clear bias toward people who are privileged enough to reach old age, ignoring the significant disparities in infant mortality and in longevity between white and Black populations in the United States. Given these facts, there remains a de facto segregation and stratification along the “color line,” to an extent that may have surprised Chesnutt and Hopkins if they were alive today. Their form of transhumanism, consensual and white-endorsed amalgamation, potentially holds more promise for equity than the technological and medical enhancements that are currently laid over a deeply racially-stratified foundation. In the end, perhaps it is more accurate to say that Hopkins’s story, rather than showing the limits of transhumanism today, instead reveals that it is naively ahead of itself in assuming that U.S. Americans are all equally limited. Hopkins’s story takes out the misleading promise of science and technology by foregrounding racial change through sexual attraction. Her story also makes the science that upholds a racist order bow to an alternate logic— instinct, which can’t be coded or predicted easily. The story voices this alternative through a white male professional, whom Hopkins uses to introduce a new way of thinking for white America; at the same time, she is the author and distributor of this view in her publication, Colored American Magazine, which was aimed at Black readers. She laid out a transhumanist vision in “Talma Gordon” that was revolutionary in her time and remains so in ours. WORKS CITED Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. London: Anthropological Society, 1865.



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Bostrom, Nick. “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 14, no. 1. April 2005. Web. http://jetpress.org/volume14/freitas .html. Accessed June 1, 2018. Brown, Sherronda J. “The Handmaid’s Tale and the Reproductive Rights Movement’s White Supremacy Problem.” Wear Your Voice Magazine. April 26, 2018. Web. Accessed June 27, 2018. Browner, Stephanie. Profound Science and Elegant Literature: Imagining Doctors in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Cartwright, Samuel A. “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” DeBow’s Review. Vol. 11, No. 1. (July 1851). pp. 64–74. Chesnutt, Charles. Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Robert C. Leitz, and Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford University Press, 2001. Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg, 1903. Harper, Frances E.W. Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted. Broadview Press, 2018. Hopkins, Pauline. “Talma Gordon.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology. Edited by Karen L. Kilcup. Wiley-Blackwell, 1997. Pp. 458–68. Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: a Fragment. London: Henry Renshaw, 1850. Lemke, Thomas. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. Translated by Eric Frederick Trump. New York University Press, 2011. M’Charek, Amade. “The Mitochondrial Eve of Modern Genetics: Of Peoples and Genomes, or the Routinization of Race.” Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2005): pp. 161–183. Nayar, Pramod K. “A New Biological Citizenship: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 796–817. Project MUSE. Nott, Josiah, and George R. Gliddon. Types of Mankind, Or, Ethnological Researches. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo. 1854. Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Reprint edition. Anchor, 2008. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central. Accessed March 8, 2018.

Chapter Three

Arthurian Legend, Algorithmic Code, and Racialized Technology Technocultural Allusions in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada Myungsung Kim INTRODUCTION In his conversation with President Lincoln in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Arthur Swille—a slaveholding plantation owner in Virginia—reveals his anxiety about the cryptic ways African Americans are able to “pass codes to one another” (34). He is aware that his slaves are “in contact with [other] slaves in the rest of the country, through some kind of intricate grapevine” (34). As in Mumbo Jumbo, in which Reed describes the biological human body as a political medium of information storage and transfer, the grapevine telegraph opposes the dominant culture’s linguistic system in Flight to Canada.1 Similarly, Raven Quickskill, the trickster slave protagonist, refers to his fellow slave Stray Leechfield as the African Americans’ “greased lightning,” “telegraph wire,” and “wing-heeled Legba,”2 working “under [white] eyes” (73–74). The bioinformatic body networks that the body/language nexus constructed in the antebellum political milieu enable us to read Reed’s concept of a secret communication channel in the centuries-long political struggle, in which African Americans have found political expressions in codifying and textualizing black bodies. In the same sense, Reed describes Josiah Henson’s The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave—the original story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Reed explains as having been stolen by Harriet Beecher Stowe—as Henson’s “gris-gris” and “Etheric Double” (8), with physical existence here closely linked to the textual representation of experience. Such descriptions of the biological human body and material human experience as akin to a textual representation in Flight to Canada evoke the “technoepistemic” substrate in the postwar western epistemology, a perceptual framework that explains all kinds of human relations—biological, social, cultural, and political—in scientific and mathematical languages (Kay 2002, 57

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xvii). As modern bioinformatics and life science attempt to scripturalize what has been perceived as natural and non-mechanical, the new scientificinformational discourses have altered the basic scope to understand the material human experience. Flight to Canada historicizes the antebellum political milieu within such a relation between a natural reality and its textual embodiments. However, the technocultural descriptions of U.S. slavery in Flight to Canada do not simply allude to the paradigmatic shifts in thinking of material experience and textual information. Instead, while glossing the racial dynamics in the antebellum South with the languages of information technology, cybernetics, and communication science, Reed’s description of the body/text nexus in Flight to Canada opens into a broader discussion of a symbiotic human-nonhuman relationship, a process that organizes human presence in reciprocal terms. Particularly of note is Uncle Robin, Swille’s house slave, who refers to himself as Swille’s “reading and writing . . . computer,” given his capacity to decipher the “scrambled and jumbled” words to supplement Swille’s “dyslexia” (171). Such a metaphoric description of the master/slave relationship arguably informs two distinct notions from modern techno-digital culture. On one hand, the novel’s description of human literacy as analogous to the cryptanalytic process of a computer points to the cultural notions from cybernetics, which tend to interpret biological organisms and their relationships as translatable to the language of code, a social and cultural architecture that establishes ontology on the epistemological platforms of modern digital culture. Following contemporary assumptions that codes are “cultural objects embedded and integrated within a social system whose logic, rules, and explicit functioning work to determine the new conditions of possibilities” (Cheney-Lippold 167), codes can be understood as referring to new modes of practices regarding the cognition, definition, and interpretation of mundane life processes in a highly advanced techno-scientific milieu. Reed articulates the inheritable structure of slavocracy in the numerical and computational structure of meanings and criticizes the master-slave technology for reliance on the enclosure of Western language systems. The anachronic presence of modern technologies regarding physical and informational transfer—such as airplanes, helicopters, Greyhound buses, motor-equipped yachts, Xerox machines, telephones, microphones, cassette tapes, transistor radios, and satellite televisions—adds a similar angle to the novel, helping us understand slavery as another form of the circulation and transfer of human experience. Slavery becomes interpretable as a “technologicallymediated and culturally-situated consequence” (Cheney-Lippold 167) in this allegorical representation.



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On the other hand, the human-machine symbiosis described in the masterslave relation in Flight to Canada reminds us of the “enduring racial subtext” in the perceptual tradition of cybernetics and other theories on digital culture, in which a hierarchal master/slave relationship has been considered a default lexicon to express the basic nature of human and nonhuman relations (ChudeSokei 78). Since the expansionist impulse of Western imperialism triggered and drove the visions of a technologically enhanced future in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since technoscience began functioning as a powerful tool to reinforce the legitimacy of imperial regimes, the relationship between humankind and machines, or other nonhuman presences assumed to have human intelligence, have been imagined alongside the intrinsically racist hegemony of Eurocentrism in the Western world. The slave/computer analogy in Flight to Canada can be read as Reed’s rhetorical strategy with which to disclose the homogenizing forces of U.S. slavery that attempt to define white manhood as a universal state of being. SLAVOCRACY AND THE UNIVERSE OF COMPUTATION The interrogation of postwar paradigms and the critique of their racist regime allusively suggested in Flight to Canada notwithstanding, significant scholarship on the novel has focused primarily on the novel’s reconfiguration of time and history, a postmodern practice that has provided the most axiomatic reading of the novel. Its representation of a conflated time continuum, Timothy Spaulding representatively argues, “blur[s] the distinctions between American slavery and late-twentieth-century commodity culture” (26), challenging traditional historiography’s “impulse to bury the past with willful ignorance or abstraction” (25). Reed’s trans-time tropes in Flight to Canada, similarly, are read as based on his rhetorical experiment to invalidate any “monolithic” definition of black experience and to “reconfigure the accepted protocols of African American discursive tradition” (Rushdy 112). The anachronistic presence of Raven—who flies to Canada in a “non-stop Jumbo jet” (3)—Levecq asserts, identifies him as a “potential representative of postmodernity,” who seeks “to go beyond the limitations of modernity, including its narrow, racebound concept of the nation” (289–90). Thus, Raven’s mastery over aviation transcribes his geographic migration into a “historical movement, from the archaic, pre-modern South” to a “reflexive modernity” in the North (Levecq 290). While shedding light on such new inventions of post–Jim Crow black literature—called neo-slave narratives—these readings have largely failed to notice the novel’s exploration of the enslavement experience within a process where human experience becomes describable as an interaction between the

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physical body, textual letters, computational codes, and, most importantly, their stratified symbiosis. What underlies the trans-historical vision and the presence of technocultural episteme in Flight to Canada is a perceptual shift and increasing interest in a cultural understanding of the modern digital world, yet with substantial racial variations, which centers on information structure and the scriptural and textual technology of its representation. Flight to Canada is centrally concerned with the logocentric nature of slavery and the political legitimation necessary to reproduce itself. The most conspicuous description of slavery as a systematic logocentric technology comes with Swille’s family history. Having above-the-law authority, the Swilles epitomize a masculine, AngloSaxon, slavocratic desire. Reed describes the white male regime as inherited from the legend of King Arthur: “[treating] their serfs like human plows, de-dubbing their women at will; torturing and witchifying the resistance with newfangled devices” (15). When Arthur Swille’s grandfather—a “zealous slave trader, breeder and planter” (15)—died, his dream of an “Anglican Grand Design” (16) was adopted by his son, Rockland Swille. Arthur Swille, who “obey[s] no nation’s laws” (16), succeeds such a symbolically enclosed, white male regime inscribed in Arthurian codes. When he notices that his wife is going to mail a subscription letter to National Era, a magazine that “carried the work by that fanatical Beecher woman” (21), he asks his house slave Mammy Barracuda to destroy it. As Michael Chaney highlights, Swille is “both the figurehead of slavocratic power . . . and the medium through which that domination replicates itself” (271, emphasis added). As a “pivotal text in a textual system,” Chaney goes on to argue, Swille embodies “a cycle of ownership that always posits a master and a collection of properties” (271). Flight to Canada’s assumption—that social, cultural, and historical experience can be inscribable in written form—is based on the perceptual premise that, as an ontological presence should be mediated through the symbolic signification process, the function of linguistic signifiers can replace our physical reality and experience. Since Reed consistently makes analogies between the material human body and the textualization and codification of bodily existence throughout the novel, the act of writing takes a significant role in Reed’s understanding of African American cultural identity. As Christian Moraru highlights, “processing of specific texts and textual references” makes a substantial contribution to the “production of African American subjects” in the novel (99). The Swille lineage operates according to a socio-cultural mechanism in which genetic kinship combines with symbolic scriptualization of white male power. Understanding the inheritance of white male power in the Swilles as a process of scripturalizing phallogocentric impulse invites us to pay critical at-



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tention to the epistemological shift in the mid-twentieth century, in which informatizing the structural control of a biological or mechanical system functions as a perceptual framework. Reed extends the attachment of a biological body and its political signification into the assumption that “a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes” (Golumbia 8). This rhetoric of computation has attempted to explain the social fabric in what Katherine Hayles calls the “Computational Universe,” which claims material reality to be “generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality” (2005, 3). Reed places the relationship between Swille and Robin in such a perceptual ground, a central premise of which defines human consciousness and natural reality as constructed on “feedback loops” between “human and machine, dominator, and dominated, subject and object” (Hayles 2005, 241). After Swille dies, Robin says, Swille had something called dyslexia. Words came to him scrambled and jumbled. I became his reading and writing. Like a computer, only this computer left itself Swille’s whole estate. (171)

Robin explains his relationship to Swille as like a user-computer interface, and, in this analogy conventional master-slave dynamics translocate into a conceptual realm of codes, where “materially specific ways in which flows across borders create complex dynamics of intermediation” (Hayles 2005, 242). Such an analogy between natural experience and computational process in Flight to Canada mirrors some significant moments in the post–World War II United States. First, it points to the cultural shift observed by the “postmodern cybernetics,” a school of thought that views “physical systems as forms of computation, rather than merely inert structure” (Eglash 1995, 19). Since “analog systems can achieve the same levels of recursive computation as digital systems,” according to this kind of assertion, they are “epistemologically equals” (Eglash 1995, 19). Swille’s literacy is mediated through Robin’s cryptanalytic ability to encode and decode textual information. This thought-data process is structurally identical to the function of a “calculating, data-processing, and information-storage-and-retrieval machine . . . designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures” (Licklider 5–6). Robin embodies “intelligence in human behavior, such as perception, natural language processing, problem-solving and planning, learning and adaptation, and acting on the environment” (Tecuci 168). Robin’s intelligence replaces what Swille alone cannot achieve, becoming Swille’s “cognitive nonconscious,” a process of systematic human-machine interactions that aim to “arrive at solutions

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difficult or impossible to achieve by explicit means” (Hayles 2014, 200). Robin is Swille’s digital workstation, an “intelligent assistant” that “gather[s] data and attend[s] to such tasks as noise filtering, data smoothing, outlier rejection, and data storage” (Waltz and Buchanan 43). Read in this light, the King Arthur romance, a sacred text for the Swilles, represents how a white male regime has been reproduced within a putatively enclosed loop of meanings, symbols, and their material embodiments. Swille’s belief in the pseudo-scientific authority as “Dysaethesia Aethipica,” which he believes causes “Negros to run away” (18), epitomizes such semiotic enclosure and recursiveness. Chaney-Lippold calls such social and cultural normalization of hierarchy a “modulation,” in which a “series of guiding, determining, and persuasive mechanisms of power” function as an “axiom of control” designed along with seemingly open but exclusively “coded language” (169). Such a cultural modulation makes Swille believe himself to be “the last man to go against science,” and the abnormal mental state of a runaway slave to be “rejuvenated” (18–19). Reed represents slavery as a historically accumulated set of meanings, whose circulation relies distinctively on a combination of different social components: an “information provider who amass [the] data,” a “third-party industry who gather and purchase [the] data as a commodity,” and those who “traffic in [the] data” (Gillespie 174–75). Reed’s representation of the complexity of slavery translates these antebellum dynamics into a process of storing and transmitting certain forms of cultural experience and, more importantly, their hierarchy in the digitalized language of codes. Flight to Canada’s cybernetic allusions, therefore, highlight the history of autopoietic slave economy. SUBVERSION OF SYSTEM CONTROL AND SYMBIOTIC MASTER/SLAVE In such an ethnically varied computational universe where the algorithmic process pertains to any of kind of substrate based on racial otherness, Reed’s antebellum technoculture in Flight to Canada gains political validity in criticizing the antebellum political milieu. In representing African American experience in the language of modern digital culture, however, the particular notion of computational reality in Flight to Canada does not simply transplant the technocultural tropes into the antebellum United States. Instead, the novel’s cybernetic allusion, along with the novel’s description of master/slave symbiosis in the antebellum political milieu, sheds light on the way in which textual and scriptural symbolism includes and excludes individual bodies based on racialized social registers.



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Reed describes Robin as Swille’s subservient artificial intelligence designed to find solutions that his dyslexic master cannot. Such an allegorical analogy of master-slave relation becomes all the more significant, given that machines, or other mechanical devices that drive humanity to reach a higher level of material existence, have been framed in racial contexts in the Western cybernetic culture. According to Ron Eglash, the “Hegelian cliché” of master and slave relation has been a common lexicon in describing a “control relation between two devices” (2007, 361). This technosocial metaphor, which became an “Americanized cliché by the time of [Norbert] Wiener’s technological revolution” (Chude-Sokei 83), has served to naturalize hierarchical racial difference and social control by the dominant culture. The racialized black body and anthropomorphic machine intertwine to produce the prevalent dyad of race and technology in the tradition of cybernetics and other compatible theories where technology is present in racial frames. The presence of the racialized black body in the cybernetic formulation of master-slave relation in Flight to Canada, and the political charge that it evokes, can be read in the light of the countercultural movement of the postcivil rights 1970s, an era that attempted to bring mainstream science fiction into “dialogue with the civil unrest, political activism, and artistic innovation produced by African Americans” (Kilgore 18). Significantly, the digitalized formulation of master-slave relation in Flight to Canada corresponds to the rhetorical experiments of cyberpunk, a science fiction subgenre that depicts a highly advanced technocultural capitalism where the human-machine conflict stands as a major crisis. Since cyberpunk’s cross-cultural tropes of mechanical body alteration, cyborg prostheses, and brain-computer emulation contest the “supposed ‘essence’ of humanity” (Foster xi), the genre provided substantial inspirations to the post-civil rights black culture. Cyberpunk has created narratives that explore dramatization and evocation of a nonphenotypic experience in a world where what is believed to be the essence becomes ephemeral and alterable. As Thomas Foster argues, cyberpunk tropes inherently pertain to the “cultural implication[s] of . . . ‘techniques,’ specifically the ways they define ‘the nature of humanity, the nature of self,” interrogating the “dualistic habits of thought in western epistemology” (xii). He explains: The cultural work of cyberpunk fiction can only be fully grasped and evaluated in relation to a longer history speculations about, for instance, evolutionary theory’s challenge to the idea of “the body” as a stable and unchanging ground for human identity, or the origins of the figure of the cyborg in speculation about how humanity might survive an ecological collapse by adapting ourselves to extraterrestrial environments (rather than changing those environments to suit ourselves). (ixxx)

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Cyberpunk body politics and its posthuman ontology, which celebrate “‘fluidarity’ in general” and converts it to a “more specific political context” (Foster xxi) in the genre’s contemplation of humanity, offers a useful frame to understand Flight to Canada’s description of a biological human body and its material experience whose dynamic interaction in information networks inscribes physical reality and social relation in coded platforms. The particular similarity of Flight to Canada to the tropes of cyberpunk invites us to reconsider the historical moment of 1970s at which science fiction entered the political discourse of U.S. black culture. In particular, Flight to Canada uses cyberpunk’s rich inventories to investigate social mobility, in conjunction with racial otherness, in modern technoculture, capturing the moment when the monolithic flow of a slave market economy becomes a site of cultural resistance by secondhand users of Western technology. Challenging the conventional notion that technology serves to reproduce and stabilize social and cultural hierarchies, notions of technology in Flight to Canada reject a dichotomy of “demonizing technology as a satanic mill of domination” or “postmodernist celebrations of the technological sublime” (Penley et al. xii). Instead, technology is embedded in a far more complex cultural spectacle, in which the survival, resistance, and evolution of African American culture are captured, probed, and nurtured outside the conventional understanding of antebellum slavery. Robin represents the dynamics and anxiety that “whenever logical processes of thought are employed . . . there is an opportunity for the machine” (Bush). As Robin “dabble[s] with [Swille’s] will” to inherit his whole estate (170), he becomes a machine that can “manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits” (Bush). While the King Arthur romance and its inherent cultural and social hierarchies have been the family bible that “structures the boundaries, as well as regulates the flows” of the system, Robin manipulates this slavocratic design through the computer’s “pre-configured but also reflexive programmed logic” (Cheney-Lippold 166). The artificial machine gains independence by taking advantage of his master’s inability. Computation is not “merely simulat[ing] the behavior of complex systems” but is “envisioned as [a] process that actually generates behavior in everything from biological organisms to human social systems (Hayles 2005, 19). In this flexible architecture of computation, what once was a “willing slave, yet more powerful and smarter than humans” (Dinello 64) turns out to be an anti-phallogocentric machine whose ability to “recod[e] communication and intelligence . . . subvert[s] command and control” (Haraway 175). The subversion of master-slave relation that Reed depicts in the metaphors and tropes of computation makes it possible to understand Flight to Canada as representing the social dynamic of technology in a technophobic assump-



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tion where “technologized creatures . . . often seek to destroy or enslave humanity” (Dinello 2). Echoing the primal fear that the monster’s exclamation in Frankenstein—”You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!” (134)—this anxiety reveals a fatalistic view that “whether by an inherent property or by an incidental set of circumstances,” “technology is a source of domination that effectively rules all forms of modern thought and activity, . . . [which] looms as an oppressive force that poses a direct threat to human freedom” (Winner 3). African American slaves in Flight to Canada embody the subversive nature of such non-human presences. In the same way, in which technophobia serve as a central device in representing a master-slave relation in Flight to Canada, Raven’s mastery of aviation can be understood as technological progress providing minority groups with tools to challenge dominant systems. Raven’s airborne escape echoes the diasporic ethos of transatlantic slave-transportation through the Middle Passage, captured in the Flying African myth. This myth reflects the “desires for freedom, cross-Atlantic return, and even death shared by enslaved Africans and their descendants” (Thorsteinson 259).3 Reciting the “African struggle for freedom in the New World” and reflecting “Black affect and need” (McDaniel 36), this diasporic sensibility “evolved from the desire for freedom” to a “narrative of resistance” (McDaniel 38). It addresses the shared African experience of enslavement and desire for the transcendence over their physical reality. Further, since Raven does not consider a cross-Atlantic flight as a viable route for escape, the theme of magical human flight gets transformed into anti-Garveyism. While Robin’s manipulation of Swille’s will transplants a science fiction theme—“supercomputers and programmed androids that revolt their human creators” (Dinello 11)—to the antebellum milieu, the aviation technology points to how airmanship was associated with African American upward mobility from the interwar period through the civil rights era. Such a sociological understanding of Raven’s flying skills invites us to contextualize Flight to Canada’s narrative of mastery over the dominant culture’s technology within the racial struggle for social uplift of African Americans in the U.S. military, the Tuskegee Airmen. Since enlistment in the American military during wartime was considered to confirm full-fledged citizenship (Takaki 36), mastery of flight meant African American social uplift. In the Washingtonian sense, this racial struggle in the military made it possible for African Americans to believe that “wartime mobilization unleashed eventually [would break] down barriers of racial segregation and discrimination in American life” (Moye 14). As greater citizenship rights would “help belie . . . the basis for racial discrimination in America—white supremacy” (Hooks in Scott xii), the success of African American airmanship was closely tied to the civil rights movement.

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In Flight to Canada’s anachronistic time frame, African American mythic imagination and a techno-epistemological interpretation of antebellum slavery capture a moment where new technologies challenge social regimes that deprive marginalized groups of resources for their cultural production. Far from being neutral, technology serves the dominant culture’s information gathering, large-scale deployment of surveillance and control, and maintenance of a panoptic social system. However, Reed does not only describe modern technologies as either fatalistic machines or as messianic devices. Instead, Flight to Canada engages in the speculative re-creation of “technocultural activism” (Penley xiii), which contributed to the formation of technocounterculture in the late twentieth century United States. CONCLUSION Flight to Canada illuminates the moments in which modern technoculture intervenes in African American cultural identity, pointing to the paradigmatic shifts in thinking about biology, information, machines, and cybernetics. The novels’ revisionist historiographies, depicted through historical anachronism, can be read as rhetorical tropes representing the recurring manifestation of African cultural heritage. This occurs in a society where media technology’s capacity to store and transfer cultural information redefines racialized experience as digital ecology and computational codes. Conventional perceptions of materiality and textuality change. In a similar vein, the proleptic placement of modern technologies in the antebellum era in Flight to Canada can be read as Reed’s rhetorical strategy to employ the pre-modern U.S. milieu to interpret antebellum culture as a systematic circulation of data organized alongside traditional colonial regimes. In doing so, Reed transplants Western epistemology into a racial context where production and consumption of technology become deeply embedded in certain cultural and social norms. Flight to Canada participates in the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism in this way. Inheriting George Schuyler’s futuristic experiment in Black No More, in which he employs a transhuman trope of morphological freedom, the cybernetic universe in Flight to Canada provides a fertile terrain to consider African American presence in the context of modern techno-world. The novel not only reconfigures black bodies as a place in which multilayered dynamics of race become visible but serve an attempt to explain the historically uneasy relationships between regimental technologies and the ideological positions they have evoked. This rhetorical strategy establishes the antebellum South of Flight to Canada as a potential location to explore African American history and identity in the contemporary world. This is a



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world where it has become increasingly difficult to ascertain what constitutes and defines an individual identity. In this intersection, information technology, computation, biopolitics, and African folklore come to redefine black ontology. NOTES 1.  In his autobiography Up from Slavery, which is considered the first official writing that mentions the term “grapevine telegraph,” Booker T. Washington describes the term as an oral information network that “kept [African Americans] informed of events,” which allowed them to be forewarned of “Yankee invasions” (19). The grapevine telegraph established bioinformatic body networks. Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo illustrates a moment in which “the biological human body becomes a codified medium of information storage and transfer in modern technoculture,” through the analogy of Jes Grew and the grapevine telegraph. 2.  Papa Legba is a Haitian loa known to facilitate communication. Existing at a spiritual crossroad between divinity and humanity, he is believed to speak all human languages and mediates in all communications between humans and gods. For further reference, see Fleurant 71–28. 3.  For analysis of the Flying African legends, see McDaniel 28–38, Storey, Thorsteinson 271–72, and Walters 3–25.

WORKS CITED Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly 176 (1945): 101–108. Chaney, Michael A. “Slave Cyborg and the Black Infovirus: Ishmael Reed’s Cybernetic Aesthetics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 261–283. Cheney-Lippold, John. “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.6 (2011): 164–181. Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture : Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2016. Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Eglash, Ron. “African Influences in Cybernetics.” The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. 17–27. ———. “Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature.” Technology and Culture 48.2(2007): 360–369. Fleurant, Gerdès. Dancing Spirits : Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

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Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” 167–194 in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Golumbia, David. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hayles, Katherine. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2 (2014): 199–220. ———. My Mother was a Computer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Kay, Lily E. Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Kilgore, De Witt. “Difference Engine: Aliens, Robots, and Other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 37 (2010): 16–22. Levecq, Christine. “Nation, Race, and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s ‘Flight to Canada’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 35.2/3 (2002): 281–298. Licklider, J. C. R. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14.1 (1992): 4–11. McDaniel, Lorna. “The Flying Africans: Extents and Strength of the Myth in the Americas.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West Indian Guide 64.1/2 (1990): 28–40. Moraru, Christian. “‘Dancing to the Typewriter’: Rewriting and Cultural Appropriation in Flight to Canada.” Critique 41.2 (2000): 99–113. Moye, J. Todd. Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. 1976. New York: Scribner, 1998. Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. “Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Slave Narrative.” Narrative 2.2 (1994): 112–139. Scott, Lawrence P. and William M. Womack. Double V: The Civil Rights Struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin Books, 1823. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Storey, Olivia Smith. “Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of the Flying Africans.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5.3 (2004). Takaki, Ronald. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000. Tecuci, Gheorghe. “Artificial Intelligence.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics 4.2 (2012): 168–180. Thorsteinson, Katherine. “From Escape to Ascension: the Effects of Aviation Technology on the Flying African Myth.” Criticism 57.2 (2015): 259–281.



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Walters, Wendy W. “‘One of Dese Mornings, Bright and Fair,/Take My Wings and Cleave De Air: The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness.’” MELUS 22.3 (1997): 3–29. Waltz, David and Bruce G. Buchanan. “Computer Science. Automating Science.” Science 324.5923 (2009): 43–44. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Doubleday, 1901.

Chapter Four

Transmedial Posthumanisms Unmaking the Black Body in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and its Graphic Novel Adaptation Nicholas E. Miller Building on the work of Middle Passage studies scholars such as Sowande’ Mustakeem, this essay examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and its graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2017) as posthumanist narratives that render visible the “unmaking” of black bodies. Similar to the histories examined by Mustakeem, the processes of unmaking in Kindred remain mostly invisible; the unseen and undefined spaces between the past and the present in Butler’s novel act as invisible sites of historical labor and social conditioning for the protagonist, Dana Franklin. By reimagining the novel as a graphic text, Duffy and Jennings craft a transmedial narrative in which the unmaking of Dana’s body makes visible the liminal status of enslaved black bodies across time and space. The affordances of comics depict this unmaking by foregrounding the posthuman reality of black bodies as they negotiate other middle passages. For example, black persons in the United States are often seen as intermediaries between the human and the subhuman, the autonomous self and the enslaved body. As Kindred demonstrates, this intermediate status can become a space of trauma and violence, even as it opens up liberatory possibilities. In this essay, I draw on posthumanist theory and Afrofuturist scholarship to situate Butler’s novel within existing conversations about her oeuvre and alongside posthumanist studies more broadly. I argue that the graphic novel adaptation takes the abstraction of blackness in Middle Passage narratives and renders it concrete, making the historical trauma of chattel slavery tangible through the literal and visible unmaking of Dana’s black body.

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POSTHUMAN BLACKNESS AND MIDDLE PASSAGE STUDIES I tackle this project primarily through two critical frameworks: posthumanism and Middle Passage studies. Both modes help us to foreground black experiences and interrogate the ways in which we dehumanize black bodies through fictional narratives. While I plan to lay out some of the theoretical concepts unique to these as this essay unfolds, I want to begin with a brief introduction to the novel itself. I will then establish a critical scaffolding for later arguments that demonstrates how posthumanism and Middle Passages studies belong in a conversation with each other and thus open up interpretive possibilities for neo-slave narratives like Kindred. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is the first-person narrative of Dana Franklin, a fictional black woman who is involuntarily transported across time and space between her home in Los Angeles in 1976 and a Maryland plantation just prior to the Civil War. When she arrives in the nineteenth century, she encounters two of her ancestors: a black freewoman named Alice and a young white man named Rufus who will one day inherit his father’s plantation. Over the course of the novel, Dana moves back and forth across time, at one point bringing her white husband, Kevin, into the past as well. Her visits to the past become longer as the novel progresses and she finds herself enmeshed in the plantation community. Dana struggles to make sense of the lived experience of slavery through the lens of her twentieth-century knowledge of its evils and its history. Kindred thus exposes readers to complex issues tied to race, gender, and power while also addressing the complex themes of slavery, trauma, and historical memory in the United States. Reading Kindred as Posthumanist Text I begin by examining posthumanism through the work of Kristen Lillvis in Posthuman Blackness (2017). Lillvis opens by gesturing toward a history of seeing black women as “both human and nonhuman, subject and object, artifact and prophet” through the art of Krista Franklin (1). These dichotomies mirror “the Great Divides of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic” that have been articulated by posthumanist thinker Donna Haraway, even as they retool such divides to speak to the experience of black women (2007, 15). They also serve as useful tools for thinking about a bifurcated novel like Kindred, in which Dana—like Franklin’s art—exists “on both sides of the dividing line between empowered and exploited, revered and reviled, honored and objectified” (Lillvis 2017, 2). As Lillvis explains, “black women’s liminality precedes their recognition as citizens,” a history traced to the Middle Passage, which “placed captured Africans between continents,



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languages, and identities” (2). By foregrounding the Middle Passage in her conceptualization of posthuman blackness, Lillvis also establishes posthumanism as a key theoretical paradigm for examining Kindred. More specifically, Lillvis opens by invoking both Toni Morrison and bell hooks to think about why (and how) Middle Passage narratives—and the “disorientation” that is so formative in them—function as “a side effect of both forced and chosen border crossings” and “[describe] black life in the present as well as the past” (2). Butler tackles this same concern in Kindred itself via the movement from present to past and back again. Lillvis describes this temporal border crossing as a centerpiece of Afrofuturist literature, noting that “in Afrofuturist cultural productions, historical experiences of disorientation converge with contemporary strategies for survival and futurist projections of vitality. As such, the black subject settles in multiple time periods simultaneously” (3). This description is literalized in Kindred and informs my decision to revisit the novel as a Middle Passage narrative through a posthumanist lens. Such readings lead to a pair of questions: What happens when this collapse of temporalities creates contemporary Middle Passage narratives and experiences? And to what extent are those experiences common to black lives now? Lillvis addresses such questions by situating posthuman blackness within larger questions about posthumanism. She notes, for example, that “the posthuman subject travels ‘across and among’ the borders of self and other, the ‘other’ including people, communities, regimes, and technologies” (3). Lillvis then argues, via Deleuze and Guattari, that “the connections made between self and other within and across time are always already a part of the posthuman subject, a temporal paradox that elucidates the posthuman being’s simultaneous existence in the past, present, and future” (3). These ideas undergird her primary claim that posthuman blackness “[describes] the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their coincident experiences in multiple temporalities” (4). The difference between Lillvis and other scholars (e.g. Lisa Woolfork) is that she envisions a posthumanity in which the future to be seen as a site of power. There is a liberatory potential in Lillvis’s work that I find instructive, as she imagines the posthuman as not strictly adjacent to the subhuman.1 By invoking Lillvis, I read Kindred not only in terms of historical memory and trauma but with an eye toward illuminating how such liminalities can create new futures. Like Lillvis and other scholars, I argue that Kindred should be read as a Middle Passage narrative; it offers a powerful representation of the temporal movement that Lillvis theorizes, and—when placed in conversation with its graphic novel adaptation—helps us reconceptualize posthuman blackness. Lillvis invokes Calvin L. Warren, who asserts that “‘the literal destruction of

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black bodies’ during and following the transatlantic slave voyage enables ‘the psychic, economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and ultimately obliterate Being.’” (80). She argues that a “multiple consciousness” is necessary to avoid the destructive abstraction of blackness via the Middle Passage experience. In this essay, I demonstrate that there is also a destructive potential to rendering these bodies concrete—one that extends beyond mere metaphors for the Middle Passage. Building on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and others, Lillvis argues that the “transformative Middle Passage experiences in Butler’s science fiction cultivate a posthuman multiple consciousness that allows characters and readers to recognize blackness both within and outside of the ontology and cosmology of white power” (81).2 This idea of multiple consciousness invites a pragmatic, yet liberatory, reading of Kindred; the novel certainly demonstrates a historical awareness of trauma through Dana, but it also exemplifies the always-incomplete nature of her conditioning. As Lillvis argues, in “Kindred Butler directly acknowledges the material conditions of slavery,” yet Butler also assures us that Dana’s liminal status simultaneously disrupts and challenges those conditions (81). Reading Kindred as Middle Passage Narrative Lillvis is not the only scholar to consider Kindred a Middle Passage narrative. While I am eager to expand how we read the novel as such, specifically through the lens of posthumanist theory, it is important to also note that significant work has already been done to theorize the genre of the novel. Nadine Flagel, for example, has produced a compelling reading of Kindred as Middle Passage narrative that explores how it compresses history for contemporary readers: Time travel, the most prominent aspect of speculative fiction in the novel, permits Butler to construct moments of concrete contact—often conflict—between her protagonist, Dana Franklin, an African-American woman living in 1976, and slavery among her ancestors in nineteenth-century Maryland (2012, 218).

As Flagel describes it, this historical compression allows Dana to experience slavery firsthand (and the reader secondhand) in ways that render those details concrete. This represents a departure from the all-too-common abstraction of black suffering or the rendering of black suffering as spectacle in other genres. Flagel gestures to how time travel renders the Middle Passage concrete by noting that “Dana’s unexplained time travel may be ‘the vehicle that looms behind every American slave narrative, the grim death ship of the Middle Passage from Africa to the slave markets of the New World” (218). She continues by noting that, “being kidnapped in time and space, Dana re-



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capitulates the dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors’” (219). These arguments demonstrate how the novel is a cross-genre work of fiction, a claim that becomes even more compelling in graphic novel form. By focusing on a transmedial approach to Kindred, I revisit the posthumanity of the text while raising additional questions: What happens when we stop listening to Dana testify to violence, but instead witness it ourselves visually? While it is still mediated, is it is also (arguably) less abstract?3 In what follows, these tensions—and how they speak to the unmaking of black bodies—get foregrounded. The most specific examples of this unmaking are, of course, the acts of violence used to transport Dana across history in the novel, something that Lisa Woolfork notes when she asks us to think more carefully about the nature of transport in Kindred: “[Rufus Weylin] can abduct her (unconsciously) from the twentieth century when his life is endangered, and Dana can return to her present when her life is threatened” (2009, 20). Rather than dismiss this series of temporal travels as a plot device or a “mere” metaphor, however, I use this essay to think more carefully about the literal unmaking of Dana’s body and her selfhood in the novel and its adaptation. I read these acts of unmaking, and Dana’s responses to them, as Butler’s attempt to literalize the ongoing processes of unmaking experienced by black people in the United States today. Unmaking Black Bodies, Unmaking Kindred At this point, I turn to the work of Sowande’ Mustakeem, whose theoretical framework for examining histories of the Middle Passage opens up new possibilities for reading Kindred. As I mentioned earlier, scholarly narratives about Kindred often rely primarily on reading the Middle Passage as metaphor. Yet the novel is also functioning as a Middle Passage narrative in ways that are more concrete and less figurative, which is why I turn to Mustakeem: a historian who argues compellingly that “the Middle Passage comprised a violently unregulated process critically foundational to the institution of bondage that interlinked slaving voyages and plantation societies” (2016, 3). To do this, Mustakeem emphasizes the importance of shipboard captivity and the disposable nature of women’s bodies to the Middle Passage and the larger institution of the transatlantic slave trade. This foregrounding of the Middle Passage and the attention paid to violence committed against black women led me to think more carefully about Kindred. As Mustakeem describes it, her book “builds on the momentum of scholarship moving the Middle Passage from the periphery to consider how slavery functioned outside the locus of plantations” (4). Instead, by “looking beyond crowded cities, distant farms,

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murky swamps, and mountainous regions, it constructs a historical cultural womb of consciousness fueled by a commercial industry anchored on terror” (4). While Mustakeem’s project is intended to foreground the Atlantic Ocean and “slavery at sea” in Middle Passage histories, her framework remains useful for deconstructing Dana’s narrative; it allows us to imagine Dana’s temporal liminality as a series of voyages that “unmake” her both figuratively and literally. For Mustakeem, the sea serves as “an important open arena of struggle for power and agency” (5). I argue that time travel—while not historically “real” in the same sense—functions in a similar way for Dana. The movement between the present and the past, with its associated violence, represents a struggle for power akin to that waged on the Atlantic Ocean. More importantly, Mustakeem tackles the standard understanding of the transatlantic slave trade as a “human manufacturing process” by emphasizing the role of the Middle Passage as a space where “the diverse and vulnerable bodies of captives [are] continuously unmade by their transporters and the human manufacturing process” (7, italics mine). Mustakeem asserts that this has always been part of the plantation system, but that we too often ignore unmaking as part of the Middle Passage experience. Mustakeem describes how “the interior holds of merchant ships served as vital sites of power sailors used to dehumanize captives, enforce dependency, inflict pain, establish authority, and prohibit any sense of control of one’s personal life in the near and far future” (7). I emphasize these claims because they sound eerily similar to Dana’s experiences in the novel when inhabiting her present-day home. Her travels and her frequent disorientation leave her hoarding supplies; she packs an emergency duffel bag, arms herself, and is repeatedly swept away unprepared into the past with no ability to control her schedule or even leave the house safely. Her narrative is one of terror that speaks directly to the historical unmaking of black bodies and their legacies as part of the transatlantic Middle Passage experience.4 The trauma of the Middle Passage is rendered concrete through the violence Dana experiences as she travels. Mustakeem describes the actual trauma of the Middle Passage in this way: “Carrying these deep psychological scars on land once imported overseas, the effects of the Middle Passage filtered within and beyond the ocean, irrevocably transforming bondspeople’s lives as well as the societies and communities into which they were imported” (7). Such psychological scars are also depicted by Butler. The liminal space of the Middle Passage in Kindred is a space in which Rufus can see (briefly) into Dana’s present-day world; it is a frightening violation of her privacy and intimate life that terrorizes her each time she arrives in the past. When scholars have analyzed Kindred previously, the focus has often been on the



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violence enacted at the Weylin plantation, yet the unmaking of Dana is also tied to her involuntary ability to transport across time. Scholars need to pay more careful attention to these violences, which are connected to her own temporal Middle Passage narrative. As Mustakeem describes in the historical record, “turning a knife upon one’s self and jumping overboard reinforces the dangerous boundaries some slaves sacrificially probed while exposing the numerable stakes crewmen faced in not only managing captives but in keeping them alive” (106). Again, we see this happening in Kindred, as Dana takes a knife to herself to free herself from the Weylin plantation in the past. It is important to read this moment in the novel not simply as an effect of plantation slavery, but as a violence that is tied to her time travel—or her experience of the Middle Passage. Mustakeem continues by explaining that “the physical effects of these interactions produced bloodied wounds and dismembered limbs; however, the psychological scars persisted beyond such momentary scenes of intense violence” (129). Those familiar with Kindred will see clearly how this claim plays out in the text; as the novel ends, Dana suffers from a dismembered limb. Not only is this moment often ignored as part of a Middle Passage narrative (it marks her final trip), it is also important to recognize that the loss of an arm is not where the novel ends (although it is where the novel begins). Instead, the novel ends with Dana being unable to process, psychologically, what has happened. She is unable to let go of her experiences and cannot even fully let go of her connection to—and fraught relationship with—Rufus Weylin. In this way, we witness the unmaking of Dana along lines similar to what Mustakeem describes in her book; although Dana suffers a violent physical trauma, it is the psychological trauma of her Middle Passage experience that lingers. Before examining Kindred in more detail, however, I should acknowledge that Mustakeem clearly envisions her project as an attempt to reclaim the lived historical realities of the Middle Passage from strictly literary imaginings of those experiences. In that sense, the aim of her work is not to produce new critical frameworks for literary analysis of the Middle Passage. That being said, I still see her work as a productive framework that can inform our reading of texts like Kindred in a way that deepens our attention to the unmaking of black bodies and foregrounds the Middle Passage as more than just a peripheral concern. Indeed, I find it helpful that Mustakeem deemphasizes plantations and de-centers the American South in her analysis of slavery at sea. While Kindred is a work of literary fiction, it similarly disrupts normative slave narratives in ways that broaden the types of stories we can tell about the Middle Passage.

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THE UNMAKING OF DANA FRANKLIN Butler’s novel opens as Dana narrates: “I lost an arm on my last trip home” (1979, 9). Dana’s travels between the past and the present depict the literal unmaking of her body from the outset. This image of physical loss is followed immediately by a more abstract, statement of loss: “I lost about a year of my life” (9). What is striking about the coupling of these losses is how her bodily violence is tied to temporal violence; Dana’s physical trauma is connected to time travel. Similar to the historical unmakings discussed by Mustakeem, Dana’s physical injury is preceded by other forms of unmaking: the conditioning practices of her own Middle Passage and a lingering sense of physical and metaphysical loss resulting from her travels. This negotiation of physical loss alongside temporal loss invokes posthuman blackness as described by Lillvis; Dana’s liminal status requires her to construct a black selfhood via multiple consciousness. Describing the experience of losing her arm as she wakes up in the hospital, Dana struggles to understand her attending police officers, who ask: “‘How did you hurt your arm?” and “Who hurt you?” (9). As Dana reflects on these questions, she comments on the strangeness of the word they used: “Hurt. . . . Didn’t they think I knew it was gone?” (9). The unmaking of her body gets lost in translation; Dana does not know how to articulate the experience to others, and the officers strictly process her pain via the causeand-effect assumption that somebody physically hurt her. Dana’s unmaking can only be imagined through a visible sign of physical trauma, as is often the case with such narratives. Yet her incredulity at these questions also points to the larger scope of loss; her use of the word “it” to ambiguously refer to her arm also opens up that possibility that her loss—or her hurt—is something more. In this moment, she has also lost Rufus, a year of her life, and the ability to feel hurt in visible ways because her arm is not in pain. It is just gone. With the police easily mapping onto the role of slavers (e.g. Rufus) in Dana’s present-day existence, her unmaking becomes restricted by their language and imaginations. Just as Rufus was unable to see his role in hurting Dana, the police are blind to their own participation in the conditioning of black bodies as an institutional legacy of slavery. As the prologue continues, Dana slowly comes to terms with her loss. She notes: “I was almost comfortable except for the strange throbbing of my arm. Of where my arm had been” (10). The progression of this sentence is telling; she draws attention to her self-uncertainty as she remarks that she is “comfortable except.” She corrects herself for stating that part of her (her arm) exists, realizing that it technically only exists now in the past tense. It is now only present in terms of its absence. She tries to will it into existence



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by focusing on its former existence, but to no avail. To accept her new reality, Dana must first acknowledge the metaphysical unmaking that preceded it. She admits that she was pre-conditioned for this loss—she already “knew it to be so”—yet her missing arm still requires her to accept that knowledge (10). This statement is reminiscent of the other traumatic realities that she had to accept on the Weylin plantation. It is not until the next chapter that we read about Dana’s first instance of time travel. Before turning there, however, I want to examine how she narrates her experience when she first returns to the present day. Dana states: “I hesitated, trying to think, to make sense” in hopes that “I could tell it coherently” (15). Her hesitation reflects how we recollect narratives of slavery; perhaps we can never tell them in a way that makes sense, but we can try to make them coherent. This is evident in many neo-slave narratives, which narrate a trauma that can never be adequately expressed. This passage highlights how multiple consciousness is essential to understanding contemporary black selfhood alongside the historical trauma of slavery. In this instance, Butler uses vanishing not only to describe time travel but also as a metaphor for a transatlantic slave trade where black bodies frequently disappeared from view without sensible explanation. Butler locates the trauma of telling these insensible stories in the bodies of black women. Dana, for example, describes her experience as that of somebody who survives a robbery or a rape. Her attempt to render the abstract concept of feeling unsafe concrete through a narrative of rape, in particular, demonstrates both the lack of consent inherent to the Middle Passage and the loss of bodily autonomy associated with the trip. Dana’s fears are not strictly about violence, but also about being retaken involuntarily. This fear of future repercussions or repeated traumas is endemic to the Middle Passage (and, as Mustakeem explains, to black women in the Middle Passage). Dana admits to being “afraid that the dizziness might come back while I was in the shower, afraid that I would fall and crack my skull against the tile or that I would go back to that river . . . and find myself standing naked among strangers” (18). This fear of being taken and of not knowing when it might happen is also tied to her fear of being unmade—or in this case, undressed—once more. Like her fears, her hope becomes rooted in uncertainty as she reflects on her second trip to the past. While there, she states simply: “I waited to go home” (20). Her experience of waiting represents a particular form of unmaking tied to temporality. Stuck between worlds and times, she is either waiting for trauma to strike or for trauma to end. She is not allowed to simply be (or to be present). She is denied a normal bodily existence. Similar moments of unmaking occur throughout the novel and build on narratives of violence, trauma, and memory. I want to highlight a few key

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moments that deepen the extent to which we can read Kindred as a posthumanist narrative, and prepare us to interrogate the graphic novel adaptation. Most of Dana’s early interactions with Rufus demonstrate that she maintains a certain autonomy and a semblance of control over her situation and her status. Yet that changes drastically over the course of the novel. Her unmaking, much like those that Mustakeem documents from the historical Middle Passage, occurs gradually and sometimes invisibly. Yet as Dana is unmade, Rufus is unmade as well. He is unmade as a child and remade into a slave owner and a rapist. These two unmakings proceed alongside one another and even rely upon each other; Dana’s explicit unmaking begins, in some ways, when Rufus first instructs her to call him “Master,” which she eventually circumvents by calling him “Mister.” She uses a title one letter removed from “Master,” but one that still marks a shift on her part and a compromising of her status. These shifts, while subtle and rhetorical, are enacted against the backdrop of violence: Dana is held at gunpoint, witnesses the whipping of an enslaved man, and finds herself present for the stripping down and beating of Alice’s mother during her early trips. All of these events lead up to her own experience with an attempted rape just outside of Alice’s home. Amid all of this, Dana learns that Rufus is her ancestor and assumes that she keeps showing up in the past in order to save his life (and her own). Confused, she tells herself that it is impossible that Rufus’s life could depend on her, “his unconceived descendant” (29). Yet the reader understands that it does. This historical uncertainty marks Kindred as a posthumanist text; Dana’s existence requires her to negotiate the reality that she must both save and resist Rufus in order to exist. In other words, her temporal liminality requires her to both participate in and undermine white institutions. Even after legal emancipation, slavery and its institutions survive on the unmaking of black bodies. In Kindred, this includes future bodies not yet born. This is Butler’s intervention into the genre of neo-slave narratives: she depicts black bodies that have been historically removed from the legal practice of slavery yet are still shaped and broken by the past. If Dana’s Middle Passage voyages teach us anything, it is how clearly the conditioning of the past continues to unmake black bodies and selves in the present. Rufus and what he represents remain reliant on the unmaking of black bodies. The legacies of slavery and readers’ own experiences with the Middle Passage via Dana similarly serve to unmake black identities today and prop up white supremacy. In other words, black selfhood is often narrated as a posthuman experience tied to historical trauma, and even fictional unmade bodies remind us that the effects of the historical Middle Passage must still be navigated in the stories we tell. The story that Butler tells is one that attempts to render those traumas concrete, as Woolfork and others have noted. Butler makes this explicit through



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Dana, who recalls having seen violence on television and in the movies, but also realizes: “I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying” (36). Just as Mustakeem examines the historical record to uncover the realities of the Middle Passage, here Butler uses figurative tools to expose the realities of unmaking black bodies. This reference to television and movies highlights how popular culture narratives themselves often mask or romanticize the realities of historical slave violence, and of the violences still committed against black bodies (e.g. contemporary narratives of police brutality). This is a concern that I will return to with the graphic novel adaptation as I attempt to reconcile visual and written accounts of unmaking in Kindred. Here, Dana sees the visual as an abstraction of the concrete experience, yet a visual rendering of Dana’s experience perhaps also demonstrates the abstraction of rending such unmaking via words alone. As I mentioned earlier, this unmaking is not strictly bodily. Mustakeem is attentive to how Middle Passage conditioning alters and unmakes normative behaviors for the black bodies and selves involved. One example of this from Kindred can be found in the conversation between Dana and Kevin after returning to the present after the attempted rape, as she attempts to prepare herself for the possibility of being retaken. In packing a switchblade in her duffel bag, Dana entertains the possibility that she has learned from the violences attempted on her that she is capable of maiming or killing another human being—or at least that she might be emotionally willing to do so. This represents a clear sense of her being unmade as a nonviolent human, a dehumanizing reality after experiencing her temporal Middle Passage and its aftermaths. This is echoed in Kevin’s remarks as well, as he worries that he no longer knows Dana because of this spoken capacity for violence. This comment sounds eerily like a self-fulfilling prophecy about black violence that is one of slavery’s legacies in the twentieth century. Such narratives rely on fear as central to the process of unmaking black bodies. In the case of Kindred, this fear is tied to Dana’s temporal Middle Passage. She hypothesizes that Rufus’s fear of death triggers her travels to the past, just as her fear of death propels her back to the present. Fear serves as a form of mobility in the text, and as the motivating factor behind the unmaking of Dana as an autonomous self and the construction of Rufus into a slave owner. Even fear, as an abstract concept, is rendered concrete through Dana’s experience of time travel. Indeed, the dizziness and nausea of her travels invoke a narrative not only of pregnancy or childbirth but also the idea of birth as a form of trauma under slavery. If we continue to think about Dana’s narrative as one of unmaking, she is repeatedly unmade through narratives of death and rebirth. Such narratives invoke the fear of childbirth in

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the historical Middle Passage and the trauma of birthing a human being into slavery—in addition to narratives of rape itself. Time travel also explores the lingering effect of unmaking on historical narratives about being a black person in the United States. In an attempt to be encouraging, Kevin reminds Dana that her ancestors had survived slavery “with fewer advantages than you have” (51). This comment points to how black suffering is imagined as a shared experience or rite of passage. Within oppressed communities, the need to experience shared suffering can be part of an internalized oppression that unmakes and dehumanizes those involved. In the case of Dana, we sense her need to reach back and identify with past suffering, which hints at the lingering effect of the Middle Passage conditionings that she previously experienced. The unmaking of black bodies and selves here is articulated as something that occurs across generations. Generational conditioning comes up again when we consider the importance of Dana’s marriage to Kevin, a white man. His narrative invites us to think about how Dana’s marriage contributes to her unmaking. While her marriage is narrated as a consensual relationship across racial lines, it is hard not to compare it with the non-consensual relationship that leads Rufus to become Dana’s ancestor. The story of Kevin and Dana meeting mirrors the coerced unmakings of Dana’s historical past; Kevin both forces himself on her and forces food on her. He uses her economic status and physical hunger to condition her into spending time with him. Dana implicitly and explicitly acknowledges these moments in her narrative in ways that highlight how white complicity, across history, serves as a form of dehumanization. This transhistorical reach of slavery and white complicity is made evident when Rufus is asked about the year and shown a coin from the future. He says: “But it’s eighteen nineteen. It’s eighteen nineteen everywhere” (62). This claim represents an unintentional truth: that slavery, racism, and violence live on in the present day. In other words, it is always the early nineteenth century in the United States. In this context, it is hard to read Kevin as anything but complicit in Dana’s unmaking. This unmaking is also given voice through the enslaved Luke, as he talks about “Marse Tom” but implicitly references the transhistorical experiences that Dana has with white folks. In addition to making a comment about the visible marks of unmaking on Dana’s face, Luke acknowledges the toll of constantly being subjected to whiteness. As Kevin joins her in the nineteenth century, he becomes part of this process; Dana falls into role-playing as a slave to her husband, who she also refers to as her master. In addition to highlighting the inherent nature of slavery, this comment serves as a reflection on the unmaking of women through the institution of marriage. All conditioning is, to some extent, a form of role-playing. And it is not just Dana who



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is playing along; later in the novel, Dana watches two young slave children play slave auction. As she watches, she notes that “even the games they play are preparing them for their future” (99). While certainly a comment on the slave society she occupies, Dana also recognizes herself in these children. Her fellow enslaved persons hinted at this earlier, inquiring as to why she speaks like white people. While this initially seems like a mere side effect of being from the future and being well-educated, I argue that this moment also demonstrates the long, historical effects of unmaking black people; the enslaved people recognize her future self as a black person unmade as she attempts to imitate and/or please their white “masters.” What Du Bois saw as a “double consciousness” is now rendered as the multiple consciousness of black posthumanism as Dana negotiates not only race and gender, but also temporality and historical memory. I should also note that Kevin is unmade in ways that mirror the unmaking of Rufus. After traveling with Dana, he is upset that she has attempted to keep him from experiencing her Middle Passage: “Why did you try to stop me from coming?” (77). In addition to inserting himself in an experience that is not his (and against Dana’s wishes), this statement highlights his desire to impose his will—which appears to be a “white savior” fantasy. Dana serves as a prop in his progressive dream of being the hero and protector of a black woman. We also get the double meaning of her trying to stop him from coming; the subtext of rape here is clear and leads us back to the sexual and reproductive imagery tied to Dana’s travels. Yet this time the story is not about Dana being reborn so much as it is about Kevin controlling her sexual and reproductive agency in an echo of Middle Passage narratives about white men raping women. We might ask ourselves if the posthuman prospect of Middle Passage narratives is too often reduced to the unmaking of black (women’s) bodies and the making (or production) of technology (progeny) for white slave masters. If so, does that unmaking continue into the present through Kevin? Kevin is also conditioned (or perhaps revealed) as he is also converted into a slaver like Rufus. Playing the role of slaver, he tells Dana: “I could survive here, though, if I had to” (77). Dana recognizes this danger immediately, and worries that “some part of this place would rub off on him,” or that “the place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow” (77). To what extent does Dana recognize her own unmaking as she worries about Kevin? Does she also get unmade into the role of caretaker for the white men in her life? Does being taught to be concerned for the well-being of white men serve to condition her to roles that ultimately unmake her as an autonomous self? These questions are answered two pages later as Dana falls into a familiar mode of working. She sees herself as a slave, and she performs that labor.

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Dana is often honest with herself about this process, noting that: “I got into the habit of being careful. I played the slave” (91). A sign of her unmaking is that she sees herself as exceptional; she is not the slave, she is playing the slave. Yet at what point does performance become reality? One page later, she witnesses a whipping and realizes just how she is being conditioned by its violence. And her concerns about the distinction between being and playing slave become more apparent as she thinks about Kevin. She feels shameful, “happily playing whore for my supposed owner” (97). She is losing her sense of self in ways that make her ashamed for actions that she knows that she should not be ashamed of—a sign of psychological conditioning. Her worries extend to the possibility that she is comfortable in her new role: “That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize” (97). This acclimatization mirrors Mustakeem’s narrative of unmaking on the Middle Passage; the trip itself serves to condition enslaved persons to a new normalcy or new reality across the sea. As Dana notes, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (100). This realization comes on the heels of Kevin minimizing brutality in ways that scare Dana and signal his own shifting attitudes. His Middle Passage experiences are different from hers, but serve to condition him as well. Dana explains to him: “you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally” (100). This serves as a reminder of the psychological scars that Mustakeem references in her historical account and reminds us about the psychological conditioning of the Middle Passage. Those psychological scars become physical ones in Kindred, representing the intertwined nature of bodily and psychological unmakings as Dana is whipped and separated from Kevin. In the present day, she begins to glimpse the kinds of unmakings that have already occurred. She notes that she looks “passably human” in ways that demonstrate that being human seems like “passing” after being unmade (114). Such claims also invoke the posthumanist rhetoric of blurring boundaries between the human and the nonhuman—in this case, that boundary marks the subhuman instead. As Dana meets up with her cousin in the present, her cousin says: “I never thought you’d be fool enough to let a man beat you.” Dana replies: “I never thought I would either” (116). This explicit acknowledgment of her unmaking and conditioning is striking in that it seems so casual and unsurprising at this point. Readers also have been conditioned, one might assume, to accept a state of violence as the new normal. On her penultimate trip, Dana arrives at the Weylin plantation and rubs her scars as a reminder of the danger she has faced. Her multiple trips have demonstrated not only her ability to be unmade across time and space but also her ability to learn from and liberate herself from those dangers. It is in this liberatory possibility that we see a posthuman blackness more akin to what



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Lillvis describes; Dana uses her temporal liminality as a mechanism of release from the brutalities of the nineteenth century. Yet this trip leads to other forms of conditioning and reveal how deeply she has been conditioned to operate in this new context. At the request of Rufus and out of concern for her future as his descendant, Dana ends up training a traumatized Alice on how to be a “good slave.” Much like those in the historical Middle Passage were conditioned to do the work of slavery and white supremacy to protect their own families, Dana performs the work of white supremacy here. And much like she was rebuked for talking like white people earlier in the novel, Alice here chides Dana for being an Uncle Tom figure. She yells at her: “That’s what you for—to help white folks keep niggers down. . . . They be calling you mammy in a few years” (167). Rufus references the extent to which she has (and has not) been “trained” by Kevin. Rufus also learns to control Dana through Alice, who now “adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person” (168). Dana realizes that this new role of hers and Rufus’s new methods is just a new form of unmaking: “He had already found the way to control me— by threatening others” (169). Even as she considers leaving, she remembers enough stories about runaway slaves “to keep me with the Weylins for several days longer than I meant to stay” (170). Contemporary slave narratives, in addition to what she heard in the nineteenth century, thus serve as tools for unmaking black selves. This transhistorical unmaking complicates views about how slave narratives might keep black selves suspended in temporal or historical liminality. Dana eventually loses her ability to even summon fear as a form of mobility. Her next attempt to leave is described as drifting into unconsciousness, which sounds similar to the drift of time travel before. Yet as she gets whipped she finds herself fearing pain but not death; as such she is not transported home. She believes that she has been unmade in this way by her inability to even believe that she will die. Instead, she knows that she will survive, albeit in great pain. She has been conditioned to whipping and unmade as a human who fears the mortal limits of death. Much like slaves on the Middle Passage, she has the ability to choose death or even to fear it removed from her by being kept alive against her will. At the same time, she is being unmade as a modern and liberated woman. She begins to doubt the usefulness of her education and training and sees herself in greater need of tools that will help her in her role as a slave. This disorientation from previous modes of knowledge also echoes the types of psychological unmakings discussed by Mustakeem. Dana arrives at this realization explicitly, stating: “I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came. See how easily slaves are made?” (177). On this same page, she notes how her swollen mouth is affecting her ability to speak, thus giving us another glimpse of how a physical unmaking leads to another type

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of unmaking: the inability to communicate. With language being so deeply tied to a sense of humanity, this alteration to her face leaves her dehumanized and unable to access the literacies she once wielded. Her thoughts lead her to ponder sleeping pills and suicide, echoing Mustakeem’s descriptions of black women in the Middle Passage. She ruminates on her unmaking, and notes that: “Slavery was a long slow process of dulling” (182). When she returns to the present, she expresses that her unmaking has made it impossible to ever feel truly “home,” again echoing Mustakeem’s work. She has been unmade, particularly in the back-and-forth of her temporal Middle Passage, in a way that makes enslavement feel familiar and normal. This feeling is echoed by Kevin as he describes seeing the plantation again: “it was so much like coming home that it scared me” (192). As they try to adapt to being back in the present day, they encounter a bit of news that reminds them that this kind of unmaking is not simply occurring in the past: “The news switched to a story about South Africa—blacks rioting there and dying wholesale in battles with police over the policies of the white supremacist government” (196). Nigel, one of the enslaved persons on the Weylin plantation, later notes that even after six years, Dana can “come back and fit right in. It’s like you never left” (202). Here we again see Butler’s view that slavery is, perhaps, unchanging. What has been unmade might be permanently unmade. Her final trip to the past demonstrates the extent to which Dana has been unmade as an autonomous black woman. For the first time, she is taken to the field to work, where she is whipped repeatedly. She describes her humiliation: “He didn’t hit me that often, but . . . I caught myself cringing, jumping at the sound of his voice” (212). This reference is common to the Middle Passage experience as well as the plantation experience; Dana feels a deep resignation that is tied to the psychological and the physical unmaking of her body. After that, Rufus assigns her to care for his dying mother. Even Mrs. Weylin remarks that “someone must have taught you to behave” (219). The reality of Dana’s unmaking is sinking in as she finds herself caring for the well-being of her former abuser and settling into her role as a slave—except she now realizes that it may no longer be just a role. She wonders if she had grown accustomed to submission: “Why had I stopped acting?” (220). Her unmaking has uncovered a new reality. Dana’s experiences have prepared her to unknowingly accept the role of being enslaved. Dana’s final moments in the past are informed by a desperate attempt to reclaim her former life and resist being unmade. Her plight is best summarized by Alice, who desires to leave “before I turn into what people call me” (234). Yet even as Rufus tries to rape Dana, she is concerned about what she has become and what she might be willing to justify: “I realized how easy



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it would be for me to . . . forgive him even this” (259). At this moment we come to the scene where her arm is lost. After stabbing Rufus, she explains that something “clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm was being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving” (261). While literally a description of her body becoming part of a wall, this passage also speaks metaphorically to the unmaking of the self. The experience of becoming part of something “cold and nonliving” speaks to the historical aftermath of slavery; she has lost part of her humanity to historical trauma, yet she has also redeemed a version of herself by being free from slavery’s grasp. In this way, Dana occupies a temporal liminality. She is a posthuman subject whose black selfhood is constructed from a recognition of her historical past (as human property) and an empowered sense of her present as an autonomous (albeit traumatized) body. VISUALIZING THE BLACK BODY UNMADE I have chosen a transmedial approach to Kindred, in part, because the graphic novel adaptation offers a fresh look at the embodied realities of Dana Franklin. As a visual text, the adaptation translates the unmaking of Dana into concrete images of black bodies and selves being conditioned to slavery. More specifically, the artistic choices by Duffy and Jennings bolster readings of Kindred as a Middle Passage narrative. The graphic novel renders her temporal travels visible in ways that invoke both the interior of a slave ship and the explicit disorientation of such travels. By turning to the graphic novel adaptation, I expand on previous claims about posthumanity and the unmaking of black bodies in the original text. In the graphic novel adaptation, readers are given a single opening image instead of the full prologue from the original novel. Dana is depicted in a hospital bed, staring out from the page, and joined by a word balloon that states: “I lost an arm on my last trip home” (Duffy and Jennings 2017, 7). Yet this lost arm is not foregrounded; instead, her face and full arm are accentuated through contrast and her injured limb is barely visible to the side—behind the guardrails to her bed. Indeed, Dana is confined tightly between these guardrails in a space that invokes the confinement of a slave ship. Unable to stand or to fully sit down in this image, we also see Dana prominently wearing a hospital tag—one that not only recalls the tagging of animals or enslaved persons, but also the shackles she wears on the cover image. By opening with an image of one arm tagged and the other missing, Duffy and Jennings set up a narrative in which slavery and the unmaking of black bodies function in

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Figure 4.1.   Dana Franklin sitting upright in a hospital bed with a bandage around what is left of her left arm in the “Prologue” to Kindred. Art by John Jennings (2017).

tandem. Moreover, this image speaks to Woolfork’s argument that fictional narratives of time travel allow for the lived experience of historical trauma to bear on the lived experiences of existing in the present—a posthumanist rendering of the porous boundary between past and present subjectivities. This initial image is also indicative of the disorientation often described in Middle Passage narratives, particularly through its use of abstract shading and muted tones. Again, one might see in this image the hull of a slave vessel where those who are being transported cannot locate themselves clearly in either space or time. That such an image is imbued with the possibility of involuntary travel is affirmed on subsequent pages, as Duffy and Jennings open the next section with an image of a waterway and a single caption: “The River.” This scene depicts a water passage that not only invokes the Middle Passage, but also the threat of being sold “down river” when enslaved persons were not compliant—an act of conditioning tied to the transport of black bodies in the United States. Even the formatting of these initial pages highlights the relationship between Dana and such water passages; one need only flip



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the first pages quickly to visualize her floating down the river shackled in her hospital bed (or metaphorical slave ship). Interestingly, the next person to appear in the graphic novel is not an earlier version of Dana with her body whole, but rather her husband, Kevin, leaning back in his chair in a leisurely pose. Unlike the original text, in which readers might read well into the novel before realizing that Kevin is a white character, the visual nature of this medium makes his racial status clear from the start. That Dana’s husband is explicitly white in the adaptation matters because it invites readers to contemplate the function (and complicity) of his whiteness from the outset. In the original text, we know that Kevin is in close proximity to Dana each time she travels back to the nineteenth century. Yet it is not until readers see him standing there as Dana disappears that we begin to question how whiteness might render him complicit in her initial “capture” and her subsequent travels. In addition to being present each time Dana negotiates her temporal liminality, he immediately asks her to revisit her trauma each time she returns. At one point, she states: “I went back to the first dizziness and remembered it all for him” (15). This is not an abstract reference to her painful memories, however; her narrative is accompanied in the previous panel by images of her traversing the river to save Rufus. The image of resuscitating Rufus construct the boy’s face so ambiguously alongside an orange-brown landscape that it looks as if Dana is vomiting—another visual clue as to how Dana’s experiences with a temporal Middle Passage work to unmake (or in

Figure 4.2.   Dana Franklin reliving the trauma of her first visit to the nineteenth century and remembering the act of resuscitating Rufus Weylin. Art by John Jennings (2017).

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this case to empty) her body. By asking her to revisit these traumas, Kevin serves as a present-day extension of the conditioning processes that begin for Dana in the nineteenth century. Such conditioning is also predicated on the transformation of Dana from human to commodity, an act that occurs through plantation slavery but is also emphasized visually as part of her temporal Middle Passage travels. The first two depictions of time travel in the adaptation are visualized not through Dana’s body, but the falling of material objects to the ground. Dana’s time traveling thus becomes an act of unmaking her body and converting it to property. The first instance takes place across two panels, where we see Dana’s body begin to stumble but are then given an image of books crashing to the ground instead. Similarly, her next trip to the past begins with feelings of disorientation at the dinner table. She attempts to cling to present-day life (literally gripping her tablecloth) before the actual travel gets depicted through dishes and chair falling to the ground. The visual transformation of an embodied black woman into objects of luxury stands in for the transformation of black bodies into property via the Middle Passage. This act of conditioning also erases the trauma of the trip itself; her unmaking highlights the already-blurred boundary between black subjectivity and material objects in the white imagination. It is only the reassertion of Dana’s bodily autonomy on the other end of these trips that enables a more empowering posthumanist reading to emerge in resistance to such acts of unmaking.

Figure 4.3.   Dana Franklin’s first trip to the past is represented by her dropping the books that she was carrying to the ground. Art by John Jennings (2017).



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Figure 4.4.  Dana Franklin’s second trip to the past is represented by her gripping tightly to a tablecloth before the table settings crash to the ground. Art by John Jennings (2017).

Such readings are disrupted, however, with the image of her next trip to the nineteenth century. There we are given an image of her body being held tight (literally possessed) by her white husband. The text of this panel is punctuated by Dana screaming out: “No! Let go!” (66). In this instance, we do not see material objects falling to the ground, but an image of Kevin holding Dana tightly as she resists. The visual metaphor is no longer necessary as Dana is visually marked as his property before they are transported and then is immediately positioned as such (by playing the role of his slave) in the nineteenth century. The blurring of boundaries between humans and other technologies reveals how the promise of the posthuman exists in close proximity to the oppression of the subhuman.

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Figure 4.5.  Kevin Franklin aggressively grabs hold of Dana Franklin as she is again transported to the nineteenth century. Dana attempts to resist his grasp. Art by John Jennings (2017).

Despite attempts to reconstitute herself each time that she travels—asserting what Lillvis might refer to as a black subjectivity that develops from temporal liminality—readers cannot ignore the lingering effects of her Middle Passage experiences when she returns to the present. Her first return shows a surprised Kevin rushing to capture her in his grip and demand an explanation of where she had been, a move that positions him as a slaveowner concerned as much about her as property as he might be about her as a human. The following trip brings her back to the present on the heels of violence and an attempted rape as she wakes with a swollen face and again in the hands of Kevin. In this instance, Kevin offers to take her to the hospital, but she rejects this option because he might be accused of violence if they do so. While a thoughtful gesture, this move also indicates that her travels have already conditioned her to endure pain and suffering to protect a white man. This pain is amplified during her next trip; she returns to the present alone and must take care of her injuries by herself. Ultimately, she drags herself into a bathtub to soak her wounds. There her head is depicted as slowly sinking lower into the water in an image of drowning—an option pursued by many black persons during the Middle Passage. Yet no image is as strikingly violent in the graphic novel adaptation as that which preceded this particular return trip. Immediately beforehand, Dana is being whipped just out of Kevin’s reach and thinks: “I thought I would die on the ground there with a mouth full of dirt and blood” (98). Her head is shown resting on the ground, with blood and vomit spilling into the dirt as



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Figure 4.6.   Dana Franklin shown lying on the ground with blood and vomit flowing from her mouth as she is whipped by Rufus Weylin’s father. Art by John Jennings (2017).

she reaches toward Kevin. The ground itself is drawn to blend in with the substances leaving her body and eventually with her body itself—a blurring of her form with the land. This image invokes the dehumanizing force of the United States as an environment in which black bodies are unmade. Duffy and Jennings visually acknowledge the role of such violence to the construction of contemporary black identities as Dana merges with the landscape to the point of disappearing entirely. The dehumanizing condition of being rendered indistinct from dirt precipitates her return to the present. As the narrative closes, there are additional scenes worth attention. The first is of Dana walking toward the plantation during her penultimate trip to the nineteenth century. Carrying a candle in one hand, she progresses slowly toward the house and says: “Home at last.” Before that can sink in, however, she backtracks in her thoughts: “I sopped walking, trying to remind myself that, no matter how familiar, this place was alien. Hostile. Dangerous.” (119). The hostility is built into the visual apparatus of the page, as she stands in a narrow lit passage surrounded by darkness and leading toward the plantation home. The image is not dissimilar to the coloring and shape of the river from early in the text, and again invokes a Middle Passage narrative. Moreover, her language as she mistakenly calls the plantation “home” speaks to how she has been conditioned to this path and such travels.

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Figure 4.7.   Dana Franklin makes her way back to the Weylin plantation by candlelight after once again traveling to the nineteenth century. Art by John Jennings (2017).

The relationship between the plantation and the Middle Passage is then foregrounded in the images of the interior of the house as Dana plays nurse to Alice. This act renders her complicit in Rufus’s violence. As she is tasked with caring for those he has hurt, we might recall how she is referred to as a mammy figure in the original text. More important, perhaps is how the attic is rendered visually. Much like the first image of the graphic novel adaptation, this scene recalls the interior of a slave ship. Rows of tightly packed bedding spaces are laid out on a flat wooden floor where one enters through a small attic door. The creaking noise of that entrance recalls the creaking of a seafaring vessel, and those who occupy that space are constantly awakened by screams that echo narratives of the historical Middle Passage. Less a captive



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Figure 4.8.  Dana Franklin enters the attic of the Weylin plantation where enslaved persons sleep in close quarters akin to those experienced on slave ships. Art by John Jennings (2017).

of this vessel than part of its crew, this move emphasizes both the liberatory potential of Dana’s mobility and how she has been conditioned to slavery and violence. This tension is located in her posthumanity; Dana is conditioned by her experiences in the nineteenth century, but she also retains a sense of the freedoms she has enjoyed in twentieth century. It is this temporal liminality that speaks to her posthuman blackness in a way that reminds readers how black persons in the United States are constantly negotiating their selfhood through the historical traumas of slavery. This liminality is perhaps best exemplified during her penultimate trip to the nineteenth century, in a panel that represents her as halfway between the past and the present. As the sepia tones of the present transform into a darker, rain-filled image of the past, we again see water tied to her travels. She is also occupying that liminal space between being a person and being property as the rain washes over her, invoking the transformative unmaking of the historical Middle Passage. As with the original text, these transformations take a toll on Dana. Once again she risks suicide and commits self-harm in order to leave the plantation and the past; she is willing to do anything to escape the violence of slavery. Yet even when she exists in the present she cannot escape the ways in which her life has been unmade by the historical past. At one point we get an image of a tired and resigned Dana sitting in a chair, with all of her modern amenities powered off on a nearby table. She narrates that: “I waited out every moment, with my bag nearby” (216). The following panel is of a calendar being slowly marked off, day-by-day. The effect of these visuals is to render

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Figure 4.9.   Dana Franklin depicted in the middle of her transition from the present day to the nineteenth century with her face half-exposed to rainfall. Art by John Jennings (2017).

waiting itself concrete; each panel highlights how Dana is living a life where she is merely waiting for the next capture. The effects of her temporal Middle Passage and plantation slavery are to condition her out of an independent and autonomous life; instead, she is permanently living in which she perceives as borrowed time. The graphic novel adaptation of Kindred concludes with the same plot as the original text, but with additional visual details that examine Dana’s fraught posthumanity as the story ends. The image of Dana trying to again escape by cutting herself draws on the same imagery we saw earlier, yet this time she does not return to the present. Instead, her conditioning has rendered her unable to frighten herself into a return; she has become too used to violence against her body for such violence to properly frighten her. Instead, she turns her head to the creaking of a door as Rufus enters the attic, calling to mind the image of an overseer entering the ship’s hull to unmake enslaved persons on a slave ship. Indeed, the images quickly turn violent as Rufus tackles and prepares to rape Dana—the same act of violent conditioning that led to Alice’s submission and death earlier in the narrative. Narratively, this



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Figure 4.10.   Dana Franklin and Rufus Weylin depicted as two halves of the same face across two panels in the closing scenes of Kindred. Art by John Jennings (2017).

scene launches us toward Rufus’s ultimate act of possession (rape) and the end of the conditioning process for Dana. Yet this is where the adaptation opens up a potentially liberatory (if somewhat fraught) narrative. Visually, Duffy and Jennings depict this turning point by giving us two panels in which Dana and Rufus appear as two halves

Figure 4.11.   As Rufus Weylin dies on the floor of his attic, Dana Franklin is transported back to the present day with her arm encased in the wall. Art by John Jennings (2017).

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of one face. While this decision risks a kind of visual possession (or unmaking) of Dana as an autonomous self, it also serves to highlight Dana’s ability to draw upon her experiences with multiple consciousness to reassert her humanity and reclaim her dignity. As with the original text, Dana stabs and kills Rufus in a violent scene. In the adaptation, our last views of Rufus are with him lying on the ground and eventually blurring with the floorboards in an uncanny echo of the whipping scene with Dana much earlier. It is this artistic move that I find striking. As Rufus dies and visually blurs into the floor, Dana also—as in the original text—finds her arm stuck in a wall during her last trip to the present. In this way, she simultaneously achieves liberation and yet becomes (literally) part of a property and is physically unmade (again, literally). While she frees herself from Rufus, she also loses part of herself in the process. She must always retain the status of an autonomous and empowered black woman as well as that of a black woman whose body and selfhood have been caught up in the realities of slavery. CONCLUSION: TRANSMEDIAL POSTHUMANISMS Reading the original text of Kindred alongside its graphic novel adaptation opens up posthumanist readings that visually highlight the unstable nature of black bodies and black selves in American literature. In these texts, Dana performs a posthuman blackness tied to multiple consciousness; as she negotiates historical trauma she is obliterated as a stable being (i.e. the physical unmaking of her body) yet remains able to locate herself within and without structures of white power (i.e. a self-knowledge that comes from having seen a better future). By rendering this multiple consciousness visually, Duffy and Jennings not only resist abstractions of black suffering through Dana’s travels and enslavement, but also reassert her selfhood and agency in light of constant efforts to unmake her blackness via the transatlantic slave trade. The liberatory potential of the posthuman becomes visible as efforts to render Dana subhuman are resisted through her ability to craft an empowered subjectivity—one formed by navigating multiple temporalities and crafting new futures. More importantly, those futures are not mere fantasies devoid of trauma or ignorant of historical conditioning; instead, Dana’s futurity and liberation are forged as she resists the literal and historical unmaking of her body and her selfhood.



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NOTES 1.  Woolfork’s scholarship is essential reading for any scholar studying Kindred, particularly for her introduction to the idea of a “bodily epistemology,” or what she refers to as “a representational strategy that uses the body of a present-day protagonist to register the traumatic slave past” (2009, 2). Woolfork also introduces the idea of “go there to know there,” a key reading strategy for understanding Kindred, albeit one that (perhaps) does not pay enough attention to the trip—or the Middle Passage—itself (4). Whereas Woolfork’s work is deeply anchored in trauma theory, my approach seeks a more liberatory reading of the novel. 2. See also the work of Kodwo Eshun on Afrofuturism and his discussion of multiple consciousness. Eshun writes: “Afrofuturism’s specificity lies in assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access triples consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations” (2003, 298). 3.  In thinking about the abstraction of black suffering and black trauma, I am again responding (somewhat) to the work of Eshun, who writes: “The collective delusion of the close encounter is transplanted to the Middle Passage. The effect is not to question the reality of slavery, but to defamiliarize it through a temporal switchback that reroutes its implications through postwar science fiction, cultural fantasy, and modern science fiction, all of which begin to seem like elaborate ways of concealing and admitting trauma” (2003, 299–300). My argument is that the graphic novel adaptation—by rendering black trauma visual-yet-not-spectacular—is perhaps less complicit in this act of concealment and perhaps more liberatory. 4.  Mustakeem describes this in more detail: “Sailors relentlessly unmade bondpeople’s bodies through physical, emotional, and psychological conditioning. . . . This process of unmaking, which no captive was able to circumvent once forced into the slaving industry, produced a dramatic climate of terror in the world of slavery at sea that resulted in mental disorientation, familial and communal separation, malnourishment, lack of sanitation and cleanliness, severe isolation, debilitating diseases, miscarriages, sexual abuse, psychological instability, and bearing witness to physical violence committed against kin and shipmates” (2016, 7).

WORKS CITED Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon. Duffy, Damian and John Jennings. 2017. Kindred. New York: Abrams. Eshun, Kodwo. 2003. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 2: 287-302. Flagel, Nadine. 2012. “‘It’s Almost Like Being There’: Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative, and the Crisis of Representation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Canadian Review of American Studies 42, 2: 216-245. Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

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Lillvis, Kristen. 2017. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia. Mustakeem, Sowande’ M. 2016. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois. Woolfork, Lisa. 2009. Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois.

Chapter Five

“A Dangerous Idea” Human Enhancement, Transhuman Desirability, Binary Identity Negotiation, and “Mistranthropy” in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More Melvin G. Hill INTRODUCTION The idea of human enhancement that improves the human condition is not a new phenomenon. The history of humanity has demonstrated an extraordinary imagination and optimistic view of improving human physical and psychological traits. Three primary texts help to shape ideas concerning how to improve and increase the human being: Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627), René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences) (1637), and Marquis de Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) (1795). These particular three works along with discoveries in science and medicine triggered both excitement and apprehension. Human enhancement has the potential to shift humans’ ontological status, shape his/ her evolution, and stamp their more desirable personal identity. Human enhancement is rooted in the imagination of transhumanism, which asserts that humanity can be transformed or transcended through scientific and technological methods. Modeled in the imitation of God and imagination of Frankenstein, humans can modify their current physical and mental limitations and transcend their current cultural and social conditions. Regarding the potentiality of turning existing humans into transhuman beings through human enhancement from an anti-racist perspective, it is necessary and advantageous to consider asking the following questions: How does the Black body prevail over inequalities of privilege, power, and self-worth? How should the Black body respond to the possibility of human enhancement to achieve cultural, political, and social equity? If Black people embrace this possibility, 101

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how could the original Black body become transhuman and not surrender its former identity? The possible answers to these questions might conjure some cautionary outcomes and prominent fears worth considering when choosing a transhuman path that crosses the colorline and manipulates ethnic-borders. Some humans are willing to take the existential risks to obtain race, more accurately stated, human equality. For example, some African Americans (among other ethnicities) whose skin composition appeared “white,” used their “white” complexion as racial camouflage to shift their personal identity and gain access to privileges that were once denied to them. Such individuals transcended their legal status as “black” to become “white.” Once known as racial passing, black human beings can now exceed their current racial identity to be transhuman beings through human enhancement technologies (HETs) that will offer them once denied privileges. Such biological engineering is explicitly demonstrated in George S. Schuyler’s Afro-transhumanist novel Black No More. This chapter addresses the aforementioned questions. To answer the complexity of these questions, I first provide a brief, yet, clear meaning of the various implications of human enhancement and how it potentially relates to Black bodies creating transhuman bodies. Once these points are clarified, I explore the extent in which Black bodies can fundamentally endorse the potential of human enhancement and how it might play a significant role in reimagining identity and value as seen in George S. Schuyler’s Afrotranshumanist novel Black No More. Here, I identify transhuman desirability, and then, explain the complexities of personal identity through what I call binary identity negotiation where the enhanced human is conscious of both the former human identity (Max Disher) and transhuman identity (Matthew Fisher) as it consciously positions to be the dominant identity. I end with a brief analysis of mistransthropy as seen in Schuyler’s novel. Schuyler presents ethical and social consequences of morphological freedom and demonstrates societal responses to transhuman bodies. This chapter illustrates the complex connectedness between human enhancement, transhuman desirability, and the Black body within a transhuman context. HUMAN ENHANCEMENT There is an appealing simplicity in understanding the concept of human enhancement. A standard definition of the term “enhancement” means “to improve in attractiveness, effectiveness, or value.” This umbrella view of “enhancement” includes a wide variety of human changes and technological methods. In “Therapy, Enhancement, and Improvement,” Ruth Chadwick



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mentions that human enhancement involves the number of different types of changes that include, but are not limited to, “lengthening the lifespan, making people taller, increasing cognitive powers or emotional sensibilities, and facilitating greater sporting prowess, among others” (30). Furthermore, Chadwick mentions that the variety of methods consist of “cosmetic, genetic, pharmaceutical, and prosthetic” (30). However, the term is more significantly meaningful when it is distinguished from a range of meanings. As such, the term “human enhancement” will be defined within a posthuman context. In “Human Enhancement,” Eric Juengst and Daniel Moseley set forth a comprehensible meaning of human enhancement. They imply that human enhancements or human enhancement interventions “attempt to improve specific human capabilities and traits, rather than the whole person” (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In “Human Enhancement and Personal Identity,” Phillip Brey explains that human enhancement “aims to bring improvements to the human condition that move beyond the state of mere health” (169). As the cornerstone of transhumanism, human enhancement means exceeding the human limitations that are fixed within the undesirable and inevitable human condition. In addressing the various concerns of the human condition, it is both possible and desirable to overcome biological limitations on human cognition, emotion, and physical and sensory capabilities, and that we should use science, technology, and experimentation guided by critical and creative thinking to do so (Ibid., 12–13). On this view, human enhancement permeates an optimistic outcome for the future of humanity; however, it gives rise to pessimistic concerns about social identity category membership, biological equality, and morphological freedom. It might be worth locating the nexus between technology and human enhancement. The human enhancement scenarios are entangled with current and future technologies. Humanity’s integration with technology provides a rapid evolution to human existence that will ultimately affect the human condition but also transcend it. Some of these areas of revolutionary technologies include biotechnology, cognitive science and neuroscience, information technology, and nanotechnology. Technologies such as these have the ability—through human enhancement—to improve physical and mental performance, expand cognitive abilities, extend mortality, and redesign human physical appearance. At the same time, these technologies in which human enhancement resides have the potential to provide new physical and psychological capabilities and form a unique relationship with the body and mind. Technology coupled with the human species produces what most critics, notably, Donna J. Haraway and Chris Hables Gray, call human-based cyborgs. In “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Haraway defines the cyborg as

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a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (5). For Chris Hables Gray, human-machine integration or the cyborg is more specifically defined as “a cybernetic organism, which is any self-regulating (homeostatic) system that includes organic (living, natural, evolved) and machine (unloving, artificial, invented) subsystems” (26). People have observed this generalized view of the cyborg in cinema and literature, which is only one of the human-machine integrations that inclusively reflect the use of cyborg technologies. The pessimistic concerns of human enhancement that are too often ignored are centered on the basis of two deeper existential questions: how do we define ourselves and who has the right to determine our biological status? These two questions deliberately allow humans to confine to a particular social category membership that determines their value within societal communities. In “Life Enhancement Technologies: The Significance of Social Category Membership,” Christine Overall’s assertion is clear: “All human beings are differently placed as a result of their membership in various groups that are treated by their society as being morally and politically significant” (329). Many of these social category memberships are determined as either a liability or an asset and are placed on a value-scale that is intrinsically linked to racial identity. In Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (2010), Nicholas Agar properly discerns that human beings value “certain experiences and ways of existing” (12). This value system affects the transhuman condition that emphasizes the moral complexities and ethical dilemmas of the moderate change from the human to the transhuman. TRANSHUMANISM Over the course of its inception, the evolution of “transhumanism” has produced different meanings from various perspectives. The Introduction of this book provides a more comprehensive exploration of the meaning of transhumanism. This section will briefly extend those findings in order to contextualize the thesis of this chapter. As such, it is impossible to consider human enhancement, also referred to as human modification and human augmentation, without considering the connection it has with transhumanism. Phillip Brey suggests that transhumanism is “an international movement with the explicit aim of supporting human enhancement technology to improve human life” (169). In “Transcendent Engineering,” Giulio Prisco prefers to define transhumanism as “an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to



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eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellect, physical, and psychological capabilities” (qtd. in Prisco 240). Overcoming human biological limits is at the center of transhumanist thought and practice. Joel Thompson explains that the aim of transhumanism is to “enhance physical, emotional, cognitive capacities thus opening up new possibilities and horizons of experience” (165). Transhumanism promises individuals morphological freedom to be exempt of biological limitations and physical restrictions that were inherited. CREATING TRANSHUMAN BODIES IN THE NAME OF EQUALITY Science and technology are reshaping how we reimagine human bodies. In this reimagining of the human body, humans are able to correct deficiencies and replace undesirables to assure the best possible human existence. Some scholars argue that humans are manufacturing cyborg bodies and other scholars point out that humans are becoming more transhuman. Thus, the human signifies a transcendence from the natural human or authentic human to a modified or enhanced one. As such, science and technology present new possibilities for human evolution, an ambitious progress that offers new visions of the human. In the temporal perspective, the posthuman condition presents many conflicts and dilemmas for the natural human ranging from ethical and moral concerns, as well as cultural, political, and social problems. It would be more advantageous to avoid technological opportunities to enhance and advance humanity so that detrimental scenarios are not realized. In one view, the existential risks are greater than the self-determining rewards. In another view, the moral permissibility of modifying and enhancing the human for the purpose of improving life stands as the epitome of the ontological self who is entitled to a pro-equality future. From a bioconservative perspective, one of the disturbing thoughts that are raised by transhumanists is equality, including the notion that human enhancements will negatively affect the nobility and humility of humankind. Frances Fukuyama is concerned about human enhancements and their impact on human equality. Let’s consider Fukuyama’s perspective: The first victim of transhumanism [the project of enhancing human beings] might be equality. . . . Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals have inherited value is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming

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ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? (Savulesc 184)

What is especially important about Fukuyama’s legitimate concerns is the fact that any form of human enhancement will continue to constitute the disparity or relative inadequacy in economic, educational, political, and social equality. As a qualitative relationship, equality is not admissible or sustainable the more that humans are motivated to enhance or become participants of enhancements. That is, the biopolitics related to human enhancement will prevent people who desire to be posthuman from deviating from their current state and existing in a new one. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen points out that preventing certain people from human enhancements will continue to “send a chilling message to them,” a message that is all too familiar to groups who have been demonized, discriminated, marginalized, and oppressed. Such a message indicates the importance of our overriding moral duty to ensure that equality, and more specifically proportional equality, is publicly recognizable and politically distributed among all people. As such, our current political, racial, and social climate is reasonable enough to rationally and objectively think about and consider the desirability of being posthuman, which means leaving behind our current state of being human. Creating transhuman bodies through human enhancements as part of the transhumanist project means that we must consider the nexus between the ills of racism and the Black body’s desirability and potentiality to become transhuman. Under the assumption that racism—what W.E.B. Du Bois identified as “the problem of the twentieth century” no longer exists and under the guise of having achieve a post-racial America by electing an African American president to serve two consecutive terms, it is apparent that the posthuman agenda might offer ways to rethink the complexities between racism and the Black body. There are arguments to be made for the Black body to utilize transhumanist methods to not only pursue but also obtain a sense of equality within a still hostile society. There is no illusion that human enhancements create new possibilities of choice to all-too-familiar situations and wellacquainted circumstances. To put it another way, the transhumanist project allows the Black body a way to “self-direct.” Max More explains: Self-direction calls on us to rise above the surrender of independent judgement that we see—especially in religion, politics, morals, and relationships. Directing our lives asks us to determine for ourselves our values, purposes, and actions. New technologies offer more choices not only over what we do but also over who we are physically, intellectually, and psychologically. By taking charge of ourselves we can use these new means to advance ourselves according to our personal values. (version 3.11)



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In this formulation of perpetual progress, the Black body has essentially a possibility to free itself of the cultural, political, and social conflicts and struggles that have always plagued its existence. The transhumanist project asks an urgent question as to what reasons do human enhancements advance the human condition for the Black body? And at the same time, what conclusions in which human enhancements could ultimately provide for the Black body for the sake of equality? THE CASE OF TRANSHUMAN DESIRABILITY IN BLACK NO MORE George S. Schuyler’s Black No More is a classic satirical novel that addressed America’s social climate as it condemned American racism and “white is right” ideologies. Schuyler’s novel drew the attention of Du Bois who proclaimed that it was “a good-nature criticism of the Negro problem in the United States” (100). It was first published in the 1940s, but since, it has received considerable attention because it’s an early example of what would later be called “Afrofuturism.” Also, Black No More has been re-published in a series on Afrofuturism as recently as 2012. Black No More traces the journey of the protagonist and transhuman antihero Max Disher, who undergoes a genetic transformation from the scientific work of Doctor Junius Crookman, recently returned from Germany, who invented the machine that permanently changes black skin to whiterthan-white complexion in three days. After his racial transformation, Max experiences life as a white man (known as Matthew Fisher), exists within white culture and community (joining a white supremacist organization), and marries within the safeguarded parameters of whiteness (Helen Givens). Crookman’s “Black No More” science and technology are evidence of human enhancement and its capabilities to advance transhuman desirability and the reconfiguration of racial boundaries. Schuyler’s racial-transhuman universe demonstrates human evolution, implanting transhumanist ideas as both a social reality and cultural creation. Starting from the premise of transhuman desirability, Michael Hauskeller argues that transhuman desirability “of radical enhancement crucially hinges on utopian ideas that are deeply rooted in our cultural imagination and have a long history that links them to ancient dreams, hopes, and fears” (31). The utopian ideas are scripted from a genealogical perspective where specific ideas about the Black human being are inextricably bound to whiteness. As George Yancy points out, whiteness “emerges as a value code deployed by a certain raciated (white) group of people that delimits and structures what it deems intelligible, valuable, normal, abnormal, beautiful, ugly, and so on”

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(109). Writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redman Fauset, and Nella Larsen, to name a few, created characters whose white genetic skin color afforded them opportunities to re-script their bodies/selves within white spaces. However, Black bodies whose blackness is optically identifiable are limited in re-scripting their bodies, unable to produce or create a white identity. Early in Black No More, readers are given a vivid description of Max Disher. Max is one of the “gay blade” Harlemites and is a “tall, dapper and smooth coffee-brown” man (Schuyler 17). Despite his appearance and character, Max cannot find the desired place in humanity as a Black body. As such, he observes that “As a white man [I] could go anywhere, be anything [I] wanted to be, do almost anything [I] wanted to do, be a free man at last . . . and probably be able to meet the girl from Atlanta. What a vision!” (7). Here, Max not only recognizes the currency of whiteness but also, he is aware of his desire to acquire white skin in order to have an opportunity to live a “better” life. Max’s transhuman desirability is marked by what Kasper LippettRasmussen calls “discrimination-independent genetic enhancements” which will prevent Max from experiencing a lived-context inclusive of discriminatory responses to his Black body. In The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, Lippett-Rasmussen explains that “discrimination-independent genetic enhancements are genetic interventions that improve the lives of future individuals by means other than ensuring that they do not have properties that tend to result in discriminatory responses that reduce their well-being” (88). When considering the specific reasons for the transformation, Max laments, “Sure, it was taking a chance, but think of getting white in three days! No more [J]im [C]row. No more insults” (Schuyler 7). Max’s transhuman desirability relies on genetic interventions which allow him to dispossess “the relevant discriminationtriggering properties” that are fundamentally linked to the Black body which has endured a history of “rapes, lynchings, brandings, mutilations, whippings, profiling, and policing” (Lippett-Rasmussen 91; Yancy xvi). For Max, a transhumanist approach to an anti-black America is more about improving the quality of his life. In order to bring Max’s transhuman desirability to fruition, he must undergo Doctor Crookman’s scientific and transhumanist experiment. The technological machine in Black No More is the first-science approach in forecasting possibilities with changes in color conventions with the use of technology. Before Schuyler’s Black No More, several seminal visions of ethnic liberation were produced in various publications. For example, Japanese Scientist Yusaburo Noguchi revealed in the Pittsburgh Courier in October 1929 that he could change a Negro into a white man by using a treatment



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involving glandular control and electrical nutrition. Twenty years later, Walter White’s Look magazine article, “Has Science Conquered the Colorline?” became the center of social controversy because he publicly claimed that through science dark skin could be turned white. Inventions such as Crookman’s transracial machine aligns with the developmental ideas of Noguchi and White, and future enhancement technologies. In “Enhancement Technologies and the Body,” Linda F. Hogle explains that enhancement technologies are “inventions intended to improve human function” that will ultimately transform human meaning (696). Elaine Graham underscores Hogle’s point, suggesting that “new technologies promise to enhance lives, relieving suffering and extend capabilities” (66). Crookman’s logical conceivable reality of his Black-No-More science provides an expansionist vision for a racial composition to those who seek it. Crookman’s transracial machine as biogenetic technology serves as a device of humanist ambition and as an apparatus for discriminatory deliverance (Ibid., 71). Max emerges from Crookman’s sanitarium and marvels at the fact that “he is free” (Schuyler 14). He was liberated from the discriminatory markers that plagued his life. Max acknowledges his new state of being after his transformation: Gone was the smooth brown complexion. Gone was the slightly full lips and Ethiopian nose. Gone was the nappy hair that he had straightened so meticulously ever since the kink-no-more lotion first wrenched Aframericans from the tyranny and torture of the comb. There would be no more expenditures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination; no more obstacles in his path. (Schuyler 14)

Max celebrated how quickly the machine evaporated his undesired blackness as he became the outstanding delineator of Crookman’s “Black No More” transhumanist technology. Interestingly, Schuyler reveals, then, and we witness now, how many people of color desire whiteness as part of the solution to their lived-context of discrimination that they experience and the markers of blackness that they possess. For example, we can consider Michael Jackson, an international musical icon, who erased his undesirable African inherited features: kinky hair, wide nose, full lips, and brown skin. In “Is Michael Jackson a Transhumanist?,” R. U. Sirius argues that Jackson experienced a “transformation of his inherited features” and “showed interest in mutation and expanded possibilities—and dabbled in (at the very least) transhumanist tropes” (Sirius). Jackson, along with Trina McGee, Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, and Sammie Sosa, is an indication that white desirability through human enhancement tropes is more reality than fiction. In this vein, George Schuyler’s technological innovations in Black No More are further contextualized through Matthew Fisher and the binary identity negotiation.

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THE CASE OF MATTHEW FISHER AND BINARY IDENTITY NEGOTIATION An important shift in the way Max frames his new reality as Matthew Fisher is taking place through what I call binary identity negotiation. To examine Matthew’s new transhuman identity through binary identity negotiation, we must first consider three modes of thought. The first mode to consider is based on sociologist and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.” For Du Bois, as explained in Souls of Black Folk (1903), double consciousness is an individual sensation of feeling a “twoness,” a dual identity in one flesh that is putatively experienced by the Black body because of the anti-black society in which it lives. The complex feeling of “twoness” is not tenuously episodic but a continuance of consciousness, an awareness that is fixed within the psyche of the Black human being. Also, we should bear in mind another mode of thought, “negotiation.” Broadly speaking, negotiation aims to resolve points of difference through logic and reason in order to achieve the desired outcome. The information provided in the process of a negotiation is irrelevant and most attention is given to the pay-offs for the involved parties. The third mode of thought to consider is linked to “identity.” From a philosophical standpoint, “identity” addresses persistent existential questions about the essence of being human: Who am I? What determines my essence for my existence? The precise meanings of these two questions take into consideration how a person is defined and what properties shape the person’s existence. Brey notes that “the notion of identity, when applied to a person, is customarily used to designate those qualities that jointly define a person as a unique individual, distinct from others” (Brey 174). Here, “identity” requires that a boundary is drawn between two formations of “identity”: “existential identity (self)” and “categorical identity (self).” The formation of “existential identity” requires that the individual possess a profound self-knowledge and whose attitude, behavior, and thoughts are supported by self-knowledge and not influenced by societal beliefs and practices. Psychologist F. von Broembsen observes that there are three essential elements that contribute to “existential identity:” awareness, acceptance, and acknowledgment. These three important factors are the way the individual reflectively perceives the meaning of the Self and emphasizes the comparative evaluation between the environment and the individual. “Categorical identity” is associated with how the individual defines themselves within social systems of categories and strongly correlates with the ways in which they expect to be judged by others (Von Broembsen 334). The “categorical identity” advocates for inclusion to desired memberships based on social importance and is most concerned with



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how people in the desired social category feel about the individual. Brey reminds us that “human enhancement is likely to lead to major changes in personal identities, and it is, therefore, important to assess what changes are likely to occur and whether these changes are desirable for the individual and for society” (174). With that cue, the distinct separation of existential and categorical identities within binary identity negotiation suggests that the transhuman state of being challenges individual assumptions about the authenticity of the self. In the case of transhumanism, the transhuman requires the current human or the existential identity to lose all identifiable character traits in order to completely acquire the desired identity. In particular, as Nick Bostrom points out, the [transhuman] would have to lose all of his memories, his goals, his unique skills, and his entire personality. Indeed, this is a difficult task (41). For binary identity negotiation, the transhuman and the former human are existentially aware of each other’s existence but only one psychological configuration of the two identities can drive the justification and conduct within any given situation. The former human identity or existential identity desires to preserve its beliefs, memories, desires, and ideas, while the transhuman identity or categorical identity is most concerned with securing reasonable concessions that will produce a coveted outcome. There is no veil of ignorance for either the former human or transhuman. As such, a negotiation between the two identities is established. Chapter 4 of Black No More presents the starting point for one of the episodes of binary identity negotiation which occurs when Rev. Givens, the founder of the defunct organization Knights of Nordica, recognizes the transhuman Matthew Fisher’s racist attitude and concludes that he “ought to prove a valuable asset to the Knights of Nordica” (Schuyler 39). Matthew’s new white appearance attempts to interfere with the former Black identity of Max Disher and his consciousness of race relations. Within binary identity negotiation, Max’s identity reappears as a precautionary principle to Matthew so there is no irreversible damage to the realities of the Black body: “he had no belief in the racial integrity nonsense . . . he had the average Negro’s justifiable fear” (Schuyler 40). Matthew’s wish to obtain membership needs to be restrained through the negotiation whereby he can possess what he desires most without relinquishing Max’s moral consciousness. Max’s negotiation that serves as a precautionary principle provides Matthew with ethical clarity. Only an equilibrium between Matthew and Max can guide the formation of the dual identities. Indeed, as a transhuman, Matthew could not fail to remember Max’s moral and ethical beliefs because if he did, it would be a tremendous threat to the welfare of the former human’s identity. As such, the transhuman identity acquiesces to the former ideas, memories,

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and beliefs as an acknowledgment that human enhancement should not translate to the evaporation of the intricacies of human meaning. It should be noted that the case of being transhuman while experiencing binary identity negotiation with the former human identity encounters a wide range of existential questions that underscore the importance of referential names. For example, the referential name change from Max Disher to Matthew Fisher not only serves as distinguishable descriptive content but also, it provides evaluative identifying content that expands into personal meaning. Matthew propositional attitude of his referential name change is explicitly communicated to Bunny. “All right, Max; but when things get too thick, I’m gonna thin out.” “For Christ’s sake don’t call me Max,” cautioned Matthew. “That’s your name, ain’t it?” “No simp. Them days are gone forever. It’s Matthew Fisher now.” (Schuyler 70)

Matthew, as Max’s referential name, involves explaining away markers of his former human identity while assigning himself a new name that constitutes new meaning. For the most part, Max’s new name for his transhuman state of being affords him a sense of race significance, provides him a degree of validity and recognition, and secures certain privileges to help shape his destiny. Here, Matthew is not concerned about his existential identity (self) which is his former human identity, Max, but his immediate attention holds fast to the formation of his categorical identity (self). The final analysis of transhuman binary identity negotiation appears in dramatic fashion when Matthew’s transhumanist promise of white mobility, opportunity, and privilege is threatened by the sufficient limits via Dr. Crookman’s technology. Earlier in the novel, Dr. Crookman provided a notice of caution to inform the newly transhuman bodies that “the offspring of these whitened Negroes will be Negroes. This means that your daughter, having married a supposed white man, may find herself with a black baby!” (Schuyler 25). As a consequence, Matthew’s intimate involvement with Helen Givens presents unavoidable risks to his transhuman identity. The couple’s potential offspring will not create a transgenic human, and as such, the child will resemble Matthew’s former darker self. Herein lies, the transhuman binary identity negotiation. First, Max expresses recognition to the realization that despite his transhuman existence Matthew remains intimately linked with the former human identity where there is no denying that it is present. For instance, Bunny admits to Matthew that sometimes he forgets the former human identity exists but Max’s existential identity, not the transhuman identity, explicitly reminds Bunny: “I don’t. I know I’m darky and I’m always on alert” (89). As much



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as he might desire, Matthew cannot afford to discontinue Max because he serves as a voluntary survivalist element in Matthew’s transhuman world. The favorable outcome for the transhuman identity will result not in the extinction of the former human identity but in the advocacy and protection of the former human identity. Second, Matthew understood the risks in this transhuman undertaking and the existential consequences of this betrayal if it was exposed that his white identity was genetically engineered. This highly problematic dilemma is perplexing for Schuyler’s transhuman antihero; therefore, he attempts an alternative line of reasoning that is beyond negotiation in order not to forfeit his coveted desire. Here, in chapter 8, Matthew considers an underhanded plot to convince Helen—who is pregnant with his child—to “go away for a while to rest [her] nerves” only to lure her to one of the “Black No More” clinics in which infants can undergo Dr. Crookman’s transhumanist project (93). Matthew’s impractical scheme leads Bunny to hire two men to deliberately set ablaze Helen’s sentimental old home where she desires to give birth. As a result of her uncomfortable emotional experience related to the destruction of the old home, Helen, unfortunately, miscarries the baby. However, it’s not until later, in chapter 11, where transhuman binary identity negotiation resurfaces as an extension of this familiar situation. Helen is pregnant again, and this new pregnancy poses more of a threat to Matthew’s transhuman and categorical identities than before. There are various constraints on Matthew’s capacity to maintain his transhuman state of being and social membership. First, he understands that Helen will not commit to an abortion as suggested by Bunny: “‘What about an abortion?’ suggested Bunny, hopefully” (Schuyler 115). Matthew grapples with the possible reality that once exposed, he will have to leave town to avoid collective societal concerns with the death penalty and his Black body. But it’s Matthew’s categorical identity that attempts to avoid societal isolation and conform to societal standards. His desires still linger in whiteness: “He hated to leave. He had such a good time since he’d been white: plenty of money, almost ultimate power, a beautiful wife, good liquor and the pick of damsels in reach” (124). His transhuman desirability to maintain his evolution of whiteness detects his existential identity who desires for the transhuman Matthew to return to his existential self, an existential self that would love to remain with Helen regardless of the aftermath: “I’ll stick by you as long as you’ll have me and without you, life wouldn’t be worth a dime” (129). The central element with any negotiation between binary identities is the importance of truth: “You’re not responsible for the color of our baby, my dear. I’m the guilty one” (129). This particular confession of guilt is not only an admission of Matthew’s abandonment to the truth but his responsibility to it.

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The importance of Matthew’s revelation to Helen is an implicit acceptance of the value of the embodiment and embeddedness of the former human and existential identity, Max Disher. His reactionary beliefs expose the ideological formations that clearly distinguish both binary identities while fusing them together. This is most evident when Matthew poured out his secret to the astonished little audience at the delivery. A great load lifting from his soul (129). Matthew is more than a blip of his existential identity. He remains true to “his memories, his goals, his unique skills, and his entire personality” within his commixed transhuman identity (Bostrom). MISTRANSTHROPY AS REACTION TO HUMAN ENHANCEMENT TECHNOLOGIES OR TRANSHUMANISM Finally, as new human enhancements technologies and transhuman bodies arise, humanity’s prudential judgment and blissful ignorance will produce potential frightening scenarios and possible dreadful consequences. For instance, molecular biologist and biomedical ethicist Lee Silver arguably imagines communities whereby the genetically endowed, those he calls the GenRich, and the genetically unenhanced, those he calls GenPoor, live in effectively separate societies. Silver’s imaged scenario reflects the centrality of Marxism which highlights explicit social divisibility between, in this case, the enhanced and unenhanced, creating traditional and neoteric hierarchy formations based on widening the technological gap while changing the social landscape. Likewise, as Anders Sandberg argues, “genetic [enhancement] would increase class differences, possibly leading to a strongly stratified world of the haves and have-nots” (59). At the center of transhumanism is the “societal risks in terms of how new technologies are communicated to and understood by the public” (McFee 220). Unlike technophobia where an individual experiences the combination of anxiety and attitude toward modern technology, mistransthropy is a new concept that can help explain public reactions not only towards the transhuman but also the racially triggering properties of blackness. As a psychosocial phenomenon, mistransthropy is the distrust and hatred of transhumanity or transhumans. On one hand, the mistransthrope is often governed by intense emotions that regulate vehement impulses that are only experienced through the observation of the transhuman. On the other hand, the mistransthrope is undeniably influenced by emotions and impulses that will give rise to reactionary intransigence toward the transhuman. The public’s uncompromised moral and ethical codes of humanity are a refusal to indulge and accept the transhumanist project on any terms. As such, the



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concept of mistransthropy is relevant to transhumanism because it provides an explanation of the public’s (ir)rational fear and sensuous disgust toward what seems to be an erosion of humanity due to human enhancement technologies, or more specifically, the transhuman. In “Does Transhumanism Face the Uncanny Valley Among the Religious?” Donald M. Braxton arguably suggests that “modifications to the expected normal range of the human form and its behavioral repertoire will fall into the uncanny valley, triggering fear and disgust responses” (344). Mistransthropy is markedly evident when the technological enhancements of the transhuman are biologically visible. If this is the case, then, mistransthropy is clearly elucidated in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More as it clearly points toward a pragmatic conclusion and edges deeply into the perplexing ethical questions concerning the Black body: (a) how will humanity discriminate against and react in opposition to the transformed Black body that is now favorably and visibly white? (b) will the transhumanist project amplify and bolster current systems of devaluation, marginalization, and prejudice? These particular questions are important and relevant to mistransthropy. One of the most intense cases of mistransthrophy is found in chapter 4 when the all-white Knights of Nordica react to the Black-No-More transhumanist project where Black bodies have radically transformed into White bodies. In a newspaper advertisement, the social organization advocates for ten thousand white Atlantanites to fight for the “integrity of the white race.” The Knights of Nordica demonstrate a reactionary intransigence towards the transhuman: “The racial integrity of the Caucasian Race is being threatened by the activities of a scientific black Beelzebub in New York” (Schuyler 36). Here, the advertisement is intended to correct a social transgression committed by the Black body and their body modification threatens the legitimacy of whiteness. The mistransthrope’s reaction to the transhuman is self-directed and solicits multiple participants to bring about the desired result. Their intentionality towards “the activities of a scientific black Beelzebub” exhibits fixed racial boundaries which impinge on the human and posthuman condition. Chapter 10 provides another intense case of mistransthropy where a white mob, after being “emboldened and inflamed by fiery editorials, radio addresses, pamphlets, posters and platform speeches” (Schuyler 111), takes matters a step further, suggesting that any form of human enhancement technologies for the aim of transforming a black human into a white transhuman should be annihilated at all cost. Here, the proponents of mistransthropy set out to demonstrate a collective responsibility, first, by targeting the transhumanist project that genetically produces white persons including the systematic extermination of genetic engineered infants; and second, by protecting the “sanctity” of white femininity.

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The first strain of mistransthropy is made evident when the mob “attacked a Crookman hospital” and “set fire to the building” (Schuyler 111). This arsonist act toward the Crookman building is an aggressive way to not only dismantle the architectural structure itself, but also, obscure its symbolic function. The Crookman building signifies a transhumanistic view of the right to seek happiness through morphological freedom that asserts that a person has the right to his or her own body, not just self-ownership but also the right to modify oneself according to one’s desire (Sandberg 56). The Crookman building is a potent reminder to the mob and other bio-Luddites that people have the right to seek happiness and exercise their freedom to modify their body. Also, the burning of the Crookman building resulted in a systematic termination of genetically engineered infants: “A dozen babies were burned to death” (111). This sort of “techno-infanticide” assumes that the creation of children should only adhere to universal natural laws that govern the implantation and childbirth processes. Otherwise, creating posthuman children violates such natural laws within the context of “designer children.” Consequently, the mob’s social reactions reinforce the central tenet of the “designer children” debate which is firmly grounded in theological and religious frameworks. The second strain of mistransthropy is the protection of the “sanctity” of white femininity as seen when the mob sought to protect “white womanhood in Cincinnati” (Schuyler 111). This traditional “heroic” endeavor is a commonplace of white patriarchy invention. Mistransthropy underlines the impulses to protect even if it is the protection of whiteness as a source of privilege and power. The hatred and disgust toward the black human in a white transhuman body is essential toward maintaining natural human and universal societal stability. The protection of “white womanhood in Cincinnati” represents the adequate protection and preservation of humanity from the dangerous and divisive transhumanist project, especially those individuals seeking to become immune to the ills of society through permanent changes in pigmentation. As Gregory Stock asks: “Will we accept humanity’s eventual transformation . . . or will we battle against it and try to protect those aspects of the human form and character that we see as intrinsic to our humanness?” (313). Stock’s question underlines the justificatory process of addressing all potential threats to “our humanness,” or in the immediate context, “our white femininity,” in order to maintain racial formation and provide a future for the next generation to prevent a shift to a post-racial world. CONCLUSION George S. Schuyler’s novel Black No More is a basic transhumanist outlook of the existential potential of human enhancement technologies. Schuyler



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insightfully recognizes that our transhuman desires are based on racial and social contextual messages. The risk of implementing our transhuman desires may not be acceptable from a moral or ethical point of view but it is understandable why someone wishes to move beyond the systematic marginalization, methodic devaluation, and their physical, or as the novel demonstrates, racial limitations. However, the transhuman desire might not necessarily be a good desire, especially if it attempts to shift racial composition. There are always gatekeepers positioned to protect and defend the status quo. Furthermore, one must ask, would human enhancements put an end to most inequalities and injustices? Would it foster diversity and promote nondiscriminatory values? An important, and existentially relevant, question to ask is does a posthumanity create a better humanity for all humans? WORKS CITED Agar, Nicholas. Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement. The MIT Press, 2010. Bostrom, Nick. “Why I Want to be Posthuman?” The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 21–23. Braxton, Donald M. “Does Transhumanism Face the Uncanny Valley Among the Religious?” in Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement, edited by Calvin Mercer and Tracy J. Throtten, Praeger, 2015, 331–250. Brey, Phillip. “Human Enhancement and Personal Identity,” New Waves of Philosophy of Technology, New Waves in Philosophy Series, edited by Jan Kyree Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, Soren Riis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 161–285. Chadwick, Ruth. “Therapy, Enhancement, and Improvement,” Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, edited by Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick. Springer, 2008, 21–28. Graham, Elaine. “‘Nietzsche Gets a Modem’: Transhumanism and the Technological Sublime.” Literature and Theology, vol. 16, no. 1, 2002, 61–25. Gray, Chris Hables. “Cyborgin the Posthuman: Participatory Evolution.” The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, edited by Kasper Lipper-Rasmussen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Jacob Wamberg, Aarhus University Press, 2012, 21–27. Haraway, Donna L. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Manifestly. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. [PDF]. Hauskeller, Michael. Mythologies and Transhumanism. First Edition. Exeter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hogle, Linda F. “Enhancement Technologies and the Body.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 34, 2005, 691–216.

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Juengst, Eric and Daniel Moseley. “Human Enhancement,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Web. plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2016/entries/enhancement/. Accessed October 2, 2018. Lippett-Rasmussen, Kasper. “Treating Symptoms Rather Than Causes? On ‘Enhancement’ and Social Oppression,” The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, edited by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Madds Rosendahl Thomsen, and Jacob Wamberg. Aarhus University Press, 2012, 81–202. McFee, Daniel, “The Risks of Transhumanism: Religious Engagements with the Precautionary and Proactionary Principles.” Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement, edited by Calvin Mercer and Tracy J. Throtten, Praeger, 2015, 211–228. More, Max. “Principles of Extropy” Version 3.11. Web. http://www.extropy.org/ principles.htm. Accessed October 22, 2018. Overall, Christine. “Life Enhancement Technologies: The Significance of Social Category Membership,” Human Enhancement, edited by Juilan Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, Oxford University Press, 2013, 321–240. Öztürk, Samed Yasin. “What Is Existential Identity and How Is It Formed?” [PDF]. Prisco, Guilio. “Transcendent Engineering,” The Transhumanist Reader, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 231–240. Sandberg, Anders. “Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want It, But Need It.” The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 56–64. Savulesc, Julian. “Enhancing Equality,” The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, edited by Kasper Lipper-Rasmussen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Jacob Wamberg. Aarhus University Press, 2012, 181–204. Schuyler, George S. Black No More. New York: Dover Publishing, 2011/1931. Sirius, R. U. “Was Michael Jackson a Transhumanist?” Web. http://hplusmagazine .com/2009/06/28/was-michael-jackson-transhumanist/Accessed October 26, 2018. Stock, Gregory, “The Battle for the Future,” The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 301–316. Thompson, Joel. “Transhumanism: How Far Is Too Far?” The New Bioethics, Vol. 23 No. 2, 2017, 1–28. Vita-More, Natasha. “Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism,” The Transhumanist Reader, edited by Max More and Natasha VitaMore. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 11–27. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2008.

Chapter Six

Transhumanism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Rae’Mia Escott

INTRODUCTION The Bluest Eye may appear as a text about the identity crisis of a young black girl on the surface, but the controversy lies within the psychological impact of white supremacy and the modifications people will undergo just to achieve whiteness. “A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 204). Pecola’s cognitive manipulation of her black eyes to blue indicates a hierarchy of race in Western culture and the belief that a person can enhance their appearance by latching on to the concept of whiteness. For Pecola Breedlove, whiteness is a representation of good and perfection in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Morrison situates the Dick and Jane reader at the introduction of the text to establish a color line and even the words start to merge together and close the gap between separation, but only as it pertains to whiteness. While the white community compounds as a group via the characterization of the words, they become whole and impenetrable. On the other hand, this novel demonstrates how the black community grows farther apart from one another. In this paper I will argue that because a color hierarchy of blackness exists, Pecola’s darkness marginalizes her as an unacceptable adolescent and she alters her undesirable skin by reconstructing herself to what is considered to be the standard of beauty in the opening lines of the novel, a little white girl. Nonetheless, the only change she requires is the genetic modification of her eyes, the text introduces the idea that if Pecola undergoes the smallest psychological belief that her eyes are blue then that will be enough to distract people from focusing on the color of her skin. This minute detail would, for Pecola, blur the colorism within her environment since she would exist on a spectrum—yes, 119

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she is dark skinned, but she also has light eyes, advancing this idea that the color line can be crossed when the appropriate resources are accessible and suitable alterations are achieved. Pecola is no Jane, and if Jane is the epitome of an ideal self within this novel, Pecola must improve herself by internalizing the traits that make up Jane—this being her whiteness. Pecola’s desire to genetically alter her eye color from black to blue places her closer to what she believes is the realm of acceptance; nonetheless, the need to reconstruct her placement on the color line influences her perception of normalcy. While Pecola’s optical modification occurs mentally toward the end of the novel, and her concept of who she is changes, Pecola will lose her sense of the standard of beauty at the moment of her birth when her mother labels her as ugly, which will be examined later in the chapter. In this novel blackness is closely related to ugliness and because Pecola is a dark-skinned girl, she is inevitably perceived to be unappealing mainly by her peers. Morrison uses Pecola’s rejection by her own race to position blond hair and blue eyes as more favorable than black hair and dark eyes. The one way she can access transhumanism is mentally; she is not considered human, therefore she physically cannot evolve. Whiteness has been constructed as a signifier of humanism, what it means to be human, Pecola’s desire to achieve freedom from her blackness strengthens her desire to evolve and undergo physical change and in this lies the danger. The loss of her identity makes her obsolete within her own community, as those around her attempt to ignore her existence or relevancy. Pecola is not the tragedy within this novel, but race and people’s understanding of race is the misfortune. Transhumanism should not be restricted to whiteness; however, in The Bluest Eye it is, which causes Pecola to seek solace outside her race. Whiteness equates with uman perfection, while Blackness is marked as a blemish on the color spectrum. Although there are some characters, young Black girls, who understand their worth, there are more Black people in this novel who devalue their blackness and underestimate the power of melanin. Transhumanism is the belief that the condition of the human body occurs in phases and that we, as humans, can continuously improve ourselves by eliminating factors that restrict us from physical or mental enhancements. This is the type of transformation Pecola undergoes; transhumanism for her is whiteness, and the embodied psychological alteration of her eyes is what improves her existence. Even if she is the only person able to recognize the manipulation her eye color, internally this is all it takes to move out of her current human form into a less restricted space. Throughout the novel, Pecola is constantly trying to evolve into something other than herself and encountering the belief the whiteness is a color more valued within race, she attempts to align herself with the desirable. Nevertheless, the end of the novel illustrates how this need to progress and change causes her



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to lose her sanity. Pecola mentally breaks herself because her race fabricates the false perception that their color, blackness and darkness, cannot achieve transhumanism. Although the title of the novel is discussed little within this essay it is important to note the significance of the title The Bluest Eye. Transhumanism can be described merely as the belief that people can change into a more desirable individual since humans are frequently progressing. The state that one is in now is not their final sate—nevertheless, this does not appear to be the case for the Black people within this novel. The smallest transformation is required to go beyond the original foundation that is Pecola; even a simple shift of one of her eyes will support her ascension into a different space. Max More writes, “The same powerful technologies that can transform human nature for the better could also be used in ways that, intentionally or unintentionally, cause direct damage and more subtly undermine our lives” (More, The Transhumanist Reader, 4). If race is technology, and whiteness is on the better end of this spectrum, then whiteness is what destroys Pecola. This is what weakens her and causes her to believe in the switch of her eyes, the unachievable conversion into the perfect body or into whiteness. OTHERNESS/COLORISM/ANTI-BLACKNESS Most of the exclusion Pecola experiences stems from the children she is around. Morrison depicts three types of blackness within the characters of Claudia, Junior, and Maureen—their appearances exist on a scale from brown, lighter brown, to mixed. Already there seems to be a learned belief of color rankings via the actions from the children in the Bluest Eye. Therefore, when discussing the idea of human advancement, the text introduces this idea that lighter skin, that which is closest to whiteness, is better. Through the rejection of her kind, the novel shapes Pecola to analyze how the color spectrum illustrates whiteness and blackness at opposite ends to represent supremacy and insufficiency, and the further a person is from whiteness the more niggardly they shift. Pecola is disliked for her outward appearance, and her color acts as a reflection of all black people. Because she is one of them, a member of their race, they are tethered to her in return. In the attempt to refuse to love Pecola, her community demonstrates their inability to love themselves. Reinforcing this idea of the race hierarchy, if whiteness or Caucasian traits are the peak of perfection in this novel, those things that are dark try to create another subordinate position to place themselves closer to the realm of desirability. This is where the distinction between the various types of black people come into the conversation. Morrison introduces

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the brown educated women who intellectually improve their existence. By attending colleges and gaining degrees, something that was not permissible for them to do before, they shape themselves to resemble a better version of the average Black person during their time. Morrison writes about the tall brown girls from southern states, “They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinements: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul.” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 83). These women, however, were the same who demonstrated a prejudice against their own race. Conjuring the mental belief that blacks who were not like them, evolved blacks were obnoxious and uncouth. The brown educated woman, Geraldine, is more toxic than the white oppressors. She calls attention to the weakness in the black race and instead of improving it, she cognitively and physically betters herself so that she may be removed from what is genetically her heritage. Geraldine would not let her little black boy play with the other black kids; instead he was urged to play with the white kids, those more advanced and cultivated like his family. Morrison states, White kids; his mother did not like him to play with niggers. She had explained to him the difference between colored people and niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud. He belonged to the former group: he wore white shirts and blue trousers; his hair was cut as close to his scalp as possible to avoid any suggestion of wool, the part was etched into his hair by the barber. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 87)

As the story continues readers understand that this little black boy, Junior, who was not a nigger according to his mother, was in fact a horrible person and possessed the characteristics of a psychopath. Nonetheless, his appearance overshadows his behavior, making his mistakes acceptable only through the lens of whiteness. In the article “Meditation and Artistry in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston,” Tim Peoples writes, “Morrison’s approach here is similar to her stated approach to sexuality—that is, she wishes to make the reader enter into both Pecola’s destruction (producing sympathy but not pity) and the community that isolates and destroys her (producing self-examination). To achieve such a result, no one—not even the characters most readers would automatically find despicable—can be dehumanized” (Peoples 183). Pecola is secluded in such a way that she is incapable of standing alone, because she starts to reject herself. Those surrounding her detach themselves from what she represents and forces her to embody her particular blackness unaccompanied. Yes, we



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are black, but we are not as black as Pecola. Everyone is set apart from Pecola and she is shaped into an object that needs alteration. Morrison writes a character that uses whiteness as the representation of completeness in Maureen Peel, a little mixed girl. Racial otherness is the most potent form of segregation Pecola endures. The novel continuously shows how Pecola is secluded because of the darkness of her skin, regardless of her other qualities. She is portrayed as this ugly little girl because she is darker. Therefore, Pecola desires the slightest change to the most noticeable part of her body, besides her skin, to move forward on the spectrum. Singling Pecola out based on her race is one of the most tangible ways to exclude her from race and protect the status of those who shun her as superior black people. An example of Pecola’s blackness separating her from others is when Maureen Peal argues with her and the MacTeer sisters, “Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, ‘I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 73). It soon becomes them versus her, leaving Pecola to fight by herself against a powerful black community and an even more powerful white society. Maureen becomes the case study for the reality of anti-blackness and how no culture is excluded from its disastrous belief. Maureen holds herself above the other black girls that she is around because she is lighter than them. In what Maureen says to Pecola is appealing to this idea that she closer to whiteness than the other black girls and moves her away from blackness. Genetically her lighter skin reflects her desire to be a member of the white race, she consumes the identity and the problem arises when we realize Maureen is still black. In denying her blackness she marginalizes the other girls who are not as light as she is and makes their color more of an issue than it should be. Those who are darker are at the bottom, they are the lowest of the races and this dehumanizes them in the aspect of making them disposable. In a world where little white girls with beautiful blue eyes are seen as attractive, Pecola can only wish to change races so that she too can feel what she has never experienced. She is unable to produce self-love because those around her have made her feel as if she is not worth loving at all. John Bishop says in “Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” that Maureen’s reference to Imitation of Life emphasizes how white cultural shapes the value of beauty for the black community. The description of Pecola throughout the text is that of her being “black” and “ugly” by many of her fellow characters. Bishop continues to say, “The irregularity is appropriate because it denotes Pecola’s failure to be like her cinematic double: she spends ‘long hours looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness that made her ignored and despised at school. . . .” (39). Maureen Peal’s mistake has a larger relevance as well, for in Mor-

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rison’s novels the act of (mis) naming signifies the community’s power to deny individual autonomy and to use people for its own ends. (Bishop 253)

The community essentially shames the very child that deserves their comfort and supports the most. Since everyone tells Pecola that her blackness is wrong, she too starts to believe it. Her environment does not provide her with a suitable place to thrive and develop. Everyone around her limits her growth in loving her own body and forces her to love the body of another. The novel states, The master had said, “You are ugly people.”They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took their ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his way. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 39)

The white master has the power and fosters this perception his black slaves who were insignificant individuals through his words. He calls them ugly, and they believe what he says is true. if the community would have addressed Pecola’s skin complex, then maybe she would have worn her color better and embraced the significance of her race and life. Instead, she turns against her blackness in search for acceptance in a different space. Pecola lacks confidence and understanding, which makes her life harder to endure. Unlike her younger friend Claudia who represents the type of person that Pecola should manifest. Readers are to read Pecola’s character with a sense of compassionate grief. Jerome Bump also explores the idea of “the thing” which he believes is judging by appearance. Bump says that race plays a large part in othering Pecola because it enables white readers to feel what it is like to be judged by racial hierarchies of skin color. In “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism,” Bump says, After all, many emotions, including shame, are generated by the “Thing,” by comparing someone with an ideal, making them seem less than, inferior, a mistake. Crawford observed that Morrison, Hooks, and Lorde “address an overlapping set of emotions in their work, most notably love, anger, shame, and guilt” and that “the conceptual and linguistic resources of the dominant culture logically construct shame as a primary aspect of black subjects’ rhetoric of emotion.” (2000, 14, 68) (Bump 153)

Race becomes such an issue for Pecola that she wishes to move out of the category of darkness by just embodying the smallest speck of lightness assigned to her; this will make her more valuable as a person since right now



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she is nonessential. However, someone like Claudia is not defined by her color, gender, or age. She represents resistance to immoral culture values and stands against social norms for a little black girl. For example, her destruction of white baby dolls shows that she wants to be excluded from the standard of race. More so, Claudia welcomes the rejection of the white race from merging with her blackness. Claudia narrates, I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismemberment of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. . . . What made people look at them and say, “Awwww,” but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 23)

Although, Claudia is questioning the reason why people do not look at her the same way they will look at a little white girl, her curiosity does not seem to stem from jealousy. It seems to come from a place of similar desire. The idea that white girls are beautiful should hold for black girls as well. Claudia does not desire white baby dolls, because she is aware that people mark white girls as a model of refinement just for their looks and nothing more. Claudia creates the idea that the same thing that makes a white girl pretty is the same thing that should make a black girl beautiful and that is their race. She acknowledges that there is a tension created among the two races and chooses to combat the rejection of her race by rejecting the white race. Claudia enhances herself in the destruction of these dolls, which in return cognitively liberates her existence. The race she personifies becomes enough for her and she situates as someone with importance. Claudia blackness means something because it first matters to her, this triggers the real evolving of herself in admitting the injustice placed upon the description of blackness. Since society is not what it used to be, certain views should no longer categorize people according to their genetic makeup. Black-skinned people are the “other,” and they fail to live up to the standards of white people. Daina Miniotaite states, “People generally view (any) race as a static biological fact when it (alongside gender and social class) should be treated as a changing historical, social, and cultural construction” (Miniotaite 51). This idea pairs well with the notion that humans are constantly evolving and advancing in the space of man-made and organic technology. In “The Problem of Racialised Identity in Toni Morrison’s Novel The Bluest Eye,” Miniotaite writes, The Black female characters of the novel Pauline Breedlove, Geraldine, Maureen Peal, and the main female protagonist, Pauline’s daughter Pecola, try to conform to the prevailing ideal of femininity which is, first of all, represented

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by physical beauty. Their attempts are grounded on the thing that they hate their blackness, and thus are filled with self-loathing. They lack healthy self-esteem and see themselves through the eyes of White people who idolize beauty. This is because as Taylor explains: “one of the cornerstones of the modern West had been the hierarchical valuation of human types along racial lines. . . . The most prominent type of racialised ranking represents blackness as a condition to be despised, and most tokens of this type extend this attitude to cover the physical features that are central to the description of black identity.” (Taylor, 1996, 16) (Miniotaite 53)

All of this supports the idea that this novel places an emphasis on the negativity of colorism, if blackness is on the far end of perfection then there will be people who are constantly trying to reach it. Those in the novel had to have someone whom they could place in the inferior position to make themselves feel better. Pecola is the victim. While those of the black community were not white, at least they were not as dark as the Breedloves. White was the standard for beauty, and the Breedloves did not try to find it within their skin pigmentation. Instead, they rejected their own identity, allowing Pecola to lose the little individuality she has left. She has to bear the ugliness of a society that chooses to let others define what is attractive, and she becomes the victim of self-hate. The black community that Pecola lives in would rather see her in a bad situation because of her blackness than any of them. Claudia sums up the character of Pecola and her sorrow towards the end of the novel, All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. . . . Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 205)

Because of society’s construction of appearance, the inability to change herself triggers the loss of control that Pecola has over her own individuality. She has no other choice but to wish to be what everyone made her believe was beautiful. Blackness was not accepted, and acceptance is what she wanted the most: to be a part of the whole. This quote emphasizes the dehumanization of Pecola, she lacks the ability to physically develop into a healthy black girl and must achieve enhancement through her own mind. WHITENESS AS TRANSHUMANISM Pecola’s desire for blue eyes reflects her need to be included, if not with those that look like her then with those that are different from her. The problem



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with Pecola’s color stems mostly from her peers, their proximity to whiteness makes them believe they are better than her. The light-skinned Junior and the mixed Maureen categorize Pecola’s blackness as something flawed or horrible. However, all of this is psychological, the hierarchy of race exists within their minds because they have been taught to believe one exists. Therefore, Pecola’s internal alteration of her eyes is not that far of a stretch when analyzing how the novel is constructed around the concept of individual beliefs. Whiteness and those things that are close to it is seen as progress to the people who believe they can or have achieve it, while blackness is shaped to represent failure and retrogression once they have removed themselves away from it. Nonetheless, Junior and Maureen’s perceived perception of their disconnection to their blackness is extremely hypothetical and psychologically formed. This type of shame and confusion festering within the community further damages Pecola and her peers. Their belief that whiteness will solve their problems is mocked in the text, because none of them reach a level of mental transcendence or perfection towards the end of the novel. The complicated belief about the ranking of color that the black children have in this novel is a cognitive weakness that they possess. Their minds are trained to think lesser of those who are not in close proximity to whiteness and devalue the elevation of the Black community. Many of the kids who believe lighter skin is better than darker skin demonstrate a form of corruption in the actions toward Pecola. The ability to cross the color line into whiteness has been fabricated by many people within the text as a means of privilege and this feeling of privilege lends them the false authority to critique those who are farther away from whiteness. Apart from race, color becomes more powerful when examining this text. Readers are able to recognize that the children seem to ignore the fact that they are black as long as they do not look like it. The characters with the lighter skin dangerously alienate themselves from their community as a way to illustrate progression, instead of looking at their own race and color as a means of success. Pecola is not the typical little girl that she wishes to be, which is why she yearns to have blue eyes, eyes familiarly seen in beautiful blonde-haired Caucasian girls. For Pecola, to reach this type of transformation will improve her life significantly and having light eyes becomes the answer to her racial problems. Max More writes in The Transhumanist Reader: Transhumanists regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect, and not as having any claim on our allegiance. Rather, it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway and we can learn to reshape our own nature in ways we deem desirable and valuable. By thoughtfully, carefully, and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves, we can become something no longer accurately described as human­­—we can become posthuman. (More 4)

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This is where we find Pecola existing at the end of the novel, believing she has reshaped her being into something more wanted/useful. The chemical adjustment of her eye color supports her move from the hold her blackness biologically holds over her. A black girl with the bluest eyes will distract people from noticing the darkness of her pigmentation and separate her from the concept of an average black person. More states, “Humanism tends to rely exclusively on educational and cultural refinement to improve human nature whereas transhumanists want to apply technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage” (More 4). She is imperfect because she is dark and maybe this small change can produce a larger impact by stripping her from the genetics of her heritage. Pecola imagines she has blue eyes to move beyond the trauma brought on by her race. This is dangerous considering the fact that her imagination further displaces her from the environment that already excludes her. Pecola is free to determine her own happiness, and this amount of freedom ultimately restricts her. For her freedom is equated to whiteness; white people are the ones who are free while the black people are restricted. Pecola uses blue eyes as a means for inclusion, labeling herself as a part of human perfection as a racial hybrid. If the black people will not accept her, then the white people will. This is a flawed way of thinking; neither the black community nor the white community embrace Pecola, leaving her to embrace herself. Anders Sandberg writes a chapter called “Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It” in the larger text of The Transhumanist Reader where he talks about achieving happiness through transforming ourselves. This particular quote from Sandberg is worth quoting at length to illustrate the connection between Pecola’s happiness and her mind. She thinks happiness and creates happiness in a physical form of mentally modifying her eyes. This is worth quoting at length, Sandberg states, From the right to freedom and the right to one’s own body follows that one has a right to modify one’s body. If my pursuit of happiness requires a bodily change—be it dying my hair or changing my sex—then my right to freedom requires a right to morphological freedom. . . . On a deeper level, our thinking is not separate from our bodies. Our freedom of thought implies a freedom of brain activity. If changes of brain structure (as they become available) are prevented, they prevent us from achieving mental states we might otherwise have been able to achieve. There is no dividing line between the body and our [out] mentality, both are part of ourselves. Morphological freedom is the right to modify oneself. (Anders Sandberg, The Transhumanist Reader, 57)

Pecola has the right to change into an ideal version of herself, even if that version counters what she genetically embodies. In denouncing her own race,



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she leads people to presume she has finally snapped, her reality becomes distorted, and her entire identity is misplaced. She credits her joy to possessing the features of the dominant population. While black people have to learn how to live in a white man’s country and thrive, Pecola assimilates herself with that which is more tolerable and beyond critique. What if it instead of viewing Pecola as losing her sanity, we talk about her gaining her freedom? In convincing herself that she is changed, she becomes the girl she should have been in the beginning of the novel, a free happy black girl. RACE AS TECHNOLOGY Throughout the novel, there are numerous incidents that separate Pecola from her community, and each one illustrates the harmfulness in the refusal of color. Not everyone lives outside of this transhumanist belief. Pecola must change herself to find some sort of acceptance. Nonetheless, the other black girls in the story are already shaping themselves to function beyond this perception that whiteness equals evolution. Claudia and Frieda MacTeer have trained their minds to embrace who they are as superiority. Claudia narrates about herself and her sister’s self-worth, “We felt comfortable in our skins . . . could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealously we understood and thought natural a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange new feeling for us” (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 74). Her community does not define Claudia, and she does not follow societal norms, she is a loner and does not mind standing by herself, which is a strong assertion to make at such a young age. Since Claudia resides outside of her community, their opinions and treatment do not affect her in the slightest. Our understanding of race varies from person to person; yet our environment shapes it, unconsciously. As a result, race is formed into a complicated discussion that may never conclude. Morrison uses race as a technology to categorize that a race hierarchy exists and the colorism that separates people is the very thing that keeps them divided. The darkness of Pecola’s skin marginalizes her from all races including her own. At a time where a community should come together and uplift a child, they instead deconstruct her existence to secure their racial position on the color scale further. There is limited power given to children and Pecola is no exception; yet, her environment blames her for all problems linked to blackness. Nonetheless, she is not the issue, but her community’s perspective of what is they deem acceptable is the problem. Those around her lack the understanding needed to assist in her creation of a progressive self. In the mind of Pecola, beauty or even acceptance within a community comes from how a

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person appears, and in her case, a girl has to have blue eyes similar to those that a white girl would possess. In Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye, Jennifer Gillan writes, “On one level, the novel is the personal story of a little girl’s identity crisis, symbolized by her cataclysmic desire for blue eyes, but, on another level, it is a story about a national identity crisis” (Gillan 285). The United States masks its racial problems by ignoring them, which makes it difficult for Pecola as a black girl being judged by her Black setting to thrive within her color. The colorism is shifted from the oppressors’ problem to an individual issue. At the end of the novel, we witness a larger issue. It appears Pecola becomes mentally depressed after facing the unfair reality her color places her in and decides to make this life better by assimilating into this ideal of perfect white Western culture. The cognitive damage is already done before Pecola reaches her breaking point of trying to achieve the white American dream, her hopes are shattered and she made a hopeless and helpless wanderer. Ann Cvetkovich writes in Depression: A Public Feeling about sadness as it differs between races and how that itself forms depression, “By linking it to the failure of the American dream, he [Cornel West] suggests that sadness comes when the belief that one should be happy or protected turns out to be wrong and when a privileged form of hopefulness that has so often been entirely foreclosed for black people is punctured.” (Anne Cvetkovich, Depression, 116). From the moment Pecola is encountered, as a little black girl she is a sad character; we meet her already in the hopeless statex. And as we watch her try to climb out of her misery we see both the white and black race drag her back down. Since blackness does the groundwork in forming the identity of whiteness in this novel, like the MacTeer sisters, Pecola neglects to recognize that she does not need whiteness to complete her—and towards the end of the novel her belief that she has achieved flawlessness via the gaining of imitation blue eyes misplaces her further. As long as Pecola is not able to tangibly evolve and improve herself, then other black people are able to justify and maintain their position within society. The concept of color and all of its meaning is assigned to Pecola and not the community as a whole—which is troublesome. Morrison subtly depicts that when this happens no one wins through their failure to nurture her. Blackness in The Bluest Eye is buried and hidden instead of integrating and confronting how whiteness is at work in the construction of blackness. In the action of trying to usurp equality, the notion of whiteness contaminates Pecola’s mind and monopolizes her thinking. Since humanism is defined in racial terms, it creates an inequality. Pecola tries her hardest to change her racial self to be included, but it does not work. Her blackness has segregated her to the point of no return. Anti-blackness is a serious problem in any so-



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ciety, but Morrison demonstrates how its existence in the Black community is far more detrimental. Pecola is at the end of the racial totem pole and is not able to move out of this space, because she has been placed in a subordinate position throughout her existence. She becomes prey when those in her community do not teach her how to love her blackness because they are perpetuating the problem. Her desire to be white does not hold any substance other than to be accepted by someone. Besides seeking love, she has no other reason to want to be a white girl or even have lighter eyes. Race can unconsciously make people hate themselves and not possess the knowledge as to why they despise who they are as a people, while color is a reliable tool that divides the public. Morrison establishes how deadly it can be when people use it to influence negativity. The result of her failure to transform into what society wants her to be is where we find Pecola at the end of the novel, outdoors and broken. The corruption of her color restricts an ascension into human idealism by the standard of whiteness and forces her to create this pseudo-reality where she is made whole. Claudia states, Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing out metaphysical condition. Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with—probably because it was abstract. (Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 17)

Colorism breaks Pecola down to her lowest point and makes her existence in her society appear irrelevant. The physical rejection that she endures immensely impacts the mental disruption she undergoes. In “Probing Racial Dilemmas in The Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology,” Zebialowicz and Palasinki write about how society has a lot to do with what is deemed beautiful and what is not, “Only with time does she, Claudia, recognize that the source of the unjust power disadvantaging blacks does not come from white girls as they are merely recipients of that power sustained by unfair hierarchy that is condoned by the rest of society” (Zebialowicz and Palasinti 224). Pecola is at a disadvantage by not being a white girl, and her mother neglects to protect her daughter’s identity or racial space. In establishing a ranking of color, Blacks must additionally separate those who are black and very black. Within this novel Pecola is destined to fail in the opinion of her community, but she does achieve the improvement she seeks from her perspective and therefore, is successful by her own standards. Pecola evolves beyond physical race and gains the privilege to live without restriction, since the only person in her world is herself. We also witness this in the friend she

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creates to keep her company and which assists in positioning her into a superior role. In this particular relationship, in her world, Pecola is as advanced as the human race can reach and she objectifies humanistic completeness. The lack of support to successful change into a practical individual causes disarray in Pecola’s life. Society’s notion of beauty and preference becomes unattainable to those of darker skin, which marginalizes Pecola from almost everyone. In the effort to transform into the standard of whiteness, her imagination consumes her identity—making her into someone that she is not. The Bluest Eye complicates the belief of many characters in the novel that whiteness is the ultimate end to perfection by depicting those who align with it in an imperfect light. The complexity of color is made a spectacle through the tragic downfall of a young black girl who was born into race and did not have control over which one it was. WORKS CITED Bishop, John. “Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Explicator 51.4 (1993): 252. Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature 37.2 (2010): 147. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Gillan, Jennifer. “Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye.” African American Review, no. 2, 2002, p. 283. Miniotaitė, Daina. “The Problem of Racialised Identity in Toni Morrison’s Novel The Bluest Eye.” Language in Different Contexts / Kalba Ir Kontekstai, vol. 6, no. 1, Part 1&2, Jan. 2014, p. 51. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Book, 1994. Print. More, Max, and Natasha Vita-More. The Transhumanist Reader. [Electronic Resource]: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Peoples, Tim. “Meditation and Artistry in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.” The Midwest Quarterly, no. 2, 2012, p. 177. Zebialowicz, Anna, and Marek Palasinski. “Probing Racial Dilemmas in The Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology.” Journal of African American Studies 14.2 (2010): 220–233.

Chapter Seven

Glossolalia Lucille Clifton’s Creative Technologies of Becoming Bettina Judd

Deep in Lucille Clifton’s archives are folders of handwritten notes from ghosts, scribbles of the unconscious, and transcripts of Ouija board conversations. In one note dated April 16, 1977, those known as “The Ones” tell her, “Good morning, we wish to say this to you before . . . we begin . . . Lucille, you are now the one who . . . will begin to see . . . we . . . hope that you will use these powers . . . wisely . . . ” (Clifton, Spirit Writing, 1977). The Ones appear regularly in the archive; sometimes they have names, sometimes these names are familiar. “The Ones,” also appear in Clifton’s published poetry as ghostly oracles, fueling much of her posthumously published collection, Voices. Whether muses or oracles, the presence of the Ones are demonstrative of Clifton’s spiritual and creative process. This process—an unfixed formula of automatic writing, past-life regression, Ouija board play and transcription, and hand-to-pen poetic craft was held sacred by Clifton. Her writing practice, skilled in its technical proficiency and economy of language, was also a testament to a spiritual subjectivity that negotiated what it meant to be born, “between starshine and clay.”1 In this chapter, I argue that automatic writing is an embodied technology that facilitated Clifton’s self-making. By analyzing a selection of her poems alongside corresponding automatic writing, readers can see how Clifton’s unique and potent poetic voice emerges with and through her spiritual practice. To analyze Clifton’s work is to take seriously her spiritual subjectivity— aspects of herself that include the sacred. By speaking with “The Ones,” Clifton tapped into crucial components of this spiritual self. In other words, she knew “who walked with” her—a form of self-knowing (Alexander 311). Her creative process was kinetic, spiritual, and intellectual—engaging spiritual practices with undeniable poetic craft. To understand this kinetic and spiritual 133

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writing practice is to open oneself to possibility beyond the effable—to place oneself relentlessly in the curious space of spiritual inquiry. Writing about automatic writing, the foundation of Clifton’s spiritual inquiry confounds empiricist practice. Was she speaking to ghosts? How could I know for sure, if one is to believe that ghosts exist at all? What do I do with what I learn from her practice? To maintain the critical space of spiritual inquiry, I end this chapter with a video project titled The Speaking in Tongues Experiment in which glossolalia is input as translatable data in Google’s translation program. That translated data is then interpreted to develop poetry in a familiar tongue and with more familiar meaning. My hope with this project is to demonstrate the use of poetic writing as an embodied and spiritual technology in process and practice that maintains meaningful spiritual and creative inquiry. GLOSSOLALIA AND AUTOMATIC WRITING AS TECHNOLOGIES OF BECOMING In the mid 1960s, Lucille Clifton was influenced by a resurgence of interest in spiritualism and the practice of automatic writing, Ouija board play as a means of communicating with the dead, and past-life regression. Such an interest knocked directly against her Baptist upbringing, from which she draws allusions and describes as her first encounters with poetics.2 Where spiritual practice in her childhood home was also the site of patriarchal silencing, the Clifton household could be a site of self-making. Yet, as Clifton continued to write, her aspirations as a poet also expanded. Her first book, Good Times, would be published by Random House in 1969 and she would continue to publish books consistently for the next four decades until her death in 2010. It is in the late 1970s, according to her own archival notes, that she inaugurated a consistent practice of spirit writing through automatic writing particularly. These pages dated from 1977 appear as two thick folders of notebook paper and scraps in her archive. Automatic writing has a documented history in early spiritualist movements and psychology. In Europe, it is described as early as the eighteenth century as a part of Franz Mesmer’s experiments with animal magnetism (Dearmont 9). It is picked up in early-twentieth century creative writing during the surrealist movement in the works of André Breton and Philippe Soupault.3 Schools of thought oscillated between the practice being one of dual consciousness or spiritual communication with the dead. By the heyday of hypnotist entertainers and mediums that emerged in the mid and late nineteenth century, automatic writing faded from scientific interest. However, as



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new age spirituality began to garner interest in the 1960s and 1970s, what was once a discredited practice in psychology and post-enlightenment spiritualism garnered more interest from spiritual seekers, with authors publishing automatic writings coauthored by the famous dead people with which they conversed. While Clifton developed manuscripts from her conversations with the dead, the source of these conversations are relegated to the portion of her spirit writing that developed from Ouija board play (Clifton, “Lives/Visits/ Illuminations,” Manuscript and Typescript Outline). Her automatic writing however, appears to involve communication with the dead who do not identify themselves with the earthly famous. A consistent spirit who comes to her in both the Ouija board play and her automatic writing is her mother Thelma Sayles, who calls herself Greta in the beyond. Thelma/Greta appear repeatedly in Clifton’s published volumes of poetry as a muse and guide. While her spirit writing appears generative of her creative practice, it is the automatic writing that remains as generative as it is mysterious in content because it also includes text and shapes that cannot be read, but textual clues draw links between her published poetry and these scribblings. It is this matter of difficult decipherability where I argue that the writing practice is one of selfmaking—particularly the aspects of Clifton’s self that cannot be constrained by thought as we know it. In the evidence of automatic writing, we are faced with Clifton’s experience that readers cannot know, could never know, but she experienced and wrote from and about. The undecipherability of Black women’s writings has been discussed in detail by Black feminist literary critics. Barbara Smith’s canonical “Toward a Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” notes that the particular subject position of being Black and woman contributed to a vacuous silence in critiques of Black women’s work (Smith 21). In her analysis of Black women’s writings, Mae Henderson describes speaking in tongues as the mode through which Black women write to and through multiple discourses of racism, sexism, and classism, simultaneously. For Henderson, glossolalia has two connotations: one which is “the particular, private, closed, and privileged communication between the congregant and the divinity,” as well as “the ability to speak in diverse known languages” (Henderson 324). Speaking to and outside of oneself allows Black women writers not only to know and describe the contours of her experience, but to speak to others as well. Glossolalia is the language of the unknown only because it is always known by others. By its inherent divine and mystical source, glossolalia is the language of the inner self. What I describe here as an “embodied technology” are the processes by which writing and automatic writing in particular, are ways of knowing the inner-self produced through the body. If, as Martin Heidegger suggests, technology is, “a means to an end,” spirit writing functions as that means but

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with particular emphasis on the body’s ability to perceive spirit and translate such an experience through one’s limbs (Heidegger 5). As a means to an end, embodied technology makes possible the transfer of knowledge through the muscular system before cognition. Both processes, speaking in tongues and automatic writing, gesture toward ways of knowing processed through otherwise languages—modes of communication that defy systems of knowing in which the logics of spirits might be inexplicable. Deciphering Clifton’s automatic writing is an exercise in visual as well as textual analysis. The shape of the writing changes and provides information about the experience of its production. Some writings appear rounder than others. Some appear as a series of loops. Other writing looks familiar and clear. One can observe evidence that Clifton, or someone else, attempted to decipher the writing after the trance-like state in which it was written by placing dashes between more legible words, sometimes with a different writing utensil than the original script. Some spirit writing appears as mountains or rivers, and other automatic writing presents as sketches of faces or balls of string. The erratic visuality of automatic writing entreats one into reading it as a visual piece cum text. The shape of loops of one series of automatic writing signifies for the reader a different feeling than the jagged-edged lines from another. The cogent mostly legible writing reads and feels quite different than the abstract impressions. We know from her interviews that she practiced automatic writing in a spiritual trance (Hull 58). The experience of that trance is evidenced in the shape of what moved her hand across the page. Automatic writing in the archive is what is left over, the residue, of spiritual experience. The experience of reading it, too, is physical. One is forced to move in the direction of Clifton’s hand, following its orders across the page. To analyze Clifton’s spirit writing is to do more than reading. It is to know the processes by which spirit writing occurs. Automatic writing is the result of mechanical functions that take place through muscle, pen and paper. All of these physical apparatuses are galvanized into movement by the spirit. One tarries for words by putting themselves in the way of flow. The flow of automatic writing allows for the crossing of borders between the natural world and the spirit world. A crossing in which Clifton openly engages, attuned to the metaphysical and the diasporic, and crafted her own subjectivity and spiritual knowledge. She was a Dahomey woman who saw ghosts and spoke to the dead. She was the daughter of Thelma, who continued to talk to her after her death as her everlasting spirit, Greta. Clifton began spirit writing by what she called, “listening/hearing.” According to Hull, “the idea came to her that she should try writing. When she did, she received automatic messages faster” (Hull 58). This prolific practice resulted in pages and



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pages of automatic writing—the extent of which forced Clifton to organize the notes herself, with dates and times for each crossing. There is another curious aspect of automatic writing practiced at the hand of a Black woman. As I stated above, early psychologists thought of automatic writing as evidence of dual consciousness—that the person who was compelled to write automatically was writing, not through their waking consciousness, but a consciousness broken and attempting to emerge. Nearly one hundred years after these early discussions of automatic writing as dual consciousness, W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness appears in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois invokes double consciousness to describe the spiritual and psychic bifurcations, and ultimately, the “spiritual strivings” of Black folks striving for human recognition. Described as a, “second-sight” that forces one to “see himself through the revelation of the other world,” double consciousness is posited as a social, psychological, and spiritual survival mechanism (DuBois 3). Returning to the practice of automatic writing as one that signals dual consciousness, the practice, in the repertoire of a Black woman writer becomes a metaphor for the bifurcation and ultimately, the indecipherability of Black life. The archival leftovers mapping how Black life persists otherwise, and how Black folks create out of anti-Black conditions. The very concept of the human that underlie spiritual striving is mired in racist foundations of the enlightenment era by which there must be humanlike-but-not-quite-humans on which to base the concept of the modern human. Such constructions mandate a form of not-quite-humans that divide Homo sapiens into racialized subspecies. It not just the concept of man but knowledge itself that produces such taxonomies (Wynter 21). In such a system, the Cartesian forms of body versus mind, that shape humanist discourse as we know them would be obsolete or at the very least, challenged. For racialized subjects, humanism and all of its prefixes must contend with these racist origins of the concept of human. As Hortense Spillers notes, to live within the fleshy, un-embodied fact of Blackness is to be outside of the free human ideal (Spillers 67). If, as Katherine Hayles notes in her influential text on posthumanism, “a human being is first of all embodied being,” the limits of what it means to be human have already situated Black folks in an otherwise, perhaps post, space (Hayles 284). As an embodied technology Lucille Clifton’s automatic writing is made possible through her hand, and the use of not only her body, but bodymind4—the connectivity between her body, mind, and spirit. This embodied technology allows for Clifton to practice forms of humanness that are beyond concepts of the human assumed in its initial, enlightenment age formations. On the page, Clifton comes into being as a spirit, as a person on this earthly plane, as a philosopher, as a medium, and all through technologies permitted

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by the movement of her body in spiritual ecstasy. It is my contention that Lucille Clifton’s creative practice is emblematic of the processes by which Black women have engaged in human praxis that challenge established notions of the human. These practices involved a recovery of the Black body and thus the foundations of what it means to be human. Automatic writing is a technology that produces effects that re-embody and inspirit, whereas humanism’s technologies may otherwise enflesh. Glossolalia as a spiritual practice is both metaphoric and literal in my invocation here, as speaking in tongues is practiced as a peculiar spiritual channeling of unknown and unknowable language and as a descriptor of Black women’s writing in which inner dialogue, and the dialogues that must speak to and with the outside world are spoken/written at once. As a Black woman writer who always spoke of herself in such a way, Clifton not only wrote out of the complexity of her Black woman experience, but through and to the discourses that would render her less than human. According to Henderson, “It is the complexity of these simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous social and discursive domains out of which black women write and construct themselves . . . that enables black women writers authoritatively to speak to and engage both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse” (Henderson 62). That ability, described as “speaking in tongues,” describes the tireless work of writing oneself into being. Clifton sought out an otherwise language and creative practice beyond such logics that inhabited embodied, spiritual, and intellectual realms. For what else would it mean that a Black woman writer, a round-bodied mother and homemaker who dropped out of college, could channel spirits from her kitchen table and write of the human experience in such a potent manner as she does in her poetry? BEING OF USE: POETRY THAT LEADS US TO OTHERWISE Clifton’s numerous volumes of poetry give us clues to the self-making afforded by her robust practice of automatic writing. The folders titled “The Message from the Ones” in her archive, can be directly linked to her series of the same name found in the 2004 collection Mercy. The attempts to number and title some pages may be from her own revisits to this part of her archive. Through her connection to spirit beings that have no body, Clifton’s creative practice transcends the natural terrain of human experience. The collection Next features poems in the voices of those she spoke within her spirit writing. In “the message of thelma sayles,” one can witness her mother’s voice urging her to write through her spiritual gifts—and through the ecstatic. The poem reads, “I woke from ecstasy to ask/ what blood is this?



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am i the bride of Christ? / my bitten tongue was swollen for three days,” and continues, “turn the blood that clots on your tongue/ into poems. poems” (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 296). In these lines, we can read how Clifton’s poetry enacts a form of womanist midrash.5 She retells the resurrection of Christ through her mother’s many lives and deaths: her life on earth as her mother, her death as an artist, her death on the earthly plane, and her resurrection through her arrival into eternity, and once again as an artist through the voice of her poet daughter. Thelma Sayles is remade as poet through her Lucille Clifton, the poet—a becoming only made possible by Clifton’s spiritual practice. In her 2004 collection titled Mercy, Clifton poeticizes her practice of speaking with the Ones. The section “the message from the Ones (received in the late 70s)” draws an explicit connection between her spiritualist practice and her creative practice. The poetic voice meditates on speaking with “ones/who have not rolled/selves into bone and flesh,”—those who have not decided to visit the earth in human or any other animal form (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 614). These poems explicitly, point to a creative and spiritual practice and an otherwise articulation of a spiritual way being and knowing. The poems evidenced in Mercy are but a piece of this articulation—a tongue that can be easily interpreted by some and not others. Automatic writing, however, is another tongue—often undecipherable—even unto Clifton. What remains is the fact of her doing, and being with the Ones, doing what the Ones tell her to do—being “useful” for their wisdom. In this sense, these Ones invoke a possibility of possession, as their knowledge is transferred from their spirit status to Clifton’s earthly hand for a purpose beyond her. The poems in the section “beginning of message,” illustrates this explicitly. Here I read it alongside the automatic writing that begins this chapter. What appears as commands in the archive, appears as an introductory description in poetry. We are removed from the intimacy in the second person of the archival record and moved into the first. The Ones describe themselves, because it is the reader who has yet to be introduced to them. The voice of the Ones begins by entreating, “come to here/ every morning” a “here” of a place beyond geographical location, a “here” of presence, and also urgency as the spirit writing describes above (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 614). The one writing in spirit is to practice presence every morning, and at the time of its writing, that means, “now.” The use of terms that describe time and space beyond clock time and yet an urgent, emergent, and present spiritual time (Alexander 309). In this time that is now and also ritualized in, “each morning,” the Ones will bring, “logos”—language to an otherwise mysterious experience. Clifton’s

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use of the term logos also signifies the theological implications of reason and logic in response to the sublime. In the context of the poem, it functions as a repetition of the use of the “word” to bring the heft of the translation of words into greater meaning. The practice of coming to the table to be spoken through is the message itself. “Logos/with us,” may signify the biblical concept of “God with us”—the translation of the word Emmanuel which is an eponym for Christ (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 614). The Word, divine and yet, existing in the midst of mortals. Poetry is what is left of that meeting of the divine and mortal. The poem continues to entreat: “meet us here/ each morning,” a refrain which recurs in the archive and answers the question “why me?” which appears in the automatic writing dated April 16, 1977, with, “why not.” This answer to which in the archive appears to be, “you have shown yourself to be . . . one who understands their use” (Clifton, Spirit Writing, 1977). In her poetic persona, to be of use is to act on one’s purpose. The theme of being “of use” appears in Clifton’s poetry and interviews as key to a moral center for her poetry. In what might have been her final interview, she disavows poetic authority (Clifton, “Her Last Interview, with Chard DeNiord,” 13). And in conversation with Michael Glaser in a 2000 interview, she speaks of herself as a humble poet whose, “inclination is to try to help” (Clifton, “I’d like Not to Be a Stranger in the World: A Conversation/Interview with Lucille Clifton” 328). She repeats this sentiment in the series “the message from the ones” with, “you/are not chosen//any stone/can sing/we come/ to languages/ not lives//your tongue/is useful/not unique” (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 613). Clifton’s idea of herself as an ordinary woman, (which appears as the title to one of her earliest collections of poetry and memoir) encompasses the possibility of extraordinariness (Clifton, “Her Last Interview, with Chard DeNiord,” 7). To be of use, as a channel, is also to find meaning in one’s existence both ordinary and out of this world. What would it mean to understand Lucille Clifton’s poetry, or spiritual practice, or automatic writing? Could I assume that I could come to Clifton’s archive and make definitive connections between the remnants of her spiritual experience and what she has offered us in poetry? I’m dubious. I will have missed something due to my limitations of space, time, and habitus. However, I do have some tools and can receive some of the messages from Lucille, whether it is through explication, attempts to read and transcribe her automatic writing on my own. But I am overwhelmed. The moment of reading Clifton’s poems I find myself in a position where explication, translation, and uncertainty meet. Black women’s spirituality, ritual, knowing who follows you, are practices of the human that are beyond natural man, that challenge the idea of the sepa-



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ration of mind, from body and spirit, and further, incorporate Black flesh into a multifaceted whole. If, in fact, “transhumanism must take off where religion stops,” Clifton’s creative and spiritual practices disturb the notions of what can be considered human, and do so outside of logics of Western religious thought (Manoj 9). Automatic writing understood as an embodied technology provides the techne for processes of humans otherwise. AN EXPERIMENT IN SPEAKING IN TONGUES It is this experience of ineptitude—of feeling overwhelmed by my inability to comprehend—that interests me as a starting point for inquiry into creative process and literary analysis. What might it mean to play in this space of knowing and unknowing? I do not imagine that this play would be much different from the experience of speaking to the dead, transcribing what was there, and then attributing that poem to the spirit that was Langston Hughes. So much for dead authors and their silence. Here, I attempt to make sense of spirit writing—to place it in conversation with her poetry, and yet, I come up missing something—something like the experience itself. To approximate the experience of spiritual inquiry, I embark on an experiment that incorporated the practice of speaking in tongues that were both forbidden and revered in my Baptist and Pentecostal upbringing. Below is a poem that I wrote in reflection of this experience. It was initially written to invoke the ecstatic moment of mourning on the mourning bench as a part of a performance piece on spiritual transformation that I developed and performed in 2009.6 THE MOURNING BENCH wait for a breakthrough in stillness. feel any stray air seeping through drafty windows any stick fan fluttering, stopping, fluttering again stomach’s hunger groaning wish that it be spirit hear the smallest things above preacher’s cadenced prayer loud whispers invoking Christ above tambourine and gospel growl above the soft splashing of this poem wading in the other side of the creek, remembering a memory never had

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this poem, dressed in white, mourns for the lost poet who cannot, even now impart the workings of the bottomless hush hinting havoc the voice whispering for death the impenetrable skin of her ghost this is a bench for mourning skin for perishing willfully, letting blood preparing both hands for acquisition prepare this bench in the heart eat with closed fists repeat broken covenants hear shouts muffled under tongue containment, amenorrhea prepare sacrament drink of me mourn the dead or do not inhale what is: whiskey on a deacon’s breath humid summer air cowardice, resistance godly intention exhale deep as if digging a well:   first nothing    then breaking earth   sputtering water   overwhelming flood think consecration, covenant, last days think nothing be exaltation, ether, exhaustion climax in a sacred place be saved.

The mourning bench is a place and a practice. Home to both Baptist and Pentecostal churches, the mourning bench is a site of profound and necessary change. It was first explained to me by my mother, and then by my grandmother and grandfather. It separated the saved from the unsaved, members



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of the Body of Christ from those who are outside of the fold. To become a member of the church, one would have to sit on a literal bench where they would wait, or “tarry” for the Spirit to come over them. Elders, deacons, mothers, and other members of the church would fervently pray and sing songs to invite the Holy Spirit into the mourner. The idea is that one mourns her sins. She lays down the darkness to choose eternal life with Christ. Mourning is the practice into salvation. The mourning bench, when set in the mouths of some, sounds oddly enough like moanin’ (as in groaning) which sounds a lot like mornin’ (as in the beginning of a new day), and this is not a coincidence. The multiplicity of meaning for the mournin’/moanin’/mornin’ bench reveals the experience of the place and practice. At the bench one will mourn her sins, moan, and wake into the dawn of a new morning. When I was told about this practice, it frightened me. The idea of being forced to have this intimate, life-changing experience in the presence and at the behest of the community around me, and for that experience to be taken as a measure of my goodness and membership, shook me to my core. “What if the spirit didn’t decide to take over me?” I thought. What then? Was I considered less saved? My mother had an answer for me. She disclosed that when she sat on the bench for the first time, she didn’t have the ecstatic experience expected of her. The church thought that since she was just a little girl, she wasn’t ready. She later joined a church in a city up North that didn’t have this practice. The sigh of disappointment in her voice when she told me this made it clear that this mystical practice—even though it is no longer performed in that old church in Warrenton, North Carolina (where my people are from) is still highly regarded, even if considered too “old-timey” for the new sophisticated church crowd. It was a rite of passage, and, in that sense, I was envious that I’d never experienced it. I wanted to be transformed and to see myself anew through the altered state of ecstatic worship. The lure of that transformation is the promise that it would take me into the unknown. An irreducible unknown that refuses direct translation, leaving only the record and reflection that it was. What day would be the next, I could not know. But the practice, the spiritual work would be. To press toward meaning could be a noble pursuit but it would never truly uncover the experience of tongues. As Ashon Crawley notes of glossolalia, “Glossolalia is capacious and expansive, open and irreducible, returning to originary grounds to find other possibilities, another way” (Crawley 242). To explore this other way is to choose to occupy the space of unknowing—the uncomfortable ineptitude of cognition. The Speaking in Tongues experiment that follows, tracks attempts to make this unknowing knowable.

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In this experiment, I speak in tongues, transcribe it, and see if Google’s translation software could decipher meaning. It did not, and in some sense, it did. It deciphered a meaning in my revisiting its translations. More meaning than I could cognate with the text of the tongues itself. The gift of tongues is not about meaning, but experience. I cannot translate the totality of that experience for you. But through the practice of poetry and the technology of video, I can offer its remnants in the video at: http://dr.bettinajudd.com/s-i-t -experiment and in stills from this video below. The experiment is set up in four phases: edification, interpretation, manifestation, and redux. Each phase in conversation with biblical text written by the Apostle Paul on the gift of tongues found in I Corinthians 14. In this passage, Apostle Paul asks for the young church at Corinth to strive toward speaking in tongues but to have a means of interpretation for the purpose of prophesy (NRSV Bible I Corinthians 14:3). Speaking in tongues alone was considered vanity—self-edification (NRSV Bible I Corinthians 14:4). In the experiment, edification is the stage of engaging in and transcribing tongues. I call it this because this stage has no interpretation and because, as an experiment, I am open to the possibility of there being little or no decipherable meaning or prophesy. Interpretation is the phase in which the transcribed text is placed into Google’s translation software found at http://translate.google .com. Although the software automatically detected Swahili, the experiment

Figure 7.1.   Still from “S.i.T. Experiment.” Author’s figure.

Figure 8.2.   Still from “S.i.T. Experiment.” Author’s figure.

Figure 8.3.   Still from “S.i.T. Experiment.” Author’s figure.

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goes on to request translations through more of the languages available, including Catalan, Basque, and Azerbaijani. There was no preference other than alphabetical order in translating the text. Manifestation is the phase in which each input returned in English reveals some familiar words and I compose poems from what was found. Redux is the process by which I repeat this process for each subsequent language. A log tracks the experience, the circumstance behind each phase. The feeling in the room, medications are taken, and meals are eaten. It also tracks the feeling of the creative practice and its interpretation. The goal of the experiment is to produce a poem from tongues unknown and unknowable. The manifestation stage of the experiment reveals that while phrases emerge, the meaning remains elusive. The return from Swahili results in the following poem, “Swahili Returned—Manifest,” where the words and phrases, “inspiration,” and “not tomorrow is not it nonsense” come to translate nothing of the experience, but gestures toward its having happened. § . . . Inspiration   is thrust     not tomorrow all else is nonsense come to ‘I am’   or don’t any interest is your sign   just you  in you       when you do not       then . . . §

The poems are repeated failures to comprehend the translated text. The technology of Google Translate continues to plug away, to create meaning, but always misses the mark. “Ishobicallobodesha . . .” withholds definitive meaning in the experiential aspect of uttering tongues. I return to the text to make meaning and come back, with something other—and it will have to do. This outcome confirms Crawley’s assertion that tongues in what he calls the Blackpentecostal tradition, are glossolalia rather than xenolalia (Crawley



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242). Glossolalia is a form of knowledge that refuses comprehension, and is whole unto itself. The contents of tongues are already presented in the fact of their existence, whole and beyond the limits of language and our limited ways of understanding. . . . INSPIRATION . . . IS THRUST, OR STAY CURIOUS The video experiment lasts nearly twelve minutes. I ended the project here, not out of completion, but time constraints and exhaustion. If the Speaking in Tongues Experiment taught me anything, it is that this process of deciphering and attempting to decipher through multiple technologies and multiple languages would result in near endless possibilities. Technology and time are the only limitations: the fleeting moment in which the initial recording and transcription occurred, time taken to develop the poems themselves, logging of the experience, and the animation of the entire process into a short film. The project is punctuated by a series of ellipses, the punctuation of open and unknown endings. Lucille Clifton’s automatic writing, which is documented by the year 1977 is also punctuated with such ellipses, constraints of time, and never-ending possibilities. While the finite but large stack of papers speaks to the robust nature of her practice, it is curious that the archive doesn’t reflect a practice beyond the 1970s. Nor do the limits of time and space in the archive fully represent the infinite experience of Clifton’s spiritual engagement as it existed through an embodied self here on earth and now, after her death, in the beyond. It might be telling that none of Lucille Clifton’s poems translate the content of automatic writing itself but announce the possibilities of speaking to the Ones. The poems are a pronouncement of her practice and spiritual being rather than translations of the writings. Perhaps that is all that can be understood with the limits of our language. Our faulty, incompetent language is unable to write ourselves whole. The faultiness of language and the limits of time on our lives and work are mortal constraints that may be surpassed by a self or selves that are engaged through spiritual practice, knowing who follows you, and here, through the embodied technology of automatic writing. Spirit engaged through Clifton’s automatic writing never ended as her writing and spirit are still with us, continuing to ask us to, “come celebrate” with her what she has made into a, “kind of life” (Clifton, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, 427). Spirit stretches into eternity, and we on Earth are offered the opportunity to be infinitely curious to understand its meaning—trying tirelessly to fashion ourselves whole.

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NOTES 1.  This line is from Clifton’s oft-cited poem that highlights the importance of her self-making that begins with the line, “won’t you celebrate with me.” 2.  In conversation with Quincy Troupe, Lucille Clifton refers to her early influences as “good preaching.” 3.  Notably, their co-authored surrealist tome, The Magnetic Fields. 4.  Sami Schalk theorizes the concept of bodyminds as a way of being and knowing that disrupts the Cartesian body/mind split, and in Black women’s speculative fiction, imagines new possibilities for being that are inclusive of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability in Bodyminds Reimagined. 5.  Here, I use the term womanist midrash as it is used by Wil Gafney in her conceptualization of Black women who don’t, “hesitate to talk back to the Bible or its God.” 6.  This performance was documented in the art book Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea. An early version of this poem was published in the book.

WORKS CITED Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing : Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press, 2005. Clifton, Lucille. “Her Last Interview, with Chard DeNiord.” American Poetry Review, vol. 39, no. 3, June 2010, pp. 5–13. ———. “I’d like Not to Be a Stranger in the World: A Conversation/Interview with Lucille Clifton.” Antioch Review, vol. 58, no. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 310–28. ———. “Lives/Visits/Illuminations,” Manuscript and Typescript Outline. 19?? Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. ———. Spirit Writing, 1977. 1977. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. ———. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010. First edition., BOA Editions, 2012. Crawley, Ashon T. Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Fordham UP, 2016. Dearmont, Diane. Automatic Writing: A History from Mesmer to Breton. University of Washington, 2004. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. A. C. McClurg & Company, 1903. Gafney, Wil. “A Womanist Midrash of Delilah:: Don’t Hate the Playa Hate the Game.” Womanist Interpretations of the Bible, edited by Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace, Society of Biblical Literature, 2016, pp. 49–72. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.



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Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt, Garland Publishing, 1977. Henderson, Mae. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialects, Dialogics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing, 1 edition, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 59–75. Hull, Gloria T. Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women. Inner Traditions, 2001. Lucille Clifton. Los Angeles, CA : Lannan Foundation, 1996. Judd, Bettina. “The Mourning Bench.” Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea, edited by Natasha Marin, Blurb, Incorporated, 2009. Manoj, V. R. “Spiritual Transcendence in Transhumanism.” Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, pp. 36–44. NRSV Bible With the Apocrypha. HarperOne, 2011. Schalk, Samantha Dawn. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press, 2018. Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The Radical Teacher, no. 7, 1978, pp. 20–27. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81. Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2, vol. 12/13, 1984, pp. 19–70.

Chapter Eight

Soul in the Shell1 Steven Barnes’s Aubry Knight Trilogy, Black Cyborgs, and Cyberpunk Investigations of Technological Black Bodies Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV INTRODUCTION In William Gibson’s 1981 short story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” he contributes to a blueprint for the cyberpunk literary movement’s self-aware critique of what he and other writers perceived as the staid and sanitized technophilic futurisms of the 1930s and 1940s. A “devastating refutation of ‘scientifiction’ in its guise as narrow technolatry” in the words of fellow cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling, Gibson’s story has its protagonist haunted by images of such a future-that-never-was (Sterling, Burning Chrome, xii). These images that take visual and ideological cues from the titular continuum of thought of Hugo Gernsback as one of the preeminent publishers of SF (Science Fiction) during the early part of the twentieth century. Idiosyncratic (if understated) of such early science fictions was the staging of their respective futurescapes within social paradigms that were, as Gibson highlights for us, uniformly and overwhelmingly white (Gibson, Burning Chrome, 34). In his own fiction, informed as it was by the New Wave of SF that crested in the 1960s with writers like Harlan Ellison (and of course, Samuel Delany), Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and cyberpunks like them wanted to explore a futuristic imagination that could ask “messy” and intrinsically politicized questions (Sterling, Mirrorshades, viii). Across the novels and considerable swaths of his short fiction, Gibson imagines multicultural urban sprawls where questions of identity and autonomy suffuse pessimisms of ubiquitous commodification, ecological blight, and a sense of seediness altogether out of alignment with Gernsback’s sensibility of salvation through technology. Indeed, for Gibson, it is the very technology that facilitates privation, domination, and alienation. 151

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Herein lies the rub, though: While cyberpunk writers like Gibson were exhorting the discontent that visions of a techno-ambivalent SF futurescape represented, there remained the preoccupation with presenting “street-level” science fiction with the accoutrement of ethnic diversity.2 Problematics, as one imagines, abound with this kind of approach, not least amongst them the specter of “techno-Orientalism,” which paints Gibson’s “Chiba City Blues” of a fetishistically inscrutable Japanese folks in a rather questionable light (Gibson, Neuromancer, 1; Tran 139). And it warrants acknowledging that while his seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer does indeed include visions of the future were diverse, imagining space-faring Caribbean Rastafarians,3 hyper-advanced Japanese, and even sentient entities of artificial intelligence which challenge the very arbitrary boundaries of what constitutes humanity itself, 1980s-era cyberpunk protagonists are, in the main, as comparably as white as those in the Gernsback texts they exist in opposition to. It is into this discussion of cyberpunk, however, that I wish to propose the inclusion of a reading of Steven Barnes’s Aubry Knight novels: Streetlethal (1983), Gorgon Child (1989), and Firedance (1994). A Black speculative fiction author beginning a solo writing career4 during this dynamic decade, Barnes’s work in these novels runs both chronologically and thematically parallel to the cyberpunk revolution’s upheaval within the landscape of SF. The Aubry Knight trilogy took the hallmarks of a pulpy futuristic adventure in a gritty world of violence, drugs, and semiotic ghosts, and infused them with a racialized awareness within conceptions of transhumanist imagination that was not evident to the same degree elsewhere in the cyberpunk canon. Readings of Blackness in relation to Gibson and Sterling’s sort of cyberpunk are not unheard of, as Thomas Foster’s 2005 The Souls of Cyberfolk attempts to address the way that race might be explored through the conventions of the movement. But, as Sherryl Vint’s critique of his work points out, his readings of cybernetically enhanced Blackness are localized primarily through an analysis of the Marvel Comics limited-run series Deathlok, and notably do not cover Barnes’s novels (Vint, “Funk Not Punk,” 310). While Foster’s text certainly offers meaningful methodological aid toward critically assessing the implications of what cyberpunk’s take on posthumanism can mean for Black folk—especially relative to the stated problematics of passing, assimilation, and blackface minstrelsy—it is my hope that my reading of Barnes’s trilogy will push the conceptual envelope by engaging with more and different concerns facing his idiosyncratic approaches to Black cyborgs as a significant element within the cyberpunk movement (Foster 143). In the following explorations of Barnes’s trilogy, I approach the cyborg as a metaphor of boundary-effacing fusion seen in its existence as a hybrid cybernetic organism. Foundationally, relative to cyborgs’ manifestation in



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cyberpunk fiction, such hybrid figures bespeak a fascination with the ways that technology “invades” the body and mind (Sterling. “Preface,” Mirrorshades, xi). Gorgon Child and Firedance feature various cyborg characters who are representative of the digital Cartesianism that allows the human mind access to the realm of what Gibson describes as the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace’s digital simulacrum (Gibson, Neuromancer, 5). In such cases, the cyborgs are in no small part defined by their ability to “jack into” cyberspace by physically connecting organic brains to computational technology. However, in contrast to other works of cyberpunk, Barnes’s novels largely forgo theorizing “the Net” as a means of mind-escaping-body (though not avoiding this convention in toto). Instead of having Aubry explore a version of (post)cyberpunk hallmarks like Gibson’s matrix, Neal Stephenson’s “metaverse,” or Ernest Cline’s “OASIS,” Streetlethal, Gorgon Child, and Firedance lean more heavily upon the trans- and posthumanist implications of exploring a narrative of just what exactly it means to live on the boundary of flesh and technology within a male body in an otherwise comparable dystopian futurescape. As such, Barnes’s trilogy suggests a kind of legibility through the theoretical faming of posthumanism, and more specifically, what Kristen Lillvis describes as “posthuman Blackness.” His novels identify a kind of liminality that is so integral to Lillvis’s conception of the cyborg as posthuman figure, one who represents “boundary crossings [occurring] internally or even conceptually across lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other identity factors” (Lillvis 4). In reading the Aubry Knight books with this notion in mind, we become aware of the latent techno-ambivalence surrounding Aubry, whose organic male body (defined by its Blackness as a hypervisible marker of difference) is ultimately cybernetically altered by the inclusion of neuroenhancements and facial reconstruction. Aubry’s posthuman Blackness is further understood through his liminal position at the fraught boundaries of organic/technologized somatics. The narrative of his journey ultimately explores his position before and after his enhancement as an organic and cybernetic Black man in a world of technologically and/or biologically altered people run parallel as such signs of otherness throughout the first two-thirds of the series. The distinguishing qualities of this alterity become increasingly significant in the novel as Barnes’s narrative becomes ever more insistent upon the fact that it is Aubry’s body itself that is his greatest asset in his fights against the injustice endemic in his dystopic world. His body and its relationship to the ambiguous prospects of cyberization is a key analytical point in my readings of the texts’ insinuations regarding Black male somatic figuration in this otherwise readily discernible cyberpunk approach.

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This trilogy of novels offers provocative images and allegories through speculative narratives about Black bodies, and I argue that they stand as uniquely Afrofuturistic perspectives within the SF mode of cyberpunk. This series, though clearly not invested in the wonder-inducing capacity of the socalled “Golden Age” of SF (1940s–1950s) and its Anglo American technooptimism, seems initially to highlight the multiculturalism, social anxiety, and somatic ambiguities of Western cyberpunk (Vint, Science Fiction, 24, 97). However, while Barnes engages the aesthetics and general themes of the cyberpunk movement, his antihero catalyzes additional essential conversations to about the nature of the Black (male) technologized somatic in the movement’s ideological underpinnings that potentially stand to subvert (or at least challenge) key aspects of it. Thus, the narrative running through Streetlethal, Gorgon Child, and Firedance provide what I read as an Afrofuturist complication to the implicit Cartesian dichotomizing that so effectively defines the trope of cyberspace, and further proffers a more holistic engagement with Blackness, masculinity, and Black bodies as sociohistorical assemblages. And the Cartesian bifurcation of his male characters along the mind/body fault line of a particularly racialized masculinity takes on an even greater significance when read in terms of his work in the conventions and aesthetics of cyberpunk. As the chapter’s epigraph suggests, we might convincingly argue that the kind of Black masculinity that Barnes is proposing in the Aubry Knight trilogy has, as one strand of its ideological forebears, the Black Arts Movement treatises of Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka. Cleaver, in particular, states that, in regards to the matters of cyberization and transhuman augmentation: In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world—a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy—man’s need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. He feels the need for a clear definition of where his body ends and the machine begins, where man ends and the extensions of man begin. (Cleaver 234)

It is this claim that a Black man finds himself in the visceral sense of his corporeality at the edges of technology, that the Aubry Knight books entertain and by which they do much to speak to the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding the creation of a Black cyborg body. Such a hybrid being is a ripe topic for speculation and theorizing, especially inasmuch as Barnes’s novels themselves seem to be so vexed in their own entertainment of it, since cyberization as somatic enhancement/restorative stands in rather stark contrast to the embodied male Blackness as somatic sublime his fiction otherwise seems to presuppose.



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This chapter situates a reading of cybernetic Black male somatics through close readings of key aspects of Firedance, Gorgon Child, and Streetlethal. I first lay the schematics for the texts’ work with the technologized somatic as sign and signifier, reading the fictive sarkesthetic figurations of Black cyborg characters in conversation with the dynamics of controlling images of Black masculinity. This segues into a more specific reading of Aubry as the central character in Barnes’s saga as Afrofuturist Badman, a cyberpunk Jack Johnson, who channels key elements of the traveling moral hard case, with latent aggression and blues ethos. I then put Aubry into what might be identified as a “Gibson Continuum” in analyzing Streetlethal and Gorgon Child in direct conversation with the conventions of Cartesianism I find in the approach to cyberpunk fiction seen most readily in the Sprawl novels and elsewhere in that author’s oeuvre. Barnes’s novels foreground a gendered and raced identity politics that I find to reach a symbolic somatic apotheosis in Firedance, which suggests nothing so much as an actively reworked cyberpunk suffused with elements of Blackness as ontological and social identity marker. THE AUBRY KNIGHT TRILOGY: FUSING CYBERPUNK AESTHETICS WITH BLACK SOMATIC STRENGTH While Barnes’s work with cybernetically enhanced, transhuman Black bodies is most readily discernible in the trilogy’s conclusion, Firedance, the creation of space for Blackness within the futuristic landscapes of Aubry’s world has the germ of its existence planted a decade prior, in Streetlethal. From this outset, Barnes’s text signifies on a welter of cyberpunk visual aesthetics: “The streets were slick from the afternoon rain; the hologram reflected back from the wet asphalt, an erotic mirage” (Barnes, Streetlethal, 1). Subsequent passages in the novel continue to signal that Aubry’s Los Angeles (circa 2030) is well away from the techno-optimism of earlier SF movements, marked as it is by drugs, disease, and economic blight. In Gorgon Child, Aubry reflects on the ways that his personal experiences of this gritty future are so consummately defined, not by the antiseptic halls of scientific “progress,” but by the “the streets” as a crucible of violent expression: “And oh, the streets. There, he had found that the rules didn’t exist. All that mattered was the quality of fluid violence that came so easily to him as his body began to mature, and finally exploded in an orgy of revenge against a world that had done nothing save turn its head to the death of his father” (Barnes, Gorgon Child, 329). If, as Gibson’s Sprawl works suggest, “the street finds its own use for things,” in Barnes’s fiction the streets constitute a gritty world unto themselves where “use” is constituted by inherently violent assertions of power (Gibson, Burning Chrome, 199).

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The manifestations of violence and power occur across a welter of factions across the trilogy. Streetlethal explores the criminal underworld in a revenge arc where Aubry must fight back against drug cartels preparing to flood the streets with a powerful new mushroom-based narcotic, Cyloxibin. Gorgon Child explores his foiling a politically motivated subterfuge hatched by an arch-conservative politician and a cabal of genetically enhanced special forces operatives. Firedance sees him serving as unwilling agent provocateur of the United States as the nation with the existential threats of a technocratic Japan and an economically and militarily ascendant African superstate, “PanAfrica” (comprised of the territory of present-day Kenya, Uganda, and other actual African nations). And throughout overarching plot of the trilogy, tensions smolder on the disparate sides of a yawning social and physical chasm5 between the wealthy and the economically dispossessed, and various autonomous gender sects exist in uneasy (and sometimes hostile) relationship to the American national government. Conflict indeed defines this futurescape. However, while struggle and violence certainly function at the macro-level of whole imagined communities grinding against one another, the nature of conflict is also felt through Barnes’s work in conveying the embodied subjectivity of Aubry as his central character. Though simply an individual in the face of social forces considerably more prodigious in their dimensions than he is, time and again Aubry’s fists and feet shake the foundations of the adversarial men and institutions arrayed against him. While interviewing Barnes in 2018, he explained to me that the trilogy posits Aubry as a hero who “was placed into a situation where there were world-affecting consequences that could be modified or influenced with physical action.” As a fighting man in this context, the novels empower him to deal with the various modes of plotting and duplicity that define the larger scope of conflict though somatic expression. As Barnes describes it: “I would manipulate a situation into a crux-point that can be resolved physically, so that I can do the action sequences that I love doing and am really good at.” So in contrast to the data heists and cyberspace “runs” of Gibson’s Sprawl works, the Aubry Knight cycle involves an emphasis on physical violence within systems of dystopian oppressive violence. All the same, the foregrounding of physicality and “action sequences” within Barnes’s trilogy is complicated by the fact that, in order to best utilize his body in the face of his adversaries’ designs, Aubry must undertake the seemingly Sisyphean task of keeping that body working in concert with his mind and spirit. The sense of wholeness is integral to his establishing for himself just who exactly he is. And more immediately, for him to achieve his aims of rescuing his lover, protecting his child, and reconnecting with his people, no one facet of his selfhood may be neglected. An approach that



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is further differentiation from characters like Case, the protagonist of Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, who defines the mind-set of a cyberspace cowboy as “a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh” which is mere “meat” at best, and a “prison of his own flesh” at worst (Gibson, Neuromancer, 6). Considered in this way, the schema of Cleaver’s Soul on Ice perhaps offer a prescient meditation on futuristic renderings of white masculinity’s fixation on the archetype of the “omnipotent administrator” with its notions that bodies are simply incidental flesh and their parts are cybernetically interchangeable (Cleaver 208). Such points about the contempt for and malleability of the flesh in Neuromancer are articulated and explored in Isiah Lavender’s Race in American Science Fiction (2011), though in such a way as to divorce them somewhat from the traditions that Barnes and Cleaver seem to be invested in unpacking. Lavender does speak the significance of the body itself in the contexts of cybernetic transhumanist enhancements, as a means to theorize how posthuman bodies can function as racial metaphors for systemic hierarchies in American society in an organizing principle that he dubs “technicity” (Lavender 186). His work does so, however, by focusing more directly on the metaphorical work that Neuromancer in particular among Gibson’s novels seems to be engaged in: “These man-machine interfaces made possible through mechanical enhancements and computer technology enable humans to escape bodily limitations,” and this, in turn creates a situation wherein, the cyborg self is capable of being read “as a technological derived ethnicity” (Lavender 183). So while Lavender’s work with Gibson focuses on “technicity” as technologized trans-/posthuman identity, does represent a fascinating way of viewing the concept of race as metaphor in cyberpunk fiction through the questions posed by cybernetic enhancement, my interests are rather more grounded in the more immediate manifestations of racial identity. Unlike Case, Count Zero’s Bobby Newmark, or other (primarily white) folks of the Sprawl,6 Barnes’s work with transhumanism is not concerned with the place of the cyborg or the artificial intelligence in an American society encumbered by intractable legacies of racialized marginalization. Instead, the Aubry Knight novels use the aesthetic language of describing Gibsonian transhumanism in order to offer a critique and thematic challenge to the revived Enlightenment notions of dichotomized mind-body dualism within cyberpunk. Aubry is not trying to find new and more effective ways of escaping the body through the cyberspace matrix. Nor is he representative of an attempt to create a fundamentally new “technicity” as a means of reorienting his own space within an American society predicated upon a history of viewing Blackness in general and a Black body in particular as indicative of subaltern status. Barnes uses his protagonist as a way of asking different sorts of questions:

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Aubry’s quest echoes Ta-Nehisi Coates’s conundrum “how do I live free in this Black body?” (Coates 12). Such a question challenges the very nature of a Gibsonian premise like Case’s privileged dismissal of the body as a “prison of flesh,” and speaks to the importance of Aubry’s endeavors to find for better ways to more holistically operate within such a body, and to stay alive long enough to do so. He states in Firedance: “I only survived because of this body . . . because it is faster and stronger and has more energy than any body has the right to have” (Barnes. Firedance, 73). But survival is a bare minimum. Barnes would have us understand that the truest strength—whether literal or figurative—comes from achieving a harmonious development of mind and body. Such an approach further suggests the aptness of applying the critical framework of posthuman Blackness, recognizing the liminality of being and growing in both the psychical and somatic, but Barnes’s work presents a unique rationale for doing so. In a personal interview, Barnes told me that the character was conceived as a way of doing precisely that: a way to “look beyond the dualisms” and “resolve dualities” (February 3, 2018). He further remarked that to do so, to step beyond the arbitrary dichotomies between mind and body, is to run the risk of overcorrecting and either making the self too vulnerable or too brutal. The goal of life—and what he envisioned Aubry as pursuing in his journey—was to be “safe enough to be gentle” and to find a “strength to protect softness.” Thus, the physical strength that Aubry has taken to the levels of somatic sublime is merely a starting point. As mighty a fortress as his flesh is, though, the novel suggests that without addressing the other facets of his existence beyond simply the somatic, he will not be able to survive the trials he faces. He must, in the framework provided by Hortense Spillers, become more than “flesh” and recognize that he is a fully animate body (Spillers 260). Streetlethal introduces readers to Aubry as but hired muscle (read: Black flesh), walking the line between being a sanctioned “nullboxer”—a licensed pugilist who participates in micro-gravity fighting matches in arenas in Earth orbit—and being an enforcer for the Ortega crime syndicate. Speaking of himself and his self-identification with the violence inherent in the jobs he undertakes, Aubry muses that “fighting is all I know, and they need dudes who don’t mind killing each other for money” (Barnes, Streetlethal, 2). As such, his body is tool, instrument, and source of his well-being; one for which, in a Gibsonian sense, the street invariably finds its own uses. It becomes not merely a site for his subjective engagement and understanding of the world around him, but the very means by which he experiences and participates with the dystopic circumstances that surround him. But whereas there might easily have been a reductivist reading of Aubry as just his body (after the venerable troping of the “supermasculine menial”



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put forth by Eldridge Cleaver), Barnes’s utility of him as a hero figure necessitates him both being and becoming more than the aggregate portions of his somatic existence. Left to his own devices, at the beginning of Streetlethal, the would-be champion nullboxer is satisfied with an existence defined by financial security and heterosexual romantic/erotic endeavors with his erstwhile lover, Maxine Black. But, betrayed by Maxine and other figures within the cartel, he is shipped off to the Death Valley maximum security penitentiary where he must expend all of his considerable energies in the quotidian tasks of exercise and staying alive. Ruminating on this existence as fleshcentered workout regimens under the oppressive powers of guards, fellow inmates, and prison scientists, Aubry becomes dimly aware that “the harder he pushed, the more of his humanity sloughed away to reveal a tireless machine that mocked his greatest efforts [to find peace]”( Barnes, Streetlethal, 29). In this instance, he really is just a body, resisting the crushing effects that his incarceration might have on mind and spirit by sequestering them away in safer reaches of inviolate interiority. The psychical and somatic severance is most directly explored when, after attempting to take prison justice into his own hands and exact revenge upon a fellow inmate, Aubry is subjected to a form of torturous reconditioning. In a sequence analogous to 1984 or A Clockwork Orange, he is bombarded with visual images meant to evoke an adrenal response towards violence or anger, and then, once the natural somatic reaction is elicited, he is subject to painful corporal reprisals (and shocked if he looks away). The torture is designed to create mutual antipathy between body and mind, and to sunder their ability to synchronize their faculties towards the ends of violent reprisal against the system of domination that the prison itself comes to represent. Here, the iconography hearkens to Frederick Douglass’s oft-cited passage about the making of a slave as accomplished through the violent separation of Black body from the mind (Douglass 42). Aubry, like Douglass, is temporarily cowed through the destruction of this link. Indeed, it is arguable that this psychosomatic trauma itself that defines Aubry’s character throughout Streetlethal. Aubry’s hitherto indomitable mass of Black flesh is rendered compromised in the instances when it would be most useful. His inability to access his full range of emotional responses as catalyzing agents for the utility of his fighter’s prowess not only represents an existential dilemma for him (he is a fighter, before he is anything else), but it also puts his life in very real danger as he repeatedly “freezes up” before adversaries. It is an encumbrance that he spends the rest of the novel struggling to overcome. The institutional decision to forcibly separate Aubry’s body from his mind as a means of asserting a kind of control over him is one that I read as coercing

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compliance from a body that is demonstrably uncontrollable. A vital part of the subtext of this restive and rebellious body is the coding of it as Black, and therefore marked with the sociohistorical legacies of American racial hierarchy. Engaging such legacies here as defamiliarized and projected in the futuristic world of the novels allows for productive interpretations of the kinds of Black masculinity discernible in the progression of the series. Among these, I would also propose a reading of Aubry in conversation with the venerable trope of the “Badman/Bad Nigger.” I argue also, that in many ways, Aubry Knight also signifies on Jack Johnson, the early twentieth-century pugilist and first Black heavyweight champion. ONE BAD MUTHA’ (SHUT YO MOUTH) Jerry Bryant’s “Born in a Mighty Bad Land” and its study of the so-called “badman” figure in Black literature and folklore is a helpful means by which to stage the preliminary portions of this reading. But where Bryant seeks to read a badman dichotomy as split between the Lawrence W. Levine’s “moral hard man” and Roger D. Abrahams’s simple “hard man,” I find that Aubry represents something in-between these poles (Bryant 2–3). The “hard man,” as a figuration of “bad” or unconstrained Black masculinity, is a figure of nihilistic violence, willing to turn his “violence and surliness not only upon whites who get in his way, but also against the people in his own Black community” (Bryant 3). By contrast, the moral hard man is a Black badman who invests his hostility and capacity for violence primarily towards the ends of racial liberation and undermining white supremacy (Bryant 2). While Aubry lives by violence and has no compunction about ending life to accomplish his ends, he does not fit neatly into a box at either end of Bryant’s framework: he cares too much to be just a hard man, but he is also perhaps too apolitical to be read as a really moral hard man. He uses his fists to fight against systems of oppression—the Ortega syndicate, the rogue soldiers of the Medusa project, and Swarna’s autocracy—but does so less out of a sense of actuated revolutionary spirit to make lives better for Black people, or other subaltern groups, and more out of a sense of protecting the family and friends in his immediate social circle. While he might skew in the direction of moral hardness, we might hesitate to put him in the company of others like Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Tupac Shakur that Bryant identifies as being of that ilk (Bryant 2). But it is worth noting that also mentioned in the list of moral hard men is none other than Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Johnson was certainly a fighter who (arguably) likewise toed a



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line between self and community, and some of the other parallels between he and Aubry are quite telling. Though Johnson and Aubry are certainly similar, understanding the differences between them is likewise a productive undertaking. In “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life,” William H. Wiggins Jr. provides a list of four characteristics that define Johnson as an ur-example of the archetype: “an utter disregard of death and danger; a great concentration on sexual virility; a great extravagance in buying cars, clothing, etc.; and an insatiable love of having a good time” (Wiggins 36). Aubry could certainly be read as reflecting the first two, what with the novels’ extensive chronicling of his stature as a fighter and the extended emphasis on sexuality through his amorous pursuit of Promise, the dalliance with Cyloxibin, and the experiences in Ephesus and the NewMan Nation. But in as far as the other two elements are concerned—those having to do with fun and consumerist extravagance—the neither Streetlethal nor Gorgon Child, and certainly not Firedance entertain an image of Aubry that is commensurate with Johnson’s freewheeling dandyism. But perhaps the most immediately important signifier of the thematic connection between Johnson and Aubry is the latter’s profession as a nullboxer. Pugilism as signifier of strength and virility is yet another element of Cleaver’s schematic rendering of Black masculinity that serves as a helpful way of unpacking Barnes’s fiction, for as he states, “the boxing ring is the ultimate focus of masculinity in America, the two-fisted testing ground of manhood, and the heavyweight champion, as a symbol, is the real Mr. America” (Cleaver 108). Within the novels, nullboxing (and Aubry’s other martial arts) takes all of that metaphorical significance of historical boxing and emphasizes its role as a definitive somatic expression of Black masculine power. But in the matter of Aubry’s status as a (null)boxer, there are potential concerns that might arise relative to that kind of signification, too. On the one hand, we note, the association of his employment so immediately with his sheer physicality and feats of physics-defying brute force—“What I heard” a fellow inmate says, “was something about having to be faster than any normal human being. Something about being fast enough to accelerate your opponent’s chin or ribs to the breaking point before the rest of the body can overcome inertia and bounce away”—bespeaks a monumental potential for performing Herculean feats of heroic strength (Barnes, Streetlethal, 23). On the other hand, the rendering of his Blackness and masculinity as so intrinsically imbricated in his somatic articulations does run the risk of rendering him a reductivist caricature. Barnes’s work with him walks this line, though, and usually with some effect. The character avoids the pitfalls of reductivisim by virtue of the narrative’s relentless forward momentum, which seeks to drag

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him toward being a “better” and “more complete” man, who achieves balance in all facets of his subjective experiences: bodily, mental, and spiritual. A paradigm shift comes for Aubry at the end of Gorgon Child, the second novel in the trilogy. At this point, his family and friends captured by his adversaries, Aubry seeks a challenge against the cybernetically and hormonally enhanced NewMen by undertaking a rite of passage called the “hell run.” This rite pushes him to his physical limits by forcing him to carry a huge rock through the California desert during the hottest part of the day, with a mouth full of water that he cannot swallow; he is given no instruction of where he is to run, or how far, but that he is to simply keep moving. As he begins the run, Aubry repeats a mental mantra that he is “the best” and “the strongest,” and that, as such, he will not be broken by the vaguely delineated demands of the trial (Barnes, Gorgon Child, 273). But while his body and physical strength are the credentials that allow him the right to even undertake the challenge in the first place, Aubry soon comes to the shocking revelation that to be simply a body—even a body at the absolute pinnacle of somatic capability—is insufficient to continue his larger quest of protecting his family and preventing the subversion of the American government. The connection that is critical to a more holistic/heroic sense of selfhood lies in his recognition that “the pain was part of his body, that wonderful, monstrous body, which had so eclipsed his mind, his feelings, his spirit,” and “had stolen his identity until he caved” (Barnes, Gorgon Child, 275) . In unifying mind and body, Aubry effectively achieves a kind of wholeness through hybridity. The body, which the badman frames as end-all, be-all of existence, is revealed to be inadequate in spite of its ostensibly flawless physiological constitution. Likewise, as Spillers situates the differentiation between “flesh” as psychically and socially inert and the “body” as animated through embodied subjectivity, to have an actuated sense of hybridized unity of multiple facets of identity is what empowers the Black self (Spillers 260). Streetlethal and Gorgon Child seem to suggest that this bodily incompleteness is a symptom facing Aubry as an individual, and that he must undertake the various trials of his hero’s journey to address this foundational lack as a man alone (so that he might, as Barnes put it, “become strong enough to protect”). But, while the questions surrounding his racialized and social identity are potentially occluded, I would proffer that these points are actually intrinsically linked to the theme of hybridization and wholeness. We see this in the ways that Aubry’s Blackness is dynamically related to the techno-ambivalence surrounding the matter of cyberization, and the way that this process challenges notions of essentialized Black masculinity as a kind of “pure” somatic state. By allowing his body to become linked to cybernetic



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apparatus—significantly, technologizing the brain—Aubry becomes stronger still through another manifestation of hybridization. BUILDING A BLACKER CYBORG Supermasculine Badman that Aubry might be potentially read as, the singular significance of his body throughout Streetlethal and Gorgon Child is derived largely from a kind of essentialized organic integrity of the remaining hermetically “sealed.” But in a cyberpunk-derived world suggestive of the ubiquitous liminality seen in Haraway’s venerable “Cyborg Manifesto,” this issue of sealed Black male somatic integrity seems ripe for further investigation (Haraway 315). All the more so when we understand that Sterling speaks of cyberpunk’s defining themes of technology as “body invasion” with “prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration” and “mind invasion” with “brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry” (Sterling, Mirrorshades, xi). In modulating the aesthetics of the cyborg in such a way, the centering of Aubry’s body as fully organic Black-flesh-as-identity makes him isolated as well as unique. This textual ambivalence surrounding Black male cyberization is productive toward reading the novels as indicative of the symbolic signification that the motifs of fusion and reconnection bound within Barnes’s rendering of Aubry as cyborg. In addition to the function of cyberization as allegorical concept, I am likewise interested in testing its operation at a quite literal level within the text. I want to consider Aubry’s role within the stories he occupies, and to address his existence as a visual representation within the future space the novels proffer of a sociohistorical refiguring of a kind of potentially transgressive Black masculinity. My concern in reading Aubry as a Black cyborg is derived in part from the way that the metaphor of prosthetic enhancement is so integral to Afrofuturism as a mode of artistic expression. Coined in a 1993 essay by SF critic Mark Dery, the oft-cited foundational definition of Afrofuturism: Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism.” (Dery 180)

In Dery’s definition of Afrofutursim,7 the emphasis on the trope of prosthetic enhancement signifies the hybrid figure of the cyborg, whose blending of artificial/replacement components with organic bodies creates a recursive

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framework by which the Black future might be imagined through connections to the Black past (encompassing the abovementioned “themes” and “concerns”). Taken as such a figurative composite of the various implicit factors of historical processes, social constructions of identity, and the science and pseudosciences of alterity, as the Black body itself becomes a hybridized assemblage. Barnes’s fiction and its rendering of these kinds of bodies becomes a site for application of the conceptual and aesthetic framework of “Afrofuturism.” But while the Aubry Knight trilogy foregrounds its hero’s organic somatic until the very end, the series is much more readily amenable to depicting a racialized cyborg somatic in its middle entry. Aubry’s Black body is initially bound within notions of historicized archetypes and essentialism; but his child Leslie, who is first introduced in Gorgon Child, embodies a kind of perpetual boundary-transgression. Not merely the most elite of the cybernetically augmented and hormonally enhanced special operatives unit, Leslie is both multiracial and, as described in the novels, a “bifertile hermaphrodite” (Barnes Firedance, 8). Capable of undertaking the quintessentially cyberpunk motif of “jacking in”8 and projecting their (I have opted to use variations on the singular “they” when referencing Leslie)9 consciousness into cyberspace, Leslie nonetheless still retains a discernible separation from more overtly Cartesian characters in that they also—like their father—represent an emphasis on finding truer strength through a holistic sense of self through reconciling body and mind. Leslie’s obliteration of identity boundaries is all the starker when read against the kind of problematically persistent stereotypes of Black embodied masculinity that frame their father as a latently violent, frequently destructive, and occasionally infantilized “Buck” in Streetlethal and Gorgon Child. By Firedance, though, when the narrative has taken on much more radically globalized worldview, and begun to meaningfully engage with an Afrofuturist chronopolitics of Transatlantic Blackness, Barnes’s rendering of his hero is able to move away from such problematically essentialized notions of identity. As such, whereas the preceding texts render Aubry a figurative island unto himself, never feeling quite “at home,” or “belonging,” Firedance creates space for a kind of postmodern Blackness of hybridity and reconnection. And yet, for all the significance that might be productively unpacked in the reading of Blackness within the Aubry Knight trilogy, Barnes himself explained in the course of the personal interview I conducted with him, that the issues at stake in the novel are more about ethnicity and nationality than race per se (personal interview, February 3, 2018). This fascinating interpretation certainly has its own kind of conceptual weight vis-à-vis the historiography of the Black Atlantic and the theoretical distance between Firedance’s Pan-



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Africa and, for example, the Pan-Africa of twentieth-century Black American cultural nationalists. Nonetheless, I maintain that there remain salient and important elements of racialized Blackness (within Diaspora) as a socially and historically constructed phenomenon central to the trilogy’s overarching narrative. Barnes explains that Aubry’s concerns qua race are not a part of the foundations of his struggle in America; yet, when we take a step back and attempt to frame Aubry’s saga in conversation with larger Black political and aesthetic movements, even the earlier phases of his journey offer meaningful insights into the genealogies that he exists in relationship to (Carrington 183). At the very least, the iconographies of his racially unambiguous masculinity within certain segments of Black American fiction stand, perhaps, as an interesting anticipatory stage and conceptual parallelism to Barnes’s fictive approach. As to the question of the specific mode of theorizing racial identity in Barnes’s oeuvre, he explained a realization during the early stage of his career as a writer that to avoid the issue of Blackness in his fiction would be ultimately disingenuous to his own sense of self and identity (personal interview, February 3, 2018). And thus, as he explained in interviews to me and other scholars, there exists an inherent importance in recognizing Aubry as an important manifestation of an Afrofuturist hero: Barnes’s writings with Aubry ultimately serve to reflect his desire to create racially distinctive Black heroic figures who could stand toe to toe with the fantastical, lantern-jawed SF and fantasy icons of his own youthful days, like Conan the Barbarian10 (Govan 28). And for all of his self-professed reluctance to write “the great Black American novel,” and the more immediate attribution of influence that Barnes makes for other strands of literary and speculative fictions upon his prose and characterization, his Aubry Knight books stand to gain considerable academic merit when placed in conversation with hallmarks of Black literary and folk-cultural traditions surrounding the Black masculinity (Govan 28). The implicit techno-ambivalence surrounding the Black male body in the Aubry Knight trilogy suggests a that there might well be merit in reading its hero’s sublimely powerful physique in juxtaposition to the John Henry folkstory in particular. John Henry, like Aubry, is a Black male of fantastical somatic potentiality. The folk hero demonstrates the power of his fully organic Black flesh in direct challenge to the instrumentalized product of mechanical industrialization in the form of the steam-powered drill he must compete against. As Joel Dinerstein reads the significance of Henry as archetypal hero by bringing up the very heart of what he signifies: “John Henry took on the Euro-American male’s most lethal weapon: his technology, and work based on that technology” (Dinerstein 121). Dinerstein further elaborates that, in the ballads of Henry, “In performance, the singer almost always lingers over

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the line, ‘a man ain’t nothing but a man,’ which resonates in terms both of the man vs. machine frame story and the Black man vs. White man subtext” (Dinerstein 121). Not all of the adversaries that Aubry fights across the three novels are white, of course; but the challenges he faces are, across the scope of his saga, reflective of some kind of technologized/mechanical empowerment. Even when Aubry is able to get his body, mind, and spirit working in concert, the forces arrayed against him manifest as cyberpunk variations on the trope of the steam drill. Additionally, readings of Aubry’s organic Black male somatic become further legible in conversation with the 1960s essays of Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver. Both men see the increasing distance of whiteness from the Body as being facilitated by a reliance upon technology, or the “nonrealistic” or “nonphysical” as Baraka calls it (Baraka 243–44). Cleaver (in further extrapolating the schematic of his Black Supermasculine Menial/ white Omnipotent Administrator dialectic), ironically, sees the bifurcation in terms of the selfsame Cartesianism that defines so much of 1980s cyberpunk, and most directly contextualizes Aubry’s distinctive position relative to it: “It is in this connection [of Mind with Body] that the Blacks, personifying the Body and thereby in closer communion with their biological roots than other Americans, provide the saving link, the bridge between man’s biology and his machines” (Cleaver 234). These theories are certainly dated in their essentializing articulations of a kind of one-size-fits-all manifestation of “correct” Black maleness, but they nonetheless do seem to present a kind of ideological parallelism to the way Aubry embodies Blackness and masculinity within the trilogy’s narrative, and speak to a kind of coincidental techno-ambivalence. But whereas Streetlethal and Gorgon Child most readily fit this model, Firedance’s representation of the Black male body is one that is rather more open to serving as site for discourse on cybernetic augmentation. This discursive act of engagement with Black masculinity as sign and signifier occurs on two levels: the novel’s literal work in representing Aubry as a transhuman Black cyborg, and the more figurative, metaphorical implications of the Black cyborg as means of exploring the liminal positioning of temporality relative to the historical realities of the African Diaspora. I posit that it is of no mean significance that Aubry goes so long without undergoing transhuman enhancement himself. Prior to the concluding novel the whole point of Aubry’s existence was simply to be “the strongest;” true enough, such recognition of strength as abstractly conceived in Barnes’s fiction is hardly the sort of thing to be rendered solely in terms of the somatic, and naturally necessitated the refinement of a more figurative “strength of character” that is emotionally and spiritually derived. But the brute force that Aubry inevitably resorts to in order to handle the challenges the narrative throws at him is foremost a prod-



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uct of his indomitable—and neither enhanced nor augmented—physique. The notion of the body as playing a significant (if also significantly vexed) role in the expression of Aubry’s characterization, situates the techno-pessimism of the works of Gibson and Sterling in a specifically somatic context. However, such a discussion of the body’s role within Barnes’s trilogy is all the more provocative in light of its manifestation on a Black male body that utilizes the prosthetics as a means Afrofuturistically engaging with those and other elements of cyberpunk. FIREDANCE AND THE SCIENCE OF RECONNECTION Streetlethal and Gorgon Child’s engagement with Afrofuturist Blackness are, at least in early somatic descriptions, quite literally, skin deep. While the novels do not shy from describing his body as “dark,” or “a statue carved in obsidian,” it is Firedance in which the series poses its most sustained series of questions about the hero’s connections to the social, historical, and cultural site that is the African diaspora (Barnes, Streetlethal, 1, 15–16). This point is likewise emphasized through the reading of Aubry’s experiences of actually undergoing cybernetic enhancement through the language of Lillvis’s “posthuman Blackness,” where “temporal and subjective liminality [acknowledge] the importance of history to the Black subject without positing a purely historical origin for Black identity” (Lillvis 4). Through engaging in a plot point that investigates the connections across the Black Atlantic, the final Aubry Knight novel ultimately does pose questions surrounding “the fact of Blackness” that, as Fanon describes, are deeper than mere epidermal schema, and do evoke hybridity through layering the existential trebling of body, race, and lineage (Fanon 112). These questions take on a distinctly Afrofuturist significance when they are understood relative to the cyberization process that facilitates this transatlantic reconnection. In undertaking his final mission to depose Phillipe Swarna, the dictator of the futuristic technophilic nation of PanAfrica, Aubry must undergo training and cybernetic enhancement surgery by the U.S. government. This transhuman process of somatic and cognitive augmentation is enacted primarily by his brain being cyberized to allow for enhanced reflexes and foreign-language comprehension (Barnes, Firedance, 137). Although I discuss the allegorical implications of this somatic reconstruction through the use of technological prostheses takes on the significance of symbolically reconnecting the African American and African communities of the Afrodiaspora elsewhere, a reading of the temporal and spatial liminality intrinsic to Lillvis’s concept of posthuman Blackness is a helpful conceptual apparatus to understand his journey

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toward a more holistic development of a hybridized self (Brickler 71). This embrace of a posthuman liminality is especially compelling as a means of analyzing Aubry’s role as rebuke of neocolonial (and intrinsically racist) American interventionist foreign policy. In the end, his status as being beyond the arbitrary, liberal humanist boundaries of time, space, and race allow an understanding of the way that transhuman processes of somatic augmentation create an identity of posthuman Blackness that sees apotheosis as he and claims the throne of PanAfrica for himself. The connections between Aubry and PanAfrica prove to be rather more so than a mere reinterpretation of rule by right of conquest. While the earlier works in the trilogy had situated Aubry as being of “the streets” in the corrupted American metropolis of this futuristic Los Angeles, the transhumanist processes of cyberization in Firedance are concomitant with revelations that establish and historicize his African connections. The concluding novel in the trilogy ultimately discloses that Aubry is in reality one of several genetic clones of Swarna. The larger significance of this is spelled out in a dialogue with one of the other clones, San, at which time Aubry is confronted with the reality of his adversary’s understanding of his Black flesh as consummately objectifiable and disposable: “We are what Phillipe Swarna created to keep himself alive. At first he did it to continue his work. Then he did it because he was mortally afraid of death.” “Death,” Aubry said. “‘Everything of Life is born of woman,’” San quoted. “In creating us, he created something not of life. We were his extra hearts, and brains, and livers. When a piece malfunctioned, he took from us. There were three generations of clones—you were first generation. You are the only survivor of the original Six, forty years ago. Fifteen years later he grew six more. And when he had used those up, he created us, the last. The nanotech is more efficient than transplantation. We are the last generation. Only one of us, Ichi, was sacrificed in the white room. The other five became his most private enforcement arm. His personal bodyguard.” (Barnes Firedance, 343)

While the San and the others remained to guard Swarna’s body (rather than become part of it), Aubry managed to escape the fate of the rest of the first generation of clones. In a monstrous parallel to the cyberpunk interpretation of the Black body/flesh dilemma, Swarna also represents an attempt by an oppressive power structure to reduce Aubry to mere flesh (literally in this case, to use his organic matter to sustain autocracy). Taken as part of the Aubry Knight narrative as a whole, Firedance’s revelations of the missing backstory to Aubry’s childhood directly expands the horizons of the trilogy’s futurescape to encompass a truly global perspective. Aubry’s journey from the LA streets to the head of African technocracy



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works thematically well in conversation with cyberpunk. Sterling frames cyberpunk itself as invested in global awareness as “a deliberate pursuit” that exists as extension of a 1980s sociocultural zeitgeist—an “era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with new sophistication, a broader perspective”—the nature of the expansion here and its direct signification upon the Black Atlantic as Afrodiasporic space (Sterling, Mirrorshades, xii). But the particular kind of understanding of this space as what Kodwo Eshun describes in “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” as simultaneous retrospection and prolepsis further emphasizes the importance of Afrofuturism as methodological framework to provide coherence to a reading of Barnes (Eshun 289). If the trilogy’s engagement in an increasingly globalized view of the future reflects its cyberpunk genealogy, the inscription of that view within the metaphor of Aubry’s Black body as sociohistorical assemblage reflects the equally important aspect of Afrofuturism. A conceptual wrinkle might be seen in Gibson’s work, and its deployment of certain elements of Afrodiasporic epistemological concepts, though the contrast is one Barnes digs much deeper in his investigations of. Gibson’s use of autochthonous artificial intelligence (AI) entities within the cyberspace matrix that take on the names and mannerisms of the Orisha of vodou, is certainly an intriguing use of socio-cultural diversity within the Sprawl. And again, the inclusion of Black figures like Kid Afrika (Mona Lisa Overdrive) and Beauvoir, Lucas, and Jackie (Count Zero) is something that cannot be discounted in an analysis of cyberpunk Blackness. Yet, while these characters embody a kind of liminal positioning between various boundaries—between cyberspace and reality, or between corporate futurism and idiosyncratic AfroDiasporic cosmology—such an approach lacks the immediacy and arguably the impact of Barnes’s literalized manifestation of reconnection of disparate strands of history in the Black Atlantic through the exploration of the somatic representation of Aubry’s posthuman Blackness. It is the issue of depicting a body-in-history (through defamiliarizing the body of history) that remains perhaps the standout facet of the Aubry Knight trilogy’s narrative, and proves to be one of the most significant aspects of any and all critical engagement with the question of why exactly the novels themselves matter. Especially insofar as the novels self-evident reluctance in exploring Black masculinity as represented through the cyborg fusions that define so much of the rest of the dramatis personae. When nearly everyone surrounding Aubry (the most prominent Black man in the novels) is the product of some manner of transhuman flesh/tech hybridization, and when it is not until he is coerced by the U.S. government into playing the agent provocateur in PanAfrica, it suggests a kind of significance to the narrative’s framing of

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somatics in general, and Black somatics in particular, that warrants further critical explication. Rendering the Black organic body here as normative (if superlative in its physique) creates a linkage between Blackness and flesh that presents a curious relationship to cyberpunk renderings of the cyborg. The contrasts between visibly modified characters (none of whom, it should be noted, are identified as Black, beyond the implications of Leslie’s multiraciality) and Aubry, complemented by the way that Barnes’s prose lingers in its exacting attempts to capture each blow of any given fight sequence, bespeak the significance of the black somatic within his narrative style. Rendering Aubry for so long as unaltered in his physiology—so categorically un-cyberized—through every trial he had hitherto faced within the series, potentially indicates a need to have the character stand apart from so much of the cyberpunk conventionality that surrounds him. And the matter of the “visibility” of bodily enhancement is one that is rather important insofar as the narrative implications of posthuman Blackness that Aubry’s Afrofuturist cyborg body represent. A brief aside about depictions of cyborg enhancement Gibson’s body of cyberpunk fiction is instructive: on the one hand, there is the visual immediacy of replaced or enhanced limbs like the character Molly Millions and her surgically implanted mirrored lenses that cover her eyes and her retractable razorblade fingertips; on the other hand, there is the less visible way that characters like Case must be physically and physiologically capable of “jacking into” cyberspace, fusing mind with the matrix (Gibson, Burning Chome, 6, 8). The latter sort of cyberization has parallels with the way that, in the course of Firedance, Aubry himself finally becomes a cyborg, by enhancing his brain in order to stage his return to the continent at the behest of the American government, who has conscripted his services to stage its own covert operations in PanAfrica. It hearkens to the points Lillvis refers to in her discussion of internal boundary crossings, insofar as, in spite of the transhuman processes of becoming a cyborg, in terms of aesthetics and the nature of his visuality within the narrative’s science-fictive reality, Aubry still looks fully organic (Lillvis 4). However, while they are not as immediately visible to the characters who encounter him as part of his tasks of espionage and sabotage, his augmentations take on a highly visible status for the reader, given their significance as novum and markers of the adventure’s explicitly science fiction dimensions. To the people he encounters in PanAfrica, however, the physical augmentations of his body are rendered as invisible, and serve as means to allow him to communicate with local populations as though he were already culturally a part of them. Paul C. Taylor’s work with the question of Black Aesthetics



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becomes quite helpful for us here in exploring this facet of the character’s stature within the novel (Taylor 36–37). The ability to negotiate the novel’s implicit ocularcentrism and have a hulking fighter like Aubry “blend in” as a functionally invisible interloper and provocateur within PanAfrica would certainly be possible for him to an extent (notwithstanding his already selfevident status as a clone of President Swarna). But this is only a matter of, as Fanon would say, his epidermal schema (Fanon 112). A bit of internal monologue speaks to his diasporic conundrum: “These [the Ibandi] were his people. Yet the people of America were his people, too. Black, white. Brown” (Barnes Firedance, 312). In spite of his commonalities with the PanAfricans based upon purely superficial racialized dimensions, as Barnes indicated in the interview I conducted with him, Aubry is culturally and nationally American in his affiliations (personal interview, February 3, 2018). There is an instance in the novel when he confronts Go, and the latter says of him, “look at your skin. You speak the white man’s language, and you think his thoughts, except that your body doesn’t belong to his family. Do you not feel that there is something more?” (Barnes Firedance, 269). Indeed, it is precisely because of this tension between the facets of his identity that the Intelligence brass compel him to undergo the cyberization processes. This is not because of some perceived latent call for him to “sell out,” as indeed his commanders worry that he may actually betray them and defect, citing a presumption of racial determinism regarding ideologies, but because he has a vested interest in stopping Swarna, who has already come after his new family once, and has threatened to do so again (Barnes Firedance, 166). Firedance redirects Aubry’s saga away from the potentially reductive images of Blackness (and Black masculinity) seen in its predecessors. Whereas Streetlethal and Gorgon Child had moved to simply create a space for diversity by challenging extant and prevailing themes of Cartesianism and similar stands of Euro-American liberal humanist traditions within a markedly provincial tone with their efforts to explore cyberpunk futurescapes of Los Angeles circa 2030, the series’s conclusion looks further abroad. As such, Firedance does considerably more than simply emulate cyberpunk and is arguably the most nuanced text in its depiction of Afrofuturist diaspora. The reading of posthuman Blackness as a means of reading transhuman processes of cyberization in the context of engaging with and exploring the significance of Afrofuturist Blackness in a cyberpunk-adjacent narrative of global connections created an opportunity to stand apart as something markedly distinct from the rest of the trilogy. By becoming posthuman and creating an increased awareness of the role of “Blackness” and “African-ness,” Firedance effects a much more nuanced reading of the Black body’s place in futurity.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter I have endeavored to stage a reading of the Black body in Barnes’s Aubry Knight novels. Narratively, the trilogy makes some provocative moves relative to understandings of Gibson-esque cyberpunk SF conventions, in that throughout all three texts, Cartesian dualism is tabled in favor of a much more visceral exploration of the aesthetics of somatics and embodied experiences vis-à-vis Lillvis’s notion of posthuman Blackness. Likewise, even though the novels work to create an image of the future that is defined in many respects by dystopian corporate overreach and various public health crises, they go to pains to find progressive approaches in depictions of multiculturalism and positioning of a Black man in the position of hardboiled (anti)hero. The futuristic landscape of Aubry’s Los Angeles may be more defined by prosthetically enhanced violence than techno-optimism, but Barnes demonstrates that the efforts of diverse people—cyborg and not—are what it takes to begin to combat the corruption. Streetlethal and Gorgon Child have him wrestling to use his body to become something more than just a weapon, and they show him toeing the moral line at the edges of being the futuristic iteration of the trope of the Badman. Aubry’s body in these first two novels is shown to be capable of awesome feats of physical strength that allow him to literally, in some cases, fight the powers that be. But while his physique is more fortress than prison of flesh, he nonetheless runs into limitations when he attempts to be just a body. He may no more completely escape into the wholly somatic world than Case, Newmark, or any other Gibsonian console cowboy can completely exist in cyberspace. Barnes’s novels expressly emphasize that Aubry is at his most effective as a heroic figure when he becomes a hybridized construct of body and mind. Firedance takes this exploration of hybridity a step farther by dispensing with the largely tacit understanding of Aubry’s body as singularly powerful for being fully organic. At no point in Streetlethal or Gorgon Child do the novels establish that Aubry has an animus against the process of cyberization, but his strength as a John Henry in a world full of cybernetically and/or hormonally enhanced “steam drills” implicitly gives credence to the assertion of his stature as standing alone in his power. Until, of course, he is required to undertake his own personal journey to Africa. At such point, his journey toward hybridity becomes even more overt, as he is not merely fusing his organic body and mind, but must embrace the cybernetic enhancements to both, which will allow him to effectively reconnect with his past and people in PanAfrica. Steven Barnes’s Aubry Knight trilogy represents a fascinating meditation on the nature of the Black male body as it exists within a world so otherwise



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suffused with the aesthetics of cyberpunk science fiction. Whereas cyberpunk works more directly in line with the Gibson Continuum might include Black characters in them, as part of the repudiation of certain strands of SF aesthetics, Barnes’s novels insistence on addressing an increasingly Afrofuturist worldview of posthuman Blackness engage the notions of prosthetic enhancements as a means of remarking on the dimensions of Black ontology as innately hybridized. NOTES 1.  The title of this chapter is itself derived from Shirow Masamune’s 1989 manga (graphic novel), Ghost in the Shell. Shirow’s narrative—which is frequently read as part of a larger cross-cultural dialectic between Western and Japanese takes on cyberpunk themes and aesthetics—concerns the existential concerns and actionpacked policework experiences of a cyborg. The most pressing and ubiquitous of the issues presented within, is that of the matter of embodied consciousness, where the human mind (ghost) inhabits, animates, and influences the cyborg body (shell). I have opted to replace “ghost” here, with “soul” as a rather more culturally relevant signifier on how Blackness operates within the context of what is to follow. And, indeed, “ghost,” itself is a rather loaded concept when broached in the context of cyberpunk: one of Gibson’s most relevant contributions to the discourse about the subgenre is that of the “semiotic ghost.” In addressing this concept of the future as having “ come to America first,” only to have “already passed it by,” a spectral semiotic residual of the iconographies of futures-past continue to inform much of the then contemporary science fiction discourse. Insofar as those apparitions so often take the shape of anodyne, apolitical, and largely antisepctically white, “gee-whiz” technophilia of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine, Gibson’s narrator finds himself bordering on madness as a result of his inability to square those images of “a 1980 that never happened” in William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Eos, 1986), 28, 34. 2. An oft-quoted line from Gibson’s titular short story in Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection, is that “the street finds its own uses for things,” which fully encapsulates the punk-ish sensibilities of technology democratized to the point of becoming passé. In Gibson, Burning Chrome, 199. 3.  Black science fiction author Samuel Delany has some choice words about the use of Black characters in Neuromancer during a 1993 interview with Mark Dery: “you’ll forgive me if, as a Black reader, I didn’t leap up to proclaim this passing presentation of a powerless and wholly nonoppositional set of Black dropouts, by a Virginia-born white writer as the coming of a Black millennium in science fiction; but maybe that’s just a Black thing,” in Marc Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 195.

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  4.  Some of Barnes’s earliest novels, including Dream Park (1981) and The Descent of Anansi (1982) were collaborative projects with fellow author, Larry Niven.   5.  The novels do suppose a physical separation of the peoples who inhabit this future Los Angeles, with the less-fortunate inhabitants of the city still dwelling within the burned-out wreckage of a massive earthquake. This swath of urban wreckage is colloquially referred to by the characters as “The Maze.”   6.  This motif is repeated elsewhere in the use of the cyberspace trope in the rest of Gibson’s “Sprawl” series—the novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and the short stories, “Johnny Mnemonic,” and “Burning Chrome”—and also in attendant cyberpunk revival novels like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.   7.  More contemporary theorists have pushed the boundaries of the term in the decades since its inception (as we see in the collection Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones).   8.  The actual process of accessing the “virtual world of Firedance’s cyberspace continuum is very much akin to separation of body and mind that Gibson’s Case, and Ghost in the Shell’s protagonist, Kusanagi Motoko, are able to effect. One of Leslie’s first-person descriptions of the process is as follows: “I raced through the wiring wide as railway tunnels, my consciousness a ghost in the machine.” In Barnes, Firedance, 356.   9.  The novels use a pronoun system of alternating between “he” and “she” when referencing Leslie (having Promise refer to the child as a daughter and Aubry refer to them as a son). 10.  Andre M. Carrington’s Speculative Blackness also does a highly effective job of unpacking the nature of Robert E. Howard’s character, Conan the Barbarian, and his evident influences upon Barnes’s fiction. See Carrington, Speculative Blackness, 181.

WORKS CITED Baraka, Amiri. 2009. “American Sexual Reference: Black Male.” In Home: Social Essays. New York: Akashic Books. 243–262. Barnes, Steven. 1994. Firedance. New York: Tor Books. ———. 1989. Gorgon Child. New York: Tor Books. ———. 1983. Streetlethal. New York: Tor Books. Brickler IV, Alexander Dumas J. 2018. “Black Mecha is Built for This: Black Masculine Identity in Firedance and Afro Samurai.” In TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 39: 70–88. Bryant, Jerry H. 2003. Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cleaver, Eldridge. 1999. Soul on Ice. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.



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Dery, Mark. 1994. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, 179–222. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Dinerstein, Joel. 2003. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Douglass, Frederick. 1995. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Dover Publications. Eshun, Kodwo. 2003. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(2): 287–302. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, Inc. Foster, Thomas. 2005. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, William. 1986. Burning Chrome. New York: Eos. ———. 1986. Count Zero. New York: Ace Books. ———. 1988. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Ace Books. ———. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Govan, Sandra Y. 2001. “Steven Barnes.” In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. 27–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2007. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Simon During, 314–34. New York: Routledge. Lavender III, Isiah. 2011. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lillvis, Kristen. 2017. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 2000. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar.” In African American Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Winston Napier, 257–279. New York: NYU Press. Sterling, Bruce. 1986. “Preface.” In Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ix-xvi. New York: Arbor House. ———. 1986. “Preface” In Burning Chrome, edited by William Gibson. New York: Eos. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Tran, Julie Ha. “Thinking about Bodies, Souls and Race in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy,” in Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, 139–150. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Vint, Sherryl. 2007. “Funk Not Punk.” Science Fiction Studies 34(2): 301–11. Wiggins, Jr., William H. 1971. “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life.” The Black Scholar 2(5): 34–46.

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FURTHER READING Anderson, Reynaldo, and Charles E. Jones. 2016. “Introduction: The Rise of AstroBlackness.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, 63–90. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Cline, Ernest. 2011. Ready Player One. New York: Broadway Books. Shirow, Masamune. 2009. Ghost in the Shell. New York: Kodansha Comics. Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books.

Chapter Nine

Revising the White Cyborg The Interstitial Heroism of Del Spooner in I, Robot and Charles Gunn in Angel Christian Jimenez

This chapter will offer a sustained comparison of two major African American protagonists, respectively, in I, Robot and Angel. After briefly, surveying the problem of race in cinema and television, the discussion turns to the black cyborg as a construct. Though the cyborg as a cyborg is not a racial concept, it is often represented in a normative, racial manner. The cyborg in film is visualized as white whether the T-1000 in Terminator and T2 as well as the many white cyborgs in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This essay examines both the consistency of using the white cyborg as a normative standard and challenges to that standard. AFRICAN AMERICANS AND SCIENCE FICTION According to Donald Bogle, there has been a strong tendency in Hollywood to devalue the black body. It is usually either absent altogether or represented only in subordinate position. While Bogle concentrates on film, a similar argument can be mounted against television. There is a strong tendency for racial minorities to be ranked hierarchically with African Americans usually placed at the bottom of races whites would like to interact with. There are also differences and nuances not just between media but also between periods. The 1980s saw the emergence of genuinely powerful black actors with box office appeal like Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington, who were able to shape projects to some degree to their liking. Even here black actors were confined to the genres of comedy, drama, and romance. A striking absence was, however, until recently, the absence of people of color in science fiction and fantasy. While some African American icons like Murphy and Washing177

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ton were able to penetrate different genres (action, comedy, drama, fantasy), science fiction remained mostly a white-dominated field. By the 1990s, science fiction began to incorporate African Americans more actively in television on shows such as Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager as well as films like Spawn and Steel. However, Krin Gabbard is skeptical that race relations improved even here (2004). Particularly it has been argued African Americans are continuously portrayed as a “magical negro” or a black man or woman with mysterious mystic powers who always aids a white hero (Nilsen 2008). While the images of blacks were, paradoxically, “good” showing them as angels and/or saintly figures, Gabbard argues such images are denigrating limiting African Americans to a simple either/or dynamic of saints or sinners that is not imposed on whites. For instance, in The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is the “One,” or the predestined savior of humanity. He is aided by his black mentor, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). While Morpheus is represented as tough, strong, and intelligent he lacks the godlike abilities of Neo. Hence while African Americans are sometimes granted great agency within a science fiction narrative they remain in a relative state of subordination. Fishburne, for instance, played Perry White, Superman’s boss at the Daily Planet newspaper, usually represented as a white man, in both Man of Steel and Superman versus Batman. Yet in both cases he is clearly framed as a minor character. Only rarely is the black character allowed to be main hero in a science fiction film (O’Connell 2017). The black cyborg has even more anomalous place in these discussions due its recent creation and interstitial status. Similarly, Deathlok (Michael Collins), a Marvel character, is a black cyborg featured in several series, some starring himself since his introduction in 1974 (Gavaler 176). This is one of the earliest representations of the black cyborg predating DC’s introduction of the black cyborg, Cyborg, half a decade later (Victor Stone). The cyborg is explicitly racialized by the normative standard of whiteness. The Borg on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance, are almost always shown to be white in appearance and demeanor. Even the Borg Queen is represented via a white woman. Even more recently, the main cyborg villain, Adam, who appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was played by a white male and fictionally represented as such. Black cyborgs did appear on Buffy such as Forrest, a government soldier, turned into a hybrid demon-human cyborg in season 4. However, Forrest’s role is small, and he plays a stereotypical hyper-sexist masculine soldier who is fated to be killed off horribly. In short, either the black cyborg is not represented at all or is represented in a subordinate and/or stereotypical fashion. This essay will look at two major representations in film and television of the black cyborg that break from this



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norm: Del Spooner in I, Robot played by Will Smith and Charles Gunn in Angel (1999–2004) played by J. August Richards. I, Robot has been discussed from the prism of adaptation studies (Hart 2015). There is also some scholarly work on the racial politics of Angel in particular (Trussel 2016). But, interestingly, there are no sustained comparisons of these two characters though they are some of the few cases of the black cyborg in the 2000s. The bases for comparison are strong. At the level of genre, both I, Robot and Angel draw upon the noir (or neo-noir) genre and mix it with science fiction. Both feature mysteries prominently in their plots. Both have multiracial casts of characters (and real-life actors). Both have flawed yet sympathetic heroic protagonists. And both deliberately make use of Christian mythologies of sin and redemption repeatedly in the course of their respective narratives. Allusions to Christ are explicit and numerous in both cases. But major differences exist as well. Gunn is a major character and a series regular for the majority of the show. However, he is not the main hero. Secondly, the composition of the hybrid body is also different. Spooner is, literally, part-robot. Gunn’s cyborg body has no similar external, outward and visible signification. Thirdly, thematically, I, Robot is conservative in that it has a simple compare-and-contrast between Spooner, the human, and Sunny, the robot. In contrast, Gunn has no obvious robot counterpart on Angel suggesting the cyborg self he becomes has no simplistic binary essence. I, Robot presents a utopian vision of interracial—even interspecies— harmony. While it does offer some criticism of American society it limits itself to a bland condemnation. Gunn in Angel, in contrast, presents audiences with a more realistic story about racial progress. Angel presents a much darker and more accurate vision of America where many tensions (including race) are likely to continue. Whereas Spooner at the end of the film emerges as a Christ-like figure. It also normalizes police/fascist violence as Spooner is an authority figure, a detective. Angel offers no similar redemptive message offering a more realistic portrait of racial and economic divisions in America. Gunn has both heroice and antiheroic aspects, suggesting that heroes who fight racism, sexism, and fascism with their hybrid bodies may themselves have some of these qualities inside them. BLACK JESUS The beginning of I, Robot introduces us to Del Spooner, a world-weary detective in an alternative future of 2035. In other science-fiction films such as Men in Black as well as Independence Day, Smith used slang words and

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dresses in hip hop clothing. But while Spooner does wear sneakers and a jacket he is clearly framed as a highly intelligent professional detective. Spooner begins with a racial bias toward robots, seeing them as existential threats to humans. They are to him “just lights and clockwork.” He is investigating the (alleged) suicide of Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell). Lanning created robots to adhere strictly to Three Laws. I.  Robots may not injure or allow human beings to come to harm. II. Robots must obey human orders except where such orders would conflict with the first law. III. Robots must protect themselves as long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two laws.

Because of the three laws, Spooner’s investigation appears unnecessary. As Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) who helps treat robots at United States Robotics (USR). The religious subtext is metaphoric—beyond the obvious naming of Susan after the famous theologian—when Calvin tells Spooner: “A robot could no more kill than a human walking on water.” Spooner replies: “[w]ell, there was this guy” referring to Christ. Though Spooner is not outwardly religious he clearly identifies with the religiosity of African Americans, including that of his fictional mother in the film. Spooner does not compare himself to Christ, but the film will soon make the analogy. Similarly, race is not explicitly present in the narrative yet clues that racial identity matters are hinted throughout the story. At first, Spooner suspects a conspiracy by USR CEO Lance Robertson (Bruce Greenwood) to cover up Lanning’s murder to profit from robots being sold to all households. The suspect in the murder is Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), a cyborg with a humanoid-shaped body. He has a blank, white face. His body gives him super-strength, agility, and the ability to process massive amounts of information. As Sean Brayton observes every NS-5 including Sonny Each robot is given a pale white complexion . . . Sonny, for instance, is issued vibrant blue eyes and the slightly effete voice of Alan Tudyk (of the [science fiction]sf television series Firefly). He is a machine made quite literally in the image of a white man, one whose character in Firefly abstains from physical violence (unlike his African-American wife [Zoe]). . . . [T]he robot’s cold and gleaming surfaces gesture towards larger discourses of rationality and logic that inform the popular mythology of white masculinity. (2008, 74)

As Brayton continues: “Unlike robots and androids in other sf films, the whiteness of the NS-5s is fixed by the inherent blackness of I, Robot’s hero” (Brayton). Since the film borrows from the noir genre, Sonny’s distinct whiteness it is never explained despite noir films within the sci-fi genre often



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shot at night or characters dressed in dark clothing (The Matrix trilogy, Blade Runner, etc.). Instead of corruption, hope is the main theme of I, Robot. Calvin makes the case the NS-5s, as the robots are called, are in many ways superior to emotion-laden humans. But Spooner mockingly asks Sonny: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a canvas and turn it into a beautiful masterpiece?” To which Sonny replies: “Can you?” Initially, Spooner’s hatred of robots is due to his professional need to close a case but its true reason is revealed when a large convoy of robots traps Spooner and jump out at him. An NS-5 is about to deliver a debilitating blow, but Spooner amazingly blocks it with his arm. The arm is shown to be nonhuman. Spooner says: “Oh, yeah” as the robot reacts shocked and uses his metal arm to disable it and several other robots. However, as the narrative unfolds, Spooner’s racism is revealed in a flashback recalling an automobile accident he took part in where he found himself in Richard Trussel’s words deep underwater after his and another vehicle were forced off the road . . . Opposite of him in the other car is an eleven year old [white] girl, drowning . . . Spooner himself knows that he too will die soon. But a NS-4 robot that saw the accident comes to the rescue . . . [and] Spooner is saved because the robot calculated his chance of survival at 45 percent while the [white] girl Sarah at only 11 percent. Spooner . . . lives fully only by being remade by Lanning, who addresses him as “Son.” (2016)

Like Lazarus, Spooner was reborn through the water incident and becomes, partially, a robot. Since the robots know only probabilities, they lack the power of human judgment and Spooner is fearful he has partly become inhuman through the robot parts on his body. While it might seem heroic that Spooner is willing to give up his life, Trussel avoids fully describing accurately the girl in question is a white girl as Lanning is a white man. Of course this only elevates Smith’s heroism even higher. He is willing to save the entire white race with no expectation of reward. In the typical noir, the hero may be noble he usually acts of mixed motives of revenge and/or profit. But Spooner is heroic and the obstacles to his heroism are mainly physical. An added subtext is that while Robertson and Calvin are seemingly much higher in intelligence, status, and power even in this non racist society their naïve belief in progress has blinded them to the dark underside to what the robots represent. Having seen how robot judgment can lead to harming people, Spooner is (rightly) suspicious that the NS-5s are benign. The irony is Spooner is “smart” in suspecting a conspiracy where others insist there is

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none. As Trussell interprets Spooner’s heroism, he is fated to save humanity like Jesus. Spooner sees that Lanning counted on his detective nature and prejudice against robots to act like a program driving him toward solving the mystery of his death. . . . Susan’s latent humanity and her familiarity with robotics predictably drew them together for the epic struggle. Does Calvin, her last name, evoke Reformer John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination? (2016)

Spooner’s investigation leads to his discovery that Lanning was not killed but committed suicide. Sonny aided in Lanning’s death. Moreover, the robots were not sent to kill him by Robertson. Rather, VIKI, a self-aware computer program, has overridden the three laws with an unknown new law justifying the robots rebel and take over human society for humanity’s own good. As VIKI says to Spooner and Calvin, “To protect humanity, some humans must be sacrificed. . . . You are so like children; we must save you from yourselves.” To Brayton, VIKI’s justification has a parallel to “colonialist narratives used to justify systemic exploitation and cultural genocide by upholding white Western ideals of rationality as universally superior to ‘primitive’ people’s ‘childlike’ ways” (Brayton 76). However, there is a significant difference in that VIKI considers all humans, black and white, as inferior. Hence Spooner as black Jesus is saving whites as well as blacks from a monstrous (female) machine. As in other action films, however, Spooner’s heroism is given with a fair deal of sexism. Spooner has disdain for Calvin’s naïve nature and attributing it to her gender. To Brayton, Spooner uses sexist stereotypes . . . to contain the threat of female intelligence. In one scene Calvin offers Spooner driving directions, to which he responds, “You must know my ex-wife;” repeatedly . . . joke[ing] about a possible “feminist” conspiracy against him. . . . Spooner’s sexist humor draws attention to Calvin’s indubitable lack of emotion, singling her out as . . . an exception to the gender order. Late in the film . . . Spooner turns to sexist comedy for a similar purpose. After Calvin discovers Sonny’s unique characteristics, she admits, “I couldn’t destroy him. It just didn’t feel right. He’s too unique.” . . . Spooner jokes, “You and your feelings. . . . They just run you, don’t they?” (Brayton 2008, 82)

There is a parallel that Calvin and VIKI represent “female” threats to manhood—like Eve did to humanity by biting the apple in the Bible. Yet Brayton over-interprets Spooner as a sexist in that the film is largely under the female gaze. For the most part, the film focuses on Smith’s muscular body—which includes his first-ever nude scene. Also, unlike similar generic films, Smith



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and Calvin develop no romantic relationship. The triangle of Sonny, Calvin, and Spooner (a kind of holy trinity) mirrors the trio of Sarah Connor, John Connor, and the Terminator in Terminator 2. By the film’s conclusion, the VIKI conspiracy is foiled with Sonny and Spooner teaming up to save humanity in a gun-heavy confrontation with the rebellious NS-5s. On the surface, I, Robot, even with an explicitly black star, reprises a white-savior story but with a black Jesus in the leading role. As Gabbard found in examining African Americans onscreen, whether minor or major, the goal of the African American is to help whites. It is true Smith does aid whites such as Dr. Calvin and, by extension, all of white society (Gabbard 2004, 156–159). However, there is no suggestion that Smith (though a Christ-like figure) is, in fact, “magical.” Moreover, unlike similar films, African Americans have prominent roles such as Chi McBride as Lieutenant John Bergin. I, Robot, then, does not conform to the magical negro stereotype. Like John Connor and Jesus Christ, Spooner is predestined to win his apocalyptic struggle but he does so using his muscular robot/human body and analytic skills. I, Robot is closer to the genre of the Western in reaffirming traditional gender roles even while offering a fantasy history of racial cooperation. Spooner’s purpose is to maintain order. While this aim is not racist in itself, it does have an odd racial dynamic. Whereas the black body is traditionally shown endangering the white female body here the white woman is endangered by the white robots. It is a black cyborg male that is needed to save her and everyone else. Also, Guthrie argues, “Spooner helps put down the mass robot insurrection, which ironically parallels fears of slave uprisings during America’s antebellum period” (2015, 52). Seen from this perspective, Smith is endorsing a criticism of black liberation. In conclusion, I, Robot can be said to represent a neoconservative understanding of race. Race is invisible in the film and does not exist in this future of America in 2035. The future America is treated as largely has done away with racial prejudice. While the rebellious robots are being taken away, there is the implied hope that just as Spooner has overcome his prejudices humanity and robots will evolve together peacefully. That this utopia may be highly fascistic and sexist is not questioned but applauded (Winkler 2017, 293). ANGEL: CORRUPTION AND MULTI-RACIALISM Discussing Angel requires a brief treatment of Buffy before proceeding to Gunn’s role on the television series. On Buffy, Angel (David Boreanaz) is a vampire cursed by gypsies to recall the evil acts of his darker self, Angelus,

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with the restoration of his soul. Angel, after aiding Buffy on various missions, concludes he cannot be a hero with her by his side and therefore moves to Los Angeles and starts a detective agency. The literature on Buffy and race is vast and therefore only some of it can be sampled for its relevance to our topic. As Gill (2004) notes, black characters on Buffy tended to have short life spans. Kendra, a Jamaican slayer, appears in a few episodes before being murdered. Similarly, Mr. Trick, a charismatic black vampire, also appears only a handful of episodes before dying. While the final season of Buffy did feature multiracial slayers including Asian and nonwhite Latinas and African Americans, their role was mainly as helpers. In contrast, Angel featured not just Gunn. But Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), a biracial Latina, Wesley, a bookish British wizard, and a demonic singer Lorne (Andrew Hallet) aid Angel. Similarly, while Buffy often had literal ugly, dark enemies in the form of demons, Angel’s opponents tended to be white, middle-class or rich elites. Likewise while Buffy sometimes used racial allegories in its stories this was more common on Angel. In a story in the first season, “The Ring,” Angel infiltrates a fight club where sadistic white brothers, the McNamaras, use enslaved demons to fight one another to the death while their matches are bet on for the human audience, which tellingly includes some African Americans. Angel himself is caught and enslaved and has to lead a slave uprising to shut the club down. But his primary opponents are the clients of the demonic law firm of Wolfram and Hart and the never-seen Senior Partners, whose aim is to make sure the apocalypse will occur by aiding allies such as the fightclub owners. In that episode (“The Ring”), colored demons are used as slave labor, and there is a racial metaphor as humans cheer on the demons fighting one another until Angel saves them. In certain ways, Angel did sometimes fall into the trope of the white-savior narrative (Kirkland 2012). The premiere episode of Season 2 (“Judgement”) has Angel aid a pregnant Mexican girl who is unable to defend herself. Angel, literally, takes on the role of a white knight fighting for the girl’s safety in a demonic jousting match—an almost perfect example of the white-savior narrative. Nevertheless the heroic mythology on Angel is not as focused on one hero alone. Gunn develops into a hero himself. However, unlike Spooner, he is not a mere black Christ figure. Nor is Gunn’s race as invisible as Spooner. Angel is set in the Los Angeles of the 1990s and 2000s, and while it does not explicitly reference the racial tensions of the city’s history it also does not ignore it either, as Angel encounters multicultural characters like Latino gang members, black police officers, and Asian lawyers routinely (“Five by Five,” “Billy”). Nevertheless the focus is on white-male heroism with one episode in



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which Angel is facing literal Nazi demons wanting to kill off inferior demons due to their obsession with purity. Unsurprisingly, it is only due to Angel and the sacrifice of a half-demon/half-human, Doyle, who has an Irish past and accent, that the Nazis are stopped. While evil is framed occurring among different races, until Gunn appears, the worst evil can only be overcome by white men.1 Angel’s encounter with Gunn is thus much more normal and common than a similar encounter with Buffy where racial minorities come from foreign countries (“Inca Mummy Girl”). In fact, when they first meet, Gunn disregards Angel for presuming he can help him and his street gang of demon fighters. He says defiantly: “I don’t need advice from a middle-class white dude” (“War Zone”). While Gunn is not racist toward Angel he is suspicious of him both because he is a vampire and an outsider in his neighborhood. Nevertheless Gunn agrees to help him on several missions. In one early mission, Angel needs to distract Wolfram and Hart’s security and Gunn eagerly agrees, bursting into the Wolfram and Hart lobby yelling: My God! They told me it was true, but I didn’t believe em. Damn, here it is. Evil white folks really do have a mecca. . . . Somebody get me a lawyer, because my civil rights have seriously been violated. Oh, I get it, y’all can cater to the demon . . . cater to the dead man . . . but what about the black man!? (“Blind Date”)

Obviously, the scene is meant to be funny on its terms, Gunn using a pun (dead man, black man). But some have argued that because Gunn is so violent in fighting demons he affirms certain racial stereotypes though he is consistently framed as a hero in his own right (Yarma 2016). Despite initial reluctance, Gunn eventually becomes a valuable member of Angel Investigations. Although Gunn’s usefulness is mainly in his physical prowess, like Angel, he is portrayed as a detective and is analytically sharp helping solve numerous cases. The Angel team grows closer together, and Gunn even has an interracial romance with Fred Burkle (Amy Acker), a girl they rescue from a demon dimension. Nevertheless, Gunn’s doubts about his usefulness persist. Despite initial reluctance, Gunn eventually becomes a valuable member of Angel Investigations. Although Gunn’s usefulness is mainly in his physical prowess he is also portrayed as analytically sharp. Yet racial bias if not outright racism remains in the background. When Angel’s former vampire lover, Darla (Julie Benz), frames Angel for muder, Detective Kate Lockley (Elisabeth Röhm), with whom Angel has had an on-and-off relationship, assumes he is guilty and goes to Angel Investigation’s new base of operations, the Hyperion hotel. Kate enters with a SWAT team (featuring one African American) but without a warrant. Wesley and Cordelia refuse to cooperate.

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She notices Gunn and after he introduces himself she says: “Let’s see some I.D., Charles” (“Dear Boy”). He complies and gives her his driver’s license. Given the context, Kate may simply be a dedicated officer, however her next question clearly implies racism. She asks Gunn: “Got any priors?” (“Dear Boy”). Gunn then responds: “I forget” (“Dear Boy”). Kate shows racism in two ways. One is that she never asks Wesley and Cordelia for their identification—nor did she ever ask if they have a history of “prior” arrests. Kate just assumes a black male will have a history of prior arrests. Secondly, Wesley is framed as white. But Cordelia is framed as nonwhite yet Kate accords her much more respect than Gunn. It is not just that Gunn is black but an urban black male who is hostile to the police. When it turns out he does a history of prior arrests (again, none of this is related to the investigation), she advises him to help turn Angel in. He scoffs in response: “I can see you’re looking out for me, Detective” (“Dear Boy”). Angel is thus much more aware of the reality of racial tensions in America, in general, and Los Angeles, specifically, than I, Robot. That blacks as a minority and the (usually) white police they encounter have hostile relations is just a given. That sometimes African Americans appear as officers or detectives on the show does not erase this larger problem of racism—even fascism—in how authorities monitor and repress black bodies. Racial antagonism is not a strong part of Gunn’s life, but it does present unique problems the other members of the team do not experience. In season 3, Gunn forms an interracial romance with Fred Burkle (Amy Acker), a girl they rescue from a demon dimension. Nevertheless, Gunn’s doubts about his usefulness persist. Later on in the same season, Angel miraculously has a son, Connor, through Darla. However, a bitter human enemy from his past, Holtz, whose family Angelus and Darla killed, is transported into the future and succeeds in kidnapping Connor. Connor returns and seeks to kill Angel. His return coincides with the group battling a powerful Beast. These various fights culminate with Connor being driven insane. Angel to save Connor makes a secret deal to have Angel Investigations absorbed by Wolfram and Hart in exchange for giving Connor a normal life and wiping away everyone’s memories of him. It is here at the beginning of the fifth and final season that Gunn is transformed into a cyborg. While each member finds an easy transition when they move to Wolfram and Hart—Fred takes over a science lab, Wesley is put in charge of research, and Lorne handles celebrity clients—Gunn alone feels lost. A liaison for the Senior Partners, a white woman called Eve—who is obviously nonhuman—goads Gunn into realizing his “potential” (“Conviction”). Like Angel, he makes his deal to have a “mind dump”—essentially making



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his mind a vast computer of stored information on both human law and demonic law. Enduring a torturous medical procedure with his chest exposed, sweating, and a large metal cap on his head, Gunn, painfully, gains knowledge of both human and demon law and uses it on their first major case at Wolfram and Hart. To David Buchbinder (2007), the change in Gunn demonstrates that the character is “whitened” as the show proceeds. In the beginning, he represents the “black” man explicitly (Buchbinder 2007, 233). While Buchbinder’s point is well made, the evidence bears out a more complex construction. On the one hand, Gunn it can be argued is “whitened” in an obvious sense using less slang, dressing up in fancy clothing, even singing show tunes after the mind dump. However, the construction is not as validating whiteness completely as one would expect because “white” Gunn also becomes corrupt and arrogant. The mind dump can be read as Gunn distancing himself from his ghetto past but also wanting power. This is confirmed by noting that whereas in seasons 1 to 3 some of Gunn’s associates, both good and bad, appear in minor roles only a few of Gunn’s old allies and/or friends appear in the final seasons (4 and 5). Not just Gunn’s ghetto past but virtually the ghettos in Los Angeles receive little focus near the end of the show. Angel thus works on two levels acknowledging the evils of racism and imperialism but also situating the heroes as needing to make tough individualistic choices. Even victims of fascist violence like Gunn are framed as sometimes failing to be as honorable as they should be when facing a crisis. According to Meyer: “Gunn . . . must continually struggle to prove himself as a worthy member of the team” (Quoted by Buchbinder 2007, 233). This is true to a point but the issue is to what degree Gunn internalizes lack of selfworth due to race or both being the only black member of the team as well as someone with a flawed, criminal past. Gunn believes his former (ghetto) self is insufficient and the mind dump makes him invaluable to Angel struggling to be a corporate CEO. Gunn begins to play devil’s advocate and tries to persuade Angel he made the right choice: [A]s CEO and president of Wolfram and Hart, you have just bankrupted a company that dumps raw demon waste into Santa Monica Bay, banished a clan of pyro warlocks into a hell dimension, and started a foster care programme for kids whose parents have been killed by vampires. Not bad for a day’s pay. (“The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco,” emphasis added)

Gunn has been corrupted by the power and now sees the cases they have in terms of pure pragmatism. Unlike Buffy or I, Robot, which rely mainly on

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the Christ myth, one can see parallels between Gunn and Dr. Faust who also traded his soul for knowledge. The change is moral as well as physical, with Gunn seeing the law firm he mocked as catering to white demons only as perhaps capable of being reformed. While Angel is also corrupted as the “Numero Cinco” episode shows he is feeling strong self-doubts about whether he can keep the deal. In contrast, Gunn repeatedly believes—or deludes—himself into thinking they can outwit Wolfram and Hart and use the power without sacrificing their humanity. African Americans were not typical Wolfram and Hart clients because they lacked power, and all the Senior Partners care about is power, yet Gunn maintains a utilitarian defense of the deal struck with them, arguing “We’ve been able to do some serious good while we’re here. Lives saved, disasters averted, with all our fingers and souls still attached. End of the day I’m thinking we made the right choice” (“Damages”). When Spike, a rival vampire Angel sired, comes to Wolfram and Hart, he upbraids the team for being naïve. Confronted by Wesley and Gunn for attempting to be a hero without official sanction, Spike notes how: “[A] place like that [Wolfram and Hart] doesn’t change . . . You sign on there, it changes you. Puts things in your head” (“Soul Purpose”). The dialogue is obvious a sly double entendre addressed to Gunn. While the mind dump does not give any intentional messages to Gunn, the implication is eevident that Gunn’s mind has indeed been changed. Though Spike’s critique is nonracial, the symbolic allegory is racial in that the cool, white character is now “black” (working on the street level to help people) whereas Gunn has adopted a “white” position of respectability of power and authority in a corporation. As with Spooner, the narrative takes on an arc of predestination. Gunn begins losing the power of the mind dump. He is told by the mysterious doctor who surgically altered him that if he is losing the mind dump then it is because this is what the Senior Partners intended. Panicking, Gunn wants another upgrade. The doctor will agree but only if Gunn—using his new position at the firm—will sign off on a package. Gunn signs the document and unwittingly lets in a sarcophagus that is examined by Fred. Fred dies from being exposed to the sarcophagus and is reborn as a demon goddess, Illyria. When Gunn’s role is discovered, he justifies himself, believing “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt” (“Shells”). But Wesley counters: “Nothing from Wolfram and Hart is ever free. You knew that.” But Gunn pleads: “I couldn’t go back to being just the muscle. I didn’t think it would be one of us” (“Shells”). The reasoning is chilling. Gunn does not deny that someone would be hurt by his signing the document and getting another mind dump. He merely assumed no one on team Angel would be hurt. But hurting those outside the group was justified.



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Angel tries to reassure Gunn that “Drogyn said the sarcophagus was preordained to be released. Nothing could have stopped it from arriving” (“Shells”). Gunn, however, accepts he did, in essence, kill Fred. Remorseful, Gunn joins Angel in a last-ditch effort to destroy Wolfram and Hart by destroying a small elite club of powerful demons, the Black Thorn. However, just before the final battle, Gunn revisits Anne and spends some time with her (“Not Fade Away”). He asks Anne whether she would still work at the shelter knowing her efforts and the corruption of human society would continue unaffected. Anne, coyly, refuses to answer and asks Gunn to help with some chores. He smiles and agrees. Gunn is given the assignment to kill off a demon masquerading as a politician, Senator Brucker. He succeeds and joins Spike, Angel, and Illyria in a final battle with Wolfram and Hart’s minions. But Gunn looks fatally injured. The screen fades to black just as the actual battle is about to begin. CONCLUSION In this analysis, I, Robot has been analyzed as presenting a neoconservative form of racial politics. America is pictured as mainly nonracist with race a minor factor in everyday life. While Angel can also be said to be within the liberal paradigm, it is much more self-critical and self-aware that white racism, even white fascism, is a real problem racial minorities in America face. Institutional discrimination is evidenced by how police officers like Kate operate or at a more global level how Wolfram and Hart try to control Los Angeles. Secondly, whereas the conspiracy Spooner faces is of robots against humans, the conspiracy of the final season of Angel is among humans—albeit orchestrated secretly by demons. Fantasy and gritty urban realities are mixed in Angel; but I, Robot turns almost into an outright fairy tale presenting a story where none of the heroes, neither the human or robots, die. In contrast, several heroes (Doyle, Cordelia, Fred, Wesley) do die on Angel and their deaths do not follow a simple racial or generic code. Gunn, subverting expectations, lives as a black man and triumphs over racist police in some episodes. But he also becomes corrupted. Since Angel is white and Gunn is black, race alone is not the main issue. Corruption as a theme traverses race. But Yerima argues that Angel, who is a mass murderer, is shown in a sympathetic light. Yet Gunn’s (admitted) careless action killing one white woman necessitates he redeems himself. Hence whiteness is validated but in a subtle way. This critique has some force but since whites are routinely shown to be evil whether in the form of Lillah, Eve, Hamilton, and Lindsey and others

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who work at Wolfram and Hart. But while these people are not sympathetic it is also the case that neither Angel nor any member of Angel Investigations bothers to try to shame them. But Gunn is forced to feel pain. Like Del Spooner, the death of white woman even when his responsibility is murky must make him feel guilty. Yerima notes, in addition, Gunn draws upon certain action-film clichés of the tough, sexy, ghetto street fighter (2016). On the one hand Gunn being framed as attractive is progression. On the other hand, episodes rarely show his intellectual abilities framing in traditional ways as the muscular but mentally dull black man. In contrast, Del Spooner in I, Robot is a near-perfect police detective whose flaws are small. Both heroes as myths do ask whether heroism is wholly biological or theological (Jowett 2009). Whereas I, Robot settles for a utopian message about race with a black police officer saving a white society, even one that has many fascistic and sexist elements (Winkler 293). But Angel ends with strong doubts that multiracial cooperation is possible. Angel shows even if the black male body is represented within the framework of white robots, dilemmas regarding racial differences will persist and presents a more realistic if grim picture of status of racial minorities in present-day America than I, Robot. Dilemmas of racial inequity will continue even as the black body becomes more cybnertic in the future. NOTE 1.  Given that Nazism is an ideology of Aryan supremacy it is unclear Angel’s heroism in that episode (“Hero”) is meant to be ironic and subversive (Angel as a human was Irish) or plays into the stereotype that whites (alone) defeated the Nazis, forgetting the contributions of many nonwhites to the anti-Nazi cause.

WORKS CITED “Billy,” Angel: Third Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter, J. August Richards. Directed by David Grossman. Written by Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, and Jeffrey Bell. Episode 6. October 2001. “Blind Date,” Angel: First Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter, J. August Richards. Directed by Thomas Wright. Written by David Greenwalt, Jeannine Renshaw, and Joss Whedon. Episode 21. WB. May 2000. Bogle, Donald. 1998. Toms, Coons Mulattoes Mammies & Bucks (5th ed.). New York: Bantam Books. Brayton, Sean. 2008. “The Post-White Imaginary in Alex Proyas’s I, Robot.” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 104: 72–87.



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Buchbinder, David. 2007. “Passing Strange: Queering Whiteness in Joss Whedon’s Angel.” In White Matters, edited by Susan Petrilli, 229–235. Rome: Athanor. “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco,” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Jeffrey Bell. Written by David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon. Episode 6. WB. November 2003. “Conviction,” Angel: Fifth Season. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Joss Whedon. Written by David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon. Episode 1. WB. October 2003. “Damages.” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Jefferson Kibbee. Written by Drew Goddard, David Greenwalt, Steven S. DeKnight and Joss Whedon. Episode 11. WB. January 2004. “Dear Boy.” Angel: Second Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by David Greenwalt. Written by David Greenwalt, Mere Smith, and Joss Whedon. Episode 5. WB. October 2000. “Five by Five,” Angel: First Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by James Contner. Written by Drew Goddard, David Greenwalt, and Jim Kouf. Episode 18. WB. April 2000. Gabbard, Krin. 2004. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture, New Brunswick (NJ), Rutgers University Press. Gavaler, Chris. 2018. Superhero Comics. New York: Bloomsbury. Gill, Candra K. 2004. “Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First: Dynamics of Race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, edited by Emily Pohl-Weary, 39–55. Toronto: Sumach, 2004. Guthrie, Ricardo. 2016. “The Real Ghosts in the Machine: Afrofuturism and the Haunting of Racial Space in I, Robot and DETROPIA.” In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Asro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, 45–60. Lexington. Hart, William. 2015. “Racebending: Race, Adaptation, and the Films: I, Robot and I Am Legend.” In The Fantastic Made Visible: Essays on the Adaptation of Science Fiction and Fantasy from Page to Screen, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Ace G. Pilkington, 207–222. Jefferson: McFarland. Jowett, Lorna. 2009. ”Plastic Fantastic? Genre and Science/Technology/Magic in Angel.” In Channeling the Future: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 167–182. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. “Judgment.” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD. Episode 1. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Michael Lange. Written by David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon. WB. September 2000. Kirkland, Ewan. 2012. “Whiteness, Vampires and Humanity in Contemporary Film and Television.” In The Modern Vampire and Human Identity, edited by Deborah Mutch, 93–110. New York: Palgrave. Nama, Adilifu. 2003. “More Symbol than Substance: African American Representation in Network Television Dramas.” Race and Society 6, no. 1: 21–38. Nilsen, Sarah. 2008. “White Soul: The ‘Magical Negro.’” In The Films of Stephen King, edited by Tony Magistrale, 129–140. New York: Palgrave.

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“Not Fade Away,” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Jeffrey Bell. Written by Joss Whedon. Episode 22. WB. May 2004. O’Connell, Sean. 2017. ”Why The Gunslinger’s Race Doesn’t Matter, According To Stephen King.” Cinemablend, August 3. https://www.cinemablend.com/ news/1687760/why-the-gunslingers-race-doesnt-matter-according-to-stephenking. Proyas, Alex, dir. 2004. I, Robot. 20th Century Fox Film Corp. “The Ring,” Angel: First Season, DVD. Episode 16. Performed by David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter. Directed by Nick Marck. Written by Howard Gordon. WB. February 2000. “Shells,” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD. Episode 16. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by Steven S. DeKnight and Joss Whedon. Written by Joss Whedon. WB. March 2004. “Soul Purpose,” Angel: Fifth Season, DVD, Episode 10. Performed by David Boreanaz, J. August Richards. Directed by David Boreanz. Written by David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon. WB. January 2004. Trussel, Richard C. 2016. “I, Robot: You Gotta Have Heart,” Journal of Religion & Film 9, no. 2 (October). “War Zone,” Angel: First Season, DVD. Episode 19. Performed by David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter, J. August Richards. Directed by David Straiton. Written by Gary Campbell and Joss Whedon. WB. May 2000. Winkler, Martin. 2017. Classical Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yerima, Adam Kem. 2016. “Saving Innocents: Tracing The Human Monster Hunter’s Hetero-Normative Agenda From The 1970s to Today.” Wayne State University.

Chapter Ten

On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather The Transhumanist Gynoid Performativity of Janelle Monáe Kwasu D. Tembo Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Metropolis Saga (2003–present) has many revered precedents to follow. From the work of Sun Ra, Parliament, Funkadelic, Afrika Bambaataa, Warp 9, Erykah Badu, and Monáe’s contemporaries including Flying Lotus, Ras G, and FKA Twigs, the singer-songwriter’s current five part saga is indebted to Afrofuturist themes of alienation, miscegenation, radical Otherness, and the Transhumanist teloi of onto-existential and affective reterritiorialization of one’s being and the body. What makes Monáe’s (currently) five-part (called Suites) Saga so compelling is the focus with which she has pursued the overarching extended concept and, simultaneously, how the aegis of the archandroid embodied by her alter ego Cindi Mayweather does not preclude sonic and genre development and change within the Saga itself. Referring primarily to the first five Suites of Monae’s Saga, from Suite 0: The Audition (2003) to Suite V: The Electric Lady (2013) as a case study, this essay will explore how contemporary Afrofuturist music is instrumental not only in the presentation of science fictional concepts and post or Transhumanist aesthetics within typically black entertainment and genres thereof, but also in a literal presentation of black Transhumanist performance. As an analytical framework, this paper will focus on Monáe’s lyrics, liner notes, music videos, and sonic aspects of the Saga in conjunction with its latent themes of alternate times (time travel) as escapism, the onto-existentialism of class, gender, and the exploitation of both, nostalgia, and techno-organic amorousness/sexuality as a means of exploring how Monáe not only presents the concept of black transhumansim as performance, but how that performance is intimately tied to both subjective dualism and becoming. In so doing, this paper seeks to explore the following questions: What does Monáe’s gynoid saga achieve, if anything at all, for her personally, for sci fi, for extradiegetic culture more broadly? 193

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METROPOLIS: INTRODUCTION In order for a thing to be said to be able to become, here understood as the ability to be changed and to change itself, it first has to begin. The origins of Cindi Mayweather are inextricable from those of Janelle Monáe, both emerging from the same personal and artistic ethic. In an interview for Paste with Geoffrey Himes (2013), Monáe states: “I want to be clear, when I’m talking about the android, I’m not talking about an avant-garde art concept or a science-fiction fantasy; I’m talking about the ‘other’: women, the negroid, the queer, the untouchable, the marginalized, the oppressed” (Monae qtd. in Himes 2013). This ethic is crystallized in the figure of Cindi Mayweather, the central character of Monáe’s first three albums, namely, the Metropolis EP (2008), The ArchAndroid (2010), and The Electric Lady (2013). On these and more current releases like Dirty Computer (2018), Monae creates a multiplicity of political, narrative, and audio-visual worlds, each precipitating, influencing, and reacting to the other. The diegesis she creates is set in the year 2719 in a city named Metropolis. Cindi, a gynoid messiah living in an android ghetto called Slop City, flees from the clandestine machinations of a sinister secret society called The Great Divide who seek to capture, punish, and destroy her for her transgressive and pseudo-revolutionary act of falling in love with a human man, Anthony Greendown. Describing the science fictional milieu, Monáe states that in Slop City, you have a lot of androids. The community is very supportive, like any other ghetto. They can be working in stores; they can be working in factories. You have people working at the post office and people delivering newspapers, only the newspaper is a chip. The automobiles in Slop City are retro-futuristic; a car may look like 1967 Chevy but the wheels are floating. When it drove around Metropolis, it was brand new, but now it’s a used model in Slop City. The architecture is not cutting edge, because they don’t have the advanced technology that the humans have in Metropolis, so they have dilapidated buildings, very dystopian. It’s like Quindaro Boulevard in Kansas City; people are using drugs and selling drugs. You see people on the street corner rolling dice. (Monae qtd. in Himes 2013)

The latent ethos, I argue, in this wide-reaching bricolage of a story world, is one of self (re)creation, or, that self-dramatization also represents a means of self-(re)recreation. As Himes notes, Quindaro Boulevard alludes to Monáe’s upbringing in the African American section of Kansas City called Wyandotte County (or locally as the Dot). Living with her grandmother and raised by her mother, a janitor, her biological father, a refuse disposal man, and her stepfather, a mailman, Monáe found herself on the downside of advantage



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in various ways from an early age. The Metropolis Saga, even at a cursory glance, represents Monae’s attempt at self-dramatization not only to escape the socioeconomic, political, and cultural hardships she experienced in Kansas, but also to find and bring together her disparate interests in quintessentially “non-black” modes of artistic and conceptual expression. Diffusing her feelings of Otherness through music and visual art, from Prince to The Twilight Zone, Monáe’s youthful and formative forays into hybridity, play, and intersectionality allowed her to (re)create herself beyond herself, through multiple worlds and times. Monáe notes that she was “very intrigued by the unknown and by the idea of altering the future,” going on to further suggest that “when you see that there are so many different possibilities for the future, you don’t feel limited to one path. I used to write short stories about the future, and I found I loved being able to tap into my imagination” (Monae qtd. in Himes 2013). Mayweather reflects this self-same will to (re)creation. On ‘The March of the Wolfmasters,’ a 28th Century Television broadcaster announces Good morning cy-boys and cyber girls. I am happy to announce we have a starcrossed winner in today’s heartbreak sweepstakes. Android Number 57821, otherwise known as Cindi Mayweather, has fallen desperately in love with a human named Anthony Greendown. And you know the rules: she is now scheduled for immediate disassembly. Bounty hunters, you can find her in the Neon Valley Street District on the fourth floor at the Leopard Plaza apartment complex. The Droid Control Marshals are full of fun rules today: no phasers, only chain-saws and electro-daggers. (Monáe 2008)

The world of 2719 Monáe imagines for her gynoid diegetic counterpart is not a utopia, but a dystopia, riddled with inequality, onto-existential discrimination, longing, and heartache. In this sense, the future does not hold nor deliver on any promise of radical emancipation, personal or otherwise, it may seem to ostensibly enunciate. Despite being not only a prototype Alpha Platinum 9000 model, and the gynoid messiah known as the ArchAndroid, Mayweather is subjugated and exploited, having her being circumscribed by all-too-familiar segregative Jim Crow–inflected laws determining what she is, can do, with whom, how, and where—from work to love. This, ostensibly, is what makes her secret love affair with Greendown appear like a revolutionary act of resistance against the manacles placed on gynoid, and by extension nonhuman, being. The lovers are star-crossed, as radical an enjoining as the self with the Other, the son of a global millionaire, Monáe describes Greendown as aware of the abject suffering occurring in Slop City. The relationship between Greendown and Cindi, while indeed amorous, is based on honesty and open discussion. This manifests in various instances in which Cindi di-

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rectly questions Greendown’s privilege, demanding direct and incisive action for the gentleman to participate and in and further the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural struggles of the community. It is this candor and clarity of conviction that forms the basis of Greendown’s attraction to Cindi, while Greendown’s commitment not only to her but also her community forms the basis of Cindi’s attraction toward Greendown. As such, the love between the cyborg and the gentleman is in this way predicated on a shared resistance against the repressive and exploitative practises of capitalism. Monáe’s (re)appropriation of the historically “nonblack” genres and aesthetics such as rock, electronica, MGM musical orchestration, cabaret and folk music on her followup album, The ArchAndroid, which allowed her to trouble numerous ideological delineations. In an interview with The Quietus (2010), Monae states: “I learned to embrace things that make me unique even if they make me uncomfortable sometimes” (Monáe qtd. in Calvert 2010). On The ArchAndroid, self-exploration, personal and conceptual (re)assemblage, and self-dramatization come together in their most cohesive way for the first time. In her interview for the Literature Resource Center (2010), Monáe describes the ArchAndroid as a “project [that] dealt with a lot of self-realization” and further describing that the myriad sonic style, tone, and texture switches and play as symptomatic of “the characters in ‘Metropolis’ [. . .] moving through me and I had to expose them” (Monáe, Literature Resource Center, 2010). Being inspired by eclectic influences ranging from “the blue of Luke’s lightsaber” to “the atomic bombs in Muhammad Ali’s fists,” The ArchAndroid, unlike Metropolis is concisely intradiegetic (Monáe 2010). In the album notes, Monáe uses the premise of the album to draw together Mayweather’s story world and Monáe’s, and by extension the listener/viewer’s, extradiegetic world. The Vice Chancellor of the fictional asylum/facility the Palace of the Dogs Art Asylum, describe Monáe as an inmate claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2719. She also attests to her DNA having been stolen and used to create a clone cyborg-cum-gynoid rebel messiah named Cindi Mayweather. Sonically, and in terms of general aesthetic, Monáe influences here are equally, if not more, myriad. In “Janelle Monáe: Sister From Another Planet” (2010), Dorian Lynsky describes The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) as “an 18-song opus [. . . that] recalls Prince, OutKast, Erykah Badu, James Brown, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Bernard Herrmann, Funkadelic and the Incredible String Band, and establishes its creator as the most compelling new character in pop” (Lynsky 2010). While initially the range of Monae’s self-dramatization is limited to Mayweather, even within said character are contained multitudinous roles and modes of being. She is a gynoid, Greendown’s lover, a criminal and fugitive, noted Slop City singer known as The Electric Lady, and lastly, the prophesied



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gynoid messiah/revolutionary leader the ArchAndroid. This multiplicity of self is an exaggeration of the numerous extradiegetic roles Monáe plays in her life. As Himes notes, “like Cindi, Monáe has to juggle a lot of roles as well: child of Quindaro Boulevard, female pop star, science-fiction tale-spinner, political activist, and well-guarded, 27-year-old private person. She has had to be proactive about defining each of those roles for herself, because there were so many folks ready to define them for her” (Himes 2013). The similitude shared between Monáe and Mayweather, despite their different diegetic modalities, is the same. Both are popular entertainers, rebels, heroes, and targets. But as Himes notes, for the former, “her enemies won’t be coming with electro-daggers; they’ll be coming with bright lights and cameras, with chequebooks and pens ready to scribble out big numbers if she’ll downplay the politics, focus her sound more for black radio or just put on a short skirt” (Himes 2013). Regardless of whether one feels that Monáe’s multi album and multimedia experimentation and exploration into politicoartistic self-dramatization may boarder on self-aggrandizement, from her statements in Dorian Lynsky’s “Janelle Monáe: Sister From Another Planet” (2010), it is clear that the Mayweatherian responsibility of deliverance and liberation is something Monáe takes very seriously: “I feel like I do have a responsibility to the community. The music that we create is to help free their minds and, whenever they feel oppressed, to keep them uplifted. We want the music and the vision that we have to be their choice of drug, if you will. So we need a manifesto. If we want to stay on message, we have to believe in what we’re fighting for, and we do” (Monáe qtd. in Lynsky 2010). MANY MOONS: MONAE AND AFROFUTURISM In terms of genuflection to art as a pathway to self-actualization, in his article “Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism” (2010) John Calvert offers an insightful analysis of Monáe’s rise to prominence as a contemporary Afrofuturist: not since RZA’s spirit-world Staten Island has black music produced such a fully-realized example of therapy-by-fantasy as that contained on the cinematic The Archandroid. While Santigold and MIA travel the world plastically atop their magic mixing desk, Monáe only has to relocate to her so-called “Palace Of The Dogs” (a kind of Valhalla for black artists) to assume her multifarious alter-ego. The resultant Afrofuturist “E-motion picture” that underpins her debut is intrinsic to Monáe’s rightful claim as an auteurist pop star with real import. She’s an agent of change, and we’re not just talking robot emancipation here” (Calvert 2010).

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The genesis of Monáe’s Mayweather and Metropolitan narrative, conceptual, and aesthetic setting are indebted almost entirely to her exposure to Fritz Lang’s 1927 German Expressionist film Metropolis, which Monáe describes as follows: I had never watched a silent movie before and I was struck by the black-andwhite cinematography and the 1927 set design. I could see how it inspired so many movies that came later. But most of all, it had a big idea. That’s what I’m about—not money, not fame, but ideas that can change the world. I was struck by the parallels between the movie and my own life—the conflict between the haves and have-nots. That quote in the film about the heart being the mediator between the mind and the hand, that inspired me so much. That’s what I wanted to devote myself to, to being a mediator. (Monáe qtd. in Himes 2013)

Monáe’s Afrofuturism and indeed science fictional appreciation is informed by not only by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but also the novels of Isaac Asimov and Octavia E. Butler, and the speculative work of futurist Ray Kurtzweil. This is consistent with other statements she has made in other interviews concerning the ArchAndroid , such as one given for “Janelle Monáe: Dreaming In Science Fiction” (2010) in which she states “I believe that imagination inspires nations. It’s something that I live by. And I’ve always been a lover of Walter E. Disney, Salvador Dali, surrealism, Octavia Butler, you know, science fiction in general” (Monáe, Literature Resource Center, 2010). I would go as far as to describe her Afrofuturism as canon or traditional, where Mayweather may be seen as the most recent scion of preceding Afrofuturistic pioneers including George Clinton and Sun Ra, both of which used science fiction as a conceptual and allegorical aesthetic and narrative mode to explore, reclaim, countermand, and disseminate the various issues and debates surrounding the African American experience. But what does Afrofuturism mean in this non-artistic, analytical context? Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim offer a helpful definition in their essay “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism” (2013), namely that Afrofuturism can be defined as “African American cultural production and political theory that imagine less constrained black subjectivity in the future and that produce a profound critique of current social, racial, and economic orders” (English and Kim 217). This influence is clear when Monáe states, “The android represents a new form of the Other. And I believe we’re going to be living in a world of androids by 2029. How will we all get along? Will we treat the android humanely? What type of society will it be when we’re integrated? I’ve felt like the Other at certain points in my life. I felt like it was a universal language that we could all understand” (Monáe qtd. in Lynsky 2010).



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The central device Monáe uses in Mayweather, or more accurately builds her out of, is an interesting, complex, and dare I say genius concept, namely a black gynoid. I describe Monáe’s choice here is such laudatory terms because it centralizes, disseminates, and turns into politico-artistic praxis the concept of what I like to call a double Other in the form of a black cyborg, but more specifically, black gynoid (cyborg/machine woman). The figure of the black gynoid as a double Other and confluence of onto-existential (that is physical) and cultural (racial) transgressions manifests both conceptually and sonically in Monáe’s work. According to Calvert, the interpolation of cutting edge production machines and futuristic styles (i.e the “non-human”)” and “her adherence to the likes of James Brown and more ripened forms (i.e the “human”)” to form an “inexplicable mashup—the call-and-response between past and future—is what distinguishes [Monae as a bone fide] Afrofuturist from your garden-variety “black musician into sci-fi” and brings to the fore perceptions that African-Americans have always symbolically been human and nonhuman. (Calvert 2010)

The latent assumption here is that in bringing together these references, issues, and debates concerning the past, the present, and the future, a new type of being, a specifically cyborg mode of being that, amongst other things, can engender and promulgate a resistance to any sort of involuntary dialectic governing life and/or art. However, there can be a danger in the will to erasure and re-creation at the heart of Afrofuturist thinking and praxis. As Calvert notes, if you aren’t human neither can you be “subhuman” or “nonhuman,” common descriptions in civilised societies for ‘the other’ i.e. the marginalized ethnic classes, the impoverished and the homosexuals—the “semiotic ghosts,” as William Gibson saw it. It is part of a rejection of “black humanist” culture in favour of a new subjectivity which jettisons the traditional image of “black bodies in pain” expressed in blues and soul. Thus, if you’re “intergalactic funkadelic” (as George Clinton liked to put it), no longer is “the self” defined reactively by the freedom struggle against white oppressors, who are allowed a presence by inference and thus are free to over-determine African-American culture. (Calvert 2010)

The key to the ensuring the maximal artistic expression and political impact of the double Other, the black gynoid, relies of Monáe’s performativity. Through her own personal becoming, as well as through the becoming of Mayweather which is inextricable from the former, Monáe turns the concept of the double Other into praxis by embodying it, giving her various interpretations and critiques of history and the future through multiple coextensive personalities,

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as well as about those multiple personalities produced and circumscribed within history, the exigency of bodily presence. In “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s ‘Cold War’“ (2011), Shana L. Redmond states that “the lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended are often replayed and re-imagined in and through performance, and black women in particular have a tradition of representing and resisting the conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black body; black women’s performance traditions have centralized the body as evidence and epistemology” (Redmond 393–4). In this way, Monáe’s work is as reflexive of the numerous injunctions and interstices called forth by the figure of the double Other, the black gynoid, in bringing together (re)presentation, positionality, performance and the progressive and restorative ethic that the black female body, mechanical, organic, or both, is a worthwhile and powerful site of political, cultural, and metaphysical value. This postmodern ethic draws the aesthetic, critical, and political gaze toward binary distinctions such as past/present, inside/outside, and/or black/white that, if left unexamined, indemnify praxes of pernicious exploitation and commodification that subaltern or Other bodies are often historically freighted with (Lillvis 58). THE PARADOXICAL DOUBLE-BIND OF THE DOUBLE OTHER AND THE FAILURE OF THE GYNOID MESSIAH The cyborg in Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1983), is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (Haraway 2190). Haraway’s insights into onto-existential hybridity and the cross-pollinations of the known and unknown that trouble the ancient binary of self/Other have since developed into their own school of thought with multidisciplinary acolytes and equally polyvalent interdisciplinary applications. That said, the ethos, that of radical play, (re)encounter with the Other, and the disruption/destruction of binaries of all kinds still hold sway. For example, in Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1999), Anne Marie Balsamo states that the term “cyborg […] usually describes a humanmachine coupling, most often a man-machine hybrid [whereby] cyborgs are alternately labelled “androids,” “replicants,” or “bionic humans.” Whatever label they attract, the cyborg serves not only as the focal figure of the massmediated popular culture of American techno-science, but also as the figuration of posthuman identity in postmodernity” (Balsamo 18). Similarly, in “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research” (1995), Jennifer



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Gonzalez describes the pervasiveness of the concept of the cyborg in both diegetic and extradiegetic contemporary Occidental sociopolitics and culture when she states that one can consider any body a cyborg body that is both its own agent and subject to the power of other agencies [. . .] an organic cyborg can be defines as a monster of multiple species, whereas a mechanical cyborg can be considered a techno-human amalgamation (there are also conceivable overlaps of these domains) [. . .] both types of cyborgs, which appear frequently in Western visual culture, are metaphors for a third kind of cyborg—a cyborg consciousness. (Gonzales, 58–9)

By these definitions, it would seem that along with the ethos described above, the Harawayean cyborg in conceptually and practically inclined toward radical sociopolitical and philosophical emancipation. At the core of the onto-existential liminality of the half/double Being of the cyborg, resides, from a Harawayean perspective, a real revolutionary potential; a space of heterogeneity and anthropological, technological, biological, and philosophical dynamism in uncertainty. At the heart of the Harawayean cyborg is an inherent sense of hybridity and liminality which provide actionable alternative territories or posthuman subjectivities that effectively trouble prevailing Western heteronormative ideologies and praxes of exploitation. In this way, the cyborg presents itself as an effective means of resistance against holdovers of phallogocentric traditions inherent in the idea of the sovereignty of absolute dualisms including traditions of androcentric capitalism, progress, self-reproduction through the Other, and the exploitation of nature as a resource in the reproduction of culture, and the dialectical hierarchies that arrange and govern them. Far from being purely academic, the inherent radical alterity announced by the figure of the cyborg and, by extension Monáe’s double Other, the black gynoid, is daunting, exciting, and terrible because it dietetically presents radical socioeconomic, biological, scientific, and philosophical implications that aid in speculating on alternative ways of extradiegetic being. It would seem here that there is a certain affinity between the strategy and phenomena described by Haraway and extropianism and transhumanism. Extrope or Extropian(ism) refers to a set of scientific and ethical principles which focus on an approach to life that seeks to improve the human condition through the careful and ethical application of scientific and technological means. The extropian ethic is predicated on a technological constituent whereby extropian optimism and technocentric ethic suggest that the accelerated self-transformation of humanity to posthumanity is not nor will not only be technologically possible but is and will be a telos to be

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actively and joyously pursued. “Posthuman” is a term used by transhumanists to refer to what humanity could become if it were to succeed in using technology, hardware (for faster more durable bodies) and wetware (for improved psycho-emotional functions, including the transfer of consciousness between bodies), to overcome the limitations of the human condition. Indeed, the speculative, non-linear, fragmentary, and often oblique world of Metropolis is spared making careful, clear, and concise delineations regarding what a posthuman might be, do, or think. That said, within the broad extropian ethos, the concept of “posthuman” can be contrasted with ‘human.” As such, posthumans could be described, broadly, as human beings, who through the ethical application of science and technology, would be able to overcome biological, neurological, and psychological imperatives that developed over thousands of years of evolutionary processes. Here, posthumans would, speculatively, be able to configure all aspects of their onto-existential conditions, from the nature of their physical form and its function, including aging and perhaps even death, their psycho-emotional responses to phenomena and stimuli, and cognitive faculties including data processing and transmission that exceed human models heretofore experienced and understood. Transhumanists, extropians and futurists posit that genetic engineering, neural computer integration, biomedicine and nanobiotechnology, regenerative medicine, and the cognitive sciences will be some of the techno-biological approaches instrumental in achieving the aforementioned transhumanist goals. Such thinkers, some of which are instrumental in Monáe’s own Afrofuturistic self-(re)imagining, and texts in the field include, but are not limited to, Max More (Principles of Extropy Version 3.11, 2003 and Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought, 1990); Teilhard de Chardin (The Future of Man, 1959); FM-2030, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (Woman, Year 2000 1972); Robert Ettinger (Man into Superman 1972); Damien Broderick (The Judas Mandala 1982); Natasha Vita-More (“TransArt,” 1982); Robert Pepperell (Post-Human Condition 1997); and Ray Kurzeil (Human 2.0, 2003) One of the central problems concerning the figure of the cyborg as emblematic of some emancipatory future or ethic of revolutionary futurity is the fact that the cyborg does not ensure that the values and ideology of humanistic discourse have been destroyed. As John Muckelbauer and Debra Hawhee note in “Posthuman Rhetorics: ‘It’s the Future, Pikul’” (2000), the cyborg is both dangerous and paradoxical because in positing ideas of posthuman embodiedness and subjectivity, even if this myth is reinscribed into humanistic dialectics, the cyborg neither returns “us to the category of the human” nor does it “function as a refusal either of that category either” (Muckelbauer &



On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather 203

Hawhee, 769). Similarly, in Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (2007), Sherryl Vint cautions against employing the cyborg as an archon of abstract futurity or futurism, stating that we should not see the cyborg as a “technologized super-subject as an end in itself” but as a subject or subjects that “must continue to live in a material world of other subjects and ethical responsibilities” (Vint 183). Halberstam and Livingston also take up this circumspect position in Posthuman Bodies (1997) suggesting that “the posthuman does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human; it does not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it participates in re-distributions of difference and identity” (Halberstam & Livingston, 10). Despite these cautions, and perhaps naively I hold that the Harawayean cyborg should not be taken as a nihilistic symbol, but as, above all else, a (re) creative one. Haraway makes it clear that the alternative modes of being and subjectivity intimated by the cyborg are not cynical or faithless, that is, “some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying “man” by the “machine” or “meaningful political action by the text” (Haraway 2194). For Haraway, the central question concerning cyborgs is, therefore, who or what cyborgs will be. Where, then, does the Harawayean cyborg and Monáe’s double Other, the black gynoid Mayweather figure into the above posthuman configurations? What does Mayweather’s story reveal about Monáe’s understanding and speculative conclusions about the potentials and pitfalls thereof? Firstly, both Monáe and Mayweather are audio-visually coded as black and female while seemingly moving beyond the remit of quintessential or heteronormative programs of femininity, be it the former’s sartorial aesthetic or the latter’s onto-existential condition of being techno-organic. It would seem then that through the sporadic narrative of Mayweather, the double Other engine of Monáe’s own self-(re)creation, that the latter has somehow dodged the laserbeams of ossified binarism just as Haraway’s cyborg does. Her flux is key. The narrative flux and nonlinearity, the simultaneously well considered detail of the Metropolitan world, it’s received influenced bricolage into a diegetic Saga whose narrative flow and stability sometimes register as unstable and/or ad hoc allows for interesting conceptual fluxes to occur. The chiefest among these relates to the Harawayean ethic of countermanding and overcoming racial, cultural, and gender binaries and stagnant identities, and an artistically and cultural effective means to engender identarian contingency and fluidity in both herself and the listener/viewer. This is precisely what the ArchAndroid and her maker, Monáe herself, seek to achieve within and across their respective diegetic contexts. English and Kim note how this fluxity manifests, quite radically, in the aesthetic choices Monáe makes in the official video for

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the single “Many Moons” (2010) in which Mayweather is shown to be able to, with the flip of a switch, transform from white—a kind of inhuman, robotic ultra-whiteness— to human-seeming black. She then takes the stage to perform her cybersoul as part of an android-auction/fashion show, where she garners immense bids from a motley collection of creepy, futuristic spectators. This remarkable [. . .] transformation and subsequent performance correspond well to an ironic awareness of the monstrousness of racial constructions and racialized economies of desire, including within the music industry (some of the bidding spectators are played by Monáe’s musical collaborators; for example, Deep Cotton). However, Monáe’s android is also analogized in this video to a quite specific identity—not only a fashion model but also a black female slave on the auction block. (English and Kim 222)

Based on English and Kim’s insight, here we come to what I’m calling the double bind Mayweather, and by extension Monáe, encounter, dietetically and extradiegetically, in the past, present, and future. Based on the aesthetic and narrative development and denouement of the revolutionary impetus that was so scintillating at the burgeoning stages of Monáe’s career and Mayweather’s criminal career, the story of Cindi Mayweather, as it currently exists heretofore, appears to stand as surety against the emancipatory and revolutionary aptitude of the figure of the cyborg, the gynoid, and the multimodal/media praxes of cyborg art. It would seem that radical contingency and identarian fluidity cannot be sustained in any time or place built on binary dialectics. In this sense, Mayweather’s story latently suggests that the future is not necessarily coextensive with freedom, nor is the unknown with utopia, that “There is no postrace or postgender either now or in the 2719 world of androids” (English and Kim 222–223). Interestingly, even in the idea of the emancipatory potential of the figure of the cyborg Monáe pursues the notion of flux and uncertainty to its radical conclusions and does not prevaricate when confronted with the possibility that though the cyborg latently whispers “escape,” that in this or any world orbiting any moon, there can be no escape. As English and Kim note, the “Many Moons” video concludes with an ambiguous elevation of the gynoid that initially can be read as emancipatory but ends with a foreboding sense of a trap in the service of deactivation and death. In this sense, Cindi Mayweather, whose very name combines sunny spring and the possibility of death (she “may” or may not “weather” her trials), similarly combines the notion of freedom achieved through the tech- nological with the notion of robot as the ultimate, malleable “other,” perpetually subject to domination and to fetishization within commodity culture and to reinsertion into familiar social



On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather 205

categories and identities, from gentlewoman equestrian to bride, as in the “Many Moons” video. Yet even as she expresses skepticism about the postracial, the postgender, and the posthuman as avenues to freedom, Monáe/Mayweather tempers that pessimism with optimism regarding the potentialities of the technological. (English and Kim 222–223)

The most pressing question here is whether or not this ostensibly radical scepticism and yet play within and because of it is intentional on Monáe’s part. In the last instance, it does latently speak to a sense that Monáe is aware of the limits and potentials of technology and its role in late capitalist consumerism and commodification. This skepticism in play and play of skepticism suggests that Monáe is aware that a technologized future in the mode envisioned from Lang to Ra does not demarcate the emergence of a utopian postcapitalist world in which love, creativity, tolerance, and self-(re)discovery, aided and intensified by technology, are universal laws and praxiological modes of being. In fact, Monáe’s career, which itself is inextricable from her attempts at self-(re)creation, benefits directly from her conscious participation therein. As a direct result, Monáe’s formal reiteration of her technologized identity through frequent voice modulation has its parallel in the commodification of her person. With the wide array of android personas being auctioned in the “Many Moons” video, from “Cindi Mayweather” to “Jane Lee”to “Jahnny Money,” Monâe (a homonym for money in this context) makes a striking statement that the exploitative nature of commodity culture is both inevitable and inescapable; her cyberpersons are the very products of such a culture: “I’m a product of metal, product of the man,” she sings on Metropolis’s “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!” (English and Kim 223–224)

This paradox, of resisting the “Machine” and acquiescing to it by basing your entire oeuvre on one, by becoming one, is central to Monáe’s conceptualization and presentation of Mayweather. This state of paradoxical tension is not limited to the digenesis of the music Monáe creates. In listening/watching, the audience is drawn into this tension. On the one hand, she/he identifies with Mayweather and her struggle for freedom, love, and self-expression. Easy and interesting to look at/listen to, Monáe makes Mayweather’s revolution an attractive and rewarding one and therefore easy to endorse. Even in the saturnine sociopolitical setting of Monáe’s Metropolis, the listener/viewer can find numerous artistico-political affirmations in and through Mayweather, and her mediation of the audience’s present and their individual and collective anxieties/hopes for the future. In so doing, Mayweather also embodies the audience’s distrust in the dehumanizing and subjugative potential and dystopian outcomes thereof or unbridled techno-capitalism. On the other hand,

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this entire Saga, its insights into Afrofuturism, artistico-political praxis, and the successes and failures of an ethic of self-(re)creation are tributary, or at least subtended, by the media industrial complex and state apparatuses of late capitalism, despite her vociferous affirmations about art and politics. CONCLUSION While indeed important, scholarship on Monáe has disproportionately focused on drawing parallels between her Saga and those works of black science fiction artists, writers, and musicians forming the corpus or canon of contemporary Afrofuturism at the expense of explicating and theorizing how Monáe interpolates, performs, adds to, criticizes and engages with the concerns of the tradition beyond superficial similitude. I contend that this is especially particular to discussions of precisely what it is that Monáe’s conceptualization and (re)presentation of Cindi Mayweather achieves. Put differently, what is it that Mayweather, as a gynoid, as a black gynoid and therefore double Other, achieve within, at first, the very context of her condition? Mayweather is the central figure of the Saga. Ostensibly, the entire narrative, despite its moments of non-linear vagueness, is predicated on an unwavering ethic of self-(re)creation, becoming, and personal and political revolution. As the central figure of representation regarding the emancipatory goals, aspirations, and potentials of the other, the liminal, subaltern and/ or abject, Mayweather can be described as an interesting case at the epicenter of a disarrayed narrative whose non-linearity and fragmentariness risk the revolutionary potential of the music itself and the narrative it sustains registering, at least, as vague narrativization of a political art strategy of self-(re) creation and non-conformity. At most, an abstracted dream-impression of an ill-defined “sense” of freedom. This danger is compounded by Monáe’s choices of representation. Mayweather’s being and becoming are both firmly couched in pre-existing Afrofuturisms and science fictions, let alone the Occidental mainstream, making Monáe’s representation of a revolutionary in the same mode register as, ironically, un-revolutionary, unoriginal, and at best, a non-linear assemblage or bricolage of interesting ideas concerning difference, Otherness, and hybridity. The problem here is that Mayweather, then, even conceptually, can be described as trapped in the history of the future, requiring, as Frederic Jameson’s seminal text’s title so eloquently puts it, an archaeology of the future to excavate and examine the ossified remains of gynoid 57821, the so-called and once believed savior of Slop City. There is, of course, and I think importantly, an entirely other way of reading these narrative and conceptual issues. If, indeed, Mayweather’s Saga is about



On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather 207

empowerment and self-(re)creation, then Monáe stands as an embodied reification of Mayweather’s ethos, aspirations, and hopes. In her life, artistic career, decisions, interactions, her position as pop star, activist, actress, business woman, and industry inside-outsider, Monáe lives the interstice, so to speak. She makes difference, lives it, gives it voice, song, and body. From this perspective, Monáe is what Mayweather dreamt of. In (re)inventing the revolution, Monáe is the revolution. WORKS CITED Balsamo, Anne Marie. Technologies of the Gendered Body, London: Duke University, 1997. Calvert, John. “Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism.” The Quietus, 02 Sept. 2010. English, Daylanne K. And Alvin Kim. “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism.”American Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, 2013, pp. 217–230. González, Jennifer. “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research,” in The Cyborg Handbook, Ed. Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor. Routledge, 1995. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston. Posthuman Bodies. Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna (2010 [1985]) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’ in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. pp. 2190–2220. Himes, Geoffrey. “Janelle Monáe: Imagining Her Own Future.” Paste, 10 Sept. 2013. “Janelle Monae: Dreaming In Science Fiction.” All Things Considered, 14 May 2010. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A226438282/ LitRC u=concordi_main&sid=LitRC&xid=3065ff91. Accessed 2 Aug. 2018. Lillvis, Kristen. Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination. University of Georgia Press, 2017. Lynskey, Dorian. “Janelle Monáe: Sister From Another Planet.” The Guardian, 2010. Monáe, Janelle. The ArchAndroid. Wondaland Arts Society/Atlantic, 2010. Muckelbauer, John and Debra Hawhee. “Posthuman Rhetorics: ‘It’s the Future, Pikul.’” JAC, Vol. 20, Issue 4 (2000). pp. 767–774. Redmond, Shana L. “This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s ‘Cold War.’” Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2011, pp. 393–411. Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. University of Toronoto Press Inc. 2007.

Index

abolition, of slavery, 10, 21, 32 Abraham, Roger D., 160 Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (White, C.), 27 Acts 17:26, 15 Adams, Henry, 11 African Americans: literature, 9–12; science fiction and, 177–79 Afrofuturism, 53; Black No More and, 107; defined, 163–64, 198; Eshun and, 99n2, 169; Firedance and, 167; Flight to Canada and, 66; Monáe and, 197–200 Afro-transhumanism, 9, 12, 102 Agar, Nicholas, 104 Agassiz, Louis, 13 Ali, Muhammad, 160 alienation, 14, 99, 151, 193 Allouche, Sylvie, 5 amalgamation: connotations, 43; genetic engineering through biological reconfiguration or, 9–12, 16, 52–53; interracial marriage and, 14, 39–40, 43–44; with miscegenation and transhuman tropes, 13–14; racial, 8, 15, 22; transhumanism and, 41. See also interracial marriage Amazing Stories magazine, 173n1

Angel (1999–2004), 17, 179, 190; corruption and multi-racialism in, 183–89; cyborgs and, 186–87; mind dump in, 186–88; Nazis and, 185, 190n1; racial tensions and, 186; racism and, 185–86, 189 Anglo-Saxons, 42, 44, 46, 48–49 The Animal Kingdom (Cuvier), 27 Annual Review, 29 Antebellum Posthuman (Ellis), 10 “antiaging medicine,” 54 anti-blackness, with otherness/colorism, 121–26 Aphorisms on Man (Lavater), 27 The ArchAndroid (Monáe), 194, 196– 97, 198 Asimov, Isaac, 198 Atlantic (magazine), 51 Aubry Knight trilogy (Barnes): badman and, 155, 160–63, 172; with blacker cyborgs, building of, 163–67; with cyberpunk aesthetics and black somatic strength, 155–60; ethnic diversity in, 152; Firedance, 17, 152–56, 158, 161, 164–72, 174n8; Gorgon Child, 17, 152–56, 161–64, 166–67, 171–72; hybridity and, 162, 164, 167, 172; science 209

210

Index

of reconnection and, 167–71; Streetlethal, 152–56, 158–59, 161– 64, 166–67, 171–72; violence and power in, 155–56 automatic writing: deciphering, 136, 147; as embodied technology, 133– 36, 140–41; flow of, 136; history of, 134–35; “listening/hearing” with, 136–37; as technology of becoming, 134–38 Bacon, Francis, 4, 101 badman, 155, 160–63, 172 Badu, Erykah, 193, 196 Balsamo, Anne Marie, 200 Bambaataa, Afrika, 193 Baraka, Amiri, 154, 166 Barnes, Steven, 17, 152, 157, 164–65, 169, 174n4. See also Aubry Knight trilogy “beginning of message” (Clifton), 139–40 Bhabha, Homi K., 33 binary identity negotiation, 16, 109; defined, 102; human enhancement and, 110–14 biological reconfiguration, genetic engineering through, 9–12, 16, 52–53 biopolitics, 30–31, 41, 53, 67, 106 Bishop, John, 123–24 Black Arts Movement, 154 Black bodies, 1, 4; exposition, 12–18; Hollywood and, 177–79; Kindred and unmaking of, 75–77, 83–84; with posthumanism and new human, 7–9; with posthumanism imagination and subjectivity, 9–12; racism and, 106, 107; unmade and visualized, 87–98, 88; unmaking of, 80–81, 99n4; vanishing of, 79; of women, 79 Black bodies, male. See Aubry Knight trilogy Black Bodies, White Gazes (Yancy), 7 black gynoid, 199–201, 203, 206

Black Jesus, 179–83 Black masculinity, 154–55, 160–63, 165–66, 169 Black men, hypersexuality myth and, 43 blackness: devaluing of, 120–23; film, music, television and technological, 16–18; Middle Passage narratives and, 14–15; otherness/colorism with anti-, 121–26; posthuman, 9, 71–77, 153, 167; types of, 121–22. See also Black No More; The Bluest Eye Black No More (Schuyler), 9, 15, 66, 102; Afrofuturism and, 107; binary identity negotiation and, 111–14; Knights of Nordica in, 111, 115; mistransthropy and, 115–16; transhumanism desirability in, 107–9 Blackpentecostal tradition, glossolalia and, 146–47 black somatic strength, cyberpunk aesthetics and, 155–60 black subjectivity, 9–12, 90, 92, 198 Black women: bodies of, 79; as machines/animals, 26; speaking in tongues, 16–17, 135, 138; in time and space, 10; womanist midrash and, 148n5 Blade Runner (film), 177 blood: one-drop rule and, 39–42, 47–48, 50; theory of race, 27–28 The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 16; identity in, 125–26; otherness/colorism/ anti-blackness in, 121–26; plot and themes, 119–21; race as technology and, 129–32; sadness and race in, 130–31; transhumanism and, 120; whiteness and, 120–23; whiteness as transhumanism and, 126–29 Blumenbach, J. F., 26, 34n4, 41 Bodies of Tomorrow (Vint), 203 body: hybridity and, 162; mind and, 153, 154, 158–59, 162, 166. See also Black bodies; transhuman bodies bodyminds, 137, 148n4 body politics, cyberpunk, 64, 152–53



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Bogle, Donald, 177 “Born in a Mighty Bad Land” (Bryant), 160 Boston Evening Sun (newspaper), 15, 43 Bostrom, Nick, 5, 6, 28, 52, 111 boundary crossings, 153, 170 Bowie, David, 196 Braidotti, Rosi, 3–4, 30 Breton, André, 134 Brey, Phillip, 103, 104, 110–11 Broderick, Damien, 202 Brown, James, 196, 199 Browner, Stephanie, 51 Bryant, Jerry, 160 Buchbinder, David, 187 Buffon, George Louis, 26–27 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television show), 178, 183–84 Bump, Jerome, 124 Burning Chrome (Gibson), 173n2 Butler, Octavia, 10, 14–15, 53, 198. See also Kindred Calvert, John, 197, 199 Calvin, John, 182 Caribbean colonies: British attitude to miscegenation and, 21, 22–24; slavery and miscegenation in, 23–24 Carrington, Andre M., 174n10 Cartesianism, 154–55, 166, 171, 172 Cartwright, Samuel, 13, 42 categorical identity, 110–13 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 8 Chadwick, Ruth, 102–3 Chaney, Michael, 60 Chaney-Lippold, John, 62 Chesnutt, Charles, 9, 11, 14, 15, 40, 43–44 “Chiba City Blues” (Gibson), 152 China, reprogenetics and, 34n5 Christianity, 22–23, 32 “Christian Transhumanism” (ColeTurner), 5, 18n3

A Chronological History of the West Indies, 25–26 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 10, 11, 16 Cindi Mayweather (fictional character): as black gynoid, 199–200, 206; Metropolis Saga and, 193–97; with recreation, 195 civil rights movement, 40, 51, 63, 65–66, 185 Cleaver, Eldridge, 154, 157, 166 Clifton, Lucille, 17; glossolalia and, 134–38, 143, 146–47; with “listening/hearing,” 136–37; logos and, 139–40; poetry of, 138–41, 147, 148n2; spiritualism of, 133–35, 140, 147. See also automatic writing; speaking in tongues climate, race and, 23–27 Cline, Ernest, 153 Clinton, George, 198 A Clockwork Orange (film), 159 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 158 The Cocktail Party (Eliot), 5 codes: defined, 58; language as, 57–59, 62 Cole-Turner, Ronald, 5, 18n3 Colonial Desire (Young), 34n4 colonialism: with biopolitics and hegemony in Southey, 30–31; race and technology with, 10–11; Whites with climate and, 23–27 Colored American Magazine, 39, 43–44, 51, 54 colorism, 119, 129–31; with otherness/ anti-blackness, 121–26 color line, 39, 43, 47, 52, 54; crossing, 119–20, 127; in historical context, 41; interracial marriage and, 49–50; Reconstructions and, 40 computation, slavocracy with universe of, 59–62, 64 computational universe, 61, 62 Conan the Barbarian (fictional character), 165, 174n10 Condorcet, Marquis de, 4–5, 28, 101

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Index

consciousness: Afrofuturism and, 99n2; double, 83, 110, 137; multiple, 74, 78–79, 83, 97–98, 99n2 I Corinthians 14, 144 corruption, multi-racialism and, 183–89 Count Zero (Gibson), 157, 174n6 Crania Americana (Morton), 13 Crawley, Ashon, 143, 146 Croly, David Goodman, 22 crossings: boundary, 153, 170; color line, 119–20, 127 cultural hybridization, 22; counterhegemonic and, 31–33; as subversive, 33–34 Cuvier, Georges, 27 Cvetkovich, Ann, 130 cyberization, 153–54, 162–63, 167–68, 170–72 cyberpunk: aesthetics and black somatic strength, 155–60; body politics, 64, 152–53; defined, 63, 169; fiction with cyborgs, 152–53; technology and, 151–55 Cyborg (DC character), 178 “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway), 163 cyborgs: Angel and, 186–87; blacker, 163–67; cyberpunk fiction and, 152–53; defined, 103–4, 200–201; Haraway and, 200–201; identity and, 153; popular culture and black, 178–79. See also Aubry Knight trilogy cyborgs, white: African Americans and science fiction with, 177–79; in I, Robot, 180–81; in popular culture, 177–78 Dali, Salvador, 198 Dana Franklin (fictional character): with Black body unmade and visualized, 87–98, 88; with dehumanization and language, 85–86; time travel and, 76–77, 78–79, 82, 85, 90–92, 90–93, 94, 95–96, 96–97; unmaking of, 78–87; with violence, trauma and

memory, 78–81; with violence of slavery, 83–84, 85. See also Kindred Dante Alighieri, 5 Darwin, Charles, 13 Dash, Julie, 10 Deathlok (Marvel character), 178 Deathlok comic series, 152 De Chardin, Teilhard, 202 dehumanization: language and, 85–86; transcending, 9; violence and, 92–93, 93; white complicity and, 82 Delany, Samuel R., 10, 173n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 73 Depression (Cvetkovich), 130 Dery, Mark, 163–64, 173n3 Descartes, René, 101 The Descent of Anansi (Barnes), 174n4 Dinerstein, Joel, 165–66 Dirty Computer (Monáe), 194 Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Descartes), 101 “discrimination-independent genetic enhancements,” 108 Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race (Cartwright), 13 Disney, Walter E., 198 disorientation, 73, 76, 85, 87–88, 90, 99 “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Race” (Agassiz), 13 doctor figure, connotations, 51 double consciousness, 83, 110, 137 Douglass, Frederick, 15, 159 Dream Park (Barnes), 174n4 Du Bois, W. E. B., 39, 74, 83, 106–7, 110, 137 Duffy, Damian, 71. See also Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation Edwards, Bryan, 24 Eglash, Ron, 63 Electric Lady (Monáe), 193, 194 Eliot, T. S., 5 Ellis, Cristin, 10, 11



Ellison, Harlan, 151 Ellison, Ralph, 9 Emory University, 17 English, Daylanne K., 198 “Enhancement Technologies and the Body” (Hogle), 109 Enlightenment, 26, 28, 39–40 “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies” (Gonzalez), 200–201 equality, transhuman bodies and, 105–7 Esfandiary, Fereidoun M. (FM-2030), 18n2, 202 Eshun, Kodwo, 99nn2–3, 169 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater), 27 ethnic diversity, in science fiction, 152 Ettinger, Robert, 202 eugenics, 5, 30, 34n6, 42, 54 existential identity, 110–14 Fanon, Franz, 167, 171 Fauset, Jessie Redman, 108 femininity, 49, 203; ideal of, 125–26; white, 115–16 feminists, 51, 135, 182 Ferrando, Francesca, 3, 11 film: with humanity and technology, 10–11; technological blackness in music, television and, 16–18. See also specific film titles Firedance (Barnes), 17, 152, 154, 161, 172, 174n8; with black somatic strength and cyberpunk aesthetics, 155–56, 158; cyborgs in, 153; racial identity and, 164–67; science of reconnection in, 167–71 Fishburne, Laurence, 178 FKA Twigs, 193 Flagel, Nadine, 74–75 Fledgling (Nayar), 53 Flight to Canada (Reed), 14; Afrofuturism and, 66; with language as code, 57–59; master/ slave relationship in, 58–59, 62–66; slavery in, 57–58; with slavocracy

Index 213

and universe of computation, 59–62, 64 Flying African myth, 65–66 FM-2030. See Esfandiary, Fereidoun M. Focusing on the Wrong Front (Gillan), 130 Foote, Edward B., 1 Foster, Thomas, 63, 152 Frankenstein (Shelley), 65 Freud, Sigmund, 10 Fukuyama, Francis, 2, 30–31, 105–6 Funkadelic and the Incredible String Band, 196 “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (Eshun), 169 “The Future American” (Chesnutt), 9, 14, 15, 43 Gabbard, Krin, 178 Gafney, Wil, 148n5 Galton, Francis, 13 Garreau, Joel, 41 genetic engineering: through biological reconfiguration or amalgamation, 9–12, 16, 52–53; “discriminationindependent genetic enhancements,” 108; reprogenetics, 13, 30, 34nn5–6 GenPoor, 114 GenRich, 114 Gernsback, Hugo, 151, 152, 173n1 “The Gernsback Continuum” (Gibson), 151 Ghost in the Shell (Shirow), 173n1, 174n8 Gibson, William, 151–52, 155–57, 169, 173nn1–3, 174n6, 174n8 Gill, Candra K., 184 Gillan, Jennifer, 130 Glaser, Michael, 140 Gliddon, George, 13, 42 glossolalia: Blackpentecostal tradition and, 146–47; connotations, 135, 143; defined, 138, 147; as technology of becoming, 134–38

214

Index

“Golden Age,” of science fiction (1940s–1950s), 154 Gonzalez, Jennifer, 200–201 Good Times (Clifton), 134 Google, translation software, 134, 144, 144–45, 146 Gorgon Child (Barnes), 17, 152, 154, 172; Black masculinity and, 161–63; with black somatic strength and cyberpunk aesthetics, 155–56; Cartesianism and, 155, 171; cyborgs in, 153; “hell run” in, 162; racial identity and, 164, 166–67 Graham, Elaine, 109 Grant, Charles, 22, 32 grapevine telegraph, 57, 67n1 Gray, Chris Hables, 103, 104 Great Britain, Caribbean colonies and, 21, 22–24 Greta. See Sayles, Thelma Guattari, Félix, 73 Guthrie, Ricardo, 10, 183 Halberstam, Judith, 203 Hampton, Gregory Jerome, 10–11 Haraway, Donna, 10, 72, 103–4, 163, 200–201, 203 hard man, 160–61 Harper, Frances, 50 Harper’s (magazine), 51 “Has Science Conquered the Colorline?” (White, W.), 109 Hauskeller, Michael, 107 Hawhee, Debra, 202 Hayles, Katherine, 2, 61–62, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 135–36 “hell run,” 162 Henderson, Carol E., 17 Henderson, Mae, 16–17, 135 Hendrix, Jimi, 196 Henson, Josiah, 57 Herrmann, Bernard, 196 HETs. See human enhancement technologies Hill, Herbert, 25

Himes, Geoffrey, 194, 197 Histoire Naturelle (Buffon), 26 History of Jamaica (Long), 23, 24, 27 History of the British West Indies (Edwards), 24 Hobbes, Thomas, 28 Hogle, Linda F., 109 Hollywood, Black bodies and, 177–79 hooks, bell, 73, 124 Hopkins, Pauline, 14, 39, 52, 53; amalgamation and, 40; Chesnutt and, 43–44; with doctor figure, 51. See also “Talma Gordon” Howard, Robert E., 174n10 Hughes, James, 5 Hughes, Langston, 141 human-based cyborgs, 103 human enhancement: binary identity negotiation and, 110–14; criticisms of, 104; cyborgs and, 103–4; with equality and transhuman bodies, 105–7; transhuman desirability and, 107–9; transhumanism through, 15–16, 101–2, 104–5, 116–17; types of changes with, 102–3 “Human Enhancement” (Juengst and Moseley), 103 “Human Enhancement and Personal Identity” (Brey), 103 human enhancement technologies (HETs), 102, 104; with mistransthropy or transhumanism, 114–16 humanism: during Enlightenment, 39–40; More on, 128; racial inequality and, 130–31; whiteness and, 120–23 humanity: dehumanization and, 9; with film and technology, 10–11; literature and, 9–12; potentiality of, 2 Humanity’s End (Agar), 104 “human manufacturing process,” slavery as, 76 human types, race science and, 41–42



Index 215

Hurston, Zora Neale, 11, 122 Huxley, Julian, 5, 18n2 hybridity, 13, 17, 195, 201, 206; Aubry Knight trilogy and, 162, 164, 167, 172; cultural, 22, 31–34; Haraway and, 200 hypersexuality, 43 I, Robot (film), 17, 189–90; Black Jesus role in, 179–83; plot, 180; race and, 183; racial tensions and, 186; racism and, 181; white cyborgs in, 180–81 identity, 103; binary negotiation, 16, 102, 109–14; in The Bluest Eye, 125–26; categorical, 110–13; cyborgs and, 153; existential, 110–14; as mode of thought, 110; science fiction and racial, 163–67 Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (Hampton), 10–11 Iman Jackson, Zakiyyah, 10 industrialization, 10–11, 165 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (Galton), 13 interracial marriage, 22–23; amalgamation and, 14, 39–40, 43–44; color line and, 49–50; racial inequality with solution of, 43 Invisible Man (Ellison, R.), 9 Iola Leroy (Harper), 50 Islam, Christianity and, 22–23 “Is Michael Jackson a Transhumanist?” (Sirius), 109 “Is the Post-Human a Post-Woman?” (Ferrando), 11 “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger” (Wiggins, Jr.), 161 Jackson, Michael, 109 Jameson, Fredric, 206 “Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism” (Calvert), 197 “Janelle Monáe: Sister From Another Planet” (Lynsky), 196, 197

Jennings, John, 71. See also Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation John Henry (folk hero), 165–66 “Johnny Mnemonic” (Gibson), 174n6 Johnson, Jack, 155, 160–61 Johnson, James Weldon, 108 Jones, Grace, 196 Judd, Bettina, 141–42 Juengst, Eric, 103 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 28 Kim, Alvin, 198 Kim, Myungsung, 9 Kindred (Butler), 14–15; with Black bodies unmade, 75–77, 83–84; with Dana Franklin, 76–77, 78–87; historical compression and time travel in, 74–79, 82, 85, 88; as Middle Passage narrative, 71, 73, 74–75, 77, 79, 87; multiple consciousness and, 74, 78–79, 83, 98, 99n2; plot and themes in, 72; as posthumanist text, 72–74, 80; transmedial posthumanism and, 98 Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (Duffy and Jennings), 71, 80, 81; with Black bodies unmade and visualized, 87–98, 88; Eshun on, 99n3; historical compression and time travel in, 90–92, 90–93, 94, 95–96, 96–97; multiple consciousness and, 97–98 The King of Tars, 22–23 Knights of Nordica, 111, 115 “Knowledge, Moral, and Destiny” (Huxley), 5 Knox, Robert, 42 Kurtz, Paul, 4 Kurzeil, Ray, 202 Lacks, Henrietta, 1 Lang, Fritz, 198 language: as code, 57–59, 62; dehumanization and, 85–86; faultiness of, 147; glossolalia,

216

134–38, 143, 146–47; with Google translation software, 134, 144, 144– 45, 146; logos, 139–40; speaking in tongues and, 16–17, 134, 135, 138, 141–47. See also automatic writing Larsen, Nella, 108 Lavater, Casper, 27 Lavender, Isiah, 157 Lemke, Thomas, 53 Levecq, Christine, 59 Levine, Lawrence, W., 160 “Life Enhancement Technologies” (Overall), 104 The Life and Services of Captain Philip Beaver (Southey), 26 The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave (Henson), 57 Lighthall, William Douw, 5 Lil’ Kim, 109 Lillvis, Kristen, 7, 9–11, 72–74, 153, 167, 172 Linnaeus, Carl, 26 Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper, 106, 108 “listening/hearing,” automatic writing and, 136–37 literature: African American, 9–12; humanity and, 9–12 Literature Resource Center, 196 Livingston, Ira, 203 Locke, John, 28 logos, 139–40 Long, Edward, 23, 24, 27 Look magazine, 109 Lorde, Audre, 124 Lorenz Sorgner, Stefan, 3 Lynsky, Dorian, 196, 197 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 22, 32 machines/animals, Black women as, 26 “magical negro,” 178, 183 mamelucos, 24–25, 31, 34n2 “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (Haraway), 103–4, 200 “Many Moons” (Monáe), 204–5

Index

marriage: interracial, 14, 22–23, 39–40, 43–44, 49–50; women unmade through, 82–83 Marvel Comics, 152 masculinity. See Black masculinity master/slave relationship, 58–59, 62–66, 124, 183 The Matrix (film), 178 May, John, 24–25 McGee, Trina, 109 medical injustice, 1, 53–54 “Meditation and Artistry in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston” (Peoples), 122 Melville, Herman, 10 memory, violence with trauma and, 78–81 men, hypersexuality myth and Black, 43 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 23 Mercy (Clifton), 138, 139 Mesmer, Franz, 134 “the message of thelma sayles” (Clifton), 138–39 “metaverse,” 153 Metropolis (film), 198 Metropolis Saga (2003–present) (Monáe), 193–97; time travel and, 17 MIA, 197 Middle Passage: blackness and narratives of, 14–15; Flying African myth and, 65; Kindred as narrative of, 71, 73, 74–75, 77, 79, 87; as metaphor, 75; with rape, narrative of, 79, 81–82; studies and posthuman blackness, 71–77; time travel and, 74–75, 90–92, 90–93, 94, 95–96, 96–97; violence and, 75–77, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 89 Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea, 148n6 “mimic man,” 33 Minaj, Nicki, 109



Index 217

minds, 5, 101; body and, 153–55, 158–59, 162, 166; bodyminds, 137, 148n4; dump, 186–88 Miniotaite, Dana, 125–26 miscegenation: with amalgamation and transhuman tropes, 13–14; with biopolitics and colonial hegemony, 30–31; blood theory of race and, 27–28; British attitude to Caribbean colonies and, 21, 22–24; in Caribbean colonies, 23–24; connotations, 43; cultural hybridization and, 31–33; with cultural hybridization as subversive, 33–34; reprogenetics and, 13; scheme of, 24–26, 28–29; slavery and, 25–26; with Southey and counter-hegemonic potential of project, 31; theory with science and race, 26–27; in transhuman context, 28–29 “Miscegenation” (pamphlet), 22 mistransthropy, HETs with transhumanism or, 114–16 Monáe, Janelle, 10, 17, 204–5, 207; Afrofuturism and, 197–200; artistic ethic of, 194; early years, 194–95; on Metropolis, 198; otherness and, 195, 196, 198, 203. See also Cindi Mayweather Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson), 157, 174n6 Moore, Max, 4, 5, 6 moral hard man, 160–61 Moraru, Christian, 60 More, Max, 29, 106, 121, 127, 128, 202 morphological freedom, 9, 66, 102–3, 105, 116 “Morphological Freedom” (Sandberg), 128 Morrison, Toni, 10, 16, 73, 122, 124. See also The Bluest Eye Morton, Samuel, 13 Moseley, Daniel, 103 “The Mourning Bench” (Judd), 141–42

Muckelbauer, John, 202 multiple consciousness, 74, 78–79, 83, 97–98, 99n2 multi-racialism, corruption and, 183–89 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 57, 67n1 Murphy, Eddie, 177–78 music, technological blackness in, 16–18 Mustakeem, Sowande, 71, 75–77, 81, 84, 85, 99n4 Nayar, Pramod K., 3, 53 Nazis, 53, 185, 190n1 negotiation, as mode of thought, 110 neo-slave narratives, 14–15, 59, 72, 79–80 nested mysteries, in “Talma Gordon,” 39, 40, 44–46, 45, 49 Neuromancer (Gibson), 152, 157, 173n3 new human, defined, 8–9 new (Black) human, posthumanism and, 7–9 New Negro, 8–9 The New Atlantis (Bacon), 101 The New Human in Literature (Thomsen), 8 Newton, Isaac, 28 New Wave, of science fiction, 151 Next (Clifton), 138–39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8 1984 (Orwell), 159 Niven, Larry, 174n4 Noguchi, Yusaburo, 108–9 Nott, Josiah C., 13, 42 Novum Organum (Bacon), 4 “OASIS,” 153 one-drop rule, blood and, 39–42, 47–48, 50 “The Ones” (Clifton), 133, 139 “On the Variety of Mankind” (Blumenbach), 26–27 Oration on the Dignity of Man (Pico della Mirandola), 4 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 13

218

Index

Orwell, George, 159 Othello (Shakespeare), 23 otherness: black gynoid and, 199–201; with colorism/anti-blackness, 121– 26; double, 200–206; Monáe and, 195, 196, 198, 203 Ouija boards, 134–35 OutKast, 196 Overall, Christine, 104 Papa Leba, 57, 67n2 Paradiso of the Divina Commedia (Dante), 5 Parliament Funkadelic, 193 passing, with race, 84, 102, 152 Paste magazine, 194 Paul (apostle), 144 Peoples, Tim, 122 Pepperell, Robert, 202 philosophical racism, 27 Physiognomical Fragments (Lavater), 27 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 4 Pittsburgh Courier (newspaper), 108–9 Poe, Edgar Allen, 11 politics: biopolitics, 30–31, 41, 53, 67, 106; cyberpunk body, 64, 152–53 Post- and Transhumanism (Ranch and Lorenz Sorgner), 3 posthuman blackness, 153, 167; defined, 9; Middle Passage studies and, 71–77 Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (Lillvis), 7, 9, 10, 72 Posthuman Bodies (Halberstam and Livingston), 203 posthumanism: complex dynamics of, 2; defined, 3, 202; imagination and Black subjectivity, 9–12; Kindred and, 71–74; meaning and intent, 3–4; new (Black) human on horizon of, 7–9; transmedial, 98 “Posthuman Rhetorics” (Muckelbauer and Hawhee), 202

The Posthuman Condition (LippertRasmussen), 108 post-racial humanism, with marriage and amalgamation, 14 power, violence and, 155–56 Prince, 195, 196 Prisco, Giulio, 6, 18n3, 104–5 Psychiatry (journal), 5 pugilism, 158, 160–61 Putnam’s (magazine), 51 Quarterly Review, 25–26 The Quietus (magazine), 196 race: climate and, 23–27; color line and, 39–41, 43, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 119–20, 127; corruption and multiracialism, 183–89; with differences eliminated, 14; hierarchies, 40, 121, 127, 129; I, Robot, and, 183; with identity and science fiction, 163–67; miscegenation and blood theory of, 27–28; passing with, 84, 102, 152; sadness and, 130–31; technology and, 10–11, 121, 129–32; tensions in Angel, 186; Whites with purity of, 24 Race in American Science Fiction (Lavender), 157 race science: human types and, 41–42; medical injustice and, 53–54; miscegenation theory with, 26–27 racial amalgamation, 8, 15, 22 racial inequality, 41; humanism and, 130–31; interracial marriage as solution for, 43 racism: Angel and, 185–86, 189; Black bodies and, 106, 107; evolution of, 24; I, Robot, and, 181; philosophical, 27; science and, 13–14; sexism and, 135, 179; violence and, 82; with violence and slavery, 82; white supremacy, 42–43, 47, 65, 80, 85–86, 119, 160 “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye” (Bump), 124



Index 219

Ranch, Robert, 3 rape, 83, 86, 92, 96, 108; with hypersexuality myth of Black men, 43; Middle Passage with narrative of, 79, 81–82 Ras G, 193 reconnection: hybridity and, 164; science of, 167–71 Reconstruction, 39–40, 52–53 Redmond, Shana L., 200 Reed, Ishmael, 14, 57; grapevine telegraph and, 67n1. See also Flight to Canada Religion Without Revelation (Huxley), 5 reprogenetics: China and, 34n5; eugenics and, 5, 30, 34n6, 42, 54; miscegenation and, 13 Richards, J. August, 17, 179 “Robert” (Toomer), 10 Rollins, Andrew, 10 Royer, Clémence, 13 RZA, 197 sadness, race and, 130–31 Sandberg, Anders, 114, 128 Sayles, Thelma (Greta), 134, 136, 138–39 Schalk, Sami, 148n4 Schuyler, George S., 9, 15, 66, 102, 116–17. See also Black No More science, 101; African American literature with technology and, 9–12; racist, 13–14; of reconnection in Firedance, 167–71; technology and, 105–9. See also race science science fiction, 157; African Americans and, 177–79; ethnic diversity in, 152; “Golden Age” (1940s–1950s), 154; New Wave of, 151; racial identity and, 163–67. See also specific science fiction titles Science in Story (Foote), 1 Scott, Ridley, 177 sexism, racism and, 135, 179

sexuality, 10, 122, 148n4, 161; cyborgs and, 153; hyper-, 43; techno-organic amorousness, 17, 193 Shakespeare, William, 23 Shakur, Tupac, 160 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 8, 65 Shirow Masamune, 173n1, 174n8 Silver, Lee M., 29, 114 Sirius, R. U., 109 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet), 5, 101 slavery, 67n1, 99n4; abolition of, 10, 21, 32; Caribbean colonies and, 23–24; in Flight to Canada, 57–58; as “human manufacturing process,” 76; miscegenation and, 25–26; race and technology with, 10–11; with racism and violence, 82; violence of, 81, 83–84, 85. See also Middle Passage slaves, 10–11; master and, 58–59, 62–66, 124, 183; neo-slave narratives, 14–15, 59, 72, 79–80; racism toward, 24; transhumanism and neo-slave narratives, 14–15 slavocracy, with universe of computation, 59–62, 64 Smith, Barbara, 135 Smith, Will, 17, 183. See also I, Robot Sosa, Sammie, 109 Soul on Ice (Cleaver), 157 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 110, 137 The Souls of Cyberfolk (Foster), 152 The Sound of Culture (Chude-Sokei), 10 Soupault, Philippe, 134 Southey, Robert, 13, 21; biopolitics and colonial hegemony in, 30–31; with counter-hegemonic potential, 31; with miscegenation, scheme of, 24–26, 28–29; with miscegenation, theory of, 26–27. See also miscegenation Spaulding, Timothy, 59

220

Index

speaking in tongues, 134; Black women, 16–17, 135, 138; experiment in, 141–47 The Speaking in Tongues Experiment (video project), 134, 143, 144, 144– 45, 146–47 Speculative Blackness (Carrington), 174n10 Spencer, Herbert, 13 Spillers, Hortense, 137, 158, 162 spiritualism, 133–35, 140, 147. See also automatic writing Sprawl novels (Gibson), 151, 155–57, 169, 174n6 Star Trek (television show), 178 Stefan, Lorenz Sorgner, 3 Stephenson, Neal, 153 Sterling, Bruce, 151, 163, 167, 169 Stewart, James, 23 Stock, Gregory, 116 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 57 Streetlethal (Barnes), 152–54, 172; Black masculinity and, 161–62; with black somatic strength and cyberpunk aesthetics, 155–56, 158–59; Cartesianism and, 155, 171; racial identity and, 163–64, 166–67 subhuman, 15, 71, 73, 84, 91, 98, 199 Sun Ra, 193, 198 surrealism, 134, 148n3, 198 “Talma Gordon” (Hopkins): AngloSaxons and, 42, 44, 46, 48–49; color line and, 39–41, 43, 47, 49–50, 52, 54; in historical context, 39–40; nested mysteries in, 39, 40, 44–46, 45, 49; plot and themes in, 39, 46–47; post-racial humanism and, 14. See also race science Taylor, Matthew A., 11 Taylor, Paul C., 169–70 “techno-infanticide,” 115–16 “Technologies of the Gendered Body” (Balsamo), 200

technology: African American literature with science and, 9–12; alienation and, 151; automatic writing as embodied, 133–36, 140–41; of becoming with glossolalia and automatic writing, 134–38; with blackness in music, film and television, 16–18; cyberpunk and, 151–55; with film and humanity, 10–11; HETs, 102, 104, 114–16; integration with, 103; race and, 10–11, 121, 129–32; science and, 105–9; whiteness and, 166 techno-organic amorousness/sexuality, 17, 193 “techno-Orientalism,” 152 technophobia, 65, 114 television, technological blackness in, 16–18 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 23 Terminator (film), 177 Thelwall, John, 24 “Therapy, Enhancement, and Improvement” (Chadwick), 102–3 “the thing,” 124, 126 “This Safer Space” (Redmond), 200 Thompson, Joel, 105 Thomsen, Mads Rosenbahl, 8, 9 thought, modes of, 110 time: Black women in space and, 10; travel, 17, 74–79, 82, 85, 88, 90–92, 90–93, 94, 95–96, 96–97 Toomer, Jean, 10 torture, 109, 159 “Toward a Black Feminist Literary Criticism” (Smith, B.), 135 Towne, Richard, 24 Transactions of the Missionary Society, 28–29 “Transcendent Engineering” (Prisco), 104–5 transhuman bodies, 16, 116; human enhancement with equality and, 105–7



Index 221

transhuman desirability, with human enhancement, 107–9 transhumanism, 1, 18n2; Afro-, 9, 12, 102; amalgamation and, 41; with Black subjectivity in posthumanism imagination, 9–12; defined, 2, 40, 119; exposition, 12–18; HETs with mistransthropy or, 114–16; through human enhancement, 15–16, 101–2, 104–5, 116–17; with humanity, potentiality of, 2; miscegenation in context of, 28–29; neo-slave narratives and, 14–15; with new (Black) human on posthumanism horizon, 7–9; origin and meaning, 4–7; with posthumanism, meaning and intent, 3–4; with technological blackness in film, music and television, 16–18; tropes with amalgamation and miscegenation, 13–14; whiteness as, 126–29 The Transhumanist Reader (More), 127, 128 transhumanized, 5 translation software, Google, 134, 144, 144–45, 146 transmedial posthumanism, 98 transumanare, 5 trauma, violence with memory and, 78–81 A Treatise on the Diseases Most Frequent in the West-Indies (Towne), 24 Troupe, Quincy, 148n2 Trussel, Richard C., 181–82 Tupi people, 25 Tuskegee Airmen, 65–66 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 1 Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon), 13, 42 Universe without Us (Taylor, M. A.), 11 Up from Slavery (Washington, B. T.), 67n1

vanishing, of Black bodies, 79 Verdoux, Philippe, 6 Vint, Sherryl, 152, 203 violence: dehumanization and, 92–93, 93; with hard man and moral hard man, 160–61; Middle Passage and, 75–77, 83–84, 86, 88–89, 89; power and, 155–56; racism and, 82; with racism and slavery, 82; of slavery, 81, 83–84, 85; with trauma and memory, 78–81 Vita-More, Natasha, 202 Voice (Clifton), 133 Von Broembsen, F., 110 Wakeman, George, 22 Ward, Edward, 24 Warp 9, 193 Warren, Calvin L., 73–74 Washington, Booker T., 67n1 Washington, Denzel, 177–78 Wells, Ida B., 42 West, Cornel, 130 What Is Posthumanism? (Wolfe), 3 White, Charles, 27 White, Wallace, 109 white complicity, dehumanization and, 82 white femininity, 115–16 whiteness: humanism and, 120– 23; technology and, 166; as transhumanism, 126–29. See also Black No More; The Bluest Eye; cyborgs, white Whites: with colonialism and climate, 23–27; with racial purity, 24 white savior, 83, 183, 184 white supremacy, 42–43, 47, 65, 80, 85–86, 119, 160 Wiener, Norbert, 63 Wiggins, William H., Jr., 161 Williams, William Carlos, 8 Wolfe, Cary, 3 womanist midrash, 139, 148n5

222

women, 11, 82–83. See also Black women Wonder, Stevie, 196 Woolf, Virginia, 8, 99n1 Woolfork, Lisa, 75, 80, 88 writing. See automatic writing

Index

X, Malcolm, 160 Yancy, George, 7, 107 Young, Robert, 34n4 Zack, Naomi, 28

About the Editor

Melvin G. Hill is an Associate Professor of English Studies in the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages at the University of Tennessee, Martin. He is the editor of Existential Thought in African American Literature before 1942 (Lexington Books, 2016). His essay “Tale of Two Fathers: Authenticating Fatherhood in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us and Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain” appears in Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Parenting, and the Modern Family. His research interests include twentiethand twenty-first-century African American literature, identity and gaming, and gender studies. His current project is titled “The Improbable Experiment”: Representations of Blackness in Mainstream Video Games during the Age of Obama.

223

About the Contributors

Sarah L. Berry is the author of essays on medicine, gender, race, and cultural history that have appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Mosaic, Critical Insights, Rethinking Empathy, The Millions, and at the National Library of Medicine. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Oswego. She serves on the board of the Health Humanities Consortium and coauthors the annual report Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States. Her book in progress is titled Patient Revolutions: Health and Social Justice in America from Abolition to the Affordable Care Act. Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV is a PhD candidate in African American Literature at Florida State University. He has master’s degrees in Japanese literature (University of Minnesota) and African American history (Florida A&M University). His forthcoming dissertation project is tentatively entitled, “Darker Matters: Allohistorical Racial Theorizing, Perpetual Black Bodies, and Towards a Black ‘Mecha’ in the Science Fiction Oeuvre of Steven Barnes,” and seeks to address and unpack the significance of Black somatics within Afrofuturist literature. Rae’mia Escott is a PhD candidate at Louisiana State University. She has a MA from the University of Montevallo, where her master’s thesis investigates the gender fluidity of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Specifcally, she argues that Lady Macbeth’s ease in performing the masculine role and Macbeth’s learned feminine behavior demonstrates that their identity lacks some form of solid structure, since they stray away from the more appropriate roles each should possess. Her primary interests include gender fluidity and Shakespeare. 225

226

About the Contributors

Md. Monirul Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Department English Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose College, Kolkata, India. He also teaches, as a Guest Faculty, in the Department of English, University of Kalyani, India. He has published a number of papers in peer-reviewed journals. His areas of interest are British Romanticism and the non-West, postcolonial and posthumanist discourses, and travel writing. His most recent publication is the book chapter, “Posthumanism: Through the Postcolonial Lens” in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (Springer, 2016). Christian Jimenez holds both a bachelor’s in history and master’s in political science from Rutgers. He has taught courses on modern China, globalization, and comparative politics at Rutgers and Rider University and presented several professional conference papers at New York University, State University of New York, and Rutgers on extremism, myth, literature, and film. He has various forthcoming publications including encyclopedia entries on conspiracies in American history as well as sexism in the fine arts in American culture. Other publications include essays on masculinity and gender in Sons of Anarchy, feminism in recent Hollywood cinema, and the politics of Cuban science fiction in the work of Yoss. His research interests include apocalyptic mythologies, framing mechanisms in the mass media, and hybrid genres in film and American and Latin American literature. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, artist, and performer. She is an alumna of Spelman College and the University of Maryland and is currently Assistant Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Washington, Seattle. She has received fellowships from the Five Colleges, The Vermont Studio Center and the University of Maryland. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in poetry multiple times. Her poems have appeared in Torch, Mythium, Meridians, The Offing, and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient., which explores the legacy of medical experimentation on Black women, won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. Myungsung Kim received his PhD degree in English from Arizona State University in 2017. He is currently affiliated with the Institute of British and American Studies at Korea University as a research professor, and also teaches literature, philosophy, and cultural studies at Pukyong National University in South Korea. His research interest centers on technology, post/ trans-human body politics, cybernetic culture, and, most importantly, their influences on African American experience represented in contemporary



About the Contributors 227

Afrofuturist novels. Also, he closely observes the construction of computation and algorithm as cultural artifacts, conceptual tools and ideological principles, through which to read canonical U.S. literature. Nicholas E. Miller is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University, where he teaches American literature, gender and a/sexuality studies, and comics studies. Miller received his BA from Michigan State University and his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of “Asexuality and Its Discontents: Making the ‘Invisible Orientation’ Visible in Comics,” published in Inks (2017), and “‘Now That It’s Just Us Girls’: Transmedial Feminisms from Archie to Riverdale,” published in Feminist Media Histories (2018). He is a founding member of the Comics Studies Society and a periodic contributor to The Middle Spaces. Kwasu D. Tembo is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s Language, Literatures, and Cultures department. His research interests include—but are not limited to—comics studies, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, particularly the so-called “prophets of extremity”—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. He has published on Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, ed. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (Columbia UP, 2015), and on Superman, in Postscriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies (2017).