Black Intersectionalities : A Critique for the 21st Century [1 ed.] 9781781385531, 9781846319389

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BLACK

INTERSECTIONALITIES

BLACK

A Critique for the 21st Century

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk Cover image: “Envi” (2001) by Jean-Paul Rocchi. Collection of Jean-Paul Rocchi. Photograph by Dominique Cros-Pophillat. Courtesy of the artist and the photographer.

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ed. Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi

Monica Michlin teaches at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Jean-Paul Rocchi teaches at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée.

BLACK INTERSECTIONALITIES

Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualized within contemporary thought. Markers of identity are too often isolated and presented as definitive, then examined and theorized, a process that further naturalizes their absoluteness; thus socially generated constructs become socializing categories that assume coercive power. The resulting set of oppositions isolate and delimit: male or female, black or white, straight or gay. A new kind of intervention is needed, an intervention that recognizes the validity of the researcher’s own self-reflexivity. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, this collection examines the frameworks and practices that deny transgressive possibilities. It seeks to engage in a consciousness-raising exercise that documents the damaging nature of assigned social positions and either/or identity constructions. It seeks to progress beyond the socially prescribed categories of race, gender, and sex, recognizing the need to combine intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity, abstraction and emotion, consciousness and desire. It seeks to develop new types of transdisciplinary frameworks where subjective and political spaces can be universalized while remaining particular, leaving texts open so that identity remains imagined, plural, and continuously shifting. Such an approach restores the complexity of what it means to be human.

INTERSECTIONALITIES

A Critique for the 21st Century

edited by

Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi

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BLACK INTERSECTIONALITIES

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The Collegium of African American Research (CAAR) was founded at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1992 and incorporated at the University of Rome later that year. From its inception it has worked to stimulate research in African American Studies in Europe and beyond. CAAR promotes intellectual collaboration through the creation of an international and interdisciplinary research and teaching network. CAAR organizes bi-annual conferences, sponsors local symposia, helps to create research networks, and supports publications, most prominently its FORECAAST Series (Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies). The first volume of the FORECAAST series was issued by Lit Verlag in 1999, and for its twentieth volume the series moved to Liverpool University Press. Begun as an occasional publication of monographs and themed, selected conference papers, the Series has always sought to highlight the best recent scholarship in the field. In 2013, FORECAAST became an annual publication of CAAR, reflecting the growth of the organisation and the richness of the scholarship produced by its members. SERIES EDITORS: Professor Alan Rice, UCLAN and Dr Cynthia S Hamilton, Liverpool Hope University

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Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century

Edited by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi

Liver pool Un iversit y Press

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First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 Liverpool University Press The rights of Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi to be identified as the editors of this book have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-938-9

Web PDF eISBN 978-1-78138-553-1

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

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Contents

1 Introduction: Theorizing for Change: Intersections, Transdisciplinarity, and Black Lived Experience Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi

2 Exordium: Writing and the Relation: From Textual Coloniality to South African Black Consciousness Rozena Maart

I Challenging Hegemonic Gender Identities 3 Postcolonial Backlash and Being Proper: Femininity, Blackness, Sexuality, and Transgender in the Public Eye Antje Schuhmann

4 Productive Investments: Masculinities and Economies in Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho Eva Boesenberg

5 “I Hugged Myself”: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Florian Bast

II Nonconformity and Narrative heorizing 6 Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag – Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect Carsten Junker 7 “Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap”: Claude McKay’s Literary Drag Performance in Banana Bottom Jarrett H. Brown

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8 The Souls of Black Gay Folk: The Black Arts Movement and Melvin Dixon’s Revision of Du Boisian Double Consciousness in Vanishing Rooms Charles Nero III Upsurges of Desire

9 “Risking Sensuality”: Toni Morrison’s Erotics of Writing Claudine Raynaud

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10 Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body Laura Sarnelli

145

I V Epistemological Genealogies and Prospections

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11 Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire, and Doing 158 Rebecka Rutledge Fisher

12 On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire Lewis R. Gordon

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14 The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire: Abolish Property Sabine Broeck

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13 Revising Jezebel Politics: Toward a New Black Sexual Ethic Jennifer S. Leath

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Contributors

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Index

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1 Introduction: Theorizing for Change: Intersections, Transdisciplinarity, and Black Lived Experience Monica Michlin (Université Paris-Sorbonne) and Jean-Paul Rocchi (Université Paris-Est) Intersectional Beings, Doings, and Readings: A History to Pass On and Transform In the Spring of 2011, the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) placed the emphasis of its ninth international conference, “Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation,” which was held in Paris, on the conditions of social transformation in the black world.1 It insisted on the intersection of a socioeconomic approach with a multicultural and identity-focused perspective; on the relation between theorizing processes and social transformation, between intellectual activity and political action; and on the cross-cutting relations between different communities with specific emancipatory agendas. The call for papers further explained that [i]n the wake of Lorde’s esthetical and political alliance of the self and the community, of Baldwin’s desiring consciousness and ethics of inclusion, desire and the black states are together rich with conscious revolutions to come. They work as immaterial and physical orientations, symbols of shifting identifications, of the diversity of black lived experience. The black states of desire therefore set out to describe lack turned into impetus and actualization, the movement from what exists to what can be imagined and created, from words to the building stone, from statement to establishment. […] To reach the necessary coalition-building between black communities, it is necessary to consider the multiple identifications and identities that found them, and the cross-cutting issues that impact them. While revisiting the African American literary esthetics of optics, through which things unseen are made evident, contemporary writers and 1 We have tried to respect each author’s preference for the spelling of “black” (Black) and “white” (White) in the chapters of this book.

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artists – often activists as well – such as Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, or Sapphire, have complied with this double agenda. Their commitment to both art and the world prolongs the organic bond between literature and sociopolitical struggles, while eschewing academic aporias, conceptualizations disconnected from black reality, or, up until recently, the delusions promised by the proclaimed advent of, in the United States, the postrace, and in South Africa, the postcolony. […] If reconnected to the social world, starting with a productive connection between disciplines […] the call for transformation from worldwide black philosophies, arts and literatures may not remain unanswered.2

Proceeding from this collective work, Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century reflects the contemporary theorization intersecting race, gender, and sex, and the disciplines that study them. It also aims at preserving the historical interrelatedness between intellectuality and political action. As Patricia Hill Collins recalls in her recent genealogy of intersectionality (2011), the notion coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and 1991 prolongs a long tradition of “intersectional selves and thoughts,” going from Ida Wells-Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper to Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), the Combahee-River Collective’s Statement of 1977, or Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Though the spreading of intersectionality in academia paralleled the development of interdisciplinarity and (more regrettably) the depoliticization of discourses, Crenshaw’s original law-oriented analysis of intersectionality did address both academics and sociopolitical actors. Rather than nostalgically returning to the Combahee River Collective and discarding the academic benefits of interdisciplinarity which span the last two decades,3 Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century 2 Gathering some 300 participants, including scholars in various disciplines, but also “intellectual, artistic and cultural conversants, and socioeconomic, political, and institutional actors who aim[ed] at anchoring Black Studies and creations in a social world to be concretely changed with innovative projects,” the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) Conference, “Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation,” also featured “The Black Open Arts Program: In, Out, and Through,” with poetry and fiction reading, creative arts, music, theater, visual arts, and cinema. The complete text of the “call for papers” and a record of the full program are available at http://caar2011.caar-web.org/ index.php?id=102. 3 The land of positivistic, monodisciplinary, and anti-embodied knowledge, especially when it comes to Cultural Studies to which it remains adamantly opposed, France stands singularly alien to this worldwide theoretical, institutional, and academic evolution. Such a lack and absence may in part contribute to explaining its ongoing incapacity to deal with minority subject-groups’ claims for equality, which are instead readily labeled as “communautaristes,” or, to put it bluntly, anti-French (for more on Frenchness, Cultural Studies in general, and African American and Black Studies in France, see Rocchi 2007). Though an

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operates an ethical shift towards a greater articulation of discourses and social movements – for what change is possible if they remain disconnected? Should not this interrelatedness be claimed as the primary intersection? The ambition of this identity-focused collection is therefore to examine the generative conditions of theory; its possible limitations; and the methodological innovations needed when the theorization of the lived experience of black people aims at implementing lasting social change. Within the original metaphorical evocation of “traffic intersections” conjuring up the flux of ever-changing individual and collective identities and their crosspollination, intersectionality should not, however, be reduced to a sheer concept or to a symbol describing any subject position – a current academic trend which depoliticizes intersectionality by applying it to all, in any situation.4 Intersectionality is a tool; perhaps even a weapon. As such, it needs to be thought through and used by those of us for whom policies of inequality and discrimination still matter because they are an inescapable condition of our existence. Though they strongly condition the materiality of our lives, race and sex are similarly evasive; it is precisely this evasiveness which requires study if the epistemological and sociopolitical consequences of the intersection of race and sex are to be fathomed out. As a psychological and cultural reality, race merges with sex at the fundamental points of intersection represented by origin and generation. Beyond and within this point of intersection, both escape us, as they bear an imperfect correspondence to self-consciousness. While race, which is biologically insignificant, cannot be identified empirically, sex, often subject to repression, is scarcely easier to define, except when rendered manifest by sexual differentiation and the ascribing of gender. Both may therefore represent a “limitation of thought” (Rocchi, 2014). Such is the crux of this collective critical enquiry: intersecting limitations to open up a new space – possibly a field – exploring the crossing of lines, to revise racial, gender, and sexual constructions in texts and discourses, and in the social world alike. This comprehensive scope requires that the critique, while intersecting objects and limitations, should also endeavor to interrogate the premises and important breach in the French ethos of identity, which academia both reflects and fuels, the April 2013 vote legalizing same-sex marriage under the name “marriage for all” – an astute euphemism strategically recapturing the country’s uncritically examined infatuation with “universalism” – has triggered an important wave of homophobia across France, from unashamed hatred in public discourse to gay-bashing on the streets, proving that, if under siege, the conservative bastion of a monolithic nationhood and the knowledge project that founds it have not fallen yet. 4 The original metaphor of “traffic intersections” is to be found in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989).

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implications of positionality. The failure to do so over the last thirty years has led African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Black Queer Studies in turn to fall prey to epistemological and political shortcomings and to ignore, for instance, how transgenderism and gender non-conformism could provide new articulations of “manhood” and “womanhood.” A thorough examination of intersections and positionality is also necessary to develop a postcolonial critique of gender performances and of identity formations, to analyze how, for instance, the divide between Western feminism and South African postcoloniality can be overcome. One of the recurring answers to this challenge suggested by Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century is to be found in the subject him/herself – including when he/she studies black subjectivities. In order to set a genuine transdisciplinary praxis resisting foreclosure and petrification – the fate of most traditional disciplines, as Lewis R. Gordon points out in Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (2006) – intersections of objects and field positionality need to be completed by researchers’ self-reflexivity – a method and an ethics in which affectivity is not cast out from the process of theorization. This task, whereby the (perverted) desire for mastery is also circumvented, has already been taken on by black writing and black thought. Its permanent bridging of consciousness and desire, and the continuously transformed modes of being black it bears witness to are also a valuable source of inspiration for theorizations to come. That is why W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Joseph Beam, Melvin Dixon, or Octavia Butler (among others) are so central to the essays of this collection. Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century analyzes historical situations of oppression, such as slavery and colonialism, the prevalence of sexist and racist stereotyping in the history of ideas, and the contemporary equation of black subjectivity with reductive violence, trauma, and melancholia. Beyond racial, gender, and sexual divides, the art of combining intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity, abstraction and emotion, consciousness and desire, is of paramount importance to forge a theoretical framework that resists becoming “a pure instrument of knowledge […] that exempts the subject from any modification at the level of being” (Mannoni, 1979: 42). As subjective and political spaces that can be universalized while remaining particular, these texts are open to identity inasmuch as this identity remains imagined, plural, and continuously shifting. They thus restore the complexity of what it means to be human. Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century aims to be the toolbox emerging from these contributions. While looking at new objects and key notions such as agency, the essays of this collection revise the black literary tradition from W. E. B. Du Bois and

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Claude McKay to Melvin Dixon and Octavia Butler, in a queer perspective. They share a common interest in language and storytelling for their ability to produce theory. In “narrative theorizing,” best exemplified by Morrison’s erotics, the text is not merely literary but transformational. Like metaphor, it bridges intra- and extra-textual spaces, being and doing, and can give birth to theories of liberation like Fanon’s or contemporary Black Queer activists’. These theories and theorizations are the record, both affectual and political, of lived experience, and an invitation to social change that strives to resist systemic authority. Embodied Knowledge A mirror image of this critical posture – both philosophical and political – is Rozena Maart’s “Writing and the Relation: From Textual Coloniality to South African Black Consciousness.” At the outset of the book, the text stands as the place where pain returns, the space that no critical or fictional discourse can fully circumscribe or foreclose, the location of an embodied consciousness heralding the ethics of the entire collection and the primordial intersection it explores: the critique to come cannot be severed from the subject’s lived experience, from which it springs. Unorthodox in its form, the text reflects this “modification at the level of one’s being” in a continued praxis, a task more frequently taken up by writers and artists than by critics or academics. What the other contributions of the volume theorize – how intersecting identities influence the subject’s agency and possibility to transform social and imaginary spaces – is enacted here in a self-reflexive writing experiment in medias res, at the very intersection of consciousness and non-being, where the writing subject faces the (im)/possibility to make sense and relate to history, geography, or political resistance, and in doing so creates. As such the text is a consciousness materializing in worded flesh, the South African black consciousness as lived, remembered, and written out by Rosa, the girl child of the short story “No Rosa, No District Six.” This textual layer is interwoven with the testimony of the writer that Rosa has become, and with the author’s more recent reflections on writing and meaning while she rewrites the never-ceasing palimpsest of memory in a spiraling textual stratification characteristic of her style. The binary logic of identification and differentiation – the rational backbone of colonization, racism, and gender construction – is also challenged when it comes to the author’s inscription in the genres of black writing. Her text blends the philosophical essay, the memoir, autobiography, and fiction, in resistance to categorization and labeling. A similar defiance of binaries that teleologically predetermine identities is reflected in the themes of the text and its narrative strategies. The traumatic experiences of coloniality and of the postcolonial

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rupture, for instance, neither signify arrested development nor mark an absolute starting point: the various voices create a polyphony echoing the panoptic focalization which the embedded narratives deploy, and in which one recognizes the various points of view of Rosa the child, the adult, and the writer. Writing might be circular in essence, but the circularity that this multidimensional verbal flow draws is, first and foremost, that of the subject’s subjectivity. Freudian psychoanalysis, Derridean grammatology, and Biko’s black consciousness intersect in the language that the writing unfolds even as it also shapes the space the subject comes to inhabit – the immaterial body of the self reinvented. The twists and turns of the process are punctuated by “the hives” and their recurring occurrence. A bodily symptom of the forced removal from District Six, the hives signify in turn British colonization, the struggle against South African apartheid, and resistance to violence against women and racism against blacks, connecting these struggles and making them relevant everywhere and at all times. The hives are not the sign of repressed trauma but that of pain – renewed and re-enacted – as it looks for a place to dwell, from the body to the text, from the text to consciousness. This is where the witnessing text starts to speak and tell the story of its genesis – one in which we catch a glimpse of the subject’s. Not only does this text exemplify the raw material necessary to our work as critics of black literatures and cultures, but it serves as the acute reminder of what is fundamentally at stake in our critical analyses and epistemological speculations. It is the subject, the being of flesh, pain, and joy, masquerading behind unveiling words, for whom agency is a matter of life and death, of survival and mental sanity, and for whom intersections are not abstractions but a lived reality, that we need to understand intellectually and physically. This is what the text calls upon us to do, and what the three chapters of Part I respond to, in their endeavor to challenge hegemonic gender identity. Challenging Hegemonic Gender Identities In “Postcolonial Backlash and Being Proper: Femininity, Blackness, Sexuality, and Transgender in the Public Eye,” Antje Schuhmann tackles nationalistic appropriations of women’s bodies and the inscription of sexual hierarchies through the enforcement of “proper” (i.e., conforming) gender behavior. Focusing on transgender and intersex identities, she calls upon a true dismantling of the two-sex binary in contemporary queer politics, and examines the paradoxes of South African authorities’ defense of athlete Caster Semenya, at a moment when women’s rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights seem under attack in that same country. Drawing upon scholarship from Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias to Ifi

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Amadiume or Robert Edgerton, the author reads the official management of the Semenya “affair” within the history of women’s bodies as allegorically identified to the nation itself, both against the backdrop of South Africa’s colonial history, and in a contemporary postcolonial backlash to that history. Antje Schuhmann relevantly emphasizes how the Western media’s contemporary treatment of Caster Semenya echoes the forced exposure of Saartjie Baartman, the nineteenth-century “Hottentot Venus”; but she also highlights how the South African government, in rejecting this racist and sexist colonial history, in turn uses the rejection of “Western” values to reinforce an oppressive patriarchal political agenda against women, gays, or transgender people in the name of nation-building, and in contradiction with its official self-imaging as the “rainbow nation.” Beyond her critique of the current attack on women’s rights, Antje Schuhmann, drawing upon Judith Butler, summons feminist and queer movements to resist the current two-sex classification of human beings, and to answer the transgender challenge to redefine identity as fluid and inclusive, beyond the violence of either/or (male or female). As she writes: “Feminism that is directly invested in the politics of otherness – essential for hegemonic nationalism – invests inevitably in normative body politics and as such, reproduces regimes of violence.” Antje Schuhmann’s writing on the transgender or intersex identity as being abjected not merely by official discourses but perhaps even by those activists who fight for women’s rights or same-sex marriage, and who may think of transgender as the “new margin,” aptly highlights contradictions within feminist or gay movements. Such an analysis also echoes Sabine Broeck’s rethinking the history of (white) gender as grounded in the abjection of black women in slavery, in Part IV of this volume. Some readers will wonder that the chapter does not underline that many transgender people lead particularly precarious lives because in the absence of administrative recognition of the identity they have chosen they cannot find any other work than sex work, which places them in one of the most vulnerable situations of all, at the intersection of sexist, classist, and racist patterns of violence. The same readers will, however, agree that transgender civil rights may be the new civil rights litmus test for those who seek to challenge sexual and gendered hierarchies today. While the chapter does not use the acronym LGBTQI (i.e. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) explicitly, it is a call to open up queer politics and recognize each individual’s identity as an act of agency. This central issue of individual self-determination announces some aspects of Florian Bast’s exploration of agency versus genetics in Octavia Butler’s dystopian fiction; but also Eva Boesenberg’s “Productive Investments: Masculinities and Economics in Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho,” which, in its analysis, is careful to question

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whether the homosocial circulation of investment between men is predicated on the commodification or exchange of women – a question also put by Charles Nero in his study of black and gay nation-building, in Part II, and which receives a very different answer. Eva Boesenberg’s object of enquiry is masculinity, or more accurately alternative forms of masculinity. Neither gay – though homosocial – nor performances of male domination, they demonstrate how, between black men at least, the walls of Jericho (reinterpreted here as the walls of gender and class) may indeed, as the Spiritual claims, come tumbling down. Boesenberg’s analysis of the intraracial and interracial politics of gender in her close reading of masculine investment – which, as she points out, draws on Leslie McCall’s double notion of “intercategorical” and “intracategorical” complexity as well as on Dill’s definition of “people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups” (2002: 5) – connects her chapter to Antje Schuhmann’s. Her close reading of Fisher’s text emphasizes issues of assimilation versus exclusion, and of empowerment versus constraint – in terms of race, gender, and class – along lines that echo similar dialectics in Jennifer Leath’s study of Jezebel or Charles Nero’s reading of the intersectionalities of gender and class in Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms. Her perceptive analysis of the circulation of capital, and of cultural capital between black men in this Harlem Renaissance novel and of their fluid redefinition of identity highlights Fisher’s mobilization of the black vernacular, from signifying to overt satire, in a range of registers that expresses everything from fond solidarity between black men to class tensions culminating in intraracial forms of violence. Eva Boesenberg’s emphasis on the novel’s use of literary voice, and of the often humorous, vivid, speakerly forms it deploys, allows her to root her political analysis of identity and of the circulation of black male investment and desire in a reading of the vernacular voices that recasts voice not merely as a vehicle for political speech, but as a political form of agency. This very point is at the heart of Florian Bast’s chapter “‘I Hugged Myself ’: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’.” In a close reading of Butler’s dystopian short story, which he recontextualizes within the history of first-person black narrative from the original slave narratives to contemporary emancipatory neo-slave ‘I’-narratives, Bast sheds light on the specific dynamics of voice and gender in a story that never actually names the narrator’s race, but encodes it as black. The tension between genetic determinism and agency in the narrator’s intradiegetic and extradiegetic use of her voice is analyzed on multiple levels; the narrator discovers that she has the power, through her voice, to control demented patients who have fully developed the disease

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she carries, and to prevent them from acting out violently; and she simultaneously performs that empowerment through the agential act of narrating and ordering, thus regaining control over her grim herstory. While Bast’s is an optimistic reading of Butler’s dystopian story, that does not see the narrator as gaining a form of privilege within the marginalized and othered community at her fellow-sufferers’ expense, it is a subtle analysis, from its very title, of the mise en abyme of the power of voice, and of how “the firstperson narrator narrativizes – that is, orders, frames, and chooses to include – the bodily act of enveloping, even containing her self while her very narration establishes a coherent subject.” Indeed, Florian Bast cleverly reads the fictional disease that causes its carriers literally to dig into themselves to the point of self-mutilation and self-blinding as a (gothic) critique of Enlightenment notions of the rational and coherent subject. To challenge hegemonic gender identities inherited from history or implemented by political and economic systems, voicing the self certainly appears efficacious, especially for intersectional selves attempting to resist erasure, foreclosure, or the subordination of one or several of their identities. Against the backdrop of enmeshed power relations that these intersectional selves necessarily confront, agency then seems to stand for the yardstick of the subject’s subjectivity. But as the modern conception of the subject as rational and coherent has proved constraining and limitative, an analysis of intersectionality solely revolving around agency would oversimplify subjectivity. It would first preclude from its scope the subject’s possible incoherences – how he/she, or his/her conscious or unconscious identifications, chosen or imposed, may or may not cohere with others’. Through the lens of agency, situations of “not being proper” and of nonconformity tend to duplicate an understanding of subjectivity based on the very binaries that multiple identities and contemporary intersectionality precisely aim to challenge. In this perspective, the subject remains conceived as an interiority struggling against/within exterior power relations, his/her nonconformity being defined through the norms to be subverted. A second limitation to an agency-oriented intersectional subjectivity lies in the sterile opposition between discourses which are preexistent to the subject and his/her actual experience, two alternatives respectively embodied by poststructuralists and cultural feminists and which have framed “the metaphysics of gender and sexual difference,” as Linda Martín Alcoff argues in her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006: 151–60). Taking up Barbara Christian’s “narrative theorizing,” the next three chapters, in their effort to produce theory from language and story-telling, attempt to supersede these agential pitfalls which might revive the tenets of a traditional subjectivity. Carsten Junker, Jarrett H. Brown, and Charles Nero, each in his own voice, wonder whether intersectionality can be thought and/

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or fictionalized from the subject’s own actual experience, without being determined by preexisting discourses. What is the signification of writers’ and/or critical readers’ attempts at creating and/or examining intersectional selves as the revised continuation of literary traditions, be it the captivity narrative (in Carsten Junker’s text) or Du Bois’s political philosophy and the Black Arts Movement (in Charles Nero’s study of Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms)? Beyond agency, the problem thus posed is the historical overdetermination of intersectionality as theory and praxis, the stake, for these scholars, being to maintain the open space that emerges from intersections within the texts they study, and between these texts and their narrative theorizing – a space for negotiation, in a reinvention of both space and subject. Nonconformity and Narrative Theorizing In “Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag – Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect,” Carsten Junker focuses on a relatively neglected satirical attack on slavery by Benjamin Franklin, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” (1790), which was symptomatic of the affective responses sought by late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing. Indeed, the abolitionist desire to envision an end to the enslavement and thingification of African-origin people was channeled through the power of emotion – from sympathy, empathy, guilt, and shame, to fear, disgust, and laughter – as deployed by narrative structures of address, visualizations of the plight of the enslaved and depictions of the monstrosity of the enslavers, in travel narratives or satire. Voiced by a white male protagonist of abolition who speaks on behalf of an Algerian beneficiary of the slave trade and displaces the horrors of enslaving from Europeans onto North Africans, Franklin’s text can also be read as a performance in “ethnic drag” which partakes in establishing and normalizing white masculinity as a hegemonic speaking position in the late eighteenth-century Transatlantic sphere. Besides exemplifying the import of queer rewritings of performance and performativity into critical race theory, Junker’s analysis is instrumental in showing how narratives and textuality reveal the structuring of a hegemonic subjectivity and can, in turn, be used to theorize intersectionality and an intersectional subjectivity – one which would not be defined by a predetermined space. The rationalization of space, through structures, is an important concern of the chapter: the articulation of textual spaces (diegesis/narration/writing) through focalizations, the structure of address (speaker-subject/object/addressee), the structure of subjectivization (subject/ other/discourse), and, first and foremost, the structure of performance (impersonation/reception/signification). Contrarily to other contributions

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that also explore hermeneutics, this chapter proffers all the textual layers necessary to a critical examination of the ambivalences of Franklin’s ethnic drag and of the intersecting textual layers’ ever-changing meaning and cluster of ambiguities. The different structures of Franklin’s text seem embedded in such a way that their intersections neutralize ambiguities or alternative meanings instead of generating them. None of the embedded structures of the text in fact gives access to the black subject; as such, he/she remains outside the text. While this is also the fate of the white American, the differentiating element is that exclusion and estrangement from the American Republic and from the ethics of the Enlightenment was the existential reality lived by blacks. The analogical slippage between identities confirms the imbalance: blacks are present as enslaved whites, while white Americans are present as white Europeans who themselves are in the position of enslaved blacks – which requires white American readers to identify with white Europeans, precisely at the historical moment when America was distancing itself from Europe. Franklin’s ethnic drag thus seems to function as a space of signification which closes upon itself, sealed by two nodal points – the black enslaved and the free white Americans – that both remain outside the text and unrelated to each other. If the text’s anti-abolitionist agenda thus appears rather remote, what, then, might its aim be? Drawing on Gender Studies and on Butler’s concept of performance in particular, one might argue that what is at stake is revealed by what is not represented in Franklin’s text – that is to say both blacks and American whites. Indeed, Butler analyzes drag performances as the theatricalization of a loss with which the subject cannot come to terms; as the manifestation of melancholia, and of impossible mourning (1995: 21–36). In Franklin’s ethnic drag, it would be that by which white American consciousness no longer signifies through its similarities and dissemblances with Europe but instead through race – an enclosed and unidimensional space determining subjectivity, where intersectional potentialities are to be revealed only through theatricality and fiction. This perspective is also explored by Jarrett H. Brown in “‘Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap’: Claude McKay’s Literary Drag Performance in Banana Bottom.” The author argues that Banana Bottom is a form of “literary drag performance” in which Claude McKay, under the guise of Bita Plant, was able symbolically to return to Jamaica – as he was not in real life – to repair autobiographical pain (the passing away of his mother). Brown reads Bita’s decolonized subjectivity when she deliberately chooses Banana Bottom and self-definition over subordination to the white Craigs and the mission house as modern-day plantation in terms of a political allegory for the decolonization of Jamaica. The strategies Bita uses to free herself are analyzed in terms of marronage and creolization – from her awakening to her deeper,

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repressed identity, to her “trickstering” and “playing” the men and the whites who would control her. With Brown’s study of McKay’s literary drag performance, as with the two other texts of Part II, a central question about narrative theorizing arises: one that is related to both phenomenology and hermeneutics. Inasmuch as the reading of identitary intersections is justified in turn from within the diegesis, by way of paratextual and/or contextual elements, or via extratextual cultural discourses, but rarely across all the layers of the text, such readings may unavoidably appear incomplete or even forced. This difficulty calls into question the way we understand the theorization of intersectionality. How does one determine the meeting point between textual intersections and critical ones? The corollary question being: do we produce the intersections we are looking for? Do we project them onto, rather than discover them within the text? These speculations do not invalidate cultural and/or identitary-focused readings since the text, beyond any circumstances, has the ability to salvage its collaborative function in the production of signification by either favoring or opposing/contradicting/ nullifying the reader/critic’s projections. The point is therefore not to classify or hierarchize interpretations, but rather to be alert about the space that opens up when textual intersections and critical ones meet. Does intersectionality produce a new critical perspective (and what might this be?) or does it fail to do so because it cannot supersede the duality from which it springs? To this question, one already raised in Part I, Charles Nero answers that intersectionality does, indeed, provide new critical perspectives. In “The Souls of Black Gay Folk: The Black Arts Movement and Melvin Dixon’s Revision of Du Boisian Double Consciousness in Vanishing Rooms,” Nero reads Dixon’s novel Vanishing Rooms at multiple intersections of black heritage (political and artistic). What is traced back to Du Bois is not the celebrated political concept of “double consciousness” as readers generally know it, with its image of the “veil,” but “the queer doubling convention, a structure representing same gender homoerotic desire as the basis for nationbuilding,” in “Of the Coming of John,” the lone piece of fiction in The Souls of Black Folk. The chapter’s central argument is that Vanishing Rooms offers an intraracial, Black Nation alternative to Du Bois’s scenario of two characters, one black and one white, “doubles of each other […] locked into an erotic bond that represents a yearning for a union that will be an American nation healed from the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” This queering of Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John” is of course in itself a daring reading – since in Du Bois’s short story it is not consciously encoded.5 5 Hegelian readings of the story see it as logic of opposites finally synthesized – through death in “Of the Coming of John,” in the “truer self ” of double consciousness in “Of Our

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This opens perspectives for fruitful debate over what we read in highly sexualized political allegory, and will prompt readers to ponder similarities and differences, echoes and revisions, between the images of “masculine,” “femininized,” or “invert” black men projected by African American discourse and theorizing over time: from Du Bois’s attempts to respond to the patriarchal sexualization of racism through the re-masculinization of the African American, to Dixon’s blurring of assigned (male) sexual roles, to Charles Nero’s deliberate signifying that queers double consciousness. By arguing that “Dixon repeats and revises Du Bois in narratives that invoke the new national identities that emerged after the Civil Rights Movement: Black Power and Gay Liberation,” Nero makes Dixon’s novel a critical intersection of these last two movements and, as such, an essential contribution to the “Generation of 1986”’s creation of a “black gay collective identity.” In this perspective, Vanishing Rooms contributes to a “distinctive African American male queer literary tradition” in its critical viewing of Gay Liberation through a Black Arts/Black Power lens. Nero indeed identifies the political reason for setting Vanishing Rooms in 1975, at the end of the Black Arts/Power Movement, and not at the time of its writing (1991), as due to Dixon’s desire to raise the crucial issue of whether “these two nations [Black Power and Gay Liberation] can be redeemed [respectively]  from homophobia and racism.” The chapter’s demonstration – intraracial gay love supersedes interracial gay love – will remind readers that the issue of interraciality, as tackled by the black gay writers of the 1990s, has been at the core of as heated literary and critical debates as those concerning the Harlem Renaissance, foregrounding that interracial collaboration or black cultural nationalism can both function as primarily ideological tools. While both are often accused of misguided utopianism, they are also just as often accused of perpetuating symbolic violence. Nero thus reads Dixon’s novel as critiquing Gay Liberation as implicitly White Gay Liberation – which announces a similar questioning of the White underpinning of Gender Studies, in Sabine Broeck’s final chapter of this book. His subtle reading of the novel’s mobilization of black art from the Black Arts Movement (in particular, the Harlem Renaissance poem and Nina Simone song “Images”) does not preclude an unflinching look at the Spiritual Strivings,” or as the union between the “Teutonic Strongman” and the “African Submissive Man” called for in Du Bois’s earlier “Harvard Commencement Address” of 1890. Unconscious homoerotic desire can also be read in The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (1968), when Du Bois recounts how in 1928 he fired Augustus Granville Dill, the business manager of The Crisis, who had been arrested in a public restroom: “In the midst of my career there burst on me a new and undreamed of aspect of sex. […] I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I had never understood the tragedy of an Oscar Wilde” (282) (our italics).

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gender issues posed by roles assigned to black women within some forms of Black Nationalist discourse. Thus, while optimistically offering that Dixon may be heralding the advent of a “new black nation […] redeemed from homophobia,” Nero also announces Sabine Broeck’s highlighting of the key epistemological and ethical interventions made possible by Black Feminism. Nero’s highly original analysis of Vanishing Rooms thus undoubtedly opens new spaces for the discussion of gendered and queered definitions or ideals of nationhood, in its layered re-reading of black nation-building, Black Art, Gay Liberation and Black icons, from Du Bois to Nina Simone to (perhaps) Dixon himself. Upsurges of Desire Pursuing the politics of reading and interpretation, Part III focuses on the creative and regenerative power of the subject’s affectual states and of the text’s metaphors. Intersecting the self–other rapport with one’s relation to the world, desire in Claudine Raynaud’s chapter, melancholia in Laura Sarnelli’s, and metaphorization in Rebecka Rutledge Fisher’s are all oriented towards a transformation of the social world. Whether literal and sensual, in Claudine Raynaud or Laura Sarnelli’s studies of the erotics in Morrison’s writing, or allegorical in Rebecka Rutledge Fisher’s reading of Richard Wright’s work, the upsurges of desire, though emancipatory and empowering, can also be fraught with danger – loss and deflation, self-alienation and/or rejection by the loved one or by the black community the subject longs to be joined with, tragedy and destruction. All three chapters explore forms of ecstasy – the movement through which one feels transported beyond oneself, fostering a recreated subjectivity that deploys a transformed space for itself – ecstasy as the experience of intersectional selves and as a powerful inspiration for an intersectional critique. In “‘Risking Sensuality’: Morrison’s Erotics of Writing,” Claudine Raynaud therefore reads the erotic in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre not merely as a theme but as a driving dynamic of the writing itself. In close readings of Morrison’s novels, from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, drawing upon theorists from Audre Lorde to Barbara Christian or bell hooks, but also on cultural forms such as call and response or the sensuality of jazz reinterpreted in an erotic context, Raynaud emphasizes the ambivalent nature of love and desire as they are represented in Morrison’s work. The chapter demonstrates how the erotic is simultaneously portrayed as the most intimate deploying of the black subject’s subjectivity, and as a means of self-expression often likened to an art form, but also as an essential form of freedom – including for the enslaved black subject – that may paradoxically result in destructive feelings of loss and of alienation of the self to another. These multiple perspectives

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on love and on black desire are reflected in a novel like A Mercy in the radically differing perspectives provided by the other characters on Florens’s passionate love for the blacksmith. These multiple, “refracted” images of desire – which echo the rainbow image for sexual pleasure at the heart of The Bluest Eye, a novel that simultaneously depicts abuses of body and feeling – can be seen as a mise en abyme of reader responses to Morrison’s depictions of the erotic. Indeed, as Claudine Raynaud subtly argues, the power of Morrison’s erotics lies in the reflexively sensual dimension of the text and in its performance of the erotic in a call to reader response that Jazz openly formulates, in an open, and risky, declaration of love. Laura Sarnelli, in her study “Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body,” prolongs this conversation on black desire in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, similarly drawing upon Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” and thinking of the black woman as haunted by memories not merely of loss but also of ecstasy. Rereading Morrison in the light of Ranjana Khanna’s work on postcolonial melancholia, which somewhat revises Paul Gilroy’s, and in an invitation to think of melancholia as creative rather than as mourning without end, Laura Sarnelli interprets the “re-memory” of loss (both personal and cultural) as allowing the emergence of embodied black desire in The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and A Mercy. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s writing on loss and community, she in particular examines the community on Jacob Vaark’s farm as a “protoculture of melancholia,” in which all characters, across class, gender, and racial lines, suffer from loss. In a close reading of the erotics of the novel in Florens’s passionate love for the blacksmith, Laura Sarnelli analyzes the recurring patterns of loss, self-alienation, and melancholia in Florens’s story, that nevertheless result in the assertion of her subjectivity and agency through her first-person narrative (in echoes of Florian Bast’s reading of black first-person narratives in this volume). On issues of othering by the white gaze and of the desire for recognition, Laura Sarnelli’s chapter can be heard in a critical conversation with Lewis R. Gordon’s, with a difference in their respective articles’ intertext to Fanon. In its insistence on critical melancholia’s aim – “to acknowledge the unsaid and repressed colonial subject who hauntingly appears as an ethical demand of human agency” – Laura Sarnelli’s writing ties in with Sabine Broeck’s reading of Black Feminism as a call to respond affectively to the “abjection” of black women in slavery by hearing the black subject’s pain. “Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire, and Doing,” also connects individual and social change. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher highlights the mise en abyme of the black artist’s desire to free his people in Wright’s novella The Man Who Lived Underground. Her chapter performs a close reading of the text, informed by existentialist and phenomenological

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texts, by Paul Ricoeur’s writing on metaphor and Du Bois on the cultural heritage of black folk, as well as by Wright’s own definition of the black writer’s work in “Blueprint for Negro Writing”. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher points to Wright’s writing as a praxis of embracing black nationalism and its cultural expressions, but only in order to transcend them. She explains how metaphor is central to Wright’s political narrative and how he “insists that affect and imagery – including figures of language such as conceptual metaphors – are capable of granting form, meaning, and access to a new and better world.” At the heart of the novella lies an allegory of “psychic and bodily descent,” culminating in the hero’s unjust death, precisely at the moment in which he feels the most selflessness and empathy. The fact that this ending is bound to elicit a “morally outraged response from the reader” may enable the emancipatory change, in Wright’s readers, that the hero fails to bring about within the story. As Rutledge Fisher writes, Wright thus creates a “tensional imagination of truth, and makes of the tragedy that ensues from an unjust death a heuristic that construes a new sphere of meaning opened by metaphorical discourse.” The focus on the use of affect as well as reason in political discourse likens this article to Carsten Junker’s, and even more to Lewis R. Gordon’s – in Gordon’s, one hears a painfully aware thinking subject; in Fisher’s, an embodied subjectivity that is ultimately beyond thought and speech, so flooded is it with feeling. In its analysis of metaphors but also of analogies, allegories, and parables, Rutledge Fisher’s chapter is a timely opportunity, under the aegis of upsurging desire, to prolong our reflection on intersectionality and the transformation of both the subject and space. In the wake of Paul Ricoeur’s study of similarities and dissemblances, continuity and discontinuity, in Parcours de la reconnaissance, trois études (2004), it could be argued that metaphor and analogy differ in the way perception and cognition are articulated and spatialized. While metaphor combines two signifieds in one signifier, analogy links together two distinct signified/signifier binaries. When applied to signifieds and signifiers, the deciphering of similarities and dissemblances produces the space necessary to deploy signification and interpretation. This is where the discursive context might be of some importance. As narrativization propels signification while channeling and orienting it, can narrativized metaphors salvage their transformative power? What space is left for the reader and his/her transformative input (in comparison with poetry, for instance), and for alternative meanings, when narrativized metaphors – as in Du Bois’s parables – curb plurisignification? Are narrativized metaphors and the force they draw from the narrative dynamic a counterbalancing response to stock images or stereotypical representations, as could be the case with Wright? If so, these narratives need to be studied within the larger context of cultural discourses, which influence perception and

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cognition. The transformation of meaning and of the world would thus lie where these three dimensions (metaphor, narrative, and cultural discourse) intersect – precisely because this is where their (un)likeliness is manifest – and, possibly first and foremost, to subjects with intersecting identities and cultures. Such a stretching of space between metaphors, narratives, and cultural contexts in order to generate a transformative self-reflexivity and to lay the foundations for transdisciplinarity – a praxis of intersectionality preventing disciplines from closure and the human subjects they study from reification – is precisely the task taken on by the last three chapters. Epistemological Genealogies and Prospections In this part, chapters explicitly grapple with the oppressive subtext that underlies the history of disciplines such as philosophy, black theology, and Gender Studies that have all variously laid claims to bringing about liberation. Each of the three authors argues that by examining how these disciplines or fields of knowledge forged their epistemological tools through explicitly racialized and sexist forms of othering, and by reclaiming those abjected others, the master’s tools can – pace Audre Lorde – be used to dismantle the master’s house. Such a move might allow the renewal of culturally and epistemologically inherited – but deeply alienating – definitions of reason (Gordon), sexuality (Leath), or gendered subjectivity (Broeck). In “On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire,” Lewis R. Gordon takes up Fanon’s angry realization that he was “excluded” from reason because of his race. To fight the “asymmetrical white grammar” over “the Negro [as]  black object,” Gordon contends that Africana philosophy must challenge euro-centered philosophy, by reading its racialized canonical texts as such. In a reversal of Audre Lorde’s famous words on the master’s tools’ inability to dismantle the master’s house, Lewis R. Gordon calls for a more dialectical approach, in which the master’s tools can be reappropriated by the black thinking subject to “rebuild” the house of philosophy and theory itself, short of which subjugation would repeat itself: “The price of a failure to participate in the development of thought, of the abrogation of theory by people of color, is epistemic dependency.” Because euro-centered philosophy denies the thinking black subject and because Africana philosophy has too often been subsumed under political and social thought, Gordon calls for a teleological transformation of disciplinarity, through theory that stems from the thinking black subject’s confrontation with texts that deny him or her. This would simultaneously prevent philosophy from falling into disciplinary decadence and empty “ritual”: the black desire to generate theory is thus

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doubly vital – to the thinking black subject, to avoid the pitfall of black melancholia, but also to the future of philosophy itself. Jennifer S. Leath similarly calls upon Audre Lorde to incite black thinkers to rediscover the biblical figure of Jezebel, and to reclaim the subversive potential of a woman devalued into a sexist and racist stereotype. In “Revising Jezebel Politics: Toward a New Black Sexual Ethic,” through a close reading of the biblical text, Leath argues for black churches to see the “non-normative gender and sexual identity” that Jezebel manifests as collectively empowering, transformational, and even spiritual. Drawing upon Cathy Cohen’s writing, Jennifer Leath indeed challenges black communities and black churches to reappropriate Jezebel as a figure of “deviance that is not for its own sake, but deviance that happens by virtue of the integrity and dignity of inherent identity, and deviance that is embodied as resistance to oppression for the sake of the sociopolitical integrity of people and communities.” Crossing black feminist theory (Audre Lorde and Cathy Cohen), quare theory (E. Patrick Johnson), and cultural forms of black cultural expression (Sade’s song on Jezebel) with the biblical text, this chapter thus summons an intersectionality of black liberation struggles, proclaiming the hope that upon this revised Jezebel “a new black sexual ethic [might be] built.” Sabine Broeck’s “The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire: Abolish Property” in turn calls upon Gender Studies scholars to examine the epistemological roots of (implicitly white) Gender Studies. The personal “remembering” of the major black feminist texts of the 1970s the chapter opens on reminds us of black feminism’s fundamental claim that identity is intersectional and that black women live in double jeopardy. More painfully, in its archeology of gender, this essay traces the history whereby the assertion of white female subjectivity between the Enlightenment and the late nineteenth century remains caught up in a rhetoric (“we are not property”) predicated on the abjection of black women. Sabine Broeck’s contention is that white women predicated their subjecthood on the thingification, and on the abjection (beyond othering) of black women into black flesh. Drawing upon the work of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, Sabine Broeck claims that the past needs to be affectively reclaimed. Its exposure of the underside of white Modernity allows this essay to echo Carsten Junker’s and Lewis R. Gordon’s; and its argument that black feminist writing can offer an “epistemic lesson in redress” for (white) Gender Studies, black (male) liberation discourse, and recent queer theory alike likens it to Lewis R. Gordon’s call for an epistemic critique of theory (in this case, gender theory). By recalling black feminism’s critique of sexism within black (male) liberation movements, this chapter also resonates with Charles Nero’s critique of the transaction of women within the forms of black nationalism

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deployed in Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms. Finally, in its exhortation to hear the voices of the disremembered black women who lived and died in slavery, Sabine Broeck’s essay recalls Claudine Raynaud’s highlighting of the engaged, affective reading black feminist authors ask of their readers. Last, but not least, in its desire that white Gender Studies “come to grief,” this chapter perhaps shifts the burden of melancholia and mourning from the black to the white subject, reversing the dynamics exposed in a number of contributions to this volume, and, in particular, Laura Sarnelli’s. Beyond melancholia and mourning, it shows that desire does not partake of an economy of recognition and is not prompted by loss – the loss of an idealized recognition. If desire can be transformative and political, it is because the structure of lack that it encompasses is inherent to the subject – it is the hallmark of one’s humanity and of intersectionality itself. Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, Calif.: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute Press, 1987. Baldwin, James. Baldwin, Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. —— Baldwin, Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. Bambara, Toni Cade (ed.). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Signet, 1970. Butler, Judith. “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification.” In Maurice Berger (ed.). Constructing Masculinity. New York and London: Routledge, 1995: 21–36 Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” In Angelyn Mitchell (ed.). Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 348–59. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3.2 (2011): 88–112. Combahee River Collective. [1982]. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In B. Guy-Sheftall (ed.). Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press, 1995: 232–40. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Anti-Racist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 139 (1989). —— “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (July 1991): 1240–99.

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Dill, Bonnie Thornton. “Work at the Intersections of Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Other Dimensions of Difference in Higher Education.” Connections 2002 (Fall): 5–7. Du Bois, W. E. B. [1968]. The Autobiography of W. E. B Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century. New York: International Publishers, 1975. —— [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1989. Gordon, Lewis R. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press, 1984: 53–9. Mannoni, Maud. La Théorie comme fiction. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979. Ricoeur, Paul. Parcours de la reconnaissance, trois études. Paris: Editions Stock, 2004. Rocchi, Jean-Paul. “Preservation of Ignorance; The Lack and the Absence: Self-Reflexivity and the Queering of African American Diasporic Research.” In Michelle M. Wright and Antje Schuhmann (eds). Blackness and Sexualities. Berlin: Lit, 2007: 15–27. —— “‘The Other Bites the Dust’; The Death of the Other: Towards an Epistemology of Identity.” [2006]. Trans. Joelle Theubet. In Sabine Broeck and Jason R. Ambroise (eds). Black Knowledges: The Legacy of Enlightenment, and Critical Epistemology. Liverpool University Press, 2014.

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2 Exordium: Writing and the Relation: From Textual Coloniality to South African Black Consciousness1 Rozena Maart (University of KwaZulu Natal)

This chapter situates the subject of fiction, and the subject as writer of fiction, simultaneously. Between the two, a third emerges – the subject as critic – offering the reader a triple reading of a triple writing. It is a moment whereby to trace the trace, to trace the historical trajectory of a historical trajectory, requires that both the subject of the fiction and the subject as writer of fiction lay themselves bare on the page – reveal everything – and the critic binds and unwinds, untying the strings of history at different threads, unraveling the hidden, the forbidden, and the repressed that lie within writing. But it is the writing of the colonized that I am concerned with here – the writing of the English language in South Africa that is traced through its colonial history: a history that legislated that South Africans were British subjects until 1961, and removed them from the British Commonwealth in 1962 – the year that I was born – yet where a British system of education remains firmly intact, to this very day. 1 In April 2011, I was asked to give a presentation at CAAR on my fiction work. There are moments in the reading and performance of one’s fiction where one is able to situate oneself through physical presence in the flesh, voice, and the allowances that such presence offers – with gestures, tonality of voice, and the spaces between and among pauses that fill in, connect, and facilitate conjectures of the work – in such a way that the follow-up, the write-up, so to speak, does not fully allow. Now, months later, I wanted to produce the sentiment of the invitation to CAAR around my presentation – the physical aspect of being there and reading my poetry, fiction, etc. – within the scope and the general outline of the work of Glissant, Baldwin, and Audre Lorde, while also quite aware that I was the literary person who was asked to offer a different input […] to offer a different narrative, one that had fiction as its starting point as a means of asking questions and opening up possibilities for how the subject is situated in literary discourse, and the subject as raced, sexed, gendered, and historicized whilst still historicizing […] still making history, still participating in the construction of her history. It is with all of these in mind that I situate this piece of work alongside and within the framework of Black States of Desire.

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The trace is not a thread to be pulled for the purpose of evidence to make its claim. The trace is the historical trajectory, which the subject asserts as the presence of absence, as part of the subject’s history that was forced to truant outside her writing, and that which she now inscribes as present. Coming of Age through Writing. The Child Subject and the Adult Subject: The Agency of Their Letters “Textual coloniality” – the operation and functioning of coloniality within the pages of the subject’s reading – the colonized subject – she who is instructed to read and write in the language of her colonizer; she who reads, within the very formulation of the words with which she speaks her existence, within the very form and structure of the rules of the language that would only let her play if she abides by its diction. Textual coloniality thrusts itself, by law, upon the very tongue of her verbal communication because the instructed pronunciation punishes her native tongue with her as an accomplice to the crime, within the very landscape of her imagination – where if she speaks the language she upholds the civilization of that language.2 A relation is engraved between the page and the inscriber, between the purpose of the prose and the poisoning of the letter, between an admission of participation and a realization of refusal, between the need to acquiesce and the determination to rebel. Textual coloniality is the suicide of the colonized: a death that is committed in silent repose – of taking the letter that was forced as a gift through sounds that elocute sweeter than the street talk that you speak because it does not hiss like the patois of your people. Textual coloniality is the starving of the self for the gorging of the master. The postcolonial subject – she who writes fiction, who creates a world of words that come from within the colonial condition of her existence and inscribes it outside of it, inscribes it as a world of words that represent her world. The colonial subject as child – she who writes post the withdrawal of the term subject from her identity, she who writes from slave quarters and newly established quarters. The text is interrupted here in order to forge the first moment in the trajectory – that is the revelation of a diarized writing that traces its trajectory after the event … after the event of the writing of “No Rosa, No District Six.” This interruption reveals the events that led to the publication of the text in the second segment, and the decision to trace its history.

2 I am here evoking the phrase used by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, where he says, “you speak a language, you hold up that civilization”: “Parler […] telle ou telle langue […]  c’est […] assumer une culture, porter le poids d’une civilisation.” (Fanon 1952: 13)

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Writing the never-written 1973, the 4th of August. We are moved along with hundreds of others from District Six.3 Families from MacKenzie Street, Stirling Street and Sackville Street come and say their good-byes. Mummy, Mamma and Pappa, all of us, stand huddled together while the Portuguese speaking workers from Mozambique stand at a distance, circled by South African police vans. I wait for Nita. She is nowhere to be seen. Her mother comes along shaking her head. It is Nita’s birthday. Mamma looks at me and points to the sun settling close the mountain. It is time to go. The bulldozers are parked at the end of the street. We will be escorted – the government-stamped letter said; Mamma showed it to me. Wasfi and Ludwi stand leaning against one of the walls; they have stones in their pockets ready to hurl at the police. We have cried in each other’s hands. We have collected photographs of our friends left in the midst of removal, between fallen buildings and dead rats and dressed ourselves with scarves that stayed behind. Nita’s mother comes to tell Mummy “Nita just got her period. She won’t leave the house. She does not want to see Rosa.” I hear everything. I knew she’d get it before me. I don’t want to see her either. We fell out yesterday – she stole my ball. 10th of September: In Lavender Hill.4 We begin to build castles in the sand. Mamma tells us the same story of how Van Riebeeck could never get his castle built because her ancestors refused to participate in building him a home. Pappa sits at window, gazing at Table Mountain, the only living, speaking, thinking, permanent feature that keeps his secrets and knows not to tell – this he says often. I don’t know where Gadija moved to or Mari. I know they’ll be looking at the mountain every day, just like me. I look across the court, the block from where we live. There are clothes stuffed in broken window-panes, pregnant, bulging, bursting with unspoken words fisted into glass panes. We eat our fish frikkadels and our savoury rice with tomato smoortjie in silence. 1974, August 4th. One year later. I break out in hives – thick, lumpy, fleshy hives, not to be mistaken for a bruise or a love-bite. Mummy tells me not to tell Mamma and Pappa. “Don’t remind them of how they could not fight hard enough to save our home,” she says. Two days later, on the 3 District Six, a former slave quarter, was named the sixth municipality of Cape Town in 1867. Migrant workers from Mozambique were hired to do the job because South African workers refused to assist the regime. 4 Lavender Hill, Steenberg [trans. stone mountain], Bonteheuwel [trans. many hills], Mannenberg [trans. man and mountain] – townships that were created to house the freed slaves, those whose art, rhythm, music, and song made District Six a legendary place. Rosa and her family were moved to Lavender Hill.

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6th of August, Pappa’s left leg is amputated. “It was the days, the years, of working with chemicals,” he says. “A fisherman should fish from the rocks, not work in a concrete building for Irvin and Johnson.” Pappa looks toward the mountain. He can no longer see the sea. Pappa can no longer walk to the top of De Villiers Street or Caledon Street to see if they took Robben Island away too. I watch Pappa as he touches his left leg; it is severed at the source. His trousers are folded around the remaining flesh to cover the loss, a reminder of what was. He sits in his new chair, staring at the space where flesh flourished. I listen to him talk. He tells me that many years ago, when Mummy was a girl, thousands of women marched to Pretoria to fight the government. I nod. Mamma already told me that story but I listen all the same. A week later, the first drop of blood colours my panties. “You are now a woman,” Mummy tells me. “Learn when to say things and when to hold your tongue not for ever, never forever but when the time is right for you to use it.” Mummy gives me a letter from Nita which she wrote after I sent a card for a birthday with Mummy to give to Nita’s mother. 1975, August 4th. I am at Steenberg High. The hives arrive early in the morning, earlier than the first time. Now they are scattered all over my face. It’s Nita’s birthday and the hives are here again. It’s a Monday morning. Mummy has to go to work. I have to go to school. No, I can’t, Mummy decides. The hives will have to be hidden. I will get a packet of Willards crisps, cheese and onion flavour, and stay in bed – Mamma will fetch it from the corner shop when everyone is gone. My cousins, will be told that I have the flu. Mamma and Pappa will be told the same thing. It is winter and my long pajama hides the calamine lotion well. But if Mamma sees the calamine lotion on my face, I’ll say that I got bitten by a bug. Mummy says to stick to one story. I ask if I can tell both. A week after the hives I hand in my project on fairy tales and why Mamma never told them to us. I have to stand and read my project. Mrs W. has taken a liking to me; she sits with her hands under her chin as she waits for me to read. “Hansel and Gretel were Jew hunters. They found a crooked woman in a crooked house, in the woods. Why was she in the woods? She was hiding. She was hiding because she was afraid of being killed? Cinderella was named to reflect her blackness, the cinder that was the remains of the black wood, and she was punished for being Black, for having black hair and she had to work for her white sisters, and redeem herself by marrying a white man, who chose her because of her small feet. She had to be small for him to love her. You can’t hide a big Black Jewish woman. Snow White met the dwarves, the small men, all living in hiding, all Jewish men who were hiding because they would be killed if they were part of society … ” Mrs. W. rushes toward me. She grabs the pages out of my hands. Her face is red. I can hear the veins in her neck throbbing. She

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tears my pages into pieces, and rushes to the bin. “Get out!” she screams. “Get out now! Who do you think you are?” 1976, August 4th: The hives are here again. Mummy takes me to the hospital the day after. By the time I have my porridge the hives are gone. They have disappeared like ghosts, without a trace. Mummy says we should still go. The doctor looks at us funny – his eyes say the hives are imaginary. I want to believe him. It is Nita’s birthday. August 31st. D gave me a pamphlet. He is a head boy at school and he’s been talking to me about Steve Biko. “His words are banned,” he said. D told me that Biko spoke at football stadiums because the South African government banned him because of his words. I read the pamphlet over and over when I am alone. I begin to say them out loud. They are illegal words, words that are not allowed to be said, thought or read. Words that spring off the page, a small page, ripe for distribution, small enough to hide, clear enough to read and deep enough to keep the shudder of my nose and mouth under control with fingers pressed hard against my face and with tears running over them like a waterfall. Biko situated the mind within the body. The mind is the body. The body is the mind. “The mind is the weapon of the colonizer, don’t give it to them, If you have, take it back,” that is what I understood. “Stop talking to yourself, “Mummy said. “People might think you’re mad.” As I combed my hair that evening, Biko’s words went into the brush. My friend at school gave me a photo of Hector Peterson who was shot in Soweto earlier in the year. I remembered him. How could I forget the girl and the boy who carried Hector’s body? I put the photo in my history book. One cannot leave these things lying around. 1977, August 4th. The hives have come again. How could this happen? Just a few days ago I felt the sting of teargas against my skin. The hives will die, for sure, I thought. I sat with Ayesha wiping water from our faces after we had covered them with wet handkerchiefs before the protest march. The day was filled with bodies vibrating, running past us, familiar hands pulling us away from alleys policemen knew well, feet scuffling about us, shamboks in the air held by hands in blue uniforms who were instructed to beat us like dead stones until we bled. I did not attend to the welts – strokes of the shambok that I got from a green-eyed policeman for not climbing the wall fast enough when he ran after me. He saw in my eyes that I was reading Biko. The following day M brings me Frantz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Masks. “He is not banned here,” he says. M is the only one who knows about the hives. I had to tell him. M told me that since his father has been imprisoned on Robben Island he cannot get an erection. M does not think of me as a girl.

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18th August. The memory of the hives has disappeared. Fanon has explained a lot about Black skin and the mind, about writing and the mind and about things that puzzle me. Later that day Steve Biko gets taken into custody. September 11th: men are running up and down in Lavender Hill. There is a panic in the air. It was the day that dogs barked in harmony. There are stories everywhere as to where they have taken Steve Biko. “Why didn’t he lie? Why did he tell them his name? The boere think that all Black men look the same. He is such a clever man. He could have said his name was Sam.” Mamma does not answer me. She looks at the splashes of coffee from my cup all over the table. I know I have to clean it. I eat my peanut butter sandwich in silence. September 12th: I listen to the news broadcast early in the morning. Steve Biko has died in custody. I don’t remember much about that day. I walked to school. Everyone had a cold. No one slept a wink. The principal announces the death of Biko in assembly. No one listens. No one goes to class. Teachers do not instruct us to. The Student Representative Council spreads the word about going to Crestway High School. All of our High Schools take to the streets for a march. Everyone has stones packed in their pockets. 1980, August 4th. The hives start inside my mouth. By 6 o’clock in the morning, as the wind whistles through the kitchen window through which Mummy blows her nicotine puffs, tears run inside my mouth. I throw my head back, my face is upside down, my chin facing the ceiling, trying to prevent tears and fear from mingling. I do not get up to do a count. The house is still. The morning is young. My hives are now 6 years old. “They are like an enemy that shows up each year to collect its debt – I don’t owe it anything!” Mummy tells me to stop screaming. Mummy gets dressed to go to work. I am 18 years old and stay in bed like an infant charged with a bad bodily function. Mamma gets everyone out of the house as quickly as she can. I get cheese and onion crisps. Nita knows that I usually telephone her the day after her birthday from the sweetshop; she answers the phone at her neighbour’s house. October 6th: The first written story on District Six is handed to my English teacher. It is short. It describes people walking in the street. The recent riots kept everyone indoors. The story is returned with red ink that flows like a sea of water turned into blood, all over my written pages. The message is clear: this is your final year of High school. You are the top English student and you think you can write like this? The echo of the biology teacher’s words now two days old, two corridors away, screech silently, as I lick the edge of the first page to get to the second. I now see

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what the English teacher has done; he has corrected my grammar. He is a foreigner here just like my biology teacher. I can still hear her voice: “nothing will become of you. You defy every act of reading and writing as though you own the language. You cannot do as you please. You should feel privileged to speak English.” 1986, August 4th. I am covered in hives. It is the 12th year. This time they are on my scalp too. I cut my hair to get closer to them to see if they are different than the ones on my arm. They want to get inside my brain. They are all the same, joined together and determined to be inside me forever. I work at Groote Schuur Hospital. I have to go to work. Coloured girls do not stay away on a Monday. Later that month, we start Women Against Repression, the first Black feminist organization in South Africa. All five of us are determined to let our voices be heard. 1988. The hives arrive in England. What does a student who is doing a Masters in Women’s Studies do? The hives have followed me. I did not think they would come again this year. I am in another country. How did they know where to find me? The dissertation period is upon me and I have to face my written pages wherein accounts of Cape Town feminist activism are inscribed. I cannot tell anyone about the hives, not even Melinda. My professors are all white except for one. How can I speak to white liberals who refuse to understand their participation in the very racism they claim to be against? Biko was right! They are feminists, and therefore, they are not racists. “It is not your feminism,” I say, “not your feminist, White world,” when one of the lecturers makes a remark about difference. I am faced with that tense white middle-class moment; the moment where white women, faced with confrontation, hold their breath. My favourite lecturer says: “I’m sorry, I mean, I think you are right.” Her stammering voice rings with colonial ambiguity. 1990, August 4th: Canada. I am 28 years old. I cannot lift my head from the pillow. I try to move but the hives are everywhere now. They are talking to themselves. There are several clusters on my lips. They no longer emerge alone. They have grown. There are too many of them to count. I count them, write down the location of each one, and only manage to count to 365. I am convinced that there are more and I count again: under my armpit, behind my ears, under my feet, in the palm of my hand, where repression finds the muscle of its withdrawal, the mechanism of its operation. There is that one between my second and third toe but I glance at the paper and it appears I have already accounted for it. There are the same in number but just bigger in size each year. I place kisses on them. It is not to say that I want them to stay but to say that I am no longer afraid of them. I will write what they say. I will do it. The hives are sixteen years old – teenagers. My friends tell me every year now for the past four years,

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“you talk about Black Consciousness … you do psychoanalysis for God’s sake, why can’t you sort this out.”

The Adult Subject: To Sort Out To sort out, attend to, to make an attempt to establish order – that is usually what is expected from one when you are charged with the task. More so, that one employs psychoanalysis as a result of one’s training and through one’s scholarly work and is therefore capable by the very commitment to its practice, the knowledge of its history, to identify the symptoms, trace them, act as both analyst and analysand and make them disappear. But there is a dual charge: that between the Black Consciousness I speak of and the psychoanalysis that I do lies the possibility of attending to a symptom that can be sorted, one with the help of the other but at which backdrop? I ask myself. In the charge itself, posed by friends who cite their knowledge of my Black Consciousness as spoken (not to suggest that they do not see it, witness it, as lived) and their knowledge that I do psychoanalysis, lies the difficulty itself. Black Consciousness as espoused by Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon is concerned with consciousness; psychoanalysis with the unconscious. If, as Freud suggests, those symptoms are caused by hidden disturbances, and remain hidden because they are aided by the mechanisms of the unconscious – resistance and repression primarily – how would I engage with two concepts that have very different historical trajectories in what appears to be opposing disciplines of thought? One is concerned with those that fight, the other with those that withhold. For both Biko and Fanon, the resistance of the subject – who is subjugated, oppressed, and colonized by a system of white colonial domination – is what defines Black Consciousness, is the very essence of Black Consciousness because it speaks to the subject’s refusal to participate in her own coloniality. For Freud, resistance means barring, maintaining a barrier, thus a mechanism that aids the unconscious in order to keep the status quo in place – the regime of mental activity through which the subject is owned by the very language of the colonizer she writes and speaks, governed by the language she upholds, thus, as the logic follows, responsible for her own coloniality. But to dig within the flesh in order to reveal the history of the blood that keeps its memories in place cannot be ordered. There is no prescription. Memory is not a psychical property – it is the very essence of the psyche. The blood that surfaces, knots itself around flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, keeping a lid on the brew of my pot of history as tightly as possible and how can it be led out? There is speech, Black Consciousness speech, and there is writing, psychoanalytic writing. There is a body, a body whose history is situated within the history of forced removal of its ancestral land; there are hives, fleshy bounds of skin and blood

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composed of nervous tissue holding memory, true to its history of repression. I can be ordered to write but the form that I wish to be read in is the form that the history of my symptoms is buried in. I sit down, stand up, speak the knowledge of District Six in the voice I knew as an eight year old. This is the speech I know. This is the speech that I transfer to the page. The psyche speaks itself as text. Writing as the Symptom. The Psyche as Text. The Writer Writes “No Rosa, No District Six” Mummy and Mamma orways say dat I make tings up and dat I have a lively e mag e nation and dat I’m like der people in der olden days dat jus used to tell stories about udder people before dem das why mummy and mamma orways tear my papers up and trow it away but tis not tru I never make tings up I orways tell mamma what happened and mamma doan believe me and I tell mummy and mummy doan believe me too and den I write it on a piece of paper or on der wall or behind Ospavat building or in der sand at der park and Mr. Franks at school he doan believe me too cos he says dat I orways make trouble wi der teachers and I talk too much and I jump too much and I laugh too much and I doan sit still too much and I orways have bubble gum and I orways have pieces of tings and papers and my hair orways comes loose and mamma toal Mr. Franks dat I’m under der doctor and dat I get pills cos I’m hyper active like mamma say “someone who is restless all der time” but Mr. Franks doan believe dat I’m under der doctor cos I make too much movements and today Mr. Henson gave me four cuts cos he say dat I was dis o be dient and dat I cause trouble in der class but tis not true cos you see last week we celebrated Van Riebeeck’s day on der sixt of April wit der flag and we sing “uit die blou van onse hemel” on der grass for der assembly and four weeks ago Mr. Henson teached us Van Riebeeck made Cape Town and built a fort and erecticated a half way station for food and surplies for der Dutch people and der European people so dat dey could rest at der Cape after a long journey and den Mr. Henson also toal us dat Van Riebeeck’s wife was Maria de la Quelerie, dis is true I dirint make dis up like mummy and mamma orways say I make tings up and den Mari der big girl in my class she has her periods oready she toal us she wondered where Maria put her cotton clot wi blood on it in der ship from Holland cos Mari’s mummy told her not to tell her daddy her broder or her uncles about her periods cos men mus never see or know dees tings and den we all laughed cos Mari’s very funny and today we had to give in our assignments on Van Riebeeck and Mr. Henson ga me four cuts on my hand cos I drew a picture of Maria and not Jan and Mr. Henson say dat der assignment was about Van Riebeeck and not Maria and I say is der same ting cos it was part of der same history lesson and Mr. Henson screamed at me to shut up and

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his veins was standing out and he say dat I was not paying attention and dat he is going to write another letter to mummy about my bee haviour and I ask Mr. Henson if Maria and Jan had children and Mr. Henson say dat I want to play housey-housey all der time and not learn history and I say dat if Maria was Jan’s wife den dey must have had children and den Mr. Henson took me down to der office to Mr. Franks cos Mr. Franks is der principal and Mr. Henson tell Mr. Franks dat I was causing trouble and Mr. Franks believe Mr. Henson and tells me dat I know I should not have been in school in der first place and dat I’ve made trouble since Sub A cos when I was in Sub A Mr. Franks found out dat I was 5 and not 6 and Mr. Franks sent me home and der next day mummy went to school and made a big performance and Mr. Franks took me back cos mamma doan wanna look after me der whole day and cos I start to write when I was four and mamma say I make too much mess on der walls and on der tings and now der school doan want me back no more and Mr. Franks say dat I mus bring mummy to school but I dirint do anything wrong all I wannit to know was if Maria and Jan had children, dat’s all 9 April, 1970

This is the first staging of memory. “No Rosa, No District Six” was written in 1990. The writer attends to the symptoms by situating the character of Rosa. Rosa, the subject, as girl-child who engraves her presence through her spoken-ness in a language that is derivative of the imposition of English, for which Rosa as an eight-year-old has not understood nor acquired the grammatical laws according to which her writing will not be called English. It is read as English because it resembles English inasmuch as a language resembles an origin, however fickle or fictitious, which allows it to be understood in terms of both her historical location and the relationship of the writer to the English she imitates as her language – the language which is not her language but which she makes her language – and thus a language through which she inscribes her presence. This presence is unpunctuated – it does not comply with the rules of English – the systemic, structural, institutionalized aspect of the language where writing takes place from left to right, in linear form, because the writer, through Rosa, abandons the full stop, the comma, the capital letter, the tools through which the English language instructs both reader and writer when to pause, when to continue with a thought, where and when to think, and, more importantly, as a result of its systematic inscription, to be an accomplice to the suicide of its thoughts – to kill it rather than see it live … fornicate … reproduce itself … multiply, as blackness has been accused of. In the complicity lie the loyalty, the faithfulness of the writer and the reader to a thinking that is kept within the language. Through the writer Rosa writes outside of this language, thinks outside of this language, with its limitations, its pauses, which forbids

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her to continue her thought and connect one to another without the rupture of the full stop, and without the authority of the capital letter, which she discharges from the task of imposition. Rosa’s capital letters are reserved for Mr Henson – her teacher – and Jan Van Riebeeck – the colonial whose importance is heralded by the regime under which she lives, which, like all colonial regimes, expects the colonized to celebrate their colonization by declaring Van Riebeeck day a holiday – an occasion to remember the day when your country was usurped – and expects you to participate in the celebration of your colonization. But it is Rosa’s voice, through her writing, that is heard across the page, refusing to conform to the grammatological rules of the English language and Rosa who instead insists on the timing of her words, in her vernacular, its rhythm and its fluidity outside of the sterile cutting the English language inflicts when performing the incision of inscription. The shuffling of feet, the racing of pulses, the screams of little children being bathed by older sisters and brothers in the backyard, the green hose pipe curling itself up among the plants, the sound of several liters of urine being flushed down the toilet in the backyard, where its circular swashing motion competed with bundles of early morning hair awaiting its disposal, the sound of creaking floors as boys and men raised themselves from their place of sleep, the smell of fire as the stove brewed its first round of morning tea, the ravenous chirps of gulls circling the street for morning bread crumbs, the sound of peanut butter jars being emptied by eager hands clenching sharp knives, the smell of fresh tobacco as working women and men light their first weed, the aroma of freshly braised turmeric onions from homes already preparing the base for tonight’s supper, the ripeness of tomatoes, onions, potatoes, Durban bananas, and Constantia grapes shining like jewels in Auntie Tiefa’s cart, the disgruntled noises of dockyard men walking the charcoaled streets, their feet removing crisps of wood and cigarette butts from the previous night’s fire, their eyes looking ahead matching their place of work – the sea, with the sky above their heads – and spotless Table Mountain – gray with not a speckle of white on its top – these formed the backdrop of this early morning Cape Town experience.

Immediately after Rosa writes in her District Six vernacular, the shift to English takes place – one that serves up the activities of the slave quarter as central to how the text is read. The sentence contains all of the grammatical rules of English yet defies the very purpose of the written word – the Englishness of English. Having introduced us to Rosa, the writer proceeds with an English that deceives the conditions of its existence, breaks all the rules of grammatological civility because it introduces District Six on the terms that Rosa prescribes. As is evidenced above – this is one sentence, one

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set of words that describes District Six with rhythmical pauses that cannot be separated by commas, neither regulated by the colon in colonialism nor stopped by the full stop. The houses are not crowded, they are filled with life, with boys and men lifting themselves from floors upon which they have slept. The description evokes the image of poverty as a party. This is their life – they will make it as joyful as they are. The stove, fire, the use of wood that bring flavor to the page, the smell of the coffee brewing on it, the Javanese blood and brewing in homes where Dutch slavery could not erase taste nor destroy the desire to enjoy the culinary delights that colonizers, whose palates only knew raw meat and whose colonial objective included a determination to enhance the flavor of its food through coloniality, could never understand. Rosa’s District Six has flavor. Rosa and the residents of District Six delight in the flight of birds that greet them each morning. For Rosa, the sky is present and the mountain features in her imagination – it is here where we see the writer claim the land, its features, the space, the surrounding – they sailed into the cunt of the Cape but they have not taken the landscape away from Rosa. The empire strikes in many different ways. First in fleets upon shores, seeking land to erect forts, places to plunge from, to usurp the land, to rape it, to dig inside and extract, killing inhabitants, fucking flesh, murdering, then throttling the colonized into the bitterness of the land, where nothing grows except loneliness and despair. But despair of the masses turns to chatter, to laughter, to dance, and, from these, the lively, musical, rebellious township is born. Rosa’s language inscribes her relation to the blood of her writing, the flesh of her infancy, the age of her grace. Reflections after the Act: The Writer as Critic 1991. August 4th. The hives have not come. I do not miss them. I thought of them the whole day wondering whether they would make their appearance. During the course of the day I wish I could see one in order to tell her to tell the others that I will never forget them.

Writing the hives – writing the symptomatic return of the repressed is to write the history of colonialism with the tools offered by Black Consciousness. The hives – the annual, commemorative debt to a historical event that refused to erase itself from the subject’s body has meant, insisted upon, a reflection of what writing means within the history of the subject as writer. For it was the subject as writer herself who learnt that Black Consciousness as espoused by Steve Biko was a consciousness that engraved itself in writing on pamphlets – disseminating a critique of the apartheid regime whilst inciting, informing, conscientizing the masses through writing selected words, a forbidden writing, legally banned from point of conceptualization

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to inscription, to moment of reading. For to “Write What I Like,” as Biko entitled his writing, means to write the ontological history of the word … to insist consciousness is the word and the word is Black Consciousness. I learnt through Black Consciousness that the color of my blood can be transferred to the pages of my text – the postcolonial text – that my blood will color the text, and, as it colors the text, it colors consciousness. The color of my blood is the color of my consciousness. Works Cited Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1994. —— Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952. Maart, Rozena. Rosa’s District 6. Toronto: TSAR, 2004.

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I Challenging Hegemonic Gender Identities

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3 Postcolonial Backlash and Being Proper: Femininity, Blackness, Sexuality, and Transgender in the Public Eye Antje Schuhmann (Witwatersrand University)

From homophobic hate crimes and the reinforcing of dress codes for women in townships to the censorship of the arts in the name of “proper” femininity, culture, morality, and nation-building, the right to female self-determination is being challenged concretely in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. Threats to the Constitution by Christian right-wingers working alongside members of the Government currently target the right to abortion and the right to same-sex marriage, and normative understandings of womanhood seem to be gaining ground in multiple ways (Schuhmann, 2009a). In this context, the spectacle around the questioning of athlete Caster Semenya’s sex after her outstanding victory at the 2009 Berlin Athletics World Championship must be seen as another moment in a chain of ongoing events. Indeed, Caster Semenya, South Africa’s celebrated “Golden Girl,” then received widespread support across the country as a female athlete – but what are we to make of a situation where a woman who looks, sounds, and performs “male,” and whose body is questioned as transgressing our rigid two-sex model, is nevertheless celebrated by the national collective? At first glance, such support seems to show an encouraging disregard for her non-conforming gender performance – a clear paradox at a time when Black South African women are routinely abused for wearing pants or skirts considered to be too short, and face ‘curative’ rape for being or looking like a lesbian, i.e. a woman who does not know her appropriate place (ibid.). Shoring up assertions of Semenya’s unambiguous female identity became particularly necessary for the nation after an Italian athlete questioned her sex and lodged a complaint against Semenya’s 800 meter World Championship victory, claiming it was unfair. The International Association of Athletes (IAAF) then called for tests – including physical, hormonal, and psychological tests – to investigate Semenya’s sex status. With statements such as “I bathed with her, I should know” and “She is a beautiful First Lady of sport,” the real message behind the patriotic-driven support Semenya received was:

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“We support you for the price of reinforcing your sex as female – and as long as you play along, we are willing to overlook your masculine gender performance.” Most commentators reported on Semenya’s “gender testing,” confusing the dominant gender/sex division. Commonly understood as a person’s biological hardware (with corresponding genitals, hormones, facial features, reproductive organs, bodily hair, and so forth), sex is supposed to be coherent with the person’s gender, which is defined as socially learned ways of conduct as a gendered being (how one sits, dresses, walks, and if one changes nappies or repairs cars) – how one performs what is understood as feminine or masculine within a given historical and cultural context. One could argue that supporting a gender non-conforming athlete who does not look the way a typical, young black woman in South Africa is supposed to was a rather progressive act that destabilized the norm according to which sex and gender must be synchronized – one that potentially authorized Semenya’s right to self-determination and self-identification. Contextualised within the lived realities of many women in South Africa, however, this reading of the support Semenya received would be naive. The reiteration of her femaleness in fact reinforced that Semenya must be what the public needed her to be: a woman; a South African woman; a black South African woman; a black, South African, heterosexual, woman; a “normal” woman. Gender and Nation: Collective Appropriations Her body never belongs to the individual woman only – the female body serves as a symbol for the society she lives in. Unfolding the cultural history of virginity in the West, Bernau (2008: 139) argues that “shame and the threat of ostracism […] are summoned to police the young woman’s sexual behaviour; her body and desire are not hers to do with as she pleases, for her body possesses a significance and a worth that goes beyond the merely personal.” Across time and place, the female body stands in as a symbolic signifier for the father’s, the brother’s, the husband’s, the family’s, the collective’s – the nation’s – honour. The collective imagination of a nation is inherently gendered and as such based on the metaphoric signifying of the nation as a collective of heterosexual, patriarchal families. Expressions such as “the mother of the nation,” “the First Family,” or the saying “you educate a woman, you educate the nation” are indicators that the dominant iconography of the nation is not only gendered but also deeply familialistic. As such, the common notion of the national collective is still structured around heteronormative and patriarchal modes of representation, irrespective of emerging gay-friendly and gender-mainstreaming policies.

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The axes of race, age, sexual orientation, and gender impact on the sociopolitical realities of heterosexual, patriarchal families and their representation. Projecting these power relations (men dominate their wives, parents their children, etc.), perceived as “natural,” onto other social entities, such as a national collective or the relationship among nations, allows socially produced hierarchies to appear natural, static, essential, and unquestionable. The colonized territories, for instance, were referred to as the “children” of the mother colony, suggesting that they needed parental guidance for their development toward maturity/ civilization. In colonial times foreign shores were described as “virgin lands” ready to be penetrated and conquered. In today’s conflicts, the rape of women “belonging” to the enemy is understood as symbolical penetration of his land, of emasculating him by bringing shame upon him for not being able to protect his “property.” We find the violent analogy whereby the female body equals territory/ the collective in widespread verbal representations: the expression “the rape of South Africa’s economy” makes South Africa a vulnerable and helpless entity, “penetrated” by China or multinationals. We find it within legitimizations of xenophobic violence when women are referred to as collective property – “They steal our women” – reminding us that the word “rape” in fact originates from the Latin raptus, meaning theft or seizure. We find it in the experience of women, whose violation during conflict is understood on both sides rather as an insult to the other collective than as intimate trauma inflicted upon female individuals. The realities of historical subjects as well as the politics of representation speak to the racialized/ethnicized gendering of national discourses, of violence, and of the violence of national discourses. According to Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, women and nationalism are bound together in five ways (1989: 7). Women are seen as the biological reproducers of national collectives and their boundaries, for instance through restrictions on sexual and marital relations; and they serve as active producers of national culture. Furthermore, women are the symbolic signifiers of national difference as well as active participants in national struggles. McClintock (1997: 90) argues that all nationalisms are gendered. This is often reflected in an uncritical relationship between feminism and nationalism, something only a few feminist scholars have analyzed so far. She calls for developing a feminist analysis of nationalism through investigating the gendered formations of sanctioned male theories; bringing into historical visibility women’s active cultural and political participation in national formations; bringing nationalist institutions into critical relation with other social structures and institutions; and at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privileged forms of feminism. (McClintock, 1997: 90)

I argue to add heteronormativity as another element of privileged feminism.

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Zanele Muholi, “Difficult Love”. Courtesy of the photographer.

Sexualities: The Normative Powers of Nation-building In 2009, Ms Xingwana, the then South African Minister of Arts and Culture, illustrated how hegemonic understandings of race and gender intersect with compulsory heterosexuality as an element of dominant, nationalist discourses. She refused to open the Innovative Women art exhibition funded by her ministry, after previewing photographs of the internationally acclaimed artist and lesbian activist Zanele Muholi. It was reported: after she saw a series of photographs […] of naked, black women embracing each other, Xingwana slammed the work as “pornographic”, spoke to her aides, and left in a huff… In a statement read by her spokeswoman Lisa Combrinck, Xingwana said: “Our mandate is to promote social cohesion and nation-building. I left the exhibition because it expressed the very opposite of this.” […] “It was immoral, offensive and going against nationbuilding.”1 1

The Times March 1, 2010.

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The former Minister of Arts and Culture – and now Minister for Women, Children, and People with Disability – is right: the values displayed in the photographs of Zanele Muholi (Figure 1) are at odds with promoting a heterosexual, patriarchal family and as such they do challenge hegemonic nation-building and the restoration of existing power relations. The Minister’s outrage is not new and she is not alone in her crusade.2 Today, conservative Christian groups lobby for values which are also promoted through the state-driven moral regeneration movement (De Nobrega, 2008). The recent formation of the National Interfaith Council facilitated by the Rhema Church and its association with President Zuma, who responded to their demands to revisit laws legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion by reassuring them that “everything is up for debate,”3 is worrying but should come as no surprise. Their attempt to protect the patriarchal, heterosexual family and a moral value system that condemns the decriminalization of sex work – seen, like homosexuality, as a threat to the family, and as such as a threat to the health of the nation – corresponds with certain aspects of patriotic discourses. The gay kiss in the South African TV soapy4 Generations, and the ensuing controversy, clearly indicate that South Africa, like many other countries, is caught up between celebrating diversity for nation-building purposes and the rejection of everything “other” to the heterosexual norm. Embracing the “other” is branded as symbolizing modernity, progress, and the level of “civilization” of a nation, in line with the discourse of contemporary global human rights. Yet, at the same time, “tolerance” of the “other” is also conceived as a threat for established privileges. In spite of claiming human rights, gender equality, and citizen rights such as self-determination or a right to privacy as part of the framework of a national rainbow self-imagination, the ideological cement of the above-outlined backlash seems to be a patriarchal entitlement to control the female body and sexuality. National unity, supposedly symbolized by the rainbow, can be seen to be cracking. The massacre of mine workers by South African police and military forces on August 16, 2012, and the growing spread of wildcat strikes in the mining and agricultural sector as well as the militant service delivery protests 2 Erlank (2003) explores the historical ties the African National Congress (ANC) has with boosting hegemonic masculinity in relation to national liberation and McClintock (1997) unfolds the patriarchal similarities of Afrikaaner and ANC national identity and their respective celebration of maternity as an idealized role for women. See also the groundbreaking work of Michelle Wright in her book Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004) where she theorizes black subjectivity in relation to slavery, the Enlightenment, hegemonic whiteness, and patriarchal Black Nationalism. 3 Mail and Guardian, October 4, 2009. 4 This is the South African term for “soap opera.”

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of the last years, prove a growing dissatisfaction with the neoliberal politics of the current African National Congress (ANC)-led government alliance which includes COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and the South African Communist party. The rise of South Africa to the top of the world’s most unequal societies speaks to the political reality of a rising social and economic crisis, which is still highly racialized. While historical legacies are still vivid, tremendous wealth remains with white South Africans who now shake hands with an emerging black middle class. We can observe worldwide, that in times of social and economic tensions, citizen rights, and specifically the protection of groups thought to be more vulnerable, such as women, immigrants, and other minorities, are scapegoated in the name of patriotism. Often this includes references to an assumedly shared homogenous tradition of the dominant group. It is the abject “other” (immigrants, perverts, criminals, HIV/AIDS-positive people, prostitutes, the homeless – the “dangerous classes”) that is made responsible for threatening the inner peace, rather than hegemonic notions of violent masculinity or specific class interests. Diverting the attention to scapegoats partakes of tightening inner security, enforcing territorial border controls, as well as a symbolic boundary management in which the female body serves as a multidimensional signifier. Rigid bio-politics revolving around purity, authenticity, belonging, sacrifice, and moral values appear to secure collective boundaries – mainly by way of policing women’s bodies and behaviour in the name of nation-building. In South Africa, feminine masculinities and masculine femininities are normally not celebrated overtly; the country is known for the worldwide highest levels of violence against women generally, and specifically against those who transgress norms. Women who look, dress, and move like Semenya, and who do not conform to gender stereotypes, are often the target of hate crimes, so-called “curative” rape, and homophobia – violent practices aiming to remind non-conforming women of who they are supposed to be.5 That is why the support Semenya received, with the insistence on her womanhood and the reiteration that she was treated in ways unfair to a “lady” rather than unfair to everyone irrespective of sex and gender identity, in fact reinforced the hetero-patriarchal binary, according to which men must be men and women must be women, with no third space in between. In the light of the normative powers of nation-building, feminist theory and practice need to interrogate their relationship with nationalist and patriotic discourses, asking what price we are prepared to pay in relation to 5 According to a study by the Cape Town-based Triangle Project, published by the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project in early 2009 there are more than thirty known cases of murders motivated by homophobia each year. These hate crimes include gang rape, stabbing, stoning to death, and other atrocities.

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the re-enforcement of a normative understanding of gender performance and sex status linked to compulsory heterosexuality. Is it possible to struggle for inclusion in the name of women’s rights, and yet at the same time to utilize concepts and discourses which reinforce new exclusion by simply pushing the margins further back? Activists, artists, and intellectuals are increasingly challenging the two-sex system and its violent normative powers as a human rights violation (Neue Gesellschaft bildende für Kunst, 2005). Compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980) reinforces a norm, which needs two clearly identifiable and opposed entities – men and women. Anyone blurring the line of a supposedly clear-cut either/or is perceived to be a threat to this norm. As such, the “makeover” photo shoot in YOU magazine, “Caster Enjoys Going Girly,” which cast Semenya posing in stilettos, silver glitter, and make-up, only served to confirm that she was not “deviant” – that her sex status and her gender performance did match. The Two-Sex System, a Human Rights Violation In order for her masculine gender performance to cohere with a sex that allowed her to run as a female athlete, the collective appropriation of Semenya’s body as female was needed to silence her masculine performance; and because a “lady” cannot speak for herself, Semenya herself was silenced and shielded from the press. The tabooization of her status and performance became more difficult once the official test results were leaked and rumors started to spread. Her testosterone levels were said to be higher than those of an average woman, her voice to be deeper, her facial hair unusual. In addition: “[r]eports allege that she has been found to have no womb or ovaries – that is feasible. They do not allege that she lacks a vagina […] They do allege that she has testes, presumably in her abdomen […]” (Gross, 2010). Since mid-2010, when Semenya was allowed to return to international sport competitions, she has been running against women again. If we agree with one of the essential paradigms of equality – the claim that inequality is not a natural fact due to essential difference but socially fabricated – then inequality becomes changeable. If we agree that our understanding of gender is based on the socialization of conventions and that it is, as such, a historical category, we understand that gender relations are continually being transformed. Consequently we need to consider what this means in terms of body politics. Judith Butler summarizes the complex consequences as follows: To understand gender as a historical category, however, is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open

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to a continual remaking, and that “anatomy” and “sex” are not without cultural framing (as the intersex movement has clearly shown). (Butler, 2004: 9)

Our gaze on the body is itself a gendered gaze; our language a gendered language; consequently the knowledge we produce and reproduce must inherently be gendered too. As such, it becomes limited to the narrow boundaries of a two-sex system, which is constantly reinforced, from toilets to cosmetics, to sporting categories, to national identity documents. We have no language beyond the duality of “she” and “he.” Does the binary understanding of gender reflect ahistoric common sense, that defines women as having a vagina, breasts, and becoming pregnant, while men have a penis, are more strongly built, and produce sperm? A growing body of scholarly work – as well as social and cultural practices – challenges this assumption, arguing that the dual-sex system with its rigid boundaries is actually a very recent invention that developed with the rise of modernity in the context of the Enlightenment (Laqueur, 1990; Voß, 2010). Natural sciences, medicine, and other disciplines unfolded their normative powers to regulate bodies, to classify health and pathology, and to define who was human. The rise of colonial empires intensified the need to dissect, to explain, to categorize and classify populations even further, often overwriting traditional systems of gender relations and body politics. Scholars like Ifi Amadiume (1987), Tarikhu Farrar (1997), or Robert Edgerton (2000) have all tried to recover aspects of pre-colonial gender relations differing from those established under European patriarchal regimes. In her book Male Daughters and Female Husbands (1987), Amadiume argues that, in pre-colonial societies, sex and gender did not necessarily match, and that roles were neither rigidly feminized nor masculinized. European conquerors, missionaries, and traders were unable and unwilling to recognize this. In order to place bodies in hierarchical structures, and to map the genealogy of humanity as a tree with the “inferior” races on the lower branches, these Western powers needed to generate reliable “facts” about bodies, such as their races, their gender, and their sex. Classification systems based on mutually exclusive gendered and racialized binaries spread: white women and people of color were/are said to be closer to nature, less rational, and so forth. Order means control – transgression thus implies a threat. Our world revolves around differences and hierarchies, and we learn early on which ones matter and which ones do not. Big ears versus small ears are not as significant as beige skin versus brown skin; we learn what needs to be straightened if it is too queer. The globally emerging transgender and intersex movements challenge the notion of a two-sex system beyond the claims of lesbian and gay people for recognition and protection of their

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same-sex desire, since such a desire is still based on two sexes which simply match the other way round. How do feminists and women’s rights advocates respond to the violence of normativity and to the normativity of violence? How do they respond to queer interventions, which destabilize hegemonic notions of kinship and family by questioning stable identity markers, and which as they attack the violent social, legal, and medical enforcement of unambiguous, never-changing gender and sex identities, open up spaces to revisit our understanding of humanness? Rethinking “Human” – Contesting Power Butler (2004) revisits Fanon, who critiqued humanism as racialized when saying “the black is not a man,” pointing to humanism’s investment in masculinity – racialized masculinity – with the white male as dominant norm. She concludes that “these formulations show the power differentials embedded in the construction of the category of the “human” and, at the same time, insist upon the historicity of the term, the fact that “human” has been crafted and consolidated over time.” She unfolds how the “norms of recognition” constitute the “human” and “encode operations of power”. As she foregrounds, the “future of the ‘human’ will be a contest over the power that works in and through such norms” (13). Our understanding of what constitutes a “human” being is linked to recognition and its denial: “Those deemed illegible, unrecognizable, or impossible nevertheless speak in the terms of the ‘human’ opening the term to a history not fully constrained by the existing differentials of power” (14). In the case of Semenya, the revelation of her “condition” intensified the run to lay claims about rightful representation as well as the right to represent. Semenya was increasingly referred to as a “child.” Using gender-neutral language seemingly erased the tensions around her ambiguous sex status. This culminated in an African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) statement, which linguistically exterminated people who transgress the norms of the two-sex system. By denying the existence of intersex people, the ANCYL denied their right to exist, and used these genocidal linguistics to reinforce its anti-racist credentials: Even if a test is done, the ANCYL will never accept the categorisation of Caster Semenya as a hermaphrodite, because in South Africa and the entire world of sanity, such does not exist. The basic, traditional and known method to determine gender has classified Caster Semenya as female and to us she will remain a female.

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The ANCYL is also very concerned by the fact that all the media reports about Caster Semenya are generated in Australia, which is the most lucrative destination for South Africa’s racists and fascists, who refused to live under a black democratic government. The maltreatment of Caster Semenya is evidently a coordinated racist attack on Caster Semenya, an African woman whom the racists never thought will [sic] represent South Africa with excellence. (Shivambu, 2009)

No athlete has “privacy,” and all bodies are scrutinized; however, racism indeed subjects athletes differently and sex tests do have strong ideological undertones. In this instance, however, I would suggest a very different perspective. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc was suspected of “cheating”; in relation to Semenya’s sex testing, Western newspapers reported that Third World countries in particular send men disguised as women to international sports competitions. During the 2011 Women’s Soccer World Cup in Germany, accusations that three male players from Equatorial Guinea were playing disguised as women, initially voiced by the Nigerian trainer in combination with homophobic statements, resurfaced. As a consequence, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) passed regulations for sex testing (Gauto, 2011). The critique voiced by the ANCYL thus misses the point: athletes from the First World are subjected to sex tests too, and competitors from non-Western countries can also accuse a fellow black athlete of sex-cheating. The relevant point is rather, that given the history of slavery and colonialism, the exposure of a black woman’s body creates a very specific context in relation to various technologies of violence: the power of definition and classification, linked to a penetrating and probing gaze regime deeply involved in hegemonic politics of otherness. The sensationalism exhibited today in the Western media, in their exposing of Semenya and their labelling the Bantu as often being “hermaphrodites” echoes the treatment of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as a freak. After her death her skeleton, preserved genitals, and brain were displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (Abrahams, 2003). In 2002, her remains were brought back to post-apartheid South Africa after long negotiations with the French government. Her life has been appropriated as a symbol for the battered history of a nation in the making. In Baartman’s painful “herstory” we recognize aspects of Semenya’s public exposure driven by various interests in the West and at home. Postcolonial Western ignorance of colonial legacies, which infiltrated the racist representation of the Semenya case, amplified a highly gendered, homophobic anti-Western populism in South Africa. The mutual reinforcement of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity were intensified by science, public spectatorship, and an interest in the commodification of Semenya’s body.

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No person, black or white, should be subjected to such an enforcement of heterosexual gender norms; having one’s sex questioned for the purpose of its enforced reclassification, or having it reinforced for the price of denying one’s transgressions both limit one’s agency to self-determine in terms of gender and sex identity. One can only determine one’s own understanding of one’s gender and sex if there are social norms which enable one to claim both for oneself: “In this sense, individual agency is bound up with social critique and social transformation” (Butler, 2004: 7). Popular Culture as Vanguard of Social Transformation for Self-Acclaimed, Politically Progressive Organizations and Movements? From Davie Bowie to Tokyo Hotel, pop music is a legendary field for sex/ gender transgressions. While the international fashion circus is already working with androgynous models dubbed “femimen” and with intersex and transgender people, the German National Ethics Counsel scheduled 2012 to discuss bettering the situation for persons with ambiguous or ambivalent sex – in Australia, for instance, one’s passport allows a choice between “male,” “female,” and “X”. These are examples for social transformation a party organization like the ANCYL will not be alone in having to catch up with. But what of progressive social movements? Is this social transformation – which includes complex issues such as changes in kinship structure, debates on gay marriage, issues of medical “pathology,” and collective identities in relation to individual identities – also driven by women who understand themselves as agents of change for women’s rights? Let us return to the former Minister of Arts and Culture. Responding to criticism that she was reacting in a homophobic and unprofessional manner, she stated: To my mind, these were not works of art but crude misrepresentations of women (both black and white) masquerading as artworks rather than engaged in questioning or interrogating – which I believe is what art is about. Those particular works of art stereotyped black women. […] What I think is necessary in our country today is a long overdue debate on what is art and where do we draw the line between art and pornography. What do we wish to encourage as a community concerned about the imaginative possibilities of art to shape our nation and our future? South Africans last engaged in such a debate before the democratic era. It is time that we open this discussion in the context of moral regeneration, social cohesion and nation-building. (Xingwana, 2010)

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Yesterday Today Tomorrow: Feminist Complicities and Commitments How do we deal with chauvi(femi)nism – women marrying the rhetoric of women’s rights to reactionary projects (Schuhmann, 2013) – thus allowing an active hijacking of the discourse empowering women (Gqola, 2006) by conservative groups (in this case making them agents of a backlash within the ruling ANC)? In the name of representing gender equality, national uplifting, and an anti-colonial attitude that claims to strengthen non-Western traditions irrespective of their patriarchal inequalities, such women re-enforce a narrow understanding of gender relations and deny the diversity within femininities and masculinities of all shades. Another example of the silencing power of anti-Eurocentrism intersected with patriarchy is the controversy generated by Mandela’s grandson: More than 40 women and men from some of the remotest rural enclaves of the country trekked to Parliament this week to beg – sometimes in tears – the portfolio committee on rural development and land reform to disband traditional authorities created by the 1951 Black Authorities Act (BAA). And the MP who spearheaded the defence of traditional leadership was none other than committee member Zwelivelile Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson and chief of the Mvezo traditional council in the Eastern Cape – Mvezo is the village where the former president was born. “We as women don’t really like the chief that much,” one woman told the committee. “We ask this Parliament to disband the current traditional authority and court.” […] At the hearings he made an impassioned speech about the wholesomeness of ukuthwalwa, the marriage custom – meaning “to be carried” – which implies the abduction of often prepubescent girls, who are then forced into marriage. Speaking in isiXhosa, Zwelivelile Mandela reprimanded one of the rural women who had criticised ukuthwalwa as a distortion. “What is her culture that informs her that [ukuthwalwa] is a distortion?” he asked. “When a man sees that this one is ripe for marriage, then she is taken and she is put through a ceremony and then she’s ready. Don’t bring in white people’s things such as her age,” he snapped. (Jobert, 2010)

The former Arts and Culture Minister’s self-righteous reaction to the photograph of two nude black women embracing each other illustrates that nation-building is often tied to hegemonic discourses around gender, sex, sexuality, and the patriarchal family. How should feminism relate to normative forces and their related discourses that re-enforce gendered regimes of power and dominant body politics? The controversy around Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandchild who is also a local chief, shows how (re)claiming patriarchal traditions de-legitimizes the critiques of patriarchy by women in the name of anti-colonial, anti-Western,

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anti-white politics. We need to break down the illusionary universality of women in relation to their different positionalities: what does this mean for the women this discourse targets, and what, on the other hand, does it mean for white women? White feminists need to find ways to take responsibility for past colonial and apartheid atrocities perpetrated by a white collective in power, as they are inevitably identified as being part of contemporary systems of white privilege. Only then can they relate politically and in non-paternalistic solidarity to those women whose claims for equality are targeted today by the strategic patriarchal utilization of the legacies of Eurocentric subordinations of indigenous cultures in order to delegitimize their struggle. To undermine the struggle for gender equality by ignoring the differences within, and at the same time to limit the struggle by reinforcing hegemonic identity impositions such as the prevalent paradigm of a narrow two-sex model, means to subscribe to various forms of exclusion. To deny the possibilities of transgressing into a third space of fluid gender identities and ambivalent sex status beyond a male–female binary and the congruence of sex and gender performance is limiting. Feminism that is directly invested in the politics of otherness – essential for hegemonic nationalism – inevitably invests in normative body politics, and, as such, reproduces regimes of violence. One challenge for today’s feminisms is how to respond more efficiently to public debates that often simplify complex issues. In light of what happened to Caster Semenya, this means developing frameworks so as to how to complexify our understanding of gender/sex diversity. This could mean acknowledging the existence of more than two sexes, recognizing transgressive gender performances as many trans organizations demand, or, as deconstructive feminists argue, to challenge the very binary of “social/natural” itself. To extend our critique from the very notion of a person’s gender as being fixed to questioning a person’s sex as culturally framed as well, also requires acknowledging that gendering always goes hand in hand with the racializing of bodies, and that both imply the violence of identification which inevitably includes the violence of denying recognition for those who transgress existing identification categories: “That feminism has always countered violence against women, sexual and nonsexual, ought to serve as a basis for alliances with these other movements, since phobic violence against bodies is part of what joins antihomophobic, antiracist, feminist, trans, and intersex activism” (Butler, 2004: 9). There is a clear need to build alliances, but this requires a much better understanding of how different forms of exclusion and violence are interlinked and reinforce each other, often through the back door of language, and of concepts we take for granted but which, at a second glance, reveal their investment in the upholding of hegemonic power relations: “History is larger than personal goodwill, and we must learn to be responsible as we must study to be political” (Spivak, 1998: 337).

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Works Cited Abrahams, Yvette. “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Disjuncture: The Historiography of Sarah Baartman.” PhD thesis. University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2003. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. Bernau, Anke. Virgins: A Cultural History. London: Granta Books, 2007. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. De Nobrega, Chantelle. “Gender Transformation and the Moral Regeneration Movement in South Africa.” In Greg Ruiters and Rhodes University Institute for Social and Economic Research (eds). Gender Activism: Perspectives on the South African Transition, Institutional Culture and Everyday Life. Grahamstown: Rhodes University Press, 2008: 72–79. Department of Arts and Culture, Republic of South Africa. “Statement by Minister of Arts and Culture, Ms Lulu Xingwana on Media Reports around the Innovative Art Exhibition.” March 4, 2010. www.dac.gov.za/ media_releases/2010/04-03-10.html. Edgerton, Robert. Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the Nature of War. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. Erlank, Natascha. “Gender and Masculinity in South African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950.” Women in Democratic South Africa. Feminist Studies 29.3 (2003): 673–671. Farrar, Tarikhu. “The Queenmother, Matriarchy, and the Question of Female Political Authority in Postcolonial West African Monarchy.” Journal of Black Studies 27.5 (1997): 579–97. Gauto, Anna. “Wo ist eigentlich die FIFA?” Die Zeit. July 6, 2011. www.zeit.de/sport/2011-07/aequatorialguinea-fifa-geschlechtstest. Gqola, Pumla Dine. “The Hype of Women’s Empowerment.” Mail and Guardian. November 27, 2006. http://mg.co.za/article/2006-11-27-the-hype-of-womensempowerment. Gross, Sally. “Response on the Mistreatment of Caster Semenya.” Intersex Initiative (2009). www.intersexinitiative.org/media/castersemenya.html. September 28, 2010. Jobert, Pearlie. “Fury over Traditional System.” Mail and Guardian. July 23, 2010. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lesbian and Gay Equality Project. EQUALITY Newsletter 1, No. 1 (2009). Luig, Judith. “Das dritte Geschlecht. Männlich, weiblich – und bald auch intersexuell?” Welt Online. October 27, 2011. www.welt.de/lifestyle/ article13735225/Maennlich-weiblich- und-bald-auch-intersexuell.html. McClintock, Ann. “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Gender, Race and

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Nationalism.” In Ann McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (eds). Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: 104–123. Neue Gesellschaft bildende für Kunst (ed.). 1-0-1 [one ‘o one] intersex: Das Zwei-Geschlechter-System als Menschenrechtsverletzung. Berlin: NGBK, 2005. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5.4 (1980): 631–60. Schuhmann, Antje. “Feminine Masculinities, Masculine Femininities.” Mail and Guardian. August 31, 2009a. —— “Interpreting Intersectionalities: Moving beyond the Violence of Normative Binaries.” Presentation at the Wits University XX-WHY? Symposium, October 21, 2009b. —— “The Violence of Normativity and the Normativity of Violence: Immigration, Neoliberal Utility Discourses and Neo-Fascist Terror in Germany.” In Annette Horn, Kathleen Thorpe, Veronique Tadjo et al. (eds). Hospitality and Hostility in the Multilingual Global Village. Stellenbosch, South Africa: Sun Media, 2013. Shivambu, F. “ANCYL: Statement by Floyd Shivambu, African National Congress Youth League National Spokes Person. On Caster Semenya (11/09/2009).” www.polity.org.za/article/ancyl-statement-by-floyd-shivambuafrican-national-congress-youth-league-national-spokesperson-on-castersemenya-11092009-2009-09-11. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Love, Cruelty, and Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: Revisiting the Global Village.” In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds). Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1998: 329–348. Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Voß, Heinz-Jürgen. Making Sex Revisited: Dekonstruktion des Geschlechts aus biologisch-medizinischer Perspektive. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997. Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Floya Anthias. Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan, 1989. Xingwana, Lulu. Statement by Minister of Arts and Culture, Ms Lulu Xingwana on Media Reports around the Innovative Art Exhibition. March 3, 2010. www.dac.gov.za/media_releases/2010/04-03-10.html.

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4 Productive Investments: Masculinities and Economies in Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho Eva Boesenberg (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)

Rudolph Fisher’s 1928 novel The Walls of Jericho identifies “black states of desire” as economic, socio-political, and sexual, championing the transfer of financial means and the mobilization of erotic energies beyond lines of class, heteronormativity, and “race” in order to effect meaningful social change. Its project to break down the “walls” of the title – be they between black and white neighborhoods, different class positions in the African American community, or emotional repression mandated by hegemonic gender discourses – situates the text within modernist economies no longer governed by the imperative to save both money and corporeal capital but rather, as Michael Tratner has argued, by the injunction to spend: Instead of slowly building up the self by laboring, saving, and restraining impulses, people were encouraged in the new credit economy to indulge economic desires by temporarily borrowing, as a way of keeping money circulating. Similarly, they were encouraged to indulge sexual desires […] to keep libido circulating. Not indulging in spending or sexuality would lead to a “pent-up” state that was considered deleterious to the economic or the individual body. (Tratner, 2001: 3)

Fisher’s novel skillfully draws on such a modernist understanding of economics in which physical, sexual, and financial resources follow the same laws. Their trajectories determine the health of the human (implicitly male) body as much as the smooth functioning of industrial production and the financial system. Such a comprehensive notion of “economics” can fruitfully be analyzed by drawing on the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and his conceptualization of cultural skills, family connections, and other assets as forms of capital. In order to do greater justice to intersections of categories infrequently discussed by him, though, I will employ a revised version of Bourdieu’s theory that incorporates “race,” gender, and sexuality as forms of social capital.

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Even as the novel proposes the investment of financial capital in black homosocial joint ventures that transcend class divisions, and the judicious deployment of emotional and erotic energies to redefine hegemonic notions of gender and sexuality in productive ways, it emphasizes the necessity of moral boundaries for the passage of financial and emotional currents. It is the classic construction of homo oeconomicus, characterized by the relentless pursuit of personal gain without regard to the welfare of the group, that signals the limits of ethical investment in the narrative. With its critique of whiteness as property1 and its analysis of economics as a central factor in co-constructing “race,” gender, and sexuality, The Walls of Jericho offers powerful vantage points from which to address problematic gender, sexual, and racial discourses that continue to undergird US American financial and economic systems, as well as economics as a discipline, even today. It is particularly valuable for its denaturalization of hegemonic categories, for instance that of the middle class. My analysis of the novel’s economies proceeds from an intersectional perspective that focuses on what Leslie McCall has termed “intercategorical complexity” and “intracategorical complexity.” The first, she writes, “requires that scholars provisionally adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions” (2009: 50). The second concentrates “on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection – ‘people whose identity crosses the boundaries of traditionally constructed groups’ (Dill, 2002: 5) – in order to reveal the complexity of lived experience within such groups” (McCall, 2009: 51). The following discussion proceeds in four stages. I will first look at the text’s revision of class antagonisms through black homosocial bonding underwritten by the transfer of financial capital, highlighting intercategorical complexities. The second part then addresses gender and sexuality with an eye towards the internal differentiation of these categories, specifically the ways in which the circulation of emotional and erotic charges interrogates heteronormativity and significantly revises heterosexuality. Part three examines the text’s articulations of “race,” particularly the intercategorical complexities resulting from its critique of whiteness that simultaneously eschews essentializing moves. Finally, I will analyze the text’s economies of language, particularly the narrative voice’s deployment of signifying in the service of highlighting both intra- and interracial complexities. It is not least the mobilization of this culturally specific linguistic capital that advances the novel’s vision of reduced racial and class hierarchies. 1

See Harris (1993).

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Signing the Race Contract: Economies of Cross-Class Male Bonding The text’s two plotlines focus on lawyer Fred Merrit’s attempt to contest residential segregation by moving into a previously all-white New York neighborhood, and the courtship of two working-class characters, Joshua Jones (called “Shine” by his friends) and Linda Young. They are linked through Merrit’s employment of Jones, a furniture mover, and subsequently also of Young, who works as a domestic servant while attending night school. But relations between the three figures go beyond the realm of finance. At one point, Jones believes Merrit to be a rival for Young’s affection, and the lawyer’s disavowal of any erotic interest in her – in effect the exchange of a woman between them – constitutes an important dimension of their emerging partnership. This relation is also premised on Merrit’s lack of interest in asserting any kind of social superiority vis-à-vis the furniture movers and his refusal to fetishize his material possessions. His behavior demonstrates the intercategorical complexity of the black middle class. Whereas the stilted diction characters such as J. Pennington Potter employ flaunts their cultural capital and thus highlights their distance from working-class African Americans, Merrit’s informal language narrows the gap between middle-class African Americans, called “dickties” in the novel, and the working-class “rats.” His companionable address of the movers causes Jones and his colleagues to wonder: “What manner of dickty was this? He greeted you like an equal, casually shared his troubles with you, and did not seem to care in the least what the devil you did with his furniture” (Fisher, 1928: 51).2 Jones’s discovery that Merrit’s new home has been firebombed not by the racist white neighbor Miss Cramp but by black pool hall proprietor and bootlegger Henry Patmore, who holds a grudge against Merrit, ushers in a new stage in their exchange. Feeling indebted to Jones, the lawyer proposes a joint venture explicitly designated as a model of intraracial solidarity: Here was the idea: Here was a business. Shine knew that business, didn’t he? […] Suppose Merrit bought it – easy – only a one-truck moving business – and turned it over to Shine to run? Fifty-fifty on the profits with an option to purchase outright in due time. That’s what we Negroes need, a business class, an economic backbone. […] Well, here’s a chance for you and a good investment for me. How ’bout it? (282–3)

To represent racial solidarity as a business deal clearly bespeaks a confidence in the salutary effects of liquidity, i.e., the circulation of financial capital, characteristic of the 1920s. The homosocial bond, which illustrates how 2

Page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text.

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“economic interactions construct social identities and communities” (Badgett and Williams, 2008: 13), is ratified by the paradigmatic modernist act of consumption: “Merrit produced part of a pint and they drank, rat and dickty, as equals” (281). Drawing on intraracial complexity, their compact reflects the “changing configurations of inequality” outlined by McCall (2009: 50). The passage of money beyond class boundaries begins to erode what Emma Coleman Jordan and Angela P. Harris conceptualize as “economic borders to community” (2005: 984–1012) as it contributes to improving the situation of African Americans as a group. Merrit’s credit to Jones in terms of legal tender is based on emotional credit – the trust both men place in each other. They can reach an understanding only because Merrit has gained Jones’s respect despite his class position. Jones’s and Merrit’s agreement translates the idea of racial solidarity expressed in the General Improvement Association (GIA) annual costume ball into the realm of the economic, and extends its time frame. For the GIA ball, a thinly veiled satirical portrayal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is restricted to one evening in which established class divisions are temporarily disregarded: The bootleggers raise no objection to their rivals, the doctors. The K.M.’s [kitchen mechanics, i.e. domestic servants] are seldom if ever seen to turn up their noses at the schoolteachers. Elevator boys and gamblers together discuss their ups and downs; and the richest real estate man in the colony greets his bootblack with a cordial smile. The bars are down. This is for the Race. One great common fellowship in one great common cause. (71)

Significantly, the narrative voice first assumes the perspective of “bootleggers,” “kitchen mechanics,” and “elevator boys,” endowing them with subject positions, before briefly also representing an (upper) middle-class view. This is in line with the text’s primary focus on Jones and Young and its overall satirizing of black middle-class pretensions: “By way of contrast, it is of further interest to drop in on a little group of dickties, superiorly self-named the Litter-Rats…” (35). Ridiculing the pompous term the club has chosen for itself, the narrative voice’s (mis)representation emphasizes that its members are hardly better than the “rats” from whom they seek to distinguish themselves. The introductory phrase (“by way of contrast”) again establishes African American working-class life, with which the text opens, as a reference point from which to evaluate black middle-class cultural capital. In this manner, the narrative voice revisits intersections of “race” and class from an uncommon vantage point, participating in debates about the value of cultural capital that are distinctly political, as Bourdieu has argued (1996: 261–76). It utilizes its linguistic resources to express desires for a less

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exclusionary concept of the middle class also articulated in the Jones–Merrit compact. Such revisionary strategies can similarly be observed in the novel’s articulations of gender and sexuality. Desiring Differently: Rewriting Gender and Sexuality Even as matters of class are primarily negotiated between black men who seem to identify as heterosexual, the text makes space for non-heteronormative sexualities within the circumference of black masculinities. This is exemplified by Jones’s colleagues Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown, who are engaged in more or less serious altercations throughout the novel. Yet this behavior is not indicative of their true feelings for each other, the narrative voice avers. Rather, the pronounced antagonism of their exchanges results from emotions for each other their culture has taught them to repress: the habitual dissension between these two was the symptom of a deep affection… […] Words and gestures which in a different order of life would have required no suppression became with them necessarily inverted, found issue only by assuming a precisely opposite aspect, concealing a profound attachment by exposing an extravagant enmity. And this was a distortion of behavior so completely imposed on them by their traditions and society that even they themselves did not know they were masquerading. (10–11)

Again, it is the circulation of liquid assets that both responds to and liberates “black desires,” serving to overcome the “walls” erected by social conventions. Shut up in Patmore’s cellar to settle their conflict once and for all, Jenkins and Brown “hit” a case of whiskey instead of each other. When they eventually come out, they collapse on top of each other – though not as a result of the homicidal violence the onlookers have anticipated. Instead of responding to the social taboo against the expression of libidinal desires between men with a moment of “homosexual panic,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called it (1985: 83–96), Brown finally articulates his tender feelings for his partner: “Ain’ nuthing’ to fight about, boogy. Ain’t you my boy?” (211). Deconstructing an important component of hegemonic masculinity, Fisher’s text seconds a libidinal investment between African American males that might arguably be considered “queer.” It reveals “spaces within blackness that had been concealed and silenced,” as Jafari Allen phrases it elsewhere, and thus again underscores intracategorical complexity.3 Rather than attempting to claim a higher position in inter-male hierarchies through 3 See Jafari Allen’s unpublished essay “The Past and the Next in Black Queer Feminist Theorization: ‘Find Yourself a Friend’.”

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victory over another man in physical combat, Brown and Jenkins affirm their attachment to each other through the joint appropriation of Patmore’s liquid assets. Even as they serve as a spectacle for the collective male gaze and are therefore to a certain extent “feminized,” they remain firmly within the purview of black masculinity. In contradistinction to the dominant trend, “‘authentic’ blackness” is not “imagined as always already heteropatriarchal” (Wright and Schuhmann, 2007: 10). Asking, with Michael Hames-García, “how social identities are constructed […] both as a result of and in resistance to homophobia” (Hames-García, 2006: 80; emphasis in the original), the text emphasizes desire rather than sexual identity in its portrayal of Jenkins and Brown. In this regard, they are “determined by […] indetermination,” as Jean-Paul Rocchi writes in a different context (2007: 24). Considering the “communities and identities [they] are […] coming out to and coming out from” (Hames-García, 2006: 92), the text foregrounds their inclusion in the category of African American manhood, which is achieved in part through their refusal to back down when threatened by racist violence: “Far as I’m concerned,” contributed Jinx, “I’m ready now – to run. I been haulin’ furniture, and I been haulin’ pianos; but when they starts plantin’ dynamite, this babys gonna start haulin’ hindparts!” […] To Shine this banter was merely pledge of allegiance in case of crisis… […] Beneath the jests, the avowed fear, the merriment, was a characteristic irony, a typical disavowal of fact and repudiation of reality, a markedly racial tendency to make light of what actually was grave… […] Members of another race might have said simply: “What the hell do you think we are – quitters?” (29)

Jenkins and Brown establish their manhood through signifying.4 The double-voiced discourse allows them to vent any anxiety they might feel while exorcizing it in their joint determination not to allow any threat to abridge their manhood. In this particular instance, the text links their verbal self-assertion to the repression of their fondness of each other. The performance of accepted forms of masculinity is thus diagnosed as entailing the denial of “unmanly” feelings, be they insecurity or desires that transcend heteronormativity. The inclusion of Brown and Jenkins in the realm of “the normal” seems dependent on two specific factors, though: their continuing economic marginalization as members of the working class, which I understand, with Joyce Jacobsen and Adam Zeller, as an “effect […] of heteronormativity […] on economic outcomes” (2008: 2), and their status as minor characters in the 4

See Gates (1988).

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text. The comparative affective freedom they enjoy in their present social position might not be available in a middle-class context. Their colleague and future employer Jones serves as an instructive example of what is expected of a black man in the process of upward social mobility. For, as Joel Pfister writes about the formation of the (white) middle class in the nineteenth century, the middle-class family established boundaries between itself and other classes […] through gender construction […] [and] the cultural production of specific kinds of psychological bonds, dependencies, expectations, and norms, as well as a certain income level and the character of the husband’s gainful employment. (Pfister, 1991: 4)

But the narrative also registers racial specificity in the production of a middle-class position and thus another form of intracategorical complexity. In the case of Joshua Jones, this process takes place above all in his courting of Linda Young. Its success requires him to abandon what Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson later described as “cool pose,” an attitude he has cultivated to shield himself from male aggression and female covetousness. In a pivotal conversation, Young employs the metaphor of the “walls” to describe his “hardness” as a self-defense mechanism that prevents true self-knowledge: “There’s a wall around you. A thick stone wall. You’re outside, looking. You think you see yourself. You don’t. You only see the wall. Hard guy – that’s the wall. Never give in, never turn loose. Always get the other guy. That’s the wall. […] You’re not hard. […] You’re just scared. […] So scared, you take every chance you can to prove how hard you are.” (255–7)

The dismantling of these psychological “walls” generates two related outcomes: Jones’s ability to verbalize his feelings for Young, and his relinquishment of extreme physical violence. There are interesting parallels to Jenkins’s and Brown’s defiance of homophobia, which is similarly represented as an erosion of emotional compartmentalization. In their case, the expression of strong feelings for each other likewise prevents a potentially lethal fight. The redirection of Jones’s libidinal energies towards Young signals a turn away from commodity fetishism. The intimacy in their partnership reconfigures his desire to possess the van with which he and his colleagues conduct the moving business, superseding the romance of the man and the machine so central to 1920s constructions of masculinity: He called her Bess, and Bess was the only thing on earth that he coveted. She was padded within and especially designed for the moving of things fine and fragile; her engine was responsive and smooth, her treads

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pneumatic… […] It was Shine’s ambition one day to win her away from old man Isaacs. (46–7)

The personified, sexualized, and distinctly gendered van illustrates what Walter Benjamin has termed “the sex appeal of the inorganic.” Characterized by a clear subject–object structure, Jones’s gendered relation to “Bess” highlights male dominance and enhanced mobility. The desired outcome of this “courtship” is literal ownership, which would position Jones as the head of a company, however small. This idea of self-fashioning condensed in the concept of the “self-made man” remains constitutive of hegemonic US American gender discourses even today. It assumes particular relevance in the context of the historical denial of manhood to African American males, including the withholding of economic opportunities, as well as the legacy of racialized chattel slavery that legally defined enslaved persons as property and refused to acknowledge their subjecthood. Instead of calling for an abolition of property, a strategy discussed in Sabine Broeck’s article in this volume, the novel suggests its redeployment. Jones’s reordering of his priorities does not necessarily imply a critique of his socio-economic desires. In fact, Young’s affirmation of Jones’s entrepreneurial aspirations functions as a potent aphrodisiac, generating one of the most romantic moments in their relationship: “… if I learn to type­w rite you can give me a job in your office – when you get one.” In astonishment he stopped to stare at her. The expression of mingled amusement, decision, and tenderness with which she returned his look gave him a sudden overwhelming happiness. (196–7)

Even as she suggests an economic relationship marked by a gendered power imbalance, Young revises the contours of marriage as a “sexuo-economic” institution, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman termed it (1966: 122). She refuses the conventional division of labor in middle-class families implicit in Jones’s marriage proposal, which she describes as a continuation of her present work as a “K.M.” (kitchen mechanic). Instead, the position of a clerical employee in a family business would officially recognize the qualification she is in the process of acquiring, as well as the monetary value of her labor. This model also distinguishes her from Jones’s former lovers. In a move that testifies to the internal variability of both class and gender as categories, she does not seek to benefit from Jones’s assets on the basis of an exchange of money for sex and domestic labor – not even in the context of marriage. Jones’s earlier female partners, however, apparently indulge both erotic and financial desires without inhibition. For him, their voracious appetite for vital male resources appears detrimental to male welfare: “Women

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[…] don’t mean a man no good. Always want sump’m. Always got they hands out. Gimme” (81). In contrast, Linda Young’s attractiveness for Jones resides at least in part in her erotic and pecuniary restraint. She not only refuses Patmore’s offer of money for sex, but carefully manages any physical intimacy in her relationship with Jones. Her value remains firmly rooted in her sexual virtue, the nineteenth-century gold standard of female worth. Earlier contenders for Jones’s affection, on the other hand, represent contemporary “vamps,” who, as Bram Dijkstra (1996) observes, were represented as depriving the hapless male not only of his precious bodily fluids but increasingly of their symbolic equivalent, money. While Dijkstra’s observations concern white middle-class characters, and Jones’s ex-partners participate in somewhat different economies due to their class and racial positioning, the construction of these characters in The Walls of Jericho is problematic nevertheless. It resonates with stereotypical notions of black female immorality, and judges the characters on the basis of a patriarchal value system that demands of “good” women sexual, as well as economic, “virtue” and selflessness. Young, who embodies these qualities, is limited by traditional constructions of femininity in different, but related, ways. Once racial uplift is figured as “performing respectability,” to employ Tavia Nyong’o’s instructive phrase (2009: 94), she can hardly afford to transgress the lines of “propriety.” Her “business plan” revises the institution of marriage by providing for female economic agency, but simultaneously curtails it both through its location within matrimony, and through the conflation of the husband’s position with that of the employer. Her trajectory thus highlights what Robert Reid-Pharr has identified as “insistence on conjugal union, the tying together of black bodies, black domesticities, and black (bourgeois) nations of universalism” that characterized discourses of black embodiment and racial uplift in the nineteenth century and beyond (Reid-Pharr, 1999: 130). Furthermore, she is objectified through a collective male gaze when she first appears in the text. Watching her approach establishes a sense of unity among the black male characters regardless of class. The gaze that appraises the young woman as a potential sex object engenders a community that includes not only the lawyer and the movers but the narrator and, potentially, the reader: You could see that she knew they were staring, so completely did she ignore them, and the ease with which she did so, the queenly unconcern with which she passed, indicated that she was accustomed to being stared at and did not mind it at all. […] She was tall and her face was pretty, and her body slenderly invited, though her legs perversely eluded, the persistent caress of the sedulous soft black satin. (52–3)

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As Luce Irigaray (1976) has noted, objectification through the male gaze and lack of control over language are correlated with women’s status as commodities in patriarchal societies. By subjecting the novel’s female characters to a male gaze and evaluating their bodies in accordance with hegemonic beauty ideals, the narrative voice discounts their active participation in the economic sphere. Even though they are not without economic agency, the text denies them full access to the modernist economies it mobilizes so successfully on behalf of their male counterparts. Opening Up New Spaces, Rewriting “Race” Fred Merrit’s productive investments reflect economic self-interest as well as a desire to further the social advancement of African Americans as a group. This is also true for his purchase of a mansion on a previously “white” street, with which he challenges residential segregation. His move is met with what George Lipsitz (1998) has called a “possessive investment in whiteness” – the refusal of racist white residents like Miss Cramp to accept him as a neighbor. With her bigotry and her ignorance, Miss Cramp figures as the narrative’s most conspicuous representative of whiteness as property, to use Cheryl Harris’s (1993) illuminating term. She is emotionally invested in possession to such an extent that, after the burning of Merrit’s new home, she sympathizes with the property rather than its inhabitant (284–5). Her friendship with a white Southerner associates her explicitly with white supremacy. As the incarnation of whiteness as property and social privilege, Agatha Cramp seems capable only of destructive expenditure: Her disbursement of money, designed to shore up her feeling of self-worth, functions to consolidate rather than mitigate social distinctions.5 For all its pertinent exposure of white philanthropy, it is significant that the text chooses a female character (a woman, moreover, who is not the property of a man) to target racism and white privilege. But even white characters that do not exhibit Miss Cramp’s prejudice and condescension invest in interracial relations exclusively for their own benefit. Thus the writer Conrad White, whose nickname “Con” already identifies him as a “con-man,” ostensibly identifies with blacks even as he makes a name for himself by commodifying African American culture in his fiction (117). His disingenuous pretense of reverse passing is belied by the economics of his exchange with black Harlem: “‘Downtown I’m only 5 Miss Cramp’s conversation with her Irish American maid reveals a combination of prejudice and condescension similar to the one that had marked her interaction with Young before. Unwilling to recognize “Mary” as a fellow American, Miss Cramp persists in likening her to her image of an exotic “other” (288).

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passing. These,’ he waved grandiloquently, ‘are my people.’ ‘Yea – so you seem to think, the way you sell ’em for cash,’ said Cornelia. ‘They enjoy being sold,’ returned Con” (117). The chilling reference to slavery transcends its attempted containment through the humorous tone and points to the continued appropriation of black cultural production by whites capitalizing on “the market value of racialized culture” (Jordan and Harris, 2005: vi). Blackness is here “constituted through theft,” as Tavia Nyong’o argues in a related context (2009: 110). The novel thus suggests that African Americans still have to contend with what Houston A. Baker, Jr. (1985) has described as an “economics of slavery.” There is no productive white investment in interracial relations in The Walls of Jericho. Any hope for a beneficial flow of resources thus resides in intraracial exchanges. Yet, the text’s critique of whiteness as property premised on the right to exclude avoids essentializing “race.” In a daring deconstructionist move, the text attributes the destruction of Merrit’s new home not to white culprits but to a black man. With its representation of arsonist Patmore, the narrative’s paradigmatic homo oeconomicus, it offers a trenchant criticism of both hegemonic masculinity and laissez-faire capitalism. Like the subject of neoclassical economics, Patmore cares only about his own sexual and financial profit (McCloskey, 1988; Ferber and Nelson, 1993). Constitutionally incapable of investing into anything but his own self-aggrandizement, he ends up destroying another black man’s property in an open breach of racial solidarity. As Phillip Brian Harper (1998) notes in an illuminating reading of Patmore’s behavior, his firebombing of Merrit’s house represents an instance of “passing,” since the threatening letter he writes seems to address the lawyer from the perspective of white residents: “You are not wanted in this neighborhood. If you move in, we’ll move you out” (48). Patmore sardonically comments: “… damn if this ain’t d’ first time in my life I ever passed for white” (268). One might therefore wonder if his deed does in fact result from “black states of desire.” Yet, Patmore’s positioning as “white” is complicated by his self-identification as “black” through his opposition to Merrit, whom he describes as a “fay nigger” (267), i.e. as “not quite black” and less than manly because of his move into a “white” upper- (middle-) class residential area (267). Even though, as Harper observes, it is the bootlegger’s “narrative revelation [of this act] that catalyzes the alliance between the upper and lower classes of black Harlem” (1998: 394), the text here demarcates the limits of modernist economies from a black perspective, I would argue. As much as Merrit, Jones, and Patmore are united in their desire for upward social mobility, the narrative – unlike The Great Gatsby, for example (Tratner, 2001: 72–89) – draws a clear line between legitimate and illegitimate strategies for

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attaining this goal. While Patmore’s position as the owner of a pool hall places him squarely within a black male community, his bootlegging already renders him untrustworthy, since his desire for financial gain appears to take precedence over any regard for his customers’ health or safety. Jones even suspects him of trying to poison Merrit through adulterated liquor (33–4). Patmore is likewise discredited through his attempt to purchase sexual favors from Young, and his use of force when she declines (157–8). His rage over having to pay damages to a pedestrian he injured in a traffic accident (31–2) confirms that his emotional investment in his financial capital overrides any concern for others’ welfare. One might argue that such affects, which also motivate the arson, again point to his whiteness. According to his own standard – “Gittin’ even is woman’s stuff – man don’t hold no grudges” (32) – his course of action also renders his masculinity questionable. The de-essentializing of “race” noticeable in Patmore’s “passing” can be observed in other passages of the text as well. Most of the time, its “denaturalizing ideological input,” to quote Rocchi (2007: 21), targets primitivist notions of African American culture. As Hartmut Grandel (1991) has pointed out, the novel dismantles the entire range of contemporary stereotypes concerning Harlem. In this connection, the narrative relies on deadpan humor resulting from black characters’ signifying on whites. A prime example can be found in Fred Merrit’s conversation with Miss Cramp at the GIA costume ball. Aware that she considers him white, Merrit prompts her to reveal her racist preconceptions and ridicules them through hyperbolic irony: “How primitive these people are,” she murmured. “So primeval. So unspoilt by civilization.” “Beautiful savages,” suggested Merrit. “Exactly. Just what I was thinking. What abandonment – what unrestraint – ” “Almost as bad as a Yale–Harvard football game, isn’t it?” (108)

Building on a tradition of “provoking affective responses” detailed in Carsten Junker’s essay in this volume, the text signifies both at a black audience and the implied white reader, who cannot afford to side with the obtuse and narrow-minded white character. Such an address expresses a guarded optimism also noticeable in the concluding sentence of Fisher’s essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem”: “Maybe they are at least learning to speak our language” (1997: 1194). In a similar vein, the narrative voice in The Walls of Jericho appears to accept or at least tolerate the viability of interracial erotic investment – even in the historically fraught constellation of black women and white men. In contradistinction to Merrit, who objects to such sexual relations because he believes there can be no “fair exchange” under these conditions (107),

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it tentatively endorses them. The image of Irish–Italian–American Tony Nayle and African American Nora Byle’s “flirting disgracefully” (105) and reappearing “laughing and breathless” after their dance at the GIA costume ball (110), stands as the novel’s most conspicuous image of black–white eroticism. Yet, their flirtation remains confined to the GIA ball, where “everybody is present and nobody minds” (71). Compared to the apparent impossibility of mutually advantageous financial exchanges between blacks and whites, however, the circuit of erotic currents remains relatively open, underlining the novel’s nuanced understanding of intercategorical complexity. Significantly, it is African American culture – specifically music and dance – that facilitates a modernist mobility in which libidinal investments tentatively transgress not only lines of class but even those of “race.” As the linguistic equivalent of the GIA ball, an image that, like the metaphors discussed by Rebecka Rutledge Fisher in this volume, proves transformational, the novel’s language mediates between differing social positions and socio-economic as well as erotic desires. Modernist Economies of Language If black states of desire are best served by the flow of financial, emotional, and linguistic resources in intraracial relations, the text’s signifying also suggests a cautious investment in the prospective white reader. With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1988), and Michael North (1994), one can read signifying with its dual message and its two intended audiences as a modernist form of expression drawing on two distinct creative traditions in the interest of more complex and more dynamic modes of representation. In The Walls of Jericho, it functions above all to interrogate class and racial hierarchies. It points out that economies, be they financial or erotic, are invariably racialized, sexualized, and gendered. The heterodiegetic narrator adopts the perspective of different characters in passages of free indirect discourse (one of literary modernism’s distinctive stylistic features), but frequently assumes a generalized black male working-class perspective, ridiculing African American middle- and upper-class conceit and self-importance and, even more poignantly, white middle- and upper-class materialism, obtuseness, and racism. He positions himself as black through his intimate knowledge of Harlem and his proximity to the protagonist, who only countenances the appellation “Shine” from fellow blacks, as the text points out (21–2). African American working-class characters are addressed by their first names or nicknames, middle-class characters by their last or full names. While this emphasizes the narrator’s closeness to Jones, Young, Jenkins, and Brown, it simultaneously reiterates social hierarchies. Matters are further complicated as intracategorical complexity is foregrounded by

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the circumstance that the narrator’s diction clearly identifies him as middle class. In many ways, the narrator speaks from a position not unlike that of Fred Merrit. It is therefore not unimportant that the novel ends with Merrit’s desiring look at the van that carries Jones and Young away, possessed by “preposterous feelings” such as “an impulse to run after the departing Bess, crying, ‘Wait…’”: He stood and watched and smiled. The road led up and over a crest beyond which spread sunrise like a promise. Away for a time, then up moved Bess, straight into the kindling sky. […] Against that far background of light he saw it hang black and still a moment – then drop abruptly out of vision, into another land. (292–3)

In this scene, “Bess,” transformed into a mobile, eroticized domestic space through Young’s initiative (291), might be said to represent a “reproductive futurity” (Edelman 2004) that Merrit, much like Jenkins and Brown, is excluded from. Even as his own investment has underwritten this model of a racial future in which the constellation of more flexible masculinities, somewhat reduced gender hierarchies, and wider access to middle-class positions promise a more beneficial circulation of financial resources and affects between African Americans, Merrit’s yearning emphasizes that some desires are left behind in such a vision. Merrit might here be read as “queer”; he might also be interpreted as a symbol of the narrative’s profound ambivalence about the project of black middle-class fashioning it pursues as the best available strategy for advancing towards economic justice (Jordan and Harris, 2005). At any rate, he stands as a figure of the self-reflexiveness that also characterizes the narrative voice. Unlike the lawyer, however, the narrator invests not only in a lowering of class barriers but also in an improvement of interracial relations. He endeavors to advance intercultural communication by elaborating on African American expressive styles. This “ethnographic” approach runs the risk of reinscribing the white gaze, representing the inhabitants of Harlem as exotic “others.” But the narrator’s gestures of translation are carried out with a signifying difference. Thus the “Introduction to Contemporary Harlemese,” a glossary appended to the narrative, is subtitled “Expurgated and Abridged” (295), signaling that the white audience will gain at best restricted access to black New York’s linguistic universe. This internally dialogized register contrasts markedly with the more straightforward language that marks the establishment of homosocial alliances or heterosexual bonding among African Americans. This mode of address seems unavailable in black/white relations, even those between text and literary audience, testifying to what Robert Stepto (1986) has called a “distrust of the reader” in African American

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writing. The text’s self-reflexive character finally returns the question of an appropriate reading to the audience, as Dorothea Löbbermann notes: “The readers get what they expect – an affirmation of their prejudices, if they wish, a commentary on the sensationalism of these images of Harlem, if that’s what they desire” (2002: 102).6 With its signifying performance, the novel extends a wary invitation to white readers, challenging them to reduce the walls that obstruct interracial flows of language, money, and recognition. But, within its fictional universe, black desires are above all focused on achieving a more comprehensive and rewarding circulation of resources among the members of the African American community. Works Cited Allen Jafari S. “The Past and the Next in Black Queer Feminist Theorization: ‘Find Yourself a Friend’.” Unpublished essay, undated. Badgett, M. V. Lee, and Rhonda M. Williams. “The Economics of Sexual Orientation: Establishing a Research Agenda.” In Joyce P. Jacobsen and Adam Zeller (eds). Queer Economics: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2008: 11–18. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. University of Chicago Press, 1985. Bourdieu, Pierre. Die feinen Unterschiede: Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Originally published as La distinction. Critique sociale de jugement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Dijkstra, Bram. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996. Dill, Bonnie Thornton. “Work at the Intersections of Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Other Dimensions of Difference in Higher Education.” Connections 2002 (Fall): 5–7. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Ferber, Marianne A., and Julie A. Nelson (eds). Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics. University of Chicago Press, 1993. Fisher, Rudolph. “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” In Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Nellie Y. McKay (eds). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton and Co., 1997: 1187–94. —— The Walls of Jericho. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 6 “[Der Leser] bekommt, was er erwartet – eine Bestätigung seiner Vorurteile über das schwarze Harlem, wenn er will, einen Kommentar zum Sensationalismus der Harlem-Bilder, wenn er das will.” Löbbermann (2002: 102). My translation.

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. [1898]. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Ed. Carl N. Degler. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Grandel, Hartmut. “Die literarische Entdeckung Harlems: Rudolph Fisher und der afroamerikanische Roman der 20er Jahre.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 39.3–4 (1991): 238–49. Hames-García, Michael. “What’s at Stake in ‘Gay’ Identities?” In Linda Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya (eds). Identity Politics Reconsidered. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006: 78–95. Harper, Philip Brian. “Passing for What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility.” Callaloo 21.2 (1998): 381–97. Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1709–91. Irigaray, Luce. Waren, Körper, Sprache: Der ver-rückte Diskurs der Frauen. Berlin: Merve, 1976. Jacobsen, Joyce P., and Adam Zeller (eds). Queer Economics: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Jordan, Emma Coleman, and Angela P. Harris. Economic Justice: Race, Gender, Identity, and Economics. New York: Foundation Press, 2005. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998. Löbbermann, Dorothea. Memories of Harlem: literarische (Re)Konstruktionen eines Mythos der zwanziger Jahre. Frankfurt: Campus, 2002. Majors, Richard, and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Touchstone, 1992. McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” In Emily Grabham, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas, and Didi Herman (eds). Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power, and the Politics of Location. New York: RoutledgeCavendish, 2009: 49–76. McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Rhetoric of Economics. [1985]. Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1991. Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Rocchi, Jean-Paul. “Preservation of Ignorance; The Lack and the Absence: Self-Reflexivity and the Queering of African American Diasporic Research.” In Michelle M. Wright and Antje Schuhmann (eds). Blackness and Sexualities. Berlin: Lit, 2007: 15–27.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Stepto, Robert B. “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives.” In Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.). Reconstructing American Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 300–22. Tratner, Michael. Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in TwentiethCentury Literature. Stanford University Press, 2001. Wright, Michelle M., and Antje Schuhmann (eds). Blackness and Sexualities. Berlin: Lit, 2007.

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5 “I Hugged Myself”: First-Person Narration as an Agential Act in Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Florian Bast (Universität Leipzig)

This study gives an introduction to the complex interrelation of agency and first-person narration in the works of Octavia Butler by way of the short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987).1 Butler’s diverse oeuvre utilizes narrative perspective as it conspicuously employs complex constructions of homodiegetic narrations: in its discussion of notions of identity, power, control, and freedom, it gives voice to, among others, a runaway in a dystopian future in Survivor (1978), a black woman repeatedly forced to travel back to the times of slavery in Kindred (1979), a human–alien hybrid of a third gender in Imago (1989), a hyper-empathic young woman who founds a major religion in Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), and a black vampire–human hybrid in Fledgling (2006). As such, Butler’s fictions, in how they narrate hybrid and intersectional species identities, are powerful examples of texts which “explore the complexity of what it means to be human” (see the Introduction to this volume), and her short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” provides a pertinent example of these dynamics. The central theoretical category of my analysis is agency, which I define as an individual’s capability to reach a decision about himself or herself and implement it. This ability is significantly expressed in agential acts, i.e., acts which address and problematize agency as such: agential acts are intended to achieve a higher level of agency, explicitly to express or perform agency. They mark a choice between several options, particularly in situations of oppression or determination. Thus constructed, agency is not simple voluntarism, a vague notion of doing what one wants, but rather an ability realized in a specific cultural and historical context and within a dialectic of enablement and constraint. Historically, this ability is tied to and in fact conceptualized in 1

I would like to thank my colleague Sebastian M. Herrmann for his invaluable feedback.

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combination with a specific notion of the subject; it is as an inherent attribute of the rational, autonomous, white man, the subject of the Enlightenment.2 However, even as this notion of the subject has been deconstructed in different postmodern schools of theory,3 allowing for some notion of agency remains a central theoretical challenge. Particularly to those theories centering on the political and cultural struggle for the equality of marginalized groups, such as feminism or Critical Race Theory, the deconstruction, sometimes even the negation, of the liberal humanist subject poses a significant problem.4 For groups striving to achieve social and political change, the notion of informed choices leading to planned actions which cause change cannot be surrendered. Their postmodern reconceptualizations of the subject thus create significant and politically charged differences between notions of what agency actually entails, of what its prerequisites and its limits are, and of how agency can be created for a given group. This mutually informative relationship between agency and subjectivity can serve literary interpretation as a potent tool in understanding literary texts’ philosophical and ethical work, if these two closely linked concepts are precisely differentiated.5 Whereas subjectivity describes an abstract and general state, agency denotes the capability to choose and act in a concrete context. In a way, agency connects the abstract philosophical concept of subjectivity with action: as conceptions of agency and conceptions of the subject mutually inform each other, specific constructions of agency indicate specific constructions of subjectivity. Its focus on acts by concrete characters in turn makes agency analysis a potent tool for the theoretic endeavors at the heart of this volume, “the art of combining intellectualization and feeling, rationality and affectivity” (see the Introduction). I propose that reading Butler’s first-person narrations in general – and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” in particular – yields a fascinating view of the texts’ multilayered concerns with the creation of intersectional selves in terms of their connection of agency and first-person narration: “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” uses first-person narration to juxtapose the creation of self through language – for example, via changing we-versus-they constructions – with the self ’s physical self-destruction. 2 See Melley (2000), among many others. 3 For a rather comprehensive inventory of the different theoretical challenges to the subject of the Enlightenment, see Melley (2000); Mills (2002); and Hartsock (1996). 4 As Judith Kegan Gardiner asks in the Introduction to Provoking Agents, “Do attacks on liberal human identity and essence disable the concept of agency, and therefore do they inhibit feminist action?” (1995: 8). 5 For an in-depth treatment of this point, see Bast (2012).

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Not only does the text address the agential potential of the multidimensional category of voice, but its narrative perspective also bespeaks the deconstruction of the mind/body binary at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conception of the subject. Moreover, in choosing to construct the narrative as a creative utilization of African American literary traditions, the story creates a narrative intersectionality which serves as a locus of agency. Part I. First-Person Narration and Agency in African American Literature Narratologically speaking, writings from a first-person point of view, i.e., writings in which the narrator is part of the narrative deixis, create distinct effects: most ubiquitously, they simulate proximity between the reader and the character(s) of the story by seemingly removing an extra-diegetic element from in-between them, creating “a sense of reality, of immediacy and […] of intimacy” (Sebate, 1994: 134; cf. Schipper, 2003: 101). This can substantially increase the identificatory potential of characters, as “we are more inclined to share views or to sympathize with a character when the story is presented mainly from his or her particular view, feeling, ideology” (Schipper, 2003: 112). Even if there is a temporal distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I, this point of view creates a heightened sense of the ‘authenticity’ of the text. Moreover, homodiegetic narrations equip a character with the discursive proficiency of a narrator and thus with the ability consciously to structure the telling of one’s own story. Narrativizing one’s experiences includes the power to choose what to include and how to include it. To shape and order past events constitutes a form of power over these events and one’s memory of them. It is a process of choices about the self and their implementation in the narrativization of subjectivity as it performs “the validity of one person’s right to interpret her experience” (Lanser, 1992: 19). If “[t]he telling of a story is always bound up with power, with questions of authority, property and domination” (Bennett and Royle, 2004: 52), then the textual act of firstperson narration constitutes an agential act. This connection between agency and first-person narration takes on a heightened significance in the context of African American literature. In the following, I will thus briefly outline the importance and diverse usage of first-person narration as an agential act in African American literary tradition. The point within the confines of this text is not to provide a nuanced typology of this complex phenomenon throughout the history of black writing in the United States, but rather to sketch, by pointing to some of the most diverse and yet most well-known examples of this dynamic, a multifaceted context which Butler’s text references. It is also from this

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traditional intertwining of first-person narration and agency that the story draws specific agential dynamics. The effects of I-narration summarized above apply to African American literature, but they resonate differently within a cultural tradition grounded in using the narration of self as a tool to claim one’s humanity and instigate social change. I-narratives constitute a rich and ethically charged strand within the canon of African American writings and its deep entanglements with, and detailed investigations of, the intricate dialectics of agency and oppression. As Butler’s texts reference African American literary traditions, they utilize and creatively rework these conventions. Without reducing the African American experience to that of being victimized by slavery, the slave narrative is often regarded as a founding genre of African American literature. Indeed, Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. famously identify a powerful intertextual connection between the slave narrative and the African American literary tradition as a whole (1985: xiii). As a multitude of slave narrative scholars have pointed out, narrative perspective is a defining formal feature of these texts, not just because their concrete political agenda demands that they be eye/I witness accounts but because the narratives themselves declare their authors subjects and agents in their audiences’ eyes. What is at stake – what is created through narration – are subjectivity and agency themselves. This narration of self is a crucial agential act, since, as Valerie Smith argues, the “example of the slave narrators shows us that in the capacity to create a self in language lies autonomy” (1987: 64).6 Accordingly, first-person narration remains a central tradition throughout African American literary history even after the slave narrative, as “the Afro-American literary tradition takes its start, in theme certainly but also often in content and form, from the slave narratives” (Olney, 1985: 168). Through the agential act of first-person narration, authors from Booker T. Washington to Zora Neale Hurston, from W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright to Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler engage, each in uniquely distinct ways, with similar concerns as their literary predecessors: giving a voice to African Americans, exploring and claiming African American intersectional subjectivities, portraying possibilities and limits of agency for

6 This is why A. Robert Lee claims that Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), and by extension the entire genre, is a transgression significantly above and beyond the fact that it breaks slave laws against literacy and describes the illegal act of escape: “It represents transgression of a profoundly more consequential kind, autobiography as the ‘making’ of the self in the face of that self ’s historic denial” (154).

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African Americans, and constructing narrators that speak to and for “the race.”7 Moreover, owing to the slave narratives’ double status as autobiography and literature (cf. Olney), the canon of African American literature contains a multitude of influential autobiographies, first-person fictions, and texts that blur the boundaries between the two.8 In dealing with “form and its implicit ideology” (Smith, 1987: 13), African American literature offers such a prolific canon of narratologically and psychologically diverse homodiegetic narrators that Gayl Jones claims the main difference between what she terms “Western literature” and African American literature to lie in the fact that while the former’s most notable artistic achievements are third-person narrations, the latter’s are first-person narrations (1991: 131–2). One need only think of the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), of Ursa in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), of the different first-person passages in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987),9 and of the letters which comprise Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) to begin to fathom the complexity of black first-person perspectives in these four decades alone. It is no coincidence that many of the texts in this list were written by women. Indeed, it is essential to point out that African American women writers have used the I-narration specifically to address their intersectionality, their subject status as both women and blacks, which Ann duCille in “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation” so pointedly calls her “indivisible blackwomanness” (2000: 445). Following the poignant example of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), African American women authors have forcefully portrayed black female subjectivities as distinct from those of both black men and white women. First-person neo-slave narratives such as Corregidora (1975), Kindred (1979), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) especially insist on the “multiple jeopardy” to which black women have been and are subject (cf. King, 1988). Accordingly, many of the themes and techniques of African American literary tradition, such as questions of voice, the rendering of oral narrative in 7 See e.g. Weil (1999) for a typology of first-person voices in African American poetry according to whether they convey a personal experience of the author or represent “their race” (223). 8 This is not to claim that the dynamics of first-person narration in autobiographical texts and fictional texts are identical; in fact, they certainly vary between, and even within, individual texts. However, while a nuanced theoretical and historical engagement with this complex relationship would certainly constitute a productive project, the point here is only to establish the slave narratives’ combination of both genres as a reason for the large and heterogenous group of I-narrators in African American literature. 9 Cf. Claudine Raynaud’s reading of the erotics of writing in Toni Morrison’s works in this volume.

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writing, and the use of call and response, are inherently connected to point of view. Considerations of narrative perspective figure prominently in the work of many of the most important theorists of African American literature, such as Robert B. Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston A. Baker, Jr., Madelyn Jablon, and Valerie Smith. As for the politics of narrative perspective, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues that it was particularly Williams Styron’s choice to cast his infamous Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) as a first-person narration which sparked a controversy that “marked a transitional point in the emergence of the Black Power-generation intellectuals” (1999: 54). Even such a cursory look at the importance of first-person narration in African American literature – from the slave narratives’ political and philosophical project to the neo-slave narratives’ postmodern theoretizations, from canonical autobiographies to the most referenced theoretical engagements with African American literature – makes it abundantly clear that first-person narration is not simply a frequently employed formal feature of texts by African American authors. It is an agential act of significant ethical and political potential within the African American literary tradition.10 It is my contention that Butler’s narrations consciously reference this tradition. The texts of the first African American woman successfully to write speculative fiction and science fiction yield complex commentary on the multilayered intersection of power, freedom, body, and voice when read in terms of their constructions of agency through the use of first-person narrators. Part II. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” revolves around its narrator Lynn Mortimer. She tells the story of growing up with Duryea-Gode disease, the acronym of which is DGD. In a near future, children born to parents treated with a new cancer drug are genetically doomed to have the disease erupt in their middle adulthood. The onset of the disease causes mental absence and gruesome self-mutilation, sometimes even the mutilation of others. Lynn commences the story by referencing the time her parents took her to see a DGD ward at age fifteen, after which she attempted suicide. She continues to describe her life as a DGD carrier, including extensive passages 10 It is, thus, no coincidence that a number of the contributions to this identity-focused collection on the intersectionalities of black culture include in their arguments analyses of first-person writings. Among many other examples, Charles Nero studies Du Bois’s “The Coming of John” and Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms; Rebecka Rutledge Fisher discusses works by Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others; and Laura Sarnelli looks at Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

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on the resulting marginalization. Lynn recounts how she met her boyfriend Alan, with whom she shares the rare misfortune of having been born to two treated parents, and “search[es] for a meaningful sense of personal agency in the face of both biological determinism and painful experiences of scapegoating” (Hamner, 2009: 96). The story’s climax comes in the form of their visit to a treatment facility which relies on the patients’ supervision by Beatrice, a woman also born to two DGD parents. As Beatrice explains to Lynn, her genetics, and more specifically her smell, make her capable of calming and, to a large extent, controlling the supposedly out-of-control DGD patients. She explains that Lynn, as the female progeny of two treated parents, shares this power. In what Elana Gomel has called a “strange semi-utopian twist” (2000: 420), the story closes with Alan’s extreme dismay when he understands that he has been subjected to Lynn’s influential smell from the start, and Lynn’s realization that she will use her genetic gifts to become the head of such a facility herself instead of surrendering to the genetically inevitable outbreak that awaits her. In many ways, this story represents a prism of Octavia Butler’s work:11 like most of Butler’s writings, it revolves around its characters’ bodies. Moreover, it showcases the struggle of rational will versus genetic drives, the fight against seeming genetic inevitability and social marginalization, and reluctant but ultimately successful attempts at community building. Lastly, even though the story never reveals the racial backgrounds of its protagonist, it creates intertextual ties to narrative traditions of African American literature.12 We versus They The most ubiquitous element in this regard is the text’s creation of we-versusthey constructions. As these change throughout the plot, they show Lynn defining herself by picking different Others against whom to contrast herself. It is through these constructions that the text establishes itself as a means of narrative construction of a self. At first, discussing her life as an individual marked by the tag DGD patients have to wear for medical reasons, she constructs a “they” that encompasses healthy people who mock, marginalize, and regulate her, against which the “we” of the DGD carriers seems victimized but resilient (36, 39). Lynn indicates awareness of this clear 11 In light of this, it seems particularly surprising that the story has received little scholarly attention. Cf. Govan, who also states that readers “tend to ignore the complexity” of the story (2005/2006: 23). 12 See Green, who reads Lynn’s and Alan’s respective parents’ religions and nationalities as subtle indicators of the characters’ “multiethnicism” (1994: 180).

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binary and its significance when she discusses the choice of having children with Alan. To his frustrated “Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us,” she replies “They? […] I don’t want kids, but I don’t want someone else telling me I can’t have any” (42). Later, when she and Alan visit the ward, her construction of herself stands in contrast to those whose disease has erupted (54). Concurrent with the fact that genetic difference separates her from healthy people and genetic inevitability connects her to those who have an advanced form of the disease, this construction is somewhat less stable. When Alan informs her that people at the treatment center are not simply being “shut away to die,” she switches between the two distinct dichotomies of diseased and healthy in which she holds different subject positions, asking him, “What else is there to do with them? With us?” (44). These constructions of self in relation to an Other are clearly linked to the use of first-person narration. What is significant in the context of firstperson narrations as an agential act is that they transcend direct speech and appear in the narrated portions, causing two distinct consequences. First, the dichotomy between “we” and “they” itself appears more intense by virtue of the lack of a mediating third-person narrator. Through the above-mentioned identificatory potential of the first-person narrator, readers are forced much more strongly to consider their own stance in this binary, a design highly reminiscent of the slave narratives’ project of making their intended white readership sympathize with the slaves’ plight.13 Second, and even more importantly, the fact that the narrated text outside of direct speech uses these we-versus-they constructions makes the story itself the act of creating a coherent subject in the face of marginalization. Thus the narrative itself constitutes a textual agential act, the very means of creating a subjectivity in relation to shifting Others. This subjectivity, created and strengthened through first-person narration, is the most fundamental connection of firstperson narration and agency, as it serves as the basis of the text’s agential act of writing a coherent self in the face of its looming destruction. Narrating against DGD The story’s connection of first-person narration with issues of agency and subjectivity finds its most potent realization in the portrayal of DGD which reflects the story’s and the oeuvre’s deliberate and productive ambivalence 13 Ironically, Lynn seems to place little faith in the actual impact that telling one’s own story can have upon one’s readers. Describing a DGD carrier studying English, she sarcastically remarks: “He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside – which had only been done thirty or forty times before.” Butler (2005: 39).

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about enlightenment conceptions of selfhood and deconstructs the body/ mind binary at its core. As mentioned above, psychotic patients become dissociated and mutilate themselves horribly. Among many such images Lynn describes a person “who had torn at himself and been restrained or drugged off and on for so long that he barely had a recognizable human feature left” (50); she interprets the sufferers’ relationship to their bodies as being “trapped in something [they] needed to dig [their] way out of ” (55). The patients’ mental degeneration and lack of interaction with their surroundings, paired with their attempts to flee their body by literally tearing themselves apart, make DGD the epitome of the mental and physical destruction of the self (50). Blindly following their urges, losing all rationality and agency to genetic determinism, the sick literalize the de(con) struction of the subject, as they are “tearing at themselves or staring into space” (48). As I argue elsewhere,14 Butler’s entire oeuvre principally insists on an embodied notion of agency and of the subject, in opposition to the Enlightenment’s binary conceptions. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” takes a significantly ambivalent stance within this corpus as its construction of agential acts bespeaks a subject who is both embodied and discursively constructed. On the one hand, the construction of DGD powerfully drives home the point of embodied subjectivity as it satirically literalizes a theoretical move at the heart of the Enlightenment: the disembodiment of the subject. This is particularly evident in the repeated portrayal of self-mutilation as a form of digging into oneself, which can indeed be interpreted as a critique of Enlightenment philosophy. In such a reading, this driven digging symbolizes an anxiety about poststructuralist and postmodern concepts of construction, representation, and performance that negate any notion of genuine knowledge and objective truth. In a narrative about the embodied and yet discursive conception of agency, the characters who keep digging into themselves have the least agency. Refusing to stay on the surface of their self – the skin – those whose DGD has erupted express a fanatic need to get to the bottom of things, to the actual thing itself, performing a frustration with the disconnect between referent and signifier and losing themselves in the process. It is noteworthy within this context of the subject’s self-destruction by its literal self-disembodiment that Lynn highlights that the actual physical consequences of mutilation do not affect her as much as the process of self-destruction: “Scars didn’t bother me much. Disability didn’t bother me much. It was the act of self-mutilation that scared me” (50). Making such a clear distinction between the bodily harmful results and the act itself, which is at the core of Lynn’s anxieties 14 See Bast (2012).

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about the disease, the text unequivocally establishes the symbolic meaningfulness of the act: the overdetermination by DGD and the actions it forces on its victims. On the other hand, the text’s design clearly pits a textual act, the claiming of the self in writing, the mental organization of one’s life story, and thus the epitome of Enlightenment’s subjectivity, as the strongest agential act against this physical de(con)struction of the self: facing a disease which will most likely make her destroy herself, Lynn narrates her own story. In a deliberate and ordered progression through what she chooses as the relevant portions of her life, the first-person narrator performs an ordering of her self and of her narrative. In doing so, she creatively reworks the slave narrative tradition of graphic descriptions of violence that ominously looms in her own future. This construction of a coherent subjectivity constitutes a textual act of resistance, an agential act against genetic determinism where the slave narratives constituted one against the power of a racist and sexist hegemony. Many passages of the text can serve as examples of its juxtaposition of first-person narration with self-destruction, such as the description of Lynn’s suicide attempt in the very first paragraph or that of her leaving the treatment center in the last. However, the most sophisticated and significant construction of narrating a self in the face of its looming destruction appears when she tells Beatrice about her previous traumatic visit to a ward. After sharing the experience, the narrator states: “I hugged myself, remembering the young woman, bloody, cannibalizing herself as she lay at our feet, digging into her own flesh. Digging” (53). Significantly, this happens as the experiencing “I” narrates an episode within the story. The narrator Lynn describes the character Lynn hugging herself as she in turn becomes the narrator of a story from her past; it is an I-narration of an I-narration. Thus, the text establishes a double layer of first-person narratives, highlighting the narrative point of view. Moreover, it skillfully positions itself at the intersection of body and voice, two of the most contested categories in African American – and particularly African American women’s – literature: this is a first-person narration within which the experiencing I constructs another first-person narration, hugging herself while she tells the story of seeing a person performing physical acts of self-mutilation. The outer first-person narrator narrativizes – that is, orders, frames, and chooses to include – the bodily act of enveloping, even containing her self while her very narration establishes a coherent subject. Butler’s texts generally constitute highly innovative examples of what the Introduction to this collection, in reference to Barbara Christian’s famous concept of narrative theorizing, refers to as the capability of language and story-telling to produce theory. This multilayered and overdetermined scene, this interweaving combination of body and voice as the character becomes a

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narrator who literally has physically to hold herself together in the face of the horrible de(con)struction of self which awaits her, most forcefully exemplifies Butler’s conception of agency: consciously navigating tensions between embodiment and discursive construction, her fictions create subjects which by their very design reveal the oeuvre’s insistence on the deconstruction of the Enlightenment’s body/mind binary itself. Spoken Voice Significantly, it is not only Lynn’s smell and her touch that are capable of stopping crazed DGD patients from harming themselves and others. Lynn’s physical voice makes her a promising candidate to run her own DGD ward, speaking to a similar dynamic of the simultaneous insistence on embodiment and discursive construction. In Lynn’s ability to communicate verbally with a DGD patient, the text establishes an additional way of imagining the category of voice as capable of stemming the tide of genetic inevitability. This ability finds its expression when Lynn and Alan meet Naomi, Alan’s mother, in the DGD ward. Lynn is able to calm her and keep her from losing control, not just by touching her, but by speaking to her. Naomi, now physically and mentally maimed, is overwhelmed by emotion on meeting her son again after many years. Having destroyed her own eyes, she is blind, and when she touches Alan’s face, danger looms, which Lynn repeatedly averts by verbally checking Naomi’s destructive behavior.15 Within the context of the power of voice as a specifically feminist and often Black Feminist theoretical concept,16 it is noteworthy that Naomi does not react to her son’s attempts at restraining her, but only to Beatrice’s and Lynn’s. When she comes close to hurting her son, Lynn recounts: “She struggled against him until I spoke to her” (60). This construction can be read as a commentary on the power of the female voice, if not necessarily a black female voice: Alan, the only man present, is unable to discipline his mother and struggles to protect himself even though he is also born to two treated parents. It is only through the voice of another woman that Naomi can be calmed and communicated with effectively. In fact, in contrast to both Lynn and Beatrice, Alan cannot even understand his mother’s mangled speech. Thus, on yet another level, the text pits the voice of its main character 15 It should be read as another indictment of Enlightenment conceptions of the subject that the most significant disability of the most prominently featured DGD patient is the loss of sight. As she literally tried to disembody herself, she lost the ability to perceive any light whatsoever. Now her drive to disembody threatens her son’s eyesight. 16 For different approaches to this, cf. Lanser (1992); Jablon (1997); and Henderson (2000), among many others.

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and narrator against the forces of genetic determinism, as a voice that has the power at least temporarily to stay what in the beginning of the story seemed to be an inevitable, genetically determined fate, even in others. The DGDs in Beatrice’s ward are specifically not like those in others: they are productive and have stopped mutilating themselves; some are literate and perform scientific research – all due to her body and her voice – prompting Michelle Erica Green’s claim that the ward constitutes “Butler’s strangest utopia, though in some ways her most successful one” (1994: 179). Describing the spoken voice of the character Lynn as an effective tool in fighting the disease’s most violent consequences connects in a remarkable way with the textual move of making the story by the narrator Lynn an agential act against the looming destruction of self: the style of Lynn’s narration is often one of distinctly oral storytelling. This makes the text an expression of her spoken voice more than a written narration and creates a clear and powerful reference to the tradition of oral storytelling within African American culture. Even though she claims, at the very beginning, “I won’t describe the ward” (35), she ends up doing exactly that, which points more to a situation of telling a story than writing one down with the chance of revising it. There are also ellipses in particularly emotional moments, such as when she describes medics transporting one of her parents: “someone covered. More than covered. Almost … bagged” (36), and a number of expressions which indicate an oral style of narration, such as “Hell, I knew what I was in for eventually” (37). This doubling of the agential power of the category of voice is a highly significant dynamic within the story’s entire project of creating a complex portrayal of first-person narration as an agential act: the spoken voice of the character helping Naomi control herself and the oral narrative voice of the narrator which fashions a coherent self in the face of DGD are both powerful realizations of the agential potential of voice, in several meanings of the word, as they connect the African American literary traditions of the slave narrative and of oral storytelling. It is this connection to different strands of African American literary history which reveals perhaps the most important insight within the context of Black Intersectionalities: constructing the narration of her struggle with the determining powers of her disease as a first-person narration, which utilizes patterns of the slave narrative and oral storytelling (as opposed to an omniscient third-person narrator), is in itself a highly significant choice. While the story strictly refuses to reveal its protagonist’s racial background, the narrator herself constructs intertextual links between her narration of self and those at the heart of the African American tradition. Especially within the context of an oeuvre which is known for innovatively melding elements of science fiction and themes and techniques which form part of the canon of African American literature, this narrator thus creates by means of her

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text an intersectionality based not on biological or visual markers of race but on narrative strategies. Writing oneself into an oppressed subject position creates a narrative intersectionality that serves as a locus of agency – the act of narration, here, creates a subject at the intersecting textual constructions of race, gender, and disability which, only by way of its very intersectionality, can access the potential of African American literature’s tradition of firstperson narration as agential act. Conclusion This short study can only scratch the surface of the complexities and interplays of narrative point of view and agency in Butler’s work in general and even within this story in particular. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” expends significant effort to contrast both social marginalization and genetic determinism with a fashioning of self through language, a fashioning that is an act of resistance, an agential act. The story’s we-versus-they constructions allow the narrator to define herself and simultaneously make the story itself a textual agential act, contrasting a highly deliberate construction of the self in writing with a disease that represents the mental and corporeal destruction of the self. Beyond, the narrative constructs Lynn’s spoken voice as a way of controlling the disease in others, thus connecting it to the African American literary tradition and creating a narrative intersectionality which holds its very own agential potential. In the end, the outbreak of the disease is not necessarily Lynn’s genetic destiny. Exemplifying agency as an ability realized within a dialectic of enablement and constraint and as based on both embodied and discursive conceptions of the self, Lynn chooses to use her genetic talents to fight her genetic curse with both her body and her voice to “[open] the floodgates of personal agency” (Hamner, 2009: 97). As such, Octavia Butler’s short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” serves as a powerful example of her writing’s ability to theorize through narrative the complexities of intersectional subjectivity and the possibilities of agency in the face of determinism and marginalization. Works Cited Bast, Florian. “‘No.’: The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Extrapolation 53.2 (2012): 151–81. Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. “Narrative.” An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 3rd edn. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2004: 52–9. Butler, Octavia E. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” [1987]. Bloodchild and Other Stories. 2nd edn. New York: Seven Stories, 2005: 33–68.

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—— Fledgling. New York: Warner 2005. —— Imago. New York: Warner, 1989. —— Kindred. [1979]. 25th anniversary edn. Boston: Beacon, 2003. —— Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. —— Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories, 1998. —— Survivor. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” In Angelyn Mitchell (ed.). Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994: 348–59. Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds). The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Douglass, Frederick. [1845]. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. With Related Documents. Ed. David W. Blight. 2nd edn. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2003. duCille, Ann. “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I’ (1993)”. In Winston Napier (ed.). African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000: 443–59. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Gardiner, Judith Kegan (ed.). Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1995: 8. Gomel, Elana. “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body.” Twentieth-Century Literature 46.4 (2000): 405–33. Govan, Sandra Y. “Going to See the Woman: A Visit with Octavia E. Butler.” Obsidian III 6/7, 2/1 (2005/2006): 14–39. Green, Michelle Erica. “‘There Goes the Neighborhood’: Octavia Butler’s Demand for Diversity in Utopias.” In Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds). Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994: 166–89. Hamner, Everett. “Determined Agency: A Postsecular Proposal for Religion and Literature – And Science.” Religion and Literature 41.3 (2009): 91–8. Hartsock, Nancy C. M. “Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory.” In Susan Hekman (ed.). Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996: 39–55. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Tradition.” In Winston Napier (ed.). African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York University Press, 2000: 348–68. Jablon, Madeleine. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City, Iowa: Iowa University Press, 1997. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [1861]. Ed. Nellie MacKay and Frances Smith Foster. New York: Norton, 2001. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. 1975. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000.

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—— Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.1 (1988): 42–72. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Lee, A. Robert. “‘The Stance of Self-Representation’: Moderns and Contemporaries in Afro-American Autobiography.” First Person Singular: Studies in American Autobiography. London: Vision, 1988: 151–76. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Mills, Charles W. “Defending the Radical Enlightenment.” Social Philosophy Today 18 (2002): 9–20. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. —— The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” In Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (eds). The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford University Press, 1985: 148–75. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Schipper, Mineke. “‘Who Am I?’ Fact and Fiction in African First-Person Narrative.” Beyond the Boundaries: Text and Context in African Literature. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003: 99–131. Sebate, P. M. “O Fee, Ke Fano! The Angle from which the Narrator Tells It.” South African Journal of African Languages 14.3 (1994): 133–9. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Styron, William. Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Weil, Eric A. “Personal and Public: Three First-Person Voices in African American Poetry.” In Joanne V. Gabbin (ed.). The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1999: 223–38. Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

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II Nonconformity and Narrative Theorizing

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6 Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag – Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect Carsten Junker (University of Bremen)

In the English-speaking transatlantic sphere, all legal involvement in the slave trade was officially abandoned between 1807 (Great Britain) and 1808 (the United States); slavery would eventually be abolished in the British Caribbean in 1833–34 and in the United States in 1865. The struggle to ban the trade in people of African origin and, by extension, their “thingification” (Césaire, 1950) was fought by many – by enslaved blacks and by white abolitionists – and it was fought in many different forms. Forms of resistance on the part of the enslaved ranged from survival tactics of fugitive slaves organizing in so-called maroon societies to the emerging textual interventions of the slave narratives – which we may more accurately call “freedom narratives,” as Paul Lovejoy has recently suggested (2011). At the same time, whites wrote pamphlets, anti-slavery treatises, public addresses, etc., and organized in abolitionist societies. A number of scholars working on abolition have stressed the resolve of black and white people to cross-identify and join in the struggle for abolition. As Linda Alcoff emphasizes, “throughout US history, some white people have joined in common cause with people of color to fight slavery, racism, and imperialism, from the New York Conspiracy of 1741 to the John Brown uprising” (2006: 205) and beyond. What challenges this rather optimistic notion of cross-racial collaborations and efforts toward ending the trade and the enslavement of African-origin people are the fundamentally different ascriptions of social positions that black and white people inhabited at the time. This is one of the repercussions of the slave trade and slavery: the impact it had on an understanding of something like sociality – perhaps even in our time – of who can partake in sociality and who is denied access to it. Modern transatlantic enslavement practices are about the capitalization of racialized human beings made into property and commodity, into things in which others trade and from which they make profits, gains, and losses. Orlando Patterson speaks about Slavery as Social Death (1982). Hortense

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Spillers has famously called the captive body “flesh,” which she defines as “the zero degree of social conceptualization” (2003: 206) and which entails a complete erasure of the intelligibility of enslaved people as gendered subjects. Historians of slavery such as John Hope Franklin have argued that slavery was not synchronized with the first arrival of sub-Saharan Africans as cargo in the early seventeenth century. Rather, systematic enslavement of Africans evolved within the colonial project – in which enslavement practices were gradually linked with the positing and claiming of racial differences and hierarchies. While slavery had not yet been equated with an idea of blackness in the seventeenth century in the British North American colonies – there were free blacks and indentured whites – this equation was established by the mid-eighteenth. By the time of the independence of the colonies from Britain in 1776, the enslavement of black people had condensed into a viable reality in the newly founded North American republic. It had become a contested reality nonetheless; one that seemed to challenge and contradict the ideals on which the United States should be founded. Publicopinion-making white men had to react to the Problem of Slavery (Davis, 2003) as a controversy, and taking a position toward it guaranteed them public attention. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) was one such public persona in eighteenthcentury North America who officially spoke out against the slave trade. A lionized protagonist of the abolitionist project, Franklin made a number of anti-slavery interventions, one of which has remained understudied: his text “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” (1790), a satirical attack on slavery.1 Framed as a so-called Barbary captivity narrative, it allows Franklin to turn abolitionist logic upside down, reversing a call for abolition into a defense of slavery by focalizing large parts of the text through an Algerian beneficiary of the slave trade. I suggest that this focalizing maneuver, by which Franklin puts on the clothes of difference, as it were, can be construed as an instantiation of ethnic drag. In scholarship on gender and heteronormativity, drag has been discussed as a phenomenon that may expose and transgress binary assumptions about (racially coded) femininity and masculinity, highlighting the performative dimensions of gender constructions. Ethnic drag, in the sense I use it here, expands notions of the performative to address Franklin’s textual practice of imitating, mimicking, and parodying an ethnically marked speaking position.2 But rather than pressing the subversive potential of drag, I examine 1 See Montgomery (1994: 8); Jehlen and Warner (1997: 891). 2 For an insightful study that elaborates the concept of ethnic drag, albeit in an utterly different context, see Sieg (2002). Referring to concepts developed by scholars such as Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler, Sieg explores the complex relationship between perfor-

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the ambiguities created ideologically by the voice that Franklin adopts in his particular performance of ethnic drag. Taking into account Franklin’s social positioning reconfigures his textual performance as a form of drag for which the appropriation rather than the transgression of difference becomes a central tenet. Addressing his audience in ethnic drag complicates Franklin’s abolitionist agenda: the manifest function of his text may be construed as a disapproval of slavery advocacy, as an urgent call for the abolition of the slave trade, and a plea for the emancipation of the enslaved, even as an appeal for their access to participation in the newly founded United States; however, Franklin’s masquerading achieves a number of discursive effects detrimental to the abolitionist agenda of the text. By assigning pro-slavery arguments to a ghastly Algerian enslaver, Franklin seems to code his own anti-slavery voice with decency. The text displaces the responsibility for enslavement from whites on to North Africans, positioning whites as victims of slavery. Along the way, black people seem to be written out of sight, out of the equation of the North American late eighteenth-century discursive arena. These observations have prompted my considerations, to which there are three parts. Part one focuses on the figure of Benjamin Franklin, as well as on the text proper; here I ask: what is the context of its publication, who speaks in the text, what logic does it unfold? Part two discusses the generic framing and satirical mode of the text and points to its intertextual relations in a wider literary and historical context. This part raises the following questions: how does Franklin’s choice of genre frame his agenda in particular ways and what affective responses does the text potentially provoke? Part three addresses the implications Franklin’s intervention may have for an understanding of the relationship between his white advocacy of abolition vis-à-vis black articulations of resistance against enslavement. Here I am interested in asking: what does it mean for a white writer and famous public persona such as Franklin to be speaking, in a tongue-in-cheek way, in defense of slavery? I conclude with reviewing the cultural work Franklin’s ethnic drag performs with respect to the distribution of racialized speaking positions and the racial coding of slavery in the late eighteenth-century transatlantic sphere. I Franklin can be considered one of the protagonists of the Early American Republic, an actor of the Enlightenment. He was less of a politician than a scientist and publicist, and the prototypical American self-made mances of ethnicity – particularly various kinds of impersonations of Jewishness and American Native Americanness – and dominant constructions of ethnicity in a German setting from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century.

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man. His autobiography – an early rags-to-riches narrative that remained unpublished until after his death – became the blueprint for this figuration: an American self, driven by the quest for personal freedom and success. At the same time, he represents the flipside of Enlightenment, undermining such ideals as liberty for all people, and equality among all. Franklin lived at the time of the early American Republic when enslavement had become a constitutive – if vehemently debated – factor for the economic growth of the country, at a moment when racial differentiation and classification had increasingly legitimized the equation of enslavement with blackness. As an individual, Franklin benefited greatly from enslavement. In his earlier years as a publisher in Philadelphia he had often printed advertisements for the sale of slaves in his newspaper. Until 1751, he had kept an enslaved couple himself, until he sold them, not out of benevolence but because they placed an economic burden on his household. Franklin would continue to keep slaves but gradually his actions toward slavery changed. He became the first president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which had been formed as the first of its kind in the United States in 1775.3 Franklin’s involvement with the Society, however, does not necessarily substantiate an argument for assuming that he became an ardent abolitionist toward the end of his life. It may well be that he got involved in abolitionist campaigning because he was asked to give his name for the cause of abolition and serve as the Society’s famous spearhead – he eventually petitioned Congress for abolition on their behalf on February 3, 1790, some six weeks before he published “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade.” In his constituency, abolition was considered Moral Capital (Brown, 2006), and Franklin may well have used the abolitionist project to support an image of himself as exemplary figure – the image he sought to project in his autobiographical writing. He may have striven, toward the end of his life, to consolidate an image by which he wanted to be remembered, knowing that his involvement in the cause would be seen as indicative of his own humanity.4 Whether Franklin’s personal motivations were more hypocritical than sincere should not be the main point here, however; what seems more 3 The “Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage” was formed in Philadelphia in 1775, primarily by Quakers who had strong religious objections to slavery. Thomas Paine was one of its founders. The society ceased to operate during the Revolution but was reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president. See Newman (2002: 16–17). 4 Franklin may have been under the impression of the emerging anti-colonial and anti-slavery sentiments in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which anticipated the Haitian revolution that started in 1791 – not least because of his close ties to France, where he had served as ambassador from 1776 through to 1785. For a historiographical discussion of the Haitian Revolution, see Geggus (2001).

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pertinent is a reading of the ambivalences at work in Franklin as an icon of what I call white North American abolitionist self-satisfaction. Recapitulating Franklin as a symbolic figure serves to contextualize an understanding of his satirical text, and I argue that the equivocal dimensions we can construe from the iconicity of Franklin are also at play in “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim,” his final editorial and last public intervention. Just as it makes sense to read his persona as embodying the complexities of an eighteenthcentury North American hegemonic subjectivity, so does the text lend itself to more than one interpretation. A few weeks before Franklin died, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim” was printed in the March 25, 1790 issue of the Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Evening Post, on page three of a four-page paper of quarto size, under the headline “To the Editor of the Federal Gazette.”5 The text was published in telling company, in close proximity to a number of advertisements for the sale of Jamaican rum, sugar, coffee, and other plantation products. These ads predictably indicate the commonplace involvement of Franklin’s Philadelphia in a transatlantic colonial trade context in which not only the products that were made by the hands of the enslaved circulated but in which the people that made the products were shipped and handled as well. This was accompanied by the circulation of arguments for and against the slave trade: in a matter of weeks, newspapers in New York, Boston, and elsewhere also republished Franklin’s satire, which makes it safe to assume it had a wide readership. Franklin published his text as a letter to the editor, writing under the name “Historicus.” For his readers, this name must have disguised Franklin’s position only thinly (Montgomery, 1994: 615). The piece served as an immediate reaction to a pro-slavery congressional speech given by James Jackson, a Georgia congressman in the First Federal Congress from 1789 through to 1791. Jackson had attacked the petition signed by Franklin, and this provides the fodder for Franklin’s parodic rejoinder. Franklin parodies Jackson’s arguments in favor of the slave trade in North America by creating a distance to and inverting Jackson’s pro-slavery position through a number of distinct moves, which I address in the following. Move number one: in narratological terms, Franklin introduces a number of mediating steps of focalization that highlight and overcome the distance between Franklin’s own speaking position and Jackson’s. Franklin, the author, masquerades as “Historicus” the narrator-protagonist, an ominous figure – perhaps a supposed scholarly authority – who responds to Jackson’s pro-slavery speech by recapitulating the account of an American consul in Algiers, who in return reports on a pro-slavery speech by the Algerian 5

For background on the newspaper, see Brigham (1947: 905).

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official Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. The following opening passage illustrates how the text shifts from one level of focalization to the next: To the Editor of the Federal Gazette. Sir, Reading last night in your excellent paper the speech of Mr. Jackson in Congress against meddling with the affair of slavery, or attempting to mend the condition of the slaves, it put me in mind of a similar one made about one hundred years since by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers, which may be seen in Martin’s account of his consulship, anno 1687. […] The African’s speech, as translated, is as follows: […].6

The introductory paragraph invites us as readers to follow the steps that Historicus takes to arrive at reading or hearing the account of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim’s speech in defense of slavery, by which point we listen to the voice of the Algerian. He calls for the support of his pro-slavery stance by asking: If we cease our cruises against the christians, how shall we be furnished with the commodities their countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? Who are to perform the common labours of our city, and in our families? Must we not then be our own slaves? And is there not more compassion and more favor due to us as Mussulmen, than to these christian dogs? We have now above 50,000 slaves in and near Algiers. This number, if not kept up by fresh supplies, will soon diminish, and be gradually annihilated.

In a reversal of positions, it is the Christians – read: white Europeans – who are placed in the position of the enslaved. This perspective does not conjure up the kind of shocking spectacle many abolitionist accounts of enslavement evoke; it lays out reasonable arguments for the maintenance of a flourishing domestic economy based on the enslavement of others, and in subsequent paragraphs takes a benevolently paternalistic stance toward those subjected to slavery. Franklin thus displaces the rehearsal of pro-slavery arguments from whites onto North Africans, clothing a rhetoric that is reminiscent of Southern US legislators such as Jackson in ethnic drag. Franklin’s move number two: he distances the issue of late eighteenthcentury slavery from his immediate frame of reference; he transposes contemporary debates surrounding slavery onto a different time plane. What Historicus quotes as the American consul’s account of the Algerian prince dates back to the year 1687, exactly one century prior to the year 6 My subsequent references are to the original newspaper version, which I accessed at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. See Franklin (1790: 3).

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in which the United States adopted its Constitution. This is also a year before Philadelphia Quakers signed a petition denouncing slavery in North America. In their 1688 “Germantown Friends’ Protest against Slavery,” they compared slavery at home to the enslavement of Christians in North Africa. Readers of Franklin’s text who knew their history and did their math could possibly read Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim’s speech as a mock intertextual pretext to the Germantown Protest. Considering that slavery had been a contested issue in North America since the seventeenth century, we might speculate why Franklin creates this temporal distance: does it help to examine the contemporary scene of 1790 through the historical distance of a century? Distancing move number three: in spatial terms, Franklin dislocates the narrative from the United States to North Africa. The text introduces Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim as “a member of the Divan of Algiers,” that is, as a member of a council chamber, or court of justice that sees no need to justify piracy and the enslavement of whites by North Africans. The distancing strategies that the text performs establish a remote vantage point from which contemporary readers can look at the abolitionist debate of their own time more clearly, perhaps raising a smile on the part of readers familiar and sympathetic with Franklin’s abolitionist stance. At the same time, these strategies detach and remove the readers of Franklin’s text from the controversial issue of slavery in their own time, letting them refrain from responding to enslavement as a moral challenge on a personal level. As an implicit effect of the text’s abolitionist agenda, this standoffishness seems curious, if not problematic. Distancing move number four: three years after the independent United States had adopted its Constitution, in the wake of severe quarrels about the most adequate form of modern government, Franklin relocates the problem of slavery onto a different political map, namely one of good despotism.7 The exaggeratedly benevolent attitude of the Algerian official toward the enslaved is obviously for comic effect: [H]ere they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light, and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls. […] While serving us, we take care to provide them with every thing; and they are treated with humanity.

7 British philosopher John Stuart Mill would elaborate a critique of “good despotism” in his 1851 “Considerations on Representative Government”: “A good despotism is an altogether false ideal, which practically (except as a means to some temporary purpose) becomes the most senseless and dangerous of chimeras.” Mill (1991: 244).

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Framed as satire, the deliberate reference to good despotism may in reverse become readable as a critical commentary on the United States as an enlightened republic that had been unable to resolve the problem of slavery during its Constitutional Convention. II We are faced with the account of a 100-year-old pro-slavery perspective of an Algerian official, a North African beneficiary of the slave trade. Enslaved Africans do not feature in this picture explicitly: Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim is a free Muslim North African, and the position of slave is assigned to white Europeans, which leaves enslaved Africans altogether outside the framework of the text. In one passage, the account differentiates between good slaveholding Muslim North Africans and bad slaveholding “wild Arabs,” but it keeps silent about the existence of enslaved black Africans. Muslims thus become the subject of slavery, Christian whites its object, and enslaved blacks remain outside of the discourse, this racial ascription of subject and object positioning in slavery resulting from the generic framing of the text: “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim” is a satirical instantiation of Barbary captivity narratives – accounts of white Europeans and white Americans being taken captive by North Africans. The term “Barbary” refers to the countries in the North and Northwest of Africa and evoked associations among white Europeans and Americans with the ancient term “Barbarian,” which resonates with such negative attributes as “uncultured,” “primitive,” “brutish,” “savage,” and “cruel.” From the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, the Barbary Coast signified a haunt of pirates to white Europeans and Americans, and their enslavement through Barbary pirates posed a huge cultural embarrassment to them. As Ian Haywood reminds us, this embarrassment “was conveniently erased by the rapid emergence of transatlantic chattel slavery as synonymous with slavery itself ” (2006: 13).8 Accordingly, the opposition of civilized versus barbaric was gradually incorporated into the emerging logic of a black-white binary: “These lasting impressions not only abetted the colonization of Africa, but aided in constructing the boundaries of ‘barbarity’ and ‘civility’ as they came to define ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ in the United States” (Baepler, 1999: xii). Accounts of North African slavery have garnered increasing scholarly interest in recent years.9 Paul Baepler posits that the study of Barbary captivity narratives should be juxtaposed with the study of African American 8 9

See also Colley (2002: 56–65). Allison (1995); Davis (2003).

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slave narratives and so-called Indian captivity narratives. Pursuing this agenda might be seen as an invitation to white scholars to discard white accountability for the history of enslaving Africans and African Americans by also claiming a status of victimhood for whites – a noteworthy reversal of the white desire for amnesia that Haywood addresses. “[T]he study of these three genres should be intertwined,” Baepler argues, because “[a]bolitionists and slavery apologists openly referred to captives in Barbary both to [justify and protest] slaveholding practices [at home]” (2006: xii). In other words, these narratives made it possible for white audiences to sympathize with the enslaved, to relate to what it might mean to experience enslavement, to use the affects these fantasies provoked for an argument either for or against practices of enslavement. Franklin’s satire can indeed be connected to a vast literary and cultural context of fictional and non-fictional Barbary captivity narratives in the English-speaking transatlantic sphere. Quakers raised the issue of Barbary captivity repeatedly from the seventeenth century onwards.10 The 1688 Germantown Protest mentioned above is one instance that clearly imprecates the American enslavement of Africans by referring to the North African enslavement of whites; another example is Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph (1700). Far from explicitly tapping its abolitionist potential, a novel as popular as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) nonetheless implicitly juxtaposes Christian and Muslim slavery. In an episode early in the novel, Crusoe experiences enslavement when he finds himself held captive in a Moroccan port.11 Royall Tyler’s The Algerian Prince (1797) is a popular literary instance from the late eighteenth century that exposes the cruelties and dehumanizing effects of slavery in the United States by comparing the suffering of blacks through white American slave traders with that of white Americans in the hands of Barbary pirates. Published seven years after Franklin’s satire, Tyler’s is one among many literary responses to the so-called Algerian crisis.12 Susanna Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for Freedom (1794) is a famous dramatic one.13 There are early instances of Barbary captivity narratives in the seventeenth century but as a recognizable genre they gain momentum in the United States only in the late 10 Vitkus (2001: 30). 11 For a discussion of this episode, see Carey (2009: 113). 12 Between 1784 and 1815, more than a dozen American ships were captured by vessels from Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco, with over 400 American sailors imprisoned, and the “kidnapping into slavery of white Americans off the north coast of Africa thus constituted the nation’s first international crisis in the fullest sense of the term: not only were Americans in trouble abroad, but as a result, the US government was losing face at home.” Rust (2006: 227). 13 See ibid.

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eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Franklin’s satire, then, constitutes one thread in a vast fabric of Barbary captivity narratives. Inscribing his abolitionist intervention in the genre of the Barbary captivity narrative was a strategic move on Franklin’s part for another reason: a rumor circulated that Franklin himself, who had set sail from Paris in July 1785, had been seized by Algerian corsairs (Baepler, 1999: 8). The rumor of his abduction eventually proved unfounded, but it provided an effective backdrop for his text to surprise his readers and attract their attention. Not all Barbary captivity narratives pursued an explicitly abolitionist agenda; many were simply read as sensational entertainment. As such, they could satisfy their readers’ voyeurism and curiosity for unknown places and times, feeding into Orientalizing fantasies. As responses to the Algerian crisis, they could also provoke fear or shame of national powerlessness. For the broad range of eighteenth-century abolitionist writing, eliciting various affective responses in audiences was crucial. Most abolitionist writing directs affective attention to the plight of the enslaved – demanding fellow feeling, empathy, and pity for their suffering in a sentimental mode.14 Franklin’s abolitionist intervention differs decisively from the larger body of this kind of abolitionist work, due to the production of affects mapped in his piece. Indeed, unlike most abolitionist writing, which draws on compassion for the enslaved, Franklin’s satire largely directs attention to the enslavers. By explicitly referring to Congressman Jackson and blending him with the figure of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, Franklin mocks these proponents of slavery; in his white readership, Franklin may have also mobilized contempt for and fear of the North African enslaver, to be projected onto his Southern antagonist Jackson – affects fundamentally different from those of sympathy with the enslaved in the majority of abolitionist works. III What are the repercussions of Franklin’s piece for an understanding of discursive agency and the distribution of racialized speaking positions in the late eighteenth-century transatlantic sphere? A reading of Franklin’s abolitionist agenda becomes instructive particularly with respect to the exclusion of the voices of enslaved or freed blacks like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones from debates surrounding slavery in the American Republic. It is noteworthy in that regard that the text takes up the congressional debate over slavery largely as a question of trade, amplifying – through the mode of satire – slavery’s advocates’ focus on commercial and fiscal interests. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim posits: 14 See, for instance, Wood (2002); Carey (2005).

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If then we cease taking and plundering the Infidel ships, and making slaves of the seamen and passengers, our lands will become of no value for want of cultivation; the rents of houses in the city will sink one half[;] and the revenues of government arising from its share of prizes must be totally destroyed. […] Let us then hear no more of this detestable proposition, the manumission of christian slaves, the adoption of which would, by depreciating our land and houses, and thereby depriving so many good citizens of their properties, create universal discontent, and provoke insurrections, to the endangering of government and producing general confusion.

An emphasis on economic gains and losses produces ambivalent effects: it directs attention to the fact that slavery helps the enslavers to pursue their material interests. The protection of their proprietary rights becomes an index for social peace, diverting attention away from the moral challenges that the dehumanization, the “thingification” of the enslaved poses to such supposedly inalienable rights as those affirmed in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” At the same time, framing slavery as a question of property and profitability could precisely tap the critical potential of Franklin’s riposte to Jackson; he may well argue slavery to be a problematic institution by implying that an economic discourse leaves no room for moral considerations of the humanity of the enslaved. In Congress in 1790, the struggle for or against the slave trade and slavery was debated as a question of mercantile-capitalist profitability and good political judgment, precisely as Franklin’s pro-slavery performance in ethnic drag restages it. It was a decision to be made in a parliamentary democracy for or against the slave trade and slavery as a “useful” or “useless” institution for the state and its citizens. As such, it was confined to the realm of a master discourse about the most adequate economic and political forms and norms of a modern state, and it was a conflict acted out merely between the two parties for and against slavery. The issue of slavery was a matter of negotiation among white citizens in which blacks did not have a say. In this setting, black humanity did not figure as an object of debate. The discursive scenario of Congress precluded the possibility for the enslaved to articulate their own perspectives, refusing to acknowledge that their humanity could not be a matter of negotiation. Erasing the voices of black protagonists of abolition has also been characteristic of the ways in which abolition has been interpreted and remembered as history over the years, turning it into a supposedly white project of inquiry: “The history and cultural politics of antislavery movements are […] challenging, as indicated by the extent to which terms like ‘abolitionist’ can refer to white reform efforts, the center from which

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to locate black abolitionist contributions to the cause” (Ernest, 2009: 24). Marcus Wood’s The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010) provides a critical study of the ways in which media representations of abolition over the last two centuries as well as recent commemorative efforts (the British bicentennial celebrations of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007, in particular) feed into and are expressive of white sentimentality and moral self-aggrandizement. Framing abolition as a white project that granted the enslaved emancipation both renders blacks passive yet grateful recipients of freedom and devalues various forms of black resistance to enslavement. One might argue that Franklin’s text anticipated this silencing and marginalization of black voices, writing black agency out of the discourse of abolition. Structurally – in the sense of the structures of address inscribed in the text – Franklin does not provide an explicit position for blacks to articulate, on their own terms, a desire for freedom. But this reading would not sufficiently take into account Franklin’s strategy of speaking through the text in ethnic drag. The textual voice, dressed in the clothes of a free Muslim North African of the late seventeenth century, reminds his readers that in contrast to a time and place supposedly marked by “an awareness that slavery could be racially promiscuous” (Colley, 2002: 64), the United States had already moved toward disambiguation, ultimately establishing a system of enslavement coded in racially polar opposites. Franklin’s rejoinder to Jackson thus discloses in subtle ways his consideration of the dehumanization of enslaved blacks. What becomes audible when listening to the voice of the Algerian is the presence of “flesh” – to recall Hortense Spillers – in absence. Works Cited Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Baepler, Paul (ed.). White Slaves, African Masters. An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Brigham, Clarence S. (ed.). History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820. 2 vols. Worcester, Mass: American Antiquarian Society, 1947. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carey, Daniel. “Reading Contrapuntally: Robinson Crusoe, Slavery and Postcolonial Theory.” In Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (eds). The Postcolonial

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Enlightenment: Eighteenth-century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Oxford University Press, 2009: 105–36. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. [1950]. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review, 1972. Colley, Linda. Captives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Davis, David Brion. “Re-examining the Problem of Slavery in Western Culture.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 118.2 (2009): 247–66. Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Franklin, Benjamin. “To the Editor of the Federal Gazette [Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade].” Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Evening Post. March 25, 1790: 3. Franklin, John Hope, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 9th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Geggus, David P. (ed.). The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Jehlen, Myra, and Michael Warner (eds). The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800. New York: Routledge, 1997. Lovejoy, Paul. “‘Freedom Narratives’ of Transatlantic Slavery.” Slavery and Abolition 32.1 (March 2011): 91–107. Mill, John Stuart. “Considerations on Representative Government.” On Liberty, and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, 1991: 205–470. Montgomery, Benilde. “White Captives, African Slaves: A Drama of Abolition.” Eighteenth Century Studies 27.4 (1994): 615–30. Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Rust, Marion. “‘Daughters of America,’ Slaves in Algiers: Activism and Abnegation off Rowson’s Barbary Coast.” In Mary Clare Carruth (ed.). Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2006: 227–39. Sieg, Katrin. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar

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Book.” [1987]. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago University Press, 2003: 203–29. Vitkus, Daniel J. (ed.). Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Oxford University Press, 2002.

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7 “Weh eye nuh see heart nuh leap”: Claude McKay’s Literary Drag Performance in Banana Bottom Jarrett H. Brown (College of the Holy Cross)

Caribbean and Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay locates his third novel, Banana Bottom (1933), in his native home, Jamaica. Set between the country town of Jubilee and the rural village of the same name, Banana Bottom examines turn of the century Jamaican cultural and social value systems through its female protagonist Bita Plant and can be read as an autobiographical novel in which the protagonist Bita Plant is really McKay in drag. Where in life McKay could not return in actuality, he takes a literary journey through the body of his protagonist to repair his relationship with his father and to resolve his guilt over responsibility in his mother’s death. The biographical evidence of McKay’s life mirrors his characterization of Bita Plant as a maroon figure returning to “the point of entanglement” (Glissant, 1989: 26). In this reading Bita can, for a number of reasons, be considered to be McKay’s maroon self returning to the land of his birth: one, because of McKay’s habit of literary self-portrait, primarily through impersonation/ ventriloquism; second, because, as critics have shown, McKay tends to map his double consciousness onto his male protagonists in his earlier texts; third, because McKay mirrors himself through maroon personas – vagabond troubadour and nancy persona, both figures of ambiguity – postures that we see Bita Plant inhabiting. This, however, is the first time that McKay maps his psychological split onto a female protagonist. As both a social and symbolic act, cross-dressing (transvestism) allows an individual to express (an)other side of his or her persona and to expose the fiction, frailty, and unreliability of gender. Performing drag then becomes a disruption, to echo Judith Butler (1990), and highlights the “risk” of/ in heterosexuality being “de-instituted at every interval” (Butler, 1990: 24). Butler’s notion of drag as a disruptive performance emphasizes the complexity inherent in how drag deconstructs and constructs – in terms of same time, same sex desire, transgressive sexualities, gender identity, gender inversion, and gender bending. Such critics as Esther Newton (1979),

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Magnus Hirschfeld (1991), Marjorie Garber (1992), Judith “Jack” Halberstam (1998; 2005), Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough (1993; 2005), Judith Butler (1990), David Valentine (2007), and James Wilson (2010) have explored the complexity and sophistication of drag as an instrument of a queer identity that helps us to appreciate and interpret “the lived realities and day-to-day activities of diverse individuals today, whatever the constructed, the tactical, and performative” (Hall, 2003: 5) while shedding light on “some of the ways in which many late-modern individuals experience the fractured and contingent nature of human existence in the twenty-first century” (ibid.). I am interested in this contingency and also in how, to use Esther Newton’s words, drag highlights “the discontinuities between gender and sex or appearance and reality but refuses to allow this discontinuity to represent dysfunction. In a drag performance, rather, incongruence becomes the site of gender creativity” (quoted in Halberstam, 2005: 236). I argue that this kind of creativity allows McKay’s literary drag performance to achieve more than just a crossing of boundaries but also a reconfiguration of “his own identity […] as well as a liberation of himself from other people’s interpretation of who he essentially is” (Gabb, 1998: 301). By “playing” with his own self-acceptance and sexuality, McKay uses this creative space to “raise important questions that go beyond the boundaries of gender [and] sexuality” while simultaneously enabling his female character Bita Plant to “inhabit multiple identities that exist with-out location” (ibid.). McKay’s drag performance thus achieves more than just a crossing of gender boundaries because he reconstitutes the illocutionary hierarchies inherent in heterosexual and gender relations in the novel: Bita Plant positions herself as masculine in her return to Banana Bottom and in her maroon flights from the heteronormative and patriarchal mission house of the Craigs. Bita as McKay in drag provides adequate room to discuss marronage as a space for exploring heterogeneous masculinity. Additionally, McKay’s drag performance is the basis for considering the intersection of marronage and creolization as products of a particular historical experience. Because Bita appears as McKay in drag, masculinity spans both the idea that she is a man in metaphor and the idea that Bita does not inhabit the traditional roles assigned to women. She exerts the authority normatively assigned to males in patriarchy, like Nanny of the Maroons. This view of masculinity appears to demonstrate that femininity cannot be authoritative; however, I associate maroon femininity with a different set of profiles, more to do with covert modes of power than the open display of authority. By associating femininity with covert means of power, I complicate masculine authority by showing the subterfuge of marronage as its technology. What this investment in covertness and subterfuge means is that these masculine performances are imbued with the maroon feminine

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and may be displayed by either sex. Consequently, the technologies, manner, and style of the historical maroons define maroon subjectivity. To be Maroon is to be Creolized(?) Marronage is associated with fugitive slaves who fled the plantations in North and South America and the Caribbean (Campbell, 1990: 1). The etymology of the word is uncertain but the general claim is that it derives from the Spanish “cimarron,” which originally described “domestic cattle that had escaped to a wild existence” (ibid.). However, the term has come to describe the fugitive existence of runaway slaves, almost exclusively. Thus, marronage is the “process of flight by slaves from servitude to establish their own collective agencies in inhospitable areas” (ibid.). This removal from the mainstream into a less “civilized” life is another kind of isolation that is about physical and psychological withdrawal from the plantation by the slave to find a space of resistance, endurance, or survival. Withdrawal, therefore, does not mean weakness or helplessness and does not project a subjectivity of resignation. Indeed, marronage demonstrates the cunning of the slave and his/her intent to carry out a range of political insurrections both internally and externally so as to diminish and eradicate the inhumanity slavery inflicted upon Africans. This new non-slave self is the critical, acting subject who liberates him/herself and others. There are two kinds of Maroon. There are those who lived as isolates (described as runaways in the United States) and those who lived in the mountains and who created their own communities (notably in Jamaica, McKay’s birthplace) – in some instances, retaining complex and ambivalent relations with both the planters and slaves on the plantation. In sum, we can think of marronage as flight or migration from hostile spaces to personal and communal freedoms, the negotiating of “in-between” and hostile spaces, and the development of a consciousness that is based on embracing and celebrating one’s culture (Brathwaite, 1970). My discussion of the trope of marronage as an organizing frame for McKay’s texts is intricately tied to ways in which creolization, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay’s sensibility and representation of black male subjectivity. “Creolization” is a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity. All creolization models tend towards a trajectory in which the various cultures, ethnicities, and races as well as racial mixtures of Caribbean societies are seen as dovetailing into a single, albeit heterogeneous, identity. However, more recent theorizations of Caribbean hybridity, such as Antonio Benítez Rojo’s concept of “Chaotic” supersyncretism in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), Édouard Glissant’s application of creolization as a descriptor of cultures other than the Caribbean in Poetics of

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Relation (1990), and Shalini Puri’s The Caribbean Postcolonial (2004), begin to point to a more multifarious concept in which the movement is not towards synthesis but towards multiple culturalities and subjectivities. This chapter aligns with these later conceptualizations and I argue that McKay’s representation of black men performs multiple and diverse subjectivities. More importantly, I argue that McKay’s representation reflects, as well as marronage, the efficacies present in a creolized experience that allow for multiplicity without necessary synthesis. Marronage is an act and process of hybridity, both psychological and cultural, as it entails manipulating, re/ inventing, and crossing over various cultural and political spaces in order to create “new forms of being” that are able to survive and transcend hostile environments. I use the term “creolization” rather than hybridity, however, to signal McKay’s own cultural origins and the ways in which those origins direct his representations of hybridizing marronage, regardless of whether he is addressing Caribbean or wider African diaspora subjectivities. These two concepts come together in my chapter to articulate the grounds for McKay’s treatment of Bita’s subjectivity as a maroon while demonstrating the ways in which McKay appears as Bita in drag. First, I will examine Bita’s display of maroon sensibility; then I will address how the maroon sensibility she adapts and exercises aligns with and complements the idea of McKay returning in literary drag. Understanding Bita’s Maroon Self The novel opens with the story of Bita’s purported rape by the village fiddler, Crazy Bow. In the aftermath of this incident, the white English missionaries Priscilla and Malcolm Craig become Bita’s guardians and they send her off to England to attend finishing school. Bita’s return to Banana Bottom seven years later is the event Mrs. Craig in particular would like to use to show the peasant class of Banana Bottom the ability of education both to redeem the past and to eradicate the instincts of the folk. “Priscilla Craig had conceived the idea of redeeming her [Bita] from her past by a long period of education without any contact with Banana Bottom, and at the finish she would be English trained and appearing in everything but the color of her skin” (McKay, 1961: 31). The Craigs’ plan includes shaping Bita in their own image and preparing her to continue their “work” as missionaries and warders of a colonial system designed and aided by religion to dull and nullify the wayward, recalcitrant appetites and resistant mindsets of the folk. Thus, this project is to be supported by another “native,” Herald Newton Day – Malcolm Craig’s heir apparent and, by fiat of the Craigs, Bita’s betrothed. However, in response to the Craigs’ insistence that she marry this “refined” black minister and

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devote her life to missionary work, Bita takes flight from Jubilee, the site of the mission, to Banana Bottom, the cradle, or to use Brathwaite’s term, the “capsule culture,” of unrefined folk life.1 Bita’s flight from the mission takes several forms. First, she rejects the refined black minister for her father’s drayman Jubban. Second, she rejects the life of an educated, “Christian,” assistant “white lady” for the heteroglot, syncretic life of an educated peasant. The acceptance of this life situated in the ways of the folk marks how comfortably creolized she lives between carnival and a deeply religious sensibility that expresses itself between church and secular practices, intellectuality and sensuous passion, sensual abandon and thoughtful restraint. Bita’s flight is not precipitate but carefully graded and thought out as a response to the arousal of her deep emotional and cultural impulses. Her flight is a series of thoughts, actions, and responses that show her maroon sensibility and consciousness. These steps that Bita takes are not so much a mapping of maturational development as they are semiotics that reveal, or bring to the surface, a self that had been somewhat hidden in marronage. Bita’s resistant, creole Jamaican self, submerged under the nice manners and ethic of obedience to her foster parents, begins to emerge and to “take flight” from the site of its burial. Bita’s emancipatory journey back to Banana Bottom, the free space of herself, is an exact unraveling of previous cartographies, since she had initially left Banana Bottom for the mission in Jubilee and then for England. By extension, she is also asserting her self by emerging from the gradated accretions of Englishness. The Bita who returns is not fully the Bita who left, but a free person whose subjectivity emerges at the site of political negotiation between her folk tendencies and the benefits of what she has learnt through her English education; both of these join the arsenal of maroon technologies she has acquired. Bita’s actions reflect the element of choice, the refusal to identify as victim or protégée, an action that is crucial to the nature and behavior of a maroon. Bita’s time in England has exposed her to broader politics that include the Women’s Suffrage movement and other socio-political currents which exert a profound influence on her life. It is ironic that Mrs. Craig should not support Bita’s feminism or that of any other black peasant woman on the island, since she is aware of such movements, is “something of a feminist,” has a crusading suffragette as a relative, subscribes to the literature of the movement to show her sympathy (27), and believes “that women [are] quite capable of political action and filling positions that [are] concentrated in the hands of men” (28). Her racism blinds her to the possibility of Bita’s political action and she in turn underestimates the extent and impact of Bita’s education and political 1

See Brathwaite (1977: 5–56).

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awareness. Ultimately, Bita returns as a feminist educated in the inquietude of the beginning of the twentieth century – for “Queen Victoria had died with the nineteenth century” (45) writes McKay. Bita sits at the center of this inquietude and returns to Jamaica “full of ideas […] Socialist, Feminist, and Freethought” (45). McKay’s embrace of Fabian socialism, in particular with its practice of guerilla tactics as its modus operandi, complicates his drag persona, especially as maroon warfare relies heavily on these same tactics: stealth, patience, and surprise to defeat one’s enemies. Bita’s return to the island and the site of the mission is therefore a rebellious one; she not only returns armed with feminist/maroon tactics but also as a “Caliban” with the gift of Prospero’s language. And as “Caliban” she has the power to break free from “Prospero’s” hold by her ability to curse him not merely in Shakespeare’s terms but in Lamming’s; she has the power to reshape this language into a technology of self-invention and self-liberation (Lamming, 1992: 118). When she considers her future on the night she is religiously moved by the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the public theatre that is the Jubilee market, we see her initiating the first in the series of insurrections that eventually plot her flight to Banana Bottom. The market acts as catalyst for reigniting Bita’s repressed self and as a crucial site where she begins to enact her flight from the subjectivity the Craigs have imposed on her. Meeting with her childhood friend Belle Black, and walking home with Hopping Dick after experiencing “the swell and press” of the crowd and the “falling and mounting in strong waves” (40) both cause her to feel the “impulse to touch and fondle.” Bita is powerfully moved by the scene; she responds publicly to the color, the smell, and the “full hum of the broad broken speech mounting and falling in strong waves under the sheer downright sun” (40). This sensual site of memory causes her submerged self to emerge; the encounter revives Bita’s cultural roots and informs the insurrection that takes place in her being. The sensation she feels and which ties her to this “familiar kindred humanity” (40) is the stirrings of the self in marronage, one that is being baptized in the flood of memories that were always lodged in her bones. It is significant that McKay uses this metaphor of baptism simultaneously with images of sensuality because it highlights how the market becomes for Bita a site for her own sexual awakening. Here is the first moment of insurrection from below. McKay uses Bita’s crossing of the unsanctioned borders between the spiritual and the sensual, the contemplative and the sensuous, to announce her rejection, at a visceral level, of the strictly policed psychology that Mrs. Craig not only enunciates but also enacts in her own Victorian ideologies. Bita’s maroon persona is also evident in her creolized occupation of space. The fact that she is an integrated self who lives with the Craigs on the symbolic plantation of the mission house enables her to move in and out of

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multiple spaces with freedom. Specifically, Bita’s creole personality enables her strategically to manage her resistances within, at the edge of and away from the plantation. We take note of Bita’s negotiations in Jubilee at the mission house, where she is never openly disrespectful to Mrs. Craig, and in church singing with the choristers, where she performs religious conformity with spectacular aplomb. But she brings rebellion to the “homespace” (the plantation is her former and paradoxical homeland), to use Benítez Rojo’s words (quoted in Bolland, 2004: 162), especially through her attendance at the tea meetings, her relationships with Yoni Legge and Belle Black (who goes with her to her homecoming in Banana Bottom, much to the disapproval of Mrs. Craig), and her dalliances with Hopping Dick, the womanizer. These “rebellions” are part of a network of signs that guide and shape the manner in which she breaks her confinements. Perhaps the “worst” of them is her friendship with Squire Gensir, the iconoclastic ethnographer from England who stays outside the plantation circle, and who may be seen as the fifth column or traitor who undermines the plantation from within, by not only becoming a maroon himself, but by aiding Bita in her maroon activities. In its ironic state of reverse marronage – meaning, in this sense, isolation – the mission signifies once again upon the economics, geography, and machinery of the slave plantation. In this state, the mission assumes a discriminating and policing value in its presence, both physical and psychological, in the lives and minds of the villagers. But modes of infiltration and foray are practiced undetected within its gates (since in every case the Craigs can read the acts stated above as acquiescence or support for their policies). Further, in the same manner that the ex-slaves seize available land to establish their own communities, Bita seizes from the symbolic plantation technologies of resistance; first, to occupy this geo-political space where she has been brought as a captive against her will, and, second, to map onto it her own authority and independence. In this manner, McKay uses her subjectivity to ironize and satirize the plantation system as a space and an economy that cannot support itself. It is through Bita’s creolization, the expression of her maroon sensibility and cultural self, her crossing of borders and collapsing of boundaries, her attempts to represent different ways of being, and her constant negotiating and seizing of space that her composite character and her wholeness become visible. Bita’s decision to leave the mission and reject the religious order imposed upon her comes as no surprise if one appreciates the extent of her maroon character and performativity in this text: Bita knew that she was going to go [leave the mission]. She could not truthfully say that she was interested in the work of the mission. The

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profession of religion left her indifferent. She was skeptical about it – this religion that had been imposed upon and planted in her young mind. (112)

Bita is a rebel figure, like McKay, who seizes an authoritative persona that aids her threat to “break out one day with something that would destroy irreparably the whole fabric of the plan that had been carefully charted for her” (110). In one of her several moments of insurrection, she destroys the photograph of her English college that hangs over her bed, ripping “it from the frame and [trampling] the pieces under her feet” (112). Her actions demonstrate her coming into masculine authority; that is to say, a concretization of the impulse to declare a “certainty of self ” (Forbes, 2005: 220). It is from this point that she actively challenges Mrs. Craig’s plan for her life. What follows is an ensuing battle for control over Bita’s body and her sexuality. Mrs. Craig is not interested in Bita’s subjectivity as an independent adult individual and neither is she willing to accommodate Bita’s humanity. She wants to close Bita off from the world of the folk, a world where, according to her, “sex was approached too easily” (16). More important, Mrs. Craig is afraid of Bita bearing a bastard under her roof. This would contaminate not only Bita’s body but also hers, because Bita is “like her own daughter” (218) and her experiment would be declared a failure. In fact, Priscilla Craig is deathly afraid that Bita will “shame” her and forever ruin her. What she wants is a surrogate, reproductively capable body to own, in the same way the planter predicates his identity on the re/productive capacity of the slave as the engine of the capitalist plantation economy. Bita complicates her maroon subjectivity by performing the grotesque in opposition to the dominance represented by and circulated through religion, her education, and sexuality. She seeks to deconstruct and question the justification or justice in the “already set terms that designate what is high and low” (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 43). I am arguing that by making her a representation of himself in drag, McKay revokes the borders of class and gender 2 in order to “unsettle ‘given’ social positions and interrogate the rules of inclusion, exclusion and domination which structure[d] the social ensemble” (ibid.). What this means is that, as a maroon, Bita is not a “lady,” 2 McKay also plays with gender norms in the text by showing Bita to be self-consciously feminine. And by doing so at the beginning of chapter 4 he shows the porosity and unreliability of gender. On the day of her homecoming to Banana Bottom, and symbolically on the celebration of Emancipation Day, Bita makes “the most careful preparation for toilet, appearance and poise … [and spent] a lot time over her dresses” (1961: 48). Her “careful preparation” with her dresses and toilet, with her appearance and her poise, is not just a nervous act but a maroon act, specifically a guerilla tactic to conceal her rebellious self under these “princess gowns” and “refined manners.” It is a strategy to use the feminine as a natural part of a subversive aesthetics to confuse the Craigs.

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a “princess,” an “exhibit,” or an “experiment” because her maroon subjectivity resides beyond the realms of a singular discourse, as well as beyond construction by the Other. Because Bita is not a “pure” construction in this sense, she is able, until she decides physically to leave, to live with Mrs. Craig on the “plantation,” and to leave without leaving. Her maroon abilities assume a kind of power that is visible but invisible at the same time. Her maroon abilities are seen in the strategies she uses to manipulate Hopping Dick to aid her escape from the mission. Hopping Dick imagines that Bita’s attentions are proof of her love for him; he, as consummate performer, has no idea that he is being played: “So eloquent was Bita in her desire to go against the will of Mrs. Craig, her ardour so convincing, that Hopping Dick was certain she was in love with him and felt that the real affection had been sprung the night of the house party” (213). This example is intriguing on a number of levels. It identifies Bita’s rebel consciousness: she wants to release herself from Mrs. Craig without enacting a full escape, since at this point it suits her to be at the mission. In inviting Hopping Dick and being seen publicly with him, she is ignoring the “already set terms designating high and low” defined by Stallybrass and White (1986: 43); but, underground, she is charting a new plan, a new map for her life, one that includes neither Mrs. Craig nor Hopping Dick. Thus, she can be seen in a moment of double drag performance, as McKay returned as this masquerading “woman version.”3 The performance is riveting and all the more hilarious to the reader because of Bita’s appearance of calm respectability. That Bita manages to impersonate a form of ladylikeness and simultaneously display shocking impropriety (for a woman of her status) evinces both skill and daring. Given that Hopping Dick is usually the one fooling women, Bita’s action here again shows her seizing masculine authority at the expense of the male. Eventually, though, the series of insurrections Bita initiates are made obvious to Mrs. Craig; that is, Bita demonstrates in her actions that she has the technologies of marronage to wage her own battle in plain sight of and proximity to the symbolic plantation. Thus, when on one of her visits to the market with Rosyanna, she ignores the latter’s request to leave with her and gallivants with Hopping Dick all over town, then allows him to accompany her back to the mission gate, making sure he lingers there for a spell, she is “quite aware that Mrs. Craig was looking at them from the veranda” (216). Eventually, Bita’s timely and strategically orchestrated insurrections culminate in the physical homecoming by which she returns to Banana Bottom and marries her father’s drayman Jubban. She is already pregnant 3 I borrow the phrase from the title of Evelyn O’Callaghan’s book (1993), Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women.

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with the child conceived on top of her father’s coffin as they were returning with his remains for burial. At this point she fully inhabits a maroon rebel consciousness that is echoed in the song she remembers soon after her first insurrection at the mission house: “Just going to do the thing that I want / No matter who don’t like it” (219). The language Bita employs to articulate her rebel consciousness comes not from her education overseas but from the folk art that is consistent with her methodology of resistance, which is also from below. Eventually, her marriage to Jubban, an act that she rather than Jubban seems to initiate, is a marriage to the folk as well. McKay in Drag: A Literary Performance Ultimately, Bita’s reclaiming of self also assumes an authoritativeness that McKay presents as a form of masculine subjectivity. It is at the site of this subjectivity that it is possible to argue that Bita is McKay himself returned in drag, because she becomes McKay’s ideal character and the culmination of his journey home. Bita performs a masculinity that does not inhere in sex but in consciousness, and a maroon consciousness at that. In that regard, the accusation by some critics that McKay is sexist is worth exploring more closely, especially because, as Winston James so convincingly explains, McKay’s “unforced and sympathetic portrayal of women is one of the most consistent themes in [his] works from beginning to end, fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry as well as prose. This motif is under-explored in the critical literature on McKay” (2000: 100). James goes on to state that as a Fabian socialist McKay must have been influenced by a “feminist component in the movement’s ideology […] and McKay also read many of the women writers of Victorian Britain” (112). McKay’s interaction and debates with his brother U.-Theo “probably shaped his perception of the condition of women in Jamaica,” James argues (ibid.). McKay’s feminist background supports his casting himself as a woman in his fiction, within a masculine performativity that critiques the condition of women in Jamaica’s colonial space. By performing as woman, McKay initiates a series of questions against the social and cultural borders that confine and restrict denizens of the colony as extensions, albeit subordinate, of the [English] nation state. The masculinity that Bita inhabits is embedded in a combination of social and cultural norms which, according to Judith Halberstam, “conjure[s] up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege” (1998 : 2). These social norms identify the male body, and its attendant gendered constructions, as sources of agency or power. The Caribbean space, however, confounds these constructions because male and female alike perform the masculine. The Creole cultural manifestations of the Caribbean reiterate the ambiguity and

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complexity of gender in both the psychology and presence of the Caribbean.4 Masculinity must be seen as a product of this Creole experience and therefore as a “continual dynamic process” (Bederman, 1995: 7). Bita as McKay-in-drag claims certain kinds of authority to question the legitimacy and the strength of any principle that polices sex, sexuality, gender, or identity. In essence, Bita’s masculinity is a cultural process wherein her habitation of and signification on masculinity as an iconic structure or force is an ironic and satirical seizure of authority and power. Her masculinity is thus a positionality in which the term “masculine” refers not to biological sex but only to that aspect of self-definition invested with the impulse to name identificatory practices,5 ultimately “queering” masculinity in the process. Bita’s masculinity performs as maroon technology and aids McKay’s performance in drag to cast doubt on the maleness of masculinity. Masculinity performed in this manner gives McKay the opportunity to inhabit the gender gap through Bita’s masculinity. In addition, it also gives McKay the opportunity to become Bita and inhabit that queer part of him that that appears in a more fully integrated way in Ray, the character in his earlier novel Banjo. I am also claiming that McKay performs as Bita in order to return to his home, and, while one must recognize the dangers of such an autobiographical conclusion, there are certain parallels in the novel and in his life that make this an intriguing possibility. McKay shows, in his writings and correspondence, a sustained desire – indeed a yearning – to return to Jamaica. Both autobiographies – My Green Hills of Jamaica, which recounts his boyhood days in Jamaica, and A Long Way from Home – are literary rehearsals of McKay’s yearning for home. In his poems he also represented his nostalgia and longing, most powerfully in “I Shall Return”: I shall return again; I shall return To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes At golden noon the forest fires burn, Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies. I shall return to loiter by the streams That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses, And realize once more my thousand dreams Of waters rushing down the mountain passes. (McKay, 1953: 167)

4 5

See e.g. Brathwaite (1975) and Beckles (2004; 1995). I am drawing on this definition from Forbes (2005: 224).

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However, Banana Bottom is the only one of McKay’s works in which there is an actual return to Jamaica. Banana Bottom is also the only novel in which there is a relationship with or a return to parent figures. As Winston James notes, McKay always contrasts his parents, often describing his father with less affection, at times portraying him as austere, authoritarian, and quick to mete out corporal punishment to his children. As a result, McKay grew up alienated from his father and harbored some resentment towards him. Bita becomes the vehicle through which McKay repairs his relationship with his own father; that is, she bridges the gap, both physical and emotional, between them. This reconciliation is negotiated as a form of suturing of a tripartite split, or tearing. Evidence of this tripartite split is seen in Bita’s relationship with Priscilla Craig, who performs a role aligned with the authoritarianism (as opposed to authority) associated with male hegemony, which is by extension also colonial/imperial hegemony; her relationship with Squire Gensir, her mentor, who assists in her gradated flight from Priscilla and the colonial mission; and her relationship with her father, Jordan Plant – one that is wholesome, healthy, and mutually respectful. Since Jordan is head of the household to which Bita flees in Banana Bottom, we may align him with the arrival at a full reconciliation with (and emergence to light of) the marooned self that Banana Bottom symbolizes. The scarcity of scenes between Jordan and Bita parallels the notion that, for McKay, this healthy father/daughter– son relationship is more a dream imagined than a fact realized. But his ability to write this relationship itself becomes a form of healing. McKay’s appearance in drag in this novel equally implicates the role of his mother in his life. The novel makes few references to Bita’s mother, but those that are made recall McKay’s relationship with his mother and the circumstances surrounding her death. McKay lost his mother at age nineteen: she had become ill soon after his birth and “suffered for the remainder of her life from heart disease” (Wayne Cooper, 1987: 10). In fact, Cooper observes that in trying to recall his mother in the chapter entitled “The Death of My Mother,” in My Greens Hills of Jamaica, McKay conceded that he could not “distinguish between the actual remembrance of an accident at age two” and the later telling of it. Then, abruptly, he states, “one thing I do remember sharply is that my mother was ill right after I was born.” In Banana Bottom, Bita’s mother dies in childbirth, when Bita, a “seven-month baby,” is born. “The village folk said that she had killed her mother. That was the way the black peasants referred to a child that survived when the mother had died in giving birth to it.” (7). The biographical similarity is borne out by the enduring pain of loss and the unresolved guilt that McKay harbored in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Winston James observes that:

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Carl Cowl, McKay’s friend and last literary agent said that McKay also felt guilty because not only did his mother die early but McKay was not at her bedside when she died. Young Claude had left his mother for a short time to go to the field and she died before he returned. It was always self-recriminating anguish that McKay remembered the circumstances of his mother’s death. (James, 2000: 19)

This event was memorialized in McKay’s haunting poem “My Mother.” He even wrote several poems in her memory and “when he went to America his first works were published under the nom de plume of Eli Edwards, a masculinization of his mother’s maiden name, Elizabeth Edwards” (James, 2000: 19). McKay’s return in drag highlights his effort to revisit the site of his initial trauma and confront the unresolved pain that settled in his soul as a kind of longing, an emptiness even. I thus want to suggest that the absence of any reference to Bita’s mother except in the opening pages of the novel is the acknowledgement of the significant void that his mother left in his life. I would further suggest that by omitting his mother (Bita’s mother) from the narrative, except for this moment of “silence” when he tells the circumstances of her death, McKay tries to lay his mother to rest and to resolve his own pain. McKay’s spectacular entrance through Bita’s body is an attempt to negotiate and reassign the love of his mother. The construction around Bita of a mother triad – Bita’s mother, Priscilla Craig, and Aunt Nommy as so many mother figures for Bita – fixes upon McKay’s drag character a degree of complexity in the way he imagines his own mothering. It seems as if none of these women – even though Aunt Nommy affects Bita in far more personal ways than Priscilla Craig – can fully be a surrogate for Bita. Aunty Nommy is still a nurturing figure in Banana Bottom when Bita returns there, but Bita is now a grown woman with needs that have developed with time and distance, needs that a mother, let alone a surrogate, cannot fill. The death of McKay’s mother chronologically initiated a series of flights away from “home” that may be seen in his departure to the United States, then to England, Russia, Europe, and Morocco, and finally culminating in his return to the United States, but not to Jamaica. The absence of a surrogate mother after his mother’s death, one mirrored by the same absence in his novel, seems to imply that this void was never filled. In conclusion, then, Bita Plant, though a product of a colonial society, is a modern mosaic of rural and cosmopolitan nuances in a community where ambiguities abound, and where, as Benítez Rojo asserts, to be Caribbean means to exist “a certain kind of way” (1992: 4). Bita returns to her community with an even more textured subjectivity than that with which she left (much like McKay), and she yearns for a mode of expression

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that does not dumb her senses as an intellectual, social, sexual, or cultural being. She is the Caribbean self in marronage who must negotiate these complexities to re-chart new routes for her journey around the influences of colonial and religious autocracy. From the moment of her return to the island, she engages in a tightrope walk of defiance, testing some of the tensions within Jamaican and, by extension, Caribbean culture – but she successfully presents an alternative world view composed of hybrid epistemologies that will allow her comfortably to negotiate the world of, and beyond, Banana Bottom, troubling the lines of vision that oversee the definitions of sexuality, gender subjectivities, power, and individual autonomy. Ultimately, McKay projects onto this female protagonist a number of “seeming contradictions.” These seeming contradictions – “erudition/ignorance, civilization/savagery, fragmentation/wholeness, foreign/native” (Wayne Cooper, 1987: 46) – underscore the very essence of McKay’s project, which is the difficulty of “imposing a single meaning on a set of complex cultural circumstances” (ibid.). This is the complexity that informs the return of McKay as Bita Plant: his return in this guise challenges the criticisms that he failed to give complex portraits to the women in his texts. In addition, McKay’s drag performance in this context and the ultimate risk he thus takes signal a constitutive aspect of his character, life, and writing – one that deliberately resists and queers Western culture and ideology. Works Cited Beckles, Hilary. “Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery.” In Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (eds). Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995: 125–40. —— “Black Masculinity in Caribbean Slavery.” In Rhoda E. Reddock (ed.). Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses. Kingston, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 2004. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, 2005. Bolland, O. Nigel (ed.). The Birth of Caribbean Civilization: A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and Society. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature.”

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Lecture. Center for Multi-Racial Studies, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, February 1970. —— “Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831–32.” In V. Rubin and A. Tuden (eds). Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977: 5–56. —— “Caribbean Man in Time and Space.” Savacou 11/12 (September 1975): 1–11, 106–8. —— Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974. Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. Cross-Dressing, Sex and Gender. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Campbell, Mavis. The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. Cooper, Carolyn. “Erotic Maroonage: Embodying Emancipation in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Paper presented at the ninth annual Gilder Lehman Center International Conference at Yale University, November 1–3, 2007. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005. —— “Yearning for Utopia: Earth, Body, Deviance and Festival-Carnival Failure in Cereus Blooms at Night.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 41.1 (2010): 111–42. Gabb, Jacqui. “Marginal Differences? An Analysis of the Imag(in)ed Bodies of Del LaGrace.” Journal of Gender Studies 7.3 (1998): 297–305. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1989. —— Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. —— In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. James, Cynthia. The Maroon Narrative: Caribbean Literature in English across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002.

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James, Winston. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. London and New York: Verso, 2000. King, Nicole. C .L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1992. McKay, Claude. [1933]. Banana Bottom. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1961. —— [1937]. A Long Way From Home. New York: Arno, 1969. —— Selected Poems of Claude McKay. New York: Bookman Associates, 1953. Newton, Esther. [1972]. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. University of Chicago Press, 1979. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women. London: Macmillan, 1993. Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Reddock, Rhoda E. (ed.). Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004. Rosen, David. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Shepherd, Verene, and Glen L. Richards (eds). Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston, Jamaica and Oxford: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002. Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (eds). Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

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8 The Souls of Black Gay Folk: The Black Arts Movement and Melvin Dixon’s Revision of Du Boisian Double Consciousness in Vanishing Rooms Charles Nero (Bates College)

This chapter explores the influence and impact of the Black Arts Movement on the Black Gay Generation of 1986. The year 1986 refers to the publication of Joseph Beam’s pioneering In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, the first collective expression of African American gay identity. That anthology was followed five years later by a sequel, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, co-edited by Beam and Essex Hemphill. Together the two anthologies defined a generation of black gay writing. Some of the notable writers and culture workers in the two anthologies, in addition to Beam and Hemphill, were Assotto Saint, Reginald Shepherd, Craig G. Harris, Samuel R. Delany, Marlon Riggs, Isaac Julien, and Kobena Mercer. Although the anthologies were published by a small independent gay press, their wide readership and incorporation into the cultural landscape signaled the emergence of a movement of black queer artists in the American (and European) mainstream. The choreographers David Rousseve and Bill T. Jones, the artist Glenn Ligon, the performance group Pomo Afro Homos, and the bestselling E. Lynn Harris, whose first, self-published, novel, Invisible Life, was about urban black men negotiating their queer sexual and racial identities, also arrived on the American cultural landscape in 1991, although they did not appear in either of the two anthologies. Many contributors to the anthologies were casualties of the first decade of the AIDS pandemic. Melvin Dixon, the subject of this chapter, was one of those casualties, passing away in October 1992. His work as a writer reflects how the intersection of two emblematic movements of the 1970s – Black Arts and Gay Liberation – influenced a collective black gay identity. Dixon’s early death – he was only forty-two years old – was a tragic loss for the gay and African American literary worlds. In their introduction to an edition of Dixon’s scholarly essays, critics Dwight McBride and Justin

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Joyce correctly assess that Dixon was “our generation’s black gay literary treasure, cut off too soon” (Joyce and McBride, 2006: ix). In his all too brief life, Dixon earned a doctorate, became a full professor, published two novels, three volumes of poetry, a volume of literary criticism, and translated two volumes from French into English, one of which was the collected poems of Senegalese writer and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor. Born in Stamford, Connecticut on May 29, 1950, Dixon attended Wesleyan University where he received his BA with high honors in 1971. He continued his studies at Brown University, earning an MA in 1973 and a PhD in 1975 in American Civilization. His career included appointments on the English faculties at Williams College (1976–80), Queens College, New York, Harvard University, the Graduate Center of City University of New York, Fordham University, and Columbia University. He received a Fulbright lectureship in Senegal (1985–6). Dixon’s significance to the arts and cultural world did not go unnoticed by the nation. In 1993, Newsweek, the major national weekly magazine, recognized Dixon as one of the “talents whose promise died” because of the HIV/AIDS crisis.1 I examine Dixon’s novel Vanishing Rooms as a legacy of the Black Arts Movement. Published in 1991, the year before his death, Vanishing Rooms is often called Dixon’s “gay novel” because of its subject matter: a recent college graduate, African American dancer Jesse Durand mourns the death of his white lover, killed in a gay-bashing. However, the novel bears the unequivocal stamp of the Black Arts Movement, too. Set in 1975, at the end of the movement in New York City, the novel continually references icons of the Black Arts Movement. One of those icons is the singer Nina Simone. Another is the Nation of Islam, in a subplot that makes the novel’s connection to the Black Arts Movement palpably evident. Addressing these two icons – Nina Simone and the Nation of Islam – reveals what I believe is a distinctly African American male queer literary tradition. The two icons appear in the novel through what I call “the queer doubling convention,” a structure of representing same-gender homoerotic desire as the basis for nation-building. W. E. B. Du Bois originally theorized the queer doubling convention in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In “Of the Coming of John,” the lone piece of fiction in Souls, two characters – one white and one black – are doubles of each other locked into an erotic bond that represents a yearning for a union that will be an American nation healed from the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Dixon revises Du Bois’s erotic doubles, first with two college students, one African American and the other white, and again in an important subplot with a member of the Nation of Islam and a non-Muslim African American. The Muslim Abdul 1

“A Decade of Loss,” Newsweek, January 18, 1993: 22.

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and his double Phillip are incarcerated, a fact which has significance for the themes of justice and solidarity among black men in the novel as well as for the connection to the Black Arts Movement. Dixon repeats and revises Du Bois in narratives that invoke the new national identities that emerged after the Civil Rights Movement: Black Power and Gay Liberation.2 Dixon’s narrative is an experiment with whether these two nations can be redeemed from homophobia and racism. Such is not to be the case as Dixon’s narrative suggests that racism in the emerging post-Stonewall gay nation may be ineradicable; but a black nation redeemed from homophobia is a tantalizing possibility. The bases for the new nations are a pair of doubles. African American Jesse Durand and the white southerner Jon-Michael Barthé represent the possibility of a gay nation. As black and white doubles they are reminiscent of Du Bois’s model of an America redeemed by interracial male solidarity. Jon-Michael and Jesse fall in love in college, and upon graduation move together to New York City where each tries to fulfill career ambitions. Jesse wants to be a dancer; Jon-Michael a journalist. The African American doubles Phillip and Abdul are more successful as they become the basis for a new black nation, one redeemed from homophobia. The Queer Doubling Convention In “Queering The Souls of Black Folk,” an essay in Public Culture for the commemoration of that seminal text published in 1903, I use theories from classical anthropology and feminist interpretations of anthropology to explore same-gender homoerotic desire in the short story “Of the Coming of John.” I argue that W. E. B. Du Bois posits same-gender homoerotic desire as the basis for the formation of an America redeemed from racism. The structure of the short story is about the inability of union between the doubles, black John Jones and white John Henderson. In classical anthropology, kinship, 2 I am using the term “national identities” for these two political movements because theorists in each one often compared their political situations to those of colonized territories. For example, in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton declared that because African Americans “stand as colonial subjects in relation to the white society,” institutional racism is “colonialism” (5). In Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution (2012), Linda Hirshman argues that Harry Hay, the architect of modern gay liberation, made a similar argument that homosexuals were a colonized nation because they had a common vernacular, a specific historical identity, an economy, and a community of shared psychological makeup. In his influential “A Gay Manifesto” (1972), Carl Wittman also concluded that gays were a colonized people when he declared that homosexuals were “refugees from Amerika,” that San Franciso was a “refugee camp” and “a gay ghetto rather than a free territory” (330).

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which is the basis for national identity, is created when the bonds of men are cemented through a transaction of women. Feminist readings of classical anthropology inform us that this transaction of women also signals an erotic desire between men.3 Du Bois’s doubles, African American John Jones and his white double John Henderson, are unable to cement the bonds of their relationship and to form kinship through a transaction of women. Jim Crow miscegenation laws prevent any legitimate movement of women across racial lines. We see the effect of these miscegenation laws when John Jones inadvertently touches the arm of a white woman at a concert and an usher ejects him from the opera house, the symbol of culture and civilization. We see this effect again when white John Henderson attempts to rape Jennie, his double’s sister. Miscegenation laws do not protect black women from the sexual advances of white men. So white men do not need to participate in a legitimate exchange to have access to a black woman. The African American John Jones kills his white double, putatively in an act of protecting his sister. However, an analysis that only sees John Jones as killing his white double to defend his sister is highly problematic; this reading ignores the erotic homosocial bonds of desire between men that largely structure the short story. One of these structures is Du Bois’s use of gender inversion, the precursor to modern homosexuality, to craft his African American protagonist. I have argued elsewhere (Nero, 2005) that the tragic ending of the story in which the African American John Henderson awaits a white lynch mob reflects a homosexual panic because the erotic bonds that Du Bois establishes between black and white men for each other have no other resolution in Jim Crow America. Du Bois chooses death for his black male protagonist rather than having him left as a potential signifier of an invert. Dixon, Nina Simone, and the Gay Nation At an audition, Jesse Durand, the African American protagonist of Vanishing Rooms, dances with Ruella McPhee, an African American female dancer, to Nina Simone’s 1964 recording “Images.” Although the song seems immediately applicable to Ruella, Dixon appropriates the song for his male protagonist Jesse, and it thus provides a commentary on the gay political movement. Jesse, as Simone’s recording reminds us, has “No Image” in the gay world, a place in which white supremacy predominates. Let us turn first to Simone’s recording and then to Dixon’s appropriation of it. Simone’s recording is significant for its connection to the Black Arts/ Black Power Movement. Simone’s recording of “Images” marked a radical 3

For instance, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985).

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political shift in the singer’s career. Her earlier recordings in the 1950s had been on the Colpix label and, while her songs drew upon African American folklore, none was overtly political. In 1964, she moved to the Dutch-owned Philips label, and her songs took on a more avowedly political dimension. Simone refers directly to the Civil Rights Movement in the song “Mississippi Goddamn” and in “Four Women” she documents the experiences of black women under white supremacy. Many American radio stations refused to play Simone’s music because of their political content, but these songs inspired the Black Arts Movement that emerged by 1965. The stark a capella recording on “Images” is a setting of a poem entitled “No Images,” by Harlem Renaissance writer Waring Cuney. “No Images” shared first prize in a national poetry competition sponsored by Opportunity Magazine in 1926: She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street, and dish water gives back no images.

Cuney’s poem evokes an image of the millions of exploited African American female domestics in the homes of white families. Domestic employment was the leading occupation for African American women for most of the twentieth century and the source of their financial misery when 1930s New Deal legislation intentionally excluded their employers from making payments to social security on their behalf (Oliver and Shapiro, 1997). The poem and its continuing popularity, as when Nina Simone performed and recorded it in 1964, evoked the recurring theme in the Black Arts Movement of black women trapped in drudgery and economic exploitation, unaware of their beauty and their African heritage. Dixon’s use of the poem is ironic, as he appropriates it for his gay black male protagonist Jesse. Jesse recalls changing the pronouns from “she” to “he.” At the conclusion of the dance, Jesse and his female dance partner stand back to back, like a “Janus mask,” except that one is female and the other is male. This image of Jesse as possessing both male and female qualities

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appears throughout the novel. Jesse excels at domesticity – cooking and cleaning – even as a child, a fact that led his father to discontinue the mantra “Work builds character” when he realized that his son excelled at “baking cakes and polishing silverware” (7). Jesse’s roommate and dancing partner Ruella comments on his mastery of the domestic sphere: “Newspapers put away. Rug vacuumed. Clothes in the hamper. Even my dance tights folded neat. Do you do windows?” (48). Dixon’s appropriation of “Images” for Jesse – as well as the attestations to Jesse as feminine – is gender inversion. Inversion theories first developed in Germany when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 used the terms “Urning” and “Uranism” to describe “a female psyche confined in a male body” (Kennedy, 1997: 29). By the 1880s and 1890s articles about “Urnings, “Uranism,” “sexual inversion,” and another popular term, “contrary sexual feelings,” were appearing in American medical journals. Inversion theories played a key role in the development of modern sexual identity theories, since early sexologists imagined that homosexual desire emerged when a body contained the psyche of the other gender because it was believed that all desire was essentially heterosexual. Inversion was replaced by modern psychoanalytic explanations of homosexuality that drew attention to dynamics in the family. However, Dixon revealed a familiarity with both inversion and psychoanalytic theories to explain his homosexuality. In an October 1, 1972 diary entry Dixon referred to current psychoanalytic theory writing that his father was “cold, unaffectionate, aloof,” and that this “situation produces homosexual children – who are driven to other men to seek the masculine attention and affection they were denied in their childhood.” 4 Yet, Dixon alluded to inversion in Vanishing Rooms when Jesse called attention to his name, a derivation of his mother’s name Jessica: “boys named after their mothers are different” (13). Here Jesse indicates the possibility of having the female interiority of the invert to explain his homosexuality. Jesse’s inversion allows us to see that his relationship with his white lover Jon-Michael is a repetition and revision, or what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a “Signification,” of the interracial doubles John Jones and John Henderson in Souls of Black Folk, and their prototypes, the Submissive African Man and the Teutonic Strong Man, in “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization” – Du Bois’s Harvard Commencement Address of 1890. In the address at Harvard, Du Bois declared that Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, was “a typical Teutonic Hero,” the embodiment of “the Strong Man” who was a “soldier and a lover, a statesman and a ruler, passionate, ambitious and indomitable; bold reckless guardian” (Du Bois, 4 All references to the Melvin Dixon Diaries, 1965–91, are in Melvin Dixon Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

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1996: 242–3). Du Bois made it clear that Davis represented not only a man but “the type of civilization which his life represented.” Although this civilization “represents a field for stalwart manhood and heroic character,” Du Bois charged that it simultaneously stands for “moral obtuseness and refined brutality.” The union of the Teutonic Strong Man and the African Submissive Man was necessary for national development, because either, alone, Du Bois declared, “tends to an abnormal development – towards Despotism on the one hand […] towards slavery on the other” (243). Jon-Michael revels in the recklessness that Du Bois associated with the Teutonic Strong Man and the virile John Henderson. Jon-Michael cruises New York’s decrepit piers, what he refers to as a “playground” for the plenitude of anonymous gay sex available there. Jon-Michael takes Jesse to the piers and explains to his lover why he wants both of them to go there together: “anybody would walk in, hands hooked in the belt, your jeans torn just so around the crotch. You’d lean against the wood, and I’d find you, smell you waiting there. I’d kneel just so, and you’d talk dirty to me.” (42). Jesse, the Submissive African Man, is repulsed by the idea, not only of sex in the piers, but also by the fact that Jon-Michael wants him to “talk dirty.” The piers, I believe, are the filth and decay of the places for anonymous sex that is suggested by Cuney’s “No Images” and Simone’s recording of it. These places are the dirty streets and dishwater in the lyrics that offer Jesse no reflection of his beauty. For Jesse willingly to go there for the anonymous sex that Jon-Michael craves is to negate himself, to cover himself in filth. Jesse’s refusal to join Jon-Michael at the piers is significant for what it reveals about race and gay politics. Dixon rejects on the grounds of white supremacy the anonymous and plentiful sex that the 1970s Gay Liberation Movement hailed as freedom. It offered “No Images” to Jesse, or, rather, the image it offered was one of objectified blackness. Dixon makes the consequences of this objectification clear in a journal entry when, during his stay in Paris, he discovers that a lover keeps a “coded record” and that Dixon is “the 46th noir” that the lover has had sex with that year. For Dixon, his lover’s objectification reflected “the utter impossibility of having an honest love relationship between two men” (October 4, 1973). Marlon Riggs referred to this objectification of black men in the title poem used in the 1989 film Tongues Untied. In the poem Riggs remarks that, in his experience in the predominantly white Castro, the only images of black men were “joke / fetish / cartoon caricature / or disco diva adored / from a distance” (Riggs, 1991: 203) Riggs discovered that in the great gay Mecca of the Castro that he was “an alien, unseen, and seen unwanted […] a nigga, still” (ibid.). Jesse discovers that he is a “nigga still,” an object for his white lover. No union between Jesse and Jon-Michael is possible, just as none had been possible for

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Du Bois’s Johns – none can be as long as white supremacy exists in either the America or the nation proposed by Gay Liberation. The New Black Nation Phillip and Adbul represent two aspects of blackness. Phillip comes from an urban working-class background, that so highly vaunted in the Black Arts Movement as the repository of authentic black culture.5 It can be assumed that the same is true for Abdul, although the novel does not tell us that. What we do know is that Abdul converted to the Nation of Islam while in prison, thus fitting the profile of the working-class, urban, incarcerated African American. Phillip plays the role of the gender invert, the one assumed by African American John Jones in Du Bois’s short story. Phillip’s character resembles the African American John in many ways: for instance, his sexuality is uncertain and never established as heterosexual; he fails at intellectual work – at one time he wanted to be a lawyer – so he is excluded from white bourgeois culture; and he has a younger sister who is single, which means he has a transactable woman in his life. The most significant parallel between Du Bois and Dixon occurs when we learn that Phillip suffered a severe blow to his gender integrity at the hands of his mother. We recall that what signaled Du Bois’s experience of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk was an assault to his masculinity when a white girl refused his greeting card. The experience humiliated Du Bois’s sense of himself as a male and brought about his self-awareness as black and therefore unfit for participating in the culture of public heterosexuality. In Vanishing Rooms the humiliation came from his mother, who upon discovery that he had stolen candy from a white shop owner, and had lied about it, brought him back to the scene of the crime. She beat him mercilessly in front of the white shop owner. The narrative implies that Phillip may have never recovered from such an injury to his masculinity. In Dixon’s revision of Du Bois, we are led to believe that the mother’s humiliation of the son has played a role in leading him to prison. It is as though, by going to prison, he has been removed from the world created by white men and enforced by black matriarchs. This scene of humiliation by the mother in front of a white 5 See Ogbar (2004), especially chapter 4, “Swimming with the Masses: The Black Panthers, Lumpenism, and Revolutionary Culture.” Also, see Smitherman (1977). Smitherman views the black working class and street people as the keepers of an authentic African American culture. Smitherman championed this culture and it became the basis for the vernacular literary theories that Henry Louis Gates, Jr created in his monumental The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988).

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man calls to mind numerous cases in Black Arts/Black Power discourse that imply black matriarchs and white men collaborate to emasculate black males. For instance, consider Jimmy Garrett’s one-act play “And We Own the Night,” first produced at Newark, New Jersey’s Spirit House, initially published in the famous “Black Theater” issue of The Drama Review, and republished in Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal’s 1968 anthology Black Fire. The black mother, who works as a domestic, is the antithesis of revolutionary blackness. In order to bring about his own redemption as well as that of the hoped-for black nation, the revolutionary son must murder his mother for her unflagging loyalty to her white male employer. Prison is a doubly ironic site of redemption for black masculinity. First, it reflects a dual reality as a place created by systemic racism to contain black males, yet, blacks create a counter-reality to the one intended by whites. Phillip explains to his sister: “You see all these black men in here? This ain’t just the colored section of the joint. This is it. All these niggers and nothing but niggers […] [who] don’t dance to they music no more” (80). Phillip’s idea of prison as a counter-cultural space where black values are created and sustained reflects James Smethurst’s observation about how representatives of the Black Arts Movement theorized the need for mythic spaces outside of European history, and one that is constituted “in the United States, not Africa” (Smethurst, 2005: 79). Second, and perhaps most important for this chapter, it is the black counter-cultural space of prison where Phillip acquires the necessary capital to recover his manhood. The irony here is that Phillip recovers his manhood through his relationship with Abdul, the Muslim. Abdul and Phillip are the African Warriors in Black Arts literature who “embody an essential African identity to which African Americans should aspire, representing a reconstruction of an integral wholeness shattered by slavery, racism, and colonialism” (Smethurst, 2005: 81). The allusion to them as such warriors becomes evident when they avenge the brutal murder of Jesse Durand’s lover: they arrange for the punitive gang rape of one of the alleged murderers (who happens to be incarcerated in the same prison as they are). The two warriors, who were nearly inseparable during their incarceration, cement the bonds of their relationship outside of prison, when Phillip arranges for Abdul to date his sister. The transaction is complete when the two fall in love: Ruella has moved from her brother to Abdul. The new black nation formed by the black Muslim and putatively black Christian can go forward. This new black nation is also one redeemed from homophobia. Phillip provides the ethical framework that legitimates homosexual love. Phillip tells his sister Ruella, whom he calls “Lady” – a title given to Billie Holiday, but equally important, a form of courtly address that foreshadows her status as a valuable commodity – that he understands the nature of love between two men:

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“You know, Lady, a man sometimes will do anything for love. A woman too, I guess. And who’s to say who you can love and who you can’t.” […] “Sometimes a man just wants to lie there and be loved, Lady. And it don’t much matter if it’s a man or a woman doing the loving.” (143)

Phillip’s remark shows that prison is a “queer/ing space,” writes the critic Vivian May (2000: 369), and one wonders here if Phillip is being autobiographical and referring to his relationship with Abdul. Literary theorist Eve Sedgwick noted that the successful transaction of women requires from men “a willingness and ability to temporarily risk, or assume a feminized status” (1985: 51). Such is the case with Phillip. His successful ability to participate in the homosocial male rituals that create manhood, namely the transaction of a woman to another man, could only come about by the knowledge he acquires in prison. That knowledge includes gender inversion and a willingness to be homosexualized to learn to love another man. Of course, the irony here is that Phillip’s love for Abdul can only take place in prison. What we see at work here is the creation of a collective black gay identity derived from the Black Arts/Black Power Movement. In Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms the story of the murdered lover calls our attention to the need for Gay Liberation to counter the oppression and routine violence visited upon gay people. But an exclusive focus on Gay Liberation does not address the specificity of blackness. Dixon, like many other members of the Generation of 1986, was profoundly influenced by values such as self-sufficiency, pan-African cultural nationalism, black nationhood, and solidarity among black men – e.g. Joseph Beam’s and Marlon Riggs’s “Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act.” 6 These values were expressed in the Black Arts/Black Power Movement, especially by the Nation of Islam and its newspaper Muhammad Speaks. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Dixon was coming of age, Muhammad Speaks was one of the most important venues of an international, cosmopolitan, black politics that Dixon imbibed. The paper not only reached hundreds of thousands of readers, but it was one of the most progressive African American newspapers. The paper regularly featured news stories “devoted to anti-colonial struggles, workers strikes, anti-war demonstrations, and the plight of political prisoners” (Allen, 1996: 14). Its coverage of the international black world was far superior to that of more mainstream African American publications (Smethurst, 2005: 181). James Smethurst notes, “the general editorial direction of the paper was militantly 6 These are Joseph Beam’s words in “Brother to Brother: Words from the Heart” (1986: 241). Marlon Riggs then uses Beam’s assertion as a coda for his film Tongues Untied (1989).

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antiracist and anti-imperialist (and often anticapitalist) as well as nationalist” (ibid.). In the diary he kept in the summer of 1970 while working for the Hartford, Connecticut Urban League, Dixon noted that he attended several cultural functions organized by the Nation of Islam. Dixon refers to the speeches that he heard at these events about the contributions of the black man to civilization as his “spiritual and intellectual salvation” (June 13, 1970). He expresses how deeply Muhammad Speaks’ politics moved him: I was reading the current Muslim newspaper last night. It really depressed me. […] I was so angered by this country’s obvious lack of political direction or human concern – But as the Muslim brother said (who sold me the paper) white folks take care of themselves, and we (black folks) must take care of ourselves. (June 11, 1970)

The focus on the international black world in Muhammad Speaks and the Nation of Islam’s politics of self-sufficiency surely appealed to the young Dixon’s developing interest in theorizing about pan-African literature. Dixon was a pioneer in the Black Studies movement and, equally important, a pioneer for theorizing a pan-cultural blackness. By 1973, Dixon had identified a creolized, pan-cultural blackness as the focus of his future study when he wrote in his journal: I also want to link myself to the mythic element in the corpus of Negritude writings – surrealism (perhaps) poetry, prose – and develop an intercultural cosmology that I think relates fundamentally to the development of an aesthetic sensibility in Black America, the Carribbean (sp), French Africa, South America, and perhaps France itself.

Not surprisingly, then, when Dixon imagined the new black diasporic world theorized in Black Arts literature, the Nation of Islam was central. Dixon found a representation for this idea in Vanishing Rooms through the union of Muslim and non-Muslim black men, itself a revision of the theorizing present in a mentor of pan-African thought, W. E. B. Du Bois.7 Equally unsurprising, in this context, is that Dixon denied the possibility of an interracial gay world. (In this, Dixon is similar to Marlon Riggs: both praised intraracial love and omitted the interracial love that was a significant force in their own lives). At least in Vanishing Rooms, the gay world offered Dixon’s protagonist “No Images.” As I conclude this chapter, my intention is not to suggest that this novel 7 Dixon received this model and sought to work with it, including its view of women as transactable commodities. Dixon was never able to break out of this mold – perhaps due to the influence on him of both the Black Arts Movement writers he read and James Baldwin, whom he considered a literary mentor, but who was not particularly progressive on gender politics.

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has a happy, tidy, or even untroubled ending. The redemption of the black diasporic world that Phillip and Abdul’s love for each other represents is ideologically flawed. It depends upon a subordination of women by turning them into commodities for transaction between men. From this view, a woman’s value is her womb. Vivian May comments, “Jesse’s naming Ruella ‘Rooms’ puts into play several stereotypes of femininity: woman as passive receptacle, as caretaker and nurturer, and as domesticity or the home personified” (2000: 378). By using the Nation of Islam in his plot as a site for racial redemption, Dixon, wittingly or unwittingly, recreated its patriarchal vision of nationhood that appealed to both black men and black women. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar explains this appeal: In their pursuit of the western bourgeois standard of civilization, the Muslims necessarily supported both patriarchy and the cult of domesticity that relegated women to the home as important figures of domestic family affairs, but many women, long familiar with naked and crude sexism, appreciated the new status as homemakers and important and esteemed mothers of civilization. (Ogbar, 2004: 32)

This patriarchal viewpoint, so prevalent in the Nation of Islam and in the Black Arts/Black Power Movement, allows for the union of Phillip and Abdul, but it is, nevertheless, an ideological flaw in a novel that succeeds brilliantly, Darieck Scott claims, in representing the effects of racism in interracial relationships “in their most dramatic as well as in their more nuanced forms” (1994: 318). Works Cited Allen, Ernest, Jr. “Religious Heterodoxy and Nationalist Tradition: The Continuing Evolution of the Nation of Islam.” Black Scholar 26.3–4 (1996): 2–34. Beam, Joseph (ed.). In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Boston, Mass.: Alyson, 1986. Carmichael, Stokeley, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Dixon, Melvin. Vanishing Rooms. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1991. —— Diaries. Melvin Dixon Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” In Eric J. Sunquist (ed.). The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. —— [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. Garrett, Jimmy. “And We Own the Night.” Drama Review 12.4 (1968): 61–9.

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Hemphill, Essex, and Joseph Beam. (eds). Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Boston, Mass.: Alyson, 1991. Hirshman, Linda. Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial, 2012. Joyce, Justin A., and Dwight A. McBride (eds). A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Kennedy, Hubert. “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, First Theorist of Homosexuality.” In Vernon Rosario (ed.). Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 1997. May, Vivian M. “Reading Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms: Experiencing ‘The Ordinary Rope that can Change in a Second to a Lyncher’s Noose or a Rescue Line’.” Callaloo 23.1 ( 2000): 366–81. Nero, Charles I. “Queering the Souls of Black Folk.” Public Culture 17.2 (2005): 255–76. Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Oliver, Melvin, and Thomas Shapiro. Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge, 1997. Riggs, Marlon. “Tongues Untied.” In Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam (eds). Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. Boston, Mass.: Alyson, 1991. Rosario, Vernon (ed.). Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge, 1997. Scott, Darieck. “Jungle Fever?: Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom.” GLQ 1.3 (1994): 299–321. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Sunquist, Eric J. (ed.). The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Wittman, Carl, “A Gay Manifesto.” In Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds). Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972: 330–42.

Film and Music Riggs, Marlon (dir.). Tongues Untied. San Francisco, Calif.: Frameline, 1989. VHS. Feature film. Simone, Nina. Four Women: The Nina Simone Philips Recordings. Philips. 2003. Audio CD.

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III Upsurges of Desire

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9 “Risking Sensuality”: Toni Morrison’s Erotics of Writing Claudine Raynaud (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3)

The women’s legs are spread wide open so I hum. (L, 3)1 There is movement in the shadow of a sun that is old now. There. Just there. Coming from the rim of the world. A disturbing disturbance that is not hawk nor stormy weather, but a dark woman, of all things. My sister, my me – rustling, like life. (Morrison, in Denard, 2008: 33; italics added) Isn’t the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? […] It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces rather, the staging of appearance-as-disappearance. (Barthes, 1975: 9)

While past scholarship has explored at great length the inscription of the black body in Morrison’s work, recent analysis has focused on her “use of the erotic” – to take up Audre Lorde’s phrase (Turpin, 2010) – in an effort to locate her specific work with language in comparison and contrast with Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand. I wish to argue in this chapter that writing the erotic is what Morrison has been “risking” throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a “theme,” a moment in the novels’ diegesis. It is part and parcel of what writing ventures; it is its daring quest. Incest, pedophilia, rape, gang bangs, pornography – in Lorde’s words, “abuse of feeling” (Lorde, 1984: 59) – and the constant probing of “love” – the title of Morrison’s eighth novel – go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic that is constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival, and correlative to its freedom. Lorde offers, for her part, a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic incarnated in the autobiographical 1

Toni Morrison, Love. See Works Cited for abbreviations of Morrison’s novels.

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Zami (Raynaud, 1988; Jay, 1995). The erotic is power; it is knowledge from which black women have been alienated and which they must recover. Reclaiming the erotic is a bold gesture that counters the historical appropriation of black women, as both highly sexed (the whore, the hussy), reduced to their sexed bodies, their genitalia (Saartjie Baartman) and simultaneously asexual and invisible, as in Judith Chicago’s infamous plate for Sojourner Truth in Dinner Party (1974–9) (Walker, 1982: 42–3; Spillers, 2003: 156–7). In a similar vein, denouncing the documented abuse of black female bodies in medical experimentation in the 1950s, Morrison’s latest novel, Home (2012), portrays a young woman, Cee, subjected to a series of interventions on her uterus performed by a white doctor who nearly kills her. Too trusting and already traumatized, Cee is easy prey. Ending the erasure of the erotics entails the risk of vulnerability, since the intimate is laid bare, the private voiced. It might fall prey to the other’s malevolent intent or be immediately reframed by a racist/sexist dominant discourse. It professes a faith in the other’s response, places a bet on his/her “responseability.”2 At its best, however, the erotic is a recovering and a grounding of full subjectivity, the assertion of control and strength. As early as 1978, Lorde forcefully claimed: “When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (1984: 55). In the 1970s, Morrison also acknowledged black women’s sexuality and placed it in the historical and social context that has been theirs: “If she was a sexual object in the eyes of men, that was their doing. Sex was one of her dimensions. It had to be just one, for life required many other things of her, and it is difficult to be regarded as a sex object when the burden of field and fire is on your shoulders” (Morrison, in Denard, 2008: 24–5).3 Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America – a book of interviews conducted in the 1970s, and published in 1980, that Morrison cites as a source for her writing – similarly links black women’s sexuality to work in its section “Sex and Work” (Gwaltney, 1999: 134–70). The first interviewee, Nancy White, exemplifies black women’s wisdom: she denounces men’s courting rituals as a lure that white women fall for and exhibits a fighting spirit: “You know that women ain’t nothing but women. But you know that no woman is a dog or a mule, but if folks keep making you feel that way, if you don’t have a mind of your own, you can start letting them tell you what you are” (152). A second interviewee, Mabel Johns, insists that she and her husband were 2 Morrison (1993: xi). 3 Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine (August 22, 1971), reprinted in Denard (2008: 18–30).

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on an equal footing, as opposed to one of her employers, who acted like a child with her husband. Nancy White similarly proclaims that in one of her marriages: “We were both faithful servants to the other” (152). The section makes clear in explicit references to sexual harassment and domestic violence the differences between white and black women in their interaction with men, both black and white, in matters of sex, love, and labor. Throughout her work, Morrison’s creative imagination has indeed been active to name and salvage this dimension of black female subjectivity and sensibility under the constant historical threat of racist stereotyping. That meant remaining attentive to its historical and social inscription. In 1984, Hortense Spillers vehemently denounced the silencing of black women’s sexuality: [B]lack women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb. Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them, and if and when by the subject herself, often in the guise of vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and the sheer romance of the blues. (Spillers, 2003: 153)4

While Spillers’s focus was non-fiction and academic writing, Morrison’s work, alongside the many interventions of black women writers, poets, and playwrights, is a resounding answer to this silence. She provides the “missing narrative” (489 n. 31). Spillers also voiced a warning about the facile linking of black women’s emancipated sexuality to its expression in the blues. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, or Billie Holiday, though later hailed as spokeswomen for a black feminist agenda of sexual emancipation, were constrained by a racist/sexist ideology. Their appropriation of the lyrics of the songs they sang (lyrics most often written by others, and sometimes for male singers) and their performances were the site of contradictory historical and social forces. Morrison’s fiction, for its part, risks a poetics of the erotic against (and with) violence and trauma, a poetics of desire against death. The questions are: how does her text summon up sensuality in relation to sexual difference and historical violence? How does it write “black” desire, proceeding through repetition and variation? In such a perspective, Jazz (1992) could be said to promote an erotics of reading in keeping with Barthes’s proposition in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), as it stages a sensuality that derives from the rich intertextuality of blues lyrics, while reflexively problematizing the reference to jazz music and the broad circulation of “race” records in the 1920s (Sherard, 4 In this polemical piece, Spillers quotes a poem by Lorde (“Who Said it was Simple?”) at the beginning of her talk, but does not fully acknowledge the work done by black lesbians, such as Barbara Smith, Gloria T. Hull, and Lorraine Bethel as early as the mid-1970s, except in some of her notes. See Bethel (1979); Smith (1979; 1983). Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her, which depicts an interracial lesbian relationship, was originally published in 1974.

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2000). Yet Morrison is always on her guard when it comes to the poetic: she indulges in it and then retracts, afraid of losing the political edge of language. As she phrases it, the “lustre of poetry” must always be contained by the space(s) left for the other, encompassed by the sublimity of “word-work” that fights the death of language (Nobel Lecture, 1993). Echoing that peril, some of her female characters, indulging in a boundless love that is both thoroughly sensual and profoundly altruistic, flirt with death as the loss of self. Parallel to Morrison’s work, black feminist scholars have answered Spillers’s call and placed love and sexuality, seen from the black woman’s point of view, at the core of their research. While Angela Davis (1998) and Hazel Carby (1998) have analyzed female performers of the Classic Blues, bell hooks, after denouncing popular culture’s commercialization of the black female sexed body (1992: 61–78), wrote a trilogy on “love”: All About Love: New Visions (2000), Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002). Like Lorde, bell hooks promotes both self- and collective empowerment through loving relationships, which are part of the fight against self-hatred, shame, and weakness. hooks falls short, however, of giving bodily pleasure a central role. Unlike polemical and programmatic essays, fiction does something else than merely clarify issues and put forward an agenda. It presents the complexity of the question, the plurality of perspectives. It is also the locus of the subjective experience of writing and reading and enters into a complex dialogue with history and politics. Within the scope of this chapter I will address the erotics of writing in four novels only: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Beloved (1987), and A Mercy (2008), isolating poetic moments that conjure the sensual and the sexual in the letter itself. What remains to be done is a contextualization of these textual moments within the novels in which they appear and more globally in relation to each other throughout Morrison’s oeuvre. Her emphasis on the oral/aural quality of language as well as on the affinity of fiction writing with jazz music – at the heart of Jazz (1992) – is another intrinsic dimension of the sensual quality of her writing as it pays homage to blues and jazz erotics. The Colors of Black Women’s Desire (The Bluest Eye and Sula) The Bluest Eye is about trauma – the trauma of incest compounded by the rejection of the black child. Put another way, the rejection of blackness lies at the core of the father’s lust/love for his daughter: “Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her – tenderly” (BE, 162–3); “Again the hatred mixed with tenderness” (BE, 163). The novel does, however, contain a long description of lovemaking and orgasm in the grain of Pauline Breedlove’s voice:

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I begin to feel those little bits of color floating up into me – deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama’s lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors, and I’m afraid I’ll come, and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts. (BE, 131; italics Morrison’s)

As Susan Willis (1982) has argued, Pauline takes up in this monologue most of the elements from her life in the South she had previously used to describe her first meeting with Cholly:5 I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that streak of green them june bugs made on the trees the night we left from down home. All of them colors was in me. (BE, 115; italics Morrison’s)

Pauline soon bemoans that she no longer enjoys sex with her husband, which Willis reads as Morrison’s comment on the migration North and the urbanization of southern Blacks. But the reader bears in mind this metaphorical description by Pauline of her pleasure when the text delivers Cholly’s sensual memory of their meeting, later in the narrative: “The creamy toe of her bare foot scratching a velvet leg. It was such a small and simple gesture, but it filled him then with a wondering softness. Not the usual lust to part tight legs with his own, but a tenderness, a protectiveness” (BE, 163). The reader understands that the mother (and her bad foot) and the daughter overlap in Cholly’s confused mind for it is his daughter’s foot he is gazing at, as she “[scratches] the back of her calf with her toe” (BE, 162). This overlap, combined with the memory of Pauline’s laughter, eventually leads to the incestuous act. That Cholly also experienced a sexual trauma under the gaze of white men connects his own vulnerability and his thwarted perception of his daughter (BE, 147–9). Morrison’s next novel, Sula (1973), risks the erotic in the chapter entitled “1922,” as the men, young and old, watch the passers-by, and among them the two young girls, Nel and Sula, as they go to an ice cream parlor, Edna Finch’s Mellow House (Raynaud, 1992). The two young girls themselves were “interested,” as they would acknowledge later in their lives. Morrison 5 Here is her comment on this passage: “Morrison de-familiarizes the portrayal of sensual experience. Adjectives become substantives, giving taste to color and making it possible for colors to trickle and flow and, finally, be internalized like the semen of an orgasmic epiphany. As often happens in Morrison’s writing, sexuality converges with history and functions as a register for the experience of change, i.e., historical transition. Polly’s remembrance of childhood sensuality coincides with her girlhood in the rural South.” (Willis 1982: 34; my italics).

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chronicles in this passage nothing less than female adolescent sexual awakening: Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs. The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled. Those smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow gabardines beckoned to them. […] Somewhere beneath all that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams. (S, 50–1; italics added)

Like her mother Hannah, Sula sleeps around. Sula’s approach to sex is described as allowing her to achieve a certain power quickly followed by an intense feeling of loneliness. Her howling at the moment of orgasm announces Nel’s fine final cry at the end of the novel. This intense friendship between two women and Nel’s final acknowledgment that she was missing Sula and not her husband Jude, has led Barbara Smith to reading the novel as embodying lesbian love (Smith, 1979), an inscription that Morrison denies. The development on Sula’s promiscuous behavior is followed by the episode that describes how Sula has fallen in love with Ajax (the very man who had called her “pig meat” during their first encounter in 1922), a possessive love that engulfs her until his sudden desertion. Their lovemaking, narrated by an omniscient narrator, is intercut with Sula’s comments in italics, as in her fantasy she peels away all the layers of Ajax’s body, one after the other, with various instruments: beneath the black skin, there will be gold-leaf, then alabaster, and finally loam, fertile loam: If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will fall away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there … How high she was over his wand-lean body, how slippery was his sliding sliding smile. (S, 130)

The erotics of the text come from the sensual friction of the metaphorical first person narrative against the omniscient narrative, in a reflexive doubling of the poetic and sensual images of sliding and slipping in the text (Ajax’s doubly “sliding” smile and the alliterations in “s” in the last words of the text that also announce his “slipping away”). The rhythm comes from the African American oral/aural tradition and from jazz music. The text follows the pattern of call and response and thus transposes this musical model into writing.6 This passage from Sula ends on the image of the warm black soil 6 This aesthetic choice is reminiscent of collages by Romare Bearden – a contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists – in their use of disruption: discontinuity with

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and a series of questions that Sula raises, but does not answer: “I will water your soil, keep it rich and moist. But how much? How much water to keep the loam moist? And how much loam will I need to keep my water still? And when do the two make mud?” (S, 131). The opposition between the lyricism of the italics (the “I” of the black woman’s voice as she addresses her lover) and the back-to-real exclamations (“how”) produce the erotics of the text in/as the gap between metaphoric and referential writing. In Morrison’s juxtaposition of the two distinct voices that respond to each other, the oscillation between the “writerly” and the “readerly” (Barthes, 1970) leads to deflation. It spells the impossibility of maintaining the conjunction of opposite elements; it rewrites the swirl in the water that swallowed Chicken Little (“something newly missing”; S, 61), a moment echoed in Sula and Ajax’s coupling: “He swallowed her mouth just as her thighs had swallowed his genitals and the house was very, very quiet” (S, 131). It delineates the delicate tension between “mud” and “home,” between fusion – the fear of shapelessness – and safe haven at the heart of the erotic moment. What is striking in these attempts at “writing the erotic” is the reliance on metaphors from everyday life: a grounding in material yet sublimated surroundings, the sensuality of delightful food and the beauty of southern landscapes. Pauline’s pleasure takes on the colors of her life in the country (berries, june-bugs, and lemons). In Sula, the ice “cream” of the parlor and its vanilla flavor are transposed onto the men sitting outside that summer. Eventually qualified as the “summer of the beautiful black boys” (S, 56), it is also, however, the summer when Nel and Sula drown Chicken Little. In the italics that translate the crescendo of sexual pleasure, in an un-layering, Sula uses various instruments – the chamois, the chisel, the tap hammer, and then her bare fingers – relinquishing little by little the domestic and the artistic, to allow for the bare touch of fertile black soil. This passage reflects the fact that Sula should have been an artist (a sculptress?), and that lacking the proper tools, having “no art form,” she became “dangerous” (S, 121). These lines and her act of lovemaking stand in as a substitute for the artwork she did not produce, as the first person takes over a poetics of desire, her italics echoing Pauline’s joyful childhood memories: Ajax’s face is a beautiful object, a statue, and then the fertile soil itself. This gesture parallels the sexual ritual Sula and Nell had indulged in, repetitions of motifs and variations, echoing the very movement of jazz. This is true in particular of such creations as “The Blues Has Got Me” (1944), an explicit homage to blues singers. Indeed, this work was inspired by the lyrics of Bessie Smith’s In the House Blues. Jazz was not only a favorite theme of Bearden’s; he listened to music as he painted and his art bears that imprint.

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as little girls, before killing Chicken Little (Baker, 1991). Indeed, in this earlier scene, they had dug a hole in the ground with twigs which they had “[stripped] to a smooth, creamy innocence” (S, 58) – one notices the recurring of the sexual image of cream – and had buried within it the debris of their broken “tools”: “When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel’s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in too” (S, 58). In the lovemaking scene, the loam that can be seen between the breaks made by Sula’s metaphorical chisel and tap hammer is “fertile, free of pebbles and twigs. For it is the loam that is giving [Ajax] that smell” (S, 130; italics added). The earlier ritual of sexual initiation and its failed attempt at solving the disorderliness of the world, as well as its potent sexual charge, thus resurface in the description of Sula’s and Ajax’s lovemaking. The metaphor of the fertile loam also contrasts with the literal “plot of black dirt” (B, 6) that Claudia compares Pecola to, in her evocation of Cholly Breedlove’s incestuous planting of his seed in The Bluest Eye. Daring Sensuality in Slavery (Beloved and A Mercy) When reflecting on memory and slave narratives, Morrison remarked that their writers “pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate’” (Denard, 2008: 70). In light of this automatic self-censorship, she sees her job as follows: “For me – a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman – the exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (ibid.; italics added). In Beloved, the challenge of writing about the unspeakable, the unspoken, also included the erotic. How does one write about desire and the body from the vantage point of the enslaved? Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) proclaims in the prologue itself the sensuality of talk and touch, and gives voice to female desire as Dessa, now in shackles, remembers her lovemaking with Kaine: Talk as beautiful as his touch. Shivering, she pulled at his shirt. This was love, her hand at his back, his mouth. “Sho you want,” she asked him, “sho you want this old – ?” His lips were on hers, nibbling, nipping. “Dessa,” a groan in his throat. Her sentence ended in a moan. Thighs spreading for him, hips moving for him. Lawd, this man sho know how to love … (Williams, 1986: 14; italics added)7 7 For a treatment of erotic resistance in twentieth-century women’s novels of slavery, see Griffin (1996).

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In Beloved, Sethe and the male slaves on “Sweet Home” cannot express their desire. They also cannot have a wedding, as Mrs. Garner teasingly reminds Sethe: “You are one sweet child” (B, 26). It is said in the text that the men resorted to sleeping with calves (B, 26). However, in a description of “corn shucking” or “corn husking” that conjures the poetic function of language in the repetition with variations of the same line (“How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice” / “How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-down flavor run free” / “How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free” [B, 27]), the text expresses the frustration and the gradual fulfillment of sexual desire: now Paul D couldn’t remember how finally they’d cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel. The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced [Sethe] it hurt. […] There was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. (B, 27)

The erotics of the text comes from the repetition, the blues-like structure of the verse, the alliterations. Repetition and riffing enhance eroticism. They also come from an image embedded in a childhood memory that Morrison reveals in “The Site of Memory”: that of eating fingerfood in her parents’ garden. Moreover, eroticism proceeds from the metaphoric play on sexual difference: Paul D’s tenderness as he frees the kernels and Sethe’s evocative gesture, complete with the feeling of pain (cf. Raynaud, 2003). That remembrance of past yearning – a recovery of past pleasure that in the process of reminiscence induces pleasure – is preceded by a moment of lovemaking, when Paul D and Sethe finally yield to their mutual desire and go up to the bedroom. First, Paul D holds her breasts and unties her dress: Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on the back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” (B, 17)

After they make love in a hurry, Paul D sees Sethe’s wound for what it is: “a revolting clump of scars” (B, 21). The text captures the tenderness, the desire to trust the other together with sexual desire. The veiling and the enhancement that the metaphor of the tree – sustained by desire – at first allows, here gives way to abatement when the metaphor no longer holds, the

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real of slavery coming back to forbid sublimation. In contrast, the metaphor of the corn comes back to Sethe in the memory of her lovemaking with Halle, and conjointly to Paul D, to celebrate desire and freedom, stealing pleasure amidst the brutality of a system bent on negating its possibility. It is excess (“too passionate”) and its exposure – intimacy and secrecy are needed – that lead to disillusionment, and, ultimately, to a confrontation with the real. In A Mercy (2008), Florens’s words contain a frank acknowledgement of her physical attraction for the African blacksmith: You probably don’t know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise. I rest there. My hand, my eyes, my mouth. The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. Nothing outside of you. (M, 37)

The text of the novel follows Florens’s errand as she goes in search of the nameless blacksmith to save her mistress’s life. Her quest coincides with her desire for him: “I have orders. It is arranged. I see your mouth and trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair again while I breathe into your shoulders in and out, in and out” (M, 5). Morrison has deliberately chosen to use the present tense for Florens and the “I” (2008). This present/ presence proves treacherous as the blacksmith rejects her after she injures him when she feels that he favors the little boy in his care, a duplication of the moment in which she was rejected by her mother. The urgency of the present gives way to the real of rejection, to an abandonment that can never be bought back or compensated for, or only at the price of writing. Morrison also attempts here, through internal focalization, a diffraction of the erotics as the other characters comment on Florens’s and the African blacksmith’s lovemaking that they accidentally witness. Lina, who has been beaten up by her lover, sees Florens’s infatuation negatively and so does her Mistress Rebekka Vaark. Yet Sorrow, who has no experience of love and respect, depicts what she sees, Florens and the blacksmith “coiled around each other” (M, 127), using the metaphor of dancing: What Sorrrow saw yonder in the grass under a hickory tree was not the silent submission to the slow goings behind a pile of wood or a hurried one in a church pew that Sorrow knew. This here female stretched, kicked her heels and whipped her head left, right, to, fro. It was a dancing. Florens rolled and twisted from her back to his. He hoisted her up against the hickory; she bent her head into his shoulder. A dancing. Horizontal one minute, another minute vertical. […] It all ended when the blacksmith

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grabbed Florens’ hair, yanked her head back to put his mouth on hers. (M, 128)

The sensuality of their lovemaking, which Florens mistakes for a fusion in which she submits herself totally to his will, contrasts with the numerous instances of rape and the brutal sexual exploitation of women in the novel: the rape of Florens’s mother, D’Ortega’s lust, Sorrow’s sexual promiscuity, the violent lives of the women – mostly prostitutes – on the ship that took Rebekka to the New World, Lina’s experience of battering. The text, however, manages to inscribe moments when these women escape their plight, such as the improvised tea party on board the Angelus: “Wretched as was the space they crouched in, it was nevertheless blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon. Women of and for men, in those few moments they were neither” (M, 85). These blanks, which recall the spaces Morrison leaves for the reader to come in, are interstices (Spillers, 2003), blank pages (Gilbert and Gubar, 1981) that both bring to the fore the silencing of black women’s desire and leave room for its inscription. For an Erotics of Reading (Jazz and “The Dancing Mind”) In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes closes on the proposition that an aesthetic of textual pleasure would have to include “writing aloud ” (1975: 66). He further explains: Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an act: the art of guiding one’s body. (Barthes, 1975: 66)

Ever since the beginning of her writing career, Morrison has emphasized that: “language has to be quiet” (Tate, 1983: 125). In her interview with Thomas LeClair, she further stresses that “the language must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. […] There are certain things that I cannot say without recourse to my language” (LeClair, 1994: 123; italics added). She avoids adverbs to qualify the way in which characters talk. She does not describe their expression. It is a question of feeling what the characters feel, rather than identifying these feelings from the outside. Part of this strategy is indeed to let the reader come in: It’s about involving the reader. The reader supplies the emotions. The

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reader supplies some of the color, some of the sound. My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it. He or she can feel something visceral, see something striking. Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience. (Tate, 1983: 125; italics added)

On writing sexual scenes, Morrison is explicit: “What is left out is as important as what is there. To describe sexual scenes in such a way that they are not clinical, not even explicit – so that the reader brings his own sexuality to the scene and thereby participates in it in a very personal way. And owns it” (Denard, 2008: 59). Writing is thus a collaboration between writer and reader that Barthes would not disavow: Writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where one can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language. (Barthes, 1975: 67)

Jazz is about a fated love triangle: a jealous woman’s revenge, a man’s murder of his young lover, and her selfless forgiving. Another, different, triangle is formed at the end of the story by the wife, the husband, and the friend of the dead lover, Felice, in the form of a narrative riff. The text refers to sexuality as it is embedded in the song lyrics and their double entendre through the use of the Voice, an anonymous character who tells part of the story, yet falls short of being an omniscient narrator. Its gender is voluntarily undefined, problematizing in its elusive persona the sexuality that pervades Harlem and the Jazz Age. As the “songs that used to start in the head and fill the heart had dropped on down, down to places below the sash and the buckled belt” ( J, 56), Alice, Dorcas’s aunt, fears the effect this “lowdown stuff that signaled Imminent Demise,” this music of the devil, has on her niece. ( J, 56). At the close of the novel, the Voice envies the “old-time love” of “grown people” (Joe and Violet?), their secret whispers under the covers as well as the furtive expression of their public love. She then improvises a blues that, on one level, is a plea to a nameless lover, but, on another, addresses the reader: “[…] I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer – that’s the kick” ( J, 229; italics Morrison’s). If the hands holding the book and turning the pages are the reader’s, the final lines are unambiguous. They stress the physical link between the writer and the reader: “I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and

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that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” ( J, 229). The act of reading is an act of loving. It is a constant remaking, a renewal of the relation to the text, one in which pleasure courts jouissance. One also that both evokes and parallels in the letter of the text the pattern of call and response central to jazz performance (Raynaud, 1999). Will the other respond to the call? Will he/she literally let me down? In A Mercy, Morrison pushes her experiment with voice and writing one step further than in Beloved, where the centre of the novel is a threnody: the mingled voices of the mother (Sethe), the daughter (Denver), and the dead daughter (Beloved) that end on the repetition of the line “you are mine” (B, 205–17). A Mercy is composed of six chapters where Florens, the I narrator, writes/speaks in the present tense, interspersed by chapters taken up by the other major characters (Jacob Vaark, his wife Rebekka, and their servants: Lina the Native American, Sorrow the wandering young girl Jacob gives shelter to, and the indentured servants Willard and Scully). A final chapter is devoted to the mother’s plea. The reader only finds out at the end of the novel that what s/he has been reading (Florens’s chapters) coincides with Florens’s own text carved on the walls of the house that her dead master built. They are addressed to her lover, the African blacksmith, whom she realizes cannot read: “Sudden I am remembering. You won’t read my telling. You read the world and not the letters of talk. You don’t know how to. Maybe one day you will learn” (M, 161). In the logic of the address, the words aimed at the lover reach the reader who thus acts as a substitute for that privileged addressee (Raynaud, 2014) – the reader as/is lover. Morrison’s experiment with the erotics of reading spelled out in Jazz is thus prolonged in this narrative choice. Florens’s writing fights rejection (“I am expel”; M, 136) in the same way as reading fights separateness and division. At the end of her last monologue, Florens is about to set fire to the house in which her words are engraved: If you never read this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth. Lina will help. (M, 159)

Destruction by fire, which befalls Cholly’s house in The Bluest Eye, Hannah and Plum in Sula, the district of East St. Louis in Jazz, and Lina’s tribe in A Mercy, is envisioned as an end to writing. Yet Florens ventures

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an alternative: the flight of words and their process of fertilization as ashes whose fragrance can enrich the soil of the earth. The potential regeneration of the American soil recalls the fertile loam of Sula’s lovemaking, a risky balance between soil and water. But the reader also knows otherwise. S/he is reading these words and s/he reads on, to Florens’s mother’s voice in the last chapter, a voice which makes him/her understand that the abandonment was an act of mercy. The reader thus bridges the gap opened by the fragmentation of the narrative voices. He or she can only make the daughter’s longing (her regret) and the mother’s plea (her request) communicate. In her 1996 acceptance speech of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Morrison described the relation between reader and writer as “the peace of the dancing mind”: “The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one” (Denard, 2008: 190). She further phrased that encounter as a touch: “I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s – which is reading” (191; italics added). That dancing is both erotic and linked to freedom and change is made clear by Sethe’s evocation of the slaves “dancing the antelope” in Beloved: “And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma’ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did” (B, 31). “Dancing,” which the reader encounters as a metaphor in Sorrow’s description of Florens’s and the blacksmith’s lovemaking, is thus also how Morrison translates the mutual transformation of two minds through reading and writing. Like reading, writing is a need “to offer the fruits of [her] own imaginative intelligence to another without fear of anything more deadly than disdain” (Denard, 2008: 190). The round then comes full circle in an erotics of reading/writing where touching is both literal and metaphoric. The erotic moments that stage the sensuous in Morrison’s novels are often counterbalanced by deflation, disillusionment, a loss, or an abyss. They are a risk. They are imperiled like (and with) language. Pauline Williams’s rainbow turns into a nightmare. Sula’s lovemaking with Ajax leads her to a possessiveness that is equated with bourgeois conformism, and Ajax leaves. Nel and Sula’s sexual awakening finds its counterpoint in the killing of an innocent black boy. Florens’s lovemaking is a fusion that robs her of her sense of self and leads to her un-touchability, her attitude reminiscent of Milkman’s lover and cousin, Hagar, who kills herself when he leaves her for another in Song of Solomon. These moments are transient, fugitive, furtive. They do not hold. They do not last. They elicit threats of fusion and dissolution. In the excess of dispossession, they conjure up a beckoning morbidity. In their juxtaposition of life to death, they come close to Georges

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Bataille’s definition of eroticism: “Of eroticism, it can be said that it is the approbation of life up until death” (2011: 13). Through incest (The Bluest Eye), murder (Sula), or perversion (Love), they summon up transgression and ultimately the sacred (Andrès, 2009). But that is another essay. Works Cited Andrès, Emmanuelle. “Entre le sacrifice et le sacré: l’écriture de Toni Morrison”. PhD dissertation. Université François-Rabelais, Tours. 2009. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writings. Chicago University Press, 1991. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. —— S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Bataille, Georges. [1957] L’Erotisme. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2011. Bearden, Romare. “The Black Artist and Modern Art.” In David Levering Lewis (ed.). The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Penguin, 1994: 138–41. Bethel, Lorraine, and Barbara Smith (eds). Conditions Five 2.2. The Black Women’s Issue (1979). Carby, Hazel. “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” In Robert G. O’Meally (ed.). The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998: 471–82. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage, 1998. Denard, Carolyn C. Toni Morrison: What Moves at the Margin. Selected Nonfiction. Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 2008. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “The Blank Page and the Issues of Female Creativity.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 243–63. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.” Callaloo 19.2 (1996): 519–36. Gwaltney, John Langston. [1980]. Drylongso: A Self Portrait of America. New York: Norton, 1999. hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. —— Communion: The Female Search for Love. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. —— Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. —— “Selling Hot Pussy.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1992: 61–78. Jay, Karla (ed). Lesbian Erotics. New York University Press, 1995. LeClair, Thomas. “The Language Must Not Sweat: Conversations with Toni Morrison.” In Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.). Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 1994: 119–28.

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Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press, 1984: 53–9. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987 [B]. —— [1970] The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Book, 1993 [BE]. —— Home. New York: Albert Knopf, 2012. —— Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992 [ J]. —— Love. New York: Knopf, 2001 [L]. —— A Mercy. New York: Knopf, 2008 [M]. —— Nobel Lecture. 1993. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html. —— Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998 [P]. —— [1992]. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993. —— Song of Solomon. [1977]. New York: Signet, 1978 [SS]. —— Sula. [1973]. New York: Plume Book, 1982 [S]. —— “Toni Morrison Discusses A Mercy.” National Public Radio interview with Lynn Neary. October 27, 2008. Raynaud, Claudine. “Ecriture et syncope: la femme noire dans la ville, ou Jazz avec Cane.” In Sophie Marret (ed.). Masculin/Féminin. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999: 275–89. —— “‘Like a Nutmeg Nestled in its Covering of Mace’: Audre Lorde’s Zami.” In Celeste Schenck and Bella Brodzki (eds). Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988: 221–42. —— “Paroles de pierre: lire A Mercy (avec Derrida).” In Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika et al. (eds.). Toni Morrison: au-delà du visible ordinaire/Toni Morrison: Beyond the Ordinary Visible. Vincennes (France): Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2014. —— “The Summer of the Beautiful Black Boys.” Paper presented at the Symposium of the German Association for American Studies, Berlin, Kennedy Institute, June 1992. Manuscript. —— “Toni Morrison: Site and Memory.” Regards croisés sur les Afro-Américains/ Cross-Perspectives on African Americans: Hommage à Michel Fabre. In Claude Julien (ed.). GRAAT 27 (April 2003): 219–36. Revised and reprinted as “The Pursuit of Memory.” In Justine Tally and Adrienne Seward (eds). Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Toni Morrison’s 80th Birthday. Presented to the author on February 18, 2010, at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Sherard, Tracey. “Women’s Classic Blues in Toni Morrions’s Jazz: Cultural Artifact as Narrator.” Genders 31 (2000). www.genders.org/g31/g31_sherard. html. Shockley, Ann Allen. [1974]. Loving Her. Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1997.

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Smith, Barbara. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2.2 (1979): 183–94. —— Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. 1st edn. New York: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press, 1983; 2nd edn. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 2000. Smith, Barbara, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell Scott (eds). All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982. Spillers, Hortense J. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. 1987. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003: 152–75. Tate, Claudia. (ed.). Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Turpin, Cherie Ann. How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and Sensual Love: Rhetorically Transcending the Boundaries of Language (Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dionne Brand). Lewiston, NY: The Mellen Press, 2010. Walker, Alice. “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression Within the Work(s): An Excerpt.” In Barbara Smith, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell-Scott (eds). All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982: 37–44. Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” African American Literary Forum 16.1 (1982): 34–42.

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10 Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body Laura Sarnelli (University of Naples “L’Orientale”)

The theoretical concept of melancholia has recently received heightened critical attention in the field of race and postcolonial studies. As an emotional reaction to the denial of the loss of a loved object, be it a person, a place, or an ideal, melancholia gives shape to a “constellation of affect” or a “structure of feeling” encompassing the individual and the collective, the psychic and the social (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003: 3). As such, it has emerged as a crucial touchstone for subjective as well as political formations. In particular, melancholia has been deployed to unravel the complex mechanisms of national formation and racial identification. In Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy draws a rather grim picture of this passion which would lie in Europe’s inability to mourn its loss of its empire, thus resulting in a process of historical amnesia. This is reflected, on the one hand, in the euphoric celebrations of the victories of a declining postcolonial regime and, on the other, in the hostility towards migrants who represent at the same time the reminder of pain for its loss and guilt for its violent management (2005: 102–17). This blending of omnipotence and guilt that constitutes the melancholia of the former colonizers is also explored in the context of American culture by Anne Cheng, who proposes a concept of racial melancholy as a process affecting both dominant and subordinate groups. According to Cheng, racial melancholia implies a double perspective. On the one hand, dominant white identity produces itself by projecting outside a lost racial other which is incorporated and rejected at the same time in order to legitimize white superiority; hence, the racist nation state swallows up the racial object, expelling what it cannot forget – colonialism, slavery, genocide – as it does not fit in its democratic ideology. On the other, formerly colonized subjects and ethnic minorities also run the risk of remaining suspended forever in the melancholic process of assimilation/identification and expulsion/denial as they are forced to assimilate an

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impossible lost ideal of whiteness. Melancholy implies identification with the object towards which one feels resentment, in this case the colonizer; this internalization of the dominant ideal and its accompanying denigration is the work of racial melancholia for the raced subject (2000: 9–11). Thus, if white melancholia is based on a process of amnesia and repression, black melancholia is based on a process of introjected racism.1 In this respect, Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon was the first to consider, though indirectly, the process of racial identification as a painful melancholic act. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a traumatic event – the lived experience of racism in France – is represented through the image of a wound inflicted on his body “spattered” with black blood and reduced into fragments before the white child’s exclamation, “Mama, look, a Negro!” As Fanon wonders: “What else could be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? […] My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (1994: 112–13). The memory of the alienated and offended body is a form of what Fanon defines “epidermalization” (11): on the one hand, a violent inscription of race on the skin; on the other, a subaltern internalization of this inferiority so that the white becomes an ideal self to the black subject who tries to make up for his supposed inferiority by donning a white mask. The metaphor of the wound which Fanon uses to describe this psychotic condition is also used by Freud to figure melancholia: “the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies […] and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (1995: 589). Yet, if for Freud the image of the wound connotes a “form of psychic suffering” (587), for Fanon it appears in a different light as it is charged with political meaning. That which wounds is no longer a general “psychic impoverishment” but rather the overload produced by the failed recognition of one’s humanity. Beyond the concept of melancholia as a pathological dehumanizing process, this chapter tries to explore the possibility to grant agency to those bodies painfully ruined by the “grim face” of the melancholy of the nation state, those “ghosts in the machine” (Morrison, 1989: 11) – the unspoken black presence – that constantly resist its expulsive practices. This chapter offers a tentative answer by tracing a theoretical framework for considering the transformative and innovative power of the melancholic process and its 1 Melancholia as a constitutive psychic mechanism of subjectivity has also been theorized in relation to gender and sexuality. Judith Butler analyses the formation of gender identity and the institution of compulsory heterosexuality as a product of this melancholic framework in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) and in The Psychic Life of Power: Theory in Subjection (1997).

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relation to desire as a means of political resistance. Actually, even Fanon seems to foreshadow this positive form of melancholia through a process of political commitment and resistance which leads to the exhortation to anti-colonial revolution. This process is interesting as it always begins with the disalienating recognition of one’s body: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” The biology of a body which, though refused and disfigured, lives on, is an appeal proof to those who want to eschew the subaltern identification with their persecutors. In other words, melancholy can be a starting point, rather than an ending point. Following Ranjana Khanna’s philosophical conceptualizations, this study examines the positive implications of postcolonial melancholia that is no longer conceived as paralyzing morbidity but rather as a theoretical tool that criticizes colonialism and its aftermath. According to Khanna, postcolonial melancholia represents “the ghostly workings of the unresolved conflict within the colonial subject” (2003: 30), by which she means that colonized people are unable to mourn the loss of their culture as the latter is made invisible or unknown by Western hegemony. The loss of cultural memory or the inability to find signifiers for themselves leads colonized people to incorporate the objects of the colonizers. It is at this moment that the melancholic subject develops critical agency. Triggered by a remainder that cannot be assimilated, critical agency shows itself in “the unworking of conformity and into the critique of the status quo” (23). It could be supposed that critical agency takes on the form of desire: the loss which remains in melancholia can become part of the emerging desire. This desire becomes the unconscious response to the loss of an ideal corresponding to the right to humanity, subjecthood, and recognition. In other words, not only can melancholia be implosive – that is, dehumanizing – but also, and most importantly, imaginative – that is, humanizing. Melancholia is ominous when it changes into an obstinate denial of loss or into oblivion. By contrast, it excels when imagination prevails and allows grief to be carried out through forms of behavior that are “anomalous,” namely unusual, multifaceted and unstable. The literary production of some African American and Caribbean authors – including Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Dionne Brand – shows this possibility of imaginary representations which can overcome the implosive implications of melancholia leading to the denial of the humanity of the other. Conversely, these creative representations reveal a conception of a deeply embodied temporality produced by pleasurable relations between black bodies haunted by ecstasy and not solely by loss. In this analysis, gender becomes a central condition and signifier of difference. In particular, by focusing on the representation of the black woman’s body, the novels under scrutiny foreshadow how melancholic states – both their cultural

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and personal dimension – become states of desire predicated upon a call for humanity and a claim for the recognition of unassimilable lost objects. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison explores a form of pathological melancholia where loss causes its protagonist to be reduced to less than human. The novel portrays the dramatic experience of a little black girl and her family against the backdrop of the racist America of the 1940s. Considered ugly by her family and community, ignored by her mother, raped and impregnated by her father, Pecola’s story exemplifies the Fanonian idea of the black self ’s psychotic condition resulting from the failed identification with the white other. Pecola, in fact, internalizes her culture’s standard of whiteness, believing that she would have been accepted and loved by her community if she had looked like Shirley Temple or the Mary Jane candies she adores. Forced to assimilate the ideal of white beauty, she is thereby haunted by an obsessive wish for their blue eyes. Eventually, only a psychotic break allows Pecola to attain the imagined beauty that society sanctions; indeed, she believes her desire to be fulfilled and ends up going mad and being relegated to the edges of the black community. In Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison overcomes this grim vision by introducing the concept of a potentially imaginative melancholia which foreshadows a humanizing process of identity formation. Dedicated to the memory of the millions of slaves who died during the Middle Passage and slavery, while staging a traumatic story of infanticide, the novel casts melancholy as both collective and personal, cultural and psychological. In her discussion of the African female slave and her progeny in the American context, Hortense J. Spillers points out that those who have suffered the abduction and “the theft of the body” need a critical memory that can recreate the imaginary presence of the wounded body (1987: 67). According to Saidiya Hartman, any healing practice of the wounded black body produced by slavery involves a process of remembering which has to involve the actual recognition of the hurt and injured body: The recognition of loss is a crucial element in redressing the breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a remembering of the pained body, not by way of a simulated wholeness but precisely through the recognition of the amputated body in its amputatedness, in the insistent recognition of the violated body as human flesh, in the cognition of its needs, and in the anticipation of its liberty. In other words, it is the ravished body that holds out the restitution of the body […] The (counter) investment in the body as a site of need, desire, and pleasure and the constancy of unmet needs, repressed desires and the shortcomings of pleasure are articulated in the very endeavor to heal the flesh and redress the pained body. (Hartman, 1997: 74–5)

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Hartman considers American culture as a scene of subjection as well as melancholia, a space in which the exposition of the wound enables “unmet needs” and “repressed desires” to be felt and grieved, thus allowing a redressing of pain. In other words, only by exhibiting the cut and its scar can melancholia restore the black subject’s humanity.2 In Beloved productive melancholia emerges through the image of the scar which is both metaphorical and real: as a mark and reminder of the whippings and tortures suffered, the scar appears on the back of Sethe, a fugitive slave who kills her daughter in order to save her from slavery, and on the broken neck of the baby girl who comes back to recall the memory of her murdering. The scar represents the remembrance of grief, the traumatic event of slavery; yet, beyond its dehumanizing meaning of inflicted violence on the body, it takes on a productive connotation in the singular form of a chokecherry tree in full blossom on Sethe’s back. The scar becomes a site of erotic connection when touched by Sethe’s lover Paul D; a vital site of regeneration and ‘re-memory.’ Creative melancholia is metaphorically represented by this concept of re-memory: what is lost and gone and yet remains. Re-memory alludes to the capacity to recreate the past in the present and connotes involuntary shared remembrance of what no longer exists or has been forgotten: “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” (46–7)

The process Morrison refers to is potentially innovative as it is not isolated in a single mind overwhelmed by delirium, but rather in a communal structure in the shape of a scar. The melancholic remainder in Beloved appears as an embodied desire which takes on the shape of a ghost made of flesh and blood. Not only is the baby-ghost humanized but also eroticized as she is represented in the form of a girl endlessly craving flesh, food, love, recognition: indeed, the girl has “a touch no heavier than a feather but loaded, nevertheless, with desire”; “Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes” (58). Her relationship with Sethe is from the first moment erotic, reaching its climax in her sensual and murderous embrace in the clearing. Significantly, the lost object – the forgotten past of slavery – surfaces through the erotic arousal of the body, and it is Beloved who provokes the erotic unfolding of Sethe’s past, the 2 On the notion of the scar as a metaphor for creative melancholia, see Sarnelli (2011: 186–98).

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sensual retelling of her scar. Re-memory, i.e., creative melancholia, is thus represented as an erotic experience. This is also explored through Baby Suggs’s “call” in the clearing in which she exhorts the members of the black community to feel and perceive their own bodies, historically deprived of their experience of desire, as a source of pleasure and ecstasy: “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard” (88). As Audre Lorde shows in her celebrated “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” it is the power of the erotic, the lived experience of desire, that grants human agency to the black female subject: The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. (Lorde, 1984: 55)

Lorde defines the erotic as an empowering creative force halfway between self-consciousness and the “chaos” of the strongest feelings. This force proves to be a practical and intellectual tool allowing women to contest systems of oppression within the context of patriarchal and heterosexist models of power-knowledge.3 Echoing Lorde, Baby Suggs’s celebration of life aims at overcoming disabling melancholy by summoning up the power of the erotic of the black body as an imaginative and humanizing resource of agency. The potential of this creative eroticized melancholia is even more evident in the work of Caribbean Canadian author Dionne Brand. Her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) stages a story similar to Beloved both in its depiction of the separation between a mother and a child under inhuman conditions and in the ghostly presences it evokes. The novel tells the story of a mother, a nineteenth-century Trinidadian slave, who organizes a passionate act of rebellion against the white master, which results in a mass suicide. Unlike Morrison’s Sethe, she sends her young daughter Bola off to safety in a remote place, where Bola begets numerous offspring, later scattered throughout the world, and who will be haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression. Dionne Brand’s spectral erotic bodies challenge the hostility of forgetting. The abandoned Bola echoes Beloved in her description of a desiring body craving sensual pleasure; her body in fact lusts for everything she sees and touches, even for her own flesh: 3 On the power of the erotic for the black female body in the context of Caribbean diaspora, see Sarnelli (2010: 99–113).

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What her eyes touched she craved, craving raw like a tongue, and pinned to one look, one shadow, one movement of an almond leaf, one wave, one man, one woman with a fish basket, one moment. And soon forgotten. She moved to the next lust […] lust for everything she saw […] and lust for her own flesh. She would knead her soft thighs and smooth them in her fingers for hours. […] She only took note of her senses […]. (Brand, 1999: 67)

Yet, this erotic enjoyment of the body does not involve sorrowful melancholia, since “she was not faithful to sorrow only to a muscular yearning for everything her eyes touched” (ibid.). Melancholia is handed down to Bola’s descendants who keep on refusing to mourn their losses, thus enabling them to recover the fractured remains of a lost cultural history.4 As some critics have argued, the combined denial and incapability of racialized subjects simply to let go of past grief must be seen, beyond a pathological attachment to the past, as a “militant refusal” that lies at the heart of “melancholia’s productive potentials” (Eng and Han, 2003: 365; Kaplan, 2007). Actually, the melancholic’s desire for the lost object has emerged as one of contemporary African American literature’s subversive and resistant ways of claiming the black self and history (Tettenborn, 2006). In her novel A Mercy (2008), Toni Morrison returns to the theme of the mother–daughter relationship to offer an even more striking depiction of cultural melancholia. The novel could be seen as a re-memory of the early history of European colonialism in America. Set in the late seventeenth century in Virginia, when the slave trade was at its dawn, the story relates how an enslaved mother gives up her daughter to an Anglo-Dutch planter (Jacob Vaark) in order to save her from her wicked master. She perceives Jacob’s compassionate nature and he in turn realizes the grief hidden behind this maternal gesture, and accepts the girl as an act of mercy. The story unfolds as the girl becomes part of a group of laborers on Jacob’s Protestant settler plantation, animated by a spirit of solidarity and compassion. There are two other slaves: Lina, a Native American woman whose tribe was wiped out by smallpox, and Sorrow, a young woman with an equally traumatized and enigmatic past at sea. There are also two indentured white servants, homosexual men who escaped hardships in England by coming to the colonies. Similarly, the white mistress of the household, Rebekka, has avoided religious persecution in England by traveling to the colonies to marry Jacob, an orphan who left the poorhouses to find financial security abroad. A Mercy shows a community of damaged souls encompassing black slaves, white indentured servants, Native Americans, a freed black craftsman, and 4 For a detailed discussion of melancholia connected to the issue of pleasure and desire in Dionne Brand’s work, see Sarnelli (2014).

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diverse white settlers who form a sort of “companionship out of isolation” (156). In the afterword to a collection of essays by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian entitled Loss, Judith Butler argues that “loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community, where community does not overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community” (Butler, 2003: 468). If loss is the precondition of some communities, then longing is the affect to which that loss gives rise (467). Actually, Butler draws attention to the potentials of productive melancholia by relating it to the notion of desire: the melancholic’s ambivalent attachment to the lost loved object as an emotional reaction to the impossible and always deferred mourning of it opens up a space of desire in which the melancholic reaches some form of agency. Morrison’s novel displays different kinds of losses: loss of the mother, loss of the homeland, loss of origins, all of which are confronted by the characters’ attempts to reclaim their own desires expressed variously through maternal care, homosexual love, and erotic passion. This creative form of melancholia is shown, for instance, in Willard and Scully, who can survive their expatriation from England and the sufferings of indentured slavery in their mutual love by desiring each other. The melancholic Sorrow, an orphaned little girl of mixed race who was brought up as a male on a ship by her father, can overcome the psychotic condition of her split identity (she lives with her imaginary alter ego Twin) by addressing her affection and love towards her newborn baby, thus becoming “Complete.” Yet, the novel seems to explore the potentially alienating nature of desire, which also brings about loss and grief. Florens is a lovesick teenage slave who experiences several kinds of loss. Abandoned by her mother, she spends her life believing that she has been cast off because she was not sufficiently loved, or rejected in favor of her baby brother. Florens is unable properly to mourn the severing of the maternal tie, thus incorporating this denied loss which becomes a remainder of unresolved grief. Indeed, her first-person narration is often interrupted by dreams and memories of her mother: That night I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I know I am missing much. (3–4)

She tries to overcome the traumatic memory of her abandonment by addressing her cathectic energies towards her lover, a blacksmith she is sent in search of, on an allegorical journey. This form of passionate erotic desire is revealed in the craving for both her own pleasure and her lover’s body: “No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me” (136). She

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describes her passion in terms of hunger and appetite: “The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. […] My eyes not my stomach are the hungry parts of me” (28). Yet, the impossibility to mourn her first loss causes her to undergo a second loss which throws her into a state of depression and misery. The blacksmith, in fact, rejects her after she has harmed the foundling he has taken in. She also embodies a form of racial melancholia: she tells him that her dehumanization began when she was undone by the traumatizing white gaze – “Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes” (113) – where she sees the image of herself as the “Black Man’s minion” against which a little white girl, recalling Fanon, cries: “it scares me it scares me” (113). These probing eyes decide if her black skin makes her a witch. The violence of the racist gaze is total, as Florens points out: “it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. I know my withering is born in the Widow’s closet” (160). In that very moment, the “outside dark” – the color of her skin – becomes the “inside dark” (115), the dehumanizing wilderness. Yet, Florens reaches a form of agency and subjectivity only through the telling of her story, even though she narrates haunting loss and traumatic “othering” by the white gaze. Significantly, her lover is the one to whom she addresses her tale: “See? You are correct. A minha mãe too. I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last” (161). Florens’s last desire – to tell her mother her story and also to know what her mother is telling her – seems to be fulfilled in the closing tale in which her mother addresses her. The mother tells Florens that what seemed to be an unnatural motherly act was, on the contrary, a painful act of unconditional love, committed in order to save her from the hardships of plantation and from a future of sexual slavery. Indeed, it could be guessed that gender oppression is much more at issue than racism in A Mercy, as the mother tries to explain to her daughter, who is the result of a rape: “to be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below” (163). In A Mercy, Morrison offers an alternative way of being which challenges the history of slavery in America. Indeed, one key point that had been adumbrated in Beloved was that slavery as a system is not exclusively racially coded. In the present novel this is forcefully explored by depicting a period in which racism was not yet institutionalized, when there was seemingly no hierarchy between black and white, and enslavement was a common experience for both. Significantly, the novel traces the process of racialization as a means of rationalizing slavery. Throughout the novel, these racially fluid relations of labor exploi-

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tation are progressively reorganized into a strictly dualistic distinction between “Europes” and “Africs” (46). Slavery requires a reclassification of the captured African from “person” to “black” (165), from human being to “a thing apart” (115), to be institutionalized. As the African mother powerfully observes when she is first forced into slavery: “unreason rules here” (164). Morrison grants her characters a form of melancholic critical agency that reveals the dehumanizing racial (and gender) logic by simply unfolding its mechanism. Plunging into the primordial history which brought the very inception of the condition of loss to the fore, Morrison offers an investigation of what I would define as a ‘proto-culture of melancholia.’ Significantly, in A Mercy, which depicts a period in which power structures and race/gender systems have not yet become established, nobody seems to be immune to melancholy; blacks and whites, women and men, homosexuals and heterosexuals prove prone to it alike.5 These literary texts show neither blackness nor femaleness to be the source of melancholia, but rather, being “othered” by the traumatizing white/racist or male/sexist gaze to be the source of pain and unresolved grief. This is exemplified in Florens’s and her mother’s melancholia in the context of slavery’s earliest days just as it is in the context of its later days in Beloved, Sethe’s story starting at a time when the Middle Passage and the institutionalization of slavery are well-established (and ending during Reconstruction). Racial and postcolonial melancholia variously pervade and structure those cultures and communities which have been defined by histories of traumatic losses in terms of identity, place, ideals, as well as by other forms of violence in terms of racist, sexist, or nationalist oppression. By tracing a “geopolitics” of mourning and melancholia, that is, a situated, non-universalizing theory of mourning and melancholia which takes into account the different historical times and contexts of their emergence (Gana, 2001: 182), one would argue that melancholic states are not equivalent in American and European contexts, given the different historical formations which have shaped contemporary world orders. Yet, some common ground can be envisaged. As David L. Eng has pointed out: In a Western social order configured by unattainable ideals of whiteness – a world Frantz Fanon summarizes through the social imperative “turn 5 Significantly, Rebekka and Jacob, the mistress and master of the farm, also become affected by melancholy. Rebekka goes through a depressive form of melancholia after coping with the wilderness, the deaths of three infant children and of a five-year-old daughter, and her husband’s untimely dying, until she addresses her grief and resentment toward her slaves to whom she had been humane so far. Against the grain of other readings, it cannot wholly be excluded that Jacob, a “merciful” colonizer and slave trader, comes back from beyond the grave to haunt the mansion in the shape of a melancholy soul.

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white or disappear” – assimilation into dominant society for people of color means the acquiescence to racial self-erasure. (Eng, 2000: 1279)

Fanon’s examples of colonial melancholia in the 1950s taken from experiences in French Martinique, France, and Algeria bring us back to the question of melancholia and postcolonial identities as theorized by Paul Gilroy. Europe’s inability to mourn the loss of empire has resulted in a “post-imperial melancholia” which embodies the pathological condition of Western political cultures dominated by anxiety over multiculturalism, hate against the immigrant, and a denial of colonial violence and brutality. As has been pointed out, in the context of American culture, racial and gender melancholia is brought about by America’s failure properly to mourn the centrality of slavery in the development of the nation’s polity (Flax, 2010: 8). This entails a contemporary politics of domination and liberalism based on asymmetrical power relations along race and gender grids. The denied acknowledgment of the importance of slavery resides in the fact that the United States refuses the troublesome and awkward recognition of two losses: its exceptionalism – the idea of “a state uniquely born into and from freedom” (7) – and the belief that dominant groups’ privileged position has been gained through individual merit and effort (3). Imbalances in power relations and domination in terms of race and gender differences can be overcome only if the United States proves able adequately to mourn those losses that slavery and its aftermath have inflicted on society and subjectivities. Toni Morrison accomplishes this task by placing the question of slavery at the centre of the American political unconscious. Indeed, her texts aim at investigating the potentials of those strategies of reaction to loss which allow forms of agency mediating between the rigid stances of inconsolability or “impossible mourning” on the one hand, and “militant sadness” or chronic melancholia on the other. Her narratives seem to perform what Ranjana Khanna has defined “critical melancholia,” namely, a reading practice and an epistemological tool that unveils the violence of colonial discourse which has produced a dominant self in opposition to a concealed “dark continent”; its aim is to acknowledge the unsaid and repressed colonial subject who hauntingly appears as an ethical demand of human agency. This ethical claim is clearly expressed, again, in A Mercy by the enslaved mother who, remembering her atrocious experience of the Middle Passage, delivers a message to her lost daughter which even today addresses all of us: “To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing” (167).

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Works Cited Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Knopf, 1999. Butler, Judith. “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” In David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds). Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003: 467–73. —— Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. —— The Psychic Life of Power: Theory in Subjection. Stanford University Press, 1997. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford University Press, 2000. Eng, David L. “Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century.” Signs 25.4 (2000): 1275–81. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. “Introduction: Mourning Remains.” In David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds). Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003: 1–25. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” In David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds). Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003: 343–71. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. —— Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Flax, Jane. Resonances of Slavery in Race/Gender Relations: Shadow at the Heart of American Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. “Trauer und Melancholie.” Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, vol. 4. Vienna, 1916–17: 288–301. —— “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Peter Gay (ed.). The Freud Reader. W. W. Norton and Company, 1995: 584–9. Gana, Nouri. Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. [2004] New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Gorton, Kristyn. “Desire, Duras, and Melancholia: Theorizing Desire After the ‘Affective Turn’.” Feminist Review 89 (2008): 16–33. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kaplan, Sara Clarke. “Souls at the Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia.” Callaloo 30.2 (2007): 511–28. Khanna, Ranjana. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. —— “Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance.” Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006).

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Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984: 53–9. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. —— The Bluest Eye. New York: Knopf, 1970. —— A Mercy. New York: Knopf, 2008. —— “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (1989): 1–34. Sarnelli, Laura. “Dionne Brand: The Pleasure of Melancholia.” MaComère 15.1 (2014). —— “Eroto-histories and Counter-Memories of Violence in Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers.” Anglistica AION 14. 1 (2010): 99–113. —— “The Scar and its Borders. Melancholic Forgetting and Embodied Memory.” La freccia e il cerchio/The Arrow and the Circle, Memoria/Limite, Due/Two. Naples: La scuola di Pitagora, 2011: 171–98. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64–81. Tettenborn, Éva. “Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature.” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 101–21.

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11 Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire, and Doing Rebecka Rutledge Fisher (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

In this chapter, I examine how Richard Wright, in The Man Who Lived Underground (1944), puts into practice what Paul Ricoeur describes as metaphor’s knowledge of its relation to being.1 The poetics I describe are evident not in this novella alone; they appear in many familiar works of African American literature throughout the modern period.2 While this chapter cannot, of course, lay claim to a comprehensive study that presents an exhaustive overview of all the texts that constitute this literary tradition; my hope is that my analysis will suggest a theory of metaphor alive in Wright’s work, a theory that I elsewhere develop more fully as I examine other African American texts equally concerned with the poetics of black being.3 Wright, who highly valued and regularly profited from textual metaphors that revealed both a critical ontology and a critical epistemology, calls our attention to metaphorical matters when he opines in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) that the “image and emotion” of literature “possess a logic of their own” (2004: 1410).4 He insists that affect and imagery – including figures of language such as conceptual metaphors – are capable of granting form, meaning, and access to a new and better world. Underground paradoxically points the way to life in such a world through the complexities of its philosophical metaphors. I see Wright’s metaphor of psychic and bodily descent as emblematic of archetypal ontological metaphors of death and life, 1 See Ricoeur (1977). 2 One need think of only a few prominent names and titles to grasp the gist of the point: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789); Frances Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life (1872); W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903); and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). 3 Please see my forthcoming work (Fisher, 2014). 4 Parenthetical page numbers refer to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd edition. Parenthetical pages references for The Man Who Lived Underground are also drawn from this anthology.

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guilt and freedom, time and space, memory and oblivion that facilitate the African American text’s existential demands. It may first be good to contextualize the concept of “being” and its relationship to metaphor before providing a more pointed discussion of metaphorical expressions of black being in Wright’s novella. Martin Heidegger, whose philosophical writings Wright began studying in earnest in the 1940s (and this in spite of Heidegger’s racism), was the twentieth century’s foremost Western philosopher of the concept. In Being and Time (1929), Heidegger presents “Being-in-the-world” as a quasi-spiritual concept that is central to understanding human existence (2008: 83). It not only signifies being in relation to other worldly entities (whether living or inanimate), but also indicates the quality of concern that is constitutive of human being, which Heidegger calls “Dasein.” Dasein is characterized by its historicity as well as its care and concern, which are crucial ways of Being-in-the-world (83); Heidegger uses concern as an “ontological term for existentiale” (ibid.). Care, he writes, “is always concern and solicitude if only privately” (238–9). Heidegger conceived Dasein as a rejection of both Aristotelian categories of being (including the notion of “essence”) and universalist notions of “Being” that came about in the works of Kant and Hegel. Like Nietzsche, he sought to refute such absolutist notions, and would do so later in his oeuvre by placing Being “under erasure” – the sous rature adapted, somewhat differently, by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967) – showing both the unreliability of the term and its indispensability. Yet Heidegger’s later thinking on humanitas does not “think” the essence of human being in ways adequately radical to deconstructing the privileging of what might be called white Western being. For instance, in 1947, Heidegger intended to recuperate a sense of universal humanism once its earlier degenerated form had been put to rest. Thus he proposed a renascent humanism that cherished not an absolute sense of being but a pluralistic humanist perspective. Heidegger articulated this proposition in his “Letter on Humanism.” Written in response to a query from Jean Beaufret, a French philosopher who had posed a number of questions regarding phenomenology, significant among them the question of how to restore meaning to the term “humanism,” Heidegger argues: Your question not only presupposes a desire to retain the word “humanism” but also contains an admission that this word has lost its meaning […] The same thinking that has led us to this insight into the questionable essence of humanism has likewise compelled us to think the essence of man more primordially. With regard to this more essential humanitas of homo humanus there arises the possibility of restoring to the word “humanism”

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a historical sense that is older than its oldest meaning chronologically reckoned. (Heidegger, 2008: 247)

Though Heidegger claims the project of conceptualizing a “primordial” man, a conceptualization that will, he argues, restore to humanism its sense and purpose even as it avoids the pitfalls of a false metaphysics, he continues to embrace a conceptualization that focuses almost exclusively on white Western human beings. As Heidegger explains in On the Way to Language, “I was trying to think the nature of phenomenology in a more originary manner, so as to fit it in this way back into the place that is properly its own within Western philosophy” (1971: 9; my emphasis). Given his purposeful situation of his project at what he considers the origins of Western philosophy alone (to the exclusion of non-Western philosophies), his vision of homo humanus is not anterior to or conceived radically against concepts of race and racialized being that crystallized in the metaphysics of the West during the modern era. Indeed, as Heidegger indicates, his own conceptualization of being remains largely ascribed to the confines of white European historicity without challenging its limits. Rather, Western historicity is, for him, the “standard conception” (102). Heidegger’s “neighborhood” of Western being, the purportedly originary one from which all others are cast as simply derivative, appears to remain segregated, a gated community in which black being is neither welcome nor recognized. Metaphor, which Heidegger ultimately rejected as locked within an outmoded version of metaphysics and which Derrida critiqued for its linkages to what he called a “white [Western] mythology,”5 may nonetheless push past these gates. This is, at least, the way in which I see conceptual metaphors at work in Wright’s novella. Wright’s metaphors are inherently ontological and onto-theological. For their functioning, they depend, either implicitly or explicitly, upon the verb “to be,” and thus they broadly reflect upon human existence. They also speak to one’s place in the world (even as one seeks to negotiate the gap between temporality and the atemporal), or a sense of displacement from it, since they not only voice proscribed black being in the face of anti-black racial oppression, but also deviate from accepted conventions of language and thus challenge traditional categories of meaning, a movement that I examine critically here. In Wright’s novella, such metaphors are employed to project a sense of being that is not simply concerned with what Heidegger calls “private” care, but care, and more importantly caring action, in the public sphere. Specifically, Wright crafts conceptual metaphors as part of his call for concerted moral, humanistic action against Jim Crow discrimination, racial 5

See Derrida (1982), passim, and Heidegger (1991: 48).

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and economic injustice, and segregation. Such emphasis is lacking in most European and American treatises on being. Jean-Paul Sartre is, of course, a notable exception in this regard, though his own work on the topic has not escaped the criticism of Frantz Fanon, for instance.6 While I underscore throughout this chapter that a sense of noetic movement (from one pole of thought to another) provides for Wright’s metaphorical expressions and their possibilities – a notion that correlates well with Ralph Ellison’s more pointed concept of and insistence upon human possibilities7 – I also emphasize that such movement is specifically conceived in response to the harsh realities of American and global racial injustice. In Paris, Wright would, of course, become Sartre’s friend and interlocutor. By the time Beaufret introduced Heidegger’s work to a circle of French intellectuals, Wright had already discovered Heidegger for himself, having asked Dorothy Norman, the prominent photographer and author, “to instruct him on existentialism and the writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, whom she had read. She invited […] Hannah Arendt over so that they could discuss the topic with him” (Fabre, 1993: 299). Importantly, Wright did not look to Heidegger for inspiration on ways to theorize black being, but appraised Heidegger as he engaged various thinkers also contemplating the complex problems of being in the modern world. In light of Wright’s thinking on black existence, I underscore a characteristic element of Wright’s poetics and the central metaphor of his novella: the habitation of the chthonian world. This trope has, of course, attracted the attention of many of Wright’s critics, who largely see it as Wright’s bleak and pessimistic judgment of the world’s sorry state of affairs. Indeed, in the past decade the novella seems to have fallen out of critical favor. Bibliographies on Wright up to 2008 revealed few analyses of the novella published during the first decade of this century. A number of notable studies of Wright have emerged over the past twenty-five years, yet these, too, seem to overlook the novella, though some gesture towards it.8 Eugene Miller’s Voice of a Native Son (1990) remains focused on Wright’s poetics and does present a thorough reading of Underground. Drawing upon Wright’s own words, Miller underscores the ways in which Wright sought to push art “‘beyond 6 See Fanon’s well-known essay, “L’Expérience vécue du Noir” (1952). 7 See Ellison (1995), passim. 8 See, for instance, studies by Joyce (1986); Miller (1990); and JanMohamed (2005). Joyce, though her book is entitled Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy, does not focus on Wright’s oeuvre at large, but solely upon Native Son. No mention is made of Underground, nor is any but passing mention made of Wright’s other works of long fiction. JanMohamed, who moves with chronological acuity through Wright’s major works, gives no critical attention whatsoever to the novella, though it would seem quite germane to the thrust of his book (an omission he explains: 303 n. 15).

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mere contemplation. In short its expression must become an objective act, having immediacy as its aim’” (1990: xviii). This sort of understanding of Wright’s poetics is central to reading Underground, and accords with my analysis, since I view Wright as moving the reader toward a sense of moral outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader toward constructive social action. However, Miller views guilt as the unifying “symbol” of Underground, a reading I cannot support, first because guilt itself cannot be a symbol, though it may be a major theme or conceit that is symbolized in various ways. Further, I see the novella proposing a number of ontological metaphors that emerge from the symbolic opposition of chaos and cosmos, as I argue here. Though his method is quite different from mine, Houston Baker’s reading of the novella, which insists upon a tropology of the “black (w)hole,” and thus a metaphorics of consciousness, echoes my intention here, though I differ slightly. In my reading, the task Wright sets before the reader is that of discerning the affinities of metaphorical language and human being, even as they are condensed in the weathered patina of the tragic anti-hero. The tonal images and sedimented emotions of The Man Who Lived Underground form a tropological stream of discourse in which the novella not only probes its own status as a work of art but also demonstrates the ways in which Wright’s theory and practice of metaphor touch on and contribute to broader philosophical issues of the crises of social belonging, the liminality of black existence, and the historicity of black being.9 We may infer Wright’s position on this question by referring to “Blueprint,” his major statement on African American aesthetics. “Blueprint” considers African American expression, including folklore, Spirituals, and the blues, to be a font of “racial wisdom” (2004: 1405), and makes clear Wright’s belief that the Negro’s consciousness stemmed from the black church and African American folklore. Yet he also argues that, since the Civil War, the black church has functioned as an inadequate and even deceptive “antidote for suffering and denial” (1404). While he allows that religion constituted an important element of early black radicalism and nationalism, Wright argues that Negroes of his own day were still apt to regard the church as the source of “their only sense of the whole universe, [and their] only relation to society and mind” (ibid.). Such over-dependence upon black religion and black folklore for the development of the Negro’s Weltanschauung is as manifest in black nationalism as it is in black institutions such as “a Negro church […] a Negro social world […] in short, a Negro way of life in America,” Wright insists (1406). Though African Americans did not ask for these separate 9 Of course, as critics have noted, the use of ontological metaphorics takes place throughout the tradition of African American poetry and prose alike, yet most focus on the inventiveness of these metaphors rather than their philosophical import.

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social institutions, Wright states, they are compelled to accept them as integral to a way of life that has been forced upon them by the oppressive social and political systems of the southern United States, especially. Wright, framing writing as praxis – as “doing” – insists that African American writers must, in turn, embrace black nationalism and its constituent elements – including religious expression – “not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them” (1406). Though the black folk were full of potential as a natural proletariat, they were also guilty because they refused the power of choice that was endemic to modern freedom: they could choose to move beyond nationalism; they could choose a broader form of thought. Instead, in Wright’s view, they had refused the self-consciousness and awareness that Du Bois seems to accept as intrinsic to the black folk expression that founds black nationalism itself, at least in Wright’s genealogy of the concept. Wright argued, for instance, that such expression, especially the Spirituals, could help them transcend the worldly limits of racism and oppression. It constituted a way of attaining, however tenuously, a state of psychic freedom and the realities of bodily freedom. Du Bois, too, recognized the signal importance of folk expression in American culture, but refused to call for its sublimation,10 as did a number of his contemporaries, including James Weldon Johnson.11 Having completed his exposition of the Spirituals in the final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois linked them directly to the cause of democracy and saw them as cultural expressions that could help obliterate the global color-line. This is why, perhaps, we note that sharp shift in tone near the conclusion of Souls, when Du Bois, after providing one of the earliest critical treatments of the Spirituals, including its existential metaphorics of liberty, exile, and calls to agency, abruptly and brashly interrogates whites’ supposed sole possession of freedom, which they ensured by claiming a racially exclusive national identity. “Your country? How came it yours?” Du Bois queries incisively, before launching a searing critique of American national history, in which African Americans and their cultural expressions played a central and definitive, but ultimately ignored role (1986: 545). Wright, of course, did not note Du Bois’s revisionist perspective on the Spirituals in “Blueprint.” Yet his erstwhile protégé, Ralph Ellison, for whom Underground would be instructive, forcefully takes up Du Bois’s attention to 10 I am using “sublimation” in the psychoanalytic sense of this term. In this sense, cathexes that might be seen as the motility behind black folk expressions such as Spirituals and “dialect poetry” would be redirected towards other more “socially acceptable” avenues of affect and utterance. These points merit further discussion, especially given Wright’s deep investment in psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis. 11 See Johnson’s Preface (1992).

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the intersections of black folk culture and radical democracy when he raises a similar question regarding freedom in Invisible Man (1952). There, his concern for freedom is expressed through metaphors of invisibility, moral life, and ideal democracy, but his approach, too, contrasts sharply with Wright’s. The invisible man’s forging in the very crucible of black folk culture that is so important yet so seemingly dispensable to Wright calls us to a greater consideration of the historicity of black being and its continual efforts to make itself known even as it stretches forth toward an ideal world to come. Black being, as such, has had to contend with processes of objectification and obliteration that arose in the early modern period, a period contemporary to the rise of Western imperialism in the fifteenth century, and that extends through the modern civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century to our own day. Embodiedness and the phenomenology of the black body are issues in constant question in the work of each of these writers (especially in Invisible Man), and thus they are frequently at the center of a poetics of being in African American culture and African American metaphorical constructions. This poetics emerges from the modes by which metaphor sets before the reader’s eyes an image that relates the reality in which being is situated; it permits the grasping of the dissimilar within the similar, a transgression of categories of identity and a deviance from established sets of knowledge. Wright makes clear his awareness of this point in “Blueprint.” Wright, like Du Bois before him and Ellison after him, employs metaphor in an effort to establish a rapport with the white Western reader (though he does not readily admit this point) and to commune with the reader of African descent by way of a subject/object paradigm quite familiar to the African American reader (with whiteness occupying a position of subjectivity and knowing, and blackness relegated to an antithetical position of objecthood and inscrutability). And while Wright in Underground, unlike writers such as Du Bois in Souls, does not suggest to the reader a clear path of action as black being is revealed, he nonetheless offers her or him an ironic and subversive portrait of conscious black being and an alternative pathway to global humanism. I suggest that the alternate pathway Wright offers is hewn subtly out of his antagonistic relationship to black folk culture and black folk expression. Wright’s works arguably remain compelling to the present generation of readers because his writings present to the reader a disturbing but crystal clear (if not at times purposely hyperbolic) portrait of the journey of black being in mid-twentieth-century America. Whereas the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston might have provided her reader inspiration for living, Wright shows his reader the clear path to death. This pathway is littered with his protagonists’ choices, which, in most instances – the so-called later Wrightin-exile as well as the early Wright who wrote about the South from his

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perch in the urban North – disallow the freedom for which the protagonists dearly yearn. The wages of guilt – that is, the recompense for a refusal of consciousness and responsibility – comprise the lesson one draws from Wright’s fiction, but this is a lesson the reader must learn on his or her own. Wright does not specify how we must act – that is, in what ways we should demonstrate our care and concern for others through ethical action – as do canonical figures throughout the African American literary tradition. Yet we, as did the protest agents of the 1960s who embraced Wright’s work unequivocally, know that we must. Wright gets at the marrow of his point by showing the reader the effects of the soulless city on a black underclass in Underground. The effects are sobering and horrifying. Wright exacts a powerful critique of modern existence; he insists that literature must bear a direct connection to other discourses that work to convey the difficulties of the human condition, including philosophy, history, and political economy. And, in spite of his insistence that black folk thought and its corollary black nationalist impulses be surpassed, he sees in the complex structures of this culture a rich resource upon which the black writer and artist could and should draw. The writer who “seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility,” Wright argues in “Blueprint”. He must develop a complex consciousness that acknowledges the reciprocity of the local and the universal; it must “[draw] for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and [mould] this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today” (2004: 1407). Wright averred that the black writer could shepherd black readers – his primary audience – through a radical experience of deep moral self-interrogation by reshaping familiar and rich vernacular forms that were ripe for the cause, and that through the experience of reading works that were intellectually engaged and morally invested people would examine their own lives and their own positionalities. They would, in turn, be compelled to act thoughtfully – with care and concern – through an engagement with literature. Wright’s exhortations to the reader are narrated most compellingly in the chaotic underground of the novella. The text’s underground is a geographical metaphor of gape and rift. It is hardly the amorphous and random primordial mass described in the classical-era writings of Ovid. Rather, Wright adheres more closely to the image of the underground given in Hesiod’s Theogony, which classes the abyss as the site of the world’s origins. Whereas the civilized world above ground takes the name Cosmos and is characterized by the rule of order, the underground world is given the name Chaos, which precedes the existence and appearance of the Cosmos. Chaos begets Cosmos, and thus is something of a pre-condition for the ordering of knowledge to which the Cosmos gives rise and which it in turn

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bestows upon the civilized world. Whereas some aspects of postmodern theory, for example, that of Gilles Deleuze,12 have tended to underscore the continuity between these two realms rather than their opposition, the modernist Wright seems most intent upon underscoring the dissonance between these worlds and the falseness of the Cosmos. At the same time, he critiques the notion of the modern cosmopolitan writ large (see below), in so far as this concept is founded on Enlightenment-era notions of material value and global economic exchange. In the novella’s underground, we find numerous processes through which Wright represents the repercussions of modern life on black being: the interrelation of Cosmos and Chaos with reason and madness; the chaotic interplay of memory and dreams; and the compression of time and space. Wright thus situates his anti-hero within the structure of ontological myth, wherein Daniels is compelled to redefine the nature of his existence and the ultimate reality of things. Daniels may be seen as an iconoclast and a deconstructionist, as he regularly subverts the ontological assumptions of the world above ground. Indeed, Daniels’s descent into the underground world may be likened (ironically, given Wright’s rejection of religion) to a Christian rite of passage. As with baptism, Daniels’s immersion into an underground “sea” of chaotically flowing, putrid water is intended to affect and transform his mode of being. It may be read as a regression into the womb of mother earth. But his descent also constitutes dissent and resistance; through it, Daniels “becomes” a self-aware artist, a man possessed of self-consciousness. It is because of his descent that Daniels emerges with a revised and critical ontology. This rite of passage, however, does not confer upon him the power to conquer death. Daniels’s murder by the police, the corrupt enforcers of the order of the Cosmos, remands him permanently to the chaotic oblivion of art and shadows. He is not permitted to emerge, and therein lies the tragedy of his life and existence. As many critics have noted, the affinity between Wright’s tragic anti-hero and Ralph Ellison’s invisible man is clear, given Wright’s depiction of a man who descends into an underground space from which he designs an intuitive plan for his life and his mode of being. Both characters are concerned with an ethical love and care for those in their community who cannot see with a sensible acuity similar to their own. Unfortunately for Daniels, whose struggle is both continuous and finite and who is thus, like Bigger Thomas in Native Son, stricken with a type of double consciousness and existential guilt, he emerges from his underground space only to be consigned to it in 12 See Difference and Repetition, which upholds what Deleuze sees as Nietzsche’s rejection of the dialectical opposition between chaos and cosmos, embracing instead a “chaosmos” (1994: 299).

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death after a fashion that resonates with Wright’s dictates in “Blueprint”: the artist always risks oblivion even as he strives for recognition. It is as if the space from which he plans represented both freedom and enslavement, being and non-being; in the final scene, his absurd remanding into the underground space of enslavement/freedom is made permanent by the trajectory of the bullet fired from the policeman’s gun. In a sense, the absurdity of the narrative results from the transformation of the “real” world above ground into the false or insufficient double of the underground world. For Daniels, the originary Chaos of underground life begets the Cosmos of the upper world, and the world’s reality is deemed the prosthesis of originary chaos. Thus the underground world where he lives serves as the ironic origin from which he divines the truth of being, which he longs to share with the realm he considers to be distorted by the “dead world of sunshine” (2004: 1451). “Reality,” then, is surreal; so, then, is Daniels’s ontology. The relation between truth and the surreal (the truth of living underground and the surreal stagings of life above) is analogous to the relation between truth and fiction. The realm above ground is contaminated with a deceptive light that promises knowledge – a species of happiness and security – but grants none at all, at least not in Daniels’s most recent experience. In other words, Wright renders Daniels as a primal poet in a savage city, not unlike that poet who, in Plato’s imagination, posed a threat to the order (the cosmology) of the Republic, and was thus to be banished by the guardians of that city. Daniels’s art poses a threat because through it he promises to bring into being a thing that, prior to his descent, was simply nonbeing. By situating the locus of Daniels’s existence in a metaphorical underground space beneath the modern city, Wright insists that we meditate and act upon the problems of life, being, and the desire for agency-driven transformation at the outer limits of modern Western civilization. The urgent mode of action Wright depicts comments directly upon the sort of epistemology Kant set out as definitive of the modern world and its modes of consciousness. Kant’s treatise Geography (marred, like his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, with an inordinate but not surprising dose of racism) considers modern time to indicate a “richness, fecundity, and life,” while space (like that of the underground cave) “was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” (Foucault, 1980: 70). Wright is clear in his refusal of this distinction; he compresses time and space in the novella, and thus delivers a radical revisioning of the historicity of conscious black being, and, therefore, the basis upon which we claim to know this or that, and in light of which we undertake purposeful action. If we look more keenly at what I shall call Daniels’s tableau, the poem he has constructed in the cave from objects that constitute the detritus of modern materialism, we may come closer to an understanding of the significance

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of Wright’s strategy in this regard. Because language – the fundamental conveyor of Western knowledge – ultimately fails the underground man, his poetry largely comprises the material: its lines of verse are drawn from the jewels he steals, the paper money he uses to veil the walls of his cave, the various objects that serve as talismans. We might say that the lines separating these elements themselves become blurred, to the extent that meaning is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher. Foucault describes the sort of disorder that characterizes such loci as that in which “fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry” (1970: xvii). The sort of “enigmatic multiplicity” of which Foucault speaks reflects the revolutionary prescience of the underground space in Wright’s novella, with its incongruous orders: technology (the radio, which serves above ground as a conduit of misinformation and an instrument of control); capitalism (the money, jewels, and precious metals used as pure ornamentation – without exchange value); weaponry (primal in the case of the cleaver, and modern in the case of the gun); and time (the watches set to a random hour, alluding to Daniels’s subversion of the ordering of time and history). Collectively, these pieces, along with Daniels’s inability to grasp fully the sense and ontology at work in black folk expression, destabilize the provisional wisdom Wright assigns to black vernacular and folk forms in “Blueprint”. They eventually constitute the fragmented and heterogeneous poetry of the underground man’s cave, itself deconstructive of the ordering of the cosmos which it, geographically, precedes. They also suggest an alternative epistemology and, following Kant’s thought, they impinge upon universal knowledge. These are the spaces in which otherness and alterity might flourish in support of a revised ontology and a subversive epistemology; yet, the critical geographer David Harvey warns us against taking too much comfort in this theory. Heterotopias may allow us to “think of the potential for coexistence in the multiple utopian schemes […] that have come down to us through history” (2000: 537). However, Harvey complains that the radical promise of heterotopias is reduced to theoretical commonplace when “power/knowledge is or can be dispersed into [multiple and many] spaces of difference” (538). The disruptive effect of geographical thought “makes space a favorite metaphor in the postmodernist attack – inspired, for example, by Foucault’s The Order of Things – upon all forms of universality” (539). But these are only metaphors, he claims. They stop short of postulating “questions of real geography and even the production of space” (541). Harvey argues that we should resist overvaluing geographical metaphors and instead pay attention to the ways in which “places and localized ways of life are relationally constructed by a variety of intersecting socioecological processes occurring at quite different spatio-temporal scales.” We must also,

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he insists, give due consideration to “historical-geographical processes of place and community construction” (542). Wright constructs metaphorical spaces in his novella that are actually reflective of the “localized ways of life” and “processes of place and community construction” that are so important to Harvey, and they are not simple metaphors. It seems to me that the novella’s imagination of critical, metaphorical spaces is indeed productive not only of conceptual and revisionist thought; they also bear the potential to induce radical social action and consciousness on the part of the reader. Here I return to my earlier point on cosmopolitanism: the disruptive nature of Wright’s metaphorical underground may be seen to attempt the sort of cosmopolitanism Harvey values. Consider, for example, Daniels’s erratic encounters with black folk culture during his time in the underground, a folk culture that seems alien to him and which he observes with ambivalence. He is both attracted to and repulsed by the singers; their songs at once “enchant” him and appear “abysmally obscene” (Wright, 2004: 1438–9). On first spying the choir, with its “white robes” and “tattered songbooks” in “black palms,” Daniels’s “first impulse [is] to laugh” (1439). His second visceral emotion is that of guilt. Why guilt? Even in his heterotopic space beyond the Cosmos, Daniels fears that God will “strike him dead” for ridiculing the devoted song-offerings of the choir (1439), which sings of love and a home beyond the world in which they live, even as slave singers had done in foregoing generations. But unlike the improvised renderings that are characteristic of the Spirituals, the singers of Wright’s underground sing from well-worn songbooks, an unusual occurrence. While hymnals are bought and broadly distributed throughout modern African American churches, it is unusual for African American choirs (especially black Baptist and apostolic choirs that continue the spiritual tradition Wright describes in “Blueprint”) to sing Spirituals (rather than hymns) from songbooks (rather than from memory) while in the choir stand on Sunday mornings. The guilt incurred by Wright’s fictional choir appears to be that of being fed hopeful lyrics whose apparently dogmatic and seemingly unreflective rendering in song brings pain to the protagonist, because it seems to him that the singers are unconscious of their intrinsic freedom – what Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, refers to as the ontological origins of freedom. When Daniels hears singing coming from this same church later in the novella, he has already made the decision to emerge from his heterotopic space, to act in the aftermath of the false accusations that have disrupted not only his own life but also the lives of others. The singing convinces Daniels that he must “tell” the church folks what he has learned, perhaps to absolve both himself and them of their common guilt. When he opens the door to the church, the “deluge of song” that washes over him confirms

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in him the necessity of this action: his deep-seated need to emerge from the underground into what he considers to be the realm of false light and “truth,” to convey to the black folk subversive insight, and even salvation. As he approaches the church, he hears the choir sing: The Lamb, the Lamb, the Lamb Tell me again your story The Lamb, the Lamb, the Lamb Flood my soul with your glory[.] (1440)

The lyrics cast Daniels as a black Christ figure, come to take on sin and guilt, and to save the black folk by way of the baptismal stream of his narrative, his “story.” He is an ironic savior who comes to the surface of the earth not from the realm above but from a space below, where blackness is not detrimental and evil, but affirming and good. The song next taken up by the choir confirms the Christic metaphor: Oh, wondrous sight upon the Cross Vision sweet and divine Oh, wondrous sight upon the Cross Full of such love sublime[.] (1441)

While Daniels is positioned as a savior, the folk are transformed from a collective of automaton-like singers to a cautionary, insightful group, gifted with the second sight of what Wright refers to in “Blueprint” as “racial wisdom.” (Du Bois, as we recall, would often refer to the gift of second sight among those living within the veil.) Their lyrical commentary is perhaps like that of a Greek chorus and recalls Wright’s analogy in his Introduction to Black Metropolis, wherein black migrants to northern cities are likened to “characters in a Greek play,” “driven and pursued” down “the path of defeat” (Wright, 1994: xvii). They warn Daniels of both bodily sacrifice and a love vast in its dimensions, yet still comprehensible: the transitional stage of the death of the body (the knowledge of the graveyard and the “laying down” of the body, in the language of the Spirituals) and the subsequent rising up of the spirit of consciousness in a sublime, transcendent, and even victorious fashion. Even so, bodily death is required before one can achieve such transcendence. As I have noted, Wright warns of an analogous sacrifice of the artist in “Blueprint”: By his ability to fuse and make articulate the experiences of men, because his writing possesses the potential cunning to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he can create the myths and symbols

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that inspire a faith in life, he may expect either to be consigned to oblivion, or to be recognized for the valued agent he is. (Wright, 2004: 1407)

The dilemma is one of life and death; the Negro writer “is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die” (ibid.). The choir’s mortal warning emanates from Wright’s own theory of the poetics of African American literature but falls mute on the ears of Daniels, who, intent upon conveying his own salvific message rather than lending credence to the import of the Spiritual, is turned away by the men of the church. Quite apart from the biblical injunction to take in strangers and anoint their feet with oil, Daniels, dirty, seemingly intoxicated, and quite unruly, is turned out of the church to wander once again the streets that precipitated his initial descent. He is, as Wright puts it, consigned to oblivion. This rejection provides Daniels with a new but naive purpose in his wandering: to go to the police and make a statement. “What statement? He did not know. He was the statement” (1462). In yet another allusion to Christ – that Daniels is the “ statement,” that he is the “Word” made flesh – he will confess and assume, like Christ, guilt that is not his alone, but rather, to his mind at least, everyone’s: “I’m guilty! […] All the people I saw was guilty” (1464). It is the scene in the church that most forcefully occupies Daniels’s thoughts as he struggles to word his confession, and thus reveal his consciousness to the very policemen who falsely accused him. As he becomes convinced of the need to “force the reality of himself upon them” (1465), he tries again to structure the narrative of his confession, which somehow is rooted in the songs from the church: “First, he ought to tell them about the singing in the church, but what words could he use?” (1465). When the policemen finally agree to take him to the cave and see what he has done, Daniels feels not only relieved of his “burden,” but experiences a transcendental “selflessness” (1468). The song he sings as he is being driven back to the manhole, “the song that had brought him to such a high pitch of terror and pity,” underscores this sensation of “selflessness” and “ecstasy” as he intones lyrics expressing his joy that the spirit of Christ now resides in his soul (ibid.). When they finally arrive at the manhole, Daniels is convinced that by showing them his cave, along with his inversion of the meaning of material objects – his inversion of the “order of things” – he will provoke in them a transformative feeling of empathy (1469). For Daniels, the cave is a space of poetic meaning whose content – the material objects he refashions and reorders – has been reduced to pieces, fragments that are themselves metaphors of the modern condition, capable even in their fractured state of disseminating radical meaning by way of what Daniels refers to as “feeling.”

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Such feeling, Daniels believes, will lead others to be “governed by the same impulse of pity,” a conclusion that, in Daniels’s mind, might advance in a number of hopeful directions. Not least of these is compassion, indicating a “suffering with” another: the importance of strengthening the bonds of communal affinity and emotion that will lead individuals to grant succor and care to other human beings. Caring, then, as a fundamental existential act and construed as a characteristic of Being-in-the-world by Heidegger, emerges as the cornerstone of Daniels’s project, conveyed by the tableau he composes in his underground cave, a poetic tableau that requires a reader/ viewer in order that its import and possibilities do not fall soundlessly into oblivion. I have underscored that Wright was unequivocal in his fiction as in his criticism regarding the need for an engaged art, and these demands eventually become the foundation of his poetics, his artistic principle; he was not interested in an art for artists only. Were this so, Daniels would not have been so concerned to share his newfound world view based upon a transformative aesthetics of anti-materialism. In “The Literature of the Negro in the United States” (1957), Wright did not shift position from his earlier work of criticism, “Blueprint.” He continued to insist that the craft of writing should maintain a certain autonomy, but that it should also reach beyond itself to communicate with a community of writers and readers – indeed, one of the tasks he assigns the text is the responsibility of creating readers or implying readers. There is a way in which Wright strives to set before his reader the scenes and images that beset his protagonist, and this setting forth is most regularly accomplished through metaphors such as rift and descent, and symbols such as darkness and light. We often, mistakenly, consider metaphor to be simple ornamentation, loosely called a figure of speech. However, metaphor, at its very foundations – as the somatic phrase “figure of speech” suggests – is ontological in nature. As metaphor is related to action or movement (physical, cognitive, or both), it depends fundamentally upon the primal verb of existence, the verb “to be,” whether that verb is explicit or implied. Paul Ricoeur has argued that there is a harmony between the verb “to be” and the noun “reason”: being is deemed rational, while nonbeing is irrational; nonbeing is the chaos Daniels negotiates in life as in death. Yet, if, as Heidegger writes, true poetry awakens “the largest view” and “makes World appear in all things,”13 we must look a little more closely at what work the philosophical metaphors in Daniels’s underground perform. That is to say, that if Daniels’s chaotic poetry “makes World appear in all things,” then it does, as Daniels insists, give birth to a true and radically new cosmos. It 13 Heidegger (1971: 100, 101).

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associates with imagistic knowledge a mystery of sensibility, an intuitive grasping of intent and import that is akin to perceiving in darkness, to listening in silence. It is perhaps because Daniels insists upon such paradoxes of metaphor and symbol that he meets his end in tragedy. In spite of his amassing of materials for his cave, the tragedy of Daniels’s life is that he cannot overcome the split between art and spectatorship any more than he can heal what Wright describes as America’s riven consciousness, a split similar to that endured by Bigger Thomas, who longs not simply to spectate upon life but to participate in what he considers to be “real” life, and thus to know life. Bigger remains an enigma to himself, yet Daniels, gazing upon the art he has made, is placed in contact with an innermost truth that he is driven to share. To his mind, he has achieved perfect knowledge, which he senses will displace and supersede the false logic of the upper world. Nonetheless, Daniels’s creation does not ensure the erasure of his sense and state of alienation; in fact, his act of creation seals his ultimate alienation through death. The creative-destructive force of his art is that it eventually serves as a poetics of perversion that calls for a thoughtful, even morally outraged, response from the reader. Wright’s dynamic critique in The Man Who Lived Underground demands that the reader engage in a tensional imagination of truth, and makes of the tragedy that ensues from an unjust death a heuristic that construes a new sphere of meaning opened by metaphorical discourse. He makes of the death-laden split that inhabits America, and the West more generally, the foundation upon which a new human existence and ethical human action become possible and necessary. Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics: The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. New York: Modern Library, 1984. Baker, Houston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. University of Chicago Press, 1984. —— “A Forgotten Prototype: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Invisible Man.” Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Beaufret, Jean. Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006. Bone, Robert. Richard Wright. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 1969. Callahan, John (ed). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

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Cazeaux, Clive. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida. New York: Routledge, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. [1967]. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. —— “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1982. Du Bois, W. E. B. [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. Ellison, Ralph. [1952]. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. —— Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Fabre, Michel. “From Tabloid to Myth: ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’.” The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. —— The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. 2nd edn. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Fanon, Franz. “L’Expérience vécue du Noir.” Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being. New York: SUNY Press, 2014. Foucault, Michel. “Questions on Geography.” In Colin Gordon (ed.). Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980: 63–77. —— The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. —— The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Harvey, David. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12.2 (2000): 529–64. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. [1929]. Trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. —— “Lecture Six.” The Principle of Reason. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991. —— “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings: From Being and Time to the Task of Thinking. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. —— On the Way to Language. [1959]. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. JanMohamed, Abdul R. The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

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Johnson, James Weldon. Preface. Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922. Joyce, Joyce Ann. Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Kant, Immanuel. Immanuel Kant’s Physical Geography. Trans. Ronald L. Bolin. [Translator’s thesis. Indiana University, 1968]. —— “The Metaphysics of Morals.” Excerpt. In Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (eds). The Nationalism Reader. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995: 38–48. —— Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John Goldthwait. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1960. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005): 157–206. Miller, Eugene E. Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Mills, Charles. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Plato. The Republic. New York: Penguin, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. University of Toronto Press, 1977. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. Sinclair, Mark. Translator’s Introduction. In Jean Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006: vii–xiii. Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” [1937]. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (eds). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd edn. New York: Norton and Co., 2004: 1403–10. —— Introduction. In St Clair Drake and Horace Roscoe Cayton (eds). Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, 1945. —— “The Literature of the Negro in the United States.” [1957]. Black Power: Three Books from Exile. Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man Listen. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008: 729–73. —— Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. —— The Man Who Lived Underground. [1944]. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (eds). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd edn. New York: Norton and Co., 2004: 1436–70.

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IV Epistemological Genealogies and Prospections

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12 On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut at Storrs)

There is a problem in the pursuit of knowledge that is peculiarly evident in the experience of many black graduate students. On the one hand, the student is often excited by the opportunity to pursue questions in a discipline whose resources for the advancement of knowledge have intoxicated him or her with a quest that may best be described as a faith in possibility. On the other hand, such a student often encounters subtle and at times not-so-subtle snippets of challenges to his or her intelligence that, in a context in which reputation about one’s intelligence is paramount, is degrading. That student may resort to a defense mechanism that most scholars rely on – namely, the enduring value of ideas, of the life of the mind. But even in such retreat there is a lack of salvation since, as Frantz Fanon put it so well in 1952: “Quand je suis là, elle n’y est pas”; where it – in this case, reason – was, he was not (Fanon, 1952: 96). Take the case of philosophy, where to seek such solace from its greatest voices often meant knocking at doors whose authors held signs tantamount to the phrase, “Whites only.” I recall, while a graduate student, discovering that most of my white peers went through a strange perceptual process when they read modern and contemporary canonical texts. When it came to the racist or sexist dimensions of the thought of authors such as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, or G. W. Hegel, or even more recent exemplars such as Martin Heidegger or Bertrand Russell, they suffered from a blind spot, which, when pointed out, was often defended by their denial of the presence of bigotry in those authors’ writings: “Those things are not there,” they often proclaimed, or, after I showed them the offending passages, missed in spite of their previous “careful” readings, they argued that those sections were, in the end, harmless because, ultimately and supposedly, “irrelevant.”1 In one sense, it was as in the form of repression, 1

This problem pertains as well to recent postmodern European philosophers. See Miller

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as in the case where one might repeatedly walk along a beautifully adorned street without realizing, until after an enormous passage of time, that it includes a funeral parlor. At work was a form of theodicy in their readings of texts. They needed such dimensions to be extraneous. Theodicy, as we know, refers to G-d’s justice (theo [god] and dikē [justice]).2 In its classic form, theodicy offers an account of the compatibility of G-d as omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent in the face of evil and injustice. In theological interpretations calling for G-d as the creator of all things, how is it possible that G-d is not responsible for iniquity? Responses often took two forms. The first argued that the meaning of G-d’s actions is beyond human comprehension. In other words, there is ultimately good behind all evil. The second response appeals to human free will; G-d created us as free, which means that we, human beings, are responsible for evil and injustice in the world. Both instances placed blame on human beings. Applied to the interpretation of texts, the conclusion is that if injustice or infelicities are present and the text is intrinsically just, then such negative elements must be externally imposed. Critics such as I were simply reading them badly. I call this practice theodicean textualism, where what is sought is, in the end, a theodicy of the text. The problem for me was that I did not encounter such readings as external but internal features of those canonical philosophical works, especially since the authors took the time to put them there. But what was crucial was what such an observation signified. It was clear to me that the theodicean appeal had an implicit prescription of how to respond to textual infelicity. The concern, in other words, was about whether such flaws entailed dismissal of the texts themselves. The problem with such a conclusion, as far as I was concerned, was that it would require me not only to reject that literature but also to engage a variety of social phenomena in a way that would result in my becoming sealed in a world sterilized of hostile whiteness. In short, it would have been ill-advised to pursue the world of knowledge with a guiding presupposition of perfect authorship and perfect authors (gods). Both texts and authors, in other words, had to be recognized as human phenomena, which meant that they would always fall short of the godly ideal. What I was doing, in other words, was building the case for reading those and other writings. My criticism was that my colleagues were not really reading what was before them but instead selecting and projecting what ultimately was narcissistic cultural desire for ideal reflections of dominant racial norms. This insistence is part of what I later learned to be an (2008: 725–7) and Lewis R. Gordon, “Esquisse” (2011: 165–83). 2 I use the Jewish convention of respecting the deity by not spelling out the name where the use is singular. Thus, there are “the gods” versus “G-d.”

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important element of black thought in the modern world, namely, the call to break down misrepresentations of national and historical self-reflection. The dominant scholarship and society, the argument goes, fear nothing short of truth and reality. Since human beings are not gods, why did so many of my colleagues need their intellectual heroes to be perfect human beings? The question I just asked is, in effect, a diagnostic one. It relates to understanding the declining faith in the human underside of disciplines of the West. Such realization appears as a harbinger of things wished avoided. It is, in such regard, akin, as we will see, to explorations of disasters, which means, in effect, those parts of the diagnostics are the conditions of their appearance. I have lost count of incidents, for instance, of my being asked to join the project of rendering thought born of African Diasporic reflection and critique irrelevant – to participate in, as Pierre Bourdieu would formulate it, symbolic violence.3 Offering Africana philosophy, a hybrid field within Africana studies and philosophy, as an area of research, a very nontraditional kind of knowledge if there ever was one, often occasions disgust, anxiety, and, at times, curiosity from its critics. “Africana philosophy” is an area of philosophy that focuses on problems raised by the emergence of the African Diaspora in the modern world. These problems range from challenges of philosophical anthropology, where practices of dehumanization such as efforts to make people into property or locate them as subhuman are called into question, to concerns of freedom in a world where colonialism and racism dominate even the production of knowledge.4 Although not exclusively produced by and about black people, there is enough concern with the lives of black people in Africana philosophy to raise many of the challenges of any study devoted to the study of ideas from such people. There are those who treat such research as an exotic rarity, and, returning to theodicy, there are those for whom it makes no kind of sense to be engaging in philosophical reflection when it seems like both G-d and history have shown no evidence of respect for black people. The problem here is about being a problem. Fanon noticed that he had a problematic relationship to reason. As he said, where he was, it was not. By this, he meant that it took flight when he entered the room. How was he to respond to this rejection? Although at first a grammatical matter, much could be understood from the French when he remarked, “Quand je suis là, elle n’y est pas”. What was he supposed to do when she has rejected him? If 3 Bourdieu speaks of this in many texts. See e.g. Bourdieu (1972). Symbolic violence in this context involves devaluing the humanity of the African Diaspora. 4 I offer a detailed study of a thousand years of the development of this area of thought in Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008).

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he attempts to force her (reason) to submit to him, the familiar structure of rape or violence comes into play. Fanon thus had to reason with her, which meant he had to reason with reason, who was, in this case, being unreasonable. Fanon, here representing black thought, thus had to reason with unreasonable reason. How was he to achieve this? The answer has been the underlying grammar of Africana philosophy and studies: he had to do so reasonably. Such a task required taking on a variety of additional challenges. The first is the set of expectations around what the Black is when she or he attempts this relationship. What is thought of when one hears the word “black” when applied to people could be the lived reality of such people or the imposed one. The imposed one is the historic construction of “Negro.” A concept emerging by the sixteenth century, the Negro is a web of constructions in the imagination of a world that transformed millions of people in Africa into what Oliver Cox called the proletarian race (Cox, 2000).5 As Black Studies and Africana Studies emerged in the twentieth century, the presupposition from without was often that of Negro Studies. In the famous chapter, “L’Expérience vécue du Noir” (“The Lived Experience of the Black”), Fanon articulated this problem well when he realized how he was seen when he walked through the world. He was aware of being a black man, but he had not thought of himself as le nègre, the French word for “Negro” and “nigger.” In his words, “ je sécrétais une race” (“I secreted a race”) (Fanon, 1952: 98). At the same time, Fanon noticed an odd fascination in the society invested in this notion, one in which repulsion and attraction are negotiated along a thin line: Negrophobia was saturated with desire. The world of Negrophobic desire is wrought with bad faith, where the Negrophobe seeks protection from an imagined object that turns out to be her or his own projection. Thus, the Negro threat was in fact an expression of a wish not to be held responsible for desire. Yet, such self-concealment often carries guilt, which demands justification in a multitude of directions. There is first the narcissistic investment in the self as a desired desire. Thus, the presupposition of Negro desire for whiteness becomes foundational. The Negro always wants something, and if he (mostly he) wants it badly enough, he becomes the nigger pursuing it. Among the things the Negro supposedly wants is to be in the system, the economy, of governed whiteness. Since that is the condition by which the Negro emerges as Negro, then he (and again, mostly he) is presumed ultimately to have at the systemic level what he wants. He must, then, be “happy.”6 5 6

For recent discussion of the proletarianization of blacks, see Feagin (2000). See Fanon’s discussion of the Negro’s smile (1952: 39–40).

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The Negro must be happy about everything save one: being a Negro.7 This is because the Negro, too, understands that it is not good to be a Negro. Thus, the schizophrenic logic of a societal need for a people who are happy yet aware of their wretchedness solidifies the rationalization of a just unjust system, for what conclusion could one harbor but that Negroes ultimately deserve to be Negroes? We return to the terrain of theodicy. In this regard, Negroes are a gift. They are the salvation of the system of white supremacy. Thus, there is good reason for whites to love Negroes, if by that affection we understand a narcissistic investment in a false imago. We have arrived, then, on a peculiar observation. Where there is hatred of black people, there is a perverse love of Negroes. If this is correct, a difficulty faced by the cultivation of Black Studies is that it is a threat to the beloved Negro Studies. While black and Africana philosophers assert black and African Diasporic thought, the demands of a white-dominated, antiblack academy is to have Negro entertainment. The consequence, then, is an additional problematic: where the subject is Negro, the thought has to come from elsewhere, which makes it obvious that Negroes cannot be “thinking” about themselves. Thus, while the black scholar attempts to study blackness (which transcends Africanness) and an African Diaspora (which is linked to Africa), she or he, as the projected Negro, encounters resistance as a legitimate producer or source of knowledge. The conflict with unreasonable reason returns. It emerges from the meaning of the word “study.” Such a phenomenon becomes an asymmetrical white grammar over a Negro and black object. The latter are treated, at best, as sites of affect and experience. The black scholar, theorist, or philosopher becomes, then, a threat to this organization of research, since it requires, in effect, her or him being outside of knowledge production. In plain language, so-called mainstream theory and scholarship demand leaving the thinking (and by extension, theorizing) to whites. Rejecting the thesis of thought as fundamentally white requires liberating it from the economy of rationalizations that assert this. The liberation of thinking, then, becomes also an important dimension of liberation praxis. It requires addressing the dimensions of thought that have been barred from their potential or reach. If thought is subordinated to a system of whiteness, wherein blackness is placed outside of it through the construction of an ossified 7 He refers to the countless products on which there are smiling Negroes, which suggests, to paraphrase a recent formulation, the price of whiteness. A rich compendium of these images is available in Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (1992). On the presumed “happiness” of the Negro and the black, see also Lewis R. Gordon (2000: chapter 1).

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exemplar – Negroeness – the problem emerges of the extent to which thinking falls short of truth and reality. The subtext here, as the reader may have already surmised, is the dreaded dark side of reality. I have argued elsewhere that if knowledge, reason, research, theory, and thought – in other words, the array of activities involved in intellectual work – were to face this dark side, they would encounter the implications of relationality, where all relations must address their negations, and, in doing so, discard metaphors of thought as light and then realize that thinking and seeing require doing so in black.8 A challenge such as thinking in black requires taking on the constructions of knowledge in the modern world as both a liberatory enterprise and an epistemic critique of a peculiar kind, for, in effect, the radical claim would be about failures at the heart of the production – and conceptions – of knowledge that have become hegemonic (now “traditional”) and about the resources available (the underside, the black side of modern thought) to transcend them.9 Part I In addition to Fanon’s concerns, a major challenge to reason has been posed by the Africana poet and critic Audre Lorde, who poetically observed that “the master’s tools” could never tear down the master’s house (Lorde, 1984: 110–13). She addresses, in that adage, the problem of keeping structures of domination and colonization in place, including the ways of thinking that created them, instead of seeking more radical alternatives. She affirms Fanon’s contention that colonization was itself a radical endeavor whose tentacles reached down to the level of method (Fanon, 1952: 9). Although similar in observations, the impact of the two formulations was historically different. It pretty much took forty years for Fanon’s point to find an audience, whereas Lorde’s was immediately taken up in directions that she may not have intended. In many ways, this was because of the hermeneutical or interpretive openness of her metaphor. Lorde’s became a rallying cry not only against Eurocentrism (master’s tools if there ever were any) but also against theory itself as Eurocentric. One could think of the division that emerged between African Diasporic studies scholars along lines of those who were attempting to purge themselves of Eurocentrism in terms of any connection to Europe and those who saw centrism as a problematic stance to take in the first place. 8 See Lewis R. Gordon (2010: 193–214) and Wynter (2006: 85–106). 9 See Gordon and Gordon, A Companion to African American Studies (2006) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (2006); Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence (2006); An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008); and Gordon and Gordon, Of Divine Warning (2009).

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These are not, however, the only alternatives. There are those, as well, who simply affirm Eurocentrism through asserting the global reach of Western civilization, in which even the Islamic world, under the rubric of a “world religion,” is subsumed. Added to this is the hermeneutical or interpretive turn through which “tradition” is always asserted textually in a world of simply texts and context. In such a world, the response to error is always a retroactive search for a moment of “misreading.” The conservatism of this project emerges through the global reach of the past, where an original text and context stimulated a sequence of texts whose legitimacy is already conditioned by the presumed completeness of another text – namely, their grammar, the functional production of rules through which meaning is generated.10 Since Lorde’s appeal was not meant to be a conservative one, this hermeneutical option is but an additional consideration. As for Lorde’s admonition, or at least the interpretation of it as rejecting the use of any epistemic resource from the West, it stands locked at the negative level of destruction instead of construction; it fails to account for what tools really are, that it might be crucial for tools to be used as tools for the building of different houses. In other words, why only use tools to tear down houses, especially when everyone needs shelter? The credo of dismantling the master’s house has at times reached levels of absurdity. I recall, for example, attending an academic conference in which a black psycho-physiologist presented the findings of his research, which was focused on distinctions between black brains and white brains and the processes of learning best suited for each kind. His conclusions harkened back to reflections that led Frantz Fanon to tears at the end of the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs: black brains, the black psycho-physiologist concluded, were best suited for poetry, music, and dance (rhythm), whereas white brains were more mathematical, rational, and conducive to science and technological work (mind). During the question-and-answer segment, the obvious objection emerged: if the speaker’s research were correct, he should not have been able to do his research. If he were right, he must have been wrong. (But, paradoxically, he was clearly wrong, which means at least with regard to himself, at least in his case, he was right.) Although the speaker was ultimately motivated by the effort to articulate psychological foundations for better learning for black students, his location of the cause of dysfunctions to be purely European in origin created a tautological and Manichaean divide that forced his normative prejudices onto reality.11 The contradictions at the heart of his research remained repressed throughout the experimental 10 For a similar concern and for arguments with regard to problems of culture and historical relativism, see Moody-Adams (1997: chapter 2) and Wiredu (1996). 11 Moody-Adams brings up a similar criticism when she observes that while some groups

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process. Returning to the misinterpretations of Lorde, the connection here is the danger simply of dismantlement and purification. Should tools build alternative houses, the “master’s house” could not maintain the significance of mastery, since it would, in effect, be de-centered. Some interpreters have, however, concluded that theory, in itself, is a European tool. In such cases, there is a failure to appreciate the fact that enslaved and indigenous peoples have tools of their own and that some of the tools that built the master’s house, including the house of theory, were theirs. In other words, the modern and contemporary world is more heterogeneous than anti-theorists would allow. It is as if such critics were to treat colonization as establishing a tabula rasa, a blank slate, for the dominated populations. That people were stolen or colonized across their own social hierarchies means that a vast range of cultural resources were brought into the dominating groups, the effect of which was often, whether welcomed or not, creolization.12 A response to the challenge against reason here is, then, the realization, as Fanon observed, that it is the very tool through which we must struggle against unreason and reason gone wrong.13 Given the relationship of theory to reason, it, too, becomes one of our important tools. Another tactic, however, is, as we have seen, that the critic of theory often pits experience against it. But a response from the resources of reason is that experience by itself requires additional elements to become meaningful. The interpretation or theory brought to experience makes all the difference on the bearing it has on reality. If, however, the agents of experience did not exemplify those resources, then the problem of epistemological colonization emerges in the form of epistemic dependency, as we saw earlier. This structure has been maintained through the constant effort to explain the lived realities of people of color in nearly exclusively the terms of Eurocentered thinkers. It is not that such thinkers do not offer any insight into the conditions of non-European peoples, but it is highly problematic to maintain a social epistemology and sociology of knowledge in which they function as the exclusive source of such reflection. The price of a failure to participate in the development of thought, of the abrogation of theory by people of color, is epistemic dependency.14

appeal to a form of cultural (and at times racial) relativism as a limit on criticism from outsiders, they also insist that those outsiders could learn from the protected culture (218). 12 See Monahan (2011) and Jane Anna Gordon (2014). See also Asante (1998), who argues that dominated groups, e.g. Africans, were also agents in the formation of modern life. 13 For more discussion of this point, see Lewis R. Gordon (2007: 8–15). 14 For more discussion of these themes, see Lewis R. Gordon (2000; 2008). See also Maldonado-Torres (2008).

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Part II We come now to the problem of modern reason from the standpoint of Africana philosophy. Part of the disaster of the modern world is, after all, the delineation of whole groups of people into sign continua (“monsters”) from which even reason itself should flee (see Gordon and Gordon, 2009). In effect, then, Africana philosophy paradoxically emerges as a function of such a catastrophe. This means that it cannot offer itself as thought within the theodicy of an affirmed modernity, but neither could it offer itself in terms of a disgruntled postmodernity. A theme that emerges, at least as I argue it in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, is that Africana philosophy responds to the modern, disastrous phenomena of racism and colonialism with at least three problematics: (1) the philosophical question of who and what we are, of what it means to be a human being, of philosophical anthropology; (2) the meaning of social transformation, especially in terms of liberation; and (3) a self-critical evaluation of rationality and reason. The first response is fairly obvious. It is the logical direction thought will take that emerges from people who have either been told that they are not people or who have been treated as less than human. Simply asserting their humanity is insufficient, since the question would then be raised: on what standard of humanity is the assertion premised? The second consideration also makes sense since it would be contradictory to assert one’s humanity – which is, in effect, denying one’s inferiority to other human beings – while affirming one’s bondage, namely, one’s subordination to others. Implicit in the objection to one’s dehumanization is a requirement that such a circumstance is contingent and could thus be changed. Since the focus of this chapter is the collapse of traditional knowledge, it is the third problematic that will be the focus of the remaining discussion. In the self-critical evaluation of rationality and reason, the argument rests on a distinction between the two. Rationality is often instrumental, which is to say it often deals with how-to questions, and aims at maximal consistency. Order and logging (from which we get logic) are cases in point. A problem with being maximally consistent, however, especially in the human world, is the danger of becoming unreasonable. This distinction may seem odd since the two words have the same etymological roots. “Rationality” is, after all, drawn from “rational,” which is from the Latin rationalis, which means to be endowed with skills of reckoning and calculating, that is, ratio. The English translations often add “reasoning,” but the problem is that “reason” and “reasonable,” which refer to sound judgment, being sane, and being rational, have their roots in the Anglo-French resoun, which in turn emerges from the Old French raisoner and raisonable, which in turn are from the Latin rationare and rationabilis, both of which point back to ratio. But crucial for

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this discussion is the verb rationare, which means to engage in discourse and to question. That dimension points to evaluative activity that sets the stage for a broader kind than the search for consistency. The usage I am advancing here, although appearing common in this formulation of reason versus rationality, is very uncommon save in the work of a small number of philosophers. Chief among those with this usage is Karl Jaspers, who saw reason as broader than what should properly be called instrumental rationality.15 It is also a concern of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, especially so in the thought of Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno.16 The epistemic dimensions of dehumanization in the modern world, as seen through the lens of Africana philosophy and the critical thought of indigenous communities in the New Worlds, are a function of an effort to subvert the relation of reason to rationality. An exemplar of this is the mutation of science into scientism, which demands the colonization of reason by rationality, that is, to make reason scientific. This is not a surprising development. Although we have been speaking of knowledge, especially philosophical and theoretical knowledge, a peculiar feature of the modern and contemporary world is the almost hegemonic status of scientific knowledge. The word “science,” although also meaning knowledge, reveals much in its etymology. Its roots are in the Latin word scire (“to know”), which suggests a connection to the verbs scindere (“to divide” – think of “schism”) and secare (to cut, to divide), which, like many Latin words, also share origins with ancient Greek words, which, in this case would be skhizein (to split, to cleave). Yet, given the discussion about the elision of African elements, it behooves us here to protest that etymological work too often stops in the Greco-Latin past, as if there were no formation of words that preceded that moment. Going further, however, points southward, as follows. The term skhizein also has connections to the word sex, which emerges from the Latin sexus, which in turn has roots in the word secare, which means to cut or to divide. That word has roots in the Hebrew word Crethi, derived from the root carath (to cut) and the ancient Egyptian words Crethi and Kotket. Crethi referred to the Egyptian royal armies, which were split into two classes.17 The importance of making distinctions in science comes to the fore here, but one could as well see connections to research involving dissection or breaking things down into its parts. One need not be an existentialist to see how this approach is more at home with the study of “man” than that of the human being.18 15 16 17 18

See Jaspers (2003; 1971). See Horkheimer and Adorno (2002). See The Academy of St Louis (1860: 534). I am thinking, of course, of Foucault’s famous critique of man as a function of the human

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Since I have argued that reason is broader in scope than rationality, which challenges the modern desire for the former to behave by virtue of being yoked to the latter, then appeals to maximum applications of method are subject to such a critique. The collapse into method-centrism, into treating method as deontological, as a categorical imperative, so to speak, is a form of what I call disciplinary decadence. It is a form of decadence in that it emerges as a death in the teleological impetus of a discipline, that is, from a discipline failing any longer to engage reality. The discipline begins to contract into itself in a rationalization of itself as world and succumbs to solipsism. What is left under such circumstances is simply the continued practices of the discipline – in effect, rituals, where methods collapse into a closed methodology or, worse, secularized theodicy. In such instances, disciplines break down and cease to communicate with other disciplines and knowledge-seeking practices. As the process continues, there is, eventually, implosion: a discipline gets reduced to a subfield or one of its parts. This happened for a time in philosophy, where many practitioners confused it with epistemology. It is happening now in sociology as demography continues to colonize it in many institutions. In Africana thought, it often takes the form of history or some form of historicism, and in Africana philosophy, it is the undisputed dominance of social and political philosophy. This is not to say that there were not good reasons for periods of such in the latter two: much of African and New World black history was either erased or not yet articulated. And the social and political concerns were a function of the problem of social transformation. But the point here is that exploring these questions is different from prioritizing them at the expense of other questions. In short, such a response to a collapse of knowledge would be an exemplification of a continued decadence instead of the construction of new or alternative kinds of knowledge. The loss of a teleological impetus for disciplinary formation raises the question of whether resuscitation is possible. I do not think so. If there is one adage that seems to be a near primordial constant, it is that one can never really return home. Besides, such a turn would presuppose that reality has not moved on, that it has not changed. In other words, it is by looking at reality beyond our methodological presuppositions that the questions animating disciplinary formation, if such a formation is needed, will arise. Let us call that activity a teleological suspension of disciplinarity.19 A teleological transformation of disciplinarity means engaging what needs to be addressed in spite of the constraints of our disciplines. sciences in The Order of Things (1971). Cf. also Wynter (1989). 19 For more on this concept, see Lewis R. Gordon (2006: Introduction and chapter 1).

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Part III We have thus far seen what the question of reason and that of the production of knowledge, at least as understood through Africana philosophy, bring to the conceptual life of dehumanized peoples such as the African Diaspora. Now let us consider, following the famed physicist of string theory James Sylvester Gates, Jr., what Africana people bring to reason and one of its subcategories, namely, science. What, in other words, should we expect if we shift the geography or location of reason from its current modality of limited possibilities (by virtue of hegemonic demands of embodiment from its current manifestation)? W. E. B. Du Bois, as is well known, raised the problem of black double consciousness (1903). In its first stage, it is seeing oneself through the eyes of the dominating others. It is, in other words, seeing the world as the dominating group sees it. Or, in the American context, let us just call it seeing the world as whites, understood as a structural whiteness, see it. (After all, it is not the case that every member of any group necessarily sees things in the same way.) That stage is often treated as the “universal.” There is, however, another stage, a stage of critical consciousness, where the contradictions of universality as white are evident. Paget Henry (2005: 79–112) has described this stage as “potentiated double consciousness.” It involves admitting the lived contradictions of reality as presented by extant thought. A good example of this is the critical discussion of race, detailed discussions of which are available elsewhere, so I will restrict this discussion to two points: (1) modern science has brought instrumental rationality to the study of race through the dominance of efficient causality in its study, but (2) we still work under the assumption of a substance-oriented metaphysics of identity, where the essence is about what is hidden “inside” the phenomenon; a rejection of that metaphysics would lead to a radically different philosophical treatment of race, where “essence” is an external configuring of a subject.20 What this should mean is that race is presented to us as “internal” (that which is “secreted”) while we constantly live it – including at the level of our production of knowledge – as external. From the word raza (medieval Spanish), which referred to the breeding of horses and of dogs and to Moorish and Jewish lineage in Iberia, with possible roots in Arabic ra’ and Hebrew rosh, both of which refer to beginning and origins, the term runs into trouble when its logic collapses into a designation without the need for additional interrogation.21 The search for race as a cause in and 20 See e.g. Lewis R. Gordon, “Race in the Dialectics of Culture,” in JanMohamed (2011: 55–79). 21 See e.g. Orozsco, Tesoro de la lengua (1611) in Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan (2007: 79).

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by itself, in other words, is a misguided project.22 Race, as we know it, thus emerges from a collapse of knowledge that displaces its origins into the modern world. Put differently, it may not be correct to say that there was never any such thing as race; instead it is the way we have been using and have come to know race that is incorrect. Some critics, as we know, have concluded that this should mean the end of race, but the evidence suggests that if the error continues to be the grammar of its generation the future could very well hold a proliferation of races.23 What Africana peoples bring to this discussion is an internal genealogy of having struggled through this possibility, which continues to be a feature of the black world.24 Beyond race, there is another response to the modern crises of knowledge to consider. Returning to science, we should understand it not simply in terms of evidential criteria, verification, and falsification, as many positivists may demand, but also in terms of imagination.25 We bring our imagination to science, and what science brings to us, as philosophers, is a reminder that reality matters. An Africana philosophy of science will bring to our understanding of science not only the dangers of scientific reductionism but also the value of scientific and philosophical imagination. The famed string theorist Sylvester James Gates, Jr. put it this way: science is a discourse that is learned, as is any other discursive activity (2005). What this means is that those who develop a sufficient level of competence and facility with, for example, the mathematical approaches achieve more than semantic and grammatical knowledge; they achieve the next level, namely, style. That dimension is epistemologically rich since, as we know with ordinary languages, adverbs affect meaning. To work at that level is the equivalent of making the scientific statements, in a word, groove, and do so through epistemological relations of differing dimensional scope. If we compare it to music, which is a very mathematical discourse, one could see immediately that simply having the order of tones and meters is not the same as making music. For music to occur, other elements have to be brought in. Those other elements, such as culture and experience, are also what accompany individuals who perform music. Gates was, in effect, arguing that there are shibboleths that emerge at more complex levels of theoretical mathematical physics. The question for knowledge that takes the challenges of reason

22 There is much literature on this: Zuberi (2003); Taylor (2004); and Alcoff (2005). 23 For a survey of racial eliminativism and racial conservationism, see Taylor (2004). For discussions of racial proliferation, see Falguni Sheth (2009) and Lewis R. Gordon’s “Falguni A. Sheth: Toward a Political Philosophy of Race” (2011). 24 See e.g. Dzidzienyo and Obeler (2005). 25 On this matter, I recommend Caws (1993). See also Lewis R. Gordon (2002).

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seriously is this: do such dimensions affect the way one thinks and what one thinks? Concluding Remarks Blacks reach out to unreasonable reason and attempt to do so reasonably for the effect of creating reasonable reason. Why, however, should blacks bother? The link to knowledge and liberation, where colonization also involves the cultivation of epistemic dependency, means that knowledge and reason, its modus operandi, must be transformed for any serious project of liberation. In effect, the appeal is to that concern of Africana philosophy, and by extension Africana studies, that is symbiotically linked to the question of what we are and our conditions of justification, namely, freedom. To be free, one must be able to appear without apology, to appear with legitimacy, and to have justification for that appearance. Those conditions, however, are also exemplars of what we also call home. As where one lives, it does not have to mean a place: it could also be symbolic and epistemological. There is a peculiar melancholia born from this insight. Recall that black people and Africana people are indigenous to the modern world. Our discussion of their being problematic in that world raises an additional difficulty: such people, and their correlative thought, are supposedly illegitimate in the world – indeed, the only world – to which they are indigenous. This leads to the unfortunate circumstance of being homeless in the only world to which they could belong. We could call this phenomenon Black Melancholia.26 The “it” that is not when the black enters is not only reason but also the subjective condition of belonging. That can be achieved, however, through taking responsibility for the unique demands of knowledge posed by such rejection. It means, in a reasserted yet transformed understanding of desire, to transcend the desire to be desired, for the interrogative and encomia of responsibility for no less than responsibility, for the maturation process of facing the darkness beyond the false security of epistemic closure.

26 The subject of melancholia, transformed from its clinical dimensions in psychoanalysis, has received much study in recent work on theories of race, culture, and modernity. Judith Butler’s “Thresholds of Melancholia” (1995) offers critical insight with regard to the formation of modern subjectivity; Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2006) in terms of colonial nostalgia; Nathalie Etoke’s Melancholia Africana (2010) in terms of the condition of blackness in the modern world; and I have offered elaboration of these themes in other places as well – e.g. Lewis R. Gordon’s “When I Was There, It Was Not” (2007) and “Theory in Black” (2010).

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Works Cited The Academy of St Louis. Transactions of the Academy of Science of St Louis. vol. 1, 1856–1860. St. Louis, Mo.: George Knapp and Company, 1860. Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Asante, Molefi. The Afrocentric Idea. rev. edn. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1998. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Nice Richard. Cambridge University Press, 1972. Butler, Judith. “Thresholds of Melancholy.” In Steven Galt Crowell (ed.). Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Caws, Peter. Yorick’s World: Science and the Knowing Subject. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993. Cox, Oliver Cromwell. Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. 50th Anniversary Edition of Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. Preface by Cornel West. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 2nd edn. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903. Dzidzienyo, Anani, and Suzanne Obeler (eds). Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Etoke, Nathalie. Melancholia Africana: L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire. Paris: Éditions du Cygne, 2010. Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971. Gates, Sylvester James, Jr. “How Diversity Likely Matters in Science and Mathematics.” Keynote Address, Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2005. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Gordon, Jane Anna. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Gordon, Jane Anna, and Lewis R. Gordon. Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2009. Gordon, Lewis R. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. —— “Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison postcoloniale.” Trans. Sonya Dayan-Hezbrun, Tumultes 37 (2011): 165–83.

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—— Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. —— “Falguni A. Sheth: Toward a Political Philosophy of Race,” Continental Philosophy Review 44.1 (2011): 119–30. —— An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2008. —— “Making Science Reasonable: Peter Caws on Science Both Human and ‘Natural’.” Janus Head 5.1 (2002): 14–38. —— “Race in the Dialectics of Culture.” In Abdul R. JanMohamed (ed.). Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class and Caste. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011: 55–79. —— “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18.2 (2010): 193–214. —— “When I Was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night.” Performance Research 2.3 (September 2007): 8–15. Gordon, Lewis R., and Jane Anna Gordon (eds). A Companion to African American Studies. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2006. —— —— Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Henry, Paget. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications.” The C .L. R. James Journal 11.1 (2005): 79–112. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 2002. Jaspers, Karl. Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 2nd edn. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. —— Philosophy of Existence. Trans. Richard F. Grabau. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press, 1984. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Miller, Reid [Jerry]. “A Lesson in Moral Spectatorship.” Critical Inquiry 34.4 (2008): 725–7. Monohan, Michael. The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Moody-Adams, Michelle. Fieldwork in Familiar Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Orozsco, Sebastian de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua. [1611]. Trans. and quoted in David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and its Jews.” In Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and

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Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Sheth, Falguni A. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. Taylor, Paul. Race: A Philosophical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1996. Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles.” World Literature Today (1989): 637–47. —— “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project.” In Lewis Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (eds). Not Only the Master’s Tools. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2006: 85–106. Zuberi, Tukufu. Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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13 Revising Jezebel Politics: Toward a New Black Sexual Ethic Jennifer S. Leath (Yale University)

The failure of respectability and the incessant onslaught of cultural attacks against all black sexualities invite us to “crawl back” (Long, 1999: 9) through the lives of Jezebel, imagining a deviant future (Cohen, 2004), a “still unfolding” revolution (Walcott, 2006). A careful review of the mythological, historical, and biblical lives of “Jezebel” unearths the value of reappropriating Jezebel as a model for radical uses of the erotic. The queerness of her faith; the deviance of her sexuality; the bold pluralism of her politics: these are qualities that fill the interstices of hegemonic his-stories of Jezebel. While epistemological archeology will not uncover a pristine heroine for contemporary scholars and activists to emulate, a thoughtful retreat toward the naissance of Jezebel reveals holistic praxes of justice-making and adumbrates the parameters of a sexual ethic. Jezebel’s historical and biblical records – though corrupted by the impositions of cultures that have endeavored to vilify her and her “progeny,” and corrupted, also, as a result of some of her own choices – still inform a productive model of intersectionality. Specifically, a redacted historical and biblical Jezebel stands at the crossroads of faith, politics, and sexuality. For Jezebel, these are inseparable, mutually informing, and co-constituted. However, Jezebel’s faith, politics, and sexuality – even once redacted according to historical critical theory and the praxis of reading “darkly” (Wimbush, 2001) – emerge as deviant, other, outside of the respectable rubrics of ancient Israel and subsequent time and places alike, awkward in the shadows of racial formations and contemporary black identities as well. And, yet, there is something positively compelling about a redacted Jezebel. Ultimately, a (once more) redacted Jezebel embodies radical “uses of the erotic,” with particular emphasis on the erotic (as sexuality), powerfully expressed as the work of faithful queer spirituality and intractable pluralistic political purpose. A revised Jezebel politics – that redacts the historical biblical Jezebel, dismantles the sexual-racial terror of the Jezebel trope of modernity, and

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conserves the values of blackness and deviance – directs us toward a new black sexual ethic that cannot be reduced to bodies coordinated in motion, but must be meta-ethically articulated as both religious and political. That is to say, this new black sexual ethic does not demand that one be religious and does not necessarily require that one be political in a particular way, but does demand an open posture toward the religious and disallows political neutrality. While I contend that sexuality, faith, and politics are mutual partners in an economy of collective and individual identity, because of the unique electricity of sexuality, sexuality prevails as the definitive factor in an ethical framework that reflects the contemporary intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion (see Crenshaw, 1995). Whether by virtue of cultural attitudes toward sexuality or by virtue of some organic bio-political truth about sexuality, sexuality never fails to charge social discourse. While many scholars of religion argue a similar point with respect to religion, this chapter focuses on the peculiar ways that sexuality can “read” religion by virtue of its own qualities, although this essay also dares to develop a distinctive discourse on sexuality, that is, a discourse that engages the normative potential of sexuality without stipulations of respectability and without rejecting the latent morality of deviance. For this reason the co-constitutive relationship between sexuality, faith, and politics that emerges through a redaction of the biblical Jezebel and a revision of her cultural legacies is cast as a “sexual” ethic, although it is indisputably an ethic of faith and politics as well. We Know Jezebel Patricia Hill Collins writes: “the jezebel, whore, or ‘hoochie’ – is central in [a] nexus of controlling images of Black womanhood” (2000: 81). Deborah Gray White explains: In every way Jezebel was the counter-image of the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh. (White, 1999: 29)

We know Jezebel: in the history of black women, her foil was the asexual, religious, nurturing mammy. We know Jezebel: she “excused miscegenation, the sexual exploitation of black women, and the mulatto population” (Collins, 2000: 61). We know Jezebel: she transcends time and name – as the hypersexual, unrapable black woman. Patricia Hill Collins argues that, “[b]ecause jezebel or the hoochie is constructed as a woman whose sexual appetites are at best inappropriate and, at worst, insatiable, it becomes a short step to imagine her as a ‘freak’” (83). Jezebel queers all things because, as

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Collins suggests, she makes her male sexual partners hypersexual, her own hypersexuality masculinizes her, and any same-sex desire reconfirms her queerness. (83–4). Jezebel, and all those subjected to the imposition of her mythology are paradigmatically queer, with legs spread between heterosexual and homosexual deviances. But do we really know Jezebel? Jezebel’s history long precedes that of her imposition on black female bodies. It is through a brief excursus into the historical biblical Jezebel to whom the name refers, along with a conscientious appropriation of the paradigmatic queerness extrapolated from Patricia Hill Collins’s analysis of historic and contemporary impositions of Jezebel onto black women’s bodies, that we reach a new black sexual ethic that revised Jezebel politics inspires. The ninth-century BCE queen “Jezebel” is situated in at least three (ostensibly) timeless power matrices: (1) the power matrix of faith: a faith of her own, the faith of her Hebrew narrators, and the faith of contemporary believers who hold the Hebrew scriptures sacred; (2) the power matrix of politics: politics defined by the objectives of nation/empire building through labor and alliances; and (3) the power matrix of sexuality: sexuality defined, primarily, as corrupted by the inferiority of women, the default conceptualization of all things sexual as immoral and cooptation as an instrument of seduction and manipulation; rarely, but significantly, also as a matter of self-protective agency. What follows are some biographical details of special interest about the historical biblical figure we know as Jezebel, some features of which you may recognize from the accounts of Jezebel in 1 and 2 Kings (books of the Hebrew scriptures). The woman we know as Jezebel was originally named “Itha-Baal.” Her name, literally, asks, “where is Baal?” – a Phoenician god. For the Phoenicians, the word “Baal,” however, could also be translated as “highness” or “god.” Thus, Jezebel, in her own land, in her own tongue, might have been understood as “woman of God.” In the process of calcifying their hard-fought monotheistic tradition and chastising King Ahab, Jezebel’s Israelite husband, for his choice of a spouse, Jezebel’s Israelite contemporaries and the writers of the Hebrew text attacked Itha-Baal’s name, changing it from Izebul to I-zebul to Izebel. By the end of these redactions, no longer would her name ask “where is Baal?” Instead, it would ask “where is the shit?” No longer “woman of God,” Jezebel was “woman of shit” (Yee, 2003). Jezebel suffered the age-old, but familiar, violence of being “called outside of her name.”1 Jezebel’s cosmological taxonomy was not, however, limited to Baal. The 1

A common black US Southern colloquialism, to be “called out(side of) one’s name” is to

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worship of Asherah, who was represented by a pole, was known as Baal’s companion, and could manifest herself as both female and male, was central to Jezebel’s faith. In addition to this queerness of her gods, some people in Jezebel’s community also engaged in spiritualized, polyamorous sexual acts through which they embodied a connection with the earth’s seasonal changes. The central attack on Jezebel’s sexuality, in fact, had nothing to do with her intimate praxes, but were actually a matter of her queer polytheistic and pluralistic faith praxes. Not only was Jezebel polytheistic, she was also pluralistic in her political approach. She even went so far as to host an interfaith banquet. In this respect, Jezebel toed a fine line between pluralist gestures for the sake of the just and peaceful embrace of difference, and pluralist gestures for the sake of imposing imperial assimilation. It was not until she was attacked with the monotheistic prejudices of the leaders of the Israelite community that Jezebel crossed this line, pursuing the destruction of Israel’s most famous prophet during this period, Elijah. There are two points within the scriptural narrative of Jezebel that reveal her sexuality at work. The first of these is her imperialistic murder of Naboth, one of Ahab’s vulnerable subjects, and her acquisition of his land. On one hand, this proved that sexual politics can go wrong. On the other hand, it is a reminder of the reciprocal, mutual, and egalitarian bond that Ahab and Jezebel shared, unparalleled in the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. Ahab’s and Jezebel’s were sexualities that inspired and generated political collaboration for a common good, exceeding “explicitly” sexual acts. The second implicit reference to Jezebel’s sexuality comes at the very end of her life. Here, instead of sexuality inspiring political action, political action inspires an expression of sexuality. Prior to eunuchs forcing her out of a window at the behest of Jehu in 842 BCE (2 Kings 9:30–7), Jezebel “painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window” (English Standard Version). The political challenge Jezebel faced provoked a sensual response. Without her sexuality, Jezebel’s politics are incomplete, her political acts entirely irrational, and her unique contribution to the faith ethics that inform the work of politics do not make sense. Jezebel politics are thus revised to emphasize Jezebel’s primordial faith claims, adjudicate qualified violence, interrogate hierarchical structures – personal and social, private and public, promote (overall) political and faithful sexuality, and sexualize politics and faith. Because of the uncanny experiences of intersectional degradation that the historical biblical Jezebel faced, because of the complex matrix of identities she embodied, and because of the ways that she signifies a queer be referred to or spoken at/to using a name or term (often pejorative) that is not one’s given or preferred name. Thanks to Jafari Sinclair Allen for this reminder.

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and deviant approach to historical and contemporary sexual, religious, and political ethics, I have provided an extensive account of her political significance. It is this unsung legacy of Jezebel that simultaneously sucks us into the black hole of her legacy while propelling us forward into another dimension of space and time, a dimension in which sexuality, politics, and faith are normative and essential companions in the realization of re-formations of blackness as community of solidarity and purpose. Now, returning to the Common Era, White writes that Europeans “misinterpreted African cultural traditions, so that polygamy was attributed to the Africans’ uncontrolled lust, tribal dances were reduced to the level of orgy, and African religions lost the sacredness that had sustained generations of ancestral worshippers” (1999: 29). Could it have been that the dominant leaders of Ancient Israel attempted to do to Jezebel and her people what Europe attempted to do to Africa and its people? The epistemological work done to degrade the historical biblical Jezebel is seconded in the work done to fuse that Jezebel and black womanhood. “Jezebel, the worst woman ever heard of in the annals of mankind […] was a Negro woman”: in 1843, Josiah Priest, famous for his racial theorization of the descendants of Ham in the same text, published these words in an extensive volume entitled Slavery, as it Relates to the Negro, or African Race, Examined in the Light of Circumstances, History and the Holy Scriptures. Priest notes: Jezebel being a heathen of the worst description, and a woman of great impudence and boldness of character, as well as exceedingly beautiful, as a negress, captivated the vitiated imagination of Ahab by her wiles and fascination, and became queen of the kingdom of Israel. (Priest, 1977: 156)

Subsequently, Priest celebrates her demise: “Jezebel came finally to a fearful end” (160). When Jehu, Ahab’s successor, came to power, before he ordered her defenestration Jezebel “tired her head, and painted her face, to disguise her negro complexion, and if possible, thereby, to seduce the new king, Jehu” (ibid.). The illogic of Priest’s argument presents a dilemma of grand proportions: when Jezebel dies, the hegemonies of Judeo-Christian scripture do not die with her; the spurious affiliation between a corrupted perspective on Jezebel and black women’s bodies does not die; the images of black women as hyper-sexual seducers do not die either. When Priest’s Jezebel dies, she does not even enjoy the glory of seductively effective beauty; Priest’s Jezebel dies in an act of self-hatred, realizing that her beauty, “as a negress,” is not enough to pull the more virtuous Jehu; her makeup is not enough to hide her blackness; her tamed hair is not enough to whiten her. Priest’s Jezebel is beautiful enough to seduce the weak, but never beautiful

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enough for whiteness, that is, true beauty. If Jezebel dies, she can never claim: “Whether or not I am Black, Black is beautiful.” Several attempts have been made to reclaim Jezebel, walking the path from the historical biblical Jezebel through her history in the US South; from her appearances in early US cinema to her contemporary cameos in popular culture (see Quinby, 1999; Pippin, 2007). In fact, religious scholar Tina Pippin even identifies the spaces in which efforts were made to reclaim Jezebel amongst contemporaries of Josiah Priest. Pippin (33) cites Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1895 treatment of Jezebel in The Woman’s Bible, which she wrote in collaboration with twenty-six other white women: “Jezebel was a brave, fearless, generous woman, so wholly devoted to her own husband that even wrong seemed justifiable to her, if she could thereby make him happy” (Stanton, 2006: 247, cited at Pippin, 2007: 33). Stanton hereby normalizes Jezebel’s expressed sexuality through voluntary loyalty to her husband and, thus, embraces the marginalized Jezebel. However, this embrace remains situated in the patriarchy of heteronormative logic and fails to identify the similarities of and differences between the relentless interpretive attacks on Jezebel (and the impact of these attacks) with respect to white women and black women of her day.2 While contemporary attempts have explicitly acknowledged the racial overtones of Jezebel’s history and attempted intertextual, cross-temporal readings, they have not fully explored the possibilities and challenges of a black cultural embrace of a revised Jezebel. The imagination of Pippin’s “re-vamped” (2007: 33) Jezebel, for instance, does not make her more palatable for contemporary black US women. Can we Reclaim Jezebel? Expanding upon Lorde’s famous question, how do we identify “the master’s tools,” as such? To the concern at hand: can we reappropriate Jezebel? When all things conspire on behalf of “the master’s house,” all technologies are co-opted for “the master’s plan,” what everyday acts attain as resistance and what prevents nihilistic paralysis? For Lorde, polite, perfunctory treatments of difference are the chief offense. Hope resides elsewhere. She writes: Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power 2 This significant limitation was not, however, limited to Stanton’s analysis of Jezebel. It is important to remember that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony ultimately resolved not to support the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the US Constitution because of their conviction that women’s suffrage should have accompanied suffrage for black (men) in the United States.

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to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. (Lorde, 1984: 112–13)

The question of reclaiming Jezebel is a matter of whether some recovery of her can lead us out of what Emilie Townes has called the “hegemonic fantastic imagination” and into the interdependently, diversely secured, chaos of knowledge. Nevertheless, the obstacles to reclaiming Jezebel are great – and the racial particularities of any effort to reclaim a revised Jezebel complicate such an agenda: she has been the source and object of religious violence; she has been identified as the thesis and antithesis of heteronormativity; she exhibits an ethos of mutuality and individualistic opportunism; she has been leveled against black women and, in turn, the black community at multiple levels. Can Jezebel be anything other than “the master’s tool”? Jezebel, as both contemporary signifier of racial-sexual bigotry and historical and biblical figure, raises a series of complex concerns that precede any model of contemporary black sexual ethics that she might inspire. While Jezebel (as biblical historical referent) has been shrouded in the most insidious attacks on black women’s sexual dysfunction and while contemporary culture usually invokes Jezebel by other names, Jezebel has not been forgotten in contemporary black pulpits. Instead, she has been spiritualized, her racial history made opaque. Between 2005 and 2010, the journal The African American Pulpit published eleven sermons with references to Jezebel. Two of these sermons provide detailed sketches of “the Jezebel spirit.” For Roma Benjamin, Jezebel’s is a controlling spirit that breeds confusion, worldliness, corruption, and bad moods; a spirit that co-depends on those who are available to be controlled. When Benjamin puts a face on the Jezebel in her life, it is that of a male pastor who used her for sex and companionship for seven years. According to Juanita Bynum, God told her to “seek” Jezebel’s spirit out because “she’s the culprit that is diminishing and tearing up churches, tearing up ministries, tearing up people’s families” by turning into a male or female, like the mother deity, Asherah, whom she worshipped; by doing work that one is not called to do, but that (appropriate) others refuse to do; by refusing to be obedient to and dependent on the God of Israel. Interestingly enough, none of these sermons acknowledges the history of Jezebel as a favorite racial epithet that white US society has leveled against black women, but all of them participate in reifying an unsympathetic reading of Jezebel that is consistent with the biblical bias for “the people of Israel” and against proud polytheism. While Benjamin and Bynum queer Jezebel’s past, present, and future, they do not applaud her for this and they do not hesitate to point the finger at contemporary backslidden believers who embody Jezebel not (primarily) as a function of their sexuality

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but as a defect in their submissive fidelity to God. There is a deep need for a revised discourse. Black churches report that more than half of the over 40 million black people in the United States are churchgoers.3 In fact, according to “A Religious Portrait of African Americans,” a study conducted and funded by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, although the United States is considered a highly religious nation, African Americans are among the most religious demographic populations within the United States with 87 percent of African Americans indicating a religious affiliation and 88 percent indicating absolute certainty in the existence of God.4 Moreover, 78 percent of all African Americans are Protestant and 59 percent are affiliated with historically black Protestant churches.5 Significantly, women constitute roughly two-thirds of black church membership. For a particular subculture of black US Christian women, the role of Christian scriptures (i.e. the Bible) in spiritual formation and social identity cannot be underestimated. Even taking into consideration the growing number of adults in the United States with no religious affiliation, blacks in the United States not only remain among the demographic groups with the highest percentage of some religious affiliation but also, while the percentage of black US adults without some religious affiliation is growing, this percentage is growing at a slower rate than it is for all other ethnically based demographic groups.6 In her work, anthropologist and ethnographer Marla Frederick demonstrates the ways that for black US Christian women: (1) the authority of these women’s independent interpretations of scripture trumps other forms of religious authority, including that of clergy; (2) proper gender-sexual norms are often determined on the basis of one’s faith; and (3) marriage and sex are fundamentally connected for these women, consciously, as a matter of their faith, and only secondarily, if at all consciously, as a matter of social validation or respectability (Frederick, 2003: 191–2). Given the importance of scripture and black US women’s independent reading of scripture to their 3 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches 2010 (2010). 4 “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” January 30, 2009. 5 Even amongst unaffiliated African Americans, 72 percent “say religion plays at least a somewhat important role in their lives.” Also, African American women attend church more regularly and are more active in the church than any other demographic group. Of African American women, 84 percent indicate that religion is very important to them; 59 percent report attending church at least once a week. 6 “‘Nones on the Rise”: “The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.” www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx#who. Accessed November 18, 2012.

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sexual politics, it is essential to engage Judeo-Christian biblical narratives in the work of disrupting accusations of immorality. Cohen notes: “Black youth who are more religious are 13 percent more likely than the least religious black youth to agree” that “it is always wrong to have sex before you are married,” “homosexuality is always wrong,” and “abortion is always wrong” (2010: 64). For those interested in more progressive sexual ethics, this observation may inspire a political agenda of atheism or agnosticism, especially with data indicating that black youths between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are much less likely to be religiously affiliated than every other category of older African Americans.7 Nevertheless, unless (or until) the validity and spiritual relevance of religiosity and the Bible is persuasively critiqued or perceived as irreparably compromised, such that it no longer has authority in the faith formation and spiritual identities of black women, it is necessary to engage the Bible, spirituality, religiosity, and even Christianity as tools for provoking and promoting alternative, even deviant, models of political sexuality and sexualized politics. Biblical Engagement The recovery and revision of Jezebel and her politics is one way to engage the biblical text, but this type of reading, alone, is insufficient. Ludger Viefhues-Bailey explains Susan Friend Harding’s conclusion: “Only after it stopped resonating as true did preachers such as Jerry Falwell claim that the biblical text rejects segregation and slavery” (Viefhues-Bailey, 2010: 39). The attitudes of religious blacks seem to be following a similar trend of intuitive cultural sensitivity with respect to their attitudes on same-sex intimacies. While Bible proof-texting does not, generally, persuade opposed blacks to affirm same-sex intimacies and civil rights for those who enjoy same-sex intimacies, when asked to articulate and defend their perspective on same-sex intimacies and relevant civil rights, biblical texts are, nevertheless, among the first sources to which black Christians appeal. Importantly, broader ethical frameworks that address central precepts of the faith (e.g. “love thy neighbor as thyself ”) do attain with respect to persuading black Christians to support LGBTQ rights.8 Moreover, exit polls following the 2012 presidential 7 “19% of black youth in this 18–29 age-range report that they are religiously unaffiliated whereas the average of the other age brackets measured (i.e. 30–49, 50–64, and 65+) is 9%.” “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” 8 Rebecca Voelkel and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s National Religious Leadership Roundtable, “A Time to Build Up: Analysis of the No on Proposition 8 Campaign and its Implications for Future Pro-LGBTQQIA Religious Organizing” (Arcus Operation Foundation, 2009).

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elections indicated a dramatic shift toward increased support for same-sex marriage among voting blacks in the United States that many analysts agree cannot be explained without reference to President Obama’s assertion of public support for same-sex marriage in May 2012 and the overwhelming support for President Obama among blacks in the United States. Thus, there is a complex web of religious and cultural logics that religious, predominantly Christian, blacks are navigating to reach a resonating rhetoric and (distinct) praxis of sexual ethics. For black Christians, at least, it is in a space between proof-texting and ethical arcs that close readings of biblical texts like Jezebel can be cast for transformations of black sexual ethics. Religious and Theoretical Engagement It is a qualified heterodoxy that provokes renewed attention to the biblical and historically imagined figure of Jezebel. Not only is Jezebel “other” in the eyes of the people of Israel as a foreigner and worshipper of Baal, but she also perceives a value in “others,” and affirms the value of diversity in her own way. Not only is Jezebel deviant with respect to the way she maintains power, contradicting traditional gender-sexual roles with respect to Ahab, but she is also deviant with respect to her wielding of power in the orchestration of Naboth’s assassination and procurement of his land. The characteristics and behaviors that distinguish Jezebel as “other” or “deviant” are morally mixed, a hybrid of that which is commendable and that which must be rejected. While various discursive methodologies and perspectives might illuminate the complexity of Jezebel – especially for a black US sexual ethic – queer theory (in particular by black theorists) and the problematics of contemporary queer identities provide a critical bridge between the biblical character of Jezebel and Jezebel’s afterlife in black US culture. On the one hand, queer theory has attained status as one of the most effective areas within the contemporary cultural production of knowledge for navigating hybridity while maintaining the inherent and qualified values of deviance; queer theory best accommodates the unique gender-sexuality fluidity of a character like Jezebel. On the other hand, contemporary queer identities continue to serve as harbingers for general discourses on both sexuality and race – as conversations on sexuality hover around those expressions of sexual identity that deviate from a patriarchal heteronormative model and as the sociopolitical position of US blacks as religious subjects continues to be measured by, against, and in relation to positions on issues such as same-sex marriage. Looking at Jezebel through queer theory, as a potentially or partially “queer” subject, enables a fairer adjudication of the strategic, commendable deviances Jezebel represents and of those that must be rejected. The “queer” methodology maintains the dignity of Jezebel (i.e.,

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her personhood) and makes Jehu’s assassination of her unjustifiable – even if she is “other,” deviant, and, at times, morally culpable in her otherness and deviances. The revision of Jezebel invites and insists upon a more critical engagement than a hermeneutic treatment of the Bible allows. Charles Long “crawls back” to what black religion should be. Long argues: “The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressors, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth – their first creation” (1999: 184). The discovery of one’s autonomy and truth – dignity, if you will – is characterized as an oppressive aspect of the process of religion. Long explains: “The oppressive element in the religions of the oppressed is the negation of the image of the oppressor and the discovery of the first creation.” This discovery of the first creation, of dignity, has been channeled through languages of sin and shame, but might be more aptly described in terms of normative dependence and humility (i.e., “a sense of absolute dependence and humility in the sight of the divine and one’s fellow human beings” (176) that definitively transcends the particular experiences of human assertions of domination, power, and superiority). Black religion, however, cannot conclude with this rickety, normative fence of “what it should be”: materiality, flexibility, and revulsion to confinement demand expression. Then, there is what is (in some spaces) and could be increasingly true with respect to black religious landscapes. In an explanation of her interest in Voodoo and Santería – an interest that some might dismissively characterize as too extreme in its appeal to historic African traditional religion, and others might critically characterize as a quintessential irony of modern capitalism – anthropologist M. Jacqui Alexander writes: “It is at these crossroads of subjectivity and collectivity, Sacred knowing and power, memory, and body, that we sojourn so as to examine their pedagogic content to see how they might instruct us in the complicated undertaking of Divine self-invention” (2005: 299–300). Black queer scholar and performance artist E. Patrick Johnson offers another alternative. On the one hand, he demonstrates the extent to which the black church authenticates blackness even while problematizing endeavors to authenticate/verify blackness. On the other hand, he exposes the open ways that LGBTQ blacks consistently participate in the “black church” – including their simultaneous disruptions and confirmations of “blackness” through reinventions of the “black church,” and thinly veiled presence in typically heterosexist black churches. The black church, as Johnson imagines it could be, would not celebrate a “queering of hegemonic sexuality,” but would rather be transformed into “a descriptive ‘space’ rather than a pre-scripted ‘place,’ where the expression of non-normative gender and sexual identity is accepted and embraced by all members” (2001: 22–3).

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With Alexander’s black religion in relief, Johnson’s vision might even go a step further: black churches could celebrate and expect non-normative gender and sexual identity – not only as a diversity, but occasionally as an expression of spirituality – of theological and sociological import – in and of itself. That is, gender and sexual identity and expressive diversity signifies itself always, and yet is sometimes code, signifying an im/material transcendence. Quare,9 queer, deviant, stigmatized, marginalized, pariah, Jezebel identity is not new to blacks – or black religion – in the United States (see Stockton, 2006 and Scott, 2010). At issue are black religious perspectives on the quarenesses of blackness and of black religion – and, too, black religious perspectives on the quarenesses – and queernesses – that it can safely locate outside of blackness and black religiosity. Ultimately, though, black religion is quare religion – albeit in a shallow, self-unaware way. When intersecting identities reveal a complicated weave of subjugated conditions, the best that most people hope for is majority status, or an empowered position, with respect to at least one of their identities. Normalcy, respectability, and privilege seem to be the objectives. Yet, queer theory teaches us that the pride of the pariah is fundamentally distinct from the pride of the token or the exceptional. Michael Warner offers a helpful distinction between dignity that concerns itself with honor, rank, nobility, and bourgeois propriety and a “modern and democratic” dignity that is “inherent in the human.” He builds a case for the latter form of dignity with respect to sex, in particular, by passing through the normative deviance of shame: If sex is a kind of indignity, then we’re all in it together. And the paradoxical result is that only when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human. In order to be consistent, we would have to talk about dignity in shame. (Warner, 1999: 36)

What is this “dignity in shame” if not individuals and communities discovering their “first creation” (to return to Charles Long’s description of the inherently oppressive nature of religion)? And this is none other than the progenitor of an avowedly “quare” religion. Cathy Cohen takes the ethical precept of “dignity in shame” a step further. On one hand, she notes the distinct, cumulative social stakes when the question of dignity goes beyond “sex.” With respect to African Americans whose identities and/or behaviors do not conform to the majority 9 According to E. Patrick Johnson’s description of this term that he appropriates from his grandmother, framed in language that implicitly and explicitly recalls Alice Walker’s term “womanist,” one defining specification of “quare” is “a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered person of color who loves other men or women, sexually or nonsexually, and appreciates black culture and community.” Johnson (2001: 2)

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of who blacks are and what blacks do, she exposes a “secondary process of marginalization” (Cohen, 1999: 75). Cohen does not, however, advocate assimilation. To the contrary, she writes: Despite the feelings of some in Black communities that we have been shamed by the immoral behavior of a small subset of our community some would label the underclass, scholars must take up the charge to highlight and detail the agency of those on the outside, those who through their acts of nonconformity choose outsider status, at least temporarily. It is an intentional deviance given limited agency and constrained choices. (Cohen, 2004: 43)

Cohen, thus, calls for deviance that is not for its own sake, but deviance that happens by virtue of the integrity and dignity of inherent identity, and deviance that is embodied as resistance to oppression for the sake of the sociopolitical integrity of people and communities. This is none other than the daring deviance of a revised Jezebel, restored her original name, realizing a peaceable pluralism, and deploying her sexuality – even to her last breath – in acts of deviance and political resistance. Black Identity Politics Continued For many, who do not fit into the confines of heteronormativity, a revised Jezebel politics-inspired black sexual ethic remains untenable. This is not necessarily because respectability is a viable option or because there is such a high premium on assimilation. However, just as Jezebel fought to juggle the intersections of her identity, contemporary blacks juggle blessed burdens as well. Those negotiating the intersections of identities – especially identities that signify deep belonging and collective oppression, often make choices about which communities to prioritize and how. This prioritization often comes down to a question of which community an individual finds most beneficial and fundamental to her or his identity (see Haldeman 2004 and Swartz 2011). Certainly, this is reflected in the complex logic of down-low culture amongst LGBTQ blacks in the United States that cannot be reduced to accusations of hypocrisy or cowardice. This tendency presents a critical challenge with respect to the normative call for deviance as the hallmark of a new black sexual ethic. Ultimately, unless this deviance is a collective voluntary deviance, one that black communities are choosing to embrace as community – cultural, religious, or sexual community – deviance (as an individual black sexual ethic) is untenable.

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Toward a New Black Sexual Ethic In the end, the problem with Jezebel is that, as she is, we can afford for her neither to live nor to die. Her deviance requires our creativity. In contemporary terms: on the one hand, Jezebel is problematic because of her imposition onto our bodies. We did not choose her for ourselves – and the descendants of Josiah Priest would reinterpret that appropriation as an escalation of moral depravity. Of course, such misunderstandings need not stop us from the task at hand. A revised Jezebel is, after all, a viable candidate for a new black sexual ethic built on the foundations of a politics of deviance. Jezebel has lived many lives: persecuted in her historical biblical form, deployed in white culture as an act of sexual-racial terror against black women, redeployed in contemporary black pulpits for respectability, heteronormativity, and social conformity. If we can radicalize and resurrect such a figure through a normative politics of deviance, her next life might just transform religious, political, and sexual landscapes, as we know them. What is this new ethic? It dances in pluralist shadows … It transgresses public/private demarcations … It defies imperialism in pursuit of mutuality … It inspires political action even as it responds to political push … While these criteria are but a sketch, they begin to imagine a new way of thinking sexual ethics from a foundation of deviance through a revision of Jezebel politics. And perhaps one day we will receive a new revelation of revolution and sing with Sade: Jezebel Jezebel Won’t try to deny where she came from You can see it in her pride And the raven in her eyes Try show her a better way She’ll say you don’t know what you’ve been missing And by the time she blinks you know she won’t be listening Reach for the top she said And the sun is gonna shine Every winter was a war she said I want to get what’s mine.10

10 Sade (1985).

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Works Cited The African American Pulpit. www.theafricanamericanpulpit.com/. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Cohen, Cathy J. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. —— Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics. Kindle edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. —— “Deviance As Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1.1 (2004): 27–45. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. revised 10th anniversary edn. New York: Routledge, 2000. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, 1995. Frederick, Marla. Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003. Haldeman, Douglas. “When Sexual and Religious Orientation Collide: Considerations for Psychotherapy with Conflicted Gay Men.” Counseling Psychologist 32.5 (2004): 691–715. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21 (January 2001): 1–25. Long, Charles. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Aurora, Colo.: The Davis Group, 1999. Pippin, Tina. Apocalyptic Bodies. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2007. Priest, Josiah. Slavery, as it Relates to the Negro, or African Race, Examined in the Light of Circumstances, History and the Holy Scriptures. [1843]. New York: Arno Press, 1977. Quinby, Lee. Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” January 30, 2009. www.pewforum. org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-African Americans/. Sade. “Jezebel.” The Best of Sade (from Promise), Sony Music Entertainment (1985). Audio CD. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York University Press, 2010. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. [1895]. The Woman’s Bible. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer”. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

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Swartz, Mimi. “Therapists Who Help People Stay in the Closet.” New York Times, June 16, 2011. Magazine. www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/magazine/ therapists-who-help-people-stay-in-the-closet.html. Viefhues-Bailey, Ludger. Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Walcott, Rinaldo. “Origins … Beginnings … : Transatlantic Slavery.” Paper presented at the conference “Diasporic Hegemonies: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Feminist Transnationalism,” Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, October 21, 2006. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. Revised edn. New York: Norton, 1999. Wimbush, Vincent L. African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Structures. New York: Continuum, 2001. Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches 2010 (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2010). Yee, Gale A. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003.

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14 The Challenge of Black Feminist Desire: Abolish Property Sabine Broeck (University of Bremen)

A Remembering The following chapter needs to be framed in explicit ways: it reads the theoretical advances of Black Feminism in the United States as an epistemic rupture for, and of, contemporary White Gender Theory. It is not an up-to-date exhaustive and inclusive report of recent Black Feminist activism and scholarship, particularly of the younger, post-Obama, internet-based textual and activist production, in its manifold academic and non-academic articulations. This restriction is due to the particular nature of my enterprise here: to produce a reckoning within the white African American and Gender Studies scholarship of my generation. For scholars and activists of the middling generation, particularly in Europe, Black Feminism has figured prominently in the controversial debates between African American female post-civil rights movement activist intellectuals and their male opponents, both in the black leftist and Black Nationalist organizations. Alice Walker’s anti-patriarchal advances in her short stories and in novels like Meridian (1976), Michelle Wallace’s book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), or Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls (1977), met with enthusiastic feminist acclaim, but also scandalized conservative audiences. Those public representations of the struggle of African American women struck back against reactionary white racist and sexist stereotypes, and against black male misogyny cast in the post-Moynihan report mold of unveiled contempt. All of a sudden, black women thinkers and writers, anthologized in collections like Anzaldúa and Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) or Barbara Smith’s Home Girls (1983)1 had found a powerful public voice, which also made visible 1

These essays were collected and reprinted from Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue, the

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the ignorance, indifference, and downright racism of much of the White feminist movement at the time. Epitomized in the landmark compilation All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave (1982), those pioneering controversies and the ensuing black women’s studies created productive and lasting responses within the US and European academies and have helped to shape the Collegium for African American Research, its research focuses, and publication output. Even a cursory glance at faculty listings, class syllabuses, web publications, or at Sherri Barnes’s stunning multidisciplinary web bibliography “Black American Feminisms”2 will show that black women have entered the US academy to stay. This was by no means predictable when Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Mary Helen Washington, and others began articulating black women’s social, cultural, and political claims in the early 1970s, and when an immediately empowering text like Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman (1970) put the black woman – as the subject of her own life – on the public agenda in a visionary and lasting way (see Broeck, 2008). Black feminist articulation has been traced way back to the first black poet, Phyllis Wheatley; way back to female black preaching against the sins of slavery, movingly recaptured by Alice Walker; way back to the first women freedom narratives of the enslaved, which created a wide transatlantic echo space for the abolition of human propertization;3 way back to the late nineteenth century, when Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice From the South (1892). Way back to the black women modernists of the Harlem Renaissance; way back to the communist post-World War II transnational militancy of Claudia Jones and to the radical grassroots resistance that Dayo F. Gore’s recently released book Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (2011) chronicles so painstakingly. Way back to the black women of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, to 1950s insister Gwendolyn Brooks, to 1960s prophet Margaret Walker. For some readers, it will indeed be a reminder that the post-1970s explosion of literary talent, political acumen, and academic sharpness revealed in the intellectual generation of bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Williams, Nell Painter, and Patricia Hill Collins (among many others) owes its strength to a stubborn ancestry: today’s endeavors of first magazine to publish a wide range of Black Feminist – including lesbian – voices, in November 1979. 2 Sherri Barnes’s exhaustive web bibliography is an ambitious project hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara library (see Works Cited under Barnes). 3 I prefer the neologism “propertization” to the too-familiar terms “commodification” or “reification” that have, by their very banality, come partly to mask the scandal of reducing a human being to property. The ungainly aspect of the word, the fact that it shocks, is part of the political thrust of this chapter.

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Black Feminism in disciplines no one would have dared dreaming of, such as law, anthropology, prison studies, history, sociology, political sciences and more, are connected all the way back to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century knowledge formations created by black women. It has also been a Black Feminist prerogative, and not a White theoretical virgin birth to intervene into the debates of gender from the point of view of the interlocking systems of oppression4 of race, gender, class, and sexuality – a point of view which made it impossible to look at gender as the only, or even as the privileged, signifier of women’s lives. Dating back to Frances Beal’s 1969 exhortation in Double Jeopardy, intersectionality has been on the agenda – even if it took another two decades and more (in Europe, at least) for White feminism to catch on. Texts like Alice Walker’s pioneering In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class (1981), and Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984) set radical standards to refocus the US and transnational feminist debates around the exclusiveness of gender as an epistemic and analytical category. The fact that this work has not acquired theoretical currency internationally, and, as an epistemic contribution, has been dis-acknowledged persistently – often relegated to cursory footnotes and empty appraisals in the bylines of much transnational Gender Theory – cannot diminish the importance of Black Feminist epistemology. A Hesitating Talking about the challenge of Black Feminism entails, of course, a problematic stance for a White feminist like myself, and a German at that, who needs to steer clear of ventriloquism or unbidden translation. Instead, I want to speak here as a white feminist scholar who considers herself an addressee, a spoken-to, of the epistemic challenge which Black Feminism has posed to any critical theory of transatlantic modernity – in my case, white Gender Studies. To read Black Feminist contributions epistemically is to acknowledge their fundamental intervention, which goes straight to the core of transatlantic modernity, on the issue of property. It is to Black Feminism, I argue, that critical attention needs to be directed to overcome the lasting theoretical agnotology, as Lorna Schiebinger puts it (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008), that is, the studied epistemic ignorance Charles Mills criticizes in The Racial Contract (1997), that has marked Western critical theory – including gender theory – for generations. What would it entail for a radical critique of modernity, including modern and postmodern gender 4

To use the terms of the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 manifesto.

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relations, to hear a position that has consistently spoken from the location, the materiality, and the inherited memory of having literally been property? I have been challenged by Black Feminism to hear a female slave singing to a passing traveler about having been raped on the order of her master, and to have heard her singing in grief – because of the impossibility of legal redress, since a thing would not be treated like a vulnerable and violated human being before the law. I have tried to hear the curses of the black freedwoman during Reconstruction, whom the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to re-educate as Mrs John Freeman. Her radical stance against propertization would not tolerate the replacement of a white master with the subjection by a free black husband, so that she would end up as second-order property. The liberal promises of post-slavery contract law must have too closely resembled another form of unacceptable commodification of body and soul to hold a promise of freedom. I have tried to hear the courage of a middle-aged, very well educated female African American teacher defending her dissertation at the Sorbonne, in 1925 – no mean feat in itself. The topic, however, was the Haitian revolution against enslavement, and her critique of the French refusal to acknowledge the meaning of enslavement for French metropolitan society. Anna Julia Cooper’s dissertation – a daring knowledge project if there ever was one – struggled to conceptualize transatlantic enslavement as the most suppressed subtext of European modern societies (see May, 2007). I have been challenged to hear Ida B. Wells’s enraged campaign against lynching, in which she fearlessly attacked the most appalling legacy of black abjection, and of white-hot hysteria against what racist white communities perceived as the loss of entitlement in any form of black property. In all those articulations I hear a will to be done with abjection, a rage for change and a wild longing for un-owned-ness – altogether a stunning recombination of social sentiment, which gives desire an entirely new name. My interest has been to trace a lineage of Black Feminism that needs to be acknowledged for its profound critique of White Western post-Enlightenment capitalist societies. It must be recognized for making available to critical knowledge projects a location at once historically specific and yet generative of the most radical social, cultural, and political consequences. Historically marked by the enforced location of being treated as propertized black female flesh, black women have articulated practices, discourses, cultural repertoires, and memories, which by logical necessity criticized modernity in the most incorruptible ways. Theorizing from the position of enslavement has made it necessary to address a system of black abjection and of white abjectorship. Departing from Kristeva’s psychoanalytical employment of the term, and also from White feminist theorizing of the abject (in Tina Chanter’s work, for instance), I am taking up the term abjection in the post-Fanonian vein in which it appears in Saidiya Hartman’s and Hortense

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Spillers’s work. Abject thus has changed from a category descriptive of individual subjectivity and its contours into a theoretical concept to discuss the underside of White Western modernity’s terms of human sociability. One needs the term to be able to talk about the positioning of human beings as female flesh – as that abject which has been most radically cast beyond the pale of the subject as defined by the Enlightenment, as that abject which has been structurally, not contingently, cut off from the human, from the self-possessed possessor of the world and its things. The abject un-location of the prototypical thing, the movable laboring property, was the only position from which to reckon with Western modernity and its self-conceptions, without any of the narcissistic screens of post-Enlightenment philosophies and subject theories. Therefore, my reading of Saidiya Hartman’s arguments in Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother will make three assumptions: 1. Western modernity has been constituted by, and deeply embedded in enslavement, which most importantly must be read as a regime of propertization. 2. The discourse and practice of gender as we know it today is a contingent historical formation which owes its existence to modern Enlightenment struggles around human subjectivity. 3. As a prototypical modern discourse, thus, gender carries a baggage of propertization and abjection of blackness, which needs to be addressed more directly from within White Gender Studies.

If enslavement is the point from which to read modernity, it follows that property needs to be that reading’s counterpoint. But property with a double difference: first, in a sense that goes beyond a post-Marxist critique. That is, property not just as means of production and as ownership of natural and man-made resources, but property of human beings in their actuality, property of their reproductive capacity, of their capacity to generate a human future. And, secondly, property as a term that signifies not the metaphorical slavery of white post-Enlightenment theories of subjection, but the literal “accumulation and fungibility,” as Saidiya Hartman (1997) has called it, of black human beings. Ever since Angela Davis’s 1972 “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves” put slavery on the agenda of Black Feminist theorizing, the debate has become increasingly sophisticated. Groundbreaking theoretical texts by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Williams, Adrienne Davis, Kathryn Gines, and Saidiya Hartman – to name but a few – have created a sustained epistemic intervention of sorts. This concerted theorizing has resulted in a crucial knowledge project of

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the connection between property of the self and abjection of the black, and, accordingly, in a revised abolition­(or, rather, demolition) project; a project which situates itself in our present as “the future slavery has made,” to paraphrase Hartman. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007) – besides its meaning as an autobiography, a travelogue, a critique of patriarchal mythological versions of Afrocentrism, an engagement of contemporary Ghanaian politics, and a major intervention against Afro-American delusions about the so-called African homeland – has become most important to me because it makes the time of slavery erupt in our own, pushing a reckoning with enslavement into critical theory and philosophy. One of Hartman’s most compelling points in her first book, Scenes of Subjection (1997), had already been the exposure of White American society’s libidinal, emotional, cultural, and legal investments in the enslavement – and, later, in the racist abjection – of black people: Although assertions of free will, singularity, autonomy and consent necessarily obscure relations of power and domination, the genealogy of freedom, to the contrary, discloses the intimacy of liberty, domination, and subjection. This intimacy is discerned in the inequality enshrined in property rights, the conquest and captivity that established “we the people,” and the identity of race as property, whether evidenced in the corporeal inscriptions of slavery and its badges or in the bounded bodily integrity of whiteness secured by the abjection of others. (Hartman, 1997: 123)

Hartman has indirectly extended this argument in her recent work, focusing on the modern machine of triangularized trading in enslaved Africans, which saturated the entire transatlantic world with its regime. What does that mean for critical thinking today? Hartman’s symptomatic reading of the “Dead Book,” as she calls the vast archive of enslavement, follows a textual strategy by which every elusive archival trace of slavery becomes charged with referential value clearly in excess of the term’s metaphorical workings. Enslavement becomes visible as proactive white history, not as a bygone deplorable but disowned state of affairs. By way of a particularly striking example, I quote the description of her visit of the slave-holding dungeons in Elmira: Human waste covered the floor of the dungeon. […] For a century and a half after the abolition of the slave trade, the waste remained. […] In 1972, a team of archeologists excavated the dungeon and cleaned away 18 inches of dirt and waste. They identified the topmost layer of the floor of the compressed remains of captives – feces, blood, and exfoliated skin. (Hartman, 1997: 115)

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This strategy of re-referentializing, of calling thingification5 to consciousness, becomes the crucial political lever for Hartman’s text to turn the tables on slavery, and on critical theory. Her text’s very mass of details makes readable the catalogued but previously neutralized transgressions of the trading machine, and forces a white reader to reconsider our White investment in, as well as the short-term and long-term benefits of the discourses and practices of enslavement for modern white European societies. Beyond its autobiographical context, and beyond its address of black mourning, Lose Your Mother must be read as a major contribution to theorizing transatlantic modernity as driven by the technological machinery, the economy, and the epistemology of enslavement: Impossible to fathom was that all this death had been incidental to the acquisition of profit and to the rise of capitalism. […] Death wasn’t a goal of its own but just a by-product of commerce, which has had the lasting effect of making negligible all the millions of lives lost. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead. […] To my eyes this lack of intention didn’t diminish the crime of slavery but from the vantage of judges, juries, and insurers exonerated the culpable agents. In effect, it made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance, since it wasn’t possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. (Hartman, 2007: 31)

Two questions pertaining to content and form result from this. The first is: “How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?” (Hartman 2007: 3); and the second: “What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? […] Do the possibilities outweigh the dangers of looking (again)?” (4) The dangers of looking and thus of creating a panopticon of what Hortense Spillers early on called a “pornotroping” (2003: 206) of the enslaved’s suffering weigh in heavily on Hartman’s text; the only strategy available to deal with that ambiguous challenge is a constant momentum of self-reflection that punctures her own text relentlessly. With its almost obsessive gesturing towards images of the dead, Hartman’s text performs a wake for the nameless millions lost in the Middle Passage. Working with the archival material which historiography has of late unearthed in great quantities, she 5 I use the term Césaire coins in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), when he writes: “My turn to state an equation: Colonization = ‘Thingification’” [in French: “Colonisation = Chosification”].

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reconstructs the scenes of torture, abuse, and annihilation filling the records as mere numbers, as ciphers of obstinacy, loss, or safe cargo. Her text strains aggressively against the process by which historiography functions as “a second killing” of the victims; her purpose is to de-familiarize enslavement for her readership; the text becomes a meticulous memento, which dares white readers to understand the extent to which the records available amount to a comprehensive book of the dead. This pornography of suffering “flummoxed the public” (Hartman, 2007: 145), became sanitized in historiography, and regains its ability to haunt contemporary readers only if connected to an ethically self-reflective and deconstructive reassembling of detail. Beyond the contemporary international debates for monetary reparation (167–9), Hartman goes straight for a transatlantic white public, which has programmatically deluded itself about the pertinence of enslavement to White Europe and America. As Hartman argues, the slave barracoon must be looked at not just as a holding cell but more importantly as a modern episteme which controlled the practices of history and of collective white memory; it created a “second order of violence” by way of disappearing, and abjecting black life in the figurative and most material sense (5). But what, one might ask, has this to do with gender? The focus of Hartman’s attention in her chapter “The Dead Book” (Hartman, 2007), and its companion piece, “Venus in Two Acts” (Hartman, 2008) is on the black female as doubly violated: first, made into a mere thing, abject in her opaque subjectivity, which the machine of enslavement refuses to acknowledge and which thus does not exist in the archive. That violently absented claim to subjectivity, secondly, also entails the denial of any access to human differentiation, according to categories like age, region, local origins, language, or what passed at the time for gender distinctions – except, crucially, for instructions about slave ship packing, and, of course, except for the suffering of sexual transgression and abuse enacted on what amounted to nothing more than a female anatomy. As Hartman writes, following her descent into slave ship captains’ ledgers, abolitionist pamphlets, doctors’ treatises, and records of insurance companies and legal institutions: There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed off as insults and crass jokes. The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, the display of the violated body, and inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative history. (Hartman, 2008: 2)

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Vis-à-vis the “Dead Book,” there is not one single autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage (3). Hartman makes explicit the challenge to represent the absented human clamor, which haunted Morrison’s Beloved implicitly. In one self-reflective turn after another, she agonizes about the impossibility of a narrative which can never have a solid foundation in a human voice, and may only be delivered in the paradoxical mode of invented testimony. Her witnessing, as Hartman sees it, has always already failed by necessity, so that, in a perturbing way, she reproduces excess, in order to produce an “acuity of regard” (Scarry, 1998: 11) for the loss produced first by enslavement, and then, over again, by the archival agnotology. For the conceptual archive of Western modernity, no black human (and, consequently, no black woman) existed. This insight urges Gender Studies to move away from benevolently adding the talk of race to its postmodern thinking about subjectivation. Instead, we need to discuss the modern white gendered subject as situated in a nexus of the white female’s successful fight for access to the category human over and against blackness as abjection. The ontological white violence (Wilderson, 2010) of enslavement forced blackness outside the defining categories of modern subjectivity. At the same time, it was the fine white line drawn between women and slaves – even by way of prolonged conflicted negotiations of oppression and discrimination – that necessarily and consequentially contained gender relations within human society. That is to say, the founding difference of early modern transatlantic societies was the splitting of white propertied and sovereign humanity from thingified black flesh; gender as modern category comes to figure within that split social economy and that epistemology. It became a category to negotiate, for White European and US women, toward a status of sovereignty, subjectivity, and property rights, due to them as human members of post-Enlightenment societies, however marginalized and discriminated against. This is not to deny that African societies organized themselves around particular and various cultural, social and economic interpellations of differently seen humans, nor that in New World enslavement, and in colonial societies, African-origin female beings were subjected to particular politics and practices – most importantly, enforced genital availability, and the theft of motherhood. However, as Spillers had already argued in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), and as Hartman’s texts illuminate, enslaved Africanorigin female beings never qualified as women in the transatlantic modern world. Because of their non-humanness, it followed logically that they were not interpellated to partake in the ongoing social construction and contestation of gender. Thus, the point I want to make is that gender – a category that would have enabled a black female claim on social negotiations – did

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not apply to things, to what was constructed as and abused as black flesh; it became a category from which black females were ex-scribed. In transatlantic Western societies, the very category of binary gender emerged in Western transatlantic rhetoric precisely in the context of creating a space for White women, who refused to be treated like slaves, like things, to lay claim to subjectivity. Modern gender, with early modern feminism, constituted itself discursively precisely in the shift from eighteenth-century white female Christian empathy with the enslaved to the paradigmatic feminist rhetorical and material distancing of self-possessed women from slaves, a process that repeated itself in the late nineteenth-century American negotiations of suffrage and of the fight against racism. The fact that black women have – in their long history in the Western transatlantic world – consistently fought for access to the category of gender to be able to occupy a space of articulation at all, does not alter the structural complicity of gender with the formation of the sovereign modern white subject. That is to say, that to have, or to be of, female gender, in the name of which one could demand and deserve certain kinds of rights, as well as civil treatment, staked the claim of white eighteenth-century women to full human subjectivity, on opposition to thingness. The infamous and very persistent use of the analogy of women and slaves provided a springboard for white women to begin theorizing a catalogue of their own demands for an acknowledgement of modern, free subjectivity as antagonistic to enslavement. As a discursive construct, then, modern gender served the differentiation of white human from black property. White gender theory, therefore, needs to think through enslavement and abjection of blackness as its constitutive grounds; it cannot remain mired in the addition of a racialized ethnography of black women’s supposed “difference.” White Feminism – to which gender theory is still indebted – has been a discourse of negative analogy: we are not slaves, we are not property! – ranging from Wollstonecraft through Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French, and not stopping there (Broeck, 2011). These white feminist remonstrations have left untouched, however, the modern and postmodern grammar of human propertization as an inevitable part of the anti-black capitalist machine. Disturbing traces of this linger when Judith Butler, for example, in a text about queer kinship (2000), suddenly incorporates Orlando Patterson’s key term for slavery, “social death,” into her argument. While she mobilizes an epistemic reservoir for which slavery marks the limit of unwanted terror, she does not, however, engage with black positions on her specific issue of queer kinship, nor does she show any interest in the question of how a reckoning with black enslavement might impact on her argument. One could say she transposes the negative analogy from the language of political claims to the language of theory, but its function remains the same. Following in

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Hartman’s footsteps, I would argue that rather than this continued practice of negative analogy what is required of us is an affective response to the burden of our theories’ genealogies. Black Feminist Desire and White Gender Theory – Coming to Grief? Lose Your Mother’s critique of the sexualized campaigns of Anglo-American abolition has compounded the challenge for an epistemology of enslavement not to recycle abolitionist titillation and not to reproduce abolitionist sentiments characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such intervention will enable a turn away from the solipsistic and exclusive focus on the present moment of much contemporary theory and make it answerable to its own indebtedness to the history of early modern Europe and of the New World. Hartman’s text does enact a kind of self-conscious parasitism, forcing readers into complicity with the archive’s point of view; but it refuses to do so innocently – it disrupts a renewed take on slavery by way of quasi-abolitionist benevolence. For a white constituency of the Gender Studies community in Europe to adapt itself to what Hartman calls “the redress project” means a relocation into the time of enslaving, into a genealogical continuum which reaches from the early modern period into postmodernity. This relocation entails far-reaching implications for the conglomerate of post-Enlightenment Western critical thinking, be it for post-Hegelians, Critical Theory, post-Marxists, Black Nationalists, and other radical camps, or for White Gender Theories. All liberation philosophy steeped in a post-Hegelian dialectics of oppression has evaded a theorization of abjection, which lies outside the potentially reversible subject–object struggle. Black male philosophy has widely missed a theorization of what I call second-order property in female flesh and labor. And White Gender Studies have foregone the issue of the propertization of blackness – so it is to Black Feminist interventions that we owe the most complex and radical analysis of modernity. To follow this analysis requires white critical communities to read Black Feminist work, such as Wynter’s, Hartman’s, or Spillers’, not as “native informants,” but as epistemic lessons in redress (Best and Hartman, 2005). Black Feminist theory has done its utmost to move a critique of human propertization from the abjected beyond of modern intellectual orbits into the space, however marginal, of a to-be-heard-ness. It has clearly spoken the desire for a sociability not based on any propertization of human relations. It seems to me that Black Feminism as a political, cultural, and social project necessarily and consequently remains an abolitionist, or demolitionist desire – a longing for something which has not been realizable within capitalist enslavist modernity (a neologism I am deliberately

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coining). That “something” of desire still remains on the horizon of our post-enslavist, postcolonial, and mega-capitalist present. It posits the Utopia of a sociability formed by un-owned and un-owning selves, for which the issue is not belonging but convivial association.6 That something of desire refuses to articulate human-ness articulated in possession – of self, and other – but defines it instead in doing justice, and practicing a mutual beholding. This project, at this point in history, can only be a “fugitive” one, as Hartman suggests. By necessity, it bears the marks of mourning, and not of transcendent exuberance. Hartman’s “I, too, live in the time of slavery” is a statement that has not yet been echoed widely enough. At a time of rampant takeover by globalized forces of neo-liberalism, the challenge for (white) Gender Studies theory is to achieve agony instead of developing complicity with the corporate projects, particularly in Europe, where speeches in praise of European Enlightenment as the mythical ground of universal freedom have been rampant. (White) critical Gender Theory, as much as it has been a modern critical agent in the white-on-white negotiation of patriarchal power, has also partaken in the violence of discursive formations that produced the disposable lives of “black flesh.” What an epistemic return to the time of slavery requires is a political orientation in support of “fugitive justice,” rigorously to interrogate the kinds of political claims that can be mobilized on behalf of the slave (the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present: [W]e are concerned neither with “what happened then” nor with “what is owed because of what happened then,” but rather with the contemporary predicament of freedom, with the melancholy recognition of foreseeable futures still tethered to the past. […] [W]hat is the story about the slave we ought to tell out of the present we ourselves inhabit…? (Best and Hartman, 2005: 3–4)

White Gender Theory’s transcultural and transdisciplinary expansion, recently marked by terms like the post-human, the queered ungendered, the post-racial, and the postcolonial cosmopolitan, needs to check fantasies of untethered, mobile subjectivities with the subject’s white history deeply implicated in propertization and abjection. White Gender Studies, that is, needs to theorize enslavement, and it needs to come to its own grief.

6 The term “convivial” is borrowed from Paul Gilroy’s use of conviviality in After Empire (2004).

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Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984: 53–9. May, Vivian M. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2007. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Proctor, Robert Neel, and Londa L. Schiebinger. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Conference publication from workshops held at Pennsylvania State University, 2003 and Stanford University, 2005. Stanford University Press, 2008. Scarry, Elaine. “On Beauty and Being Just.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Yale University, March 25 and 26, 1998. http://tannerlectures.utah. edu/_documents/a-to-z/s/scarry00.pdf. Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Smith, Barbara. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press, 1983. Smith, Barbara, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell-Scott (eds). All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982. Spillers, Hortense. J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. [1987]. Chicago University Press, 2003. Wallace, Michelle. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Dial Press: 1979. Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. [1983]. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2004. —— Meridian. [1976] Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003. Washington, Mary Helen. Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and about Black Women. 1st edn. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1975. —— Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. 1st edn. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1987. —— Memory of Kin: Stories about Family by Black Writers. 1st edn. New York: Doubleday, 1991. —— Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1980. —— “Teaching Black-Eyed Susans: An Approach to the Study of Black Women Writers.” Black American Literature Forum 11.1 (1977). Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project.” In Lewis Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (eds). Not Only the Master’s Tools. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2006: 85–106.

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Contributors

Florian Bast, Universität Leipzig, Germany Florian Bast earned his MA in German studies and American studies at Leipzig University in Germany in 2009. He has taught a number of BA and MA classes in the literature and culture track of American Studies, Leipzig, where he is an assistant lecturer. His PhD project focuses on constructions of agency in the writings of Octavia Butler. Florian is one of the guest editors of the 2011 issue of Current Objectives of American Studies and the general editor of aspeers: emerging voices in american studies, Europe’s first and only peer-reviewed graduate-level print journal for American studies. His work has been published in such venues as Extrapolation, Kultur und Geschlecht, and Callalloo. Eva Boesenberg, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany Eva Boesenberg studied in Freiburg, was assistant professor at Martin-LutherUniversität Halle-Wittenberg, and is now professor of North American literature and culture at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. Her publications include Gender– Voice–Vernacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker (1999) and Money and Gender in the American Novel, 1850–2000 (2010). Among her research interests are economics and literature, African American literature and culture, South Asian literature, gender studies, whiteness studies, and the cultural significance of sports (especially basketball). Sabine Broeck, University of Bremen, Germany Professor Dr Sabine Broeck teaches Black Diaspora Studies at the University of Bremen. Her research commitment is to a critique of the coloniality of transatlantic modernity, in particular in studies of western modernity as social formations and cultures of (post)-enslavement. She has been a longstanding and active member of the European American, and African-American Studies community. At present, she is President of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), as well as director

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of the University of Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS). Her two previous monographs are Der entkolonisierte Koerper (1988) and White Amnesia – Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (1999). She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript entitled: Abjection and Metaphor: (Post) Slavery and the White Rhetoric of Gender contracted with SUNY Press. For more information, see http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/ lehrpersonal/broeck.aspx. Jarrett H. Brown, College of the Holy Cross, USA Jarrett H. Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester MA and he teaches courses on Caribbean and African Diasporic literatures. His present research is on representations and iterations of masculinities in Claude McKay’s works of fiction and correspondences, titled Maroon Masculinities: Truants, Vagabonds, and Mad Men in Metropolitan Spaces.  He has also published in the journals Caribbean Quarterly and the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL). Lewis R. Gordon, University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA Lewis Gordon teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He previously taught at Temple University, where he founded and directed the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, and Brown University, where he was the founding chairperson of the Department of Africana Studies.  Professor Gordon has held several distinguished visiting appointments and is currently Visiting Professor in the French-German Summer School at the University of Toulouse, France.  He is the author of several influential books, including Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995), Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997), Existentia Africana (2000), Disciplinary Decadence (2006), and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008). The URL for Professor Gordon’s website, which contains an elaborated biography, list of publications, audio and video presentations, and his blog, is: http://lewisrgordon.com/. Carsten Junker, University of Bremen, Germany Carsten Junker ([email protected]) teaches English-speaking Cultures/American Studies at the University of Bremen. His current research project examines abolition in the United States around 1800. In this context, he was awarded the Christoph Daniel Ebeling fellowship by the German Association for American Studies and the American Antiquarian Society in 2011. He obtained his doctorate from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a study on the Black essay as a genre of cultural critique. Research interests include: history and repercussions of transatlantic enslavement; articulated categories of difference and hierarchization in images and texts; cultures of

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feeling; decolonial approaches to literature; genre theory. Publications include: Frames of Friction: Black Genealogies, White Hegemony, and the Essay as Critical Intervention (Frankfurt/New York 2010), and co-authored with Julia Roth: Weiß Sehen. Dekoloniale Blickwechsel mit Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison (Seeing White. Decolonial Revisions with Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison), (Sulzbach, 2010). Jennifer S. Leath, Yale University, USA Jennifer S. Leath is a PhD Candidate in African American Studies and Religious Studies with an emphasis in Religious Ethics at Yale University. Leath is also pursuing Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies certification as part of this course of study. Her dissertation, entitled Working the Body, Working the Spirit: Afro-Diasporic Women’s Labor and an Ethics of Embodiment explores the relationship between work, activism, faith, and sexuality in the experiences of childcare providers and activists who mobilized in Brooklyn, NY for better working conditions and community empowerment during and after a citywide childcare providers campaign between 2005 and 2009. Leath is also a Program Associate for Roundtable on the Sexual Politics of Black Churches (Columbia University). She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Studies and African American Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Rozena Maart, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa Dr Rozena Maart, Associate Professor, is Chair of Gender Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, and a member of the International Assembly of Women Philosophers. Her work examines relationships between and among Political Philosophy, Derrida and Deconstruction, Black Consciousness, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, and Critical Theories of race and racism. In 1992, Dr Maart won “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada,” for her short story, “No Rosa, No District Six.” After completing her doctoral work, she then decided to write four more stories, which went into the collection Rosa’s District Six. Published in December 2004, it made the weekly bestseller list in Canada and the HOMEBRU list in South Africa in 2006. She published The Writing Circle in November of 2007 both in Canada and South Africa. In 2010 The Writing Circle was noted as one of the ten top books in South African literature in her homeland, South Africa. Monica Michlin, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, France Monica Michlin is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, and holds a PhD in American literature on Toni Morrison’s work. She is an Associate Professor in American Literature and contemporary American society at ParisSorbonne University, and is currently one of the Vice-Presidents of the French Association for American Studies (AFEA). She has published articles on a

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number of African-American authors, including Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Sapphire, or Ernest Gaines, as has published a book on Jean Toomer’s Cane. Although her main focus is on “minority” writers (African-American, LGBT), she also works on contemporary American film and post-9/11 American TV series. She is currently at work on a book focusing on the representation of the voice of the abused child in the novels of American authors from Toni Morrison to Jim Grimsley, and is also co-writing a full-length study of the American Dream/American Nightmare in contemporary TV series from The Wire to Homeland. Charles Nero, Bates College, USA Charles I. Nero received his PhD from Indiana University. Currently, he is a Professor of Rhetoric, African American Studies, and American Cultural Studies at Bates College (Maine, USA) where he teaches courses in film and literature. A pioneer in African American queer studies, his paradigm-shifting 1991 essay “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature,” was the first essay to provide a systematic critical framework for the analysis of black gay texts. His essays on film, literature, and queer studies have appeared in many academic journals including Camera Obscura: Feminist Media Studies, FORECAAST, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and The Journal of the History of Sexuality and in several anthologies including Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, Black Queer Studies in the Millennium, and Out in the South. Nero wrote the introduction for the Cleis Press edition of Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (2000). Claudine Raynaud, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France A Professor of English and American Studies at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, Claudine Raynaud has taught in England and the United States. A Fellow at the Du Bois Institute (Harvard, Fall 2005), she was vice president of the CEAA when Michel Fabre was its president, has headed GRAAT and the nationwide African American Studies Research Group in Tours and works at the CNRS. She is the author of Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la survie (1995) and numerous articles on black autobiography (Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Lorde), Joyce and feminist theory. Her most current publications are “Coming of Age in the African American Novel,” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), an anthology of articles on Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (CRAFT, 2005), “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory,” The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (2007) and the co-edition of a collection of essays on Gloria Naylor (l’Harmattan, 2012). Jean-Paul Rocchi, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, France A Professor at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Jean-Paul Rocchi teaches in American studies and on African American literature and gay,

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lesbian, and queer studies. A Fellow at the Du  Bois Institute (Harvard, Fall 2007), he is the elect co-director of the research group IMAGER (Paris-Est) and a member of the Executive Board of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR). He has published several essays on James Baldwin and other contemporary black writers, and on race, sexualities, psychoanalysis, and epistemology. He is the author of several edited collections including L’objet identité: épistémologie et transversalité (2006) and Dissidence et identités plurielles (2008). He was in 2011 the main organizer of the CAAR Conference “Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation” from which he has co-edited four collections. He is currently working on a monograph on James Baldwin and on an anthology of critical essays tentatively entitled The Desiring Modes of Being Black: Essays in Literature & Critical Theory. Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches courses in African American and African diasporic literature, and literary theory. Her work has appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Obsidian, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and CR: The New Centennial Review. She is also the editor of a recent edition of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (Barnes and Noble, 2005). She has two new books forthcoming from the Philosophy and Race series at SUNY Press: Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Being before and after Du Bois, a study of philosophical metaphors in African American literature; and Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy, an edited collection of critical essays on Gilroy’s work that includes a new original essay by Gilroy. Both will appear in November 2013. Laura Sarnelli, University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy Laura Sarnelli holds a PhD in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”(Italy) where she is a Post-doctoral Fellow (Department of Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies). Her research interests include cultural and postcolonial studies, gender studies and queer theory, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, black diaspora, and Caribbean and African American literature. She has published on topics such as Shakespearian criticism, cinema, modern and contemporary Gothic, and postcolonial literature with a specific focus on Caribbean and Canadian women writers. She is the author of Il libro dei desideri. Scritture di deriva nella letteratura femminile diasporica in Nord America (Aracne 2009); La donna fantasma. Scritture e riscritture del gotico inglese (Iacobelli 2012). She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research, University of California, Santa Cruz, and is working on a project on racial and postcolonial melancholia in European and American contexts.

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Antje Schuhmann, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa Antje Schuhmann holds a PhD in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Munich, Germany, and works as a Senior Lecturer in the Political Studies Department at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. The intersections of power with body politics, and their historic legacies within today’s systems of violence and domination are one of the main foci of her intellectual and activist work. How do gender, race, sexuality, and class manifest in everyday experiences and politics of representation? What are the ways we memorize past violence subverting or reinforcing contemporary forms of oppression? She is active in international feminist and anti-racist networks and initiatives, has produced film and audio features, publishes in various journals and newspapers, and is the co-editor of Blackness and Sexualities. She is currently co-editing a book on Female Film Practitioners in Africa and completing a monograph on Imperial Feminism: Racialising Gendered Nation-building.

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Index

abject, abjected, abjection 7, 15–18, 41, 209, 214–223, 226 abolish, abolition, abolitionist v-vi, 10–11, 18, 58, 84–90, 92–96, 211–212, 216, 218, 221, 226 Abrahams, Yvette 45, 49 absence, absented 2n3, 7, 20, 22, 66, 73, 95, 110, 218–219 academic 2, 2n3, 3, 5, 130, 184, 192, 211–212, 228 see scholar acknowledge, acknowledged, acknowledgement 15, 58, 94, 110, 129, 130n4, 132, 137, 155, 165, 200–201, 213–214, 218, 220 activism, activist 2, 5, 7, 27, 39, 42, 48–49, 96, 195, 211–212, 223, 227, 230 see militant Adorno, Theodor 187, 193 address (structures of) 10, 53, 61–64, 86, 95, 122, 134, 139–140, 153, 155 addressee 10, 140, 213 (a)esthetics 1, 105n2, 162, 172 see poetics affect, affected, affective, affectivity, affectual v, 4–5, 10, 14–16, 18–19, 57, 62, 64, 69, 76, 84,

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86, 92–93, 110, 145, 152, 154n5, 156, 158, 163n10, 166, 182, 190–191, 221 see emotion see feeling Africa, African 10, 13n5, 40n2, 41, 44–45, 49–50, 82, 84–85, 89, 91–92, 92n12, 96, 100–101, 111–112, 119–120, 122–124, 137, 140, 148, 154, 156, 164, 180, 180n3, 181–182, 182n7, 183, 185n12, 187–189, 194, 199, 205, 209, 216, 219, 226, 228–230 African American 2n2, 13, 19, 73, 82, 96, 115, 143–144, 175, 209–212, 223, 228–229 African American literary tradition 4, 10, 13, 70–73, 80, 115, 158, 165 see Black writing African American Studies 2n3, 4, 183n9, 193, 211, 225–228 Africana 17, 180, 180n4, 181–183, 183n9, 186–191, 191n26, 192, 226 afrocentric, afrocentrism 192, 216 agency 4–10, 15, 22, 46, 59–60, 68–69, 69n4, 70–71, 73–76, 78, 80–81, 93, 95, 107, 146–147, 150, 152–155, 163, 167, 197, 207, 225

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agential v, 8–9, 69–71, 73, 75–77, 79–80 agnotology 213, 219, 224 see ignorance AIDS 41, 114–115, 209 Alcoff, Linda Martín 9, 19, 66, 84, 95, 190, 192–193 Alexander, M. Jacqui 205, 209 alienation 14–15, 173 allegorical, allegorize, allegory 11, 13–14, 16, 152 see metaphor Allen, Ernest Jr. 123, 125 Allen, Jafari S. 55, 65, 198 alliance 1, 41, 48, 61, 64, 197 Allison, Robert J. 91, 95 Amadiume, Ifi 7, 43, 49 ambiguity, ambiguous 11, 27, 44, 46, 86, 98, 107, 110, 217 ambivalence, ambivalent 11, 14, 46, 48, 64, 75–76, 88, 94, 100, 152, 169 Ambroise, Jason R. 20 America 11, 19–20, 66, 82, 85, 88, 90, 96, 100, 110, 113, 116, 116n2, 117, 121, 124–126, 129, 142, 148, 151, 153, 155–156, 162, 164, 173–174, 192, 218, 223 see North America see United States analogy 16, 38, 170, 220–221 ANC 40n2, 41, 47 ANCYL 44–46, 50 Andrès, Emmanuelle 142 Anthias, Floya 6, 38, 50 Anthony, Susan B. 200 Anzaldúa, Gloria 211, 223 Borderlands/La Frontera 2, 19 apartheid 6, 32, 36, 45, 48 appetite 58, 101, 153, 196 Arab 91 see North African archetypal 158

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archival, archive 216–219, 221, 223 Arendt, Hannah 161 Aristotle, 173 art, artist, artistic vi, 2, 2n2, 5, 10, 12–16, 23n4, 36, 39–40, 42, 46, 49, 72, 107, 114–118, 121–124, 124n7, 125–126, 133n6, 134, 138, 142, 161, 161n8, 162, 165–167, 170, 172–173, 175, 205 Asante, Molefi 185, 192 assert, assertion 15, 18, 22, 36, 56, 110, 123n6, 129, 150, 182, 186, 204–205, 216 assimilated, assimilation 8, 145, 147, 155–156, 198, 207 authenticity 41 authority 5, 31, 47, 49, 70, 82, 88, 99, 104–106, 108–109, 202–203 autobiographical, autobiography 5, 11, 13n5, 20, 71n6, 72, 72n8, 73, 82, 87, 98, 108, 128, 143, 173, 216–217, 219, 228 autonomous, autonomy 69, 71, 111, 172, 205, 216 Baartman, Saartjie 7, 45, 49, 129 see Hottentot Venus bad faith 181, 226 see denial, deny Badgett, M.V. Lee 54, 65 Baepler, Paul 91–93, 95 Bailey, Barbara 111, 113 Baker, Houston A., Jr. 61, 65, 73, 135, 142, 162, 173 Baldwin, James 1, 4, 19, 21, 124, 228, 229 Bambara, Toni Cade 2, 19, 212, 223 The Black Woman: An Anthology 2, 19, 212, 223 Bantu 45 barbarian, barbarity 91

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Index

Barbary captivity narrative 85, 91–93, 95 see captivity Barnes, Sharri L. 212, 223 Barthes, Roland 128, 130, 134, 138–139, 142 Bast, Florian v, 7–9, 15, 68, 69n5, 76n14, 80, 225 Bataille, Georges 142 Beal, Frances M. 213, 223 Beam, Joseph (ed.) 4, 114, 123–126 In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology 114, 125 Beam Joseph and Essex Hemphill (eds.) 113 Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men 113, 126 Bearden, Romare 133–134, 142 Beaufret, Jean 159, 161, 173, 175 beautiful, beauty 36, 62, 118, 120, 134–135, 143, 148, 167, 175, 199–200, 209, 224 beauty ideals 60 Beauvoir (de), Simone 220, 223 Beckles, Hilary 108, 111 Bederman, Gail 108, 111 being v-vi, 1, 4–7, 9–10, 12, 15, 21, 24, 31, 36–39, 41–45, 47–49, 59, 61, 71, 75–76, 84, 91, 98, 101, 103–104, 106, 111, 123, 139–140, 148, 153–154, 158–167, 169, 171–175, 179–182, 186–188, 191, 194, 197, 199, 201, 205, 212n3, 214–215, 219, 224, 229 Bell-Scott, Patricia 144, 224 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 100, 104, 110–111 Benjamin, Roma 201 Benjamin, Walter 58 Bennett, Andrew 70, 80 Bercovitch, Sacvan 67 Bernau, Anke 37, 49 Best, Stephen 221–223

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Bethel, Lorraine 130, 142 Bible, biblical 18, 171, 195–205, 208–210 Bigger Thomas 166, 173 Biko, Steve 6, 25–28, 32–33 Billson, Janet Mancini 57, 66 binary 5–6, 9, 16, 41, 43, 48, 50, 70, 75–76, 78, 85, 91, 220 biographical, biography 98, 109, 112, 197, 217, 226 bio-political, bio-politics, body politics 7, 41–43, 47–48, 196 bisexual 6–7, 206n9 Black Arts Movement vi, 10, 12–14, 114–118, 121–123, 124n7, 125–126 Black Church 18, 162, 169–171, 201–202, 202n5, 205–206, 227 Black Consciousness v, 5–6, 21, 28, 32–33, 227 see consciousness Black Feminism, Black feminist vi, 14–15, 18, 19, 27, 78, 82, 130–131, 142, 144, 209, 211–212, 212n1, 213–215, 217, 219, 221, 223–224 Black Nationalism 16, 19, 39n2, 162–163 Black Power 13, 73, 116, 116n2, 117, 122–123, 125–126, 175 Black Queer 4–5, 55n3, 65, 114, 205, 228 Black Theology 17 Black Thought 4, 180–181 Black Writing 4–5, 70 Blackness v, 6, 20, 24, 30, 36, 55–56, 61, 66–67, 85, 87, 91, 120–124, 131, 154, 164, 170, 175, 182, 191n26, 196, 199, 205–206, 209, 215, 219–221, 230 anti-black 160, 220 Blight, David W. 81 blues 65, 130–131, 134n6, 136, 139, 142–143, 162, 173

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bodily fluids 59 body vi, 6–7, 15, 25, 28, 32, 36–38, 40–43, 45, 47–49, 51, 59, 66, 70, 73, 76–81, 85, 93, 98, 105, 107, 110, 112, 118–119, 128, 131, 133, 135–136, 138–139, 145–150, 150n3, 151–152, 164, 170, 205, 214, 217–218, 227, 230 see binary see embodiment see mind Boehmer, Elleke 111 Boesenberg, Eva v, 7–8, 51, 225 Bolland, O. Nigel 104, 111 Bone, Robert 173 Bourdieu, Pierre 51, 54, 65, 180, 192 bourgeois 59, 121, 125, 141, 206 see middle-class/middle class Brand, Dionne 128, 144, 147, 150–151, 156–157 At the Full and Change of the Moon 150–151, 156 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 100, 102, 108, 111 Brereton, Bridget 111, 113 Brigham, Clarence S. 88, 95 Britain, British iv, 6, 21, 84–85, 90n7, 95, 107, 229 Brodzki, Bella 143 Broeck, Sabine vi, 7, 13–15, 17–20, 58, 211–212, 220, 223, 225 brother 31, 37, 107, 115, 122, 123n6, 124, 126, 152, 228 Brown, Christopher Leslie 87, 95, 98 Brown, Jarrett H. v, 9, 11–12, 226 Bullough, Bonnie 99, 112 Bullough, Vern L. 99, 112 Butler, Judith 7, 11, 15, 19, 42–44, 46, 48–49, 85n2, 98–99, 112, 146n1, 152, 156, 191n26, 192, 220, 223 Butler, Octavia E. 4–5, 7–9, 68–71, 73–74, 75n13, 76–82, 226

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“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” v, 8, 68–69, 73, 76, 80 Fledgling 68, 81 Imago 68, 81 Kindred 68, 72, 80–81 Parable of the Sower 68, 81 Parable of the Talents 68 Survivor 68, 81 Bynum, Juanita 201 Caliban 103, 112 call and response 14, 133, 140 Campbell, Mavis 100, 112 Cape Town 23, 27, 29, 31, 41, 49 capital 8, 30–31, 87, 95, 122 cultural 8, 53–54 financial 52–53, 62 linguistic 52 social 51 capitalism, capitalist 61, 105, 168, 205, 214, 217, 220–221 captive, captivity 85, 91–92, 96, 104, 216–217, 219 captivity narrative 10, 85, 91–93, 95, 97 Carby, Hazel 131, 142 Carey, Brycchan 93, 95 Carey, Daniel 92, 95 Caribbean 20, 84, 98, 100–101, 107–108, 110–113, 147, 150, 157, 192, 226, 229 Carmichael, Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton 116n2, 125 Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America 116n2, 125 Carruth, Mary Clare 96 category, categorizing 42–44, 48, 51–52, 56, 58, 68, 70, 77–79, 113, 159–160, 164, 203, 213, 215, 218–220, 226 see label, labelling Caws, Peter 190, 192–193

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Index

Cazeaux, Clive 174 Césaire, Aimé 84, 96, 217 change see social change Chanter, Tina 214, 223 chattel slavery 58, 91 Cheah, Pheng 50 Cheng, A. A. 145, 156 child 5–6, 22, 30–31, 38, 44, 73, 109, 119, 129–131, 134, 136, 144, 146, 150, 154n5, 196, 210, 226 Christ, Christian 36, 40, 89–92, 94, 96, 102, 122, 166, 170–171, 199, 202–204, 220 Christian, Barbara 9, 14, 19, 77, 81 church see Black Church civil rights 7, 203 Civil Rights Movement 13, 116, 118, 164, 211 civilization, civilized 22, 22n2, 38, 62, 91, 100, 111, 115, 117, 119–120, 124–125, 165–167, 184 class 8, 15, 26, 29, 38, 41, 51–54, 57–59, 61, 63–64, 66, 101, 105, 187, 192–193, 196, 212–213, 223, 230 see middle-class/middle class see working-class/working class classification, classify 7, 12, 43, 45, 87 see hierarchy Cohen, Cathy 18, 195, 203, 206–207, 209 collective, collectively 2–3, 13, 18, 19, 36–38, 41–42, 46, 48, 56, 59, 100, 114, 123, 131, 145, 148, 168, 170, 196, 207, 213n4, 217–218 Colley, Linda 91, 95–96 Collins, Patricia Hill 2, 19, 196–197, 209, 212 colonial, colony 7, 15, 21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 38, 43, 45, 47–48, 54, 85, 87n4, 88, 101, 107, 109–111, 116n2, 147, 151, 155, 191n26, 219 colonialism 4, 32, 45, 49, 96, 116n2,

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122, 145, 147, 151, 156, 180, 186, 217n5 coloniality v, 5, 21–22, 28, 32, 156, 225 colonized 21–22, 28, 31–32, 38, 116n2, 145, 147, 185 color 17, 20, 33, 43, 72, 82, 84, 97, 101, 103, 131–132, 132n5, 134, 139, 144, 153, 155, 163, 175, 185, 206n9, 209, 223–224 Combahee River Collective 2, 19, 213 commodification, commodify 8, 45, 212n3, 214 see reification see “thingification”/thingification commodity 60, 84, 89, 122, 124n7, 125, 218 commodity fetishism 57 Commonwealth 21 community 1, 9, 14–15, 46, 51, 54, 59, 62, 65, 110, 116n2, 148, 150–152, 160, 166, 169, 172, 198–199, 201, 206n9, 207, 215, 221, 223–224 conform, conforming, conformism, conformist, conformity 6, 31, 41, 104, 141, 147, 206, 208 see non-conforming, non-conformism, nonconformity consciousness vi, 1, 3–6, 11–13, 13n5, 28, 32–33, 81–82, 98, 100, 102, 106–107, 114, 121, 150, 162–163, 165–167, 169–171, 173–189, 209, 217 Cooper, Anna Julia 2, 212, 214, 223–224 Cooper, Carolyn 112 Cooper, Davina 66 Cooper, Wayne F. 109, 111–112 COSATU 41 Cox, Oliver Cromwell 181, 192 creative 2n2,14–15, 63, 70, 77, 99,

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129–130, 147, 149, 149n2, 150, 152, 173 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 2–3, 19, 196, 209 “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” 3n4, 19 creole 102, 104, 107–108, 113 creolization 11, 99–101, 104, 112–113, 185 Critical Race Theory 10, 69, 209 cross-class 53 cross-dressing 98, 112 see drag see gender-bending see transvestism cross-identify 84 cross-racial 84 see interracial Crowell, Steven Galt 192 Cuney, Waring “No Images” 118, 120 dance, dancer, dancing 32, 63, 115–119, 122, 129, 137–138, 141, 150, 184, 199 Davis, Adrienne 215 Davis, Angela 131, 142, 213, 215, 223 Davis, Charles T. 71, 81–82 Davis, David Brion 96 Davis, Jefferson 119–120, 125 Davis, Robert C. 85, 91, 96 Declaration of Independence 94 Defoe, Daniel 92 Robinson Crusoe 92 dehumanization 94–95, 153, 180, 186–187 dehumanize, dehumanizing 92, 146–147, 149, 153–154, 189 Delany, Samuel R. 114 Deleuze, Gilles 166, 174 democracy, democratic 45–46, 49, 94, 145, 163–164, 206, 209 Denard, Carolyn C. 128–129, 135, 139, 141–142

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denaturalization 52 denial, deny 17, 44, 47–48, 56, 58, 71n6, 208, 219 De Nobrega, Chantelle 40, 49 dependency, dependent 17, 56, 91, 185, 191, 201 Derrida, Derridean 6, 143, 159–160, 174, 227 desire, desiring vi, 1, 2n2, 4, 8, 10, 12–13, 13n5, 14–19, 21n1, 32, 37, 44, 51, 54–58, 60–65, 67, 92, 95, 98, 106, 108, 115–117, 119, 126–127, 130–131, 134–138, 145, 147–153, 156, 158–159, 167, 178–179, 181, 183, 185, 188–189, 191, 193, 197, 211, 213–215, 217, 219, 221–223, 229 destructive 15, 60, 78 deviance, deviant 18, 42, 112, 164, 195–197, 199, 203–209 diaspora, diasporic 20, 40, 50, 66, 101, 112, 124–125, 150n3, 156, 180, 180n3, 182–183, 189, 210, 225–229 difference 9, 13, 15, 20, 27, 38, 42–43, 48, 64–65, 69, 72, 75, 81, 85–86, 112, 130, 136, 147, 155, 166, 168, 174, 185, 193–194, 198, 200–201, 215, 219–220, 223, 226 Dijkstra, Bram 59, 65 Dill, Bonnie Thornton 8, 20, 52, 65 disability, disabled 40, 76, 78n15, 80 discipline 2, 2n2, 4, 17, 28, 43, 52, 178, 180, 188, 213 disciplinary decadence 4, 18, 188 see also transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary discrimination 3, 19, 160 diverse, diversity 1, 40, 47–48, 68, 70, 72, 81, 99, 101, 112, 152, 192, 204, 206 Dixon, Melvin 4–5, 12–14, 114–126

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Index

Vanishing Rooms vi, 8, 10, 12–14, 19, 73n10, 114–115, 117, 119, 121, 123–126 Donawerth, Jane L. 81 double consciousness vi, 12–13, 13n5, 98, 114, 121, 166, 189 Douglass, Frederick 71, 81 (in) drag v, 11–12, 85–86, 98–99, 101, 103–111 see ethnic drag Du Bois, W.E.B. 4, 10, 12–13, 13n5, 14, 16, 20, 71, 73n10, 115–117, 119–121, 124–126, 158n2, 163–164, 170–174, 189, 192, 209, 228–229 “Of the Coming of John” 12–13, 13n5, 73n10, 115–116 The Souls of Black Folk 12, 20, 115–116, 119, 121, 125, 158n2, 163–164, 174, 192 duCille, Ann 72, 81 dystopian 7–9, 68 Dzidzienyo, Anani 190, 192 economic, economy 9, 19, 38, 41, 49, 51–54, 56, 58–60, 64–66, 87, 89, 94, 104–105, 116n2, 118, 161, 165–166, 181–182, 196, 217, 219 economics 7, 51–52, 60–61, 65–67, 104, 225 economics of slavery 61 economies v, 51–53, 59–61, 63 ecstasy 14–15, 147, 150, 171 Edelman, Lee 64–65 Edgerton, Robert 7, 43, 49 Egyptian 187 Ellison, Ralph 161, 161n7, 163–164, 166, 173 Invisible Man 72, 81, 158, 161, 163–164, 166, 173–174 emancipate, emancipation 86, 95, 105n2, 112, 130, 135

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237

emancipatory 1, 14, 16, 102 see liberatory embodied, embodiment 5, 9, 15–16, 18, 59, 76, 78, 80, 119, 147, 149, 157, 189, 198, 207, 227 dis-embodiment 76, 77n15 see also body emotion, emotional 4, 10, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 62–63, 78–79, 102, 109, 138–139, 145, 152, 158, 162, 169, 172, 216 see affect, affective see feeling empire 32, 43, 82, 145, 155, 193–194, 197, 222–223 see imperial empower, empowering, empowerment 8–9, 14, 18, 47, 49, 131, 150, 209, 212, 227 self-empowerment 131 Eng, D. L. 145, 151–152, 154–156 England, English 21, 26–27, 30–31, 67, 75n13, 96–97, 101–102, 104–105, 107, 110, 112, 115, 126, 151–152, 186, 198, 226, 228–229 see Britain Enlightenment 9, 11, 18, 20, 40n2, 43, 69, 69n3, 70, 76–78, 78n15, 82, 86–87, 96, 193, 215, 222 see modernity enslaved 11, 15, 58, 84–95, 135, 151, 153, 155, 185, 212, 216–217, 219–220 see slave enslavement 10, 84–87, 89–92, 95, 153, 167, 214–223, 226 see slavery enslaving 10, 92, 221 epistemic 17, 183–185, 187, 191, 211, 213, 215, 220–222 epistemological, epistemology vi, 3–4, 6, 14, 17–18, 20, 111, 155, 158, 167–168, 177, 185, 188, 191, 195, 199, 213, 217, 219, 221, 223, 229

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Equiano, Olaudah 73, 158, 229 Erlank, Natascha 40, 49 Ernest, John 95–96 erotic, eroticism, erotics 5, 12, 14, 15, 20, 51–53, 58–59, 62–63, 112, 115, 117, 128–135, 135n7, 136–138, 141–143, 149–150, 150n3, 151–152, 157, 195, 213, 224 erotics of reading 138, 140–141 erotics of writing vi, 14, 72n9, 128, 131, 141 see also sensual essence, essentializing 6, 28, 52, 61, 69n4, 108, 111, 159, 189 de-essentializing 62 ethic, ethical, ethics vi, 1, 3–5, 11, 14–15, 18, 46, 52, 69, 73, 102, 122, 155, 165–166, 173, 195–199, 201, 203–204, 206–208, 210, 227 ethnic 38, 145 ethnic drag v, 10–11, 84–85, 85n2, 86–87, 89, 91, 93–97 ethnicity 20, 65, 86n2, 100, 112 ethnographic, ethnography 64, 113, 220 Etoke, Nathalie 191–192 Eurocentered, Eurocentric, Eurocentrism 48, 183–185 Europe, European 10–11, 19, 29, 43, 45, 89, 91, 110, 114, 122, 145, 151, 154–155, 160–161, 178n1, 183–185, 199, 211–214, 217–219, 221–222, 225–226, 229 existence, existential 3, 11, 22, 31, 44, 48, 50, 91, 99–100, 159–163, 165–167, 172–173, 175, 193, 202, 215 exploit, exploitation 138, 196 Fabre, Michel 143, 161, 174, 228 faith 75n13, 129, 171, 178, 180–181,

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195–199, 202–203, 209, 226–227 Falwell, Jerry 203 Fanon, Frantz 4–5, 15, 17, 20, 22n2, 26, 28, 33, 44, 146–147, 153–156, 161, 161n6, 174, 178, 180–181, 183, 185, 192, 226 Black Skin, White Masks/Peau noire, masques blancs 20, 22n2, 25, 33, 73n10, 146, 156, 174, 184, 192 Fanonian 148 Farrar, Tarikhu 43, 49 Feagin, Joe R. 181, 192 feeling 4, 15–16, 50, 53, 55–57, 60, 64, 69–70, 93, 119, 128, 133, 136, 138, 145, 150, 167, 171–172, 175, 207, 227 see affect see emotion female 7, 18, 36–38, 40–44, 46, 48–49, 57–60, 65, 72, 74, 78, 98–99, 107, 111–113, 117–119, 129–131, 133, 135, 137, 142, 148, 150, 150n3, 153, 197–198, 201, 210–212, 214–215, 218–221, 223, 225, 230 see woman feminine 37, 41, 50, 99, 105n2, 119 femininity v, 6, 36, 59, 85, 99, 125 feminism, feminist 4, 7, 9, 19, 27, 38, 41, 44, 47–49, 55, 65, 69, 69n4, 78, 81, 95–96, 102–103, 107, 116–117, 144, 156, 209–214, 220, 224, 227–228, 230 see Black Feminism see also womanist Ferber, Marianne A. 61, 65 Festa, Lynn 95 first-person narration v, 8, 68–72, 72n8, 73, 75, 77, 79, 152 in African American literary tradition 71–72, 72n8, 73 see also I-narration

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Index

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge vi, 14–16, 63, 73n10, 158, 158n1, 174, 229 Fisher, Rudolph v, 7–8, 51, 53, 55, 62, 65–66 The Walls of Jericho v, 7–8, 51–52, 59, 61–63, 65 flesh 5–6, 18, 21, 24, 28, 32, 77, 85, 95, 139, 148–151, 171, 196, 214–215, 219–222 Flax, Jane 155–156 focalization 6, 10, 88–89, 137 see point of view Forbes, Curdella 105, 108, 112 Foster, Frances Smith 81 Foucault, Michel 81, 167–168, 174, 187, 192 France, French 2n3, 3n3, 45, 87, 87n4, 115, 124, 143, 146, 155, 159, 161, 175, 180–181, 186, 214, 217n5, 226–228 Frankfurt School 187 Franklin, Benjamin v, 10–11, 84–87, 87n3, 87n4, 88–89, 89n6, 90–97 “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” 10, 85, 87–88, 91, 96 Franklin, John Hope 85, 96 Frederick, Marla 202, 209 free, freed, freedom 11, 15–16, 23n4, 57, 63, 68, 73, 85, 87, 87n3, 91–93, 95–96, 100, 102–104, 116n2, 120, 128, 135–137, 140–141, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 163–165, 167, 169, 179–180, 191, 214, 216–217, 220, 222, 224 freedom narrative 84, 96, 212 French, Marilyn 220 Freud, Sigmund 28, 49, 146, 156 Freudian 6, 163 fugitive 84, 100, 141, 149, 222–223 Gabb, Jacqui 99, 112

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239

Gabbin, Joanne V. 82 Gana, Nuri 154, 156 Garber, Marjorie 85, 99, 112 Gardiner, Judith Kegan 69, 81 Garrett, Jimmy 122, 125 And We Own the Night 122, 125 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 56n4, 63, 66, 71, 73, 81–82, 119, 121n5, 174–175 Gates, Sylvester James, Jr. 189–190, 192 Gauto, Anna 45, 49 gay vi, 6–8, 12–14, 40, 41n5, 43, 46, 49, 66, 114, 116, 116n2, 117–121, 123–126, 203n8, 206, 209, 228 see homosexual see LGBT see queer gaze 15, 43, 45, 56, 59–60, 64, 132, 153–154 male gaze 56, 59–60, 154 white gaze 15, 64, 153–154 Geggus, David P. 87, 96 gender 2–9, 12, 14–15, 18–20, 35–37, 39–40, 42–44, 46–52, 55, 57–58, 64–66, 68, 80–81, 95, 98–99, 105, 105n2, 108, 111–112, 119, 121, 124n7, 139, 143, 146n1, 147, 153–156, 192–193, 196, 213, 215, 218–219–220, 223, 225–227, 230 gender bending 98 gender (and sex/ual) identity 6, 9, 18, 41, 44, 46, 98, 146n1, 205–206 gender inversion 98, 117, 119, 123 gender theory 18, 211, 213, 220–222 Gender Studies 17–19, 211, 213, 221–222, 227, 229 genealogy vi, 2, 17, 43, 163, 177, 190, 216, 221, 227 genetic, genetics 7–8, 74–80 geographical, geography 5, 104, 165, 167–169, 174–175, 189

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Gilbert, Sandra M. 138, 142 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 58, 66 Gilroy, Paul 15, 145, 155–156, 191–192, 222–223, 229 Gines, Kathryn 215 Glissant, Édouard 20–21, 98, 100, 112, 194 Gomel, Elana 74, 81 Govan, Sandra Y. 74, 81 Gqola, Pumla Dine 47, 49 Green, Michelle Erica 74, 79, 81 Gordon, Jane Anna 183n9, 185n12, 186, 192–194, 224 Gordon, Lewis R. vi, 4, 15–18, 20, 178, 179n1, 180n4, 182n7, 183n8, 183n9, 185n13, 185n14, 186, 188n19, 189n20, 190n23, 190n25, 191n26, 192–194, 224, 226 Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times 4, 20, 183n9, 192, 226 Gore, Dayo F. 212, 223 Grabham, Emily 66 Grandel, Hartmut 62, 66 Greer, Margaret R. 189, 193 grief 19, 147, 149, 151–152, 154, 154n5, 156, 214, 221–222 see melancholia Griffin, Farah Jasmine 135, 142 Gross, Sally 42, 49 Gubar, Susan 138, 142 guilt 10, 98, 109–110, 145, 159, 162–163, 165–166, 169–171, 181 Gwaltney, John Langston 129, 142 Haiti, Haitian 87n4, 96, 214 Halberstam, Judith (“Jack”) 99, 107, 112 Haldeman, Douglas 207, 209 Hall, Donald E. 99, 112 Hames-García, Michael 56, 66 Hamner, Everett 74, 80–81

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Harding, Susan Friend 203 Harlem 60–65, 65n6, 66, 139 Harlem Renaissance 8, 13–14, 19, 81, 98, 112–113, 118, 133n6, 142, 212 Harper, Philip Brian 61, 66 Harris, Angela P. 54, 61, 64, 66 Harris, Cheryl I. 52n1, 60, 66 Harris, Craig G. 114 Harris, E. Lynn 114 Invisible Life 114 Hartman, Saidiya V. 18, 148–149, 156, 214–219, 221–223 Hartsock, Nancy C. 69, 81 Harvey, David 168–169, 174 haunt, haunted, haunting 15, 110, 138, 147–148, 150, 153, 154n5, 218–219 Hay, Harry 116 Haywood, Ian 91–92, 96 heal, healing 109–142, 148, 153, 173 Hebrew 187, 189, 197–198, 210 Hegel, Hegelian 13, 159, 178, 221 hegemonic, hegemony v, 6–7, 9–10, 35, 39–40, 40n2, 41, 44–45, 47–48, 51–52, 55, 58, 60–61, 77, 88, 109, 147, 183, 187, 189, 195, 199, 201, 205, 210, 227 Heidegger 159–161, 172–175, 178 Hekman, Susan 81 Hemphill, Essex 2, 114, 126, 228 Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn 78, 81 Henry, Paget 189, 193 Herman, Didi 66 hermeneutic(s) 11–12, 205 herstory 9, 45 heterogenous 72n8 heteronormative, heteronormativity 37–38, 45, 51–52, 56, 85, 99, 200, 204, 207–208 heteropatriarchal 56 heterosexist 150, 205 heterosexual, heterosexuality 37–40,

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Index

42, 46, 50–52, 55, 64, 98–99, 119, 121, 146n1, 154, 197 hierarchy 6–7, 38, 43, 52, 55, 63–64, 85, 99, 153, 185 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks 96 Hirschfeld, Magnus 99, 112 Hirshman, Linda 116, 126 historical, historically 2, 4, 10–11, 21–22, 28, 30, 32, 37–38, 40n2, 41–42, 58, 68, 72n8, 86, 90, 99–100, 111, 113, 116n2, 129–130, 132n5, 145, 150, 154, 160, 169, 180, 183, 184n5, 195, 197–202, 204, 208, 214–215 history 6–7, 9, 21, 25, 28, 30, 32, 45, 48, 84, 90, 92, 94, 96, 111–112, 122, 129, 131, 132n5, 150–151, 153, 163, 165, 168, 180, 188–199, 209, 213, 216–218, 220–222, 226 history of ideas 1, 4, 7, 9, 18, 28, 37, 44, 49, 95, 111, 151, 197, 199–201, 226, 228 his-stories 195 HIV 41, 115 homoerotic 12, 13n5, 115–116 homophobia, homophobic 3n3, 13–14, 36, 41, 41n5, 45–46, 56–57, 116, 122 homosexual, homosexuality 13, 40, 116n2, 117, 119, 122, 126, 151–152, 154, 197, 203 homosexual panic 55, 117 homosocial 8, 52–53, 64, 67, 117, 123, 126 homo oeconomicus 52, 61 hooks, bell 14, 131, 142, 212 Horkheimer, Max 187, 193 Hottentot Venus 7 Hull, Gloria T. 130, 144, 224 human 4, 7, 15, 17, 40–44, 51, 68, 69n4, 76, 84, 99, 124, 148, 150, 154–155, 159–162, 165, 170,

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241

172–173, 179–180, 186–187, 187n18, 192–194, 205–206, 212, 212n3, 214–222, 224, 229 humanity 19, 71, 87, 90, 94, 103, 105, 146–149, 180n3, 186, 219 humanize 147–150 see dehumanize Hume, David 178 Hurston, Zora Neale 71, 164, 225, 227–228 hybrid, hybridity 68, 100–101, 111, 113, 180, 204 I-narration 71–72, 77 see first-person narration see slave narrative identification 1, 5, 19, 48, 145–148, 193 identified 3, 7, 48, 59, 124, 201, 216, 218 multiple identification 1 self-identification 37, 61 identity v, 1, 3, 3n3, 4–9, 11–13, 17–20, 22, 36, 40, 43–44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 66, 68–69, 95, 99, 100–105, 108, 111, 114, 116, 116n2, 117, 119, 122–123, 126, 145, 148, 152, 154–155, 163–164, 189, 192, 195–196, 198, 202–207, 216 identity politics 19, 66, 126, 207, 209 ignorance 20, 45, 60, 66, 111, 212–213, 224 imagine, imagined 1, 4, 56, 106, 109–110, 119, 124, 147–148, 181, 196, 204–205, 208 imagination, imaginative 16, 22, 32, 37, 46, 130, 141, 143, 147–148, 150, 167, 169, 173, 181, 190, 199–201, 209 immoral, immorality 39, 59, 197, 203, 207 imperial 109, 198, 230 imperialism 84, 164, 208

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(anti-)imperialist 124 imperialistic 198 impersonation 10, 86n2, 98 incest, incestuous 128, 131–132, 135, 142 indetermination 56 indigenous 48, 185, 187, 191 inhuman, inhumanity 100, 150 insult 38, 218 intercategorical 8, 52–53, 63 interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary 2 interpretation, interpretive 12, 14, 16, 69, 72, 81, 88, 99, 116, 179, 183–185, 200, 202, 209 interracial, interraciality 8, 13, 52, 60–62, 64–65, 116, 119, 124–125, 130n4 intersectionality 2–3, 9–10, 12, 14, 16–20, 66, 70, 80, 196, 209, 213 narrative intersectionality 80 intersex 6–7, 43–44, 46, 48–50 intracategorical 8, 52, 55, 57, 63 inversion, invert 13, 98, 117, 119, 121, 123, 171 investment v, 7–8, 44, 48, 51–53, 55, 57, 59, 60–61, 63, 65–67, 99, 148, 163n10, 181–182, 216–217 emotional 62 erotic 62 in-between 70, 100 Irigaray, Luce 60, 66

Jaspers, Karl 187, 194 Jay, Karla 126, 129, 142 jazz 14, 130–131, 133, 134n6, 139–140, 142 Jehlen, Myra 85, 96 Jewish 24, 179n2, 189 Jezebel vi, 8, 18, 195–201, 203–209 Jim Crow 117, 160 see segregation Jobert, Pearlie 47, 49 Johnson, E. Patrick 18, 205–206, 206n9, 209 Johnson, James Weldon 163, 163n11, 175 Jones, Bill T. 114 Jones, Claudia 212 Jones, Gayl 72, 81 Corregidora 72, 81 Jones, Leroy (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal 122 Black Fire 122 Jordan (Emma Coleman) and Harris (Angela P.) 54, 61, 64, 66 Jordan, June 212, 223 jouissance 140 Joyce, Joyce Ann 161n8, 175 Joyce, Justin 115, 126 Judeo-Christian 199, 203 Julien, Isaac 114 Junker, Carsten v, 9–10, 16, 18, 62, 84, 226

Jablon, Madeleine 73, 78, 81 Jacobs, Harriet 72, 81 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 72, 81 Jacobsen, Joyce P. 56, 65–66 Jamaica, Jamaican 11, 88, 98, 100, 102–103, 107–113 James, Cynthia 112 James, Winston 107, 109–110, 113 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 161, 174, 189, 193

Kant, Immanuel 159, 167–168, 174–175, 178 Kaplan, Sara K. 151, 156 Kazanjian, David 145, 152, 156 Kekeh-Dika, Andrée-Anne 143 Kennedy, Hubert 119, 126 Khanna, Ranjana 15, 147, 155–156 Khoikhoi 45 Kierkegaard 161 King, Deborah K. 72, 82 King, Nicole 113

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Index

Kleinberg, Ethan 175 Kolmerten, Carol A. 81 Krishnadas, Jane 66 Kristeva, Julia 214 label, labe(l)ling 5, 45, 118, 207 see category Lamming, George 103, 112–113 Lanser, Susan Sniader 70, 78, 82 Laqueur, Thomas 43, 49 law 20, 22, 30, 40, 51, 66, 71, 75, 117, 168, 213–214 Leath, Jennifer S. vi, 8, 17–18, 195, 227 LeClair, Thomas 138, 142 Lee, A. Robert 71n6, 82 legitimacy, legitimate 61, 107–108, 117, 182, 184, 191 lesbian 6–7, 36, 39, 41n5, 43, 49–50, 130n4, 133, 142, 203n8, 206n9, 212, 228 see homosexual see queer Lewis, David Levering 142 Lewis, Thabiti 223 LGBT, LGBTQI 6–7, 203, 205, 207, 228 liberal 27, 69, 69n4, 214 liberation 5, 13–14, 17, 18–19, 40, 99, 114, 116, 116n2, 120–121, 123, 125–126, 182, 186, 191, 221 liberatory 183 liberty 87, 94, 96, 148, 163, 216 see emancipation see freedom Ligon, Glenn 114 Lipsitz, George 60, 66 liquidity 53 literacy 71n6 Löbbermann, Dorothea 65–66 Locke, John 178 Long, Charles 195, 205–206, 209 Lorde, Audre 1, 4, 14–15, 17–18, 20, 21n1, 128–129, 130n4, 131,

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243

143–144, 147, 150, 157, 183–185, 193, 200–201, 213, 224, 228 “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power” 15, 20, 143, 150, 157, 213, 224 Zami 129, 143 loss 11, 14–15, 19, 24, 78n15, 84, 94, 109, 114–115, 131, 141, 145, 147–148, 151–156, 188, 214, 218–219 love 13–15, 24, 39, 50, 106, 108, 110, 116, 122, 124–125, 128, 128n1, 130–131, 133, 135–139, 142–144, 149–150, 152–153, 166, 169–170, 182, 203, 206n9 lover 58, 115, 119–120, 122–123, 134, 137, 139–141, 149, 152–153 Lovejoy, Paul 84, 96 Luig, Judith 49 Maart, Rozena v, 5, 21, 33, 227 “No, Rosa, No District Six” 5, 22, 29–30, 227 mainstream, mainstreaming 100, 114, 123, 182 Majors, Richard 57, 66 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 185, 193 male 7–8, 10, 13, 18–19, 36, 38, 43–46, 48–49, 51, 53, 55–60, 62–63, 98–100, 106–109, 115–119, 121–123, 126, 130, 136, 152, 154, 197–198, 201, 211, 221 male domination 8, 58 see also manhood see also masculinity mammy 196 man 16, 23–24, 26, 44, 47, 56–62, 65, 69, 72, 78, 81, 99, 112, 120, 122–124, 133, 135, 139, 147, 151, 158–162, 164, 166, 168, 173–175, 181, 187, 194, 210, 215, 226 Mancini Billson, Janet 57, 66 Mandela, Zwelivelile 47

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244

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manhood 4, 56, 58, 66, 120, 122–123 see male see masculinity Mannoni, Maud 4, 20 margin 7, 20, 42, 142, 174, 209 marginal, marginalized 9, 69, 112, 200, 206, 219 see deviant maroon, maroonage/marronage 11, 84, 98–105, 105n2, 106–108, 111–112, 226 see fugitive Marret, Sophie 143 marriage 3n3, 7, 36, 40, 46–47, 58–59, 107, 130, 202, 204, 210 masculine, masculinity v, 7–8, 10, 13, 19, 37, 40n2, 41–42, 44, 47, 49–51, 55–57, 61–62, 64, 85, 99, 105–108, 111–113, 119, 121–122, 226 master, mastery 4, 17, 22, 27, 94–96, 119, 140, 150–151, 154n5, 183, 183n9, 184–185, 193–194, 200–201, 214, 224, 227 materialism 63, 167 May, Vivian M. 123, 125–126, 214, 224 McBride, Dwight 114–115, 126 McCall, Leslie 8, 52, 54, 66 McClintock, Ann 38, 40, 49–50 McCloskey, Deirdre 61, 66 McDowell, Deborah 212 McKay, Claude v, 5, 11–12, 98–101, 103–113, 226 A Long Way from Home 108, 113 Banana Bottom v, 11, 98, 109, 113 Banjo 108, My Green Hills of Jamaica 108–109 McKay, Nellie Y. 65, 175 melancholia vi, 4, 11, 14–15, 18–19, 145–146, 146n1, 147–151, 151n4, 152–154, 154n5, 155–157, 191, 191n26, 192, 223, 229

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melancholic 145–146, 146n1, 147, 149, 151–152, 154, 157 melancholy 19, 145–148, 150, 154, 154n5, 156, 192, 222 see grief Melley, Timothy 69, 82 memory 5, 26, 28–30, 66, 70, 103, 110, 132, 135–137, 143, 146–149, 152, 157, 159, 166, 205, 209, 214, 218, 224, 226, 228 re-memory 15, 149–151 see also trauma Mercer, Kobena 114 metaphor, metaphorical vi, 3, 3n4, 5, 14–17, 37, 57, 63, 99, 103, 132–137, 141, 146, 149, 149n2, 158–162, 162n9, 164–165, 167–175, 183, 215–216, 226, 229 see allegory metaphysical, metaphysics 9, 160, 175, 189 method 4, 44, 162, 183, 188 method-centrism 188 methodology 107, 188, 204 Michlin, Monica v, 1, 227 middle-class/middle class 27, 41, 52–54, 57–59, 63–64 see bourgeois Mignolo, Walter D. 189n21, 193 migrant, migration 23n3, 100, 132, 145, 170 militancy, militant 40, 151, 155, 212 see activism, activist Mill, John Stuart 90n7, 96 Miller, Eugene 161, 161n8, 162, 175 Miller, Reid [Jerry] 178n1, 194 Mills, Charles W. 69n3, 82, 175, 213, 224 mind 1n1, 25–26, 46, 59, 63, 70, 76, 78, 89, 104–105, 122, 129, 132, 138, 141, 149, 162, 171–173, 178, 184 see body minority 2, 41, 145, 228

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Index

see identity see subaltern miscegenation 117 misinterpretation 185 Mitchell, Angelyn 19, 81 mobility 57–58, 61, 63, 66 mobilization, mobilize 8, 14, 51–52, 60, 220 modernity 18, 40, 43, 186, 191n26, 193, 195, 213–215, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225 see Enlightenment Mohanty, Satya P. 66 Monohan, Michael 193 Moody-Adams, Michelle 184n10, 184n11, 193 money 51, 54, 58–60, 65, 168, 225 monster, monstrosity, monstrous vi, 10, 17, 178–179, 181, 183, 186–187, 189, 191, 193 Montgomery, Benilde 85n1, 88, 96 Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa 211, 223 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 211, 223 moral, morality 36, 40–41, 46, 49, 52, 87, 90, 94–95, 120, 160, 162, 164–165, 175, 193, 196, 208 Morrison, Toni vi, 4–5, 14–15, 19, 71–72, 72n9, 82, 128, 128n1, 129, 129n2, 129n3, 130–132, 132n5, 133–144, 146–155, 157, 219, 225, 227–228 A Mercy 14–15, 128, 131, 135, 137, 140, 143, 151, 153–155, 157 Beloved 15, 72, 82, 128, 131, 135–136, 141, 143, 148–150, 153–154, 157 The Bluest Eye 14–15, 72, 82, 131, 140, 142–143, 148, 157 Home 129, 143 Jazz 15, 128, 130–131, 138–140, 143 Love 128n1, 142–143

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Paradise 143 Song of Solomon 141, 143 Sula 128, 131–135, 140, 142–143 mother 11, 23–24, 37–38, 49, 78, 98, 109–110, 113, 119, 121–122, 125, 132–133, 137–138, 140–141, 148, 150–155, 166, 201, 213, 215–217, 219, 221, 223–224 mourn, mourning 11, 15, 19, 115, 145–147, 151–156, 217, 222 Moya, Paula M. L. 66 Mufti, Aamir 50 Muholi, Zanele 39–40 multicultural, multiculturalism 1, 155 multiple jeopardy 72, 82 music, musical 2n2, 23n4, 32, 46, 63, 118, 122, 126, 130–131, 133, 134n6, 139, 184, 190, 209 Muslim 91–92, 95–96, 115, 122, 124–125 see Nation of Islam NAACP 54 name, naming 3n3, 8, 23n3, 24, 26, 54, 60, 63, 72, 88, 98, 108, 110, 119, 158n2, 165, 179n2, 196–197, 197n1, 201, 207, 218 nameless 137, 139, 217 Napier, Winston 81 narcissism, narcissistic 179, 182, 215 narration 9–10, 71–73, 77, 79–80 see first-person narration see I-narration narrative theorizing v, 5, 9–10, 12, 77, 80, 83 narrative voice 6, 8–9, 31, 52–55, 60, 62, 64, 70, 72n7, 79–80, 82, 86, 95, 134, 139–141, 219 narrator 8–9, 59, 63–64, 70–73, 75, 77–80, 82, 133, 139–140, 143, 197 nationalism 7, 13, 38, 48, 50, 123, 126, 162–163, 175 nation-building/nation building 7–8,

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12, 14, 36, 39–41, 46–47, 115, 197, 230 see also Black Nationalism Nation of Islam 115, 121, 123–125 see Black Nationalism see Muslim native 22, 98, 101, 111, 221 see Richard Wright Native American, Native Americanness 86n2, 140, 151 Negro 17, 53, 87n3, 146, 162, 171–172, 175, 181, 181n6, 182, 182n7, 199, 209 see Richard Wright Nelson, Julie A. 61, 65 neo-slave (I-)narrative 8, 72–73, 82 see freedom narrative see slave narrative Nero, Charles I. vi, 8–10, 12–14, 19, 73n10, 114, 117, 126, 228 New World 112, 138, 187–188, 219, 221 Newman, Richard S. 87n3, 96 Newton, Esther 98–99, 113 Nietzsche, Friedrich 159, 161, 166n12 non-conforming, non-conformism, nonconformity v, 4, 9–10, 36–37, 41, 83, 207 see deviance see transgression non-heteronormative sexualities 55 non-normative 18, 205–206 non-Western 45, 47, 160 norm, normative 7, 9, 36–37, 39–44, 46–48, 50, 57, 94, 105n2, 107, 179, 184, 196, 199, 202, 205–208, 217 normal, normalcy 37, 56, 206, 210 Norman, Dorothy 161 North Africa, North African 10, 86, 89–93, 95 North America, North American 85–86, 88, 90, 100, 225 see United States

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North, Michael 63, 66 Nyong’o, Tavia 59, 61, 66 Obama, Barack 204 see post-Obama Obeler, Suzanne 190n24, 192 object 3–4, 8, 10, 17, 59, 62, 91, 94, 120, 129, 134, 145–149, 151–152, 164, 167–168, 171, 181–182, 201 objection 54, 87n3, 184, 186 O’Callaghan, Evelyn 106n3, 113 Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G. 121n5, 125–126 Oliver, Melvin 118, 126 Olney, James 71–72, 82 O’Meally, Robert G. 142 ontology 158, 166–168 oppression 4, 18, 68, 71, 123, 150, 153–154, 160, 163, 207, 213, 219, 221, 230 oppressed 28, 80, 205 oppressor 205 oral 72, 79, 82, 131, 133 see speakerly Orozsco, Sebastian de Covarrubias 190n21, 193 Other/“other”/other 20, 40–41, 60n5, 74–75, 106, 147–148, 195, 204–205, 222 othering 15, 17–18, 153 otherness 7, 48, 205 own 27–28, 105, 122, 125, 139 owner, ownership 58, 62, 121, 215 see capital see property pain 5–6, 11, 15, 109–110, 136, 145, 149, 154, 169, 193 see memory see trauma Painter, Nell 212 pamphlet 25, 32, 84, 218 pan-African 123–124 see African

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Index

see Black paratextual 12 passing 60–62, 66 patriarchal, patriarchy 7, 13, 37–38, 40, 40n2, 43, 47–48, 59–60, 99, 125, 150, 200, 204, 216, 222 patriotic, patriotism 40–41 Patterson, Orlando 84, 96, 220 Slavery as Social Death 84, 96 perception 16–17, 107, 132 perform 9, 16, 36–37, 68, 70, 77, 79, 86, 89–90, 101, 104, 107–109, 155, 172, 190, 217 performance v, 4, 8, 10–12, 15, 21n1, 30, 36–37, 42, 48, 56, 65–66, 76, 86, 94, 98–99, 106–108, 111–114, 130, 140, 193, 205, 209 performative 85, 99 persona 85–86, 88, 98, 103, 105, 139 Pfister, Joel 57, 66 philosopher 90n7, 159, 178n1, 182, 187, 190, 227 philosophical, philosophy 5, 10, 17–19, 69, 73, 76, 82, 95, 147, 158–160, 162, 162n9, 165, 172–175, 178–180, 180n4, 181, 183n9, 186–190, 190n23, 191–194, 216, 221, 226–227, 229 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 182n7, 194 Pippin, Tina 200, 209 plantation 11, 88, 100–101, 103–106, 112, 151, 153, 210 planter 100, 105, 151 pleasurable, pleasure 15, 113, 130–132, 134, 136–138, 140, 142, 147, 150, 151n4, 152, 157 poetics vi, 15, 100, 112–113, 130, 134, 142, 156, 158–159, 161–165, 167, 169, 171–175, 229 see (a)esthetics point of view 6, 70, 73, 77, 80, 131, 213, 221 see focalization

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political 1–2, 2n2, 3–5, 7–13, 16–17, 19, 38, 41, 46, 48–49, 51, 54, 69, 71, 73, 81, 90, 94, 100–104, 116n2, 117–118, 123–124, 131, 145–147, 155, 163, 165, 188, 190n23, 192, 194–198, 203, 207–208, 212, 212n3, 213–214, 217, 220–222, 227, 230 see sociopolitical politics vi, 6–8, 14, 18–20, 38, 45, 48, 50, 66, 73, 94, 96, 102, 113, 116n2, 120, 123–124, 124n7, 125–126, 128, 131, 142, 154–156, 193, 195–199, 201, 203, 207–210, 216, 220, 227, 230 see biopolitics Pomo Afro Homos 114 pornographic, pornography 39, 46, 97, 128, 218 pornotroping 217 position (class or subject) 3, 10–11, 51, 54, 56–59, 62–64, 75, 77, 80, 84–86, 88–89, 91, 93, 95, 99, 102, 105, 155, 162, 164, 170, 172, 204, 206, 214–215, 220 positionality 4, 48, 108, 165 postcolonial v, 4–7, 15, 33, 36–37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49–50, 95–96, 101, 112–113, 145, 147, 154–156, 191n26, 192, 222, 226, 229–230 postcoloniality 4 poststructuralist 9, 76 postmodern, postmodernism 69, 73, 76, 81, 100, 111, 166, 178n1, 213, 219–220 post-Marxist 215, 221 post-Obama 211 power relations 9, 38, 40, 48, 155 praxis 4–5, 10, 16–17, 163, 182, 195, 204 prejudice 60, 60n5, 65, 184, 198 Priest, Josiah 199–200, 208–209 primitive 62, 91

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privilege, privileged 9, 27, 38, 40, 48, 60, 107, 140, 155, 206, 213 Proctor, Robert Neel 214, 224 production of knowledge (knowledge production) 180, 182–183, 189, 204 productive v, 2, 7, 51–52, 60–61, 72n8, 75, 79, 105, 149, 151–152, 169, 195, 212 profit, profitability 53, 61, 66, 84, 94, 217 projection 12, 181 promiscuity, promiscuous 95, 133, 138 propertization 212, 212n3, 214–215, 220–222 property vi, 18, 28, 38, 52, 58, 60–61, 66, 70, 84, 94, 180, 211, 212n3, 213–216, 218–221 see capital see ownership see slave propriety 59, 206 Prospero 103, 112 protest 25, 40, 90, 92, 165, 187 Protestant 151, 202 psyche 28–29, 119 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic/al 6, 28, 119, 128, 156, 163n10, 191n26, 214, 227, 229 psychology, psychological 3, 57, 66, 98, 100–101, 103, 108, 116n2, 148, 184 Puri, Shalini 101, 113 Quaker 87n3, 90, 92 quare 18, 206, 206n9, 209 queer 4–7, 10, 12–13, 18, 43–44, 55, 55n3, 64–66, 99, 108, 111–112, 114–116, 123, 195–198, 201, 204–206, 209–210, 220, 228–229 Quilligan, Maureen 189n21, 193 Quinby, Lee 200, 209

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race 2–3, 3n4, 8–11, 17, 19–20, 38–39, 43, 49, 51–54, 56, 60–63, 65–66, 69, 72, 72n7, 80–81, 95–96, 100, 111, 113, 120, 130, 142, 145–146, 152–156, 160, 165, 171, 175, 181, 189, 189n20, 190, 190n23, 191–194, 196, 199, 204, 209–210, 213, 216, 219, 223–224, 226–227, 229–230 race relations 156 raced 21n1, 146 racial 3–4, 15, 38, 52–54, 56–57, 59, 61, 63–64, 66, 74, 79, 85–87, 91, 100, 117, 125–126, 145-146, 153–156, 160–162, 170, 179, 185n11, 190n23, 193–195, 199–201, 213, 224, 229 racial identity 114 racial uplift 59 racialized 17, 38, 41, 44, 58, 61, 63, 84, 86, 93, 151, 160, 220 racism, racist 4–7, 13, 18, 27, 45, 53, 56, 60, 62–63, 77, 84, 102, 116, 116n2, 122, 125, 129–130, 145–146, 148, 153–154, 159, 163, 167, 178, 180, 186, 192, 211–212, 214–216, 220, 226–227 radical 82, 117, 126, 159–160, 164–165, 167, 169, 171–172, 183, 188, 195, 208, 212–215, 221, 223 rape 32, 36, 38, 41, 41n5, 101, 117, 122, 128, 138, 153, 181 rational, rationality 4–5, 9, 43, 69, 74, 76, 172, 184, 186–189 Raynaud, Claudine vi, 14–15, 19, 72n9, 128–129, 132, 136, 140, 143, 228 reader 7, 10–16, 19, 21, 30, 59, 62–65, 67, 70, 74n11, 75, 75n13, 88–90, 93, 95, 106, 114, 123, 132, 134, 138–141, 162, 164–165, 169, 172–173, 183, 212, 217–218, 221 reason 13, 16–17, 72n8, 166, 172, 174, 178, 180–183, 185–191, 193

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Index

unreason, unreasonable 154, 181–182, 185–186, 191 rebel, rebellion, rebellious 22, 32, 103–105, 105n2, 106–107, 112–113, 150 recognition 7, 15, 19, 43–44, 48, 65, 146–149, 155, 167, 222 Reddock, Rhoda E. 111, 113 redeem, redemption 97, 122, 125 Reid-Pharr, Robert 59, 66 reification 17, 212n3 see commodification see “thingification”/thingification rejection 7, 14, 40, 103, 131, 137, 140, 159, 166, 166n12, 171, 180, 189, 191 relation v, 1, 5, 9, 14, 21–22, 32, 38, 40, 40n2, 41–43, 46–48, 53, 58, 60–64, 75, 86, 99–100, 116n2, 130, 140–141, 146n1, 147–148, 153, 155, 158–159, 162, 167, 183, 187, 190, 204, 214, 216, 219, 221 relationality 183 relativism 184n10, 185n11 religion 68, 74n12, 101, 162, 166, 184, 196, 199, 202, 202n5, 202n6, 205–206 religious 87n3, 102–104, 111, 151, 163, 196, 199–203, 203n7, 204, 206–208, 227 representation 17, 37–38, 44, 61, 63, 76, 95–96, 101, 105, 124, 142, 147, 211, 223, 226, 228, 230 repressed 6, 12, 15, 21, 32, 103, 148–149, 155, 184 repression 3, 27–29, 51, 56, 146, 178 reproductive 37, 64, 105, 215 resistance 5–6, 18, 28, 56, 77, 80, 84, 86, 95, 100, 104, 107, 112, 135n7, 142, 147, 157, 166, 182, 200, 207, 209, 212 respectability 59, 106, 196, 202, 206–208

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revelation 22, 44, 61, 208 revised 10, 18, 51, 166, 168, 195, 197–198, 200–202, 207, 216 revision, revisionary, revisionist vi, 12–13, 52, 55, 114, 119, 121, 124, 163, 167, 169, 196, 203, 205, 208 revolution, revolutionary 1, 87n3, 87n4, 96, 116n2, 121n5, 122–123, 126, 147, 168, 195, 208, 214 rhythm 23n4, 31, 103, 133, 184 Rich, Adrienne 42, 50 Richards, Glen L. 113 Ricoeur, Paul 16, 20, 158, 158n1, 172, 175 Parcours de la reconnaissance, trois études 16, 20 Riggs, Marlon 114, 120, 123, 123n6, 124, 126 Tongues Untied 120, 123, 126 risk, risking vi, 14, 64, 98, 111, 123, 128–133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 167 Robbins, Bruce 50 Rocchi, Jean-Paul v, 1, 2n3, 3, 20, 56, 62, 66, 228 Rosario, Vernon 126 Rosen, David 113 Rousseve, David 114 Rowson, Susanna 92, 96 Royle, Nicholas 70, 80 Ruiters, Greg 49 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 73, 82 Russell, Bertrand 178 Rust, Marion 92n12, 96 sacred 142, 197, 205 Sade 18, 208, 208n10, 209 Saint, Assotto 2, 114 Saint-Domingue 87n4 santería 205 Sapphire 2, 228

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Sarnelli, Laura vi, 14–15, 19, 73n10, 145, 149n2, 150n3, 151n4, 157, 229 Sartre, Jean-Paul 161, 169, 175 satire v, 8, 10, 84, 88, 91–93 satirical 10, 54, 76, 85–86, 88, 91, 108 savage, savagery see barbarian scar 76, 136, 149, 149n9, 150, 153 Scarry, Elaine 219, 224 Schenck, Celeste 143 Schiebinger, Londa 213, 224 Schipper, Mineke 70, 82 scholar, scholarly 2n2, 6, 10, 18, 28, 38, 43, 52, 71, 74n11, 84, 85n2, 88, 91–92, 114, 125, 131, 178, 182–183, 195–196, 200, 205, 207, 211, 213 Schuhmann, Antje v, 6–8, 20, 36, 47, 50, 56, 66–67, 230 science 43, 45, 184, 187, 188n18, 189–190, 213 science fiction 73, 79 Scott, Darieck 125–126, 206, 209 Scripture 197–199, 202, 209 Sebate, P. M. 70, 82 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 55, 67, 117n3, 123, 126 segregated, segregation 53, 60, 161, 166, 203 see Jim Crow self 1, 6, 9, 13n5, 14–15, 22, 51, 69–71, 74–80, 87, 98, 100–105, 107, 109, 111, 131, 141, 146, 148, 151, 155, 181, 216, 222 self-assertion 56 self-aware (ness) 121, 163, 166, 207 self-conception 215 self-conscious (ness) 3, 106n2, 150, 163, 221 self-definition 11, 108 self-destruction 69, 76–77 self-determination 7, 37, 40, 46

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self-erasure 155 self-hatred 131, 199 self-identification 37, 61 self-interest 60 self-invention 103, 205 self-knowledge 57 self-liberation 103 self-mutilation 73, 76 self-portrait 135 self-reflexive (ness), self-reflexivity 4–5, 17, 64–65, 217–219 self-sufficiency 123–124 self-worth 60 selflessness 16, 59, 139, 171, 173 Semenya, Caster 6–7, 36–37, 42, 44–45, 48–50 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 115 senses 111, 151 sensibility 100–102, 104, 124, 130 sensual, sensuality, sensuous vi, 14–15, 102–103, 128, 130–132, 132n5, 133–135, 138, 141, 149, 150, 198 servant 53–54, 130, 140, 151 servitude 100 Seward, Adrienne 143 sex 2–3, 7, 13n5, 19, 36–37, 40–50, 58–59, 99–100, 105, 107–108, 111–112, 120, 129–130, 132–133, 156, 187, 201–203, 206, 210 same sex 3n3, 7, 36, 40, 44, 98, 197, 203–204 sexism, sexist 4, 7, 17–18, 46, 77, 107, 125, 129–130, 154, 178, 211 sexual vi, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 13, 15, 18, 37–38, 48, 51–52, 56, 59, 61–62, 65, 103, 111, 114, 117, 119, 129–139, 141–142, 153, 195–199, 201, 207–209, 218, 227 hypersexual 196–197, 199 sexuality v, 6, 17, 36, 40, 47, 51–52, 55, 65, 67, 96, 99, 105, 108, 111, 113, 121, 129–131, 132n5, 139,

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Index

146n1, 195–201, 203–205, 207, 209–210, 213, 227–228, 230 sexualities 20, 39, 55, 66–67, 98, 195, 198, 229–230 sexualized, sexualizing 13, 58, 63, 198, 203, 221 shame 10, 37–38, 93, 105, 131, 205–207 Shange, Ntozake 211, 224 For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide 211, 224 Shapiro, Thomas 118, 126 Shepherd, Reginald 114 Shepherd, Verene 113 Sherard, Tracey 130, 143 Sheth, Falguni A. 190n23, 193–194 Shivambu, F. 45, 50 Shockley, Ann Allen 130, 143 Shohat, Ella 50 Sieg, Katrin 85n2, 96 signified, signifier 11, 16, 37–38, 41, 62, 76, 91, 104, 117, 147, 159, 179, 198, 201, 206, 213, 215 signifyin(g) 8, 13, 37, 52, 56, 62–65, 206, 228 see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. silence 23, 26, 110, 130, 173 silenced 42, 55 silencing 47, 97, 130, 138 Simone, Nina 14, 115, 117–118, 120 “Images” 14, 117–118 “Mississippi Goddamn” 118 simplified, simplification, simplify 9, 48 sin, sinful, sinner 170, 205 Sinclair, Mark 175 sing, singer 104, 115, 118, 130, 134n6, 169–170, 173, 214 song 14, 18, 23n4, 107, 117–118, 130, 139, 141, 143, 169–171 skin 22n1, 25–26, 28, 33, 43, 73n10, 76, 101, 128, 133, 146, 153, 156, 216 slave 22, 23n3, 23n4, 31, 71, 71n6, 72, 75, 81–82, 87, 89, 91–92,

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94–96, 100, 104–105, 112, 136, 141, 148–153, 154n5, 169, 210, 214–216, 218–220, 222–223 see enslaved see property slave narrative 8, 71–72, 72n8, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81–82, 84, 92, 135 slave trade 10, 84–88, 91–92, 94–96, 151, 154n5, 216 slavery 4, 7, 10, 15, 19, 32, 40, 40n2, 45, 58, 61, 68, 71, 84–87, 87n3, 89–92, 92n12, 93–97, 100, 111–112, 120, 122, 135, 135n7, 137, 142, 145, 148–150, 152–156, 199, 203, 209–210, 212, 214–217, 220–223, 226 anti-slavery 84–86, 87n3, 87n4, 90, 94 pro-slavery 86, 88–89, 91, 94 see also enslavement Smethurst, James 122–123, 126 Smith, Barbara 130n4, 133, 142, 144, 211, 224 Smith, Bessie 130, 134n6 Smith, Valerie 71, 73, 82 Smitherman, Geneva 121, 126 social change/social movements/ social transformation 1, 3, 5, 15, 46, 51, 71, 186, 188 see sociopolitical socialism, socialist 103, 107 sociality 84 sociopolitical 2–3, 18, 38, 51, 102, 204, 207 solidarity 8, 48, 53–54, 61, 116, 123, 151, 199 soul vi, 12, 90, 110, 114, 151, 154n5, 170–171, 214 South, Southern 60, 89, 93, 116, 132, 132n5, 134, 158n2, 163–164, 197n1, 200, 210, 212, 223, 228 South Africa, South African v, 2, 4–7, 21, 23, 23n3, 25, 27, 36,

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38–40, 40n4, 41, 44–46, 49–50, 82, 227, 230 Soweto 25 speakerly 7 speech 8, 16, 28–29, 47, 75, 78, 88–90, 103, 124, 141, 157, 172, 193, 222, 224 Spillers, Hortense 18, 85, 95–96, 129–130, 130n4, 131, 138, 144, 148, 157, 212, 215, 217, 219, 221, 224 spiritual, spirituality 13n5, 18, 103, 124, 144, 159, 202–203, 206 Spirituals 8, 162–163, 169–171 spiritualized 195, 198, 201 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 48, 50, 174 spoken 28, 30, 78–80, 213–214, 221 see oral Stallybrass, Peter 105–106, 113 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 200, 200n2, 209 status 56, 60, 72, 82, 92, 106, 122–123, 125, 162, 187, 205–207, 219 see position status quo 28, 147 Stepto, Robert B. 64, 67, 73 stereotype, stereotypical, stereotyping 4, 17–18, 41, 46, 59, 62, 125, 130, 211 Stockton, Kathryn Bond 206, 209 Styron, William 73, 82 Confessions of Nat Turner 73, 82 subaltern 146–147 subhuman 180 subject 2n3, 3–6, 9–11, 14–19, 21, 21n1, 22, 28, 30–32, 38, 45, 54, 58, 61, 69, 69n3, 70–72, 75–78, 78n15, 80, 85, 91, 100, 114–115, 116n2, 129–130, 145–147, 149–151, 155, 164, 174, 182, 189, 192–193, 204, 212, 215, 217, 219–223 subjection 146n1, 149, 156, 214–216, 223

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subjectivity 4–6, 9–11, 14–18, 39n2, 69, 70–72, 75–77, 80, 88, 100–107, 110–111, 129–130, 146n1, 155, 164, 191, 205, 215, 218–220, 222, 225 Submissive African Man 13n5, 119–120 subordinate 107, 145, 182 subversion, subversive, subvert 9, 18, 85, 105n2, 151, 164, 166, 168, 170, 187, 230 suffer, suffering 9, 15, 76, 92–93, 109, 121, 146, 148–149, 152, 162, 172, 178, 197, 217–218 Sunquist, Eric J. 125–126 supremacy 60, 117–118, 120–121, 182 survival 6, 84, 100, 128 survive 101, 109, 152, 219 survivor 68, 81 Swartz, Mimi 207, 210 symbol, symbolic, symbolize 1, 3, 37–38, 40–41, 45, 59, 64, 76–77, 88, 98, 103–104, 106, 109, 117, 162, 170, 172–173, 191, 209 symbolic violence 13, 180, 180n3 symptom, symptomatic 6, 10, 28–30, 32, 55, 216 syncretic, syncretism 100, 102 system, systemic 5, 9, 21, 28, 30, 40, 42–44, 48–52, 59, 95, 98, 101, 104, 122, 137, 150, 153–154, 163, 181–182, 213–214, 230 systematic 30, 84, 228 Tally, Justine 143 Tate, Claudia 138–139, 144 tautological 184 Taylor, Paul 190n22, 190n23, 194 Taylor-Guthrie, Danille 142 technology 99, 103, 108, 168 teleological, teleology 17, 188, 193 telling 70, 75, 75n13, 79, 88, 109, 140, 153

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Index

Tettenborn, Eva 151, 157 The Caucasian Storms Harlem 62, 65 The Great Gatsby 61 The Walls of Jericho v, 7, 51–52, 59, 61–63, 65 theodicy 179–180, 182, 186, 188 theoretical, theory 2n3, 3–5, 9–10, 17–19, 41, 51, 65, 68–69, 69n3, 72n8, 73, 76–78, 80–81, 96, 106n3, 111, 113, 119, 121n5, 145–146, 146n1, 147, 154, 156, 158, 162, 166, 168, 171, 174, 182–183, 185, 187, 189–190, 191n26, 192–193, 195, 204, 206, 209, 211, 213, 215–217, 220–221, 227–229 see Gender Theory theorization 2–5, 12, 55n3, 65, 100, 199, 221 theorizing v-vi, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–13, 15, 17, 19, 77, 80, 83, 124, 143, 145, 156, 182, 214–215, 217, 220 “thingification”/thingification 10, 94, 217, 217n5 see commodification see reification Third World 45 touch 78, 134–135, 141, 149, 162 Townes, Emilie 201 tradition (Black/African American Literary) 4, 70–73, 79–80, 165 traditional 4, 9, 43–44, 47, 49, 59, 71, 99, 160, 183, 186, 204–205 transaction 19, 117, 122–123, 125, 192 transatlantic 10, 84, 86, 88, 91–93, 96, 210, 212–214, 216–220, 225–226 transcend/s 16, 52, 56, 61, 75, 101, 163, 182–183, 191, 196, 205 transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary v, 1, 4, 17, 222 transformation, transformative 1–2, 2n2, 14, 16–17, 19, 46, 49, 96, 141, 146, 167, 171–172, 186, 188, 204, 229

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transgender v, 6–7, 36, 43, 46, 112–113 transgression 43, 46, 71n6, 86, 113, 142, 164, 217–218 transnational 212–213 transvestite, transvestism 98, 112 see cross-dressing see drag Tratner, Michael 51, 61, 67 trauma, traumatic, traumatized 4–6, 12, 38, 77, 110, 115, 129–132, 146, 148–149, 151–154 trickstering 12 truth 16, 76, 167, 170, 173, 180, 183, 196, 205 Truth, Sojourner 73n10, 129 Turpin, Cherie Ann 128, 144 twenty-first century 99 Tyler, Rowall 92 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 119, 126 underclass 165, 207 underground 106, 165–170, 172 see The Man Who Lived Underground United States 2, 70, 84–87, 90–92, 95, 100, 110–111, 122, 155, 163, 172, 175, 200n2, 202, 204, 206–207, 211, 226, 228 universal 94, 159, 165, 168, 189, 194, 222 universalism 3n3, 59 unspoken 23, 135, 146, 157 utopia 79, 81, 112, 222 Valentine, David 99, 113 veil 12, 135, 170, 174, 205, 229 veiled 54, 205 vernacular 8, 31, 65, 116n2, 121n5, 165, 168, 225 victim, victimized 71, 74, 77, 86, 102, 218 Viefhues-Bailey, Ludger 203, 210 violate, violation 38, 42

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254

Black Intersectionalities

violence, violent 4, 6–8, 13, 20, 38, 41–42, 44–45, 48, 50, 55–57, 77, 79, 96, 123, 130, 138, 145–146, 149, 153–155, 157, 180, 180n3, 181, 197, 199, 201, 209, 218–219, 222, 230 vision 52, 64, 111, 125, 131, 142, 148, 160, 170, 200, 206 Vitkus, Daniel J. 92n10, 97 Voelkel, Rebecca 203n8 voodoo 205 Voß, Heinz-Jürgen 43, 50 vulnerable, vulnerability 7, 38, 41, 129, 132, 198, 214 Walcott, Rinaldo 195, 210 Walker, Alice 72, 82, 129, 144, 211–213, 224–225 The Color Purple 72, 82, 206n9, 211 Meridian 211, 224 Wallace, Michelle 211, 224 Warner, Michael 85n1, 96, 206, 210 Washington, Mary Helen 212, 224 Weil, Eric A. 72n7, 82 Wells-Barnett, Ida 2, 214 West, Cornel 192 Wheatley, Phyllis 212 White, Allon 105–106, 113 White, Deborah Gray 196, 199, 210 whiteness 40n2, 52, 60–62, 66, 91, 143, 146, 148, 154, 164, 179, 181–182, 182n7, 189–200, 216, 225 white gaze 15, 64, 153–154 white supremacy 60, 117–118, 120–121, 182 whore 129, 196, 218 Wilderson, Frank B. 219, 224 Williams, Patricia J. 212, 215, 224 Williams, Rhonda M. 54, 65 Williams, Sherley Anne 72, 82, 135, 144 Dessa Rose 72, 82, 135, 144 Willis, Susan 132, 132n5

LUP, Michlin Rocchi.indd 254

Wilson, James F. 99, 113 Wimbush, Vincent L. 195, 210 Wiredu, Kwasi 184n10, 194 witness, witnessing 4, 6, 28, 71, 137, 219 Wittman, Carl 116n2, 126 “A Gay Manifesto” 116n2, 126 Wollstonecraft, Mary 220 woman 2, 15, 18–19, 24, 36–38, 42, 45, 47, 50, 53, 59–60, 62, 68, 73–74, 77, 81, 102, 106–107, 110, 113, 117, 121, 123, 125, 128–131, 134–135, 139, 147, 151–152, 196–200, 209–212, 214–215, 219, 223–224 blackwomanness 69 see also Black Feminism womanhood 4, 36, 41, 196, 199 womanist 206n9, 224 Wood, Marcus 93n14, 95, 97 working-class/working class 53–54, 56, 63, 121, 121n5 Wright, Michelle M. 20, 40n2, 50, 56, 66–67 Wright, Richard vi, 4, 14–17, 71, 73n10, 158–161, 161n8, 162–163, 163n10, 164–175, 228 “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (“Blueprint”) 16, 158, 162–165, 167–170, 172, 175 The Man Who Lived Underground (Underground) 16, 158, 158n4, 161, 161n8, 162–165, 173–174, Native Son 161n8, 166, 175 Wynter, Sylvia 183n8, 188n18, 194, 215, 221, 224 Yee, Gale A. 197, 210 Young, Allen 126 Yuval-Davis, Nira 6, 38, 50 Zeller, Adam 56, 65–66 Zuberi, Tukufu 190n22, 194

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