The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor 9783110789744, 9783110789799, 9783110789843, 2022935982

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The Aliens Within

Buchreihe der Anglia/ ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Andrew James Johnston, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Ad Putter, James Simpson, Emily Thornbury, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Liliane Louvel, Christopher Morash, Susana Onega, Martin Puchner, Peter Schneck

Volume 80

The Aliens Within

Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor Edited by Geoffroy de Laforcade, Daniel Stein, and Cathy C. Waegner

ISBN 978-3-11-078974-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-078979-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-078984-3 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935982 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Geoffroy de Laforcade, Daniel Stein, and Cathy C. Waegner The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor Editors’ Introduction 1

Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass Page R. Laws Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ 21 Daniel Stein “Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel 45 Noel Allende Goitía The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early 67 Twentieth Century Ludmila Martanovschi and Dana Mihăilescu Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema 85 Verena Adamik Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of 113 Trump

Disease: Pathologizing the Other Geoffroy de Laforcade Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism 135

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Adrienne Ronee Washington and Briana Lee Robinson De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation 161 Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social 187 Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction Cathy C. Waegner Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels 209 Regina E. Brisgone African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 233

Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse Hunter H. Gardner Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary 255 Contexts David Metzger Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of 277 the Ocean Chrysovalantis Kampragkos Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece 293 Sarah Ryniker Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia 315

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Michele E. Rozga Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry 337 Notes on Contributors Index

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The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor Editors’ Introduction

In the preface to the classic collection of texts Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, Edward Chamberlain and Sander Gilman wrote that, in the early nineteenth century, “fear was contagious. It infected the air, and poisoned the wells” (1985: xiv). This theme was recurrent in modern thought and culture, emanating not just from the centers of imperial and colonial expansion, but also from within their conquered, settled, fantasized, and restless peripheries, where real and imagined “contagions,” discovered by virology and imagined in society, couched modern bourgeois apprehensions and emergent state-sanctioned regimes of discipline in a language of sickness. The nation, an insurgent ideological, civic, and spatial framework for understanding affiliation and rights from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, has since entered into an era of global transformation. In political discourse as well as tropes of belonging and exclusion in popular culture, national community is often narrated as an organism prone to decay, or as facing imminent danger and thus in urgent need of measures of security. Like the depictions of invading hordes of beastly, undisciplined, and diseased poor workers in industrial-era cities that produced stories and treatises on containment, policing, civilizing social programs, and educational reform, as well as classics of horror and hubris in literature and film, these representations are repopulating our civic and cultural imaginations with expressions of dread. Dystopias, fears of a zombie apocalypse, planetary ecological collapse, pandemic outbreaks, and bewildering breakthroughs in the frontiers of knowledge along with skepticism toward science, reason, political and philosophical representations of futurity, have rendered humanity aghast: from the Middle English verb gasten, meaning “to frighten,” and its roots in the powerful medieval, pre-modern image of the “gast” – or ghost. Of what ghosts, in our era, are we afraid? As shown in Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory (1996 – 1998), the modern nation institutionalized and spatialized its desired finality: fixed, eternal imaginations of kinship marked by monuments, boundaries, enclosures, and teleological narratives of historicity, complete with lofty universal claims of timeless rationality and certainty. “Postmemory” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-001

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(Hirsch 2012) in our present predicament of crisis and multidimensional collapse refers to our tendency to frame the remembrance of personal, collective, and cultural traumas in familiar stories, images, and behaviors, which we continue to deploy, as we process change and its unknowns, through our own perceptions of imminent danger and disruption. Historical metaphors abound of places we feel we have been ‘before’: perilous border crossings, transgressions of atavistic and colonial-area binaries of identity (national, racial, sexual, biological), chaotic spaces of fatal infection, besiegement by monsters (and terrorists), glaring disparities in wealth and well-being, the immanence of outbreaks (be they of disease, war, or violent, anti-systemic change), daunting specters of scarcity and risk, imagined conspiracies and dark forces at work, emergency quarantining and separation. The contemporaneity of these fears, their echoes in something diffusely familiar and perceptible to us, has its origins in the catastrophic genesis of modernity itself, rather than the eclipse suggested by the widespread usage of the prefix of ‘post-’ in compound words to describe its loss of relevance. Yet as Walter Benjamin famously argued in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” remembrance – Eingedenken, sometimes dismissed as an inward-looking, quasitheological embrace of hidebound narratives of timelessness – also functions as an incubator of radically new visions of temporality and human agency. “To articulate the past historically,” he wrote in “Thesis VI,” “does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (2007: 255). It is fitting that Benjamin should continue: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). In 1912, the year of a panic-driven crackdown on Afro-Cubans provoked by a Black-led rebellion in eastern Cuba, Gustavo Mustelier described the “thoughtless opportunism, unbridled license in customs, dangerous unpredictability in habits, brutal and indomitable egotism” of his compatriots as resulting from “contagion or transmission of the Black element” to the Cuban national family (1912: 23, our translation). This familiar echo of disease and degeneration, which the essay on Haiti in this volume documents as paradigmatic of modern discourses of racism, colonialism, and their contemporary avatars – embedded in Western consciousness – of civilization and barbarism, was also directed against uprooted European working-class migrants, for example in Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel. He feared these “hordes of vulgarity” would “erase all sense of order in societal consciousness, and that in yielding hierarchical order to the vagaries of chance will necessarily lead to the triumph of unjustifiable and ignoble supremacies” (1988: 60). While our historical epoch seems remote from that of Arthur de Gobineau’s musings on the biological and genetic foundations of racial and by extension civilizational degeneracy, the steady

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mainstreaming of notions of a “great replacement”¹ underway as the former centers of capitalist power scramble to contain human movement across borders echoes the anxieties of the nineteenth century. From the sudden acceleration of European, colonial, and industrial history unleashed by eighteenth-century French and Haitian Revolutions to the perceived decrepitude of “the West” evoked by Spengler and Toynbee in the early twentieth century, the metaphor of contagion elicited dread and invited discipline in the minds of moderns. It framed the understanding of disease and social disruption in the fledgling halls of science and national politics, the spirit of laws to confine the uprooted and police the deviant or restless, and fashioned new genres in literature and the arts in a new era of mass communication. As disease and epidemics soared in colonial societies and concern for their prevention soared in imperial ones, plagues and their viral spread became familiar tropes of storytelling and boundary-making, civilizational collapse and societal reordering, of which Albert Camus’ classic novel La Peste (The Plague), metaphorically concerned with Nazi encroachment on the body and social fabric, is emblematic. Angela Mitropolous has noted that “contagion” is a word that evolved to mean “contact with filth” (from the Latin contagio: con – ‘together with’ and tangere – “to touch”) (2012: 14).² In Europe of the fourteenth century, Mitropoulos writes, “the apocryphal story of merchants spreading a disease literally hoisted upon them by foreign invaders had been abbreviated into one of Jews polluting the water […]. In these narratives of contagion, the liquid signals danger, but the plague serves to reconstitute the channels of circulation and their foundations” (2012: 45). The fear of the popular classes and the representation of contagion as danger led to increased measures of control of labor and migration and new forms of governance. This, at a moment when the fall of Islamic Granada and accidental encounter with those imagined wild, uninhabitable “torrid zones” (see Wynter 1995) of the Global South unleashed a new era of forced deportations and global mobility and interdependence. Contagion and globalization went hand in hand: “Politics [became] epidemiological” (Mitropoulos 2012: 205). Michel Foucault (1977) noted that mechanisms of biopolitical securitization developed by states

 The far-right ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory was first widely publicized in a book written by Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement (2011). The adherents of this theory believe that members of an international, liberal elite plan the replacement of white AmerEuropeans with people of color and Muslim denomination. See Verena Adamik’s chapter in this volume for an application of the ‘great replacement’ in connection with Donald Trump’s political rhetoric.  Mitropoulos is quoting from François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris (1832: 159).

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from the late seventeenth century onward, marked by urban quarantining and strategies to isolate and confine the ‘abnormal’ – the displaced, the destitute, the degenerate, the disorderly (see Fanon 1966) – resulted from the fear of disease, and escalated into an obsession with supervision and control to counteract dangerousness. Scholars of labor, women’s studies, colonialism, and race have since amply documented how, abetted by sensationalist storytelling and new technologies of information, bodies, represented as sickly and dangerous, inhabited by passions and pathogens, became sites for the construction of power and authority. Science and statecraft, in an age of revolution, capitalist expansion and endemic warfare, combined to designate the laboring poor as infected and contagious, even monstrous and ghastly threats to the configuration of an organically defined modern nation-state and its projection of universal progress. The current pandemic looms large as an indicator of the disruptions caused by contemporary neoliberal globalization, which has resurrected middle-class and consumer fears of social insecurity, contagion, and chaos. It has also cast light on the logics of what Achille Mbembe calls “capture, predation, extraction and asymmetrical warfare” (2017: 5), reminiscent of capitalism’s colonial and slaveholding past, and that today “converge with the re-balkanization of the world and intensifying practices of zoning, all of which point to a new collusion between the economic and the biological” (2017: 5). Borders, which typify the engineering of hygiene, quarantine, and immunization as a means of protecting the national body politic through the control of migratory flows, are once again sites of intense ‘othering’ of moving peoples perceived as bearing disease and dangerousness. Within the boundaries of nations, in cities, prisons, and migrant detention centers, policing and physical containment are once more deployed, as they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries against the ‘dangerous classes’ or laboring poor, in the defense of ‘civilization’ against ‘barbarism.’ Postcolonial population flows are racialized, as were transgressions of property and enclosure in the time of colonialism and slavery, as imminent threats to the safety and security of a modern order predicated on whiteness. Loic Wacquant’s discussion of the formation of Jewish enclaves in European cities and African American ones in US cities is relevant to our understanding of poor laws and other strategies of welfare reform; the arising organization of urban space into ghettos worked to “maximize the material profits extracted out of a group deemed defiled and defiling” and “to minimize intimate contact with its members so as to avert the threat of symbolic corrosion and contagion they carry” (2004: 2). Once again, notwithstanding the cliché of plagues as great equalizers that ultimately “destroy all forms of distinctiveness” (Girard 1974: 834), discrimination, stigmatization, and xenophobia – fear and blaming of ‘others’ – characterize the world into which COVID-19 has plunged us.

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Connections between the colonized and the urban poor have been a constant in modern history and literature, as Grace Moore evidenced in her study of Charles Dickens. She shows him to have been at once repelled, alarmed, and fascinated by working-class mobs, rebels, and rioters, and to have excavated, in his fiction, the correlation between the taming and cleansing of the downtrodden, social abhorrent, criminally inclined, illness-stricken British worker and the urgency of “civilizing” the culturally maladapted colonial “savage” (Moore 2004: 29 – 30; 67). Like “enlightened” bourgeois liberals in the age of revolution and similarly to today’s humanitarians, he and his contemporary social reformers often lamented the loss of “primal innocence” by peasants (uprooted by the city), natives (displaced by empire), slaves and women (freed from property) – i.e., the degeneration, through contagion and disorder, of the masses. Savagery, it should be noted, was a notion that originally applied to inanimate objects, such as the landscape of the wilderness, before being transferred to the classification of ‘de-selected’ humans in the era of evolutionary science and biological racism. The legacy of intolerance and persecution bequeathed by late medieval and early modern European absolutism and Christianity, which encoded the stigmatization of indigents, lepers, nomads, minorities, sexual ‘deviants,’ and a myriad of perceived malevolent heretics in a language of desecration and perversity, is also relevant here. It engendered discourses of witchcraft and monstrosity during the age of encounter, conquest, and colonization, as the intimate, licentious contact between bodies and cultures produced fears of contagion and degeneration. These imagined alterities then crystallized into categories of modern scientific thought, as well as gendered, racialized tropes of differentiation that found their way into social and representational hierarchies. “Once genders, species, and races were identified and classified,” Mbembe posits, “nothing remained but to enumerate the differences between them. […] From the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, curiosity as a mode of inquiry and a cultural sensibility was inseparable from the work of fantasy, which, when focused on other worlds, constantly blurred the lines between the believable and the unbelievable, the factual and the marvelous” (2017: 17). Biologically defined orders of difference became essentialized as those who held colonial, class, and patriarchal power rationalized their exclusivity to rights. Meanwhile, notions of contagion applied to genetic and cultural hybridity and to metaphors of degeneration led to the deployment of monsters, zombies, anarchists, feminists, half-breeds, and the insane as widespread signifiers of danger in the popular imagination of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They served not only to emphasize, like border policing, incarceration, counterterrorism, or drug wars today, the urgency of disciplinary control, but also to define the characteristics and boundaries of respectability and civilized

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propriety. To return to the question, “Of what ‘ghosts,’ in our era, are we afraid?”, we may ask whether our society, faced with defining, epoch-changing catastrophes, the causes and directions of which we are uncertain, is reenacting the traumas and aporias of the past five centuries from which our most cherished (and loathed) notions of affiliation, allegiance, and progress, emerged. Widespread laments of the decline and degeneration of the “West,” defined as an idea evoking such notions as democratic, capitalist, free, modern, developed, Christian, and White, are not new. As a representation of identity, they have been historically problematic and racially coded, and expectations of “post-racial” futures have visited us before. Oswald Spengler’s rejection of the scientific underpinnings of “race” did not prevent him from defining it as something that “exists for the feelings – with a plain certainty and at first glance” (1926: 130). Alastair Bonnett has argued that in the twentieth century, the West became a comprehensible collective identity that connoted a certain group of people, who just happened to be of European heritage, without it appearing to be mired in the racial mythologies of the past. The deracinated, deracialised content of the idea of the West was sustained by the development of an association between being Western and a cosmopolitan and relativist world-view. (2003: 339)

As this perception of the world’s postcolonial centers flails in the face of globalization and ubiquitous threats from non-Western ‘others,’ who like the laboring poor of industrial-era cities spark fears of civilization’s imminent and irreversible collapse, race once again pervades contemporary consciousness much like class did during the heyday of emancipatory narratives of socialism. Ideologies of security, and the revival of aspirations to law and order even at the expense of basic freedoms, permeate representations of displacement, disease, and dangerousness in reactive paradigms of nation and citizenship. To return to Mbeme’s insight that contemporary science could herald a return in the twenty-first century to “biological understandings of the distinctions between human groups,” current developments evoke ghosts of discriminatory eugenics: “There is good reason to believe that in a more or less distant future genetic techniques will be used to manage the characteristics of populations to eliminate races judged ‘undesirable.’ Race and racism, then, do not only have a past. They also have a future” (2017: 21). This volume addresses these and other issues from an interdisciplinary perspective designed to capture the historical moment of the present pandemic and its meaning for our understanding of the postmemory it has triggered. The representation of the laboring poor as “dangerous classes,” uncontrollable, filthy, diseased, unbounded, and rebellious, has a long and storied past which is currently being rekindled. Debates on the ‘social question’ and the West’s ‘civilizing

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mission’ deployed stigmas of pathology and tropes of racialization, generating biologized fantasies of perilousness and degeneracy in cities and colonies. These debates culminated in new technologies of state discipline and control, pseudo-scientific strategies of social engineering (such as eugenics), and a cultural industry of fantasized fear and loathing, filling the popular imagination with images of jeopardy and disorder in a context of fast-paced economic change and catastrophic political convulsions. During a brief parenthesis of post-World War II industrial development, working-class, colonized, and outcast subjects, the pathologized, racialized, policed, and interned dregs of society, were believed redeemable within an integrated social compact – pending formal education, respectable employment, and the exercise of responsible citizenship. In the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, however, a growing sense of calamity and chaos accompanied decolonization, deindustrialization, mass migration, ongoing warfare, and multifarious threats to social peace. Landscapes of despair and desolation spawned new concerns for the health of the body politic, and revived discourses of disease, danger, and displacement in cultural and social scientific representations of the racialized poor. The current pandemic, wave of uprisings against structural racism, and global migration crisis bring to mind the contemporaneity of Susan Sontag’s intuition in her tract AIDS and Its Metaphors: “The fact that illness is associated with the poor – who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst – reinforces the association of illness with the foreign, with an exotic, often primitive place” (1989: 51). This book explores narratives of disease, danger, and displacement through the lens of literary criticism, visual studies, historical representation, cultural geography, music, linguistics, philosophy, and public discourse. It aims to revisit the process of ‘othering’ – a key heuristic device of postmodern and postcolonial discourse – through stigmatization, the encoding of social practices, and the biopolitical embodiment of alterity. The ‘parasitical’ ‘poor’ and ‘disease-bearing’ racialized “aliens-in-[our]-midst” will be considered as multidimensional characters of an unfolding collective biography of humankind, with its changing and recurrent aporias, and the birthing of new forms of agency, identity, and countercultural expression. The collection is organized into three thematically intertwined parts: I. Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass; II. Disease: Pathologizing the Other; and III. Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse. It engages us in contentious, living discussions of literary, philosophical, political, visual, and material narrations across time and place, addressing thematic content and comparative study in the spirit of reasoned inquiry and pedagogical clarity. The book, part of a decade-long cooperation between Norfolk State Uni-

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versity in Virginia and the University of Siegen in North Rhine-Westphalia, is intended as a template for further research and critical dialogue. Numerous symposia, research projects, and two volumes of engagé theoretical and empirical application – Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Others, edited by Cathy C. Waegner, Page R. Laws, Geoffroy de Laforcade (Cambridge Scholars 2011); Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape, edited by Daniel Stein, Cathy C. Waegner, Geoffroy de Laforcade, Page R. Laws (Lexington 2020) – are now followed by this third volume addressing current and historical issues of compelling importance: The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor. The volume is inspired by Page R. Laws, Professor of English and Dean Emerita of the R. C. Nusbaum Honors College of Norfolk State University. During her impressive career as teacher, administrator, scholar, and mentor she unstintingly combatted harmful representations of the racialized poor as “aliens within.” Her engagement in the ACTC (Association for Core Texts and Courses) has been devoted to opening up and restructuring the pedagogical canon to admit authors and works that have long been ‘othered’ by educational institutions. Her remarkable success in encouraging her students at Norfolk State University to immerse themselves in comparative literature and its theory, cultural studies, and languages arose to a great extent from her own lived example of international commitment and cooperation, her keen interest in knowledges, discourses, and cultural products that move far beyond the narrow “perspective of the privileged” (Sontag 1989: 51). Fittingly, our volume and its first section on “Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass” begins with Page R. Laws’s careful intertextual/intermedial reading of transnational Korean film and African American literature in her “Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground.’” Laws investigates the motif of the “underground” in Bong Joon Ho’s prize-winning but controversial films, especially The Host (2006) and Parasite (2019), and two core texts of Black modernism: Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (both in the recently recovered, 2021 published novel form and as the 1944 novella) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Although Laws points out that journeys underground have a long tradition of forms of protest and insight, she maps out the striking cinematic and literary spatialization that Wright, Ellison, and Bong Joon Ho employ in their challenges of received representations of a supposedly perilous and infectious underclass of racialized subjects. In visualizing the trope of “finding light by entering darkness,” Bong Joon Ho’s mixed-genre films serve as cinematic “jeremiads against unbridled capitalism and exploitation of the poor” (Laws).

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Applying Oxford sociologists’ concepts of the “poverty-shame nexus” (see Yongmie Nicola Jo 2012; Robert Walker et al. 2013), Laws shows that a socioeconomichegemonic forcing down of the disadvantaged provokes countereffects; the ‘ghosts’ from the underground – who take on darkly monstrous form in the perception of those shaping the cultural narratives of power – eventually emerge to haunt and forewarn. In the second chapter of the volume, Daniel Stein continues scrutiny of the spatial and metaphorical ‘underground’ in literary works and social perception, propagated by newspaper and travel reports, including Charles Dickens’s influential American Notes (1842). Stein resignifies the popular nineteenth-century genre of serial urban mystery fiction in his “‘Holes Swarming with Human Beings’: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel.” He accomplishes this by uncovering the ambivalent stance of the authors and readers who are self-righteously repulsed and simultaneously culturally attracted, even thrilled, by the sensationalist rendering of a degraded, contagious, threateningly multi- and interracial, nearly subhuman ‘species’ that dwells and rules in the densely-populated slum of Five Points in the heart of New York City – from author Ned Buntline’s appalled perspective, “in our very midst” (Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life, 1848, I: 5). The nexus of exploitative industrialization, blatant racism, resentment toward immigrants, along with the collusion of readily available print media, created a world below the thriving city that could be cleansed only by the gaze and money of the white philanthropist – the US version of the nineteenth-century British paradigm Grace Moore describes (Dickens and Empire, 2004; referred to above). Nonetheless, the underground dwellers are not without self-empowering dignity: The “confluence of gazes implies that there can be no one-way gaze, where the poor would merely serve as a spectacle of the abject for the more privileged onlooker. Instead, the message seems to be that they have their own agency, however much they are reduced in their circumstances, and that they dare to look back at the slumming spectator” (Stein). The racism of the “lettered gaze” stamping a Black or racially mixed underclass as ‘other’ is also the backdrop of Noel Allende Goitía’s chapter in our volume: “The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century.” Allende Goitía’s study of Puerto Rican music in the first decades of the twentieth century looks back to white-European-influenced writing imposing Black stereotypes in a discriminatory “color line” and forward to a de-Africanization process that reinforces certain current forms of identity politics, partially including the Puerto Rican efforts to obtain full US statehood; pushing back against both of those movements is Allende Goi-

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tía’s concept of “embodied soundscape.” If the Puerto Rican lettered class viewed African-descended music and dancing as reflecting morally dangerous behavior and even genetic deficiency, the “embodied soundscape” recognizes “the black body as a complex, dynamic, and adaptative agent” (Allende Goitía) of diasporic culture-making. Gustavo Mustelier’s racist tract quoted earlier in our Introduction feared a perilous “contagion or transmission of the Black element” (1912: 23). Ironically, this infectious “transmission” has resulted in the ever-increasing transnational influence of African-based soundscapes, integral to global twenty-first-century musical cultures. Attempted stigmatization of a racialized underclass has a long and fraught history in connection with Jewish and Roma peoples, particularly in Central Europe, where they have functioned as “quintessential strangers” or the “ancient scapegoats,” framed as “the other within” (Loshitzky 2003: 59), quoted by Ludmila Martanovschi and Dana Mihăilescu in their contribution to this volume. Their chapter takes a detailed look at this stigmatization in Romania, or better, at the multitudinous ways Radu Jude’s New Wave Romanian films expose and query the historical attitudes and even present-day disrespect of these ethnicities. “Representations of the ‘Aliens Within’: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema” analyzes three of Jude’s movies: Aferim! (English: Bravo! 2015), a grotesquely comic ‘road movie’ critiquing Roma slavery in the nineteenth century; The Dead Nation (2017), an experimental Holocaust documentary featuring excerpts from a Jewish doctor’s diary; and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), consisting in a film-within-a film, meta-cinematically emphasizing Romania’s involvement in the Shoah and the Porajmos (the Roma Holocaust) as well as Romania’s current dearth of awareness of that involvement. We have already mentioned that Angela Mitropoulos referenced the emblematic fourteenth-century apocryphal story of “Jews polluting the water” (2012: 45) to poison European society; Jude’s radical cinema aims to show that the disease and poison lie instead within the apocrypha of ethnic disposability. Startlingly, Verena Adamik’s “Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump” juxtaposes horror fiction with political discourse in connection with “aliens within.” Adamik’s statement that “[p]oor people of color […] in Lovecraft’s stories are foreign, diseased, and criminal, and they threaten social and cosmic orders,” as opposed to the white rural and working class individuals who are decent and “orderly,” shows how Lovecraft is echoed in former US president Donald Trump’s public utterances about his constituency. In three novels of horror published in 2016, the year of Trump’s election, Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, the authors attempt to deconstruct Lovecraft’s

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white supremacist and antisemitic stance while nonetheless ambivalently adhering to Lovecraft’s popular conventions, including linking the racialized poor to a perilous evil astronomical power. Trump’s brotherhood with the workers and farmers and small-town inhabitants who are his self-righteous MAGA supporters (“Make America Great Again”) – Adamik inserts Trump’s obvious subtext here: “Make America Great (and White) Again” – recalls Pierre Nora’s appraisal of modern nationhood with, as we phrased it previously in our text, its “fixed, eternal imaginations of kinship marked by monuments, boundaries, enclosures, and […] certainty.” These political “imaginations of kinship” exclude the raced poor, however, pushing them into “alien” status that is reoriented but not entirely eliminated in the recent imaginative novels. The volume’s second section, Disease: Pathologizing the Other, concentrates on the plethora of cultural images of the raced poor in relation to physical and contagious infection. The section opens with Geoffroy de Laforcade’s study of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: Haiti, constantly battling with climatic, geological, and political disaster – but the source of rich cultural visions and the first country to free itself of the yoke of colonial slavery. “Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism” details little-known connections and conflicting agendas among the actors in liberation efforts in Haiti and the Americas, illuminating strands of Western ethics that have contributed to the ‘zombie-ing’ of Haiti. The trope of the zombie associated with Vodou power and revolution transmogrified into links with racial degeneracy and abnormal socio-corporeal death. De Laforcade argues that the discourse of “Haitian exceptionalism,” which has taken the turn of Haiti needing humanitarian “care and correction,” “perpetual extraneous control,” in fact reveals a projected and “chilling Western notion of the diseased and collapsing Other” (see Gilman 1988; Clitantre 2011). An era of global pandemic, with rogue capitalism wreaking environmental havoc and displacing desperate migrants, calls for a fresh look at the pathologizing of Haiti’s poor, specifically in the light of Sander Gilman’s still urgent insight that “the fear we [the privileged of industrialized nations] have of our own collapse does not remain internalized”; rather, “we project this fear onto the world in order to localize it and, indeed, to domesticate it. Then it is not we who totter on the brink of collapse, but rather the Other” (1988: 1). The continuing danger of hegemonic tendencies to believe in racial deviance, difference, and separation continues in Adrienne Ronee Washington and Briana Lee Robinson’s presentation in the second chapter in this section. “DePathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation” re-examines Ambrose Gonzales’s Intro-

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duction to his anthology, The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (1922), long considered a landmark in recording the language and storytelling traditions of the imperiled Africa-descended Gullah communities of the Lowcountry. Washington and Robinson apply key works of critical discourse theory to underscore their claim that “structural inequalities and biases” of the “pervasive cultural institution” of “systematic racism” are constantly regenerated “through everyday discursive and linguistic practices.” The biological determinism of the eugenics period is reflected in Gonzales’s division of and stigmatization of language variation, particularly in his use of intertextual allusion, lexical selection, and figurative language that encode deficiency. The semiotic processes of iconicity, fractal recursivity, and erasure propagate cultural narratives of inherent racialized linguistic and cultural inferiority. Washington and Robinson are clearly not simply performing an exercise in the analysis of a century-old text; they emphasize the current relevance of their study, pointing to “policing, stigmatization, and pathologization of [nonstandard cultural practices and language]” and calling for “pedagogical revision.” The speculative vision in African American Octavia Butler’s novel Clay’s Ark, written in 1984, eerily set in 2021, imagines a future in which a lethal and bodily transformative extraterrestrial virus attacks a society already weakened by pathological racism, one in which, for instance, access to medical care is grimly determined by skin color. The disease proves to be an agent of change, creating new racially mixed and transhuman communities with class hybridity and environmental diversity, with experimental strategies of cooperation and ethics – but forms of violent alienation remain. In her chapter “Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction,” Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard demonstrates how Butler questions received concepts of illness and disability, of authority in medical discourse, as well as the fixed notion of a pathogen as a foreign body, an alien within. “While the organism does govern the behavior and the impulses of the infected, it is also the opposite of [cancer or AIDS] insofar as it offers the Clayarks [i.e., the infected inhabitants] many benefits, in terms of protection from the other illnesses, increased sensual pleasures, and highly augmented resilience” (Kurjatto-Renard). In the dystopian future-present of Butler’s novel, the broken nation-state reigns over deserts and sewers, over gaps dividing the haves and the have-nots. Is this science fiction? Kurjatto-Renard: “Butler is not interested in describing the planet where the organism originated. Instead, she describes the aftermath, and the social cost of preferring to develop multimillion colonial projects rather than address the social needs of the disinherited.” Walter Benjamin’s striking statement that historical interpretation “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (2007: 255) could

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be applied to the various ways Toni Morrison depicts her characters “seizing hold” of their traumatic memories and experiences of racism and abjection. This seizing often results in the ethnic person’s internalizing hegemonic associations of ethnic groups with contagion and uncleanliness, vermin, disgusting viscosity of body fluids, and worthlessness. Cathy C. Waegner’s chapter, “Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels,” manifests that “Toni Morrison storytelling, group solidarity, interrogations of debilitating abjection and disease [“tetter” being skin sores such as ringworm] from without to within and from above to below in her complex canonical novels of narrative experimentation” (Waegner). The discussion of The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and Home refers to theories of psychological and social abjection (Julia Kristeva, Rina Arya), abject stigmatization through modernity’s rise of colonialism and capitalism, through economics and images (Imogen Tyler, Susan Sontag), and the ‘slow violence’ of neoliberal environmental and health policies (Rob Nixon). Key figures in Morrison’s novels show that the “ideological script” of what Morrison famously calls the “master narrative” (Moyers 1990: 8:10 – 9:10) and abject loss of self can be modulated to a certain measure by such strategies as individual and communal storytelling, group solidarity, interrogation, and feisty defiance. Michel Foucault (1977) has influentially shown how the historical quarantining of diseased persons in attempts to contain them and burgeoning plagues fostered the rise of the securitized state. Regina E. Brisgone disturbingly but productively looks through the lens of state medical control at an othered, jeopardized group in her contribution, “African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19.” Her interviews in two in-depth studies of over 100 drug-using sex workers in two cities in New Jersey and Virginia give them a seldomly heard voice and reveal the vulnerability, desperation, and complex resistance of these women – locally referred to as being “on the stroll” – to the modern plagues of HIV/AIDS and the coronavirus. The racialized history of stereotyping and instrumentalization of the black body, both female and male, has long linked medical experimentation with surveillance and incarceration, as Brisgone shows, continuing into present-day patterns of health regimes and media discourse. Women interviewed by Brisgone in both the HIV and COVID-19 studies felt over-scrutinized for disease risk and discriminated against, and thus to varying degrees rejected the quarantining effects of testing and treatments offered by health services supposedly aimed at helping these women and their families, including radical legislation to revoke all parental rights for HIV-infected women giving birth. These women are systemically profiled “by their race, gender, economic status, and behavior” and “stand apart as ‘aliens within’” (Brisgone).

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The final section of the volume, Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse, focuses on the ways hegemonic centers tend to program their own impending downfall through short-sighted, even unethical methods of controlling the ‘viruses’ of epidemics and desperate movements of the racialized poor, as well as on the possibilities of sustainable new strategies. In “Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts,” Hunter H. Gardner knowledgeably looks far back into disease discourse in ancient medical writing, including the Hippocratic Corpus and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, to reveal palimpsests of patterns. Variously mixed connections among pathogens, (misuse of) nature, the moral and physical corruption of the population, and poor citizenship have been decried through the ages as sources of pandemics, reflecting spillover in contagion, epoch, and rhetoric. Gardner applies and critiques contemporary theories of epidemy and environmental crisis as developed by scholars such as Laurie Garrett, David Quammen, Richard Preston, Susan Sontag, and Priscilla Wald, showing how the toxicity of epidemiological ‘hot zones’ both physically and discursively “infects the inhabitants of such zones, further marginalizing populations already marginalized by low income and inadequate health care systems; [writers must] attempt to neutralize the stigmatizing rhetoric that has defined earlier outbreak narratives,” and politics must work to reduce “the economic disparities across the globe that fuel crises in public health” (Gardner). As a specialist in, among other subjects, classical studies and philosophy, David Metzger continues the inquiry into ancient thought with regard to moral and physical corruption in the polis, to what Metzger calls “sick souls.” His contribution titled “Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean” unconventionally links and contrasts classical views with those of African and African American playwrights and poets through a contemplation of renewed and renewing ritual. The trope of impending “collapse” in Western perspectives is countered by strategies in August Wilson’s and Wole Soyinka’s dramas, as well as Kwame Dawes’s poetry: “When sharpened against Soyinka’s critics, Wilson’s project appears as a call for and the creation of a new universal (one not fueled by collapse) when other terms for the universal have been exhausted” (Metzger). The journey to the ancestral and visionary City of Bones in Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean, mediated by the shamanic character Aunt Ester, serves to heal deeply embedded social and personal illness. Using the rhetoric of philosophic inquiry, Metzger interrogates notions of “the West” underpinned by classical heritage, stances regarding Africa as a monolithic entity, and even the cultural logics of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The “boundaries,” “enclosures,” and hegemonic “certainty” (indicated by Pierre Nora) that the contemporary nation-state employs to bolster itself against

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what it might perceive as looming collapse are painstakingly documented in the following chapter, Chrysovalantis Kampragkos’s “Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece.” Confinement in primitive, unhygienic camps and surveillance of housing and transportation literally keep these ethnic and social ‘aliens’ “in their place” – while the Greek government is compensated financially by the European Union for containing the “refugee threat” within its borders. In Kampragkos’s phrasing, the chapter “connects refugee/unemployment management and David Harvey’s theory of ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ for the spatial regulation of those who have been dispossessed of their country and/or work is now a prerequisite for the augmentation of profit.” It seems that the twenty-first century has not moved far beyond the nineteenth-century welfare ‘reform’ that strengthened the growth of ghettos to “maximize the material profits extracted out of a group deemed defiled and defiling” (Wacquant 2004: 2). Kampragos finds fruitful support for his arguments in the representations of the racialized and exploited, all too often unemployed poor in fiction (e.g. Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything, 2016) and film (Ken Loach, I, Daniel Blake, 2015). In her empirical investigation of attempts by a local government to construct viable administration in times of massive migration, “Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia,” Sarah Ryniker gleans the archives of council meetings and newspaper reports for clues to the way the once binary black-white rhetoric of such town discussions in the US South has tempered to accommodate – or contain – the refugees from over fifty countries who now reside in Clarkston. Ryniker discovers that variations and ambivalence in the discourse, such as greater emphasis placed on law and order when refugees are perceived as transgressors or on economic advantage for the township when asylum-seeking newcomers are viewed as potentially financially beneficial, tend to arise from the vested interests of the elected politicians. She embeds her study in a consideration of academic literature on neoliberal systems and national policies, which seldom adequately address local configurations. The mythological credence that Girard reviews of plagues as great equalizers that ultimately “destroy all forms of distinctiveness” (1974: 834, cited earlier) is also challenged in the micro-structure of town administration. Ryniker’s findings “highlight a need to include the marginalized communities’ voices within local decision-making, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a need for more scholarly attention to neoliberal multiculturalism at the local scale” (Ryniker). Our volume ends with Michele E. Rozga’s braid of intersections in “Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Cit-

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izenry.” Two ancient war-torn areas that for centuries have been the focus of hegemonic struggles for possession and of layers of oppression – Polish-Lithuania and Middle Eastern Palestine – have produced poets, Czesław Miłosz and Taha Mohammad Ali, who, in their own ways, lyrically construct an experimental “framing of place” (Rozga) from the shards of geographical and emotional displacement. The shared purpose is to mount “a fierce defense and creative resurrection of the world citizen, driven out of his or her homeland under thinly derived, monstrous rationales of racial or ethnic inferiority” (Rozga). Drawing on ideas from (Mid-)Eastern poetics (Adonis and Kojin Karatani), Rozga recounts the complex metaphors of doorways, windows, bells, bridges, brick, and stone that Miłosz and Ali weave into their works, seeming “to combine the natural world, poetic language, memory, and place into a renewal of the poet’s personhood, even though [they are] writing of loss” (Rozga). Possibly more optimistically conceived than Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” that copes with painful ramifications of personal and cultural trauma in subsequent generations, Miłosz’s and Ali’s poetic weltanschauung provides new constructs: “Each poet speaks as an architect, building via the material of the language of ‘the lonely / forgotten by the world’ (Miłosz, Collected Poems 35). Out of their own forgotten worlds, these poets build structures to hold world memory and culture” (Rozga).

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. 2007 (1968; originally written 1940). “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In: Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (ed.). New York: Schocken Books. 253 – 264. Bonnett, Alastair. 2003. “From White to Western: ‘Racial Decline’ and the Idea of the West in Britain, 1890 – 1930.” Journal of Historical Sociology 16(3): 320 – 348. Camus, Albert. 1991 (1947). The Plague. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Originally published as La Peste. Paris: Gallimard. Chamberlin, Edward, and Sander L. Gilman. 1985. “Degeneration: An Introduction.” In: Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (eds.). Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press. ix–xiv. Clitantre, Nadège. 2011. “Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti.” The Journal of Haitian Studies 17(2): 146 – 153. Dickens, Charles. 2004 (1842). American Notes. Patricia Ingham (ed.). London: Penguin. Fanon, Frantz. 1966 (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: Éditions Maspero. Foucault, Michel. 1977 (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Gilman, Sander L. 1988. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Girard, René. 1974. “The Plague in Literature and Myth.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15(5): 833 – 850. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Jo, Yongmie Nicola. 2012. “Psycho-Social Dimensions of Poverty: When Poverty Becomes Shameful.” Critical Social Policy 33(3): 514 – 531. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2003. “Quintessential Strangers: The Representation of Romanies and Jews in Some Holocaust Films.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 44(2): 57 – 71. Mbembe, Achille. 2017 (2013). Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Originally published as Critique de la raison nègre. Paris: La Découverte. Mitropoulos, Angela. 2012. Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia. London: Minor Compositions. Moore, Grace. 2004. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. London and New York: Routledge. Moyers, Bill. 1990. “Toni Morrison: Interview on her Life and Career.” World of Ideas, 11 Mar. 1990. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Mustelier, Gustavo E. 1912. La extinción del negro: Apuntes políticos-sociales. Havana: Imprenta de Rambla, Bouza y Cía. Nora, Pierre. 1996 – 1998. Realms of Memory (3 vols.). New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published as Les Lieux de la Mémoire. 1986 – 1993 (3 vols.). Paris: Gallimard. Rodó, José Enrique. 1988 (1900). Ariel. Translated by M. S. Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sontag, Susan. 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spengler, Oswald. 1926. The Decline of the West. Vol. One: Form and Actuality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. “Ghetto.” In: Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon. 1 – 10. Walker, Robert, et al. 2013. “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?” Journal of Sociological Policy 42(2): 215 – 233. Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View.” In: Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex M. Nettleford (eds.). Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 5 – 57.

Danger: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass

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Bong Joon Ho Meets Richard Wright: Spatialized Poverty in The Host and Parasite or ‘The Koreans Who Lived Underground’ Abstract: After close readings of two core texts of Black modernism, Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (both in its recently published novel and its novella form) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this chapter pivots to use the concept of spatialized (underground) Black poverty, disease, and danger to approach work in a different language, and from a different culture, continent, and genre: South Korean Bong Joon Ho’s transnational cinematic oeuvre, especially The Host and Parasite. Applying “the shame of poverty” theory propagated by Robert Walker and his University of Oxford team, the chapter shows how the racialized underclass can, in the literary and filmic strategies of the works investigated, take on forms of agency to foreshadow a radical reshuffling of high-low, up-down social spatializations.

Racialized and/or Spatialized: Black and Korean Dwellers in the Depths On se fatigue de la pitié quand la pitié est inutile. One tires of pity when pity is useless. (Camus 1947: 110, my translation)

Among the scourge of diseases afflicting humanity, parasitical ones – living organisms such as certain worms that invade the human body and grow unseen, sometimes to grotesque proportions – are among the most terrifying. Poverty likewise can invade and hide within communities with its perpetrators (the diseased poor) unseen, sometimes living in dwellings so lowly as to be actually underground. My chapter title is meant to echo Richard Wright’s famous novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942), just published for the first time in 2021 in its original longer novel version, a major development to be discussed. Both short story and novel concern Fred Daniels, a Black man who skulks around basements and closed shops in an urban area reminiscent of Chicago. My title may also bring to mind another core text of African American literature: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-002

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Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Ellison’s impoverished I-narrator also resorts to living in a bizarre underground chamber, illuminated by hundreds of lightbulbs, all powered by stolen electricity. Writer and film director Bong Joon Ho, born in South Korea long after Wright and Ellison lived, is now enjoying his own spotlight worldwide. Like his Black predecessors, Bong seems obsessed with the ‘spatialization’ of poverty, the metaphorical renderings of the thriving rich and infected poor living in close and even dangerous spatial proximity to one another. This is particularly striking in Bong Joon Ho’s 2014 film (and 2019 HBO TV series) Snowpiercer, where humanity’s sole survivors of a climate apocalypse – both the rich and the poor – ride a perpetually moving long train in separate but very unequally equippedand-appointed cars (a case of horizontal ‘spatialization’). But it is also a primary theme in Bong’s vertically organized 2019 Parasite (winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture) and his earlier monster movie The Host (2006), set partly in the sewers of Seoul. In the latter genre-busting horror film, American neocolonial abuse of power leads to a rapacious amphibious monster arising from the watery depths to devour city-dwellers, including a girl from a poor family that bands together to retrieve their child (regurgitated alive) and defeat the creature, though not without a heavy ultimate cost. In Parasite, a poor but plucky Korean family cleverly invades the house of a rich Korean family, with one of them eventually taking up parasitic secret residence in their employer’s forgotten subterranean rooms (displacing the hiding husband of a former employee). When not working or hiding out in the rich folks’ mansion, which, above ground, is a gorgeous example of minimalist modern architecture, the poor family inhabits its own semi-basement apartment in a low-rent part of town.¹ This dwelling features a high ground-level window through which a torrent of storm drainage water and sewage comes, nearly drowning them all. But the rich folks, in their gorgeous house and garden, also suffer gruesome retribution for their witlessness and wealth.

 In a study entitled “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?” Robert Walker et al. have noted that many poor urban Koreans live in similar subpar, subterranean conditions: “[h]alf underground dwellings or basements that suffered from damp, while heating was often inadequate in winter” (2013: 221). The same authors later note, “[T]here is no more telling symbol of failure than the inability to provide food and shelter for oneself and one’s family; for respondents this was the epitome of shame and demonstrable evidence of having succumbed to poverty” (222). In an article by one of Walker’s co-authors published the previous year, “Psychosocial Dimensions of Poverty: When Poverty Becomes Shameful” in Critical Social Policy, Yongmie Nicola Jo speaks of this worldwide phenomenon as the “poverty-shame nexus” (2012: 519). See my chapter’s conclusion.

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Perhaps they are the parasites of the film title and must be purged to make a just society. Though Snowpiercer features a diverse cast of Asians, African Americans, and Europeans (whites predominating in the luxury-class train cars, of course), in The Host and Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s poor Koreans, at least to Western eyes, are not racially distinct from his rich ones. But the presence of economic castes in Korean society, “caste” being a word recently brought back into service by Isabel Wilkerson’s important book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is unmistakable in Bong’s films. As Wilkerson says about poverty in general, “Caste is the bones, race the skin” (2020: 19). Parasite also harkens back to centuries of comedies (from Aristophanes to Molière and beyond) involving clever slaves or servants vs. their dim-witted masters. The theme of life lived underground also has its own tradition of filmic and literary works including the sewer scenes of Balzac’s Les Misérables (1862), Colson Whitehead’s 2016 magic realism novel The Underground Railroad (which places a Black train system literally underground) and its striking 2021 smallscreen adaptation, just out 14 May 2021, directed by Barry Jenkins. Marquis Bey’s 2018 essay “Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature” in the New Centennial Review deals with The Man Who Lived Underground, Invisible Man, Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, and several other works. Bey, just brought to my attention by Lauren Michele Jackson in her 12 May 2021 New Yorker review of the newly restored Richard Wright novel, TMWLU for short, offers a daring paradigm of Black works of art which I will extend to cover Bong’s ‘spatialized’ if not racialized Korean ones. Bey says the following: [T]he present theorization proffers the underground as more than a site of secrecy or dormancy: while indeed both of these things, the underground is also a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption, and, too, vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality. (Bey 2018: 107, also qtd. in Jackson)

Nothing could be more politically or ‘epistemically radical’ than the sudden emergence of Bong Joon Ho’s knife-wielding ‘ghost’ (Geun-sae, the former housekeeper’s husband, living secretly below for four years) from the sub-basement of the architectural marvel, to try to kill the oblivious, obnoxious rich family celebrating in their garden in Parasite. The family’s youngest child had long ago spotted the ghost man stealing food in the kitchen, but no one believed in the child’s reported apparition. Richard Wright’s Fred Daniels (in both novella and novel) is also laughed off as a hallucination or apparition, after he is spotted by a female secretary in her office. Her male co-workers label her “hysterical”

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and demand that she be fired after she reports a man’s emergence out of nowhere (he has, the readers know, tunneled there from underground). Likewise, the first-person narrator of Invisible Man, after emerging from underground and attacking the blond, white man who bumps him in the Prologue, speaks the following well-known words: You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. […] He [the blond man] lay there moaning on the asphalt; almost killed by a phantom. […] Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man. (Ellison 1995: 4– 5)

“Vibrant, volatile epistemic radicality” well describes all three examples, with blows against capitalism delivered by all three artists, Black and Korean. Still speaking from and about the Black context and underground life, Bey continues shortly after his definition of life underground, stating, “We synesthetically ride the dissonance of blackness’s frequency when we see without light” (2018: 107). That can serve as an aural, olfactory, visual cue to turn back to Wright’s Fred Daniels (both versions of him, in the novel and novella), a character who learns to practice synesthesia – growing supersensitive to sound, smell, touch, living in his dark and dangerous watery world underneath some American city. Wright’s penchant for synecdoche (we often see disembodied “white hands” and “white faces”) adds an extra dose of spookiness to the mix, as Fred Daniels masters his future prophetic role, as “the voice of one crying in the [underground] wilderness” (New Testament, John 1:23).

Of Rats and Men (Invisible Ones): Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground and Ellison’s Invisible Man “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things.” (Wright 1990: 455)

Various diseases have had their own symbolic/totemic animals – bats, monkeys, even pangolins – but no carrier, real or imagined, outdoes the feared purveyor (via fleas) of the bubonic and related plagues: the rat. The ubiquitous common urban sewer rat is ‘The Animal Who Lives Underground’ and brings despair and sometimes death to the poor who must share his space down below and above.²  Albert Camus’s early chapters of La peste (1947) feature tens of thousands of dead rats in the

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Most readers of Wright’s first and most famous novel, Native Son (1940), will recall the early scene in which Bigger Thomas must fight and kill a huge rat in order to protect his fatherless family in their vermin-infested Chicago tenement, owned by the father of the girl Bigger will eventually kill and then later dismember. Here is a bit of the first rat scene: “Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, its black beady eyes glittering, its tiny forefeet pawing the air restlessly. […] Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’” (Wright 1987: 9 – 10). In the critical essay Wright wrote to accompany Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright mentions rats, as well: “Chicago was overrun with rats. I recalled that I’d seen many rats on the streets, that I’d heard and read of Negro children being bitten by rats in their beds […] the rat would not leave me […] I let the rat walk in, and he did his stuff” (Wright 1987: xxxiii). Bigger meets another rat in the deserted building where he hides with and kills Bessie (1987: 217), unfortunately dealing with her as he had done with the rat. Bigger has likewise killed the white girl (Mary Dalton) out of pure impulse and fear. In the narrator’s words, “He passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared” (44). The place where Bigger disposes of Mary Dalton’s body is also quite notably subterranean, specifically the furnace in the basement of the Daltons’ house where Bigger works. In choosing Wright’s classic novella about Fred Daniels’s bizarre urban underground adventure “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1944) to write about in connection with Bong Joon Ho, I was unaware that the original work itself – an eponymous novel written right after Native Son but rejected by Harper and Sons and unpublished until now, May 2021 (see Betts 2021 and other reviewers) – was about to be released, along with a valuable newly published critical essay about its genesis entitled “Memories of My Grandmother.” (This is the same Seventh Day Adventist Grandmother whom Wright so fears and reveres in the highly autobiographical Black Boy, his second published novel.) In the novella, Fred Daniels fights his underground ‘monster’ – his smaller Cerberus in Hades – with a sewer workman’s pole: “[A] whisper of scurrying life whisked past and was still. He held the match close and saw a huge rat, wet with slime, blinking beady eyes and baring tiny fangs” (1990: 419). Once he stabs it with the pole, Daniels hears the creature’s “shrill piping” and sees its “grizzly body […] snatched out of sight, spinning in the scuttling stream” (420). A Black baby’s corpse Daniels finds soon thereafter in the sewer is likewise sent spinning out to sea,

streets of Oman, ignored by city officials for what they clearly are: harbingers of the bubonic plague that soon decimates the city.

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but this time tenderly instead of violently, this being the only burial Daniels can offer the tiny, discarded human who later haunts his underground dreams. (In the novel form of TMWLU, Daniels has a wife, Rachel, who delivers a son he never gets to see.) Readers familiar with the novella’s ending may also recall that Fred himself, after being shot by Lawson, one of the policemen who first captured, tortured, and forced a false confession from him, will end his own life and Wright’s novella/novel in the same way as both the rat and the deceased baby. Daniels, wounded by Lawson’s unprovoked gunshot, goes spinning away in the sewer water rushing underground to the sea, as his murderer Lawson, utters his ‘benediction’ cited as the epigraph of this section: “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things” (455).³ Though this occasion does not permit a lengthy comparison of Richard Wright’s original novel TMWLU and its pared-down eponymous novella version, a few observations are germane to this chapter and certainly this moment in US history. First, readers and reviewers of the ‘new’ novel are asking why this original was rejected by Harper and Sons, particularly after Wright’s recent triumph with Native Son. Speculative answers abound but tend to fall into two categories: political reasons and aesthetic ones. The political reason seems to be that the novel was just too graphic in its depictions of police brutality against Blacks (Wright uses the term Negroes) to be published in the early 1940s. The first 50 pages of the novel indeed deal mostly with Fred Daniels’s being arrested, charged for a double murder he did not commit, and then tortured by the police into signing a confession. This original (novelistic) incarnation of Fred Daniels has a wife, Rachel, at home about to deliver a baby, and he is desperate to get back to her. The police hold this desire over him. They do actually take him home to see her (after he has signed his confession), and they all accompany Rachel to the hospital to give birth, but, once in the hospital, Fred seizes his opportunity to escape from the police. One of the Harper and Sons readers, Kerker Quinn, said the police torture depicted in the novel was “unbearable” (“Notes on the Text,” included in the novel; Wright 2021: 223). These approximately 50 pages were those Wright later cut to get the work published as a novella. But it is precisely this aspect of the novel – by coincidence, published on the very same day that Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder (noted by Scott McLemee as qtd. in Jackson 2021) – that makes it so pertinent to contemporary concerns for racial and social justice.

 The original line in the novel differs only in using “They would wreck things” (Wright 2021: 159), later amended by Wright to the contracted “They’d,” in the novella, perhaps for better rhythmic effect.

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But a quite different political objection – inferring the novel was/is too conservative rather than too radical – spills over into the second category of reactions to the newly published novel: the aesthetic ones. As he did with his character Bigger Thomas – much to the dismay of James Baldwin as expressed in a famous essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (referring to Wright’s Native Son) in Baldwin’s volume titled Notes of a Native Son (1955) – Wright shows Black characters overcome and, in many ways, destroyed by their oppressors. In another essay, “Many Thousands Gone” in the same volume, Baldwin calls Wright’s hero Bigger, “the beast in our jungle of statistics […,] that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro” (Baldwin 1955: 28; 33 – 34; cf. Laws 2009: 31). Bigger commits two murders and is executed. He has an epiphany of sorts before he is killed, but his life has been both a violent and pathetic failure. Baldwin noted that Bigger’s violent and inchoate qualities are all too often identified with Black men, making his character the fulfillment of a dangerous and embarrassing Black stereotype. (Wright’s reaction to Baldwin’s complaint was outrage and a sense of betrayal, especially since Wright had befriended the younger writer in Paris.) Wright’s character Fred Daniels, by contrast, is innocent of the murders he is forced to confess to committing, although he does later perpetrate thefts to survive and thrive underground. But what still seems to grate upon some concerned readers (such as Lauren Michele Jackson, writing in The New Yorker, 12 May 2021) is that Daniels so often submits to being stereotyped by the vicious white characters in his world. Daniels is infantilized by being called “boy,” “baby,” and “crazy” all throughout the novel, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the novella. Daniels does have his moments of courage, and they are sharpened by Wright when he edits the novel down into the novella. In the novella, for instance, Wright tries to stop the night watchman from committing suicide, by actually crying out (albeit too late) at the risk of revealing his own hiding place. The newly interpolated line reads, “Don’t! he half whispered and half yelled” (Wright 1990: 443). In the novel, it was actually a different character, a young man, who committed suicide after being accused of stealing the money from the safe that Daniels had stolen. Moments later, the original novel follows this young man’s death with the calloused observation, “The dead man was already completely gone from his [Fred Daniels’s] mind and he was bent toward other goals” (Wright 2021: 123). In the novel, we see the night watchman horribly tortured by police, but we do not see him die. Probably for aesthetic economy, Wright combined the similar (i. e., redundant) characters of the young man and night watchman into one – the night watchman – and then added Fred Daniels’s cry of empathy and courage trying to stop the suicide from his hiding place. There are many dozens of similar changes made when Wright edits down the novel to create the novella. And

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for this reason, the novella is indeed aesthetically sharper and tighter than its text of origin, the novel. The 50 pages cut at the beginning of the novel – containing the egregious police torture scenes – are also aesthetically marred by their similarity to a hundred ‘hard-boiled’ detective story/film noir scripts. The three policemen are virtually interchangeable as characters (though Lawson is the worst), and the true heart of the story is Fred’s surreal experiences in the underground that mostly exclude the policemen (except, of course, in the last scene, almost identical in the novel and the novella). The original novel version is unquestionably worthy of being published and read, however, and includes, as a bonus, an accompanying essay by Wright, the previously mentioned “My Grandmother’s Memories,” in which Wright quite convincingly explains that the improbable main inspiration for the novel (and therefore the novella) was his Seventh Day Adventist grandmother’s all-encompassing “abstract” (Wright 2021: 173) sense of religion and life. Wright defines “abstract” living in his essay as “simply any way of life that does not derive its meaning and sanction from the context of experience, a way of life that is lived distantly from the environment even though it subsists on the environment” (173). His grandmother, who loved Wright but abused him, saw much of her life in terms of the Bible, emphasizing things unseen at the expense of reality, and inhabiting an “everlasting present” (164). But his grandmother’s habitual overdetermination of ordinary things into signs and symbols offered Wright a royal road into the mind of Fred Daniels, as Fred pursued his weird life underground. Wright speaks of a “recurring motif of the strangely familiar” (180), perhaps the unheimlich, to borrow the German word for uncanny. Though Wright does not use that particular Freudian term, he does specifically mention Freud’s dream theory among his secondary (in importance) sources of inspiration. Wright adds to his list of inspirational works What Is Man? by Mark Twain (180) and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (181), along with jazz music. Wright also reports a more quotidian source: a newspaper account about a white man who lived underground in Hollywood, CA, in the early 1930s, digging his way “beneath buildings from vacant space in the earth” (197). The actual white “man who lived underground” also set himself up in a nice dry underground cave. Using a term from jazz, Wright says in the “My Grandmother’s Memories” essay, “In The Man Who Lived Underground, the spot where improvisation takes place is the sewer” (Wright 2021: 193). So Fred’s entering the sewer is where Wright chooses to begin the novella version, with the dark underground world leading, eventually and ironically, to the character’s enlightenment and some significant maturation in his self-image. (Also included with the newly published novel is a brief but cogent essay by Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright in which he likens TMWLU to Plato’s allegory of the cave in reverse: For enlight-

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enment, the hero must head down into the cave rather than up to the sun-filled realm of Ideas [215]). For Fred Daniels, trouble and death ensue when he wants to share his prophetic insights with others and reascends aboveground to do so. (This is analogous to Plato’s enlightened former cave dweller’s returning to his former fellows in the depths and being threatened and rejected by them.) One last inspiration Richard Wright cites for his novel and novella is the film popular at the time based on H. G. Wells’s book The Invisible Man. His grandmother, after all, believed in invisible men – she would just call them angels (2021: 178). Ralph Ellison, not long after the publication of Wright’s TMWLU novella, would use the invisibility trope in a much-expanded form, to create his own ‘underground’ hero: the I-narrator of his masterwork Invisible Man (in contrast to H. G. Wells, Ellison, of course, used no “The” in his title – published as a whole in 1952). Ellison’s use of the underground theme deserves attention before switching locale and genre to South Korean film. As previewed in the ‘phantom-beats-blond-guy’ incident mentioned earlier (from the Prologue), Ellison’s first-person narrator in Invisible Man concentrates his talk of living underground in the Prologue and Epilogue of the novel. The novel itself ends by reminding the readers of the Prologue they read so many hundred pages back: “I would take up residence under-ground. The end was in the beginning” (Ellison 1995: 571). Ellison then appends his Epilogue, as important as his deservedly famous Prologue. The Prologue has thrust us into the book’s circular structure by its mention of the Invisible Man’s underground digs: Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that’s getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead. (Ellison 1995: 5 – 6)

Like Fred Daniels’s cave, decorated with money glued to the walls, watches and rings hung on the walls, and diamonds stomped into the earthen floor, Ellison’s I-narrator’s “hole” is homey to him: “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light” (6). Ellison’s narrator gleefully steals the power to illuminate 1,369 light bulbs from Monopolated Light & Power, an excellent representative of capitalist greed and oppression. Wright’s Fred and Ellison’s narrator both have a radio or phonograph for music below ground. Listening to jazz, Ellison’s character descends still further into a deeper “cave” (of the mind) where we’re told about a slave mother whose sons kill their father/master and about the Blackness of Black (from a Black preacher). Though the narrator’s penchant for super-illumination somewhat contradicts Bey’s theory of radical Black prophets eschewing

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the light, every other detail of these two disparate characters’ similar underground dwellings (and strange imaginings and insights) is quite consonant. By making his I-narrator the hero of a lengthy novel, Ellison, of course, gives him more life-experiences than Wright’s Fred, including a boyhood and a cheeky, advice-giving grandfather who opines: “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (Ellison 1995: 16). At first too young to grasp his grandfather’s meaning, as a schoolboy the narrator earnestly strives to please white people, as in the battle royal scene where he is manipulated by adult white men into boxing his fellow Black students under the most degrading circumstances Ellison could imagine. We learn, soon thereafter, of the narrator’s abortive efforts to obtain higher education. His time at a Black college is cut short by that institution’s perfidious college president, Dr. Bledsoe (Ellison’s riff on Booker T. Washington), who blames the young narrator for allowing Mr. Norton, their prized white donor, to have contact with Jim Trueblood, an ignorant, incestuous Black father, and his family. The narrator, also at Mr. Norton’s request, takes the donor to the local Golden Shovel bar where they meet patients from a local insane asylum. The I-narrator is perfectly innocent of any ill intent in exposing Mr. Norton to dark secrets, but Dr. Bledsoe cruelly sabotages the young narrator anyway, sending him to seek work in New York city unknowingly armed with a discommendation rather than a recommendation. The narrator, by dint of sheer effort, finds work at a paint company called Liberty, where he is sent to work in a deep underground chamber (Ellison 1995: 207) with a bitter long-time Black employee, Mr. Brockway, who knows the secret of making the company’s famous Optic White paint. The secret is somewhat analogous to the forced race mixing under slavery and plays on the “one-drop” idea in eugenics: To make a great white paint, the company adds ten drops of black paint to the formula. Before his major life-transforming realization that he is invisible, Ellison’s narrator has many other experiences. He is forced into being a medical guinea pig and given electro-shock treatments. (The same thing happens to the chief protagonist in Bong’s The Host, about to be discussed.) The narrator becomes a spokesman for a left-wing group called The Brotherhood and clashes with nationalists who oppose them, including Ras the Destroyer, a fearsome bully. The narrator starts calling himself Rinehart and other names and is constantly betrayed by others, both Blacks and whites. Close to insanity, he resorts to living underground, as described in the circular Prologue/Epilogue feeding into one another. “The end was in the beginning” (again). But there is an element of hope in the Epilogue, a hard-won sense of how to hold opposites in some precarious balance: “So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love” (Ellison

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1995: 580). The Invisible Man also says he is ready to ascend and, like Wright’s Fred Daniels, share his hard-won prophetic truths.

Bong Joon Ho’s The Host and Parasite: Spatialized Oppression and Monsters Down Below Just as Wright drew on a real newspaper account (the white Californian who lived underground) in order to come up with Fred Daniels, so Bong Joon Ho, the Academy Award-winning director we now turn to, drew on all-too-real details of American ecological destruction in Seoul to kick off the plot of his genre-busting monster 2006 movie The Host. Hsuan L. Hsu’s 2009 article “The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak” cites the profoundly disturbing real event. Albert McFarland, a US Military mortician at the Yongsan camp, ordered two assistants to dump about 80 liters of formaldehyde into the Han River that runs through Seoul. McFarland’s punishment, when his deed was discovered, was only a 30-day suspension and a $4,000 fine (Hsu 2009). Bong begins his film with much the same scene. An English-speaking American medical official, bothered by the dust that has gathered on the large formaldehyde supply in his lab, orders his Korean underling to dump the stuff down the drain and directly into the Han. The Korean mildly objects, noting that the Han is the water source for Seoul. The arrogant American persists with the paternalistic line, “Let’s just try to be broad-minded about this.” The obedient Korean dutifully dumps. And the cinematic premise is thereby set for Bong’s mixed-genre classic. The idea that monsters grow from atomic explosions and the like certainly underlies many classic Japanese and American monster films, so Bong’s use of an ecological disaster as his monster’s origin story does not stand out as unique. But Bong’s slightly ‘mad scientist’ rendition of the formaldehyde-dumping scene in The Host is a well-placed and targeted swipe at Americans in Korea, one of many such blows to come in this particular film. Critics of Bong’s work, such as Christina Klein, speak of his “half-respectful, half-resentful attitude toward the United States” (2008: 880), even suggesting that “Korea has let itself become a ‘host’ to a parasitic United States” (890). All of Bong’s other films with which I am familiar – including Memories of a Murder (2003), The Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017, about a friendly, monstrous pig-like animal, genetically modified for its meat), and, of course, Parasite (2019) – also deal directly or indirectly with America’s neocolonial she-

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nanigans in South Korea, and the real human costs of rapid industrialization and hyper capitalism (Klein 2008: 889). But in his films Bong is not just thematizing America’s hegemonic control of South Korea; he is also employing American film genres and conventions to do it.⁴ Spatialization, genre-bending, an odd sense of time, synesthesia (cf. Richard Wright) – these qualities, along with anti-Americanism, are the hallmarks of Bong’s transnational creative oeuvre. Some critics dislike Bong’s work for reasons similar to those of critics who have disliked Wright (e. g. James Baldwin). Says Brandon Taylor, writing about The Host in the 2016 volume of Cineaction, “The Korean heroes have been castrated or infantilized and must assert their authority and masculinity in relation to the American hegemon” (2016: 45, italics in original). Taylor continues his complaint, “Bong Joon-ho merely replicates the American lens, points it at South Korea, and creates myriad issues with the representation of the film’s protagonists” (46). Taylor is more enthusiastic, however, about Bong’s Snowpiercer because he sees Bong “subverting and repurposing the United States blockbuster filmmaking forms to criticize the American caste system” (46). Taylor and others also observe Bong’s influences from 1950s and 1960s Golden Age Korean film to create a “peculiar hybrid form” in Bong’s work that is both South Korean and American (45). Though it came along after Taylor’s article, I believe the same subversive “pivot,” to borrow his term (44), can be seen in Bong’s Parasite. But first we must follow Bong down into the sewers of Seoul, where he actually filmed parts of The Host, but only after inoculating his actors against possible diseases “that lurked down there” (Chung 2009: 54). The human heroes of The Host include Bong’s favorite male actor Kang-ho Song (featured in many of his films), here playing an initially most unimpressive father named Park Gang-Doo of a pre-teen daughter named Park Hyun-seo (Ko Asung). They live with Gang-Doo’s father, Park Hie-bong, played by the excellent Byun Hee-Bong, in a small single-wide trailer parked in what looks to be the flood zone of the Han River. The trailer doubles as their impossibly cramped home and place of business – a snack station peddling candy, chips, cheap ramen noodles and squid that are grilled for customers enjoying the river view on blankets. (Gang-Doo has a habit of snitching pieces of the squid to eat himself before delivering the order to the customers.) Gang-Doo is what critic Hsu has called a “motherless, malnourished […] man child” (2009) who has often sustained blows to his head. Gang-Doo is introduced to us, most unprepossessingly,

 Rather than stressing borrowings from Hollywood, Jihoon Kim valuably investigates the complex negotiations between the global and the local, “the multiple hybridizations with the transnational” in Korean cinema (2019: 3).

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as literally asleep on his job of tending the snack trailer’s counter. The patriarch Park Hie-bong clearly runs this family, with his other adult children, an unemployed male college graduate and a female national-team archer, appearing as visitors and, later, important allies. Gang-Doo’s daughter Hyun-seo is as sharp and lively as her father is dull and lethargic, that is, until tragedy strikes the riverbank in the form of a monster who swallows several victims, including Hyunseo, before diving back down into the river. The monster itself is a wonder of computer-generated design (executed for Bong by an American CG outfit), both gruesome and oddly charismatic at the same time. We first meet the monster in a long shot, POV the people on the riverbank enjoying their picnics and strolls. From this distance, the creature at first seems to be shaped like some gigantic bat hanging upside down from the under girding of the bridge. But the ‘bat’ soon executes some remarkable moves. It can swing its whole body like a gymnast on the parallel bars, executing sweeping girder-to-girder moves before dropping down into a high dive, hurtling into the water. At one point the monster snatches up a Korean businessman who is attempting suicide from the bridge above. Critic Hsu sees this figure as representative of the many suicides prompted by failed International Monetary Fund policies in Korea or, in the same critic’s words, “neoliberal market reforms” (2009). The monster emerges unseen from underwater, because we soon see it running down the river embankment at high speed, looking like some gigantic beaked fish with legs and a monstrous multi-part, flower-like head/mouth (reminiscent of the monster plant in Little Shop of Horrors). Our Han River monster snatches and swallows people on the land, left and right. He is fully, athletically amphibious. Meanwhile Gang-Doo, our previously somnolent dullard, has sprung into heroic action in order to fight the beast and protect his daughter. He is aided by a quick-thinking, quick-acting white guy (Scott Wilson), who, we later learn, is an American sergeant relaxing in Seoul on leave (a rare, positive American character in Bong’s anti-American world). We later learn that this American dies on an operating table from a torn-off arm and NOT, as rumors have had it, from some dread virus the monster spreads with his bite or breath. This, the monster’s first rampage, ends with Hyun-seo, our pre-teen, being dragged by the monster into the river. Her father dives in after her, but there is no chance he can reach the lightning-fast creature. We see the monster lift up Hyun-seo and slowly submerge with her into the Han. Her full family, including the unemployed uncle and professional archer aunt, plus, of course, her stricken father and grandfather, gathers to mourn her at a common memorial site for the monster’s many victims. There is a weirdly slapstick scene, typical of Bong’s genrebending, where all of Hyun-seo’s family members literally fall on the floor of the memorial site and writhe about in grief and anguish. Even their fellow

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mourners look askance at their bizarre mourning antics (which might look much more natural in some Pentecostal American churches). Meanwhile, Korean and American officials have declared everyone who has had contact with the monster (that includes our target family, especially GangDoo) must go into quarantine in a hospital to be tested for the deadly monster-borne virus. There follow further semi-comic scenes of fumigation and horrible torturous medical tests. Gang-Doo does everything he is told not to do, such as scratching his rash, eating food before undergoing tests. But suddenly amid the family’s plotting to escape the hospital, Gang-Doo receives an impossible cell phone call. It is his ‘dead’ daughter calling (at first assumed to be a ghost, just like the underground dwellers in Wright and Ellison). She is alive because the monster regurgitates some people to consume later. Her regurgitated ‘body’ is being stored by the monster in some corner of the vast city sewer system. Hyun-seo’s cell phone runs out of power before she can give more details, so it is up to her family, especially her father, to search for her down in the sewer system. The whole family escapes hospital quarantine by posing as a crew of fumigators. The Americans have organized and are executing a huge campaign to wipe out the (non-existent) monster-borne virus. The fumigation mist is called Agent Yellow and supposedly “annihilates all biological matter.” (No mention is made of its effect on humans, who also tend to be “biological” themselves.) We eventually begin to suspect the Americans may just be testing the fumigation agent on the Koreans, in case a need arises to use it for real in the USA or against enemies (à la Agent Orange). The unemployed uncle gets a techie friend to track down Hyun-seo’s cell phone location. (The friend then tries to betray him and collect a reward.) Both the ne’er-do-well uncle and archery-gifted aunt prove braver than one might have guessed from their first appearances. We see more battles with the monster both above ground, where the grandfather is killed, and below. Hyunseo heroically tries to care for others regurgitated by the monster into his rat-infested (more rats!) sewer lair. She finds only one regurgitated survivor, however, a young street urchin boy swallowed along with his older brother, who is dead. Before they are eaten by the monster above ground, we get a glimpse of these children’s lives practicing “seo-ri” or “a right of the hungry” to steal what they need (Hsu 2009). Above or below in the sewer, they, and to a lesser extent Hyun-seo’s own family, represent the most impoverished “Koreans Who Live Underground.” The aunt, uncle, and Hyun-seo’s father gallantly wander through Seoul’s sewers, seeking their lost child (fig. 1.1). Hyun-seo, for her part, mothers the young street child who has survived his swallowing and tries to find a way to outwit the wily monster, even trying, at one point, to climb onto its back to es-

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cape to higher ground and fetch help. The monster awakens and grabs her, almost tenderly setting her back down into the sewer. The monster continues to rampage above and below, with Gang-Doo and his siblings finally conquering and killing the beast, only to lose Hyun-seo, pulled from the dead creature’s maw. This time she really is dead, but the little boy she has been holding and protecting is revived and joins Gang-Doo and his remaining two siblings as part of their stricken, but still partly intact family. We see the little boy and Gang-Doo, still living in the snack shop trailer, turn off their American-filtered TV news, and sit down together for an actual Korean meal. Critics have pronounced this a positive if melancholy ending, given the family’s two tragic deaths.

Fig. 1.1.: The whole family of the missing girl is seeking their lost child in Seoul’s sewers. Ko A-sung in Boon Joon Ho’s The Host (2006). AA Film Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

Nuclear families (this time including mothers) will also shape the structure of Bong’s remarkable film Parasite, the last of our partly subterranean works to be considered. We have a poor, underdog family, the Kims – father, mother, college-aged son and daughter – and a rich family, the Parks—father, mother, school-aged son and daughter. Adding a third family, the Parks’ former housekeeper and her husband (he is the ‘ghost’ hiding in the Parks’ underground subbasement), turns the film into a case of ‘dog eat underdog eat underdog.’ Para-

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site’s night at the 2019 Academy Awards was history-making with Bong himself tying Walt Disney’s record for the number of Oscars at one ceremony. Bong won Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Directing, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. The skillful pre-planning of virtually every shot is revealed in the “graphic novel” published from Bong’s storyboards after the film became a hit. The house where the rich Park family lives is so beautiful and impressive it becomes a major ‘character’ in the film. The same can be said, for different reasons, of the basement apartment where the poor Kims fight a flood of water and sewage for survival (fig. 1.2). The architectural wonder of the Park house becomes even more impressive, however, when we learn the exquisite interior and garden were totally designed and constructed by Bong’s crew – with the film being shot on four main sets (Rife 2020: 46; cf. Jung 2020). The sloping street and semi-basement where the Kims live were likewise constructed sets.

Fig. 1.2.: The Kim family folds pizza boxes in their semi-basement apartment in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) starring Woo-sik Choi, Kang-ho Song, Hye-jin Jang, and So-dam Park. BFA / Alamy Stock Photo.

As with the work of Richard Wright, critical reception of Bong’s Parasite tends to fall into two categories: political reactions (pro and con) and, in Bong’s case, aesthetic analysis emphasizing Bong’s mastery of space (what I have been calling the ‘spatialization’ of poverty). Critics agree on Bong’s consistent throughline of attacks on hegemonic capitalism (often associated, as already noted, with American neo-colonialism in South Korea) in all of his films. Writes

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Casey Rife in her Aegis journal essay “Parasitic Poverty”: “As of 2015, the top 10 % of [South] Koreans held 66 % of the wealth and the bottom half of the population held a mere 2 %” (Rife 2020: 51). In Parasite, Bong seems less interested in pointing a finger directly at America (there is a child’s archery set and ‘authentic’ teepee proudly ordered directly by Mrs. Park from the US for her spoiled young son). By the time he makes Parasite, Bong blends the US with all the other Western and Asian financial powers, saying, “We all live in the same country now: that of capitalism” (qtd. by Ridgeway-Diaz et al., 2020). But Bong still has received chastisement from critics who see him falling prey to ideas of the “false meritocracy” (Ridgeway-Diaz et al.) capitalists seem to promote. Shuquan Zhan and Chao Liang have complained, “Ki-taek’s murder of Mr. Park is simply an unorganized and symbolic resistance which will never shake the edifice of the social classes in Korea at all” (2020: 294). John K. Kim writes in an article entitled “Parasite: A Film Review on Capitalism” (from Cinesthesia), “Kevin [the Kims’ surviving son] remains committed to the notion that financial success is the path to liberation” (2020: 9). The other plot detail Marxist critics decry in Parasite is the lack of solidarity among the downtrodden. The Kim family does not hesitate to attack the Parks’ existing employees (their chauffeur and their housekeeper) in order to snatch those jobs for themselves. Zhan and Liang call this the “dogfight within the underclass for survival space” (2020: 291). Sarina Annis, appropriately writing in the Journal of Religion and Film, asks “Which family is the truly greedy one?” (2019: 3). She is questioning who is worse, the rich oblivious Parks or the poor Kims, who turn against their working-class brethren. Annis adds, “Da-song’s [the young Park son] ordeal tells us capitalism has ghosts of its own whether we believe in them or not” (2019: 4). Geun-sae and his protective wife, the former housekeeper Moon-gwang, enter the Parks v. Kims fray in what I am calling the ‘dog eat underdog eat underdog’ plot arrangement, which Bong executes via precise visuals and spatialization. The Parks dwell up on the high ground of the city and enjoy the two upper levels of their mansion; the Kims live in a low-lying area of Seoul and must ‘work’ their way (through deceit) into access to the Parks’ first and eventually second floors. The Parks’ forgotten sub-basement is where Geunsae (the displaced housekeeper’s husband, in hiding from his creditors) lives for four years underground, decorating his living space down there in a manner much akin to Wright’s Fred Daniels and Ellison’s first-person narrator of Invisible Man. ⁵ Geun-sae teases his oblivious oppressor Mr. Park via morse code messages

 In the Robert Walker et al. study cited in note one (2013) there is a possible explanation for Geun-sae’s four-year sojourn underground. It is part of the “poverty-shame nexus” (Yongmie

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using lights. After the slaughter that concludes the film, Ki-taek in turn displaces this character, newly assuming his mantle as the Korean Who Lived Underground. The Kims’ own home place, when they are not masquerading as loyal servants at the Parks’ house, is itself a carefully layered space, with its ground-level window and mostly exposed ground-level toilet. Rachel Wallace’s interview-article “Inside the House from Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite” gives the director’s nuanced explanation of this latter spatialization of the Kims’ abode: It really reflects the psyche of the Kim family. […] You’re still half overground, so there’s this hope and this sense that you still have access to sunlight and you haven’t completely fallen to the basement. It’s this weird mixture of hope and this fear that you can fall even lower. (Wallace 2019)

The Kims, of course, do fall lower, much lower, sacrificing a child (actually a young adult), their daughter Ki-jung, just as happened in The Host. The shift in tone of the film from “drama/comedy to thriller/tragedy” happens, according to Kench, exactly midway through (2020). But a few more details of the Kims’ masterful scamming of the Parks (and their fellow servants) might help to establish Bong’s own masterful manipulation (a meta-level up) of our sympathies for every character involved. The film’s first (and, later, the last) shots include the street-level window in the Kims’ lousy half-basement apartment, POV the Kims inside, with socks hung there to dry. “We’re screwed. No more free wi-fi,” the desperate brother and sister share with one another. They have been filching their neighbors’ wi-fi, and now have lost the phone service connecting them to the pizza shop for which the whole family folds (quite badly) pizza boxes in order to make what little money they have. An insect fumigation truck drives by outside during a family huddle. The father says they must leave the window open, despite the choking fog, in order to fight the vermin inside (this time bugs, not rats). So they, in effect, ‘steal’ the fumigation service, as well. (And we are reminded of the Agent Yellow scenes in The Host, where the same actor now playing the father – Kang-ho Song – actively swallows noxious fumes in order to ‘heal’ himself of the fake virus.) A new ‘free’ (free to filch) wi-fi connection arises, and the family celebrates their good fortune. They indulge in a junk food meal and observe a

Nicola Jo’s term, see note one) that the poor often try to avoid the consequences of their indebtedness: “People typically intensely disliked the need to borrow and feared its repercussions; the final demand, the landlord, money lender or bailiffs and the sanctions that might be imposed, legitimate or criminal” (2013: 223 – 224). In Geun-sae’s case, he seems to fear violent retribution from his lender.

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regular feature out of their street-level window, a drunk who likes to urinate almost directly into their dwelling. Ki-woo the son (later called Kevin and played by Woo-sik Choi) meets a friend attending college who has his own clever scheme to keep his high-school-aged girlfriend chaste (to have her himself) by handing off his job as her English tutor to a friend whom he can trust, Ki Woo. Once he has the job, Ki Woo proves equally as rapacious as his friend and sets about to seduce his student Da-hye (Ji-so Jung) himself, even concocting a fantasy plan where they marry and live on her riches. In this fantasy plan, Ki Woo will, of course, have to hire actors to play his parents because, by this point in the film, the whole Kim family is already working for the Parks, under assumed identities. Ki-woo’s sister Ki-jung (So-dam Park) has finagled a job as the Parks’ young son Da-song’s art therapist. This is the child who once saw the ‘ghost’ Geun-sae arise from the sub-basement and is therefore presumed to need therapy. Kijung’s fake backstory is that she studied art therapy in the US and the actress’ feigned sense of intellectual superiority is especially impressive. Ki-jung has gotten rid of the Parks’ former chauffeur by hiding a pair of her panties in the Parks’ car, thereby implicating the young chauffeur of having sex with girls in Dong-ik’s (Sun-kyun Lee) sacred space. The Park patriarch Dong-ik is a tech maven who fancies himself liberal-minded just so long as a servant does not “cross the line.” (The young chauffeur’s supposedly having sex where Dong-ik sits in the backseat is naturally considered “crossing the line.”) The chauffeur’s job is then open for Ki-taek to steal. And the Kim family’s mother Chung Sook (Hyejin Jang) steals the housekeeper’s job from her very efficient precursor Moongwang (Lee Jung Eun) when her family agents, already embedded, convince the Parks that Moon-gwang has TB (a déclassé disease if ever there was one)!⁶ The whole Kim family, now all working under false pretenses and identities, has been hired individually by the Park family’s mother, the beautiful but naïve Yeon Kyo (Yeo-jeong Cho). When the Parks leave home for a family ‘glamping’ trip, the Kims all have a party in the house they have invaded – that is, until the Parks return unexpectedly, setting off a masterful farce of ducking and hiding on the part of the Kims in the spatial zones designated for their betters. What eventually betrays the Kim

 Susan Sontag’s indispensable book-length essay, Illness as Metaphor (1978), explains that while tuberculosis sometimes has been associated with the genteel rich who could go off for ‘cures’ in sanatoriums (famously in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg), it is more often thought of as a disease of the poor and unclean. It was once believed that the unsanitary conditions in which the poor lived actually produced the diseases they suffered (cf. Sontag on the “miasma theory”).

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family to the noses-in-the-air Parks is that the Kims share the same unpleasant smell on their bodies (they are, after all, one family spending their nights in a cheap, moldy semi-underground apartment). The child Da-song is the first to mention it. And the effete Dong-ik, tech maven, has the misfortune to mention the bad smell one time too often within earshot of his counterpart pater familias Ki-taek. It leads to an ashamed and enraged Ki-taek killing his boss during the film’s Quentin Tarantino-like ending bloodbath in the beautiful garden. Ki-taek cleverly takes refuge only a hundred yards or so from where he has committed the murder, that distance being down and underground. At this point in the movie Moon-gwang, the former housekeeper, has come to feed her husbandin-hiding, Geun-sae, and thereby revealed the existence of the secret sub-basement to the Kims, who fight bitterly for its possession. Geun-sae is the one who instigates the garden scene bloodletting, rising out of his long-time hiding place underground, to wreak havoc, very much like the I-narrator in Ellison’s Invisible Man when he jumps out of his underground cave and attacks the blond man in the street. Geun-sae is replaced in the secret sub-basement by Dong-ik’s murderer Kitaek, who retains his underground predecessor’s artwork/shrine: a photo collection in soup cans, two pictures of Abraham Lincoln, a picture of Mandela, and one of Mr. Park. Ki-woo, bereft of his sister, killed at the garden party, continues to fantasize about getting rich and freeing his ‘buried-alive’ father by buying the marvelous architectural gem of a house, now owned by clueless Germans, utterly unaware they have a secret Man Who Lives Underground in their house.

Conclusion: Notes from Underground And the way up is the way down (T. S. Eliot 1990: 1331)

Though it is unmistakably true of The Host and Okja, Bong Joon Ho has said that all his movies are monster movies (Amidon 2019). Geun-sae and, at the end of the film, Ki-taek, the two ‘Koreans Who Lived Underground’⁷ in Parasite, are

 I am alluding to Fydor Dostoevsky’s influential novella Notes from Underground (1864). Wright and Ellison both admired Dostoevsky’s work. Wright said, “Foremost among all the writers who have influenced me in my attitude toward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky” (from Michel Fabre’s study of Wright’s library, qtd. in Peterson 1994: 381). Ellison likewise avowed he had been strongly influenced by Dostoevsky (see Bloshteyn 2001). Information on Bong’s exposure to Dostoevsky could not be located.

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both sinners. They are both murderers and therefore monstrous. But they are, arguably, just as sinned against as sinning. Bong’s subterranean characters do not seem to take their roles as prophets quite so seriously as their counterparts Wright’s Fred Daniels and Ellison’s I-narrator of Invisible Man, but they do have feelings to share. (Ki-taek, like his predecessor Geun-sae, uses the fancy house’s lights to send Morse code messages, in the former’s case, to his surviving son, Ki-woo.) Bong Joon Ho himself also plays prophet, however, with his films all serving as jeremiads against unbridled capitalism and exploitation of the poor. It is just that Bong delights in mixing up both his genres and his ‘messages.’ Bong and Wright (and, perhaps, to a lesser extent, Ellison) have all been taken to task by critics for a lack of purity in their vision of and for the poor, and, in the latter two cases, of and for the racialized poor. None of the protagonists, Korean or Black, makes a very convincing Marxist hero, however, perhaps because they sometimes wear their victimhood on their sleeves. Bong’s con-artists, the Kims, are highly questionable revolutionaries, as is the mild-mannered, eagerto-be-heard Fred Daniels (much less his predecessor, the doubly murderous Bigger Thomas, or Wright’s later ‘existentialist’ killer Cross Damon from The Outsider). But all three of the artists focused upon in this paper – Wright, Ellison, and Bong – share a lively interest in critiquing what Oxford scholar Yongmie Nicola Jo has called the “poverty-shame” nexus (Jo 2012: 519 and qtd. in Rife 2020: 47) as displayed in South Korean films and other worldwide media. This linkage of poverty and shame is a favorite belief of American right-wingers who hold that the poor – especially the Black poor – are deservedly that way because of their laziness and/or their “personal failure and inadequacy” (Rife 2020: 50). Jo and similar experts emphasize that shame is both internally felt and externally imposed. The “essentially social nature of shame […] emanates from the scorn or contempt of others” (Jo 2012: 518) as in the tech maven’s cruel comments in Parasite on how bad his chauffeur (the Kim family patriarch in disguise) smells. Capitalism as a system exacerbates the poverty-shame nexus by insisting “that one’s economic status is open for change provided one works hard to improve one’s situation” (Jo 2012: 521). At the same time, however, capitalist society has a “propensity to highlight, celebrate and exacerbate difference amongst the people throughout its competitive process, subsequently creating a physical and emotional sense of distance between individuals” (521). And the “distance” in the works of Wright, Ellison, and Bong is spatialized as straight down (with the poor actually forced underground). The artists in this study all turn to a familiar, ironic master trope: the idea of finding light by entering darkness. Though Fred Daniels is killed and spins away through the sewers to the sea, the other underground dwellers all return, like the

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Repressed, with a bloody vengeance. They make their way back up to the world with prophetic messages that some listeners will not want to hear. RidgewayDiaz likens Bong’s ghostly sub-basement dwellers to “our current global boogeyman, [the] coronavirus of 2019”; she notes that the “arbitrary nature of the pandemic – who it kills and who it spares – parallels the fragile nature of our fate as echoed in the film [Parasite]” (2020). When the reluctant prophet Jonah emerged from the belly of the whale, Nineveh was loath to listen to him, as well. But when God, by whatever name He/She is addressed, sends notes from underground (or underwater, in Jonah’s case), we dwellers still aboveground in the light and air may have very compelling reasons to heed them.

Works Cited Amidon, Aurora. 2019. “How Parasite Uses Architecture and Landscape to Tell a Story.” Film School Rejects, 16 Nov. 2019. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Annis, Sarina. 2019. “Parasite.” Journal of Religion and Film 23(2), article 16: 1 – 5. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Baldwin, James. 1955. “Many Thousands Gone.” In: Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press. 24 – 45. Betts, Reginald Dwayne. 2021. “One Nation Invisible: Richard Wright’s Newly Restored 1940s Novel Is an Urgent Tale of Today’s America.” The New York Times Book Review. 9 May 2021: 9. Bey, Marquis. 2018. “Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature.” CR: The New Centennial Review 18(1): 105 – 168. Bloshteyn, Maria R. 2001. “Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky and Three African-American Writers.” Comparative Literature Studies 38(4): 277 – 309. Bong Joon Ho. 2020. Parasite: A Graphic Novel in Storyboards. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Camus, Albert. 1947. La peste. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Chung, Hy Jean. 2009. “The Host and D-War: Complex Intersections of National Imaginings and Transnational Aspirations.” Spectator 29(2), special issue on “Transnationalism and Film Genres in East Asian Cinema”: 48 – 56. Eliot, T. S. 1990 (1941). “The Dry Salvages.” In: Paul Lauter et al (eds.). The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath. 1327 – 1333. Ellison, Ralph. 1995 (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International. The Host. 2006. Dir. Bong-Joon-Ho. Showbox, Happinet Corp., Chungeorahm Film. Hsu, Hsuan L. 2009. “The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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Jackson, Lauren Michele. 2021. “What We Want from Richard Wright: A Newly Restored Novel Tests an Old Dynamic between Readers and the Author of Native Son.” “Under Review,” The New Yorker, 12 May 2021.

[accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Jo, Yongmie Nicola. 2012. “Psycho-Social Dimensions of Poverty: When Poverty Becomes Shameful.” Critical Social Policy 33(3): 514 – 531. Jung, E. Alex. 2020. “The House that Parasite Built (From Scratch).” 4 Feb. 2020.

[accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Kench, Sam. 2020. “Parasite Movie Analysis, Synopsis and Ending Explained (Video Essay).” Studiobinder. 20 Apr. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Kim, Jihoon. 2019. “Korean Popular Cinema and Television in the Twenty-First Century: Parallax Views on National/Transnational Disjunctures.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 47(1): 2 – 8. Kim, John K. 2020. “Parasite: A Film Review on Capitalism.” Cinesthesia 10(2), article 1. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Klein, Christina. 2008. “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho.” American Quarterly 60(4): 871 – 898. Laws, Page. 2009. “Not Everybody’s Protest Film, Either: Native Son among Controversial Film Adaptations.” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 39(1 – 2): 27 – 33. Parasite. 2019. Dir. Bong Joon Ho. Barunson E&A, CJ Entertainment. Peterson, Dale E. 1994. “Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky.” African American Review 28(3): 375 – 387. Ridgeway-Diaz, Julia, et al. 2020. “Return of the Repressed: Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite.” Academic Psychiatry, 22 Sept. 2020: 1 – 3. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Rife, Casey. 2020. “Parasitic Poverty.” Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal (Spring): 46 – 53. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Taylor, Brandon. 2016. “The Ideological Train to Globalization: Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Snowpiercer.” Cineaction 98: 44 – 48. Wallace, Rachel. 2019. “Inside the House from Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.” Architectural Digest 31 Oct. 2019. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Walker, Robert, et al. 2013. “Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?” Journal of Sociological Policy 42(2): 215 – 233. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2020. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House. Wright, Richard. 1987 (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper and Row. Wright, Richard. 1990 (1944). “The Man Who Lived Underground” (novella). In: Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz (eds.). Literature and the Human Experience. 5th ed. New York: St. Martin’s. 418 – 455.

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Wright, Richard. 2021. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel. New York: Library of America Special Publication, 2021. Zhan, Shuquan, and Chao Liang. 2020. “A Study of Spatial Narrative in the South Korean Movie Parasite.” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2020). Atlantis Press SARL: 291 – 294.

Daniel Stein

“Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel Abstract: City mystery novels, a popular literary genre of the mid-nineteenth century whose commercially most successful authors include George Lippard, George Thompson, and Ned Buntline, reveled in sensational depictions of the squalid living conditions and moral degradation of the poorest of the poor. Creating horrifying fictions about a new phenomenon in the US metropolis – the emergence of an urban underclass in slums located in the middle of the city – these authors imagined the multiracial poor as alien others and as members of an unredeemable, disease-carrying, and essentially subhuman species. To do so, their novels utilized discourses of contagion, racial otherness, and the alien within to rhetorically guard white urbanites (including their readers) against the inevitable increase in ethnic diversification. Focusing on the ways in which Lippard, Thompson, and Buntline dramatized the abject living conditions and the cultural attractions of New York’s most notorious nineteenth-century slum, the Five Points, this chapter explores a pervasive discourse that spans the gamut from newspaper reportage and travel guides to the popular serial fictions of the city mystery novel.

When the March 1858 issue of Church Monthly addressed the living conditions in one of New York City’s most impoverished sections, it was unequivocal in its condemnation of the place. Identifying the Five Points section in Lower Manhattan as “the most notorious precinct of moral leprosy in the city” and as “a perfect hot-bed of physical and moral pestilence” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 1), the report reiterated a familiar discourse about this part of New York. This discourse had begun decades earlier with a letter in the New York Evening Post (21 September 1826). An anonymous commentator, writing under the nom de plume “Cornelius,” had expressed dismay about the Five Points as a “vast collection of houses of ill fame, tippling shops, drunken persons and other kinds of filth in which it abounds.” Particularly upsetting were the “rum holes,” saloons where unsavory characters of “both sexes, and almost every variety of age and colour,” were “drinking, swearing, and fighting.” Cornelius was disgusted by the “black and white […] men and women” who congregated in these saloons and whose https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-003

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“‘villa[i]nous smells’ [kept] respectable people from residing near [the area]” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 20, 21). Cornelius and Church Monthly bracket a multi-decade discourse about the Five Points that does not end in the 1850s but nonetheless defines the historical period at the center of this chapter: the antebellum era, especially the 1840s and 1850s. I have chosen these two depictions as initial impressions because they are symptomatic of larger debates about the transformations of nineteenth-century urban life in the United States, particularly the emergence of a class of urban poor associated in the public mind with a disease-prone lifestyle. The popular literature of the period, and especially the sensational city mystery novels by authors like George Lippard, George Thompson, and Ned Buntline, tapped into this discourse and addressed these transformations by constructing the emerging urban underclass as dangerous and diseased “aliens within.”¹ These aliens within encapsulate both the growing influx of immigrants and their alienation from notions of citizenship and urban belonging, as well as (and more crucial for my argument) the intensified social and physical contacts between the white urban poor and impoverished but paradoxically entertaining African Americans.² Church Monthly picked up on these changes when it introduced a semantics of contagion and identified the Five Points with “moral leprosy,” depicting it as a breeding ground, or “hot-bed,” of disease in the double sense “of physical and moral pestilence.” By associating poor areas of the city with contagious illnesses, the writer revives discussions of an earlier Cholera outbreak. “Thousands of New Yorkers died during the 1832 epidemic,” the historian Tyler Anbinder observes: [T]he disease spread especially rapidly in tenement districts such as Five Points where outhouses and wells were located too close together. The tendency of cholera to run rampant in impoverished tenement districts led to the belief that it was the dissolute habits of the poor, rather than an inadequate sanitation system, which made one susceptible to the contagion. (Anbinder 2001: 23)

 I use the term underclass in its sociological sense as a “class of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed, who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large, and do not share in its life, its ambitions, and its achievements” (Myrdal 1963: 10), as well as in the sense of subterranean creatures whose state of abjection is so severe that they are almost a different species, according to the novels discussed in this chapter. For a critical assessment, see Gans 1996.  On the city mystery genre, see Knight 2012; Peeples 2014; Stein 2017. Immigration and internal migration increased New York’s population from approx. 242,000 in 1830 to 1,175,000 in 1860 (http://www.demographia.com/dm-nyc.htm); the population of the Five Points almost doubled between the years 1830 and 1855, from 13,570 to 25,562 (Anbinder 2001: 43).

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As Anbinder indicates, regardless of the actual origins of such epidemics, the poor – and poorly sanitized – areas of the city were most affected, and their inhabitants were blamed for bringing diseases into the lives of the city’s more affluent classes.³ In addition, by speaking of “moral leprosy” and “moral pestilence” and thus connecting actual diseases with the failures of the poor to meet the standards of a properly religious life, the writer of Church Monthly posits a fundamental disparity between Christian and un-Christian, respectable and unrespectable, sick and healthy city dwellers. The poor become the root cause for the negative effects of industrialization and urbanization; they emerge from such depictions as a threat to middle-class sensibilities and notions of Protestant propriety.⁴ We can see a similar sense of indignation in Cornelius’s letter, which maligns the Five Points inhabitants as “thieves and rogues” whose “villa[i]nous smells” would offend the “respectable people.” Cornelius establishes strict class divisions by placing the poor at the “lowest degree” (qtd. in Anbinder 21) of the spectrum in opposition to the respectable classes, as if to ward off their influence on life in the rest of the city. Lippard’s, Thompson’s, and Buntline’s city mysteries share Cornelius’s outrage at the “houses of ill fame” (brothels) and the waning separation of the genders into a female domestic sphere and a male public sphere and are thus in line with the moral indignation expressed in Church Monthly. They also register Cornelius’s repeated reference to the mingling of the races (“almost every variety of age and colour”) in saloons and similar establishments by developing peculiar ways of racializing the urban poor.⁵ What’s more, they identify class divisions as a danger to the democratic foundations of the nation while warning readers of the urban presence of these racialized poor. George Lippard titles one of his novels New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), and while he paints the upper ten as vicious and corrupt and the working class as victims of capitalist exploitation, he also sensationalizes the threat that emanates from the urban underclass. In his preface to the first installment of Mysteries and Miseries of New  Scholarship on the social construction of diseases includes work on sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis (Pietrzak-Franger 2017) as well as on recurring yellow fever and cholera outbreaks (Gessner 2016). On the yellow fever epidemic in German immigrant Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Geheimnisse von New-Orleans, serialized in the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung between 1854 and 1855, see Klotz 2012.  On the urban middle-class culture of the antebellum era, see Halttunen 1982.  The population of the Five Points included African Americans and Asian Americans as well as German, Italian, and especially Irish immigrants alongside native-born citizens. In 1825, 14 % of the population was African American, double the citywide average. The percentage of African Americans in the Five Points declined over the next decade, being at only 4 % in 1855, but black inhabitants may have been undercounted (Anbinder 2001: 16, 46).

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York: A Story of Real Life (1848), Ned Buntline complains about the urban citizenry’s moral corruption, but he, too, imagines a diseased underclass beyond the bounds of civilization. “I […] will strike at vice in every garb and station, the gambling palaces of Gotham shall have a place in my chapters as well as the less fashionable dens of infamy, where the thieves and beggars […] congregate” (1848: I: 6), he states, but he ultimately fails to imagine feasible ways of turning the infamous into functional citizens. George Catlin’s painting of a turbulent street scene in the Five Points from 1827, which was reproduced widely and appeared in city guides of the 1850s (fig. 2.1), visualizes the living conditions that were commonly associated with this area but irked many “respectable” New Yorkers. It shows a busy intersection populated by black and white Five Pointers, who are fighting and drinking and are beckoned by a prostitute gazing out of a window on the right side of the image.⁶ The unsanitary conditions are foregrounded through a woman drawing water from a well in the middle of the ongoing hustle and bustle and the pigs that are roaming through the streets. This unruly diversity – and the attending threat that it might spill over from the Five Points into other parts of the city – apparently violated the proper sense of social order, according to which different genders, classes, and races/ethnicities must remain separated so that the smells of the poor will not rankle the fine noses of “respectable” people.⁷ This perceived mixture of class-stratification and interracial interaction, formulated through a lexicon of danger and disease and invested in a spatial politics of high vs. low, or up vs. down, informs my reading of antebellum city mysteries. Ned Buntline’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life, George Thompson’s City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston (1849), and George Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million essentially employ the same language as Church Monthly and the New York Evening Post in their attempts to rouse readers into following their journeys into the urban underworlds they depict.⁸ Ultimately, however, they amplify the affordances of serial storytell The urban prostitute as a sign of illicit female sexuality was another phenomenon associated with the Five Points. Greeson argues that prostitution “beg[a]n to be perceived as a virulent modern social disease” (2001: 280), functioning as an “imagined epidemic” (282), and that “sexual virtue in this period was an assiduously raced and classed attribute, widely held to be possessed by white middle-class women alone” (291). See also Renner 2010.  See Anbinder (2001: 43) for a demographic breakdown of the population. He cites various journals that comment on the diversity of the Five Point inhabitants: “All the nations of the earth are represented” (Five Points Monthly); “a population […] that represents every nationality of the globe” (qtd. in Anbinder 43).  Von Reizenstein’s Geheimnisse von New-Orleans voices its critique of slavery and the moral failures of the South, including its German immigrant population, through the lens of the

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Fig. 2.1.: George Catlin, Five Points, New York City. 1827. Lithograph. New York. Common Council. Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1855. Cornell University Library, Digital Collections.

ing to play upon the tension between contagion and containment; between alleviating the hardships of the racialized poor and preventing their effluvia from contaminating the better parts of the city; between empathizing with their struggles and exploiting their spectacular Otherness for sensational entertainment.⁹

“A Slum in the Very Center of a City” Considering the press reporting about the Five Points and the prominence that Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) had afforded this section of New York, it should come as no surprise that city mystery writers set their depictions of the most degraded city dwellers in this area of the city. In order to better un-

1853 yellow fever epidemic that ravaged the city and reappears in the novel as punishment for the sins of the city’s inhabitants. See Herminghouse 2004; Klotz 2012; Stein 2014 and 2016.  See Stewart’s (2011) analysis of antebellum reading practices and the sense of disorder serialized fiction created; D’Alessandro’s (2017) study of working-class spectatorship in Lippard’s Quaker City; as well as Denning’s (1998) foundational work on cheap fiction and popular constructions of the nineteenth-century working class.

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derstand why and how these narratives build on ongoing debates about this place, we must consider the history and demographic makeup of the Five Points. Anbinder calls the Five Points “the most notorious neighborhood in nineteenthcentury America” (2001: 1) and identifies it as “something new in America: a slum in the very center of a city” (20), or, as Buntline puts it, “in our very midst” (1848: I: 5). I have already referenced letter writer Cornelius’s fear that the stench of the neighborhood would keep respectable folks from settling in the vicinity. Confronted with the presence of a large slum in their midst, New Yorkers turned to discourses of disease and depravity and depicted the Five Pointers as a racially volatile underclass to negotiate their attending attraction to the illicit sex, dancing, drinking, and gambling it made widely available.¹⁰ As Cornelius’s statements and other quotations above have indicated, disease and depravity were frequently associated with racialized notions of disorder. On 23 July 1832, a self-declared “resident of the vicinity” complained to the Evening Post about the area’s “race of beings of all colours, ages, sexes, and nations […] inhabiting the most populous and central part of the city.” Expressing a fear of contagion, he added: “[W]hen may we be considered secure from pestilence? Be the air pure from Heaven, their breath would contaminate it, and infect it with disease” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 23). Like Cornelius, this writer is not just afraid that the multiracial poor, sex workers, and criminals who use the Five Points as living quarters, marketplace, and hunting ground will put good Christians in danger. He also seems afraid of a much more elusive threat of cultural diffusion, of a lower-class lifestyle that cannot be contained by physical boundaries but will spread through the air into the homes of the city’s more privileged citizens. If Cornelius had worried about the smell of the poor transcending the area and spoiling middle- and upper-class aspirations to settle in lower Manhattan, the second letter channels this fear of cultural contagion through a lexicon of airborne disease and contamination.¹¹ Buntline’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York shows a related concern with the invisible yet potent effusions of the Five Points. As the criminal Frank and his well-meaning benefactor Mr. Precise are nearing the notorious neighborhood, the narrator observes:

 Anbinder speaks of the public perception of the Five Points as “repulsive” and “fascinating” (2001: 1).  Klotz (2012) describes similar anxieties over the infectious power of “contagious race” in von Reizenstein’s Geheimnisse von New Orleans. In the antebellum era, this power was often associated with the fear that the Haitian revolution and later slave rebellions would spread across the South.

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Their approach to the place could easily enough be known by the distant sound of fiddles and tambourines, for on its borders every house serves the double purpose of a brothel and a dance house. The old gentleman drew close up to his young clerk, for these were new sounds that he heard, this wild music, and he began to hear shouts and yells – the laughter of drunken women, and the curses of villa[i]nous-looking men, who were staggering about very close to him. (1848: I: 74– 75)

The passage moves from the “new” and “distant sound of fiddles and tambourines” to the people “staggering about very close to him.” Frank and Mr. Precise cross the border and narrow the distance between respectable New York and the loud, wild, sex-charged, alcohol-soaked Five Points. They are lured to the area by “wild music” (a code for black music) that emanates beyond the physical confinement of the neighborhood, functions as a soundtrack to the indecent conduct of the Five Pointers, and documents the inhabitants’ noisy exuberance (“shouts,” “yells,” “laughter,” “curses”).¹² Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million makes a similar reference to the sounds of the Five Points: Enter the nar[r]ow door of the frame-house, which seems toppling to the ground. You hear the sound of the violin, and by the light of tallow candles, inserted in tin sconces which are affixed to the blackened walls, you discover some twenty persons, black, white and chocolate-colored, of all ages and both sexes, dancing and drinking together. It is an orgie – an orgie of crime, drunkenness and rags. (1853: 116)

The scene evokes a claustrophobic sense of an enclosed space (“nar[r]ow door,” “toppling to the ground”) that is extremely dark (“tallow candles,” “blackened walls”) and announces itself through “the sound of the violin.” In this confined space, the social order has been suspended, as Five Pointers of various skin colors, ages, and sexes mix and mingle while dancing and drinking. Prefiguring the “moral and physical pestilence” that Church Monthly decried a few years later, it should be clear that Lippard and other city mystery authors associate the Five Points not only with actual diseases but also with a licentious lifestyle that breeds moral pollution and social decay. Thompson’s City Crimes presents the Five Points as the noisy locus of illicit amusement: The narrow and crooked streets which twine serpent-like around that dreaded plague spot of the city were deserted; but from many a dirty window, and through many a red, dingy curtain, streamed forth into the darkness rages of ruddy light, while the sounds of the vi-

 On the transgressive element of city mystery novels, see Looby 2015; Wiele 2019.

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olin, and the noise of Bacchanalian orgies, betokened that the squalid and vicious population of that vile region were still awake. (2002: 128)

As “the dreaded plague spot of the city,” which references another mid-century pandemic, the “black death” (pestilence) of the bubonic plague that killed tens of millions of people between 1346 and 1353, the Five Points is not only a dirty, dingy, dark, and “vile region,” but it is home to a population whose simultaneous poverty and criminality Thompson takes for granted. Similarly repulsed by this alleged confluence of poverty and crime, the journalist and author George Foster, whose non-fiction sketches New York by GasLight (1850) also covered the seedy aspects of metropolitan life, characterized the Five Points in his earlier book New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (1849) as “the great central ulcer of wretchedness – the very rotting Skeleton of Civilization, whence emanates an inexhaustible pestilence that spreads its poisonous influence through every vein and artery of the whole social system, and supplies every heart-throb of metropolitan life with a pulse of despair” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 34). The city becomes a body ravaged by its most notorious slum, an ulcer that might spread into a poisonous disease and eradicate what Foster construes as the antithesis of the Five Points, the civilization of the respected people. Statements such as these are by no means isolated attempts to connect urban poverty with abjection and the slum’s cultural effluvia – music, drinking, dancing, sex – with life-threatening diseases and thus to socially, culturally, and racially Other the inhabitants of the Five Points. Many accounts of the area match unsanitary and unwholesome living conditions with the neighborhood’s multiracial demographics. An exposé in the Sun (29 May 1834) speaks of “white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women, with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity […]. The drunkards of both sexes […] intermingled with scarcely any thing to hide their nakedness” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 23).¹³ The skin color palette unveiled here – black, yellow, white¹⁴ – and the nakedness

 The article continues: “Few beds were found in any of these apartments, the inmates sleeping or lying on heaps of filthy rags, straw and shavings, the stench from which was almost insupportable” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 23). The Five Pointers are depicted as animals that sleep on straw and shavings and also stink.  I read “yellow” as light-skinned black. Recall Lippard’s phrasing in New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million: “some twenty persons, black, white and chocolate-colored” (1853: 116). Here, “chocolate-colored” indicates a racially mixed identity.

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of the men and women evoke unwanted interracial intimacies, or “indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity,” as the article puts it.¹⁵ In the 1840s, writer and critic Nathaniel P. Willis reported about his foray into an apartment in the Five Points: The floor was covered by human beings asleep in their rags […]. [W]e could hardly put our feet to the ground, they lay so closely together, black and white, men, women, and children. The doorless apartment beyond […] was occupied by a woman and her daughter, and her daughter’s child, lying together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The sight was too sickening to endure. (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 69)

Here, extreme poverty and racially integrated living arrangements intersect. The discourse of sickness and disease extends from the inhabitants to the visitors. It is literally contagious as Willis is sickened by what he sees: the “reeking, seething mass of poverty, vice, sickness, and wretchedness” evoked in an article in Harper’s Weekly from 21 February 1857 (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 75). Such impressions were frequently sutured to notions of darkness and lowliness, evocative of a Dantean descent into hell that also appears in many city mysteries. A Times report from 1 July 1859 noted “fetid odors” and “pestiferous exhalations” in one Five Points apartment and described the moment of entering it as follows: “Down half a dozen ricketty steps, the door was already open to one of the filthiest, blackest holes we had yet seen.” Writing in 1853, the Scandinavian Fredrika Bremer observed further: “lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for human nature to sink” (qtd. in Anbinder 2001: 34). The message is clear: the poor are sick and reside on the lowest rung of society; they constitute an underclass situated below the city’s working class. They are located “off the grid,” or “below the Five Points.”¹⁶

“Holes Swarming with Human Beings” One common feature of Buntline’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York, Thompson’s City Crimes, and Lippard’s New York is their spectacular depiction of a “subterranean world, sunken somewhere in the vicinity of Five Points and the  An extended analysis of the city mystery novel would have to consider the role of the Irish in the urban mix. In Thompson’s City Crimes, the most hardened and ruthless criminals (Bloody Mike and the Dead Man) are Irish.  See Unger on “deviant spaces” (2009: 320) like Lippard’s Monk Hall, whose “queer” location and morals corrupt the social order prescribed by Philadelphia’s urban street grid.

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Tombs,” as Lippard puts it (1853: 116).¹⁷ In his chapter “Below Five Points,” Lippard introduces readers to this urban underground: Descend a narrow stairway, or rather ladder, which lands you in the darkness, some twenty feet below the level of the street. Then, in the darkness, feel your way along the passage which turns to the right and left, and from left to right again, until your senses are utterly bewildered. At length, […] after groping your way you know not how far, you descend a second ladder, ten feet or more […]. You are at least two stories under ground, and all is dark around you. (1853: 116)

This descent demarcates an ontological change, as the darkness signals an absence of enlightenment in a physical and in a philosophical sense. The narrative moves from a sphere of recognition and order to a state of subterranean opacity and disorientation. Below the Five Points, readers will learn, lies a topsy-turvy world ruled by a group of ferocious fugitive slaves called the Black Senate. When Buntline sends Frank and Mr. Precise to an especially impoverished place in the Five Points called the Brewery, a place frequently depicted in illustrations of the time (fig. 2.2) and located on “horridly-smelling” Murderer’s Lane (1848: I: 82), he evokes similar sensations of a dark world below. “About halfway down this [street], [Frank] paused[, …] pointing down into a dark place, that seemed to yawn up, like a very mouth of darkness.” Frank takes Mr. Precise on a slumming tour, robbing his patron in the process but impressing on him the need for philanthropic action. “Let us go down and see the place,” Frank suggests, as they “stepped down into the cellar,” or “into the hole,” as the narrator exclaims (I: 83). Having witnessed shocking scenes of squalor, they encounter a different scene once they leave the Brewery and enter Pete Williams’s dancehall. Williams, the African American proprietor of this establishment (Buntline calls him “one of the upper-ten of darky-dom” [I: 89]), might have been known to readers, as Dickens had already described the dancing and physical intimacy of the place in American Notes and as the popular press had also covered this dancehall. Again, we follow the characters below the street: “a low door, where the inward-passage was downward” and where a “huge Ethiopian” bouncer guards the entryway (I: 89).¹⁸ Again, we cross a boundary, this time between a

 The Tombs was the name for the Halls of Justice, a prison located in the Five Points area. Dickens describes “its filthy and offensive stench” and its “indecent and disgusting dungeons” (2004: 102).  In his tour guide Seven Nights in Gotham (1852), John D. Vose claims that there were even more spectacular places: “People talk of the underground rooms of Pete Williams’ celebrated dance-house – a cave known as ‘Dickens’ Place’; they are nothing to the ‘Diving Bell,’” which is located in “[t]he lowest part of one of the lowest ones in Gotham” (qtd. in Cohen 2017: 5).

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Fig. 2.2.: “Old Brewery Five Points 1852.” The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

known world above where poverty reigns to a world below where black performance and amusement thrive. Thompson describes a much less amusing underworld below the Five Points, a “forty-foot cave – the entrance into the dark vaults,” where the criminal mastermind Dead Man and his minions reside. A footnote explains: It is a fact by no means generally known that there was, beneath the section of New York called the “Five Points,” a vast subterranean cavern known as the dark vaults. There mysterious passages run in many directions, for a great distance, far beneath the foundations of the houses. […] In these dark labyrinths daylight never shone: an eternal night prevailed. Yet it swarmed with human beings, who passed their lives amid its unwholesome damps and gloomy horrors. It served as a refuge for monstrous crimes and loathsome wretchedness. (2002: 131)

Here is once more an emphasis on darkness, as well as a sense of mystery and disorientation. But Thompson introduces another facet when he describes the dark vaults as “caverns” that “swarmed with human beings.” At the beginning of the following chapter, his narrator speaks of a “forty-foot cave” that can only be reached by going “[d]own, down, […] far into the bowels of the

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earth,” and consists of “holes […] swarming with human beings” (132). This underground population is hardly human. As cave dwellers, living, like insects (“swarming”), in holes, they are rendered as subhuman creatures. One man, “nearly naked” and “seated upon a heap of excrement and filthy straw,” devours “the carcase of some animal which had died from disease – it was swollen and green with putrefaction.” He is more animal than human: “with his finger nails, long as vultures’ claws, he tore out the reeking entrails, and ate them with the ferocity of the grave-robbing hyena!” (132).¹⁹ Lara Langer Cohen writes that “[c]ity mysteries are honeycombed with underground spaces: cellars, taverns, crypts, tunnels, dungeons, and so on” (2017: 4). All three authors whose novels I examine depict a netherworld that evokes the notorious basements and cellars in the Five Points, where dancehalls, gambling places, and drinking dens were located, and that had been excessively discussed in the press as the locus of the unsavory and unsanitary behavior of the lower classes. But these authors also imagine a more extensive underground world based on their interest in literary spectacle. In Buntline’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York, the joint discourse of disease and depravation already informs the preface to the first installment, when the author portrays his subject matter as “heart-sickening” and claims having spent “many a dreary sickening night” researching the urban poor who are “suffering in sickness.” Indeed, the main purpose of the novel, at least according to this preface, is “to lay before you all the vice of the city, to lay open its festering sores, so that you and the good and philanthropic may see where to apply the healing balm” (1848: I: 5 – 7). Cohen discerns in the city mysteries’ underground spaces a “strange conflation of the metaphorical and the literal, the political and the topographical” (2017: 2). Citing Foster’s “lower stratum – the under-ground story – of life in New York!” from New York by Gas-Light, she finds the political potential of

 Another passage equates the underground population with the animals that live among them: There are husbands and wives there; mothers and children; brothers and sisters. Yet they all herd together, you see, without regard to nature or decency. Why the crime of incest is as common among them as dirt! I have known a mother and her son – a father and his daughter – a brother and sister – to be guilty of criminal intimacy! Those wretched children are many of them the offspring of such unnatural and beastly connections. In my opinion, those hogs have as good a claim to humanity, as those brutes in human form! [Their] loathsome diet […] makes them insane in a short time; eventually they lose the faculty of speech, and howl like wild animals. Their bodies become diseased, their limbs rot, and finally they putrify and die. (Thompson 2002: 133)

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these novels in their settings.²⁰ If authors like Thompson and Buntline tend to reaffirm the bourgeois moral order (Looby 2015), Lippard indulges in a sense of chaos that leaves little hope for change. Yet these authors also produce a fictionalized urban space based on notions of class and race that may unsettle, or at least irritate, a sense of white middle- or upper-class security propagated throughout the print culture of their day.

Race as Infectious Spectacle Scenes of interracial contact abound in the novels by Buntline, Thompson, and Lippard. But not all of these scenes and the characters evoke the same notion of the racialized poor as an underclass and abject species. Buntline’s Five Points is populated by a range of black characters who include a “hideous pox-marked, one-eyed negro-girl, who was so near naked, that the savages of Africa would have been ashamed of her,” as well as “two or three big negroes, regular Five Point thieves” (1848: I: 80). However, they also include the “very well dressed” and “rather flashy” dancehall proprietor Pete Williams (I: 90) and one of his main attractions, a “young mulatto” Juba dancer whose “wonderful agility” garners Mr. Precise’s appreciation (I: 91). Despite Buntline’s frequently racist depiction of the Five Points’ black folk, their relative diversity – a poor dejected girl, a group of professional thieves, a successful business owner, and a skilled performer – complicates the novel’s attempt to contain the moral and physical effusions of the racialized poor.²¹ Connecting poverty, dejection, and an unclean mixing of the races, Buntline’s narrator follows Frank and Mr. Precise into an apartment in the Brewery: In one corner lay a heap, apparently, of rags, but at the sound of voices, and the glare of light, the heap moved, and a woman, a pale, haggard looking wretch, whose uncombed, dirty and matted hair fell down upon bony naked shoulders, raised up and gazed with a

 Cf. Cohen: “The city mysteries’ most radical impulses might be found in their settings, not their plot” (2017: 4).  I read this ambiguity as a racially inflected dialectic of order and disorder (Stein 2019). The city mystery genre produced a number of “Herculean black male heroes” (Helwig 2020: 154), such as Lippard’s Black Andy (The Killers, 1850) and Old Royal (New York) or Justin Jones’s Big Dick (Big Dick, the King of the Negroes, 1846), whose depiction was marred by the authors’ casual (and sometimes not so casual) racism but who possess a sense of agency and dignity that made them potential, and sometimes actual, collaborators in the class struggle. Helwig finds in Lippard a preference for “cross-racial sympathy over racist rhetoric” (2020: 10). See also Cohen 2017 and Wong 2014.

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wild, inquiring stare upon the party. As she did so four children of different sizes, raised up and gazed too – and the poor things looked even more wan and wretched than she, and their faces wore an expression of mingled fright and wonder. Mr. Precise looked in another corner – there he saw eight or ten – blacks and whites, rise from a perfect knot. They had hardly any clothes – and had been sleeping close, to keep warm, for a lot of old coffee bags, and some pieces of carpet was all that covered them. (1848: I: 83)

In such extreme circumstances, the lack of basic necessities, such as clothes, food, and proper housing, unites people in their misery regardless of their racial affiliation. At the very bottom of society, where these members of the urban underclass live on the brink of starvation, race does not seem to matter, even though the frequency with which city mystery authors and other commentators emphasize the mingling of white and black Five Pointers suggests a more sinister motive behind this depiction. At the same time, this passage implies a cross-racial economy of looking that connects characters across races and implicates the reader in a series of intersecting gazes. There is the pale woman “gaz[ing] with a wild, inquiring stare,” as well as four children who “gazed too.” What the woman and the children are gazing at remains ambiguous. The text only mentions “the party,” which could mean the other poor people around them or the two intruders, Frank and Mr. Precise. It seems plausible that they return Mr. Precise’s “gaz[ing] around in speechless wonder” (1848: I: 83) as he is entering the apartment, an act and sensibility mirrored by the children’s faces carrying “an expression of mingled fright and wonder.” The spectacular gap between Mr. Precise and the urban poor is so vast that both sides are amazed at what they see and have difficulties making sense of the new impressions. On a more metaphorical level, this confluence of gazes implies that there can be no one-way gaze, where the poor would merely serve as a spectacle of the abject for the more privileged onlooker. Instead, the message seems to be that they have their own agency, however much they are reduced in their circumstances, and that they dare to look back at the slumming spectator – certainly Mr. Precise, but perhaps also the reader. That Buntline wants to implicate the reader becomes clear when he switches from sensationalism to sentimentalism, showcasing the mutual tears shed by the poor Five Pointers who benefit from Mr. Precise’s charitable acts and Mr. Precise himself, who is first shocked and then profoundly moved by the misery he witnesses.²²

 “Tears gathered in the eyes of Mr. Precise, […] when the old man spoke again. His voice trem-

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After they have toured the most miserable sections of the Five Points, Frank takes Mr. Precise to Pete Williams’s dancehall, a place where black culture thrives. Upon entering, Mr. Precise saw a sight! Not less than two hundred negroes, of every shade, from the light, mellowcheeked quadroon, down to the coal-black, were there. Some were dancing to music made by a fiddle, a tambourine, and an exceedingly ancient looking guitar; all of them played with more strength than sweetness; and speaking of this latter, the atmosphere was not tinctured with too much of it. Those who were dancing, of course, kept neck and neck with the music; to do so, it was impossible not to sweat some, and the odor raised therefrom, was less agreeable than some of the perfumes which GORAUD has invented. (1848: I: 89)

Stunned by the number of visitors and their heterogeneous looks (“every shade, from the light, mellow-cheeked quadroon, down to the coal-black”), but also by the rough music, the narrator retreats from a quasi-ethnographic account to a position of white superiority. The place is hot and people are in motion, but Buntline ends the depiction with a snide remark about the stench these bodies allegedly exude, recalling the villainous smells that had bothered Cornelius two decades earlier. But Buntline’s novel is not completely devoid of cross-racial empathy and makes some attempts to recognize the racialized Other. Of particular interest is its depiction of Juba dancer William Henry Lane, who remains unnamed in the novel. Dickens had gushed over Lane’s abilities in American Notes, and Buntline is equally impressed: He was a young mulatto, and to the liveliest tune which “the band” could play, he was “laying it down,” in a dance, where every step in the hornpipe, fling, reel, &c., was brought in, double shuffles, heel and toe tappers, in-and-out winders, pigeon-wings, heel-crackers; and, then, to close up, the richest step of all that ever was danced, the winding-blade was footed. Mr. Precise paused, and the first expression of admiration which had passed his lips, came then. “What wonderful agility!” said he – “what astonishing quickness; why, the fellow seems to be made up of hair-springs, he hardly touches the floor!” (1848: I: 91)²³

bled even more than before, and two large tears came out from those sunken eyes” (Buntline 1848: I: 78).  Dickens had portrayed Lane as “a lively hero.” His description informs Buntline’s account: “Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut: snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels […]; dancing with two left legs, two right legs and no legs – what is this to him?” (2004: 102). For further analysis of this type of dancing and its socio-cultural contexts, see Masten 2015.

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Admiration, astonishment, and wonder are the flipside of Buntline’s racist coin. If earlier accounts of the black poor had largely tied the multiracial demographic of the Five Points to notions of disease and decay, this passage envisions a more positive sense of infection. Like Mr. Precise, readers can sense the ability of lively black music and the fantastic moves of dancers like Lane to spill over into the larger realm of American (popular) culture.²⁴ Unlike Williams’s dancehall and Lane’s dancing, which threaten to infect “respectable” people with vernacular (for many: vulgar) black expressive forms, the Black Senate, an underground group of fugitive slaves, in Lippard’s New York presents a more political and more violent threat. This threat lies in the ability of the Senate members, described in racialized terms as being “[o]f all colors, from jet black to chocolate-brown” and “clad in all sorts of costumes, only alike in raggedness and squalor,” to mock and ridicule the perversions of slavery. Rather than being diseased and depraved, they joke about the slaves’ subversive tactics and, when confronted with slave catchers, attack them ferociously. Armed with knives and pistols (“certificates” of freedom), they also possess “dignity” and a keen sense of the injustices of the American system. “It am ob de last importance dat you all get yesselves out o’ dis town to Canada as quick as de Lord’ll let you,” leader Royal Bill declares. His followers know: “It aint philosopy to be caught. On de contrary it am dam foolishness” (1853: 117– 118). As the minstrel dialect with which Lippard burdens these black fugitives indicates, not all is well here. Lippard seems torn between an inclination toward racist depiction and a desire to afford these characters some degree of agency. His portrayal of Royal Bill is instructive: This gentleman is almost a giant; his chest is broad; his limbs brawny, and his face, black as the “ace of spades,” is in strong contrast with his white teeth, white eyeballs, white eyebrows, and white wool. He is a negro, with flat nose, thick lips, and mouth reaching from ear to ear. His almost giant frame is clad in a sleek suit of blue cloth, and he wears a cravat of spotless whiteness. (1853: 116 – 117)

Lippard wavers between heroic and comical images of blackness. Royal Bill’s heroism is represented by his broad chest, brawny limbs, and snazzy dress, but he is still not quite a giant, and he is a minstrel-like figure to boot (note the facial features and the grinning, the almost theatrical play of white against black evocative of blackface). These black underground figures are devoid of

 On the lasting allure of black vernacular dance on the nation’s popular culture, see Lhamon 1998.

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sickness and disease, but they are still infected with the iconographies of minstrel depiction.²⁵

Conclusion The novels by Lippard, Thompson, and Buntline I have analyzed share an interest in the sensational, and, from their perspective, revolting, living conditions and lifestyles of the urban underclass in and below the Five Points. This is where the city’s most degraded and depraved inhabitants become hardened criminals, like the Dead Man and his Knights of the Round Table in City Crimes, or subversive agents against the nation’s unholy alliance between market capitalism and slavery, like the Black Senate in New York. But these criminals and subversives are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as the underground spaces these novels imagine are filled with outcasts who are only nominally human and whose life below the city has turned them into animal-like creatures, almost into a different species.²⁶ One major cause for concern for these authors was the mingling of the sexes and the races, despite the fact that their accounts of city life also included more favorable, albeit ambivalent, portraits of African American characters and culture. It would, however, be wrong to assume that these authors shared the same political convictions and offered identical outlooks on urban life in midcentury New York City. Ned Buntline, for instance, was a nativist who used the appendix of his novel to declare native-born Americans largely innocent of the criminal activities in the Five Points.²⁷ “To judge from the places of nativity of at least two thirds of the criminals,” he writes,

 City mysteries drew on slave narratives and other forms of African American writing, in some cases “shamelessly pirat[ing]” (Ostrowski 2006: 494) material from works like Henry Brown’s Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (1849), in other cases acting within the same “network of intertextual relationships within the publishing field of reform literature” (Ostrowski 2006: 494). In addition to Ostrowski, see Greeson 2001 and Helwig 2020.  In Lippard’s Quaker City, Reynolds discerns “linguistic and generic deformations (alinear narrative, irony and parody, bizarre tropes, performativity, and periperformativity) and biological and material deformations (posthuman images, including animals, objects, sonic effects, and vibrant matter)” (2015: 64), as well as “a materialist world in which people, animals, and things are put on the same level” (51).  Other city mystery writers, such as Lippard and Augustine Duganne, connected the struggle for working-class rights with the struggle against slavery, seen as a combined effort against Northern “wage slavery” and Southern “chattel slavery.” Novels such as Lippard’s The Empire City and New York indicted wealthy Northerners of being in cahoots with Southern slaveholders

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immigration must be one great cause. All of the large gang of burglars, whom with their real names and characters, we have introduced in our work, are foreigners, mostly Englishmen. The denizens of the horrible circle known as the “Five Points” are principally Irish and negroes; some few Dutch, are also living there, but not one American, to a hundred foreigners, can be found there. (1848: V: 88)

Five Pointers are aliens in the urban midst in a double sense. They are foreigners, not native-born Americans, and they are criminals, not respectable citizens. Unlike the native-born Americans Buntline idealizes, they live alongside the city’s poor, about whom the author opines: Our Alms Houses are occupied, at a ratio of about fifteen to one, by foreigners, the overflowings of the poor-houses in Europe. The street beggars are principally Irish, Germans, and Italians. When a real American beggar is found, he or she is the sauciest, most importunate and insolent of the whole crew – but we may thank our free systems of education, and, above all, our national pride and industry that they are scarce. (1848: V: 88)

Buntline fails to imagine the urban undergrounds he describes in his novel as anything but the breeding-ground for un-American activities by un-American inhabitants. Cohen provides a utopian reading of the city mystery genre, according to which their underground “settings try to imagine another world [… and] try to elicit desire for, and belief in, a world that does not yet exist” (2017: 4). As my focus on the dystopian nexus of class, race, and disease has shown, there is nothing much utopian about Buntline’s novel, which identifies philanthropism as the solution and puts his trust in the power of American institutions (schools, courts, police) to produce and protect virtuous white citizens. For the unsavory inhabitants of the Five Points, the aliens within whose poverty and foreignness contradict exceptionalist notions of “national pride and industry,” Buntline can only imagine displacement. “The immense numbers of emigrants which fill our hospitals and alms-houses, is an evil which bears very heavily upon propertyholders and tax-payers in this country” (1848: V: 88), he claims, indicating that it was not just the villainous smells of the Five Pointers that bothered respectable people but also the financial burdens for better-off urbanites. “We

(Helwig 2020: 17). They also featured sympathetic portrayals of fugitive slaves, as does Lippard’s most explicit treatment of slavery, Eleanor; or, Slave Catching in the Quaker City (1854).

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have plenty of room in this country for immigrants, if they would seek the unsettled parts” (V: 89).²⁸ Ironically, Buntline’s politics and his aspirations as a writer were at odds. Without urban slums like the Five Points, and without the cultural impact of immigration, the tumultuous city and its spectacular secrets would vanish, and Buntline’s self-righteous indignation would have to seek other targets. Moreover, city mystery novels were part of a large-scale serialization of nineteenth-century culture whose “unruliness” (Turner 2014) matched the sense of disorder Buntline, Thompson, and Lippard associated with the Five Points. Every complaint about the dangers of the diseased and racialized urban underclass in these novels also serves as an implicit acknowledgement that these authors are exposing and turning the underprivileged people who represent the abject and the monstrous into serialized spectacle.²⁹ Distinguishing between poetry as a refined and respected literary form and prose as its debased but contagious cousin, the German American city mystery writer Ludwig von Reizenstein (himself an immigrant) maintained in his Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (1854– 1855): “Everywhere prose – which is epidemic in America – has invaded the halls of poetry” (2002: 18). Serialized mass literature is identified as a threat to the finer sensibilities here in the same way in which the lifestyles and entertainment culture of the (non-white) poor is feared to infect bourgeois notions of “respectable” culture.

Works Cited Anbinder, Tyler. 2001. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press. Buntline, Ned. 1848. Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life. New York: Bedford & Co. Cohen, Lara Langer. 2017. “The Depth of Astonishment: City Mysteries and the Antebellum Underground.” American Literary History 29(1): 1 – 25.

 In Lippard’s New York, the socialist Arthur Dermoyne dreams of the West as a safe haven for white artisan workers. On the expansionist and imperial dimensions of the city mystery novel and other popular genres, see Streeby 2002.  See Looby on the “antinomy of publicity and secrecy” (2015: 2), or the evocative connection between the exposure of secrets and the confounding seriality of the narrative, in Lippard’s Quaker City.

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Cohen, Matt, and Edlie L. Wong. 2014. Introduction. In: George Lippard. The Killers: A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia, 1850. Matt Cohen and Edlie L. Wong (eds.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1 – 41. D’Alessandro, Michael. 2017. “George Lippard’s ‘Theatre of Hell’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Working-Class Spectatorship in the Quaker City.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5(2): 205 – 237. Denning, Michael. 1998 (1987). Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. New York: Verso. Dickens, Charles. 2004 (1842). American Notes. Patricia Ingham (ed.). London: Penguin. Gans, Herbert J. 1996. “From ‘Underclass’ to ‘Undercaste’: Some Observations about the Future of the Post-Industrial Economy and Its Major Victims.” In: Enzo Mingione (ed.). Urban Poverty and the Underclass: A Reader. Oxford: Wiley. 141 – 152. Gessner, Ingrid. 2016. Yellow Fever Years: An Epidemiology of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Frankfurt: Lang. Greeson, Jennifer Rae. 2001. “The ‘Mysteries and Miseries’ of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” American Literature 73 (2): 277 – 309. Halttunen, Karen. 1982. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830 – 1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Helwig, Timothy. 2020. Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Herminghouse, Patricia. 2004. “The German Secrets of New Orleans.” German Studies Review 27(1): 1 – 16. Klotz, Sarah. 2012. “Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Contagious Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans.” Mississippi Quarterly 65(2): 231 – 260. Knight, Stephen. 2012. The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lhamon, W. T., Jr. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lippard, George. 1853. New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million. Cincinnati: H. M. Rulison. Looby, Christopher. 2015. “Lippard in Part(s): Seriality and Secrecy in The Quaker City.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 70(1): 1 – 35. Looby, Christopher. 1993. “George Thompson’s ‘Romance of the Real’: Transgression and Taboo in American Sensation Fiction.” American Literature 65(4): 651 – 672. Masten, April F. 2015. “Challenge Dancing in Antebellum America: Sporting Men, Vulgar Women, and Blacked-Up Boys.” Journal of Social History 48(3): 605 – 634. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1963. Challenge to Affluence. New York: Random House. Ostrowski, Carl. 2006. “Slavery, Labor Reform, and Intertextuality in Antebellum Print Culture: The Slave Narrative and the City-Mysteries Novel.” African American Review 40(3): 493 – 506. Peeples, Scott. 2014. “The City Mystery Novel.” In: J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person (eds.). The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 548 – 563. Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. 2017. Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Renner, Karen J. 2010. “Seduction, Prostitution, and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65(2): 166 – 191. Reynolds, David S. 2015. “Deformance, Performativity, Posthumanism: The Subversive Style and Radical Politics of George Lippard’s The Quaker City.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 70(1): 36 – 64. Stein, Daniel. 2014. “Race, Gender, Sex, Class, Nation: Serienpolitik zwischen Sehnsucht und Heimsuchung in Ludwig von Reizensteins Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (1854 – 1855).” In: Simone Sauer-Kretschmer and Christian A. Bachmann (eds.). Sehnsucht suchen? Amerikanische Topographien aus komparatistischer Perspektive. Berlin: Bachmann. 39 – 69. Stein, Daniel. 2016. “Transatlantic Politics as Serial Networks in the German-American City Mystery Novel, 1850 – 1855.” In: Erik Redling (ed.). Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks. Berlin: De Gruyter. 247 – 265. Stein, Daniel. 2017. “Serial Politics in Antebellum America: On the Cultural Work of the City-Mystery Genre.” In: Frank Kelleter (ed.). Media of Serial Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 53 – 73. Stein, Daniel. 2019. “Slavery as Racial Dis/order in Antebellum America: The Case of the City Mystery Novel.” In: Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele (eds.). Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s: Popular Culture – Serial Culture. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. 287 – 309. Stewart, David M. 2011. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Streeby, Shelley. 2002. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, George. 2002 (1849). City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston. In: David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman (eds.). Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 105 – 310. Turner, Mark W. 2014. “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age).” In: Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (eds.). Serialization in Popular Culture. London: Routledge. 11 – 32. Unger, Mary. 2009. “‘Dens of Iniquity and Holes of Wickedness’: George Lippard and the Queer City.” Journal of American Studies 43(2): 319 – 339. von Reizenstein, Baron Ludwig. 2000 (1854 – 1855). The Mysteries of New Orleans. Steven Rowan (trans. and ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiele, Lisanna. 2019. “Dead Man Walking: On the Physical and Geographical Manifestations of Sociopolitical Narratives in George Thompson’s City Crimes – or Life in New York and Boston.” In: Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele (eds.). Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s: Popular Culture – Serial Culture. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. 247 – 270.

Noel Allende Goitía

The Black Body as Embodied Sound: Musicking as Personal and Communal Agency against the Othering of the Lettered Gaze in Puerto Rico in the Early Twentieth Century Abstract: This chapter approaches the long history of narrative black profiling as a central part of the construction of a white creole national identity in Puerto Rico during the early decades of the twentieth century. First, the analysis of the home-grown literature will show how its discourse typified European characteristics using metaphors related to spiritual and mental attitudes and skills. Telling, describing, and explaining the presence of people from Africa or of African descent entailed, in contrast, a focus on their physicality, the presence of their “dangerous” bodies, intended to curtail their individual and collective agency. These views were recast in a new Puerto Rican identity ideology during the first decades of the twentieth century based on a gaze of power that projected the de-Africanization of the Island’s social culture in general, and its musical culture in particular, as a problem of bodily presence and embodied sound.

Introduction: Being as Lived Agency This chapter approaches the long history of narrative black profiling as a central part of the construction of a white creole [Criollo Blanco] national identity in Puerto Rico during the first decades of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, Africans and people of African descent in Puerto Rico had established themselves as a formidable bodily presence in all aspects of the island’s culture-making processes. In Puerto Rico’s lettered class views, the physicality of the racial imagination was not a metaphysical one, but rather a fact. For this class, telling, describing, and explaining the presence of people from Africa or the people of African descent always involved their physicality: the presence of their bodies. These ideas were not new. Nineteenth-century official documents and witness accounts described and exposed everyday life as a field of existential performance for African and African-descended people of color on the island. A chronicle of music making and public display of popular rejoicing by African and African-descent people is found in reports like those of the French https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-004

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botanist André-Pierre Ledru (1810); private letters of travelers and residents in the 1820s (Rigau Pérez 2013); informed accounts like Colonel George Flinter’s (1832); Edward Bliss Emerson, writing to his family in Massachusetts (2013 [1831– 1834]); a merchant from New York (Coggeshall 1858); and local authors and writers (Del Valle Atiles 1885; Brau 1972 [1956]; Alonso 2007 [1849]). The new generation of the lettered class inherited, from their immediate colonial past under Spanish rule, a set of race-based worldviews that assessed blacks by their physical presence and not by their culture-making agency. An example of these views is found in a complaint reported in a local newspaper in 1893. The complaint was explicit about the place and time of a bomba [drums] dance gathering in the capital city: “There is a non-stop sound of drumming and singing until advanced hours of the night” (LCPR 1893).¹ The assumed impropriety of the music-making activities was based on the venue and time of night, thus where and when the drummers and singers were performing, supposedly inappropriately. This kind of powerful gaze cast over the black body morphed from its being considered a mere presence to a carrier of a genetic malady. Four years into the new century, José Antonio Daubón (1840 – 1922) wrote a series of cuentos de costumbres [folktales or popular tales] describing life within the walled city of San Juan. Most of the stories relate to his childhood in the capital city. The importance of his writing lies in his vivid description of everyday life, the demographic diversity of its population, and the presentation of the daily matter-of-factness in which the people lived class, caste, and racial mores. Moreover, his narrative gaze profiles the bodily presence of black people, marking how that physicality fills the social space in ways frequently connoted by barbarity, particularly when he narrates the bodies in motion. Writing about the Saint Michel’s festivities, an important celebration for black people throughout the island, identified as the Congos Finos, in which they crowned the King and Queen of the Congos, he starts with a caveat. He says he will refer to the “negros de extrangis” [foreign blacks] and makes it clear that he “is not talking about the good and civilized people of color, born in our households” (Daubón 1904: 20). The celebration begins with a parade of the different Congo nations: the Nagobáas, the Mandingas, the Congos, and Carabalíes, among others. Daubón adds: The parade was accompanied by bizarre and unpleasant music, for those ears not used to the colonial sounds and harmonies. The music, played by two-meter-long drums and others of a more primitive construction, beaten by pure force of arms and closed fists, resounded

 The translations of quotations from the Spanish and French sources are my own.

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with an infernal crash of dozens of devilish Negroes gesticulating with fast-moving gestures. (1904: 26)

Daubón is describing a scene that was part of his childhood memories. He, as an observer, was not told about the event; he was there, present, observing. That said, we can continue to follow the racialized discourse intertwined in his narrative when he writes: The fandango was well under way, and the bombas’ [drums’] parchments were incessantly beaten. A rhythmic and monotone song responded to the principal singer in an incomprehensible language. Suddenly, a skinny Negro jumped into the circle, with sparkling eyes, and his face crossed by a grin of happiness, showing a perfect battery of teeth in his enormous mouth. That muscular man’s snake-like movements, leaps, and amazing contortions made everyone laugh. The way he moved excited the crowd; he twisted like a veritable chimpanzee, escaped from his native jungle. (1904: 28 – 29)

Of course, this kind of racialized narrative, by today’s standards, is a transparent, unapologetic one, and, for that reason, we have to remember that, like today’s private response to low-intensity racial slurs, the text would have been received with some smiles and discreet laughing of acquiescence. The quote uses the black body as an embodied metaphor: the body as a representation of equivalency (the body = the Chimpanzee = the jungle).² However, at the same time the narrative opens a window to the physicality of culture making as embodied humanly organized musical sound. Moreover, the quotes present the black body as the medium of personal agency and community making. By 1934 the body metaphor had been translated into a genetic metaphor. The accent of the discourse changed from the body as a medium of personal and collective agency to actually being as lived agency. Antonio Salvador Pedreira (1899 – 1939) coined one of the more iconic phrases of the identity debate. Referring to Puerto Rico’s demographic composition and, in particular, the Afro-Puerto Rican population, he formulated racial interaction as a “biological struggle”: “Found deep inside of our population’s complexion, and very quietly, there is a

 In Lakoff and Johnson’s view, Srini Narayanan discovered the sequential relation from “neural mechanism” to “bodily movements” to “logical inferences,” which I consider a useful theoretical framework for text mining, as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s idea of the usage of “body-based metaphors” in the “abstract domain” (1999: all quotes 42). They summarize these concepts by stating: “What disembodied realism (what is sometimes called “metaphysical” or “external” realism) misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it” (93, italics in original).

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biological struggle of antagonistic and conflicting forces. That biological struggle has curtailed our complete and definitive formation as People” (Pedreira 1987 [1934]: 32). This quote shows how, for Pedreira and his generation, the failure of a project of nation formation in Puerto Rico, under both Spanish and American colonial authority, was due to that “biological struggle” and its strains on processes of cultural construction and nation-building. Why a biological struggle? Pedreira wanted his generation to understand that the problem of the color line was not a metaphysical one but the embodied agency of being of the black population.

Soundscape and Musicking in the Flesh The black movement’s leadership at the dawn of the twentieth century claimed that the problem of the color line was central (Douglass 1881; Schomburg 1925; Du Bois 2007 [1903]). What I argue in this chapter is that the color line was made up of the bodies of millions of people who did not match what was considered at the time the right skin color. In Puerto Rico, the color line was marked by legal acts intended to control the black presence, and that presence was marked by the black individuals’ embodied soundscape. In 1906, the Municipal Assembly of the Capital City of San Juan passed the following ordinance: The Municipal Council of San Juan approved at its meeting last night the following ordinance: Article 1. It is expressly and strictly forbidden to play the instrument called “bomba” or a similar one, and equally to sing or dance with the music of the said instruments in squares, solitary places, or any other public space within the municipality. Article 2. The police are obliged to stop and arrest the promoters of these musical happenings, those that play the said “bombas” and also those that dance and sing to the beat of them […]. Article 3. The Court of Peace shall impose on the drummer or drummers, and those that sing and dance with such drums or similar instruments, the fine of one dollar and five cents each. Article 4. This ordinance will be enforced upon approval by the mayor and sent to the police for its enforcement. (Consejo Municipal de San Juan 1906)

The articles specifically prohibited a dance form and its sounds by targeting the physical presence of the black personae: the drummers, singers, and dancers. Furthermore, the ordinance targeted the promoters of the activity. This is important, for private or public gatherings with dancing to bombas, generally, were not impromptu events. They were planned community occurrences related to local or institutional celebrations.

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Since the late nineteenth century, festive and celebratory gatherings using bombas involved the city’s black population called collectively Congos. Three examples well illustrate this: 1) In 1858 the General Government announced in the Gaceta del Gobierno de Puerto Rico that during the Royal Celebrations public dances using bombas and rural music [bailes de Garabato] did not have to pay the regular city taxes (Gobierno de Puerto Rico 1858); 2) in 1870 in the house of Concepción Dueño, a dance with bombas took place in celebration of a traditional black festivity, the eve of Three Kings Day (Gobierno de Puerto Rico 1870); and 3) in 1893 a gathering of “gente de pueblo” [townspeople] in Don Félix Díaz’s residence included a dance with bombas as part of the New Year Eve festivities (LD 1894). The prohibition of dances with bombas did not go without opposition. An article signed only with the name Luis fleshed out the text of the Municipal Ordinance and interposed his impressions and memories of the Congos’ dances with bombas. Referring to the dances with bombas, Luis wrote: The celebration of dance parties with bombas was a parenthesis in the life of the Congo people, to allow them to reminiscence about their native land during this time of aguinaldo [holidays]. It was worth seeing the joy in the countenance and lustrous eyes of the dark-colored man, as he heard the rolling of the bombas. You could see the Conga’s sweaty face and the movements of her body, performing small steps, advancing or receding, turning on herself, while her partner circled, his face gleaming, showing only the two white dots of eyes wide open and the two rows of a complete and unbeatable denture. Those who pay homage to that old custom will no longer be able to gather in public. A municipal ordinance forbids it. Singing and dancing to the beat of the bombas are expressly and strictly forbidden. Also, it is expressly forbidden to play bombas or any kind of similar instruments. The promoters of such gatherings will be punished, too! How that could happen! The conditions have reversed. Then, the Congos used to sing to the beat of the bombas: “Leñia con el peonaje” [Down with the Foreman]. – And now the new ordinance punishes those that play the bombas, sing and dance with them. Singing and dancing in public with bombas is history. However, the gatherings to dance with bombas will have a different end. As long as people exist willing to play and dance, the dances with bombas will be performed. – LUIS. (LCPR 1906, italics in original)

Notice that the author of this opinion editorial, although he is critical of it and, in some way, even sarcastic about it, uses the same body-as-metaphor discourse. The dance form is an embodied manifestation of a humanly organized sound: bomba drumming includes the facial expressions, the movements of the body,

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the drumming, the singing, and the act of memory making (“to reminiscence about their native land”). Also, the discourse implies the function of dancing with bombas as a community-building aspect of the embodied sounds. Being as agency, existing as black bodies, implies a presence in the color line. Dancing to the beat of bombas, or “a similar instrument,” as the ordinance stated, was an acting out of the self that for the white creole needed to be, at the minimum, controlled or, at best, erased. As we have read above, Pedreira, at the beginning of the 1930s, was sounding the alarm about a genetic condition that for more than a century had been draining Puerto Rican’s nation-building potential. For the Puerto Rican lettered class, the color line was not an analogy or a metaphor, it was a bodily line and manifested in an embodied musical sound. The musical presence of Africans and the people of African descent represented a sickness in the island’s musical culture, according to these intellectuals. So, the way they wrote about black Puerto Ricans was impersonal; they just talked about the byproduct of their presence: rhythms, instruments, and body movements. Salvador Brau, around 1885, argued that the characteristics of Puerto Rican society were manifested through music and that its music was related to race, place, and notions of nationhood. He established what became the theoretical framework and discursive narrative of future generation of intellectuals about what constituted Puerto Rican music: [W]e will find all condensed in the güiro’s un-harmonic scrape, in the trepidation of the savage timbal [drum], in that screech of the clarinet, up in the high octave, in the smooth, soft harmonic whispering of the strings, which bring together that wide array of sounds, and over which, in intervals, the resounding brass, which tries in vain to add vigor to the ensemble. (Brau 1972: 88)

This trinitary notion of Puerto Rico’s cultural makeup has survived until today. The reader can observe the way in which Brau matched ethnicity with the qualia and quality of the instrument. The trinitary notion of race was the ideological paradigm developed by the white creoles stating that Puerto Rican identity was the result of the miscegenation (mestizaje) of three races: Spanish, Taíno (Native American), and African. Although the emphasis is put on the imagined notion that out of three equal parts resulted one people, the discursive construction laid out the superiority of the Spanish. That explains, even when talking about the clarinet, an instrument central to ensembles dedicated to playing popular music, the descriptive noun “screech,” connoting aesthetic unpleasantness in comparison with “the smooth, soft harmonic whispering of the [European] strings.” For Brau the danger resided in the actual use of what he described as “the peculiar quivering of the African bomba, accenting, in an obscene

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way, the cadence of the dance, adopting the contorted, grotesque, and lascivious dancing style of those people that dance in the streets during our carnival” (Brau 1972: 84). Notice how Brau equates the music with the black body, and the black body to notions of diminished moral qualities and out-of-control behavior. Brau’s ideas were inherited by a new generation of influential musicians. At the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, Braulio Dueño Colón and Fernando Callejo Ferrer echoed Brau’s words when they admonished Puerto Rico’s danza composers to relinquish what they called “the snobbisms of their times,”³ of using African-based melodic and rhythmic musical forms (Dueño Colón 1937 [1913]; Callejo Ferrer 2015 [1915]). Dueño Colón was explicit and direct in his line of argumentation: We won’t deny that there was a time when our danza degenerated due to the questionable artistic taste of some composers and band conductors when the African bomba was used, adding to the danza a grotesque and anti-aesthetic rhythm. Fortunately, the exquisite taste of artists like Tavárez, Ramos (Heraclio) and Campos was imposed, and the danza criolla [creole danza] recovered the characteristic smooth and graceful rhythm that it had always had. (1937 [1913]: 118)

For Dueño Colón, any level of perceived Africanization of the vernacular culture posed a danger to what was being considered the bona fide Puerto Rican identity. However, this Africanization was not merely perceived. These musicians could identify actual musical productions that they considered a concrete threat to “the characteristic smooth and graceful rhythm” of the danza and any other vernacular musical production. The pianist and music critic Trina Padilla de Sanz points to actual musical productions that showed what Dueño Colón called “the African bomba [with its] grotesque and anti-aesthetic rhythm”: The first danzas, by composers that have been unjustly forgotten, with danza names we barely remember, used rhythmic patterns that resembled the African bomba. Their names reinforced the resemblance, with titles like “Siña María la colorá,” “Menéndez boca é cobacha,” “El Merengazo,” “El Temporal.” (Padilla de Sanz 1938)

The titles make reference to a popular usage of the language known by members of the intellectual elite, like Trina Padilla de Sanz, as related to the Afro-Puerto Rican population of the island. Dueño Colón confirmed that practice when he

 Here both Fernando Callejo and Salvador Brau use the term “snobbism” as an equivalent to “fad.” They were trying to argue that the adoption of what today we might call “musical Africanisms” was just a frivolous, passing vogue not worthy of serious consideration by a self-respecting composer.

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added to the list titles like “!Ay! yo quiero comer mondongo,” “Rabo de Puerco,” and “La charrasca” (118 – 119). Being in the color line was not only a matter of inert subsistence, just being there. It was an active, culture-producing existence, moreover a matter of being physically in a place in real time and space.

The Place of Bodily Musicking For the local economic, social, political, and intellectual elite, the color line in Puerto Rico was a rhizome; it ran through every interstice of the social body. Dance gatherings with bombas happened everywhere because black people, their bodies and agency, were a ubiquitous presence in the quotidian life, from the “baile de bomba” in Doña Aniceta Vélez’s house, in the Playa de Ponce neighborhood (BMPR 1881), or the gatherings at some point in the public road between hacienda Estebanía and the city of Mayagüez (Gobierno de Puerto Rico 1883), to what was called in the press a “boisterous mob-like group of people playing to the sound of bombas and tin-cans in the streets” (LD 1902: 2) and the consumption and appropriation of dances with bombas by the elite as occurred in Mayagüez on 7 September 1909 (BMPR 1909b). This last case is particularly interesting because it shows the degree to which the dances with bombas were integrated into the island’s entertainment culture. An article by the correspondent in residence of the newspaper Boletín Mercantil de Puerto Rico reported the events as follows: Before a house at full capacity, the new installment of the comic review was presented last night, an operatic and theatrical pandemonium of the “Novedades” show under the title cited in this article’s headings. After all the available tickets for the theater’s balconies and the Paraiso [upper levels] were sold, the audience continued to fill the place. They wanted to see Madam Matrás dancing bomba and impersonating MINUTO. The event was complete madness! The audience was delirious, the musical show was rigorously authentic. The actors on stage impersonated local characters that we all recognized. It was as if every character in Mayagüez took a turn on the Novedades’ stage, and it is possible that the criticisms made were on point. It is unfortunate that the only thing properly impersonated was the gestures and the beating of the drums, but not the color of the skin. Madam Matrás and Mister Nadal were the only ones with painted black faces in the dance with bombas. The audience frantically applauded the complete show, its originality and fashionable staging. The portraying of the town’s character was exact: the father of the band-boy, Father Cedro. Miss Blanca impersonating MINUTO eclipsed all the other impersonations of the Italian artist.

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At the request of the audience all the actors were recalled on stage. Along with the actors Martínez Nadal, Juan Nadal and others also took a bow. The audience called for Mr. Campos; his music was performed, why was he not on stage? Tomorrow the second staging of “Mayagüez en Camisa” [Mayagüez Expose] will take place. (BMPR 1909b: 3)

Consumption and appropriation of cultural products can point to two kinds of human processes. First, they can show the level of embeddedness of a cultural practice. It is remarkable that a traveling troupe of artists, in a seasonal musical revue, staged the town’s personae dramatis and exposed them as Mayagüez’ trademarked characters, and among them, as a main event, they impersonated a black dance form and the presence of the drummers, singers, and dancers. Secondly, that kind of cultural appropriation showed how the black body was portrayed as a site of ridicule, a caricature. The article makes the point that it was not black people dancing before the bombas, but white Puerto Ricans wearing blackface make-up. The article does not make clear whether the drummers were whites or blacks. However, the reference to the blackface of Madam Matrás and Mr. Nadal is explicit.

Embodied Musicking in Times of Systemic Racial Conflict Systematic racism takes form first in language usage. It is there, in the spoken and written word, when thoughts are embodied in attitudinal gestures and habitual behavior. Therefore, a naturalized view of the black body as a tolerated presence implies a level of acquiescence which is nothing more than unrecognized complicity. Liberal white creoles in Puerto Rico shared racial views and mentality about Africans and people of African descent that normalized racist attitudes and comportments. In Puerto Rico racial discourse was employed and deployed in narratives in which vernacular, low-class vocabulary was intertwined and molded in a language of identity, of selfhood. Dance in general and dances with bombas in particular were objects of this linguistic usage of written and verbal wording of the collective subjectivity. The journalist Luis Bonafoux Quintero (1855 – 1918) was responsible for bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ ideological divide created by the change of colonial administration, from Spanish to American rule. In 1882 he published an opinion editorial titled Carnival in the Antilles. For him the salient feature of the Carnival in the region is the black body, and he employs a language devoid of nuance to portray an unambiguous view of their physiognomy:

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They come out through the portals, as if they were wild brutes coming out of their cages: Negroes [negros y negras] with wide-flat noses, big feet, speaking a sort of an incomprehensible gobbledygook, even to them. They fill the ranks of overgrown nappy-haired revelers, gesturing, laughing and shouting, turning the street into a preeminent place for pleasure. The person that dares to pass through the portal finds himself surrounded by a horde of long, sharp, and white teeth, gleaming against their jet-black skin, He needs to armor himself with heroic valor to pass through those real Quasimodos making horrific grimaces with their faces. (Bonafoux Quintero 1882 [1879]: 3)

The quote synthetizes Bonafoux Quintero’s general view that the only thing that the black body generates is pleasure. For him, like other members of the lettered class, dancing is the preferred pastime of the people of color on the islands; or, as he claims, “they are born with the right foot ready to dance, and when they die, the left foot stands equally ready” (7). As early as the first years of the new century, journalists published in the local newspapers their views about the dangerous influence of new Afro-diasporic dance forms for the American port city of New Orleans, in the state of Louisiana. Together with Bonafoux, these journalists repeated and promoted the idea that the cakewalk was “a bizarre dance, as some call it, in addition to being semi-savage, provocative, and immoral” (LD 1903: 4). In August 1905 the editor of the newspaper from Ponce, La Democracia, wrote and published a piece that stands as a good example of how these ideas took hold in the white creole imagination: When I talk about dancing, I have made clear my admirations for the two-steps. And, as it has been announced, the cake-walk is coming, too. This is a famous choreographic invention from the South of the United States, and, if the reports of the experts are right, is something like the dances with bombas, but with orchestral retentions. (LD 1905: 2)

The cognitive pairing of these two Afro-diasporic dance forms, the cake-walk and the two-steps, with dances using bombas establishes a cultural proximity between them. First, despite the editor’s claim to show “admiration” of early jazz dance forms, the comparison with dances using bombas solidifies an understanding and reinforces the racist view that African-based dance forms were problematic and dangerous for the moral health of society. Secondly, it opens the door to a more inclusive and comprehensive view of Afro-Puerto Rican musical practices and dancing traditions as part of the overall cultural production of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and in the rest of the American hemisphere. The pianist, literary critic and cultural researcher María Cadilla de Martínez (1884 – 1951) embraced the latter of these two perspectives. In 1945 she published

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a detailed description of dances performed using diverse types of bombas. The importance of her description resides in the fact that it contradicted an essentialized, reductionist view of Puerto Rican black culture, specifically black dances: During the times in which slavery was still legal, and even after that, in the sugar mills and the area around them, where the Negroes lived, they celebrated dances, especially Sundays and any other day of official festivities. Those dances would last all day and all through the night. They would dance the following dances: the mariyandá, with accentuated rhythms and jumps; the guateque, with boisterous, bustling, and joyful music. In the guateque dance, the couples jumped laughing, shouting, and gesticulating. The mariangola was a slow, rhythmic-cadenced dance with languid turns; the cariquinque was danced in circles and lines, with a couple in the center showing its moves; the candungo or candungué dance was vividly cheerful and sensual. From this last dance other dances have originated, and they are in fashion nowadays. Similar dances can be found in Argentina and Uruguay, and they are called candombe or candumbé; an aristocratic version of them is called tango. In Cuba, the rhumba is its relative, with a heavy accent on its sensuality and liveliness. The United States has other descendants: the Charleston, the Cakewalk, and the Shimany [Shim Sham]. (Cadilla de Martínez 1945: 45 – 46)

Cadilla de Martínez’s description is a testimony to the diversity of the African diasporic music culture proper, but also an existential argument in favor of its importance in the making of the Puerto Rican general culture. She helps us avoid the narrative trope of collapsing the Puerto Rican black body into the folkloristic discourse of a homogeneous dance practice. The “black-profiling” narratives of Cadilla de Martínez, as well as of Arthur “Arturo” Schomburg, refer to the black body as a complex, dynamic, and adaptative agent. In their view, the agency of the black body in the Americas matches the complex, dynamic, and adaptive existence in its places of origin.

Reasons against Bodily Musicking The physical presence of black Puerto Ricans and their embodiment of humanly organized sounds was a constant challenge to Puerto Rico’s intelligentsia. The production of a corpus of texts during the first decades of the twentieth century articulating race-based rationalizations about Afro-Puerto Ricans’ dancing and musicking is evidence of the ways white creoles and their enablers thought about what constituted Puerto Rico as motherland and what outward behavior should identify the people as Puerto Ricans. The measure of that way of thinking can be gauged by reading two quotes, the first by Fernando Callejo Ferrer (1915), introduced above, and the second by Erasto Arjona Siaca (1937). During the second decade of the century Callejo Ferrer argued that composers of the traditional

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and highly regarded music genre called danza were submitting to African impact, allowing them to be influenced by the snobbisms of their times, introducing into the rhythmic structure [of the danza] those of exotic [foreign] dance forms; and in doing so, stripping the danza of its inherent beautiful rhythmic cadence and substituting it with voluptuous African accents. (Callejo Ferrer 2015 [1915]: 158)

The quote alone is an echo of a recurrent theme within intellectuals’ discourse, in particular musicians’ voiced opinions. The condemning words against the “voluptuous African accents” were not a reference to abstract, metaphysical properties. His view was supported by the social and human context within which Callejo Ferrer lived. He offers a description of the context by saying that we have to remember that, in Puerto Rico, unfortunately, during the rule of the slavery system, the diverse tribes of Negroes, annually during Three Kings Day and Saint Michel festivities, held dances in San Juan’s old market [plaza]. The only instruments used by them to establish the beat and the rhythms of their grotesque dances and singing were percussion instruments called bombas and maracas. (Callejo Ferrer 2015 [1915]: 453)

Callejo Ferrer’s text was directed at a reader who understood the nuances and connotations of the language usage. The remark about “their grotesque dances and singing” was clearly a reference to their musical experience as lived, embodied musical sound, meaning that their bodily presence and their body, in itself, was a metaphor of savagery. The intellectual class and the musical intelligentsia reproduced in the new century a centuries-old idea that equated blackness with primitivisms and barbarism, and any lived, outwardly expressed manifestation of black personhood and identity was considered a direct threat to the creoles’ vision of nationhood. Twenty-two years later, Erasto Arjona Siaca followed up on Callejo Ferrer’s ideas in a book commemorating the life and work of Juan Moral Campos, elevated to the rank of canonical figure of the true Puerto Rican danza. In the midst of a heated identity debate, Arjona Siaca tried to add to the case for a white identity as the core of any idea of Puerto Ricanhood by bringing home the argument against the Africanization of Puerto Rico’s cultural makeup and musical culture: During the past decades, we have been witnessing a slow but steady degeneration of the artistic taste of the masses. Proof of this degeneration is the manifest predilection for everything Negroid. Under the pretense of a colorful but impure native flavor [impuro sabor criollo], it attempts to conceal and elevate what is just a mere African holler. (1937: 11)

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In his defense against the perceived attack on the danza and its chief creator, Morel Campos, Arjona Siaca used as an ideological scaffolding the notion that the Puerto Rican masses were infected by what he described as “the manifest predilection for everything Negroid.” He was not alone voicing that concern. In the same year an opinion editorial published in the weekly publication Puerto Rico Ilustrado was more explicit in naming the “negroid” musical elements or, as Callejo Ferrer called them, the “exotic [foreign] dance forms.” The Puerto Rico Ilustrado editor opened his op-ed by lamenting the danza’s loss of centrality: A wrongly understood concept of modernity advances the idea of eliminating the danza – our emblematic, beloved danza – from the dance halls. However, until recently, in the dance halls’ programs we could count the presence of a great variety of musical numbers: waltzes, danzas, pasodobles, danzón, fox. The danza was the dominant among them. However, a radical change has taken place: the privileged status of the danza in the dance halls has been replaced by the bolero and a diversity of Afro-Cuban dance forms of similar rhythm. (PRI 1937: 3)

I would like to point out to the reader that we are reading a discourse in which a full sublimation of the black body and the embodiment of its humanly produced sound has been completed. The presence of the black population is taken for granted and subsumed into a general abstract notion of Puerto Ricanness. The op-ed refers to a rupture in optics. Instead of talking about the black body, the discourse narrates the actions of the body as abstraction: the musical genres. As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the references found in newspapers place the body and presence of the Afro-Puerto Rican at the center of the narrative; time and place frame the body: 1) Quebradilla’s Municipal Assembly put in place an ordinance banning dancing with bombas in the streets and the town squares along with the usual revelers dressed in extravagant costumes, including men disguised as females (LCPR 1906: 1); 2) the private club “Elk” in Ponce included in its traditional gathering for “smokers” a dance with bombas performed by a drummer named Culebro (LD 1907: 1); and 3) in a promotion by the “Cine de Puerto Rico” [Puerto Rico Cinema] published in the Boletín Mercantil de Puerto Rico, a program of the upcoming viewings included a short film with the title “Baile de bomba en Cangrejos” [Bomba dancing in Cangrejos (Santurce)] (BMPR 1909b). However, social practices were so embedded in everyday life that for black folks in Puerto Rico, racial mores remained the same from one century to the next. In 1919 the American traveler Harry A. Franck, observing a regular retreta [evening band concert] in San Juan’s main town square, commented on the unspoken racial rule of comportment:

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While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader’s baton. All San Juan with the color-line drawn, that is; for whether it is true that the well-groomed insular police have secret orders to ask them to move on, or it is merely a time-honored custom, black citizens shun the central square on Sunday evenings, or at the most hang about the skirts. (Franck 1920: 259)

As a foreign observer, casting his gaze of power from the colonizer perspective, Franck saw current life and the open display of internalized social conventionalisms before him. Knowledgeable of the racial life in the south of the United States, as well as the racial imagination of his readers, he traced the racial profile of the social conduct in the newly acquired territory; he wants his readers to know that the color line is drawn, enforced by the police, and internalized by the black people. His writing shows an interest at the level of racial self-awareness and the internalization of what can be interpreted as a self-segregationist behavior. Even the Puerto Ricans serving in the armed forces merited his attention: “scores of American soldiers who know barely a word of English, yet who have a racial politeness” (Franck 1920: 260). Franck’s views were shared by white Puerto Ricans whose aspirations were no secret: Puerto Rican identity should reflect the demographic of its population, but its culture should show the dominance of the white-central-European culture. However, even the danza, the highest representation of the white-centralEuropean culture on the island and established as an identity marker by midtwentieth century, was questioned as a true representation of Puerto Rican identity. Again, it was Antonio Salvador Pedreira who drove the argument home: [The] danza is a reflection of our character the same way the foxtrot reflects the character of the American people. They are a strong, dynamic, and sports-loving people, who needed a choreographic exercise in consonance with their athletic constitution, their gymnastic capacity, and their healthy mountain climbing sport. Puerto Rico, on the other hand, a tropical and anemic country, found an outlet to its expression in a slow, circumspect dance formula that has an introduction we call paseos, which permits amiable conversation. In comparison with the foxtrot, our danza leads to a lazy conversation. (Pedreira 1987 [1934]: 136 – 137)

For Pedreira, the danza is more than a metaphor of the Puerto Rican character; as he further argues, it is “the more visible affirmation of what we are, [because] it lacks the artistic idealism, the refinement, and the highbrow character to be presented in a concert hall.” The contradiction in which Pedreira positions himself is remarkable. On the one hand, the danza lacks the capacity to represent the best of Puerto Ricans’ potential as people because it is already the signifier of what we lack: a full, uncontaminated white demographic. However, on the other hand, he uses the foxtrot, an African American musical form from the

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South of the United States, part of the jazz meta-genre, as a marker of the white American culture and political dominance as a nation. The ambivalent positioning of this generation had profound consequences. By 1940 a young music professor and conductor of the University of Puerto Rico’s choir, Augusto Alejandro Rodriguez Amador (1904 – 1993), articulated what came to be a public domain mentality. Using Pedreira’s views as steppingstones, he launched a more comprehensive synthesis between the aspirational ideas of nationhood and race with a prescriptive description of what constituted Puerto Rican music. First, he constructed a discourse that imposed on the black body an identity reflective of what the white Puerto Ricans thought made the people of African descent in Puerto Rico inferior: The life of our folklore springs, without a doubt, from Spain; our aguinaldos, cradle songs, seises, décimas, coplas, and other artistic expressions are all musical modes transplanted from Andalucía, Castilla, Galicia, Asturias. The unhappy Carib Indians, mercilessly killed during the sixteenth century, did not leave us even a drop of musical blood. The imported Negro abandoned the rhythm inherited from African tribes: voodoo, ñañiguismo, witchcraft, dance, bembé, so on and so forth; with startling ease the Negro embraced the Catholic faith. Escaping from his own reality, the Negro looked for refuge in a false sense of security; […] betrayed by himself, he stopped being a Negro. In that way the essence of our racial plenitude was wasted. Whatever is left of the Negro in our folklore is generously borrowed from our Cuban and Haitian brothers. (Rodríguez Amador 1976 [1952]: 78 – 79)

Rodríguez Amador realized that the black body could not be deleted from the Puerto Rican identity formula. Hence, he redefined and imposed a characterization over the black body and created out of nothing a black dramatis personae as flawed as possible and in inverse proportion to the self-image of civilized grandeur of the white European culture. Using this as a conceptual framework, he made a prescriptive definition of what and how a truly Puerto Rican music should be: In the future, the Puerto Rican music expression won’t be the echo of the Antilles’ dismal jungle roaring. Neither will be buried under the Indios’ sterile quietism or wrap around the rustic monotone beating of the drum drenched with the barren tears of our sorrow. No, never. Before anything else, we will learn how to be ourselves in an art of distinction, an art that will be intelligible to all humankind, an art that will redeem us from our colonial submission. The musical expression that I foresee for us will be pregnant with the essence of past musical times, from Palestrina to Stravinsky. That music of ours will be a universalistic intonation, created by the ascendant impetus of the Americas’ artistic plenitude with the colors of our local culture. That is the way led by Walter Pisto, from Harvard University, Heitor Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro, and Carlos Chávez in Mexico City. (Rodríguez Amador 1976 [1952]: 81)

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Rodríguez Amador codified in his discourse a notion of being Puerto Rican – the sense and sensibility of Puerto Ricanness – with a deep awareness of both genealogy and geography. He represents an archetype of the lettered class of the time. His ideas synthetized the vernacular identity ideology that matured during the first half of the twentieth century. However, the discourse on this narrative also reveals how social reality and the physical presence of the Afro-Puerto Ricans imposed themselves on the historical discourse in construction. The new narrative about Puerto Rican identity was based on a gaze of power that looked at and constructed the Africanization of the island’s social culture in general and the musical culture in particular as a problem of bodily presence and embodied sound.

Works Cited Alonso, Manuel A. 2007 (1849). El Gíbaro: Cuadro de costumbres de la isla de Puerto Rico: Edición crítica. San Juan: Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española. Arjona Siaca, E. 1937. Juan Morel Campos: Biografía. Ponce: Tipografía Morel Campos. Boletín mercantil de Puerto Rico (BMPR). 1881. “Camorra de dos hombres en baile de bomba.” 13 May 1881: 2. Boletín mercantil de Puerto Rico (BMPR). 1909a. “De Mayagüez: Estreno de ‘Mayagüez en Camisa.’” 2 Sept. 1909: 2. Boletín mercantil de Puerto Rico (BMPR). 1909b. “El cine en Puerto Rico.” 15 Sept. 1909: 3. Bonafoux Quintero, Luis. 1882 (1879). “El Carnaval en las Antillas.” Ultramarinos: 1 – 8. Brau, Salvador. 1972 (1956). “La danza puertorriqueña.” In: Salvador Brau. Ensayos: Disquisiciones sociológicas. Río Piedras: Editorial Edition. 77 – 91. Cadilla de Martínez, M. 1945. Hitos de la raza: Cuentos tradicionales y folklóricos. San Juan: Self-published. Callejo Ferrer, Fernando. 2015 (1915). Música y músicos puertorriqueños. San Juan: Ediciones Clara Luz. Coggeshall, George. 1858. Thirty-Six Voyages to Various Parts of the World, Made Between the Years 1799 and 1841. New York: The Author/Putnam. Consejo Municipal de San Juan. 1906. “Ordenanza prohibiendo el baile de bomba.” La Democracia 5 Jan. 1906: 5. Daubón, José Antonio. 1904. Cosas de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Tipografía la Correspondencia. Del Valle Atiles, Francisco. 1885. El campesino puertorriqueño: Sus condiciones físicas, intelectuales y morales, causas que las determinan y medios para mejorarlas. San Juan: Tipografía de José González Font. Douglass, Frederick. 1881. “The Color Line.” The North American Review 132: 567 – 577. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2007 (1903). The Souls of the Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dueño Colón, Braulio. 1937 (1913). “Estudio sobre la danza puertorriqueña.” Brújula. Emerson, Edward. B. 2013 (1831 – 1834). The Caribbean Journal and Letters, 1831 – 1834. San Juan: José G. Rigau-Pérez, edition and transcriptions of the manuscripts.

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Flinter, George D. 1832. Examen del estado actual de los esclavos de la isla de Puerto Rico bajo el gobierno español. New York: Imprenta Española del Redactor. Franck, Harry A. 1920. Roaming Through the West Indies. New York: The Century Co. Gobierno de Puerto Rico. 1858. “Programa de las funciones Reales durante los días 23, 24 y 25 de mayo de 1858.” Gaceta del Gobierno de Puerto Rico 11 May 1858: 2. Gobierno de Puerto Rico. 1870. “Escribanía pública.” Gaceta del Gobierno de Puerto Rico 3 Mar. 1870: 3. Gobierno de Puerto Rico. 1883. “Bailando bomba en el camino de la hacienda Estebanía hacia Mayagüez.” Gaceta del Gobierno de Puerto Rico 19 May 1883: 7. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (LCPR). 1893. “Queja de vecino sombre toques de bombas en la calle Norzagaray.” 3 Mar. 1893: 2. La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (LCPR). “La Bomba: el ayuntamiento la ha prohibido que se toque ese instrumento.” 8 Jan. 1906: 3. La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (LCPR). “Ha quedado en vigor la ordenanza.” 8 Feb. 1906: 1. La Democracia (LD). 1894. “Víspera de Año Nuevo.” 2 Jan. 1894: 3. La Democracia (LD). 1902. “Aqui parece que no hay autoridades.” 25 Sept. 1902: 2. La Democracia (LD). 1903. “La bomba y bailes de jazz.” 15 Aug. 1903: 4. La Democracia (LD). 1905. “El two-step, el Cake-walk y la bomba.” 24 Aug. 1905: 2. La Democracia (LD). 1907. “En la logia de los ‘Elk.’” 22 Apr. 1907: 1. Ledru, André-Pierre. 1810. Voyage aux Îles de Ténériffe, la Trinité, Saint-Thomas, Sainte-Croix et Porto-Ricco. Paris: Arthus Bertrand. Padilla de Sanz, Trina. 1938. “La Hija del caribe: La danza puertorriqueña y otras consideraciones.” El Mundo. 8 Jan. 1938. Pedreira, Antonio Salvador. 1987 (1934). Insularismo. Río Piedras: Editorial Edil. Puerto Rico Ilustrado (PRI). 1937. “Por los fueros de la música puertorriqueña: el abandono de la danza.” 30 Oct. 1937: 3. Rigau Pérez, José G. 2013. Puerto Rico en la conmoción de Hispanoamérica: Historia y cartas íntimas, 1820 – 1823. San Juan: Editorial Revés, 2013. Rodríguez Amador, Augusto Alejandro. 1976 (1952). “La música.” In: Vicente Géigel Polanco (ed.). Problemas de la cultura en Puerto Rico: Foro del Ateneo Puertorriqueño, 1940. Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria. 78 – 81. Schomburg, Arthur A. 1925. “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” Survey Graphic 1 Mar. 1925: 670 – 672.

Ludmila Martanovschi and Dana Mihăilescu

Representations of the “Aliens Within”: Romanian Jews and Roma in Radu Jude’s Cinema Abstract: This chapter focuses on the contemporary filmic representation of Jews and Roma – two categories of “aliens within” Romania who have been constructed over time as dangerous and diseased – in three movies by Radu Jude, an acclaimed filmmaker of the New Wave of Romanian cinema. The first, Aferim! (2015), focuses on the treatment of the Roma as slaves in nineteenth-century Wallachia, while the next two, The Dead Nation (2017) and I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), are Holocaust films reflecting on Romanians’ stigmatization of the Jews and the Roma during World War II. We show how Jude’s cinematic works lay bare kindred situations of Romanians’ complicity and perpetration before and during World War II as well as xenophobic and racist attitudes in contemporary Romania; as such, these films are significant media of social practice and intervention sustaining a Romanian public memory that must acknowledge the discrimination of its “racialized poor” groups, the Roma and the Jews.

Three recent movies by Radu Jude, an acclaimed filmmaker of the New Wave of Romanian cinema, underscore problematic aspects of Romania’s history concerning the discrimination of two minority groups that have been constructed over time as a diseased danger for the mainstream Romanian population. Our chapter will examine how Jude’s contemporary films represent Jews and Roma as the two prevalent categories of “aliens within” Romania during the course of history. The first, Aferim! (English: Bravo! 2015), focuses on the treatment of the Roma as slaves in nineteenth-century Wallachia, whereas the next two, The Dead Nation (2017) and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), are Holocaust films depicting the Romanians’ stigmatization of the Jews and the Roma during World War II. With Aferim! Jude departs from his contemporaries’ engagement with the post-Communist realities in Romania and embarks upon x-raying the mid1830s, a period during which many-layered injustice and violence against the lower classes, women, children, and minorities in the territory of Wallachia are clearly exposed. The film follows the search for a fugitive Roma man, who is apprehended, brought back, and mutilated for having committed adultery https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-005

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with his owner’s wife. Rampant prejudice against the ethnic other and suppression of Roma rights seem to complement the arbitrariness of all decisions coming from figures of authority. The other two more recent works address “the capacity of films to create, in their own historical contexts, stereotypical images of evil” via an emphasis on “‘self-referential’ aspects” (2015: 4), as theorized by Gerd Bayer and Oleksandr Kobrynskyy in their edited volume Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century.

Jews and Roma in Cinema Since medieval times, the Roma and the Jews have functioned as “quintessential strangers” or the “ancient scapegoats” of Europe, cast as “the other within” (Loshitzky 2003: 59). This followed from local people’s perception of their “remote and foreign Oriental origin, lack of attachment to ‘host’ countries, ‘nomadic character,’ ‘strange’ language, dress code, customs, strict dietary practice and taboos that voluntarily isolate them from the Gadjo and/or the Goy, as well as their darker complexion and ‘different’ physical features” (Loshitzky 2003: 59). During World War II, the Roma and the Jews alike were targeted as racially distinctive “aliens” with “foreign blood” threatening Aryan racial purity (Hancock 1991: 400 – 405). Both groups were victims of discrimination and genocide, yet the Roma have received less scholarly attention than the Jewish victims of Nazism (Loshitzky 2003: 59 – 62). Similarly, Holocaust films have only lately conjoined the experiences of the Jews and the Roma during World War II, the majority of them only offering passing notice to the Porajmos, the Roma Holocaust (Loshitzky 2003: 62). In this respect, the feature film of Romanian Jewish filmmaker living in France, Radu Mihăileanu, Train de vie/Train of Life (1998), is particularly noteworthy for opening the path to the cinematic representation of Holocaust victims other than Jews, especially the Roma. The movie is constructed as a comedy telling an imaginary World War II story about Jews from an Eastern European shtetl who organize a fake deportation by train in order to escape the Nazis and flee to their promised land, Palestine. To that end, they use Nazi uniforms and fellow Jews who speak German and pretend to be Nazi German soldiers guarding the deported Jews. Toward the end of their train journey, they meet a group of Roma people who are also organizing a fake deportation to their country of origin, India. Their encounter is characterized by embracing, dancing, celebration, and foregrounds their coalition and shared history of being persecuted by the Nazis. By the end of the film, most of them end up dying in a concentration camp after the Nazis catch them, while the survivors end up in the other’s home-

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land: the Roma in Palestine and the Jews in India. The film addresses this issue by presenting Jews and Roma as kindred minorities sharing a similar fate under the Nazi rule, thus opening up “the discourse on the victims of the Holocaust”; nonetheless, the film offers only a limited approach to this issue by continuing to “reserve the main role for the Jews” (Loshitzky 2003: 64). Even if the Roma’s Holocaust experience remains a by-story in the economy of Mihăileanu’s film, the movie significantly uses “comedic inversion” as a means to parody “the typical closure of the Hollywood Holocaust narrative, and Schindler’s List in particular, whose teleology is embedded in the Zionist perception of the Holocaust which views the establishment of the State of Israel as its secular redemption” (Loshitzky 2003: 63). We argue that Jude’s three movies continue and extend Mihăileanu’s emerging openness for the cinematic representation of Jews and Roma as strangers and “aliens within” Romania before, during, and beyond World War II. Our chapter will examine the strategies used by Jude in each of his films to raise historical awareness of Romania’s perpetrator past by highlighting the vilification of Jews and Roma in past and present Romania. Building on and expanding Diana Popescu’s insights about The Dead Nation from her 2018 Humanities journal article, our analysis will show how Jude’s cinema represents an important form of social practice and intervention meant to activate Romania’s public memory of the discrimination of its “racialized poor” groups, the Roma and the Jews. In that, our chapter supports Stein, Waegner, de Laforcade, and Laws’s claim that films and their industry may have the power “to intervene in public perceptions of historical and contemporary migration” (2020: 7).

Treatment of the Roma in Aferim! (2015) Set in Wallachia of 1835, the film presents a Romanian territory that had recently known a series of reforms initiated by the Imperial Russian authorities, known as the Organic Regulation.¹ Despite the ideals of this law, it failed to improve rural life substantially. Furthermore, the Organic Regulation did not help the Roma population, even if it was supposed to bring about significant progress to the Romanian provinces in which it was enforced: “Its clauses dealing with Gypsies better defined their status and strengthened their owners’ control over them” (Crowe 1991: 65). As a result, slavery was not abolished at the time, de-

 Between 1829 and 1834 Russian governor Paul Kiseleff was responsible for the enforcement of the legislation in the two Romanian Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia.

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spite the fact that solutions for the enslaved Roma were on the agenda. Emancipation arrived during the next decade, the 1840s, both in Wallachia and Moldavia. In an interview, Jude reflects on the theme of Roma slavery that appears in Aferim!: “Of course one of the objectives of the film was to bring forth this theme rarely discussed in the public space” (Popovici and Ernu 2015). The film captures the viewers’ attention and invites reflection not only on the racism of nineteenthcentury Romanian Principalities, but also on that of today. As a matter of fact, revisiting the past in order to see how it has left traces in the present is one of the impulses at the heart of the cinematic journey Jude proposes. In one of the earliest essays on Aferim!, Veronica Lazăr and Andrei Gorzo characterize it as “a film that describes such a brutal and unjust society” (2019: 306), the critics demonstrating that the violence and exploitation depicted in the film sustain each other and make the society that practices them appear “primitive and grotesque” (304). Our purpose here is to investigate further the various forms the Romanian stigmatization of the Roma in the nineteenth century takes, maintaining that Jude’s film confronts collective trauma and urges its viewers to undertake self-scrutiny. Aferim!’s script was put together by Jude himself and Florin Lăzărescu, with support from Constanța Vintilă-Ghițulescu as historical consultant, relying on written sources such as literary works, historical accounts, legal documents, and letters. The film script is not afraid to problematize and expose its own constructedness, aiming at, as Jude phrases it, “questioning the very notion of ‘the authentic’” (Popovici and Ernu 2015). Despite its active engagement with preconceived ideas about what a filmic representation of the past should be, the final product is easy to follow, emerging as accessible to mass audiences, despite its being black-and-white. This accessibility is due to its being structured as a road movie and to offering a linear narrative “that passes from one situation to the other without any doubling back or recurring side characters” (Weissberg 2015). Furthermore, viewers of all ages and backgrounds can find the genre familiar and enjoyable, the film being considered an Eastern European western.² Some members of the audience could find themselves carried away by its action and humor, even if the director clearly forces the genre to serve his own purposes, which include the examination of a society whose atrocious principles have seeped through into subsequent centuries.

 This film received the prestigious Silver Bear for Best Director at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival.

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From the very beginning of the film, the main character, constable Costandin, who is employed by boyar Iordache Cîndescu, calls the Roma people “crows,” a derogatory term often used at the time and persisting today. While doing his duty, that is searching for fugitive slave Carfin Pandoleon, the constable uses both physical and verbal brutality with no qualms. From time to time he also adds a personal touch to the contempt the laws express toward the Roma minority, one example appearing in the first quarter of the film. When trying to extract information from a group of enslaved Roma attached to a monastery, Costandin promises a monetary reward: “I’ll give you a silver coin.”³ But in the end he does not keep his promise and fails to pay his informant anything, even if the latter does reveal useful clues, disclosing the fact that Carfin might have found refuge and greater freedom with a band of gold panners. At the end of the brief scene (8.00 – 8.28), the service that enables the constable to move on to the next stage of his search remains unpaid. The choice of setting is significant here as well, since the monastic imagery, consisting of crosses, icons, candles, and monastic attire, inspires Christian piety both in the constable and the viewers. At the same time the expectations it arouses with regard to the way Christians should treat their fellowmen are thwarted. As a matter of fact, both the searchers and the monks are equally vicious in the way they talk to and about the Roma in their proximity. During the encounter with the gold panners, the use of violence toward a man who runs away in fear and Costandin’s threats for the entire gathering that killings will follow if the group hides the truth shows again the constable’s approach to the mission at hand. The Roma spokesman explains that Carfin only passed through their area at some point and even bribes the constable to avoid further trouble. Not surprisingly, Costandin is proud of the outcome: “this is how you scare the crows, if you are a man” (15.30 – 15.33). Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the situation is the constable’s being so convinced of the righteousness of his behavior that he attempts to pass it on to his son, whom he has taken along on his search for the escaped slave. Physical and verbal abuse of the disadvantaged as a component intrinsic to one’s masculinity is emblematic for the era described, the film thus commenting on the intersectionality of the prejudices based on race, class, and gender in the nineteenth century. There are strong suggestions in the film that the discriminatory mindset exposed on screen will be perpetuated to the following generations since there are no visible forces to check or oppose it.

 Please note that the English version of all the quotes from Radu Jude’s Aferim! comes from the subtitles provided by the DVD.

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On the contrary, various segments of the society reinforce and justify the prevalent racist mentality. One priest whom the constable and his son meet gives an overview of the origins of the Roma, elicits from his interlocutors all the (offensive) names usually used for this minority, and embarks on a tirade that includes a conglomerate of ethnic stereotypes. His speech illustrates the vilification of the Jewish and Roma minorities at its most intense. The inhumanity expressed in the pronouncement that “Each nation has its own purpose. The Jews, to cheat. […] Gypsies get many a beating! Gypsies must be slaves” (21.40 – 22.25) is supposed to be crystal clear to all viewers. The emancipation of the enslaved Roma that came several years later confirms the fact that such convictions were unfounded and irrational, implying that current prejudices against the Roma minority are problematic, representing a kind of legacy that aligns contemporaneity with the repugnant and bigoted character who utters the rant in the film and in an altogether outdated world is guilty of disturbing crimes. In the scene in which Carfin is apprehended, reiteration of violence toward the Roma receives a more extensive and detailed filmic treatment. Having hidden in his new masters’ attic and having been discovered, the slave attempts to escape. Being strong and determined, he springs forward and battles his way out with the fierceness of a man fighting for his life, but he is defeated since his captors make use of firearms. This is one of the few scenes in which Carfin can affirm his love for life and thirst for freedom visually. In the commotion created, the attackers injure young and old, male and female, slave and free man alike, brutality being once again their modus operandi. Soon the search party starts the journey back. The adults are joined by a boy, Țintiric, who had also been hiding in the same household, and who becomes a sellable asset in the constable’s eyes. This detail exposes the extent to which 1830s society’s despicability went. The enslaved child testifies to the reasons why he fled from his owner. He complains about being badly beaten and mentions another trauma as well: “He stabbed my brother to death when he was drunk” (41.22– 41.35), disclosing the cruel treatment and multiple abuses even very young Roma suffered in that era. In connection to this, Lazăr and Gorzo insist that the inclusion of a Roma child points to “the savage exploitation of slaves from a very young age and the absolute innocence of those exploited” (2019: 308). Țintiric’s fate may be tragic, but the director’s capacity to present nineteenth-century realities in a palatable way prompts him to create a highly ironic situation in which, once the group of four has reached a fair, which allows the filmmaker to paint another fresco of the 1830s society, the Roma child advertises himself as merchandise through a plaintive cry, “Buy me, honorable lords! I am a hard-working obedient slave”

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(53.29 – 53.45). The poor boy wishes to be sold fast rather than to be returned to his former owner, having been convinced by the constable that they were going to find a better master for him. However, the picture of the enslaved persons being sold in a public space and of prices being tagged onto human beings is as accusatory toward the context that allowed such practices as any similar depiction in an American film. On the way to the boyar’s place, Carfin is allowed to speak. He even dares to initiate a sort of defense in which he shares an autobiographical account, mentioning his former masters and his former responsibilities. At some point he claims to be a well-travelled man, as he says that he has seen the world, having visited cities such as Paris, Leipzig, and Vienna (48.19 – 48.24). The contact with Western civilization seems to have been a formative experience for him, and he even imparts travel impressions to his listeners. In connection to the recent accusations of stealing money before running away, Carfin professes his innocence. Moreover, in defending himself, he starts building a case against his owner’s wife, declaring that the boyar lady had initiated a liaison that brought about his misfortune. He explains that once the boyar discovered his wife’s infidelity, he threatened to kill him, and so he had to save himself: “I ran for my life” (44.30 – 44.32). Actually he hopes to persuade the constable to free him before reaching their destination and his imminent life-threatening punishment. This hope seems to rely on a shared misogyny between the speaker and his interlocutor as well as on a sense of brotherhood between the oppressed, but in the end it does not work in his favor. As a public officer, Costandin chooses not to question the hierarchy of the times and decides to turn the fugitive in, thus complying with his own responsibilities and receiving his reward (fig. 4.1). Closer to home, the constable discloses further insights, such as the one according to which the Roma population is treated much better in the present: “You have a good life nowadays” (1.16.02– 1.16.04). At the same time, he almost laments this fact, mentioning nostalgically that gypsies used to be shot at arbitrarily in a previous regime. Once more he is unaware of the injustice and cruelty still practiced in his country. The film seems to warn viewers not to be trapped in the character’s ignorant and heartless position. Despite repeated pleadings from the apprehended fugitive whose fear and desire to cling to life become more and more evident, Costandin does not find an alternative for his prisoner. Intent on doing his duty and receiving his pay, he presses forward. However, he does promise that he will try to make the enslaved man’s punishment easier, by talking to Cîndescu and his wife. In other words, he believes he can influence the boyar, the center of power in the community depicted, even if he cannot evade, reform, or upturn the order of his time. And the constable does try to mitigate the offence. He even mentions qualities such as the enslaved man’s dili-

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Fig. 4.1.: Radu Jude, Aferim! (49.30) In this scene depicting the horse ride back to his owner, Carfin shares his memories of Western cities with his two captors and fellow-slave, Țintiric. His story elevates him above his current circumstances, even if just temporarily.

gence, risking his own position, while advice that the man should not be punished on site but taken to higher authorities incites physical blows from the boyar. Unfortunately, at the end of the film, the constable’s interference does not save the enslaved man from harrowing castigation. Viewers witness a savage punishment that Carfin cannot escape. Showing the procedure of castration, which is inflicted by the boyar himself with the aid of other enslaved persons, does not take away from the dignity of the victim but rather exposes the inhumanity of the racist practices that existed and that were not questioned or condemned in the first half of the nineteenth century. The director’s choice may also lead viewers to consider the roots of the discriminatory attitudes that have survived into contemporaneity. While some of the physical abuse has been outlawed as a way of expressing racism, verbal abuse has constantly metamorphosed into subtler, yet all-pervasive language. The negative connotations of the Romanian word for gypsy, i. e., “țigan,” have turned it into a term that characterizes any person who does not adhere to mainstream rules and values (Crowe 1991: 73).

Radu Jude’s Holocaust Films: The Dead Nation (2017) and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) Two of Radu Jude’s films, The Dead Nation (2017) and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), fall into the category of Holocaust films

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and re-envisage Romanians’ stigmatization of the Jews and the Roma during World War II. In our analysis of the specific forms of stigmatization in the two movies, we build upon Gerd Bayer and Oleksandr Kobrynskyy’s relevant claim, as quoted above, that contemporary Holocaust cinema is characterized by a “growing interest in the cultural repercussions of the Holocaust” and an emphasis on “self-referential aspects” addressing “the capacity of films to create, in their own historical contexts, stereotypical images of evil” (2015: 4). We will show how Jude’s films foreground this in two different directions. In the black-andwhite experimental documentary Dead Nation, he draws viewers’ attention to the way mainstream Romanians and Jews were dealing with one another during the Holocaust. In the feature film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, the filmmaker’s attention turns to the theme of how the Romanian community in contemporary times is dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust. Dead Nation addresses Romania’s public memory of discrimination, persecution, and murder of its Jewish population during the war by overlaying three types of discourses bringing together “fragments of parallel lives” (the film’s subtitle): a selection of daily entries from the wartime diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish physician from Bucharest who became the secretary general and, later, director of the documentary libraries and archives of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania from 1945 to 1946; photos taken at the time by Costică Acsinte, a local photographer from Slobozia who in the early 1930s started a private photo studio called “Splendid”; radio footage from World War II Romania including fascist political speeches and propaganda songs retrieved from the National Archives in Bucharest. In this movie, Jude’s technique of juxtaposing two or more conflicting viewpoints especially signals how the time’s photographs and soundscapes in Romania were fabricated performances that excluded the Jewish and Roma experiences and the violence perpetrated against them from the narration of the pogroms, deportations, property expropriations, and job losses in the name of “Romanianization.” Jude represents the reality of the terrible unfolding fate of Jews by interspersing such photos and soundscapes with fifty spoken entries from Emil Dorian’s wartime diary covering the years 1937 to 1944, and five entries from his follow-up diary, three entries from 1945 and two entries from 1946 included in his early postwar diary, Cărţile au rămas neterminate: Jurnal 1945 – 1948, published in Romania in 2006. Most likely, Jude chose Dorian’s diary because it covered the deterioration of Romanian Jews’ situation in real time, and thereby included the immediate reactions of someone who was living with and was affected by these decisions. Through these diary entries, Jude was able to allow the audience’s immersion in the historical reality of World War II and confront them with the strong emotions, fears, and anxieties of Ro-

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manian Jews like Dorian, in contrast to the detached, indifferent, unconcerned outlook of Romanians from the photos and the religious, patriotic, and humane depictions of Romanians’ actions from the radio newsreels. The publication history of Dorian’s diary must have also counted for Jude’s decision to include it in his film. It was initially published by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1982 in English translation as The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary 1937 – 1944, because of the censorship policies of Romania’s Communist leaders. The same diary was published in Romanian by the Jewish publisher Hasefer only after the collapse of the Communist regime, in 1996, while its follow-up for the years 1945 – 1958 was only published in 2006 by Compania publishers. These publication details alone stand proof to how Romania has been a latecomer in the process of a lucid and honest remembering of its implication in World War II discriminations, deportations, and killings. This happened as a result of the fact that, during Communist times in Romania, talking about the Holocaust and the country’s responsibility during World War II was taboo, or at best reduced to signaling the extermination of Jews from the Hungarian-occupied territory of Transylvania. After the fall of Communism at the end of 1989, official recognition of Romania’s involvement in World War II deportations and killings came extremely late, in November 2004, in the wake of negationist discourses involving the integral denial, deflective negation, and trivialization of the Holocaust through comparison (Shafir 2002). This happened after then president Ion Iliescu at long last conceded to establishing the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, a forum led by experts and scholars under the guidance of the famous writer and survivor Elie Wiesel. The final report of the commission was released in the fall of 2004, and it represented the first officially sanctioned source to acknowledge the direct implication of general Ion Antonescu’s regime in the perpetration of World War II atrocities and, by extension, Romanian responsibility for Holocaust deportations and killings. Dorian’s entries featured in the film serve as a counterpoint to the happy, bucolic, carefree, and patriotic lure of Romania’s wartime photos and radio reels. The chosen diary entries chronologically signal the major actions, laws and decisions of Romanian officials that gradually deprived Romanian Jews of most of their rights and marked them as despicable and undesirable “aliens within.” The first entry featured in the film is none other than the inaugurating entry from Dorian’s published diary.⁴ This 30 December 1937 entry deplores the recent political victory of a new government led by Octavian Goga, a well-known nation-

 All the quotes from Radu Jude’s Holocaust films used in this subchapter derive from our translation of the original Romanian language version.

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alist, antisemitic poet, and politician and leader of the National Christian party whose government, in force from 28 December 1937 until 2 February 1938, was based on the belief in “the dominance of the Romanian race” and was grossly antisemitic. Goga’s government took up measures against the Jews pointing in three main directions: Romanianization; the elimination of Jews from Romania’s intellectual life, in particular from press institutions; and the revocation of their citizenship rights (Ancel 2008: 36 – 40). In response to the rise of this antisemitic government, Dorian bluntly and bitterly wondered: “What will happen now to all of us Jews? Will the collapse be total? The majority foresees anti-Jewish measures directly patterned on the ones adopted in Germany after the Hitlerist takeover. […] The press will be nationalized and the Jewish journalists out of jobs. […] There is talk of dismissal, of making survival impossible, of deportation, of concentration camps!” (Dorian 1982: 4; Jude 2017: 3.00 – 5.00). Most of the subsequent diary entries chosen for the film map the evolution of the policy of Romanianization as an increasingly threatening and dismissive force depriving Jews of their rights, goods, jobs, and any form of life security little by little. The Romanian equivalent of Nazi Aryanization, Romanianization was an antisemitic policy of Romania implemented between 1940 and 1944 that moved toward the confiscation of foreign-owned, particularly Jewishowned, properties and companies and their redistribution to ethnic Romanian citizens (the Romanianization of property and businesses). On the other hand, it entailed the replacement of Jewish (and foreign) employees by ethnic Romanian employees (the Romanianization of employment based on the 12 November 1940 Decree Law no. 3825 for the Romanianization of Private Companies’ Personnel) (Ionescu 2015: 37– 45). Even if there were a few successful cases of restitution of illegally confiscated Jewish properties from 1940 to 1944, and some 10 % of the court cases from 1940 – 1944 decided in favor of restitution of “expropriated” Jewish properties (Ionescu 2020: 45 – 62), Romanianization hit hard on the Jewish population of Romania by stripping most of them of property and business ownership as well as of their jobs. Dorian’s initial entries express the early forms of Romanianization before it became a policy; he does that by focusing on the events he witnessed first-hand in his profession as a physician, already noting in the 14 January 1938 entry that “I have been dismissed from my position with the state medical services, because I am a Jew” (Dorian 1982: 13). In the 25 January 1938 entry, he further recounts how at Bucharest’s “Filaret” tuberculosis hospital, the only Jewish patient had faced dismissal from this hospital (Jude 2017: 07.20 – 08.20) after a petition of the “Gentile patients, at the suggestion of a former clerk of the newspaper Universul,” being called by the slur the “tubercular kike” to which the physician did not succumb for the moment, acting “with dignity.” Meanwhile a decree-law from 22 January 1938 was imple-

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mented. It asked for the reevaluation of Jews’ rights to citizenship imposing criteria for Jews from the Old Kingdom, like Dorian, to be met within twenty days (Ancel 2008: 42– 46), criteria that would strip many of the Romanian Jews of their Romanian citizenship (Dorian 1982: 15; Jude 2017: 07.20 – 08.20). In his 2 January 1939 entry, Dorian further notes how the patriarch explained the disastrous ethnic situation of Romania by making reference to the medical profession where “there are over forty-six hundred non-Romanian doctors in Romania as against forty-two hundred Gentile Romanian doctors.” Given this situation, the authorities decided to “reestablish an ethnic balance, one which is acceptable to nationalist sensibility and which is doubtless necessary for the people’s health.” The authorities’ solution is that “there will be no new Jewish doctors, for non-Gentile students are no longer accepted by medical schools” (Dorian 1982: 54– 55; Jude 2017: 14.00). In the 30 June 1940 entry, we learn how Jewish medical students were prevented from taking their final exams by not being allowed to enter the university building (Dorian 1982: 101). The 1 August 1940 entry adds a personal blow for Dorian himself – how the Romanian Credit Bank where he had served as a doctor for ten years dismissed him “on the grounds of its nationalist reorganization,” leaving him henceforth without a “steady income” (Dorian 1982: 110; Jude 2017: 23.00 – 23.15). The 30 September 1940 entry foregrounds how personal gain and thirst for power determined many fellow Romanians’ attitudes toward their Jewish peers, as applied to his medical profession. In this respect, in its general assembly from 29 September 1940, “the Medical Association asked for the expulsion of all Jewish physicians” that henceforth can only treat “Jewish patients, not Gentiles” (Dorian 1982: 123; Jude 2017: 25.40 – 26.05). The 28 March 1941 diary entry broadens the scope of interest from the more familiar one with regard to employment to all the Romanian Jews whose urban properties were to be confiscated by the state under the Romanianization decree from 28 March 1941. This law for the expropriation of Jews’ urban properties was not presented as confiscation but as a means for redistribution of the said properties to various high professional, elite categories representing the Romanian national ethnic state (Ancel 2008: 153 – 154). Significantly, Dorian notes the unfairness of such expropriation, as these urban holdings were meant to be given to high-profile gentile Romanians not out of real necessity, but to serve nationalist purposes: “the specifics as to how the real estate will be distributed among Gentile lawyers, clerks, doctors, and military personnel, and in particular the rationale for this legislation – which invokes not economic and social need, but Christianity and nationalism – are hopelessly sad and unbelievably absurd” (Dorian 1982: 152; Jude 2017: 34.20 – 35.12). In a 19 August 1942 entry, Dorian continues to deplore the unrest caused by the National Center for Romanianization

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(Centrul Naţional de Românizare or CNR)’s eviction of Jews from their apartments that resulted in a high number of gentile Romanians moving to the center where the Jews’ dwellings were located, and Jews’ moving to the outskirts where they became tenants for the gentiles who now demanded “exorbitant rents” (Dorian 1982: 222; Jude 2017: 55.53 – 56.40). Such actions worked together to cause the economic downfall of Jews and the pauperization of Romanian Jews, particularly those that had been well-off (Ancel 2008: 142– 174). By including all these entries, Jude’s film shows how Romanianization invented “new categories of identity based on national [ethnic] origins” that stripped Jews of their valuables as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” to use the concepts employed by Geoffroy de Laforcade in connection with the impact of immigrant laws on migrants’ identity (2020: 277). Jude also includes some of Dorian’s entries recording his own personal numbness and despair. Most significant is the 13 August 1941 entry in which Dorian confesses that he is “appalled at my inability to cope with economic problems,” his life seeming “wilted, senseless, and without purpose” (Dorian 1982: 167; Jude 2017: 41.40 – 42.00). The entry also highlights Dorian’s emotional weight of growing despair, behavioral patterns, and on-the-spot reactions to acceleratingly discriminatory policies. For the film, as we have pinpointed above, “Jude selected those notes [from Dorian’s diary] which illustrate the unfolding of anti-Jewish measures culminating in episodes of extreme cruelty and torture” (Popescu 2018: 7). Apart from the Romanianization case we have foregrounded above, these entries also mark the terrible events of the Bucharest pogrom from 21 to 23 January 1941, in which over 100 Jews were killed and many of their households and businesses destroyed and about which Dorian notes that women were among “the criminal monsters” (24 January 1941 and 2 February entries; see Dorian 1982: 140; Jude 2017: 31.33 – 34.15); the Iaşi pogrom from 29 June to 6 July 1941, in which over 13,000 Jews were killed, many thousands of them being forced on cattle cars toward Călăraşi and Podu Iloaiei, most of them dying of thirst and asphyxiation during transportation (11 August 1941 entry); the forced labor of Bucharest’s Jews to clear away the snow in the harsh winter of 1942 (25 January 1942 and 10 January 1943 entries); the deplorable fate of the Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia who were deported to Transnistria starting with late summer 1941 (16 August 1941, 14 November 1941, 25 January 1942 entries); the politicized war criminal trials from 1945 and 1946 which began to show the dark side of the new Communist leaders that had taken hold of Romania and the new rise of antisemitism (10 April 1945, 3 June 1945, 28 February 1946 and 2 June 1946 entries). The 28 February 1946 entry, for instance, decries some of the Marxist Communists’ speeches denying that religious discrimination ever existed in Romania and presenting antisemitism as a result of the Jews’ attempts to take hold of Ro-

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mania’s commerce (Dorian 1983: 113; Jude 2017: 1.19.00 – 1.20.00). In light of such new dominant ideas, the last entry from 2 June 1946 notes how the two Antonescu leaders of Romania, Ion Antonescu and Mihai Antonescu, had been executed alongside the Transnistria governors Piki Vasiliu and Gheorghe Alexianu, while the other three Romanian perpetrators that had been condemned to death, Constantin Pantazi, Eugen Cristescu, and Radu Lecca, had their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The ironic way Dorian continues after giving these hard facts bespeaks the emergent Communist approach to the Holocaust, consisting in downplaying the scale of ethnic genocide and discrimination and only emphasizing the Communists’ political agenda: “I think this sentence closes for good the maximum amount of sanctioning for war crimes trials. It is too late, the Romanian people are too humane, etc. Some other condemnations will follow, to everyone’s indifference. Then elections will follow. And we’ll continue to rebuild the country and reeducate the people” (Dorian 2006: 146; Jude 2017: 1.20.10 – 1.20.50). Dorian’s voiceover is superseded by a pioneer children’s song praising Communism (Jude 2017: 1.20.50 – 1.21.40). As such, Dorian’s diary entries suggest to the audience the complexity of the Jewish situation in Romania during World War II, in which the region meant different types of abuses and discriminations. This happened because Marshal Ion Antonescu, who ruled Romania during World War II, implemented a dual policy towards Romania’s Jews, based on region. Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina, disputed regions that Romania wanted to populate while getting rid of local ethnic groups that were occupied by the Soviet Union from June 1940 to July 1941, were subjected to openly violent antisemitic measures and laws, and Jews were deported to Transnistria. Jews who lived in the Old Kingdom (i. e., the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia that made up the territory covered by the first independent Romanian nationstate established in 1859 under Alexandru Ioan Cuza and proclaimed as the Kingdom of Romania in 1881 under King Carol I) were not usually deported. Discrimination of the latter tended to be economic, legal, and administrative, such as the seizure of property, exclusion from public and private employment, forced labor for men (Ionescu 2015: 18 – 24). Dorian briefly points to such differences, on mentioning, for instance, the more drastic consequences for Jews deported to Transnistria than those of the Old Kingdom like himself (14 November 1941 and 10 December 1941 entries – Jude 2017: 46.00 – 48.00; 25 January 1942 entry – Jude 2017: 50.00 – 50.45). Jude juxtaposes these entries with Acsinte’s photos of the same period that excluded the experiences of discrimination and violence rendered by Dorian. Acsinte’s photos focus on everyday life fragments for Romanian women, men, and children as examples of “parallel lives” (the film’s subtitle). These people are usually dressed in folk costumes and celebrate typical Romanian traditions

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and holidays, most often feasting together with food and drink, or portrayed alongside their animals. The photos also feature a large number of the men being armed and in military uniform while others hold an issue of the main Romanian newspaper Universul filled with antisemitic propaganda. All of them are posing proudly as soldiers serving Romania’s cause during World War II. Sometimes children themselves are dressed either in folk costumes or military apparel, some of them holding a gun or posing alongside military fathers, in over a dozen photos from the year 1939, both girls and boys performing the Hitler salute and smiling (Jude 2017: 14.33 – 15.00) (fig. 4.2). These visual depictions mirror and reinforce the nationalist ethnic agenda upheld by Romanian officials. They suggest how this agenda represented a major coordinate characterizing the lives and beliefs of many ethnic Romanians, and that it oftentimes involved an indoctrination of children with Nazi and nationalist ideas. The photo protagonists’ carefree attitude simultaneously imply indifference and state of oblivion as to what was happening during this time to the “aliens within” their midst. Additionally, the movie soundtrack consists of sound clips including broadcasts and nationalistic songs: [S]peeches by King Carol II, and by Marshal Ion Antonescu, radio news reporting the heroic deeds of the Romanian army, the conquest by Romanian and German troops of Odessa, and many patriotic songs [featuring slurs against the Jews and Roma] aimed to mobilize the Romanian army in the national war against what Antonescu viewed as its worst enemy, Russian Bolshevism. (Popescu 2018: 7)

Significantly, a newsreel on Romanian radio juxtaposed with Dorian’s 10 December 1941 entry in Jude’s film presents the reason for Bukovina and Bessarabia Jews’ deportation to Transnistria following accusations of their Bolshevism and positive attitudes toward the Russians as long as they had possession over the territories from June 1940 to July 1941 (Jude 2017: 48.00 – 50.00). These aggressive-sounding, Nazi-supporting propaganda speeches and tunes stand for a film’s conventional musical soundtrack and bear symbolic witness to the dangerous conditions in which the Jews and Roma were living and resisting their fate in World War II Romania. Jude’s technique of juxtaposing two or more conflicting viewpoints especially signals how the time’s photographs and soundscapes in Romania were fabricated performances that excluded the Jewish and Roma experiences and the violence perpetrated against them. The movie convincingly constructs the persecution of Jews and Roma in World War II Romania as a parallel unsettling universe that was silenced by mainstream Romanian society. After all, as we have already noted, the wartime part of Dorian’s diary was only published in Romania in 1996, and only later did his postwar diaries follow suit. Meanwhile, the Roma are completely absent

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Fig. 4.2.: Radu Jude, The Dead Nation (03:59 – 04:05) Two children dressed in military uniforms seem proud, yet unaware of the harm that their cold weapons could inflict or of the larger implications surrounding their pose.

both from the perspective of mainstream Romanians and from the perspective of Jews like Dorian himself; this complete silence as to the position of the Roma signals their ever more vulnerable position and the reluctance on the part of the Romanian society to view the Roma as the victims of Romanians’ actions, past and present. Jude uses juxtaposition to emphasize a macro-level approach focusing on Romanians’ complicity as perpetrators in the Holocaust, an approach appropriate for a country that was very late to officially acknowledge this implication, not until 2004. This technique makes historian Diana Popescu call the film an example of documentary and independent art happenings “designed as social interventions with a participatory and active public” (2018: 1). For the third-generation director, this palimpsestic technique equally pinpoints the new generations’ need to grapple with their uncertainty about the grandparents’ be-

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liefs and actions with regard to this dark past. The connection between the historical World War II primary sources making up the movie (diary, photos, radio newsreels) and the present is made by the voiceover reading of Dorian’s diary entries, one voice belonging to actor Ioan Filip. He is a contemporary impersonator of a Jewish individual’s ruminations during World War II, and as such functions as a device meant to foster the audience’s critical and historical thinking. Through this juxtaposition technique, the movie actually points to the high level of Romanians’ involvement as perpetrators and antisemites during World War II out of ideological conviction, engrained antisemitic views, but also out of opportunism, in view of appropriating jobs, businesses, and houses that used to belong to Jews but were requisitioned under the Romanianization banner of CNR. For such personal and immediate gains, the Jews of Romania were unproblematically discarded as undesirables and reclassified as aliens in the 1940s. The film also suggests, via absence and complete silence, how the Roma have remained the excluded victims par excellence from the Romanian Holocaust narrative. In the color feature film I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, the filmmaker’s attention turns to the issue of how the Romanian community in contemporary times is dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust. The movie plot follows the heroine, Mariana Marin, a director who is staging a military reenactment of the Romanian army’s October 1941 Odessa massacre to confront her fellow citizens with the historical facts: Eight thousand local Jews were executed within twenty-four hours after the occupation of the city.⁵ To that end, the movie superimposes archival visual material, other Romanian filmic representations of the Holocaust, and contemporary reactions of Romanians that continue to harbor strong antisemitic and anti-Roma feelings. Unlike the exclusive montage of World War II historical discourses meant to prompt the audience’s immersion into that historical reality in Dead Nation, in his 2018 film Jude openly foregrounds in the filmic construction the distance between historical reality and its artistic representation in contemporary times. He does that by employing the film-within-film and scene-within-scene structuring devices as the film follows actress Ioana Iacob, identified both as herself and the heroine Mariana Marin. Jude’s self-referential, meta-cinematic discourse technique supports the necessity to open a conversation among the young generations of Romanians as to their  On 16 October 1941 the Romanian military occupied Odessa after a two-month siege in which 30,000 Romanian soldiers died. As a result, Marshal Antonescu’s anger was fueled toward the 100,000 – 120,000 local Jewish inhabitants, 8,000 of whom were executed within 24 hours, with others being taken to do forced labor in Romania, deported, or killed, and their properties ransacked (Ancel 2008: 287– 314).

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grandparents’ and generational peers’ treatment of the Roma and Jews in their midst, past and present. In the film, Ioana/Mariana does thorough research for the reenactment of the Odessa massacre, which involves our seeing her consult a large number of historical artefacts. These include: 1) historical works she reads at home or invokes when speaking with others, works by high-profile, respected Holocaust historians such as Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Babel, Jean Ancel, Simon Weinsbuhler, Dennis Deletant; 2) archival visual materials and footage including photos of executed Jews in Odessa and Iaşi, antisemitic leaflets used by Romanian soldiers in Odessa, a World War II anti-Soviet documentary, a 1946 criminal trial filming of Gheorghe Alexianu, the governor of Transnistria during World War II from CSIER, the Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania where she can be seen in the presence of its director, Adrian Cioflâncă, playing himself in the movie; 3) Mariana’s watching and criticizing Sergiu Nicolaescu’s historical film Oglinda/The Mirror (1994) (Jude 2018: 24.00 – 25.00) that presented the Holocaust in a nationalist, negationist, pro-Antonescu, mythical history key (Durbacă 2017: 145 – 162). Even if these serious research efforts suggest how her reenactment will be a faithful rendering of the historical events, in the film she is alone in her commitment to redressing the truncated, politicized memory of World War II in Romania, the large majority of those around her openly upholding nationalist, xenophobic, antisemitic, and anti-Roma views. Firstly, her boyfriend, an airline pilot called Dacian⁶ views this past history in keeping with his name, that of a heroic figure of national history, supporting the Romanian nationalist, xenophobic outlook. In response to Mariana’s claims for redressing Romania’s historical record during World War II, his answer is that he has heard enough about “Jews always complaining.” He then goes on to discard the topic by stating that the whole of Europe was antisemitic at the time and asks instead the typical average Romanian’s question, “What about Communist crimes?,” remaining deaf to Mariana’s complaint that this is an unfair practice of trivialization by comparison (Jude 2018: 33.00 – 35.00). Secondly, a similar nationalist approach to Romania’s involvement in World War II comes from various members of the cast of reenactors that Ioana/Mariana uses for staging the show. A young man leaves the group because he finds the non-military approach of the director “anti-Romanian” and is disturbed that the mainstreaming of this view  The name Dacian makes reference to Dacia, the province from which Romania claims original ancestry, situated between Tisa and the middle Danube. It functioned as a kingdom from 82 BC to 106 AD when it became part of the Roman Empire. The praise of Dacia and its inhabitants, the Dacians, as the ancestors of Romanians, was later used in history, first by Fascists and then by Communists, to support a nationalist approach to Romanian citizenship.

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might mean he can no longer read Nae Ionescu, a right-wing, antisemitic philosopher (Jude 2018: 40.00 – 45.00). Two senior citizens protest against the presence of Roma civilians in the show’s cast, demanding that the Jews and Roma not be muddled together, even if the Roma are playing Jews, a demand which Ioana/ Mariana discards as a crass form of racism, to no avail (Jude 2018: 1.16.30 – 1.18.00). Thirdly, the municipal official Movilă who represents the Bucharest city hall – the sponsor of the show – is the most significant foil to Ioana/Mariana’s vision, functioning as a censor who threatens that the municipality will not give money and allow the show to be staged under their auspices in Bucharest’s Constitution Square if she includes the scene of execution of Jewish civilians by the Romanian military in Odessa. Movilă initially appears as a nationalist official ignorant about Romania’s involvement in the Holocaust, as he advises her to choose another topic, how the ancient Romans learned Greek philosophy and bee-keeping from the Dacians, Romanians’ positively mythicized ancestors, or a Communist-related topic, either dealing with prisons or Communist crimes (Jude 2018: 45.00 – 50.00). Movilă supports his approach by referencing Germany, whose involvement in colonialism and the Herero massacre at the start of the twentieth century has remained little known in world history in comparison to other events like the Holocaust. Gradually, Movilă proves not to be actually ignorant about this history. He betrays a racist perspective by asking about the Roma members of the cast, “Weren’t these chocolate-skin guys in Transnistria?,” and his trivialization-bycomparison outlook invokes the tyranny of a “Darwinism of massacres,” rhetorically asking “What is the minimum number of deaths that makes a massacre?,” to which Mariana responds “Numbers don’t matter” (Jude 2018: 50.00 – 59.00). He even ironically puts down Mariana’s dismissal of him by stating, “Tu n’as rien vu à Odessa,” a twist to Alain Resnais’s famous line from his film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.” He suggests that Mariana follow the direction of the most successful Holocaust movie from Hollywood, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1994), presenting a Nazi turned hero and savior of Jews; he suggests her choosing to focus on some Romanian soldiers who did not want to shoot at the Jews or Traian Popovici, the mayor of Cernăuţi who saved many of the local Jews from deportation to Transnistria during World War II by giving them work permits (Jude 2018: 1.30.00 – 1.34.00). Movilă finally agrees that historical events should be put in perspective, but he also points out that Romania’s officially admitting its implication in World War II events might just be a political act to prove it is a respectable country of the international community, as part of political dynamics. In the economy of the film, it is not clear if Movilă’s last rational comments represent his honest beliefs or just a highly intelligent politician’s tactics to support conservative state-sponsored art projects

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that would keep him and his fellow citizens within their nationalist comfort zone rather than provoke scandals and hard-to-quench confrontations. Despite her threat to complain to Active Watch about his censorship practices, Ioana/Mariana apparently agrees to only include the Romanian military’s escort of Jewish civilians, without a clear reference to their being murdered. On staging the show at the end of the film, Ioana/Mariana actually follows her secret plan of subverting Movilă and ends it with the execution of Jews in the hope of confronting her fellow citizens with the events and eliciting their empathetic response (fig. 4.3). In the Constitution Square, Ioana/Mariana stages the show under the title Birth of a Nation. This suggests a complementary meta-cinematic approach to Jude’s previous film, The Dead Nation, which seemed to imply the collective guilt of all Romanians, while Mariana’s reenactment follows her hopeful wish to present a didactic piece for her fellow citizens. Instead of the hoped-for critical reckoning and wake-up call, most of the fellow citizens in the audience boo the Soviet army and fervently applaud the Romanian army marching in Nazi uniforms under the command of Marshal Antonescu. They also applaud as the soldiers chant in chorus, “The Jew is Satan” and “Long live Marshal Antonescu.” These reactions suggest a second intertextual connection encompassed in the title of Ioana/Mariana’s show. Birth of a Nation is the title of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 highly-acclaimed but deeply racist film against African Americans set in the post-Civil War era US, whose ultimate hero was the emergent right-wing Ku Klux Klan, coming to the rescue of the helpless whites in the Reconstruction Era South. Likewise, racism rather than empathy comes to the fore during the staging of Ioana/Mariana’s show. Her audience members full-heartedly agree with the nationalist, deeply antisemitic speech about the long-overdue need to exterminate the Jews as you would “bed bugs” as part of the mission of sustaining the Romanian nation. As the Jews are escorted together toward a house and one Jew tries to escape, the audience members intervene and send him back to the group. Once the house is put on fire with the Jews inside, the audience members are heard happily and proudly shouting, “Not bad, we have thinned them a bit,” or “Bravo / Good job!” while a shy, muffled voice, almost like a whisper, can hardly be discerned stating “We are a nation of criminals,” and “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” Mariana’s own final assessment at the end of the staging bitterly states: “It was horrible! People applauded as Jews were being burned up. How can this be? They don’t have even the slightest empathy, do they?” (Jude 2018: 1.44.00 – 2.06.00). As film critics Veronica Lazăr and Andrei Gorzo have shown, Jude’s 2018 film represents an updated version of the political modernist film of the 1960s and 1970s New Wave movement. Political modernists rejected the immersion method of film construction and laid bare to the audience their use of representation and

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Fig. 4.3.: Radu Jude, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2.01.32) This screenshot captures the director’s disappointment and despair at realizing that most audience members lacked empathy for the Jewish plight.

mediation of reality as part of the film, by usually employing a Brecht-inspired aesthetics, by including in the film plot Brecht’s theatrical theory and practice (Lazăr and Gorzo 2019: 8). Jude most obviously pays homage to the productions of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, especially in introducing actress Ioana Iacob as both herself and the character she plays, just as Godard did with Marina Vlady in his 1967 film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), as well as adopting similar “primary-colors, Pop Art patterns of her clothing” (Lazăr and Gorzo 2019: 10). To our mind, to some extent, this update is due to the fact that Jude’s film simultaneously borrows another technique from the 1960s and 1970s specific to the emergent genre of cinema verité, as the hair and look of actress Ioana Iacob bears strong resemblance to that of French Holocaust survivor Marceline Ivens from the 1961 cinema verité experimental film Chronique d’une été (Chronicle of a Summer), based on the direct interviews filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin conducted in the summer of 1960 among Parisians by sending out interviewers to ask them the fundamental question “Are you happy?” For the film, Rouch and Morin used Marceline Ivens as one such street interviewer, who then became the surprising center of the film when she gave her own testimony while walking around the streets of Paris and we learn she was a survivor of Auschwitz, the camera slowly showing her tattooed arm. As Michael Rothberg has demonstrated, appearing in the year of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem that marked the emergence and primary importance of survivor testimony for Holocaust memorialization, Marceline Ivens’s

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staged testimony, occurring in France, represented an indirect challenge to French state politics at a time of war and crisis: “[H]er tale of suffering in the recent past occupies the place of those testimonies to contemporary political violence that could not be told openly in decolonizing France because of state censorship and were thus forced to pass through either underground and extralegal paths or, as in this case, indirect evocation” of the relation between Holocaust testimony and the testimony of colonial violence in France and the ongoing process of decolonization, the struggle over Algeria being in full swing (Rothberg 2016: 364– 365), opening up the possibility for the development of “solidarity across difference” (366). Nevertheless, Jude updates the 1960s–1970s left-wing film-makers’ approach by no longer suggesting, like them, an optimistic belief in a positive socio-political change to which they were contributing. Instead, Jude’s film foregrounds skepticism and self-doubt about the contemporary social arena (Lazăr and Gorzo 2019: 10). This is in part due to the different location specifics (Romania vs. France) and the temporal gap in the film’s production, the historical distance from the events having already witnessed the failure of the former filmmakers’ collective militant rhetoric and practices that have not brought about the expected changes, during which time Romania experienced Communism first-hand and was harshly subjected to its unfair practices. Therefore, Jude confronts the largely ignored Holocaust legacy in Romania with the contemporary social framework of the late 2010s, the emergent post-survivor era, for which the stakes are different than in the 1960s. They involve determining whether the post-2000s Central Eastern European countries’ officially and institutionally upheld Holocaust commemoration practices were largely just a national political strategy meant to ensure the smooth integration of these countries in the EU, in keeping with the European Union directives about a sustained commitment to Holocaust remembrance and making amends about the participation as perpetrators during World War II. Such was the case, for instance, with the post-2001 Polish policy making ample reference to Jewish children as a valuable but controversially used commodity in view of sustaining Poland’s multicultural heritage for EU membership, savvily debunked by Ewa Stańczyk (2019: 47). To express these controversies of Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Romania, Jude’s film again references location by extending a nod, but with a twist, to Chronique d’une été. In a memorable scene of his 1961 film located on the roof of Musée de l’Homme, Rouch draws two African students’ attention to Marceline Ivens’s Auschwitz tattoo and asks them if they understand its meaning. As they answer no and are told what it stands for, one of the students remembers once seeing a movie about Holocaust camps, most likely Alain Resnais’s eye-opening documentary Nuit et Bruillard (Night and Fog) (1956), which “had held one of its first screenings in the Musée de l’Homme, a

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site during World War II of resistance activity, and its director, Alain Resnais, considered the film an allegorical protest against the just-begun Algerian War” (Rothberg 2016: 365). Therefore, Rouch’s 1961 film used even location as a progressive call fostering resistance against the French state’s official silence about its problematic involvement both in World War II and in Algeria. In Jude’s 2018 film, Ioana/Mariana also uses a museum as a location for her reenactment of the 1941 Odessa events. But her choice of the Military Museum of Bucharest is the opposite from a resistance location. Situated on a street named after a Nazi collaborator, Mircea Vulcănescu – a member of Ion Antonescu’s government (Golinkin 2021), the museum stands for “a crisis of historicity” in the way in which it puts together military apparel from World War I, World War II, and the Communist-regime change from December 1989, suggesting that “military action stands as the official category for making sense of history” in the mythical historical key à la Sergiu Nicolaescu (Lazăr and Gorzo 2019: 11). After all, the lady in charge of the museum costumes considers that the uniforms they have must be authentic, since Sergiu Nicolaescu used them for his films, and she jokingly does the “Heil Hitler” salute to Ioana/Mariana, even if this is a criminal offence in contemporary Romania. Following these signposts, in Jude’s film the Military Museum events represent contemporary Romania’s deep-seated unwillingness to take up heartfelt and honest historical redress and reconciliation. Analysis of Radu Jude’s films, however, proves that at least a part of contemporary Romanian filmmakers include in their works carefully nuanced discussions of the Holocaust and the problematics of continuing to think about and treat the Jews and Roma as “the alien within.” They indicate Romania’s commitment to openly and publicly acknowledging itself as a perpetrator in World War II not only at an institutional level but also at a more grassroots, popular culture level. It might then not seem surprising that a 25 January 2019 report on how the European Union countries remember the World War II period and their willingness to engage with the memory of the Holocaust, issued by the European Union for Progressive Judaism and two universities, considered Romania “a model of success in acknowledging and confronting its role in the Holocaust. It is a rare positive story among new European Union Central European members.”⁷ The report praised Romania’s commitment to Holocaust remembrance and to making amends for its major historical injustice from its recent past. Indeed, during the past 16 years the Romanian presidents and governments have acknowledged the country’s participation in the Holocaust, apologized for it, and sup-

 See [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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ported Holocaust memory following the recommendations of the Elie Wiesel International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania. For instance, the government established a Holocaust research institute in 2005 – the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (INSHREW), a Holocaust national memorial in 2009, and a national Holocaust commemoration day (9 October – a date symbolizing the deportations from Bukovina to Transnistria). Restitution of some Jewish and Roma communal property has taken place during recent decades, and Holocaust survivors have received pensions (Ordonanţa Guvernului nr. 105/1999 “To Give Specific Rights to the Persons That Had Been Persecuted for Ethnic Reasons Between 1940 and 1945”). Holocaust textbooks and courses have been introduced in the public education system, though they are not mandatory and many of the textbooks continue to incorporate distortions of historical facts in favor of sustaining an essentialist definition of Romanian national identity (Bărbulescu 2015: 139 – 156). A special law punishing Holocaust denial was adopted in 2002 (OUG no. 31) and sharpened in 2015 (Law no. 217). The cult of Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s World War II genocidal dictator, seems to have declined since the 2000s and the two major rightwing, ethno-nationalist, antisemitic and xenophobic parties (Greater Romania Party and the Party of the National Unity of Romanians) have failed to enter the Parliament since 2008. Taking into account the previous popularity of Romanian fascism, antisemitism, and the country’s major participation in the Holocaust, these developments might seem paradoxical and very positive, especially when compared to the politics of its neighbors, such as Poland, Hungary, and Croatia, who have recently adopted right-wing populist policies challenging the principles of liberal democracy, promoting ethno-nationalism, and marginalizing Holocaust memory. Nevertheless, Radu Jude’s films do not only contribute to the apparently positive undertones of Holocaust remembrance and commemoration practices in contemporary Romania. His films simultaneously show the cracks behind this façade of Romania’s successful promotion of a democratic and inclusive memory in a thriving liberal democracy. In particular, his latest 2018 film points to worrying signs of antisemitic and anti-Roma feelings or indifference and a lack of empathy for the other that many Romanians still consider “the alien within.” Jude’s 2018 film sounds an alarm forewarning about this other reality that is developing in the present. Indeed, Romania has lately witnessed the rise of antisemitic discourses and incidents (such as vandalism of Jewish sites). For instance, in June 2017 a negationist graffiti in English (“Holocaust never happened”) was painted on the walls of a synagogue in the major city of Cluj, and in August 2018, the Elie Wiesel Memorial Museum in Sighet was vandalized with antisemitic, sexualized, and conspiracy theory graffiti. Moreover, Holocaust

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denial has not been severely punished despite legislation in this respect since 2002. To date, there is just one court sentence condemning a person for Holocaust denial. This was pronounced on 4 February 2021 as sentence no. 62 of Bucharest’s Third District Court of Law; the culprit was Vasile Zărnescu, a former Domestic Intelligence (SRI) officer who published a book in 2016 denying the Holocaust and several articles with similar content. He was sentenced to one year and one month of prison time but received a suspended sentence and surveillance for two years.⁸ Most Romanians are still largely ignorant about the country’s implication in the Holocaust, as evidenced by the findings of the Elie Wiesel Institute surveys. The Institute annually monitors antisemitism and anti-Roma levels in Romania, both online and offline, and regularly publishes surveys concerning the Romanians’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust (https://www.inshr-ew.ro/portfolio-item/sondaje/). Its latest survey from November 2019, for instance, noted that even if 76 % of the respondents say they have heard of the Holocaust, only 36 % of the respondents acknowledge that the Holocaust occurred in Romania too. Romania has also seen the recent rise of a new nationalist party, The Alliance for the Unity of Romanians, also known as AUR / GOLD in English (based on its acronym), that in the December 2020 parliamentary elections gained around 10 percent of the parliament seats and became the fourth largest political party of the country. There is also the growth of the cult of former Iron Guard fascists – depicted as anti-Communist partisans and “the saints of the [Communist] prisons.” In this sense, streets bearing Ion Antonescu’s name continue to exist in various Romanian cities just as there are monuments celebrating other Nazi collaborators, as listed in a 26 January 2021 article from Forward by Lev Golinkin.⁹ As we have shown, by laying bare kindred situations of Romanians’ complicity and perpetration before and during World War II as well as xenophobic and racist attitudes in contemporary Romania, Jude’s cinematic works are significant media of social practice and intervention sustaining a Romanian public memory that must acknowledge the discrimination of its “racialized poor” groups, the Roma and the Jews.

 See the newsreel for 4 February 2021 for the online Romanian news agency hotnews: [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].  See the list of Nazi collaborator monuments in Romania here: [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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Acknowledgment Dana Mihăilescu’s research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, UEFISCDI, for grant PN-III-P4ID-PCE-2020 – 1631 on Familiar Perpetrators.

Works Cited Ancel, Jean. 2008. Distrugerea economică a evreilor români (The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jews). Bucharest: Editura Institutului Naţional pentru Studierea Holocaustului din România Elie Wiesel. Bărbulescu, Ana. 2015. “Discovering the Holocaust in Our Past: Competing Memories in Post-Communist Romanian Textbooks.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 21(3): 139 – 156. Bayer, Gerd, and Oleksandr Kobrynskyy (eds.). 2015. Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images, and the Ethics of Representation. London: Wallflower Press. Crowe, David. 1991. “The Gypsy Historical Experience in Romania.” In: David Crowe and John Kolsti (eds.). The Gypsies of Eastern Europe. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. 61 – 79. de Laforcade, Geoffroy. 2020. “‘Space,’ ‘Aliens,’ and the ‘Race’ to Belong: Changing Geographies and Moving Borders in Europe and the Americas.” In: Daniel Stein, Cathy C. Waegner, Geoffroy de Laforcade, and Page R. Laws (eds.). Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 265 – 290. Dorian, Emil. 1982. The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary 1937 – 1944. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Dorian, Emil. 2006. Cărţile au rămas neterminate: Jurnal 1945 – 1948. Bucharest: Compania. Durbacă, Raluca. 2017. “Naţionalism şi negaţionism în cinemaul românesc: Strategii pre- şi post-decembriste” (Nationalism and Negationism in Romanian Cinema: Discursive Strategies before and after the December 1989 Regime Change). In: Andrei Gorzo and Gabriela Filippi (eds.). Filmul tranziţiei: Contribuţii la interpretarea cinemaului românesc “nouăzecist” (The Film of Transition: Contributions to the Interpretation of the 1990s Romanian Cinema). Cluj-Napoca: Tact. 145 – 162. Golinkin, Lev. 2021. “How Many Monuments Honor Fascists, Nazis, and Murderers of Jews? You’ll Be Shocked.” Forward, 26 Jan. 2021. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Hancock, Ian. 1991. “Gypsy History in Germany and Neighboring Lands: A Chronology to the Holocaust and Beyond.” Nationalities Papers 19(3): 395 – 412. Ionescu, Ştefan Cristian. 2015. Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization,’ 1940 – 44. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ionescu, Ştefan Cristian. 2020. “Debates on the Restitution of Romanianized Property during the Antonescu Regime, 1940 – 1944.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 34(1): 45 – 62. Jude, Radu. 2015. Aferim! HI Film Productions et al. Jude, Radu. 2017. The Dead Nation. Taskovski Films. Jude, Radu. 2018. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. Endor Film et al. Lazăr, Veronica, and Andrei Gorzo. 2014. “Aferim! – ceva nou în cinemaul românesc” (Aferim! – A Novelty on the Romanian Cinema Scene). In: Andrei Gorzo and Andrei State (eds.). Politicile filmului: Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan (Film Politics: Contributions to the Interpretation of Contemporary Romanian Cinema). Cluj-Napoca: Tact. 301 – 311. Lazăr, Veronica, and Andrei Gorzo. 2019. “An Updated Political Modernism: Radu Jude and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians.” Close Up: Film and Media Studies 3(1 – 2): 7 – 19. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2003. “Quintessential Strangers: The Representation of Romanies and Jews in Some Holocaust Films.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 44(2): 57 – 71. Mihăileanu, Radu. 1998. Train de vie. Belfilms et al. Popescu, Diana. 2018. “Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania.” Humanities 7(2): 1 – 18. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Popovici, Iulia, and Vasile Ernu. 2015. “Interview with Radu Jude.” CriticAtac, 11 March 2015. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Rothberg, Michael. 2016. “The Witness as ‘World’ Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights.” In: Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (eds.). Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 355 – 372. Shafir, Michael. 2002. Între negare şi trivializare prin comparaţie: Negarea Holocaustului în ţările postcomuniste din Europa Centrală şi de Est (Between Negation and Trivialization by Comparison: Negating the Holocaust in Postcommunist Countries from East Central Europe). Iași: Polirom. Stańczyk, Ewa. 2019. Commemorating the Children of World War II in Poland: Combative Remembrance. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. Stein, Daniel, Cathy C. Waegner, Geoffroy de Laforcade, and Page R. Laws. 2020. “Editors’ Introduction.” In: Daniel Stein, Cathy C. Waegner, Geoffroy de Laforcade, and Page R. Laws (eds.). Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 1 – 18. Weissberg, Jay. 2015. “Film Review: Aferim!” Variety, Feb. 2015. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

Verena Adamik

Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump Abstract: H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre abounds with stereotypes of the racialized poor. As scholars have noted, Lovecraft’s work turns those he viewed as ‘Others’ into ‘aliens.’ Poor people of color (as opposed to the orderly White rural population and White working class) in Lovecraft’s stories are foreign, diseased, and criminal, and they threaten social and cosmic orders as they are in league with a nebulous entity that waits to wreak indescribable havoc. This chapter analyzes three ‘Lovecraftian’ novels published in 2016 – Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. These works elucidate the connection of Trump’s 2016 rhetoric in campaign and presidential speeches and the White supremacist imagery used by Lovecraft. In these novels, the racialized poor have a special connection to an astronomical, evil entity à la Lovecraft. As carriers of numinous genes or parasitic entities (literally having ‘an alien within’) they become empowered. They thus occupy a pivotal position in forestalling or bringing about the destruction of societal order; that is, of White supremacy. Exploring the alleged risk posed by this ‘underclass,’ these works seem to foretell current representations of protesters as ‘riotous mobs’ that threaten the body politic Trump sought to make great (and White) again.

2016 was a significant year for H. P. Lovecraft. Memes featuring his creation Cthulhu running for president with slogans such as “choose the greatest evil” and “no lives matter” flooded the internet. Stephen King joked on Twitter that Donald J. Trump is really Cthulhu, to which the evil figure “Cthulhu” tweeted a passionate rebuke (Trinkaus 2020: 227). These representations toyed with the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft’s supernatural mythos, thus expressing widespread frustration with the US electoral system, with corrupt politicians and institutions, and reflected the polemics of the US election campaigns, in which both Republicans and Democrats framed each other as pure evil. 2016 was also the year that the World Fantasy Award changed its face – previously a bust of Lovecraft, the World Fantasy Convention responded to the outcry of members who objected to this glorification of a White supremacist, and now awards its winners with a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-006

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sculpture of a moonlit tree. Furthermore, multiple pieces of fiction with a distinct link to Lovecraft’s oeuvre were published in this year: Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, and a short story collection called Heroes of Red Hook. These publications speak to the timeliness of re-engaging with Lovecraft. This is not only due to the ongoing popularity of Lovecraftian writing. I argue in this chapter that the resurgence of the Great Old Ones (Lovecraft’s pantheon) was in fact a response to the rise of a political rhetoric that constructs a world order akin to Lovecraft’s own worldmaking. This becomes evident in the depiction of the urban, usually racialized, poor in the works of Khaw, LaValle, and Ruff. 2016 witnessed the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. His campaign marked a significant shift in political discourse, particularly a further exacerbation of the partisan rift. Furthermore, lamentably, endorsing White supremacism became increasingly socially acceptable, due also to various rally statements and (re)tweets by the future president, which were not met with sufficient reproach in Republican circles. Conspiracy theories became more visible and gained followers, threatening to leave the realm of “heterodox knowledge” (for a discussion of this term, see Butter and Knight 2020a: 31) and becoming more influential¹ as they appear sanctioned by Trump and other elected officials. White supremacists are, of course, not the only demographic group endorsing conspiracy theories (see, for example, Turner’s 1993 discussion of conspiracy theories in African American communities; Raab et al. 2017; Butter and Knight 2020b). Yet, the idea that racialized, poor minorities (bottom-up) and/or elites (top-down) conspire against the White race has a long tradition, as is evident in the history of antisemitic discourse or in the ‘Yellow Peril’ imagery of the early twentieth century. The following analysis endeavors to trace how contemporary authors such as Khaw, LaValle, and Ruff utilize Lovecraftian language to disrupt the discourses of conspiracy and White supremacy in the depiction of the urban poor. I argue that these authors situate the racialized poor inside conspiratorial networks – like Lovecraft, Trump, and a section of Trump supporters – but then, crucially, strive to assign the poor a new role within this order, aiming to challenge entrenched White supremacy. I will first outline the racial worldmaking that occurs in Lovecraft’s works, to then expound how Trump’s campaign (foreshadowing his actions as president) echoes Lovecraft’s treatment of race and class. Finally,

 The storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 demonstrated the very real danger posed by conspiracy theories endorsed by Trump, most notably QAnon.

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I will delineate how the works of Khaw, LaValle, and Ruff apply Lovecraftian worldmaking in order to disarrange the intertwined notions of White supremacism and a racialized underclass, assigning agency to the formerly powerless urban poor.

Lovecraft and the Racialized Poor Scholars have long acknowledged H. P. Lovecraft’s racist convictions and their manifestation in his oeuvre.² Explicitly contemptuous descriptions of people of color can be found throughout his stories. In addition, Lovecraft’s worldmaking makes race and class salient in a way that implies that there is a threat emanating from a racialized underclass that is incited by a secret elite. This creates a narrative that justifies White people wanting to control, if not annihilate, people of color. The representation of the racialized poor in Lovecraft’s work is reflected in his racial worldmaking – i. e., in what Mark C. Jerng describes as narrative and interpretative strategies that shape how readers notice race so as to build, anticipate, and organize the world. […] They locate race at the level of content, atmosphere, sequence, and narrative explanation – levels, that is, other than the biological representation of bodies or the social categories of persons. Thus, their effectiveness in producing the conditions of racism lies […] in getting us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. (2018: 1– 2)

 Nonetheless, the debate on how (and if) literary scholars should study Lovecraft’s oeuvre continues. I here follow Mitch Frye, who argues that “Those who would forgive the writer too readily should acknowledge that his beliefs are coded so deeply into his fiction that no amount of forgiveness can extricate them” (2006: 251; see also discussions regarding other White modernist authors, for example in Frisch 2019: 37). Of course, scholars should critically investigate the ethics and political implications of their research subjects and objectives. Literary and cultural studies still need to find meaningful ways to study what sociologists have deemed “unloved subjects” (Sanders-McDonagh 2014). Perhaps our discipline struggles with the aesthetic pleasure that some research subjects evoke, latently adhering to a Victorian understanding of (high) culture. The readings provided exemplify a way to address this cognitive dissonance in creative ways. This is relevant as the Cthulhu myth and racist discourse akin to that present in Lovecraft’s writing are far from extinct. They are still transported in conspiracy theories and sf analogies that render the ‘racial Other’ as monstrous and grotesque: “the weight of fantastic imagery can and has been violently deployed against people of color” (House 2017). Debates on class are largely absent from Lovecraft studies.

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In other words, “right-wing ideology does not merely manifest itself in […] works as occasional racist, misogynist or classist remarks, but […] one can find a structural ‘othering’ based on these categories. These others are constantly imagined as threatening the stable identity of the self and the system, in which the self holds the seat of power” (Frisch 2019: 36). Exemplary for these observations on racial worldmaking are features in many of Lovecraft’s works, such as contemptuous descriptions of “degenerate Eskimos” (1928: 166) or “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type” (1928: 168). They thus voice fears of “an uncontained and uncontainable racial underclass threatening the ‘purity’ and integrity of an anglocentric golden age” (McRoy 2003: 336). Furthermore, as I will shortly outline, race and class also become salient in the world (or, rather, cosmos) of Lovecraft, shaping the expectations of readers. These texts teach the audience to anticipate and associate certain contents, atmospheres, sequences, and causalities with different sociological groups. Hence, Lovecraft’s works train readers to participate in White supremacist notions of a threatening racial underclass guided by a powerful and omnipresent uberbeing. One of Lovecraft’s more explicitly racist stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927b), exemplifies his use of both stereotypical representation and racial worldmaking. Intersecting race and class, the story centers on a cult that worships and conjures demonic creatures. Most cult members are illegal immigrants. Some work “as dock-hands and unlicensed pedlers [sic], […] serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner news-stands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support; and were obviously connected with under-world pursuits, of which smuggling and bootlegging were the least indescribable” (65). Exaggerating, Lovecraft deems these peccadillos “least indescribable,” as anything the people of Red Hook do is fundamentally ‘other.’ Before the plot sets off, the readers are promised to discover “what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent” (60), and the setting is described as “the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld” (60), the “Dickensian” (61) quarters inhabited by “a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another” (61). Race and class are evoked in an atmosphere of doom through the use of these ominous phrases. The cultural roots of the cult’s members are similarly indescribable. Their “ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Tibet. Most […] were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan – […] the land of the Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshipers” (64), they write Aramaic or “Chaldee” (67), and they speak “a dialect ob-

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scure and puzzling to exact philology” (65).³ Being ‘mixed’ makes them all the more abhorrent: “hybrid” (61) is used synonymously with ‘monstrous.’ Individuality and agency reside with the White characters. The protagonist Malone is a detective, even though he does not detect much. As the narrator explains, Malone’s Irish ancestry makes him receptible for occult occurrences; the Irish Malone serves as a witness but is no use as a hero. The only individual able to change the plot is the White scholar Suydam, an eccentric involved with the cult. In the end, his revived corpse betrays the cult by destroying their sacred altar. By comparison, the racialized members of the cult are passive and remain anonymous. Although they have literally subverted the quarter, they lack individual agency. “Red Hook” thus exemplifies Lovecraft’s structural ‘othering’ that adds to the explicitly derogatory racist and classist comments. By contrast, Lovecraft’s White poor are no ominous mass. Multiple stories feature poor White people, such as “New England’s traditional ‘salt of the earth’” (1928: 163), as simple, hard-working, and in possession of a certain kind of wisdom. Their superstitions and folklore are important sources of insight regarding the cosmic truth, e. g. in “The Color out of Space” (1927a), “The Rats in the Walls” (1923), and “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). This repetitive formula creates an anticipatory framework in which the suspicions and fears of the White poor are to be believed, whereas the presence of people of color functions as a sign of threat (see Jerng 2018). However, the poor and colored masses only become dangerous because they collaborate with the other horror of Lovecraft’s universe – the Great Old Ones, monstrous entities of cosmic proportions. Lovecraft’s universe contains a range of species: the Great Old Ones; humans; and various humanoid beings, from succubi to fish people, which somehow relate to the Great Old Ones. Racism informs this cosmos on multiple layers. For one, people of color associate with possibly inhuman creatures, which translates to fear of racial impurity (see Frye 2006). Introducing almost-human beings also suggests that the boundaries of humanness are to be renegotiated, with humanity exclusively defined as White. Furthermore, this cosmic order resembles a conspiracy, a constant threat to White order from ‘below’ and ‘above.’ People of color, inadvertently poor, cultish, and disorderly, will bring about the reawakening of the Great Old Ones by subverting White ‘morality’ – as described in “The Call of Cthulhu”: The secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have be-

 These comments reflect centuries of ongoing prejudice, oppression, and genocide of Yezidi people.

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come as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. (1928: 170)

That is, once White people allow for ‘laws and morals’ to be abolished, the cosmic horror will inevitably strike. In “Red Hook,” New York tolerates the immigrants; in Shadow over Innsmouth, fish people are subverting the country and economy, “reflect[ing] the author’s disgust with the way American capitalism inadvertently diversified the country” (Frye 2006: 250). Lovecraft thus weaves racist convictions into his supernatural cosmic order, reiterating a core belief of White supremacists that “White violence against people of color should be viewed as a legitimate form of ‘pre-emptive self-defense’” (Rondini 2018: 50). Those who know where to look can easily detect the conspiracy against White people. Folklore, rumors, artistic dreams, and visions hint at weird occurrences. Unorthodox knowledge channels in a modernized and industrialized world transport the ‘truth’ that scientists, police, and the educated elite are unwilling to acknowledge. As exemplified in “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Color out of Space,” no big newspapers conclusively follow up on odd events, governmental institutions do not intervene, and scientists are insistent in their denial. Nonetheless, all the evidence is there for those willing to extract it – unveiling cosmic horror only takes some “armchair deduction” (Dziemianowicz 2011: 182). Lovecraft’s stories are often based on a premise integral to conspiracy theories: “everything is connected” (e. g. Knight 2001: 205). Random news clippings report of a nocturnal suicide in London […,] a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen […,] a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some ‘glorious fulfilment’ which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest. […] Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines. […] The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumor and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926. (1928: 164)

Theorists have argued that globalization and capitalism also invite this style of association: “complex networks of people and things that are experienced as invisible, powerful hyperobjects” (Kneale 2019: 99) can be eerie. A contemporary case in point is Eric Wilson’s The Republic of Cthulhu determining that Lovecraft’s writing provides the ideal aesthetics for Wilson’s conspiracy-themed ‘parapolitics.’ It was published in 2016.

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Trump and the Language of Cthulhu As the introduction outlined, the 2016 US presidential election campaign had a decidedly Lovecraftian flavor. Cthulhu also resurfaced in scholarship: Jamelle Bouie compared Cthulhu and Trump, arguing that “it feels, at times, that when it comes to Donald Trump, our political class is this Lovecraftian protagonist, struggling to understand an incomprehensibly abnormal president” (2020). Stephan Trinkaus built an argument around comparing the two as well, noting that Trump became a sort of destructive, collective affective energy, much grander than his own person. Joining Trump was to be on the side of the ‘Great’ and of destruction. Trinkaus further expounded that Trump’s relationship to Cthulhu resembles the shifting characteristics of an ambiguous image, a Kippbild (2020: 227– 232): Trump’s success is based on two, seemingly contradictory affective strategies. For one, he promised destruction of the old in a Cthulhian manner. At the same time, he was creating and addressing fears that resemble the horrors of Lovecraft’s fictional cosmos, such as being overrun by malignant immigrants and/or by a gargantuan superpower. While both Bouie and Trinkaus predominantly argue the former – Trump as a Cthulhu-like figure of chaos – I will here concern myself with the other manifestation of Trump: his deliberate play on the same anxieties as evoked in Lovecraft’s stories, making race and class salient in the context of a conspirative hierarchy. Before and during his presidency,⁴ Trump actively endorsed conspiracy theories and White supremacism by re-tweeting content from the alt-right, by silent consent, or by evasive statements when asked to condemn such groups. His alignment with these political camps is also discernible in his Lovecraftian worldmaking: Trump has depicted Muslim people as plotting to destroy the White USA (Nacos et al. 2020: 11). He cited countries that he thinks of as White (Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden) as examples of being overwhelmed by asylum seekers (BBC 2017), and he depicted immigration from predominantly Muslim countries as inscrutable chaos “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” (Pilkington 2015). Trump’s infamous statements on immigration, given at the launch of his campaign, outline how race and class inform his political agenda. For one, he accused immigrants from south of the US American border to be “‘bringing drugs, they’re bringing

 I am deliberately limiting myself to discussing Trump from his campaign launch onwards, thus focusing on the time when he was sanctioned within public, governmental political discourse. Of course, his biography offers more examples of racism and exploitation/discrimination of the poor.

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crime. […] They’re rapists’” (Philips 2017) – much like the poor of Red Hook. But these people at the same time have no agency: “‘When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. […] I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting’” (Philips 2017, my emphasis). The choice of words resonates with conspiracy theories of White genocide and replacement, implying that there is an elite sending poor migrants of color into, and against, the USA. Trump also implicitly and explicitly vilified African Americans (Nacos et al. 2020). While already campaigning, he re-tweeted a fake crime statistic that stated that most homicides are committed by Black people and that Black people perpetrate almost all homicides with White victims (Cosgrove 2019). With circulating these highly inaccurate numbers, he participated in the above-mentioned White supremacist rhetoric of interracial threats and necessary ‘pre-emptive strikes.’ At another point, Trump alleged that the unemployment rate for African American youths and for Latin people was tremendously high (Desjardins 2017); while people of color are more often affected by unemployment, such gross exaggerations falsely reiterate a racialized image of poverty. A similar and false association informed his frequent depiction of inner-city squalor. Trump played upon an image that has long historical roots, as exemplified by Lovecraft’s texts, and that had induced moral panic in the latter decades of the last century when “representations of cities as ‘landscapes of fear’ and of their residents as inherently threatening flourished” (Macek 2006: xiv), leading to increased and stricter policing of low-income urban districts (affecting disproportionately BIPoC residents), and the deliberate removal/gentrification of lower-class quarters (Macek 2006). Adding to this image of a threatening racial underclass, Trump floated theories about an elite conspiracy: “‘Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty. […] This election will determine whether we are a free nation or […] are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests’” (Nacos et al. 2020: 5). Studies on Trump voters in 2016 underline that his two-pronged fearmongering, warning of a corrupt elite and a poor, largely urban underclass of people of color, was a successful strategy. The idea of a secret cabal of powerful people seemed to appeal to those individuals who were already susceptible to believing conspiracy theories. These individuals then disseminated theories of different degrees of absurdity, hiding their racist and antisemitic roots haphazardly, if at all (Nacos et al. 2020: 5). However, contrary to popular assumptions, Trump’s main supporters, outside of faithful Republican voters, were not White people with very low (or no) income (an elitist assumption that deserves critical scrutiny) but (mostly,

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but not only White) people anxious about the poor or that they might become poor; who were already resentful of elites; conservative; and in part prone to White racial prejudice (Glas et al. 2016; MacGillis 2016; Khazan 2018). The idea that a devious but powerful minority controls the world (which is not to deny the uneven distribution of power and capital in our world, nor of Trump profiting within this system) intersects with cosmic horror. The reach of obscure powers is of seemingly inconceivable magnitude and intricacy. As the quasi conspiracy-theorist Eric Wilson argues when explaining his theory of a dual state, “the ‘natural’ literary trope for an aestheticized form of parapolitical discourse is cosmic horror and the weird tale” (2016: 35). The dual state is an “untranslatable political phenomenon” (36). Like the Great Old Ones, the dual state relies on a “collective denial” (41) which protects the illusion of rationality, since “both the national and the human scales of reference are precisely that which have been rendered obsolete through the violent irruption of the parapolitical sublime” (90). The supposed incomprehensibility of cosmic horror allows for considerable vagueness within Wilson’s theory. Just like Lovecraft’s monsters, the threat is great, monstrous, unfathomable. This also applies to Trump’s frequent, vague assertions that there are ‘bad people, very bad people’ doing bad things to hardworking US Americans and that there are plots of inconceivable proportions afoot. The slogan ‘drain the swamp’ serves not only as an apt metaphorical link to “The Call of Cthulhu,” in which the swamp has become the place where Cthulhu worshipers sacrifice White squatters, “primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men” (Lovecraft 1928: 167). It also exemplifies the vagueness of Trump’s allegations. Like Lovecraft’s horror, Trump relies on the imagination of the recipient. The presumed immensity of ‘the swamp’ and the conspiracy appears so grand, Trump could never outline it fully; subsequently, followers could add and edit the details as they pleased. Just like the Great Old Ones, the system is two things: so gargantuan it becomes indescribable, and undeniably evil. Trump’s fearmongering is reminiscent of Lovecraftian horror in that it involves an ordering of the world in which the urban poor, in particular people of color, are associated with poverty and crime, guided by a White cabal to subvert the ‘great’ USA. With these similarities in mind, I will now approach literary publications that rework the power structures of Lovecraft’s world in 2016 and therefore pertinently comment on the Trump era, White supremacy, and the presentation and underestimation of the poor.

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“Altered Chavs” in Hammers on Bone Considering the parallels between Trump’s and Lovecraft’s worldmaking, it is striking that multiple contemporary authors have used Lovecraft’s cosmos to transform its take on the underclass. The first example of such a literary challenge to be discussed here is Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone. Khaw’s oeuvre in general draws on a wealth of horror and gothic fiction, computer games, and movies, as well as folklore and myths from around the world. Lovecraft’s influence is evident throughout her work, for example in “An Ocean of Eyes” (2015), Hammers on Bone (2016), and A Song for Quiet (2017). As this short discussion of Hammers on Bone will illustrate, the novella re-contextualizes Lovecraftian convictions that horrors lurk among the lower classes, and ascribes the urban poor pivotal importance for the overall health of a city. Though the story is set in London, it maintains a link to the discourse on poverty as a threat in the USA. Hammers on Bone is mainly an allegory of child abuse, yet also comments on race and class. The story takes place in London following the 2011 “riots” (Khaw 2016: 24), though it is unclear whether the novella refers to the events following the shooting of Mark Duggan, commonly referred to as ‘riots’, or to the anti-austerity protests of the same year, as class struggle is mentioned in the context: “McKinsey was your typical working-class lug. […] Up until a few years ago, at least, when the London riots burned through the city. He apparently started getting real revolutionary then. […] Started talking about transcending boundaries, being more than just meat perambulating through life” (24). The reader at this point already knows that McKinsey had not been talking about class struggle but about transcending his human form and becoming the carrier of a neoplasmic fungus. This reference contextualizes, somewhat problematically, the monstrous within class and race tensions, and unruly subjects taking over the streets. As in Lovecraft’s stories, the lower classes have ties to non-human entities: A spore-producing organism of extraordinary repulsiveness infests working-class bodies, creating a host of “altered chavs” (Khaw 2016: 94). Two White lowerclass children delve deep into magical spheres in order to eradicate their infested molester – the implication being that lower-class children acquire ‘dark’ skills from an early age.⁵ The narrator, a private detective, is really an Yth (a Lovecraf-

 This alludes to Stephen King’s short story “Crouch End” (1980), in which two middle-class American tourists get lost in London and stumble upon two, seemingly impoverished, children who then summon Shub-Niggurath. Many thanks to Katherine Williams for sharing this knowledge.

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tian, highly intellectual species) who has developed an interest in the human race and in emulating the language and demeanor of a Philip-Marlowe-style detective. The Yth occupies the body of a Black man, who agreed to host him decades earlier while living as an addict in the (then) slums of Croydon. The events depicted in the novella seem to have been instigated by a Black woman, who works as a waitress in a working-class Caribbean diner but is really a priestess of the goddess Shub-Niggurath (another member of Lovecraft’s pantheon). The final pages portend that Shub-Niggurath intends to incite a larger conflict, the urban poor serving as the breeding ground for her subversion of London. Instead of dissolving Lovecraftian entanglements of urban poverty, cosmic horrors, and extraterrestrial players, Hammers on Bone pillages the Cthulhu myth to give agency to those perceived as powerless. Both hero and adversaries are part of London’s lower class; the 2011 riots being the super spreader event suggests that outrage and oppression foster the infestation. At the same time, the narrative employs images that render lower-class quarters ‘landscapes of fear’: The poor, living in “a dump” (Khaw 2016: 13), seem prone to moral degeneracy – the neighborhood knows about McKinsey abusing his girlfriend and her children, but chooses to ignore it. A seemingly random occurrence, such as the death of an unemployed mother and her working-class lover, becomes the symptom for a city-wide infestation planned by Shub-Niggurath, suggesting that the living conditions of the urban poor offer a backdoor entrance for serious threats (be they foreign, extraterrestrial, or epidemic). The masterfully worded novella exemplifies the danger of engaging with a Lovecraftian universe, as the association of occult powers and threats with poverty and racial ‘aliens’ is left intact. Conversely, Khaw’s unlikely heroes (young, abused children and a former drug addict who now hosts a space monster) illustrate that the seemingly powerless can change the course of history. All characters in the novella choose cosmic horrors over the ordinary life that London offers people like them. They turn to higher powers to gain agency, transcending the fate assigned to them by society, embracing becoming ‘alien.’ While the narrator and the implied reader clearly side with the urban poor, the story nonetheless replicates the world order of Lovecraft and Trump’s populist discourse: Outside power players are using the poor masses to undermine the status quo.

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“This is How You Hustle the Arcane”: LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom Like Khaw, Victor LaValle assigns the urban poor agency by skillfully re-engineering Lovecraft’s cosmos. In The Ballad of Black Tom, he retells “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927b) from the perspective of Tom/Tommy. LaValle is a widely published author of weird fiction, his works critically acclaimed, also because they comment on anti-Black violence and the long history of White supremacy. In various interviews, LaValle has addressed his complex relationship to the genre in which he writes, something to which the dedication of The Ballad bears witness: “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings” (2016). As in Lovecraft’s story, The Ballad’s suspense builds with descriptions of a New York neighborhood – however, for the African American Tommy Tester the threatening territory is neither his native Harlem nor Red Hook, but the ‘White’ Queens and Brooklyn, where he must become “unremarkable, invisible, compliant” (LaValle 2016: 12). The quarters seem to him “rustic and bewilderingly open. The open arms of the natural world worried him as much as the white people, both so alien to him” (13). His first employer emphasizes that Tommy has crossed into a different realm, advising him: “‘You shouldn’t be in this neighborhood when the sun goes down’” (16). For Tommy, Whiteness and wealth, not ‘Dickensian’ quarters populated by people of color, create the ominous atmosphere. The novella in part imitates the worldmaking of Lovecraft. Some among the poor – again, they are “‘Negroes from Harlem, Syrians and Spaniards from Red Hook, Chinese and Italians from Five Points’” (LaValle 2016: 48) – have vague knowledge about a ‘Sleeping King,’ and the White Suydam collects this knowledge, initiating the summoning of this entity. In contrast to “Red Hook,” The Ballad does not include a range of humanoid creatures; the reader learns that they were retrospectively invented by people (among them a cameo appearance by Lovecraft) who talked to the traumatized Detective Malone. Instead, The Ballad locates the ‘lowly’ monstrous within humans; Tommy’s father is shot in his own bed by a White detective, a reference to ongoing anti-Black police violence. The murder of his father, and its being sanctioned by the police, triggers Tommy to turn into Black Tom: “A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naïve. […] What was indifference compared to malice?” (65 – 66). And so he eventually declares: “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day” (143).

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Previously, Tommy had prevented the occult from becoming too powerful,⁶ but anti-Black violence has turned him: “‘Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddammit, I’ll be the worst monster you ever saw!’” (147). Suydam bates his followers with similar promises of retribution of cosmic proportions: “‘Your enemies will be crushed!’” (76). Like Khaw’s novella, the story depicts the racial poor as a potential threat. The justified outrage at White supremacy makes them prone to being manipulated by a power-crazed White man, LaValle thus explaining the reasons behind the alliance between the poor and the Great Old Ones more explicitly than Khaw. The Ballad also challenges the monolithic depiction of the racial poor via the motif of seeing. Tommy acquires special skills to survive under White supremacism, learning how to make money off White people’s feelings of superiority, and thus how to manipulate malevolent powers. At one point, he defuses an occult book, letting his father tear out the final page: “His father could not read. His illiteracy served as a safeguard. This is how you hustle the arcane” (LaValle 2016: 20). He repeats this ‘hustle’ to best Suydam in the final showdown of the novella: Suydam assumes that Tom cannot comprehend, nor change, the words he has him write. “LaValle echoes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; like Frankenstein’s creation, Tom experiences rejection and desires revenge” (Kneale 2019: 94) – and, like Frankenstein, Suydam underestimates the agency of his supposed underling. Suydam erroneously thinks he has sized up Tommy: “‘Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence’” (LaValle 2016: 47). Tommy replies, stunned: “‘It doesn’t sound like anywhere I’ve ever lived’” (47).⁷ Suydam, Howard, and Malone think of Suydam as Tom’s “‘master’” (124), which enables Tom to wreak havoc. The refusal of White people to acknowledge Black agency blinds them, and so Tom is never a suspect in the Red Hook massacre, even though he forced Detective Malone to witness his deeds. White supremacism thus originates the revenge of the Black poor in multiple ways: by creating their resentment, by underestimating them, and by supplying them with the tools to bring about an apocalypse. Even though Tom’s violent acts are undeniably cathartic, the novella does not end triumphantly but like a Lovecraftian story, with a sense of impending doom. Ultimately, Tommy unleashes what sounds like the apocalyptic outcomes of climate change: “‘The sea will rise and our cities will be swallowed by the oceans. […] The air will grow so hot we won’t be  This idea of the urban poor as the safeguards of humanity also surfaces in Khaw’s A Song for Quiet and in the short story collection Heroes of Red Hook (Sammons and Rios 2016).  Tommy makes similarly faulty assumptions about Caribbean immigrants until he enters their community center.

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able to breathe’” (147– 148). The Ballad maintains the Lovecraftian link between the racialized poor and cosmic terror, issuing a warning. In the 2016 context of police violence, anti-Black and anti-poor populism, this message is directed against those who perpetuate White supremacy, and it emphasizes the agency of the racialized poor. However, The Ballad again toys with a stereotypical depiction of the urban underclass.

“The Freedom to Choose Your Own Destiny”: Lovecraft Country Matt Ruff has also taken on the connection between race and Lovecraftian genres. His novel Lovecraft Country justly received critical acclaim and has been adapted into a series by HBO – which premiered as Trump ran for re-election in 2020. Both novel and series extensively draw on the history of anti-Black violence, focusing on depicting “white racism as itself weird or eerie” (Kneale 2019: 95), recalling the aforementioned discussions by Bouie and Trinkaus. Through the symbolism of magic, the narrative comments on race (see Kneale 2019) and class. Focusing on how the novel stages social mobility and the changing place of African American people in US American capitalism, I argue that social mobility for African Americans is depicted as depending in part on dubious occult powers. In this sense, the novel echoes the conspiratorial mindset of Trump, his followers, and Lovecraft. Like The Ballad of Black Tom, Lovecraft Country repeatedly turns to the motif of encoding, decoding, and re-writing. Again, the seemingly powerless are underestimated. Both feature Black protagonists who trick a manipulative sorcerer by changing some letters. At the same time, both authors comment with this trope on their own re-writing of Lovecraft’s world. Another parallel to the previously discussed works is that for the main character, reality is so horrendous that cosmic threats lose their edge. One of the Black main characters challenges his rich, White adversary: “‘What is it you’re trying to scare me with? You think I don’t know what country I live in?’” (Ruff 2016: 366). The Black protagonists are aware of the racial hatred that Lovecraft’s stories convey in their intended interpretation; yet, the stories appeal to some of them, who decode sf as reflecting their daily experiences as Black people in the segregated USA (Kneale 2019). The term “Lovecraft Country,” for example, designates districts that are unsafe for Black people. Accordingly, the novel consists of a series of adventure stories à la Lovecraft and other sf writers, replete with car chases, a ‘temple’ break-in,

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traveling to foreign planets, quasi deserted islands, ‘primitive’ settlements, and plenty of preternatural occurrences. The first Lovecraftian monster they encounter is a Shoggoth, who kills a White sheriff and his deputies when they attempt to murder the Black travelers. In Lovecraft’s cosmos, Shoggoths are created by some Great Old Ones to serve as slaves. Even rebelling, they are kept around as the Great Old Ones depend on their labor. In Ruff’s novel, one character decodes this as a racial metaphor, arguing that Lovecraft’s worldmaking evokes fear of the formerly enslaved, i. e., the story is about race and class even though there is no derogatory language describing racialized/lower class (human) bodies. In Lovecraft Country, this shared history creates solidarity between Black people and the gargantuan Shoggoth who comes to their aid. Of the works discussed here, Lovecraft Country most closely mirrors the hierarchical conspiracy rhetoric of Lovecraft and Trump. Members of an order of White wizards (the allusion to the Ku Klux Klan blatant) force the Black protagonists to do their bidding and take risks. The order is highly elitist, despising “‘the age of the common man’” (Ruff 2016: 86). The initial leader of this congregation, the old Braithwhite, is an open racist, as comments to the protagonist Atticus reveal: “‘The problem is you’re two very different things at once. On the one hand, you’re the avatar of Titus Braithwhite. […] It’s out of respect for that that I’ve treated you the way I have […]. But at the same time, you’re Turner, the Negro. And that I have no particular respect for. I’ll tolerate it – in my house, even in my presence – for the sake of the other’” (87). Braithwhite senior is soon overthrown by his son, who is a more ambiguous character. Braithwhite junior seems to harbor no racist resentments yet does not understand why the Black people he interacts with are not grateful for the large sums of money he gives them, which always come with strings attached. He also underestimates their solidarity amongst each other, and that they will ingeniously repurpose the resources he has given them against him. The younger Braithwhite exemplifies a capitalist who is not racist per se and yet benefits from maintaining a system of inequality. The White poor are pawns in this game as well but seem to participate more willingly: A quasi-Amish, bucolic traditionalist denomination, resembling the romanticized “salt of the earth,” lives as peasants in symbiosis with the Braithwhites. One of them, the openly racist Delilah, is struck down by Atticus as he frees his father. Instead of avenging her, Braithwhite junior will use her body in another ritual. This storyline is particularly complex. Sympathizing with Delilah is impossible, but her fate illustrates how the wealthy quickly erase all alliances and will exploit the bodies of the poor even beyond death, if it serves their interests.

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All Black protagonists strive to ascend the social ladder, with some having already become middle-class. However, two of the main characters, Letitia and Ruby, are from a poor family and still struggle without regular incomes: Letitia is out of a job, and Ruby works for a catering service until she gets fired. Their storylines are significant because they illustrate the deals that the Black poor must make for social mobility. Funded by Braithwhite money (willingly and unwillingly given), Letitia becomes the homeowner of a mansion in a White suburb, which she can defend against White extremists because she makes deals with a malevolent ghost. Her sister ventures even further into White territory. In a sense, Ruby is the main beneficiary of Atticus having struck the White Delilah, as she will take on her appearance. Braithwhite junior offers Ruby a paid job that gives her the option to ‘pass’ as White whenever she chooses: “‘The freedom to choose your own destiny’” (Ruff 2016: 224). Ruby is shocked when she finds out how the potion that turns her into Delilah is created (from the blood of the comatose Delilah) yet continues to use her magical disguise. This supernatural version of passing opens multiple ways of reading. Being White immediately changes Ruby’s own assumption of her status. Whereas, before, she fantasized about being a Sherpa, in her White skin she imagines herself “in a new capacity: not a Sherpa, but a commander of Sherpas” (229). Considering that Ruby literally accesses White privilege with the help of a ruthless White elitist casts this storyline in a, by now, familiar light. As much as the reader roots for Ruby, and as cleverly as her experiences illustrate White privilege, a Black, poor woman becomes the direct beneficiary of White-on-White class exploitation. While she does not threaten to release any monsters, and ultimately uses her White disguise to stop Braithwhite junior, this storyline still echoes uncomfortably with race/class-based fears that underlie Lovecraft’s writing and that seem to have spurred Trump’s election success. The three works discussed express the authors’ conflicted feelings regarding Lovecraft and react to the rise of double-edged fearmongering in the 2016 election campaign. Lovecraft’s writing is reengineered and agency shifted toward the lower class, illustrating in the process that Lovecraft’s racialized worldmaking provides ample reasons for the racialized poor to turn ‘alien.’ While Khaw, LaValle, and Ruff dismantle the depiction of the poor as an anonymous and easily manipulatable mass, they nonetheless maintain the association between the underclass, race, and threats to the status quo. Using Lovecraft’s works as a lexicon to write against Trump’s rhetoric demonstrates that resentments and fears of the racialized poor and a secret elite were half-slumbering at best. The appeal of this worldmaking is evident, on the one hand, in the success of the works discussed here, and, on the other hand, in Trump’s populist power, escalating in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Though Trump lost the 2020 election, these

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discourses – White supremacy, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories along the line of the great replacement – should provide a warning against toying with evoking the fear of alien horrors. Considering that Lovecraft’s cosmic horror pales in comparison to the reality of the protagonists, the resurfacing of these problematic entanglements indicates that the most pressing, ancient issue is not a sleepy space monster, but the continued oppression of the racialized poor.

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Jerng, Mark C. 2018. Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press. Khaw, Cassandra. 2015. “An Ocean of Eyes.” The Dark Magazine. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Khaw, Cassandra. 2016. Hammers on Bone. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Khaw, Cassandra. 2017. A Song for Quiet. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Khazan, Olga. 2018. “People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor.” The Atlantic, 23 Apr. 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. King, Stephen. 1980. “Crouch End.” In: Ramsey Campbell (ed.). New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. 3 – 32. Kneale, James. 2019. “‘Indifference Would Be Such a Relief’: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft.” In: Julius Greve and Florian Zappe (eds.). Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 93 – 110. Knight, Peter. 2001. Conspiracy Culture: American Paranoia from the Kennedy Assassination to The X Files. London and New York: Routledge. LaValle, Victor. 2016. The Ballad of Black Tom. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Lovecraft, H. P. 1924. “The Rats in the Walls.” Weird Tales 3(3): 25 – 31. Lovecraft, H. P. 1927a. “The Color out of Space.” Amazing Stories 2(6): 556 – 567. Lovecraft, H. P. 1927b. “The Horror at Red Hook.” Weird Tales 9: 59 – 73. Lovecraft, H. P. 1928. “The Call of Cthulhu.” Weird Tales 11(2): 159 – 178, 287. Lovecraft, H. P. 1929. “The Dunwich Horror.” Weird Tales 13(4): 481 – 508. Lovecraft, H. P. 1936. Shadow over Innsmouth. Everett, PA: Visionary Publishing. Macek, Steve. 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, and the Moral Panic over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacGillis, Alec. 2016. “The Original Underclass.” The Atlantic, Sept. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. McRoy, Jay. 2003. “There Goes the Neighborhood: Chaotic Apocalypse and Monstrous Genesis in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Street,’ ‘The Horror at Red Hook,’ and ‘He.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13(2): 335 – 351. Moufawad-Paul, J. 2018. “Some Thoughts on Eric Wilson’s The Republic of Cthulhu.” 3 June 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Nacos, Brigitte L., Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon. 2020. “Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence.” Perspectives on Terrorism 14(5): 2 – 25. Phillips, Amber. 2017. “‘They’re Rapists.’ President Trump’s Campaign Launch Speech Two Years Later, Annotated.” The Washington Post, 16 June 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Pilkington, Ed. 2015. “Donald Trump: Ban All Muslims Entering US.” The Guardian, 7 Dec. 2015. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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Raab, Marius, Claus-Christian Carbon, and Claudia Muth. 2017. Am Anfang war die Verschwörungstheorie. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Rieder, John. 2008. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rondini, Ashley C. 2018. “White Supremacist Danger Narratives.” Contexts 17(3): 60 – 62. Ruff, Matt. 2016. Lovecraft Country. New York: Harper Collins. Sammons, Brian M., and Oscar Rios (eds.). 2016. Heroes of Red Hook. New York: Golden Goblin Press. Sanders-McDonagh, Erin. 2014. “Conducting ‘Dirty Research’ with Extreme Groups: Understanding Academia as a Dirty Work Site.” Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management 9(3): 241 – 253. Schultz, David E., and S. T. Joshi (eds.). 2011. An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press. Sederholm, Carl, and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. 2015. “Lovecraft Now: Introduction.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 26(3): 444 – 449. Trinkaus, Stephan. 2020. “‘The Green Sticky Spawn of the Stars’: Trump, Affekt, Fernsehen im Cthulucene.” In: Dominik Maeder et al. (eds.). Trump und das Fernsehen: Medien, Realität, Affekt, Politik. Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag. 211 – 235. Turner, Patricia A. 1993. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. Oakland: University of California Press. Wilson, Eric. 2016. The Republic of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, the Weird Tale, and Conspiracy Theory. Santa Barbara: punctum books.

Disease: Pathologizing the Other

Geoffroy de Laforcade

Bounding Boukman: The Diseasing of Haitian Bodies in Representations of Race and Culture, from Zombies to Disaster Capitalism Abstract: Haiti has been a key protagonist of all the stages of modern history: the conquest of the Caribbean, African slavery and anti-slavery, revolution – triggered by a Vodou ceremony officiated by the maroon leader and priest Boukman – and decolonization, neocolonialism and national liberation, as well as the emergence of a racialized, diasporic double consciousness. Its people are often stigmatized by an etiology of suffering, a biologized narrative of miserabilism, and racialized tropes of sorcery and magic, all rooted in narratives of difference, displacement, dangerousness, and disease. One legacy of this history is the emergence of the zombie as a trope associated with revolution. In Sandra J. Lauro’s words, the figure of the walking-dead zombie with a toxic body “began as a figure allegorizing the plight of the colonial slave.” It is “a commentary on empire” that originated in storytelling among Haitians themselves and then was “commandeered by Europeans and Americans and put to service to represent their own concerns” (2015: 8 – 9). This chapter will explore the historical and geographical bounding of Haitian bodies and identities through disease and discourses of racial degeneracy, culminating in the contemporary images of danger, contagion, and social death that continue to permeate their representation, within Haiti and throughout the diaspora, in the era of COVID-19. Krèyon pèp pa gen gonm (The people’s pencil has no eraser). (Haitian proverb qtd. in Ridgeway 1994: 1) This experiment, which I have tried so many times and which so many times has led me to the pitchfork, the gallows, the fire, I will only finally pull off with Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines. But how strange: whether it fails or succeeds, the experiment will invariably be read as a sign of my irreversible bestiality, or my reversion to the state of bestiality. Whether they are moaning or not, the men of perfectibility rob me, out of considerations of justice, of the soul that they gave me out of mercy and pity. (Louis Sala-Molins 2006: 109 – 110)

The prevailing European modern interpretive system of “history as a struggle to the death for existence” emerged from a culture “haunted by the idea of degeneration” (Mbembe 2017: 66). In this context, scientific and public discourse https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-007

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framed blackness in pathological terms, in Fred Moten’s phrasing, “associated with a certain sense of decay, even when that decay [was] invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality” (2018: 140) associated with dangerousness and catastrophe, a “parastrophic poetics of emergency” (244). Moreover, Michel Foucault’s core argument on the emergence of discipline and securitization in Western industrial states is that they emerged as correctives to the abnormal, in response to plagues beginning with the quarantining of cities (1977: 198). Disorder ranging from riots, rebellions, and violent revolutions to poverty and disease triggered remedial technologies of power intended to purge society of racialized “places of terror” through displacement and cleansing in what has been termed “disaster capitalism,” in reference to both the early and late phases of the new globalizing system (Pyles et al. 2017: 2, 5; see Klein 2007). By virtue of its ongoing symbolism in the conceptual fabrication of alterity, the emphasis on violence in most accounts of its modern history, the seeming singularity of its perpetual suffering, even the “resilience” bequeathed upon it by humanitarian discourse, Haiti remains as vital to the narrative of white supremacy today as it was at the dawn of the nineteenth century (Meudec 2017: 11). According to Simone Brown, echoing Frantz Fanon’s “epidermal” account of “ways of seeing and conceptualizing blackness through stereotypes, abnormalization, and other means that impose limitations, particularly so in spaces that are shaped for whiteness,” Haitian bodies are marked in the dominant imaginary by race; their actions, even their mere presence “coded as criminal” (Browne 2015: 7, 20) – and, I would add, diseased. This colonialist representation says more about the observers than the observed. If “there was never a civilized nation of any other complexion than white” (Hume 1987: 629 – 630), if “the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling” (Kant qtd. by Muthu 2003: 183), then were not the African and Afro-descendant actors of the first modern social revolution against slavery and for freedom in the Americas an aberration? Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel dismissed Blacks as lacking any notion of self-consciousness, God, justice, morality of political organization. “[T]heir practices of ‘slavery’ and ‘cannibalism’ […] reflect ‘the want of self -control [that] distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been” (qtd. in Ferreira da Silva 2007: 119 – 120). Perhaps the Enlightenment was not, as is often alleged, just a project celebrating universal values at the expense of culture; but rather, as Sankar Muthu has argued, “a genuine and contentious struggle among eighteenth-century thinkers about how to conceptualize humanity, cultural difference, and the political relationships among European and non-European peoples” (2003: 183). The Haitian revolutionaries, in that case, were the first

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enslaved and colonized people to free themselves from the “intellectual blackmail” of the concept (Foucault 1977: 45). Still, as Louis-Salas Molins quipped, “I challenge anyone to find and show me the smallest little line where [JeanJacques] Rousseau condemns the kidnapping of Africans and their enslavement in the Antilles. It does not exist” (2006: 73). To underscore these “silences of modernity” is to unmask the naturalization of race as a dehumanizing concept and its critical role in the ideology of modern capitalism (Casimir 2020). Race as we understand it today is more than a product of these philosophical musings. As a constitutive component of modernity, it derives from post-Enlightenment biopolitical engineering and the representations that ensued. Our “historicity is haunted,” to paraphrase Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007), not because of the phantasm of an ‘other’ historic ‘being,’ but because teleological renderings of the modern state rest on the classification of people according to observable degrees of differentiation and normative rationality that assume perfection – “civilization” – to be the ideal. Modernity thus “recuperates the racial as a political-symbolic weapon, a strategy of engulfment, whose crucial effect is to produce human bodies and global regions as signifiers of the productive play of universal reason” (Ferreira da Silva 2007: 2, 16, 32, 103 – 104). The present as well as the past of capitalism, into which Haiti inserts itself not as a remote periphery or abomination of failure but as a central stage of its becoming, is the story of the relationship between reproduction and race: [R]acial marking of lands and bodies continues to be a way of rendering certain bodies superfluous. […] Canalized, criminalized, ostracized, stigmatized, the necropolis […] becomes a reserve of multifarious material proportions: of negative symbolic potential and death’s liminal pleasures; a reserve of labor […]; a nature reserve open for appropriation; a reserve of potentially fecund land for settlers; and a reserve of waste land for colonialism’s human and environmental detritus. (McIntyre and Nast 2011: 1471– 1474)

Before analyzing the language of disaster, degeneration, disease, and demonization in which two centuries of decolonization and recolonization of Haiti have been framed, it is relevant to examine the “unthinkable” event (Trouillot 1997: 70 – 107) of the world’s first successful antislavery rebellion. Historians have argued about Haiti’s eruption into the consciousness of the twenty-first-century world, as a radical and heroic rejoinder to the proslavery transatlantic revolutions elsewhere or a tragic and calamitous tale of a subaltern freedom struggle gone wrong – both of these narratives determined by contemporary political desires and disenchanted longings (Fischer 2010: 164– 165; see also Scott 2004). As it unfolded, however, the revolution in French Saint-Domingue inspired hope among the oppressed and instilled fear among the propertied classes, fundamentally altering the dynamics of the emancipatory lens through which its lead-

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ers saw their future and the architects of capitalism viewed their options. The Haitian Revolution of 1791– 1804 engendered abundant European commentary and criticism, not the least of which was Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), in which he developed his acclaimed “master/slave dialectic,” a direct response, Susan Buck-Morss argues in her Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), to its eruption and the panic that ensued. Dread once again, as in the recent memory of plagues, set the stage for what later unfolded. The revolution in Saint-Domingue inspired dramatic slave rebellions in the United States, such as the 1795 insurrection of Pointe Coupée and the 1811 Charles Deslondes rebellion in Louisiana, the 1800 rebellion of Gabriel and the 1831 uprising of Nat Turner in Virginia (Pamphile 2015: 11): [T]he “Haitian Fear” spread with tsunamic intensity across the Caribbean to Guadeloupe, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Venezuela and Brazil; northwards to the slaveholding societies of the American South, and eastwards to Europe, sending shudders through commodity markets and polarizing emerging debates on “race” and the abolition of slavery. In the Western imagination, Haiti is a place outside of history, a kind of phantasmal time capsule whose most visible signs recall a previous, still unspent exotic imagery of amoral violence and abandon. (Munro and Walcott-Hackshaw 2006: x)

Indeed, the Haitian revolution “was not a modern phenomenon too, but first” (Buck-Morss 2009: 138).¹ The Jacobin commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax decreed the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793 and the National Convention in Paris followed suit in 1794. What had begun as an uprising of slaves led by Vodou priest Boukman Dutty three years earlier became a defining moment in the French Revolution – rather than the reverse – resulting in the collapse of competing imperial designs: the expulsion of British invaders by the army of Toussaint Louverture, and later of Napoleonic forces themselves by that of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Significantly, Spain, ruled by French Bourbons since 1700, entered into a war with France in 1793 to oppose the republic, allying itself with Britain and the Saint-Domingue revolutionaries in hopes of reclaiming Hispaniola for itself, before signing the Treaty of Basle in 1794 ceding both French and Spanish possessions to France under Louverture’s command. He established control over the Spanish portion of the island in 1801, in the name of France but against the will of its emperor, and promulgated a constitution that declared all slaves free on a united and indivisible island. Napoleon justified his invasion in 1802, led by Charles Leclerc, by charging him with implementing the

 For further overviews of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on the gestation of the modern world, see James 1989; Dubois 2013; Geggus 2020.

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Convention’s decree of the Law of 30 Floreal Year X which reversed 1794 emancipation of slaves and with it the course of the French revolution. A defiant Louverture met his demise. However, Leclerc’s successor Count Rochambeau, leader of French troops in the American revolution (for which, ironically, Black Haitian revolutionary Henri Christophe also fought in Savannah), was defeated by Dessalines, who proclaimed the independent republic of Haiti in 1804. Thomas Jefferson would not otherwise have acquired Louisiana from France at a bargain, arguably the most important transaction in the history of the nineteenth-century slaveholding US South and westward imperial expansion, and thus of a new era in modern history. While the Treaty of Paris of 1814 allowed France to resume the slave trade and recognized its claim to Saint-Domingue, with the restored French monarch Louis XVIII vowing to reconquer the colony, and Spain retrieved its dominion over Santo Domingo, the Haitian revolution proved irreversible. These events would have a profound impact on Santo Domingo, which began the nineteenth century largely free of slaves in a state of disputed sovereignty between Haiti, committed to a Black republic, and Spain, which defended the prerogatives of white creole landowners who had supported Leclerc’s invasion and the maintenance of colonial rule (see Matibag 2003; García-Peña 2016). By extension, it would weigh heavily on the history of race in Dominican nationalism and its construction of an ominous Haitian enemy. Formally at least race was also revolutionized when, in a flash of defiance toward the legacy of French colonialism, whites not only became citizens of Haiti but officially stopped being white. They would, according to the 1805 Constitution largely written by Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, “be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks” (qtd. in Fischer 2004: 276). The document also offered citizenship to Amerindians and Blacks fighting slavery beyond Haiti’s borders. Meanwhile, the exodus of French planters to Cuba and the United States, while contributing to the development of modern techniques of plantation slavery and to anti-abolitionist politics in those societies, dramatized the catastrophe that the Haitian outcome implied for white supremacy and provoked the widespread fear of its spread. French Historian Henri Michelet conveyed the trepidation of his capitalist contemporaries when he described the Haitian revolution as “the slaughter and the fires and the most dreadful war of savages no human eye has ever seen” (qtd. in Grüner 2009). From the rebels José Chirino and Francisco Xavier Pirela in present-day Venezuela and the “Revolt of the Tailors” in Bahía, Brazil, in the 1790s to the outbreak of independence in Mexico in 1810, stirrings on the Georgia-Florida border in 1818, and repeated allegations by imperial powers of mutiny and piracy against human trafficking, suspicions of Haiti’s direct meddling were widespread (Horne 2015: 14, 21– 22).

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The phantasm of a race war, however, bore little relation to reality. Henri Christophe’s secretary, the Baron de Vastey, imagined “five million black, yellow, and dark-skinned men, spread across the surface of the globe, [laying] claim to the rights and privileges that have been bestowed on them by natural right” (qtd. in Stam and Shohat 2012: 22; see also Daut Zaka 2019). In seeking to dismantle the idea of a racialized republicanism, however, the revolution that sent shockwaves throughout the hemisphere was ultimately corralled, quarantined, and blockaded, losing even, despite the debt he owed to Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, the support of Gran Colombia’s liberator Simón Bolívar by the mid-1820s. “Political independence in the Caribbean came to halt,” writes historian Vanessa Mongey, author of a groundbreaking recent study of the revolution’s transformative impact on notions of sovereignty, liberty, and decolonization in the cosmopolitan regional palimpsest of the time; “Haiti stood alone surrounded by islands – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Thomas, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica – still under imperial rule. The contagion of revolution had been contained” (2020: 106). Like the French revolutionary Terror of 1793 – 1794, René Koekkoek argues, the Haitian revolution of 1791– 1804 bred anxieties about the risks of civic equality and popular participation, highlighting the imminent danger posed to property and privilege by citizenship and defensively restricting its reference to national belonging at the expense of a shared Atlantic revolutionary vision (2020: 1). From the first decade of the nineteenth century onward, the presumed degeneration of bodies “infected” with African bloodlines, their cognitive and mental failings were topics mobilized not just by conservative proslavery planters and merchants but also by science and medicine. Rana Hogarth writes in Medicalizing Blackness that white physicians, driven by concerns of maximizing labor productivity and safeguarding society from danger, deployed blackness as a key medical signifier of difference. The propagation of this conviction contributed to normalizing the idea of racially determined pathologies and informed the lens through which state institutions framed strategies of social control and biological containment. Prior to the revolution colonists had deployed contemporary French medicine not only to wrest more labor from slaves, but also to code slaves’ subjective response to their condition, to control slaves’ resistance, and finally to protect themselves from the real and imagined revenge which slaves took against their masters. The shape of metropolitan medicine on the colonial sugar plantation thus arose not only from the planters’ actual exploitative practices or the ideology of the slave as a commodity. It also arose from the complicated reality of social control: the dialectic between the planters’ domination and the slaves’ overt and covert resistance. (Brodwin 1996: 34– 35)

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Medical knowledge grounded in white certainties about race competed in SaintDomingue with the ancestral and syncretic experiential knowledge of African healers, an aspect of the competition for power and authority that contributed to the revolution and later galvanized white racists into pathologizing not just black bodies, but their behavior (see Weaver 2006). In France as well, as Andrew Curran has shown in his Anatomy of Blackness (2013), discourses on the “nègre” underwent a process of scientific racialization that focused on the depravity and degradation of black cognitive capabilities, drawing on polygenetic theories of human variation that had, in the earlier age of Christian humanism, lost currency in the natural sciences and returned in the wake of the Haitian revolution. Similar arguments served to pathologize French Montagnard revolutionaries and “sans-culottes,” also widely described as “savages”; they later would inspire liberal limits on democratic suffrage and civilizing discourses directed at European working classes, whose perceived dangerousness and degeneration mirrored that of colonial peoples (Koekkoek 2020: 244– 245). No more than Haitian revolutionaries could the laboring poor of European cities be assumed fit for full citizenship. The Haitian revolution accelerated but did not create these dynamics. Like discourses of the danger and infectiousness applied to Jews, indigents, and the laboring poor before the French revolution, the pathologization of blackness and biological impurity preceded the revolution in French Saint-Domingue. John Garrigus (2006) has shown that after the 1763 defeat at the hands of Britain in the Seven Years’ War, wealthy creoles were increasingly denied the label of whiteness even when they owned land and slaves, as notions of race based on biology rather than social status gradually eroded planter solidarity based on class, instead privileging lines of color and genealogy. In order to gain favor and greater civic control, elite white colonists drew a line between their “civilization” and the African antecedents that the vast majority of islanders shared; not just the large contingents of recent African arrivals but “mixed” men and women whom they believed to be morally and physically corrupt as well as unnaturally feminine. The new racial grid nurtured racial resentment and was as pivotal as the 1791 uprising of slaves in the North province, from which Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe all hailed, in unleashing the process of revolution. As many mixed-race privileged families in the South found themselves classified as free people of color, they appealed to metropolitan revolutionaries for representation in the community of French citizens to escape the demotion. The architect of this negotiation was the southern peninsula’s most prominent free colored planter, Julien Raimond, who inspired rebellions in Torbec and Les Cayes in 1790 and the Vincent Ogé uprising in 1791. He brought the pressure of the Société des Amis des Noirs to bear upon the French National Assembly, which extended cit-

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izenship to free non-whites in 1792 in hopes of averting an escalation of black slave rebellions, months before the proclamation of the republic in France led its commissioners in Saint-Domingue to proclaim the abolition of slavery. This set the stage for the conflict between the southern forces of André Rigaud and the northern forces of Dessalines and Louverture, known as the “War of the South,” which culminated in the victory of Blacks over “mulattos” in 1800, the decision by Napoleon to invade, and the subsequent collapse of the colonial racial order. The polarization of the colonial power in defense of white privilege and slavery erased the free creoles’ hopes that the defense of their status could rest with the fortunes of French citizenship, and in the process, radicalized exiled white colonists in their opposition to abolition and support of racial science (see Garrigus 2006). Just as cosmopolitanism and humanism gave way to fears of infectious social upheavals, the “narrowing” of citizenship and rise of racialized paradigms of social control focused attention on disease and its containment. Cristobal Silva argues in an edited volume entitled The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States that the “Age of Revolution” was also an “Age of Epidemic” in which illnesses borne of intensified global interaction across ecological systems and the rise of modern cities contributed to the framing of the Haitian revolution as an epidemiological event that cast citizenship as a form of immunology. A xenophobic, inward-looking discourse of national enclosure besieged by external threats took hold, as did techniques of policing territories and borders to protect societies from the contagion of pathogens – and revolutions. The yellow fever pandemic that struck the Caribbean in the 1790s and spread through Saint-Domingue with the arrival of British and French expeditionary forces provided a plausible explanation for the defeat of their colonial mission, attributed to the mass decimation in their ranks rather than to the agency of insurgents (see Silva 2016). The view of the radical, subversive, and transgressive overthrow of slavery and colonialism by black revolutionaries, its “unthinkable” and liminal nature in the context of the rise of Atlantic European modernity, coded medical, scientific, social, and literary discourses on race and racial mixture to contain the threat of black contagion. “We are told over and over again,” MichelRolph Trouillot lamented, “that Haiti is unique, bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque, […] unnatural, erratic and therefore unexplainable” (1990: 6). Narratives of excess, carnage, brutality, and barbarism, as well as magic and superstition rather than rational thought, dominate modern representations of Haiti as a model of collapse and failure rather than a defining historical moment of the universal struggle for human freedom. Haiti, and with it biologized blackness, has been fixed and framed as an object of surveillance and

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containment, elevating, according to Silvia Wynter, black and white to the status of “totemic differences” inscribed in the bodies of human beings: The poetics of purity and taint, already a central symbolism in feudal Christian thought, emerged almost seamlessly with the discourse of eugenics and biological determinism that was encoded onto the secularized, Enlightenment conceptions of humanness. Accordingly, the embodied nature of filth became a mainstay of this new discourse, inspiring an entire politico-scientific apparatus whose aim was to diagnose, categorize, and act upon bodies and bodily behaviors known as filthy. (Wynter 1999: 121)

Contagious and contaminated black bodies threatened the hygiene and purity of civilized spaces; they were marked for excision. This new racialized immunology built upon deeply ingrained fears among colonists in Saint-Domingue of black healers and their supposed magical powers. The Haitian religion of Vodou, Alfred Métraux wrote, “conjures up visions of mysterious deaths, secret rites – or dark saturnalia celebrated by blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened negroes” (1972: 15). The genealogy of such fantasies can be traced to the 1791 uprising of enslaved sugarcane workers in the North, many of them Kongo, Ibo, and born in Africa, members of secret societies that have been shown to have played a key role in the revolution. Vividly remembered in Haitian popular lore and storytelling, it began as a Vodou ceremony officiated by the maroon leader and priest Boukman Dutty in the Bwa-Kayiman, a momentous event celebrated in Haiti as the moment in which the revolution was launched (see Beauvoir-Dominique 2007; Thylefors 2009). Vodou practitioners were historically designated as “sorcerers” and persecuted, their diabolical religion banned by the 1685 Code Noir (Black Code), enacted twelve years before France formally took control of the island in 1697 to prevent the congregation of slaves and maroons such as that which occurred in the Bwa-Kayiman. Over two centuries some three million Africans would subsequently be imported to work as slaves in French Saint-Domingue, half of them dying prematurely of disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, and abuse. Vodou today permeates Haitian and diasporic culture. It is a vibrant set of distinct rites with ancient roots in a diverse tapestry of African ethnic, linguistic, spiritual sources, and systems of authority, which over time cemented the identity of a cultural palimpsest of enslaved peoples and their descendants in the recognition of its spirits and traditions as a unifying thread of memory and heritage (see Michel and Bellegarde-Smith 2006; Beauvoir-Dominique 2007). Its priests and priestesses (oungan and manbo) officiate widely as keepers of tradition, healers, counselors, midwives, community leaders, and teachers, overwhelmingly in the Kreyòl language spoken by 95 % of the people. While it indisputably played a role in galvanizing Haitians to fight colonialism and subsequent injus-

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tices, the religion spent most of Haitian history as an underground expression of cultural marronage. Upon the achievement of independence, Dessalines turned his attention to enforcing labor discipline and discouraging marronage on the plantations conceded to officers of his army. He banned Vodou, associated in military circles with insubordination, as Louverture had done before him in 1800. The regime of Jean-Pierre Boyer carried out campaigns of “pacification” in the unruly countryside and criminalized Vodou in the 1826 Rural Code, which for the first time specified the practice of zombification as illegal. With the rise to power of Faustin Soulouque in 1849, fears of the religion’s convivence with the exercise of power were distilled by observers such as Gustave d’Alaux, who denounced the “reactionary African barbarism” reminiscent of a “savagery of origins” displayed by the Haitian ruler (1856: 1). In 1860 the regime of Fabre Geffrard launched education campaigns, which would become a mainstay of Haitian governance through the 1930s, designed to extirpate the religion from the masses. Yet ounfó (temples) multiplied throughout the countryside in the aftermath of abolition, and the new leaders of rural localities included numerous former maroon practitioners of the tradition. The promotion of Roman Catholicism in official circles never thoroughly neutralized colonial-era subversions of its rites by popular Vodou spirituality and symbolism, which also surreptitiously permeated nineteenth-century political pageantry. Influential “Papa Lwa” or oungans often officiated in presidential circles seeking popular legitimacy, even as the penalization of Vodou forced the peasantry and urban poor to practice it as cultural marronage (Hurbon 1988: 88 – 93). Spenser St. John’s widely read Hayti or the Black Republic (1884) sealed the international image of Haiti as a theater of depravity, anthropophagy, and the cult of sorcery, triggering a wave of propaganda in the post-Reconstruction United States on the evils of African spirituality (Hurbon 1988: 93). Until the 1920s and 1930s, Vodou was still associated with superstition, darkness, and rural backwardness among most Haitian intellectuals, who were generally urban members of the light-skinned elite and contemptuous of rural popular culture, the Kreyòl language, and the African inheritance. In the early 1940s, Vodou altars, sacred objects, drums, and shrines were destroyed in a deliberate “anti-superstition campaign” conducted by the Haitian state and the Roman Catholic Church. Even after 2003 when Vodou was finally recognized as a religion and a core component of national identity in Haiti, evangelical campaigns against its satanic rituals continued inside and outside of Haiti. In the post-war period, Vodou entered the mainstream of elite national culture as a folkloric counter-narrative to European and American cultural hegemony. In 1991, the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide sponsored a bicentennial commemoration of Bwa-Kayiman and the Haitian parliament voted to name

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Boukman a national hero. By 1994 Aristide was mobilizing Vodou as a source of inspiration for his liberation theology, becoming the first Haitian leader since Francois Duvalier to explicitly harness Vodou to political discourse. For surging contemporary Christian evangelicals such as the Church Growth Movement and Spiritual Mapping, however, the Bwa-Kayiman ceremony was a “blood pact with Satan,” depicted mythologically as a Haitian version of “original sin” (McAlister 2012: 196 – 199, 206, 211). In 2010, it was blamed by columnist David Brooks of The New York Times, who echoed television evangelist Pat Robertson in calling it a “progress-resistant” tradition, responsible for the extreme poverty and loss of life caused by the earthquake that devastated the island nation (2010; cf. also Hebbelthwaite 2014: 2). “In the end,” Sibylle Fischer responded, “the subject of change is we specialists in the propagation of universal progress. Maybe, after this trauma, Haiti could also change, especially if we dare to be intrusive enough in our support for the local strongmen” (2010: 171). Several dozen Vodou priests accused of causing an outbreak of cholera were murdered that year. Hence Vodou and its association with sorcery and African-inspired superstitions dangerous to the social fabric of a modern civilization were equally vilified by Haitian and foreign interests. The racialized ambivalence of Haiti’s elites toward its popular culture has a history. While France continued after 1804 to view Haiti as a colony in rebellion, revolutionary veteran Alexandre Pétion, its first president (1807– 1818), was unsuccessful in achieving territorial unification in the face of the dark-skinned black self-proclaimed king of the North, Henry Christophe. Boyer achieved this in 1820. He also consolidated his credentials as a revolutionary statesman by annexing Spanish Santo Domingo in 1822 after José Nuñez de Cáceres declared an “Independent State of Spanish Haiti” and inserted the preservation of slavery into its new constitution. Boyer, however, feared for Haiti’s sovereignty after Louis XVIII and the Congress of Vienna recognized France’s right to reconquer the island and restore the property of white planters. In 1825 he agreed under duress to an ordinance of Charles X declaring that France would recognize Haiti in exchange for a substantial indemnity for expropriated planters and favorable terms of trade, effectively turning Haiti into a neocolonial state. He then raised taxes on poor farmers to pay for it (see Obregón 2018). Boyer’s aforementioned Rural Code to discipline rural labor was part of a push to expand exports, and it consolidated state control over farmers whom he believed, by virtue of their dark complexion and African cultural traditions, were “naturally opposed” to progress (Schneider 2018: 87– 88). Subservience to empire was restored, aggrieved white colonists were compensated, racial and class tensions were irremediably stoked, and the econ-

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omy would never recover from a debt that was not fully repaid, with hefty interest, until 1910. Thus, despite remaining a champion of abolition and a source of pride for Black diasporas everywhere, Haiti under Boyer and his successors neither freed its poor majority from labor servitude and restricted citizenship, nor valued its African heritage and spiritual traditions. Embracing French high culture and social hierarchies defined by skin complexion, literate, light-skinned elites enforced racial capitalism and dismissed Africans as savages while rejecting ideas of white racial supremacy (Dash 1997: 78): The emancipated were molded within and by the very French colonial thought that justified their killing and deportation. The urgency with which they separated from France was not at all linked to the ultimate necessity of conceiving a form of government endowed with its own thought and social project. […] They rebelled, then, within the limits of the vision projected by their masters (Casimir 2020: 99 – 100).

In Europe, Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, author of De l’inégalité des races humaines (“Of the Inequality of the Human Races”), 1853 – 1855, cited Haiti as evidence that the black race was incapable of civilization even when the restraints of bondage were lifted (Dash 1997: 8). This view, challenged in its time by the great Haitian scholar Antenor Firmin (see Fluehr-Lobban 2006), would become generalized among white scientists and social commentators in Europe and the United States even when their liberal dispositions predisposed them to an abolitionist stance. Even antebellum African American intellectuals, who celebrated Haiti’s revolutionary achievements against slavery, believed that its society fell short of civilized self-government. They perceived it as in need of reform through missionary work, which they carried out, for example, in campaigns to settle free African Americans in Haiti, the “best and most suitable place of residence which Providence has hitherto offered to emancipated people of colour” (Paul 1824) – most notably on the peninsula of Samaná at Boyer’s invitation. This at times aligned them with white imperialists who pressed for American intervention and the instillment of capitalist values, beliefs that would become tested during the US occupation of Haiti, during which W. E. B. DuBois, for example, became disillusioned with his country’s claims to civilize Haiti (Byrd 2020: 49, 194– 198). Speared on by Charlemagne Peralte’s 1918 – 1919 revolt (“Caco War”) against the colonial corvée (forced labor), which was brutally suppressed with killings and torture, DuBois increasingly linked the struggle against Jim Crow in the United States to the liberation of Haiti from United States imperialism. While the United States forces that occupied Haiti between 1915 and 1934 offered light-skinned Haitian elites privileges, their racism was in keeping with the

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color line. One military official described the upper class as “vain-loving, excitable, changeable beyond measure, illogical and double-faced. Many of them are highly educated and polished. […] Under strain, however, they are almost sure to revert to the black type of characteristics” (qtd. in Pamphile 2015: 33). Foreign companies pushed peasants off their lands, imposed brutal working conditions, and triggered a century of migratory exodus, sending over a million people into the United States – roughly 10 % of the population – by the hundred years that followed (Pamphile xviii). The extreme fragmentation of peasant subsistence property caused concentrations of urban poor to swell, also drawing tens of thousands of workers to the sugar plantations of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Laënnec Hurbon noted that poor Haitians were cast as “strange foreigners” in their own land, branded as barbaric and indigent, haunting hordes of semi-captive cheap labor suspected of cannibalism, sorcery, and malevolence, possessed by zombies whose status as iconic post-dead figures in the American popular imagination surged (1988: 281– 282). In addition to the radicalization of the NAACP, pan-Africanist, Garveyist, and diasporic movements that supported a free Haiti, one consequence of colonial racism was the emergence of an intellectual and cultural movement within Haiti that rejected both the occupation and the Francophile elites, and began to reevaluate the country’s African inheritance in a positive light. Literary “Indigénisme” began to claim Vodou, maligned, criminalized, marked for extermination, and blamed for the Péralte rebellion during the occupation (Kuser 1921: 56 – 57), as a source of Haitian pride (see Joseph 2011). In 1946 Black consciousness made a bid for power in a popular revolt against the repressive Élie Lescot regime. The movement launched the career of ethnologist François Duvalier, a member of an anti-Communist Black nationalist group called the “Griot intellectuals” who served in the cabinet of the “Noiriste” president Dumarsis Estimé before succeeding the pro-US anti-Communist Paul-Eugène Magloire in 1957. Duvalier embraced the legacy of Black pride and anti-elite resentment born of the occupation and 1946 uprising, only to turn the familiar specter of racialized savagery against his own people as the dreaded tyrant “Papa Doc,” with the economic and military backing of the United States in the wake of the loss of nearby Cuba to revolution (Pamphile 2015: 67– 76). Duvalier’s paramilitary “Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale” or “Tontons Macoutes” enforced a brutal dictatorship for three decades. Reflecting on the resurgence of wildly aestheticized and fanciful representations of Vodou, which Duvalier patronized, in racialized discourses on Haiti during this period, Persephone Braham writes:

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For outsiders, the quasi-mind control that Duvalier exercised on the population through the macoutes (which in other contexts might be described using forensic terms like domestic intelligence, surveillance, or national security) evoked the zombie phenomenon and confirmed both the supposedly pathological despotism of tin-pot Caribbean dictators and the childlike passivity of the natives. (2013: 41)

In Haitian literature under Duvalier, the zombie was a “powerful emblem of apathy, anonymity and loss” that told the history of colonization, evoking, in the words of Joan Dayan, colonial slavery’s “peculiar brand of sensuous domination” and “the conditions of forced, free labor that followed Haitian independence” (1995: 37). Elsewhere, with the commercial triumph in fiction and film of sensationalist depictions of Vodou as a depraved and magical set of debilitating superstitions, reinforced by centuries of racist stereotypes and the persecution of its practitioners under US occupation, the abjection of zombies became widely, and erroneously, conflated with the religion and the savage, gothic imagery associated with it. They were portrayed “as arising from some catastrophic disease, and […] thus by extension little more than an infection themselves, ones in need of violent extermination, […] synonymous with hostile hordes of the dehumanized” (Bender 2020: 175). W. B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island popularized the image of zombies, associated with Vodou and witchcraft, among the reading public of the United States as fueling rebellions among the impoverished Africanized rural masses (Seabrook 1929). This representation retains ubiquitous contemporaneity, albeit with new signifiers tainted with a decontextualized racism: The recent proliferation of popular culture zombies in film, literature, television, and games – mostly in the US and UK – echoes that of the vampire. Few to none of these numerous twenty-first-century zombies have anything at all to do with Africa or Haiti; instead, they stand in for new anxieties around consumerism, contagion, and cultural degeneration. (Braham 2013: 39)

Embodying the dangerous mysteries of irrational Africanized Caribbean mores, zombies exercised powerful allure in the imperial imagination as a diseasing of Haitian bodies, dramatized by Vodou’s historic association with poisons in the memory of colonial Saint-Domingue, by stories of capture, predation, and death, and by Western anxieties surrounding the dark, malevolent forces, the inarticulate madness of black resistance. Carolyn Fick, describing deliberate herbal poisoning, as punishment for mistreating slaves, of white colonists in mid-eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue by the rebel African maroon leader Makandal, argues that by instigating fear it gave the slaves a fugitive sense of control, a degree of psychic ascendancy over their masters (1990: 71). The resuscitated corpse of

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the zombie is an un-human object of dread, an unleashed but still captive beast of burden lacking reason or memory, powerless and lethargic but latently sensate, and therefore mysteriously terrifying. Undoubtedly, zombies conform to a representation of contemporary Haitians as poor and downtrodden, inhabited by lifeless and subdued castoffs of modernity lurking in the shadows: If slavery is no longer there, the fantasy of the slave has survived, no less than that of the master, outside and inside of Haiti. The whips cracking behind the zombie just awakened from the grave sound like those of the commander. Rumors about zombies, but also stories of zombies who claim to have been bewitched, are only the very pale metaphor of a general situation of crisis in which Haiti has settled with its scores of wandering beggars, without identity, without shelter, no hospitals to die in, and no cemetery to accommodate them. (Hurbon 1988: 296, my translation)

Yet the zombie “always retains the possibility, albeit slim, of reclaiming his or her essence, and in this sense serves at once as a reflection of Haiti’s extreme misery and of its inextinguishable potential” (Glover 2010: 60). In a compelling rejoinder to the surface image of a vicious, toxic, virus-carrying animated corpse roaming in the darkness and threatening contagion, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry underscore in their 2008 “Zombie Manifesto” (2008) the dual nature of the zombie myth – the soulless body and bodiless soul (see Ackermann and Gauthier 1991), slave-in-chains and slave-in-revolt – as encapsulating two types of representation. Zombies epitomize both the recurring colonization, appropriation, infection, and killing of literal bodies in past and present Haitian history, and the allegory of slave resistance against domination together with the horror it inspired among Western ruling classes then and visual audiences now. Lauro labels the introductory chapter in a later publication titled The Transatlantic Zombie (2015) “Zombie Dialectics” in reference to the myth’s transmission across space and time from a creolized African, Caribbean, and European-derived folk fantasy of power and possession to a symbol of appropriation and cultural theft. A stand-in for contemporary anxieties about contagion, cultural/biological degeneration, and uncontrollable mobs, the figure of the zombie is detached, like neocolonial understandings of Haiti itself, from historical origins and signifiers in African and Afro-Caribbean ritual possession. “Under the microscope,” Lauro continues, “the cinematic viral zombies of the present day remind us of the way we are slaves to our physical bodies, at the mercy of our instincts and drives, hosts to the parasites and bacteria that colonize us” (2015: 9). What remains is a racialized symbol of abject danger with no connection to the dimension of resistance to slavery – capture of the body and the soul – to which the myth alludes in popular culture. At bottom, the zombie myth as an allegory of Haitian exceptionalism engages in fantasies similar to those with

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which ruling classes responded to the unbounded rebelliousness of Atlantic “motley crews” in the age of revolution. “Elite colonists reached readily for images of monstrosity,” according to Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “calling the mob a ‘Hydra,’ a ‘many-headed monster,’ a ‘reptile,’ and a ‘many-headed power.’ Many-headedness implied democracy run wild” (2013: 233 – 234). The “monstrous hybrid” is one of the tropes of racialization identified by Marlene Daut Zaka (2019) as having distorted the memory of the Haitian revolution and diminished its far-reaching resonance for the emergence and decolonization of the modern world, infusing present-day representations of Haiti and Haitians with images of irrelevance, abnormality, and curse.² Conversely, in Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s famous The Kingdom of this World (original publication in Spanish 1949) and in much of Haitian literature today, zombies can change and liberate not only themselves, but also transform and liberate the literal, physical world around them. It is a fundamentally different conception of what zombies can represent; for it is only in the industrialized neo-colonial First World that zombies are treated as a disease, as harbingers of an apocalypse, as the collapse of civilization – although it would be the end of their civilization. But in the post-colonial realm, in places like Haiti, Cuba, and Ireland, the zombie apocalypse would instead signify the return of the human, as the enslaved and exploited reclaim their right to be human in a fundamentally inhumane world. (Bender 2020: 201; see Carpentier 2017)

The insidiousness of racialization and phantasmagoric projections of abject zombie bodies onto the Haitian poor historically manifested itself in the aporias of anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic. We have seen that in the time of Toussaint Louverture’s governorship and for two decades under Jean-Claude Boyer, Haiti ruled over all of the island of Hispaniola in the name of anti-slavery. The fall of Boyer in 1843, followed closely by the declaration of Dominican independence in 1844 and subsequent efforts by Soulouque (the last formerly enslaved man to rule over Haiti and the first to publicly embrace Vodou) to defend a unitary island state, occurred at a time of heightened racial fears among slave states in the region. In the context of the “Africanization scare” that followed the 1844 conspiracy of La Escalera in Cuba, the 1845 annexation of Texas by the United States (which reinstated slavery in the former Mexican province), amidst fears that abolitionist France after the liberal revolution of 1848 would ally with Haiti, Dominican nationalists framed their cause as an anti-Haitian race war.

 The three remaining tropes Daut Zaka (2019) isolates in her Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789 – 1865 are “the ‘tropical temptress,’ the ‘tragic mulatto/a’ and the ‘colored historian.’”

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They briefly welcomed the restoration of Spanish sovereignty as an antidote to the contagion of abolitionism to Cuba and Puerto Rico. After Haiti sided with the Union against the Confederacy in the Civil War, which finally won it recognition from the United States, the latter, relieved by the downfall of the demonized Soulouque, unsuccessfully considered annexing the Dominican Republic in alliance with its president Buenaventura Báez. Soon thereafter, the influx of Cuban planters fleeing the Ten Years War (1868 – 1878) against Spain and the United States investments stimulated Dominican sugar production and its reliance on cheap Haitian laborers, who made up virtually all braceros in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nationalist discourse vilified them as savages to legitimize Dominican border claims, despite its porosity and longstanding filiations among Blacks of both nationalities in the region. Over three quarters of Dominicans classify as “mulatto” or of mixed race; and roughly the same percentage of immigrants to the country are Haitian. Although there is a wide range of categories between what Dominicans understand as “Black” and “White” and most have some degree of African descent, Haitians and Dominicans are depicted in the prevailing racialized configuration of national identity as polar opposites, one “obscure” and indelibly marked by inferiority, and one “clear” or of European cultural and racial descent (Brookshire Childers 2020). Anti-Haitian racism is extreme to the point of hyperbole and critical to recent restrictions of citizenship rights in the Dominican Republic. Sybille Fischer writes that it is “far removed from any phenotypical of historical evidence (yet) resilient to common-sense challenges,” a “fantasy that seeks to block another memory of Haiti: not as the invading barbarian but as the radical reformer” (2004: 147– 158). Yet the historical revisionism that negates the shared Black heritage of Hispaniola and demonizes both the heresy of the Haitian Revolution reifies Eurocentric discourses in its depiction of displaced Haitians is at odds with reality. Not only are intermarriage and everyday interaction across the border common features of life on the borderlands, African influences are as widespread in the Dominican culture of the area as in Haiti, from dances and drumming to the Gagá religion, which bears many similarities to Vodou (Matibag 2003: 199 – 200). Haitian workers thus had a long history of presence on the Eastern portion of the island preceding its independence from Spain. In the aftermath of the separation of former Spanish Santo Domingo from Haiti and their own extended US occupation (1916 – 1924), many Dominicans, like observers in the colossus to the North, perceived the sacred powers of Lwa spirits mobilized by Haitian “vodouisants” as a secret weapon of possession and sorcery wielded by sinister forces of backwardness and obscurantism. Raphael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, justified his genocidal campaign to enforce state control of the border in 1937

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with such language. In October 1937, in an operation of ethnic cleansing, mobs incited by Trujillo massacred nearly 20,000 men, women and children identified as Haitians and accused of banditry, many of whom were actually Dominicans of Haitian descent, with machetes, bayonets, and sticks (see Turits 2002). The fear of occult powers and racialization of poor black workers has been couched in a language of contagion and bodily degeneration common in Dominican political discourse, infused with eugenics and racial prophylaxis, ever since. In 1961, journalist Gerardo Gallegos described Haitians as “lacerated by congenital defects and by endemic diseases, such as syphilis, elephantiasis, yaws disease, malaria, tuberculosis, helminthiasis and other infectious diseases,” by “psycho-moral traumas,” and as kidnappers of children “to sacrifice them in witchcraft rites” (qtd. in Senkman and Roniger 2019: 73) A corollary of these racist invocations was the ongoing targeting of Haitian migrant workers and farmers as carriers of disease and degeneration alleged to threaten the health of the Dominican nation. Dominican nationalists evoked this recurring fear in 1991, 1996, and 1997 to deport tens of thousands of Haitians, in 2010 to strip many Haitian-descended Dominicans of their citizenship, and in 2013 to revoke the nationality of children in the Dominican Republic of undocumented Haitian parents. Recent presidents Danilo Medina and Luis Abinader have continued the persecution of Haitians and distortion of the past between the two countries, the latter embarking in 2021 on the construction of a border wall to cement the separation envisioned by Trujillo (see Shaw 2021). Meanwhile thousands of Haitian refugees, many of them driven out of other countries in the hemisphere, amassed along another wall on the US-Mexico border, part of a global movement to contain uprooted postcolonial peoples that has once again made a model of the Haitian historical predicament, and on which Achille Mbembe wrote: [The] new “wretched of the earth” are those to whom the right to have rights is effused, those who are told not to move, those who are condemned to live within the structures of confinement – camps, transit centers, the thousands of site of detention that dot our spaces of law and policing. They are those who are turned away, deported, expelled, the clandestine, the “undocumented” – the intruders and castoffs from humanity that we want to get rid of because they fundamentally pose a threat to our lives, our health, and our well-being. [They] are the products of a brutal process of control and selection whose racial foundations we well know. (2017: 177)

When Duvalier’s son Jean-Claude fell in 1986 and the reviled Tontons Macoutes were subjected to the revenge of “déchoukaj,” a massive influx of Haitian refugees to the United States had been underway for a decade. Ronald Reagan had signed an interdiction agreement with the Haitian dictator in violation of the United States Refugee Act of 1980, a measure unparalleled in its singling

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out of a specific national group of asylum seekers for systematic repatriation at risk to their lives. When the HIV-AIDS pandemic broke out in that decade, despite its origins in contact with American tourists it was widely labeled a “Haitian” disease due its high incidence among the nation’s urban poor. In the United States, where racialized stereotypes of black threats to public health have a long history and in keeping with traditional perceptions of cities as harbors of sickness and degeneration, it was associated with their most “deviant” dwellers: homosexuals, drug addicts, and – to add neocolonial fantasies for good measure – Haitian immigrants (Pamphile 2015: 263).³ Reagan also orchestrated an unprecedented growth of immigration detention where Haitians endured discrimination and poor health. “As the constant negativity and panic about diseases, contamination, and danger permeated media reports,” Louis Herns Marcelin noted in 2005, “many middle class and elite Haitians responded with strategic concealment of their identity and avoidance of ‘real’ Haitians living in the cities of Miami Dade” (216) where the Krome Detention Center, rivaled in its cruelty only by Guantánamo Bay, was located. The system of imprisonment for undocumented Haitians in facilities throughout the country eventually grew into “the world’s largest immigration detention system.”⁴ These new technologies of control and containment are simply the most recent manifestation of policies toward migrants that have perpetuated racialization since the nineteenth century, when Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese were marked as diseased and their communities as breeding grounds for contagion, fueling immigration restrictions, border policing, sanitary management, the twentieth-century eugenics movement, and United States imperial ventures. “The discourse around race, health and nation,” Mark Allen Goldberg observes in connection with the Texas borderlands, “maintained its construction of people of color as unhealthy and unfit miscreants” (2017: 169). The pretense of the “civilizing mission” undertaken in 1915 had long since vanished, and a series of military coups were rewarded by direct US assistance (presumably to combat drug trafficking). The CIA created a Haitian intelligence service (SIN), a member of which, Raoul Cédras, ended a brief seven-month experiment in democracy with the violent overthrow of Jean-Bertand Aristide in 1991. Tens of thousands of poor refugees fled the army’s repression onto the seas, finally prompting Bill Clinton to reverse interdiction; and in 1994 the United States invaded Haiti for the second time, to reinstate Aristide, establish a new

 For a thorough treatment of the association between HIV-AIDS and Haitians, see Farmer 1992.  The phrase is from the title of Carl Lindskoog’s 2018 book, Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System.

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police force, and stem the tide of boat people (see Girard 2004). A decade later, amidst Western discomfort with Aristide (particularly his demand for reparations for slavery and the unjust transfer of Haitian wealth to France in the nineteenth century), foreign powers forced him into exile to Africa (see Robinson 2008). Haiti once again became associated with disease. Foreign occupation brought cholera, which in the absence of plantation slavery or colonial troops, Boyer and successive nineteenth-century governments had successfully taken measures to prevent (Jenson et al. 2011: 2133), to the island’s increasingly destitute poor. Some 800,000 people were sickened and over 9,000 killed by the pandemic, which struck only months after the cataclysmic January 2012 earthquake (1.2 million displaced, 230,000 dead, and 300,000 injured) (Pamphile 2015: 121– 122). The discourse of “Haitian exceptionalism,” historically linked to catastrophic events (particularly to the revolution and its aftermath), returned in the humanitarian guise of “resilience,” fixing Haiti in a time of pre-modern stagnation and a space of acute human marginality and suffering, in need of care and correction, of perpetual extraneous control (Clitantre 2011: 152). The continuous racial marking of Black bodies renders them superfluous: “Canalized, criminalized, ostracized, stigmatized, the necropolis […] becomes a reserve of […] negative symbolic potential and death’s liminal pleasures: a reserve of labor […]; a nature reserve open for appropriation” (McIntyre and Nast 2011: 1474). In our contemporary landscape of “disaster capitalism,” the depiction of the racialized poor as dirty, unsafe and unhealthy stands in as a rationale for “cures” ranging from foreign intervention to humanitarian assistance. It generates displacement, trauma, and further death and suffering, reifying in the case of Haiti the disembodiment and chaos of the zombie imagination, ominously threatening, as did the Haitian Revolution, the boundaries of “civilization” with the catastrophic contagion of sickened bodies and social disorder. Haiti exhibits Sander Gilman’s chilling Western notion of the diseased and collapsing Other: It is the fear of collapse, the sense of dissolution, which contaminates the Western image of all diseases […]. But the fear we have of our own collapse does not remain internalized. Rather, we project this fear onto the world in order to localize it and, indeed, to domesticate it. For once we locate it, the fear of our own dissolution is removed. Then it is not we who totter on the brink of collapse, but rather the Other. And it is an-Other who has already shown his or her vulnerability by having collapsed. (1988: 1)

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Weaver, Karol K. 2006. Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1999. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of ‘Identity’ and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’” In: Mercedes Durán-Gogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana (eds.). Latin America Between Marginalization and Integration. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 30 – 66.

Adrienne Ronee Washington and Briana Lee Robinson

De-Pathologizing Diversity: A Critical Analysis of Racialized Discourses of Difference and Deviance in The Black Border and the Imperative of Reframing Approaches to Linguistic Variation Abstract: This chapter performs a critical reading of the foreword to Ambrose Gonzales’s The Black Border (1922), a collection of dialect sketches published at the height of the eugenics movement, rife with discourses encoding innate racial differences and undesirable traits. Our chapter examines how narratives about inborn difference are entextualized in Gonzales’s writing through common discursive and linguistic strategies. In presenting this analysis, we seek to highlight how Gonzales’s racialized representations of language varieties and their interlocutors engage with larger cultural assumptions about human diversity as entailing innate deficiency and inferiority, that is, how the cultural institution of racism reproduces structural inequalities and implicit biases through everyday talk and text in 1922 much like it does in 2022. Findings from this analysis illustrate that the ways we talk about languages and their speech communities in everyday discourses are grounded in larger and older social histories of disparity and reflect our positionalities as writers, scholars, and educators. The chapter shows that discourses about language have the potential to perpetuate prejudices and broader traditions of subordination, exclusion, and injustice, or to disrupt them.

Ambrose Gonzales published The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast in 1922. The language varieties of the South Carolina Lowcountry (Gullah, or Sea Island Creole) that serve as a major focus of his dialect sketches form a now widely acknowledged linguistic system, and their affiliated heritage currently draws a complex mixture of intrigue and interest from scholars and cultural tourists alike; however, Gonzales’s text predated this reception. The Black Border emerged before anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (see Kennedy, Halpert, and Hurston 1939) and linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner (1949) published their seminal works to inform academics and eventually the world about the communities of the Lowcountry. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-008

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A journalist by profession, Gonzales’s approach may nevertheless ring familiar for academics and educators, even in the modern context. It resembles the long historical tradition of the imperialist gaze in the social sciences, whereby outside investigators would invade local communities and superimpose ethnocentric, decontextualized perspectives and theories on their research subjects under the guise of objectivity. It reflects the historical rift between the researcher and the research specimen, as well as between objectivity and subjectivity (see Bourdieu 1977). Gonzales’s accounts raise questions of authority, authenticity, positionality, and consent in human observation, as the writer objectifies and exhibits (puts on display) members of the Lowcountry for the voyeuristic satisfaction of outside readers. The colonial tradition of appropriation is also present in the text in that Gonzales is acclaimed for his recordings of Gullah stories and for his purported knowledge of the Lowcountry given his own upbringing there, alleged proximity with the Gullah people, and his touted use of the language with Gullah speakers as a member of the local white landowning class (see Corcoran and Mufwene 1999)¹; however, his descriptions of the local language and people suggest a lack of expertise, let alone a lack of respect for the community and a poor understanding of the complexity and nuance of human language altogether. Gonzales’s caricaturist accounts demonstrate a classic colonial and eugenic fascination with, exploitation of, and exhibition of the so-called ‘peculiarities’ of other races. Gonzales’s text has been reprinted several times and has been memorialized in the historical record (even catalogued in the Library of Congress) for its early documentation of Lowcountry speech, which supposedly pro The overt racism of Ambrose Elliot Gonzales may take some readers by surprise given his role as co-founder and co-editor of The State, a Columbia daily newspaper credited as opposing lynching and advocating sociopolitical reform (cf. Moore 1992: 8, for evidence of biological determinism). Its ideas have even led some to question the authorship of the foreword (cf. WadeLewis 1991: 21). Ambrose Elliot Gonzales was the son of Harriet Rutledge Elliot and Ambrosio José Gonzales, two plantation owners in the Lowcountry. Harriet Rutledge Elliot descended from one of South Carolina’s founding families; her father, William Elliott, was a rice and cotton planter and congressman who was accused on multiple occasions of electoral fraud and Black disenfranchisement. Ambrose Elliot Gonzales’s father belonged to a prominent family in Cuba, once the largest slave colony and one of the last countries to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the Americas. Ambrosio José Gonzales was well-traveled and educated in Europe, the US, and Cuba. He received a university education and eventually became a university professor in Cuba and is often touted as a Cuban revolutionary; however, he fought to liberate Cuba from Spain with the aim of having it annexed by the US. In the US, he served as a colonel for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Because of his white status, he became a naturalized US citizen through laws that offered citizenship to white persons who had resided in the US long enough to qualify. Given this history and the Gonzales family’s elite status in Cuba and the US Lowcountry, the racial thinking expressed in the foreword should be of little surprise.

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vides glimpses into older varieties of Gullah (see Morris 1947), clues about Gullah’s relationship to other Atlantic pidgin and creole languages, and potential insights into the historical trajectory or development of African American linguistic varieties more broadly. Yet a glance at his text also immediately reveals countless inaccuracies and embellishments that raise questions about the validity of its contributions (see Cassidy 1991; Corcoran and Mufwene 1999; cf. also Herskovits 1941: 49, cited in Taylor 1998: 37). The Black Border is a product of its time. The text emerged at the height of the eugenics movement, an era when ideas about ‘undesirable traits’ as biological inheritances that concentrated among impoverished, uneducated, and/or racialized communities prevailed in the Western imagination. Pseudoscience and social planning of the day sought to identify and eradicate said ‘bad traits’ and promulgate ‘good genes.’ Racial thinking in this era replicates many longstanding beliefs in US society about white supremacy and essential racial differences dating back to the nation’s founding (e. g. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785). The foreword to Gonzales’s text is rife with such discourses about innate undesirable traits among the Gullah people of the Lowcountry and Afro-descendants more broadly. As such, his foreword has been evoked by literary scholars (Jones 1999; Watson 2012) and within linguistics (Smitherman 1977; Smitherman-Donaldson 1988; Wade-Lewis 1991; Corcoran and Mufwene 1999) as a classic example of the traditions of racist pseudoscience and essentialism/biological determinism in early descriptions of language, suggesting that an interrogation of the text has the potential to teach or instruct more broadly (see Smitherman 1973; Wade-Lewis 2007: 75). We argue that an examination of this foreword can help to lay bare the broad reach of institutions of inequality that hide in plain sight, highlighting how they operate through commonplace discursive and linguistic practices and the commonsense ideas they tacitly perpetuate. Moreover, we note resemblances between Gonzales’s assumptions and current treatments of racial and linguistic diversity, giving his text modern relevance and today’s society an imperative for action. To engage with the unifying line of inquiry in this collection on danger, disease, and displacement in representations of racialized subjects, this chapter critically examines the foreword to The Black Border following the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the idea that systematic racism is a pervasive cultural institution that reproduces structural inequalities and biases through everyday discursive and linguistic practices (Smitherman-Donaldson 1988; van Dijk 2002; Hill 2008). Key to our framework, we theorize biological determinism of the eugenics period as a linguistic ideology of differentiation in that it has been used to semiotically racialize and divide types of people, public spaces, and sociobehavioral practices, such as language, based on the presump-

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tion of innate difference (see Irvine and Gal 2000; Gal 2005). In this chapter, we explore the discursive-linguistic devices and semiotic processes through which Gonzales hierarchically distinguishes languages and in turn stigmatizes notions of linguistic variation. Our analysis also examines how his descriptions of Gullah and African ‘tongues’ (as a monolith) engage with larger notions of difference as innate deficiency and inferiority through determinism of the eugenics period. Finally, one century following Gonzales’s publication, we conclude by connecting his (mis)treatment of Black language to the modern context and the similar policing, stigmatization, and pathologization of linguistic variation and racialized nondominant varieties, which allows for critical reflection and methodological as well as pedagogical revision.

Models for Interrogating Discourses of Biological Difference Three main texts provide a theoretical framework for this examination of Gonzales’s foreword to The Black Border within the context of racialized discourses of danger, disease, and displacement: Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson’s “Discriminatory Discourse on Afro-American Speech” (1988), Teun A. van Dijk’s “Discourse and Racism” (2002), and Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal’s “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation” (2000). To begin, Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson theorizes racism as an “institutionalized tradition based on a set of assumptions […] about human nature, race, and social behavior” rather than an idiosyncratic, obsolescing, or peripheral practice or a vestige of past societies, which is a misconception held within general perceptions of racism (1988: 145; see Hill 2008). In her study, Smitherman-Donaldson explores the reproduction of racism within the US academy through a specific vein of scientific racism within scholarly discourses on African American speech practices. Smitherman-Donaldson explains that these discourses have more or less explicit manifestations but tend to be implicit in the academy, and paradigm shifts in US society (such as social movements, changing race relations) and in the social sciences have constrained their expression, the degree of overtness versus subtlety they assume, and in turn how scholars approach and study linguistic varieties from the African American speech community. Smitherman-Donaldson presents a critical overview of past scholarship on African American language varieties, identifying several cultural assumptions and theoretical models in linguistic scholarship and other descriptions of language that have more or less implicitly perpetuated falsehoods about African

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American speech communities, supporting concepts of deviance and inferiority. One such model is the cultural deviance perspective, which posits that minoritized groups not only diverge from the socially dominant group in terms of their sociobehavioral practices (such as language and culture) but moreover that these differences are “deviant and pathological” (1988: 148). SmithermanDonaldson also identifies the baby-talk theory of language development in her critical review. This theory sees the systematic linguistic patterns of African American speech communities as simplified and imperfect forms of English resulting from the failed attempt of enslaved persons to successfully acquire and reproduce the English language because of a mental incapacity to do so. An alternate version holds that the socially dominant group employed a structurally and lexically reduced register with enslaved Africans to facilitate communication and language learning, resulting in an ‘infantile English’ from the simplified linguistic model or input that early African Americans acquired. Finally, Smitherman-Donaldson problematizes deficit theory, a model which attributes linguistic variation to cognitive-linguistic deficits in the speaker and/or inadequacies in their social environment. Each of these models, Smitherman-Donaldson explains, emerged from biological determinism, a theoretical model and broader cultural assumption that frames differences between groups as inherent and often interprets the perceived physiognomic characteristics of historically marginalized communities as bases for claiming their genetic or biological inferiority. Among other texts, Smitherman-Donaldson identifies biological determinism in Gonzales’s descriptions of Gullah speech (see also Corcoran and Mufwene 1999). To many early theorists and documenters of Black language, then, Black people were not only different from whites but moreover naturally and inherently subordinate. Smitherman-Donaldson claims, for example, that the baby-talk model of Black English’s development derives from an assumption about Black people as infantile and subhuman themselves: “The child language explanation of black language is linguistic racism that corresponds to the biological determinist assumption that blacks are lower forms of the human species whose evolution is incomplete” (1988: 150). It is a linguistic strain of widespread cultural beliefs, or ideologies, about the childlike nature of impoverished classes, ethnic minorities, and other minoritized groups, such as women and African Americans (see Franklin and James 2015), that prevailed during eugenics and has long been used to rationalize paternalistic domination by elites (see infantilization and paternalism among colonial subjects in the Americas, northern Africa and South Africa in Pete 1998; O’Brien 2004; Studer 2021; and “welfare mothers” in Fraser and Gordon 1994; Reid and Herbert 2005).

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These deterministic explanations in early metalinguistic descriptions, such as Gonzales’s The Black Border, notably diverge from social constructionism in the social sciences, which acknowledges the role of human agency and perception in coproducing the social world, negotiating social boundaries, and amplifying or minimizing any differences and similarities between groups (see Bourdieu 1977). Attribution of linguistic diversity to physical-genetic differences and putative Black inferiority also neglects major accounts for the origin of African American language varieties, including universalist, Anglicist, and Africanist traditions, the latter of which recognizes that many African American linguistic practices demonstrate continuity with Black oral traditions throughout the diaspora. They reflect a combination of Central and West African linguistic retention within these cultures as well as creativity and innovation through the Black Experiences of their speakers in the diaspora (e. g. Smitherman 1977, 1997; Asante 1990). We will furthermore show that the essentialist explanations of linguistic difference and the discourses of danger, disease, and displacement they reproduce also implicate other discredited myths. A critical examination of The Black Border within the context of racialized discourses of danger, disease, and displacement also connects to van Dijk’s work on the discursive reproduction of racism in public talk and text (2002). Van Dijk emphasizes the roles of mainstream individuals and institutions in perpetuating structural inequalities and explains that these biases can be present at diverse levels or dimensions of public discourses. Indeed, many decades of scholarship have highlighted othering and polarizing discourses that hide in the plain sight of US life, often mediated through the mundane talk, text, and images of our literature as well as other forms of entertainment (for examples, see Pyle 1976; Fox 1993; Kortenhaus and Demarest 1993; Hurley 2005; Meek 2006; Rogers and Christian 2007; Henneberg 2010; Hentges and Case 2013; Owen and Padron 2015; Wiseman, Vehabovic, and Jones 2019). For the purposes of our analysis, we will focus on the lexicon, topics of conversation, and rhetorical devices as sites of racist discourses. Van Dijk explains that interlocutors can use wording that represents the referent in a more or less positive light through complimentary or derogatory word choice, or lexical selection. Public discourses may also rely on rhetorical strategies such as figurative language, exaggeration, or euphemism and dysphemism to articulate and reproduce social biases. In terms of topics of conversation, or what he calls global discourse meaning, van Dijk reports that discussions of minorities, immigrants, and other ethnoracially marked groups tend to center around themes of difference, deviance, and threat. That is, conversations can highlight how social and behavioral practices of the ethnic other diverge and differ from that of mainstream groups. These assessments imply that nondominant groups rupture traditions and societal norms

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through ostensibly deviant practices and characteristics. Finally, these conversations presume that ethnic others threaten a society’s way of life through their customs or mere presence. Van Dijk’s work is therefore useful for examining the sites of text, rhetoric, and language structure at which racialized discourses of difference are reproduced. The foreword in The Black Border and the deterministic explanations that it advances about Gullah and African languages are based on biological theories of difference and notions of inherent deviance and inferiority of certain social groups that have been extrapolated to linguistic and other sociobehavioral practices. Nineteenth-century natural and social scientists adhering to monogenist and polygenist theories of human origins “came more and more to believe that the Negro is innately inferior and that neither education nor environment can do much to improve him” (Gossett 1997: 54). While monogenists believed in one common origin for all humans, as espoused in the Bible, polygenists rejected this theory and instead proposed that racial groups descended from different ancestors (only Europeans from Adam) and were therefore a separate species (Keel 2013). These static and deterministic theories of difference also came to inform race thinking within the broader population outside academia. They became central to the maintenance of an unequal US social order and the establishment of social policies and programs committed to the principle of separate but equal, even though the practice was far from “equal.” Professed biological divisions and theories of difference were analogously applied to the linguistic plane of social action to reify and frame understandings of language variation, which through linguistic subordination has hierarchized speech practices according to the relative social positions and status of their speakers (LippiGreen 2012). As such, discourses of difference connect to Irvine and Gal’s theory of linguistic differentiation. In fact, we deem biological determinism to be a linguistic ideology of differentiation in that it “divides spaces, moralities, types of people, activities, and linguistic practices into opposed categories” (Gal 2005: 23). Recall the observation of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that “many White Americans oppose open housing because they unconsciously, and often consciously, feel that the Negro is innately inferior, impure, depraved and degenerate. It is a contemporary expression of America’s long dalliance with racism and white supremacy” (King 2010: 127). Analyzing biological racism and biological determinism as linguistic ideologies of differentiation complements Mary Bucholtz’s assertion that “ideologies of race are also ideologies of language […] given the longstanding association between ethnoracial and linguistic differentiation promoted both in early linguistic theorizing and in (other) nationalist projects” (2001: 87). Regarding the co-stratification of linguistic and racial categories that continues in modern society, April Baker-Bell furthermore explains,

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linguistic hierarchies and racial hierarchies are interconnected. That is, people’s language experiences are not separate from their racial experiences. Indeed, the way a Black child’s language is devalued in school reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world. Similarly, the way a white child’s language is privileged and deemed the norm in schools is directly connected to the invisible ways that white culture is deemed normal, neutral, and superior in the world. (Baker-Bell 2020: 2).

As such, the model of linguistic differentiation is key to our critical analysis. Irvine and Gal (2000) explain that linguistic ideologies of differentiation operate through three semiotic processes (iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure), which construe differences or even oppositions (such as between linguistic groups) and moreover naturalize or rationalize these divisions such that they appear natural within public consciousness. Iconization signifies by way of analogy. It looks for connections, similarities, or shared attributes between linguistic features and their social meanings or users, which it then essentializes by way of ideologies, or cultural belief systems. Following Smitherman-Donaldson’s (1988) explanations of the cultural deviant perspective, baby-talk theory, and deficit theory, we see how they rest upon iconization, which attributes the language of groups historically described as ‘disease-bearing’ and as having simple and child-like mental capacities within the eugenicist tradition, as forms of baby-talk or as speaking simplified, deviant, or even pathological languages. Because of iconization, people come to see these indexical associations or ideological linkages as existing not only because of their coincidence (e. g. social circumstances and/or human perception) but moreover because they are inherently linked by nature, which their perceived similarities/resemblance is taken to indicate. Fractal recursivity is the process by which categories, divisions, or typologies that are meaningful at some level of social life become replicated or recursively projected onto other levels. As with iconization, the resemblance of schema across multiple levels of social life helps to reinforce, naturalize, and justify the division or typology. Biological theories of racial difference (or human variation) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which derived from colonial racial hierarchies, worked in this recursive fashion, eventually becoming theories of innate sociobehavioral difference and essential linguistic variation through their projection across different fields. According to Lili Kunfalvi, Social Darwinism “applied biological theories to the sociopolitical field,” and this division “contributed to the birth of scientific racism in the United States exactly around the time when the separate but equal doctrine was to be judged” (2014: 8). Moreover, Smitherman-Donaldson’s work demonstrates how these divisions and theories of innate difference were in turn replicated at the site of language to reify and frame understandings of linguistic diversity. Lastly, Irvine and Gal’s model theorizes erasure as a semiotic process that foregrounds

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information consistent with the ideological schema to the exclusion of problematic information or anything that would contradict or undermine the schema or challenge notions of inherent inferiority and superiority. In this case, erasure shows up as the multi-level projection of essential or genetic inequalities, omitting the obvious relationships and continuities between social groups and their linguistic practices, which would invalidate notions of innate difference. A second example of erasure lies in the naturalization of the social processes through which language varieties become differentiated, racialized, and then construed as nonstandard/dialect versus standard, that is, naturalizations of how the cultural-linguistic practices of sociopolitically dominant groups or “white ways of speaking become the invisible – or better, inaudible – norm” while other language varieties become accented or marked (Baker-Bell 2020: 4). Having laid this theoretical foundation, we now turn to critically analyzing the foreword to The Black Border. Following our analysis, we will discuss the contemporary connections and broader implications of the text.

Analysis of the Foreword to The Black Border We have organized this analysis according to three main overlapping discursivelinguistic sites or devices by which Gonzales perpetuates biological determinism through his descriptions and representations of Gullah in the foreword to The Black Border. We also explore in this analysis how these sites cooperate with semiotic processes as part of ideologies of differentiation.

Intertextual Allusion Gonzales employs intertextual allusion to project ideas of innate racial difference. This is the rhetorical strategy of one text alluding to and building upon prior works to establish relationships between them. Given that linguistic determinism, or notions of innate differences between language users, are originally anchored in colonial racial hierarchies and the tradition of biological determinism, and because racism is a pervasive institution, it follows that a text promoting this principle would connect to other writings. At least two examples of intertextual allusion appear in this brief excerpt from the foreword: Out of this fetid armpit of the Dark Continent came the first black bondsmen to curse the Western world. Thence, across the narrowing ocean, but a night’s flight for Walt Whitman’s “Man-of-War-Bird” – “At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America.” (Gonzales 1922: 7)

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First, Gonzales refers to Africa as “the Dark Continent [from whence] came the first black bondsmen to curse the Western World” (7; cf. 18). The idea of the “Dark Continent” was coined by Welsh American journalist/explorer Henry Stanley in his book Through the Dark Continent (1878) based on his expeditions into Central Africa. Gonzales uses the expression here to allude to and depict a land of savagery, primitiveness, desolation, and obscurity as described in Stanley’s text. Through the semiotic strategy of erasure, the narrative omits the longstanding tradition of African-European exchanges in technologies, knowledge, religion, and other resources across history and prehistory. The described blackness of the captives’ skin here iconically mirrors the obscurity of the so-called Dark Continent, and both exploit the strong, pejorative connotations that darkness and blackness bear in the Western imagination in contrast to ideas of whiteness, light, and enlightenment. Literary allusion allows Gonzales to represent Africa as the Dark Continent, a primitive, God-forsaken expanse of cannibal savagery, mystery, and heathen nakedness, among other colonialist racial tropes, and lays the foundation for Gonzales to engage with other white supremacist discourses of racial superiority in the text. These include ethnocentric notions of modernity, progress, and civilization that are modeled on Western societies’ norms, as well as the myth of the benevolent enslaver or “humane Cavalier planters” (1922: 8) who, through paternalistic enslavement, gifted to Negro captives and to millions of their descendants […] Christianity and such a measure of civilization, that, in the short space of two hundred years from the cannibal savagery of the stew-pot and the spit, they were fitted, in the New England mind, at least, for manhood suffrage, which came to enlightened England only after more than a thousand years of development! (8)

The themes of curses, darkness, and black desolation evoked by drawing upon previous works through allusion help to frame or set the tone for Gonzales’s overall claim about the inherent genetic and linguistic inferiority of Gullah and its ancestral languages. By this logic, language itself becomes a curse for Black people within essentialist notions of inherent racial difference and deviance – that is, a “legacy of inferior quality” that purportedly predestines Black people to lower status (Zavattari 1940a: 11, qtd. in English in Cassata 2011: 261). Secondly, Gonzales uses the strategy of intertextuality to directly reference poet Walt Whitman’s “To the Man-of-War-Bird” (1881– 1882). Gonzales draws on the poem to convey to the reader the perceived proximity of the West African coast to the Americas, just one leg of the Triangle Trade. In the referenced poem, which is addressed to a type of seafaring fowl (the frigate bird), the man-of-war bird is said to traverse the Atlantic Ocean in the span of one night: “At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America” (Whitman 1881– 1882: 204; qtd. in Gon-

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zales 1922: 7). The bird can do so and has even survived the previous night’s storm because of its control or mastery of the art of flying, with the sky described by Whitman as the bird’s “slave” (204). This careful choice of wording highlights another significant site or strategy for reproducing narratives of essential inequality in the text.

Lexicon/Lexical Selection The lexicon of a text involves the words and expressions it employs. Lexical selection entails employing words that (consciously or inadvertently) evoke targeted ideas about a referent based on the meaning associations of the words chosen. The lexicon of Gonzales’s text is another discursive-linguistic site through which he perpetuates deterministic notions of inequality. Gonzales, for example, references Georgian journalist/folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, who, he reports, was “known and loved by the children of half the civilized world” for his Uncle Remus stories (1922: 13). Lexical choices such as “loved” and “tender relations” (13) to describe the relationship between the little white boy and the enslaved Black elder, Uncle Remus, help Gonzales to reify narratives of benevolent and benign enslavement. The rhetorical strategy of euphemism (using “family servant” [14] in lieu of ‘enslaved person’) downplay the coercive or nonconsensual and violent power dynamics or asymmetries that governed relationships between colonial agents or enslavers, including the little boy, and the persons they subjugated: [T]he artistry of Harris lay in the sympathetic understanding of children prompted by his kindly heart, and the human appeal of the tender relations of ‘the little boy’ and the old Negro family servant was irresistible, not only to the children, but to those happy grown-ups who loved them. (13 – 14)

Gonzales also references a series of other folklorists and writers who contributed to the genre of dialect literature, but he is careful to establish the expertise and authority of Southern white writers for this literary tradition, even challenging the accuracy and authenticity of Bostonian/Baltimorean writer Edgar Allan Poe (12 – 13). Among others, Gonzales mentions writer and fellow South Carolinian John Bennett in his foreword, who is renowned for his Gullah folktales. In quoting Bennett and through his own descriptions of Gullah, Gonzales uses lexical selection to discursively construct an image of Black linguistic deficiency and genetic inferiority.

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Gonzales uses evocative word choice that represents the word “Gullah” as an aberration or perversion of English, indirectly drawing on Bennett’s writings: “But in 1822, in a publication by the Charleston City Council at the time of the attempted Negro insurrection, reference is made to ‘Gullah Jack’ and his company of ‘Gullah or Angola’ Negroes, thereby making the suggestion that ‘Gullah’ is a corruption of Angola” (9). All natural language is characterized by dynamism and fluidity. Yet Gonzales proposes a phonological process (aphesis, or loss of the word’s unstressed initial syllable /æn/) that has reportedly transformed the word “Angola” into “Gullah.” He calls the shift a “corruption,” which casts the change as degenerative rather than neutral and highlights his assumptions about the dialectal origins of the Gullah language itself. Gonzales overlooks the complexity and nuance of language and, in particular, the complex genesis of Gullah, which points to multiple historical connections including African retentions, influence from English settlers’ dialects, and universal linguistic processes (see Mufwene and Gilman 1987; Weldon and Moody 2015). He uses equally evocative and dysphemistic wording to describe the development of Gullah from English and from its African ancestral languages, which he calls “jungle-tongue” and “jungle-speech” (Gonzales 1922: 17). In the foreword, Gonzales also advances his own ethnocentric theory of Gullah’s formation: Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers and by the white servants of the wealthier colonists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was gradually adopted by the other slaves and became in time the accepted Negro speech of the lower districts of South Carolina and Georgia. With characteristic laziness, these Gullah Negroes took short cuts to the ears of their auditors, using as few words as possible, sometimes making one gender serve for three, one tense for several, and totally disregarding singular and plural numbers. Yet, notwithstanding this economy of words, the Gullah sometimes incorporates into his speech grotesquely difficult and unnecessary English words; again, he takes unusual pains to transpose numbers and genders. (1922: 10)

His paradoxical account of the language’s genesis is one which privileges the contribution of settlers’ dialects to the language’s structures while marginalizing or overlooking retentions from Niger-Congo languages, which Lorenzo Turner later demonstrated through his ethnography of Gullah (see Herskovits 1941: 49, cited in Taylor 1998: 37; Wade-Lewis 1991, 2007). In fact, Gonzales denies the continuing presence of African language influence: [Gullah speakers] seem to have picked from the mouths of their African brothers not a single jungle-word for the enrichment of their own speech.

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As the small vocabulary of the jungle atrophied through disuse and was soon forgotten, the contribution to language made by the Gullah Negro is insignificant, except through the transformation wrought upon a large body of borrowed English words. Adopting, as needed and immediately when needed, whatever they could assimilate, they have reshaped perhaps 1,700 words of our language by virtue of an unwritten but a very definite and vigorous law of their own tongue. (1922: 18)

As Gavin Jones writes, “Gonzales’s opinion that the African ‘retained only a few words of his jungle-tongue, and even these few are by no means authenticated as part of the original scant baggage of the Negro slaves’ (Black Border 17), is remarkable given that the rest of his discussion catalogues the conditions recognized even then as necessary to the continuity of Africanisms on American soil” (Jones 1999: 109). Furthermore, Gonzales’s account iconically attributes the development or divergence of Gullah from other English varieties to deficiencies in the speech community, such as their supposed slovenliness, carelessness, clumsiness, laziness and short cuts in speech, which essentializes links between Gullah and the alleged qualities of its speakers. It is a theory of failed second language acquisition that is grounded in the baby-talk models of language learning, cultural deviant perspective, and deficit theory; static and deterministic theories of racial difference within eugenics; and analogous theories about the purportedly innate inferiority of the sociobehavioral practices of Black people (Smitherman-Donaldson 1988; cf. Wade-Lewis 1991: 10). As part of this account, Gonzales employs lexical contrasts and several other contradictions, which erasure helps to reconcile. Leaning on essentialism and perceived physiognomic differences to explain the features of the Gullah language as peculiar, odd, and strange, Gonzales proposes, as in the strikingly prejudicial quotation above, that Gullah emerged from the contrastingly “flat noses” and “thick lips” of enslaved Africans (1922: 10, emphasis added). Jay Watson explains, “A few, such as South Carolina’s Ambrose Gonzales, even flirted with what Geneva Smitherman terms ‘biological determinism’ in the attempt to derive the idiosyncrasies of African American dialect from such ostensible peculiarities of black physiognomy as flat noses, thick lips, and clumsy tongues (Smitherman, Talkin That Talk 71– 75)” (Watson 2012: 12). Additionally, by Gonzales’s account, Gullah is simultaneously a product of “short cuts” and “grotesquely difficult” lexical items. Yet whereas the perceived simplicity of the language is iconically taken to indicate the mental inaptitude of its allegedly clumsy, lazy speakers, the complexity of other Gullah linguistic features that “opulently” lead to “richness” (1922: 11), is not by the same logic of iconicity taken to indicate a complex mental capacity, which is an example of erasure at work.

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Gonzales again quotes John Bennett, who explains that the forebears of the Gullah spoke an equally aberrant language: “The dialect of the West Coast, from which came these Gullah Negroes, was early commented upon as peculiarly harsh, quacking, flat in intonation, quick, clipped and peculiar even in Africa. Bosman, the Dutch sailor, described its peculiar tonality, and calls its speakers the ‘Quas-quas,’ because they gabbled like ducks.” (1922: 9)

Like Gonzales, Bennett uses negatively weighted, prescriptive wording to describe the presumed linguistic predecessor of Gullah as “peculiarly harsh, quacking, flat in intonation, quick, clipped and peculiar” not only to his Englishspeaking or Anglophone sensibilities but “even in Africa,” while redundantly stating the peculiarities, oddities, grotesqueness, and strangeness of the ancestral languages and Gullah itself (9 – 10, 12, 16, 18). These ethnocentric evaluations of Gullah and African languages elevate or center English as a standard or model while denying the legitimacy and autonomy of other linguistic systems. The privileging of English demonstrates how the ideology of white supremacy framed early understandings of social groups and their linguistic varieties. Moreover, it demonstrates how features from the social environment of languages can iconically and recursively map onto organizations of the linguistic world through descriptions of language. In particular, the stigmatization and hierarchization of social groups and racial types within white supremacy comes to analogously divide, stigmatize or other, and rank or order linguistic varieties through fractal recursion that is based or anchored in older social hierarchies and assumptions of innate difference, inferiority, and superiority. Similarly, the logic of mixophobia (Cassata 2011) within eugenic principles, which pejoratively frames social understandings of racial crossing and ‘miscegenation’ as degenerative, replicates longstanding fears and beliefs in US society about ‘amalgamation’ while also paralleling understandings of English-Gullah linguistic contact as corruptive in Gonzales’s The Black Border. Iconization also operates here through the similarities presumed between the jungle environment of Africans, as within the Western imagination, and their languages or ‘jungle-tongues.’ It is implicated in descriptions of how “living close to nature” (1922: 12) has allowed the people of the Lowcountry to “retain more of the habits and traditions of their African ancestry” (11). These semiotic strategies were present in broader eugenic and Social Darwinist understandings of the day, which emphasized how environments supposedly defined the nature or essence and innate qualities of their inhabitants and moreover how racial groups iconically embodied features of their natural surroundings. Francesco Cassata (2011) discusses such ideologies as environmental determinism/

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plasticity or environmentalist eugenics. Exploring this thinking within twentiethcentury Italian science, he draws on a two-part magazine article titled “Ambiente naturale e caratteri razziali” [“Natural Environment and Racial Character”] by once-leading zoologist Edoardo Zavattari (1940a and 1940b) in the periodical La Difesa della razza [The Defense of the Race] that was published from 1938 – 1943: [W]hile the environmental influence had inevitably produced a negative genetic impact on the blacks, hybrids and Jews, the lot of the “Italian race” had been otherwise miraculously molded by the beauty of the Mediterranean: “This is exactly the Italian, firm and fast as the mountains, strong-minded and daring like the peaks that stretch skywards, fearless and brave in seeking new paths like the courses of his rivers and the horizons of his sea, plastic in his intellectual and proactive capacities, as required by the natural aspects so mutable and different, pliable as called for by the necessities of his hard life, which must now be lived on the mountains, now on the plains, now in the snow and now by the sea.” Beyond the somatic aspect, the harmony of light, sound and the actual form of the Italian landscape had forged in the Italian “the most perfect, most complete cerebral capacity.” (Cassata 2011: 262– 263, quoting Zavattari 1940b in English).

These discourses of analogy and essential resemblance between humans and their habitats are clear examples of iconicity. Notice also that they operate through metaphors, similes, and other types of figurative language that reify presumed relationships between groups, their habits, and their natural environments. Such rhetorical devices are among the keys to Gonzales’s discourses of determinism and inequality.

Figurative Language: Personifying and Dehumanizing Strategies Figurative language is a key discursive-linguistic strategy through which Gonzales perpetuates determinism and notions of Black inferiority. Gonzales employs animalistic imagery using either dehumanizing or conversely personifying figurative language to draw analogies (similes) and equivalencies (metaphors) between human groups and nonhuman entities. The semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursion, and erasure construe these relationships and differences between social matters that are, in nature, unrelated. The Black Border serves as an example of biological themes spilling over into the realm of social life to rationalize asymmetrical power relations between social groups during the eugenics period. For example, in Bennett’s quoted passage, he represents Africans or the ancestors of the Gullah, whom he misnames the “Quas-quas,” as ducks, and their speech as meaningless “quacking” and “gabbling” through the devices

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of animalistic metaphor and simile. Animal metaphors have been shown to reify the objectification and marginalization of ethnoracial, religious, sexual, and gender minority groups by playing into and thereby reproducing larger social hierarchies and ideologies of difference (see Allen 1990; Fontecha and Jiménez Catalán 2003; López Rodríguez 2009; Weber 2015; Haslam et al. 2011; Andrighettoet al. 2016; Khazaal and Almiron 2021). This is particularly evident in the fables of the eugenics period and their animalistic metaphors involving infectious organisms, parasites, lice, rats, and other invasive species to represent nondominant groups (for example, foundational works in eugenics by Galton 1904, whose statistical models are still widely used; and US Nazism by Rockwell 1997). Within the foreword to The Black Border, establishing these iconized resemblances between African groups and ducks and recursively between their alleged speech and the quacking of ducks allows the writers (Bennett and then Gonzales) to portray Africans as subhuman. Given that language is a uniquely human capacity, it allows both writers to undermine the systematicity of Black languages and moreover deny their speakers the human faculties of speech and intellect. The assumed qualities of their language in relation to other animals become bases for negating their full humanity. Dehumanization of the Gullah people’s predecessors in Gonzales’s passage cited from Bennett contrasts with the anthropomorphism apparent in other areas of the text, which animates or perhaps even personifies inanimate objects (such as geographical regions) and, as such, at times portrays them as more human than actual people in the text: “Just under the left shoulder of Africa, which juts out boldly into the Atlantic, as though to meet half way the right shoulder of South America, lie, between Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast” (1922: 7). In particular, Gonzales assigns body parts to the regions of South America and Africa through the corporeal metaphors he employs to describe their physical geography. Similarly, Gonzales employs the figurative strategy of synecdoche, using one body part to represent the whole of a population or geographic community, and anthropomorphism to describe how “the New England eye […] saw the promise of the East” (7). Gonzales also confers feminine qualities on New England. He uses the possessive pronoun “her” (in lieu of the neutered pronoun ‘its’) to represent the region as a Puritan woman, “pocketing her prayer book while pouching her musket balls” (1922: 7– 8). Notice the contrast made between the objects in her possession, which would have been perceived as technologically advanced weaponry for missionaries or other colonists and thus suggests a more civilized, modern society, and the “bow and spear and knobkerrie” that Gonzales attributes to the African “captives” in the text (7). The femininity of New England aris-

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es again in the text as Gonzales discredits the authenticity and authority of Gullah texts produced by northern and New England writers. Feminine New England refinement is presented by Gonzales as the antithesis of the “virile” Gullah language (11): There have been many writers of Negro dialect. Some stories that have come out of the North, feminine effusions chiefly, have been fearfully and wonderfully made; the thoughts of white people, and very common-place thoughts at that, issuing from Negro mouths in such phonetic antics as to make the aural angels weep! In fact, no Northern writer has ever succeeded even indifferently well in putting Negro thought into Negro dialect. (12)

The paradox in the passage is that the use of prescriptive and dysphemistic language points to author bias and Gonzales’s positionality. As such, it undermines the expert stance that he attempts to aver as a white, Southern writer in relation the local Gullah language and culture. Gonzales also employs a corporeal, biologizing metaphor in his negatively valanced description of Western Africa as the “fetid armpit of the Dark Continent” (1922: 7). Odors are commonly associated with disease or decay and with issues of hygiene and even intrinsic dirtiness. This metaphor is therefore particularly salient and significant during a period marked by racialized (as well as gendered and classed) ideas of purity, cleanliness, and civility and extreme intolerance or (xeno)phobia for the perceived uncleanliness of racialized others as pollutive, social ills. Before concluding, we want to highlight how the themes of conversion and transformation somewhat ironically emerge as central topics in Gonzales’s text about purportedly immutable and innate racial differences in human biology, behaviors, and “mode of thought” (Gonzales 1922: 16). At times, conversion and transformation are figurative. There is the avowed transformation “wrought” by Gullah on English words (18) and the “corruption” that settlers’ dialects, local Englishes, and Lowcountry varieties have undergone in contact with Gullah speakers (9). According to Gonzales’s text, the “virile” character of Gullah has enabled this linguistic system to – as Bennett puts it – engulf “weaker” neighboring speech communities (10): “The clinging together of these Gullah tribesmen, as indicated above, and their apparent resolute and persistent character, evidently assisted in impressing their dialectical peculiarities on weaker and more plastic natures brought in contact with them, and fixed the tonality of the Negro dialect of the Carolina low-country.” (9 – 10)

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This claim about the “virile” Gullah language vis-à-vis “weaker and more plastic” linguistic systems reproduces, within linguistic models, classic racial ideologies that represent Blackness as hyperphysical (including violent; Bucholtz 1999: 444– 445), immutable/inassimilable and less emendable because of a perceived essential nature/inferiority (Gossett 1997; Cassata 2011; Keel 2013), and even therefore potentially dangerous to surrounding customs (that is, a discourse of threat; van Dijk 2002). These stereotypes or biases informed perceptions of Blackness as a menace to more “plastic” groups and thus motivated eugenic policies to control its invasive spread into other cultural domains, as discussed in this excerpted text from the period of fascist eugenics in Italy: The white race […] has become highly pliable over the course of several thousand years of civilization, making it capable of transfer to highly different environments without being strongly affected. […] The colored populations are much less plastic and much less adaptable; the more we descend toward primitive races, the more this plasticity is reduced; the inferior races are destined to subservience; others do not have this sad destiny, but must not be pushed beyond their extreme limits. A nomadic population will never be transformed into a sedentary one; a population of the forest will never become inhabitants of the savannah; a seafaring people will not become shepherds; none of these can ever assume that social form that the whites often delude themselves into believing these inferior races can achieve. (Zavattari 1940a: 10, qtd. in English in Cassata 2011: 260 – 261)

Gonzales also makes references to the transformative processes of attempting to Christianize and civilize the enslaved Africans through European colonization, the northern or Yankee enslavers who turn or soften into abolitionists, as well as the dehumanizing exchange system of the slave trade, which objectifies human beings, bartering them for material goods such as “molasses” and turning them into “cash” (1922: 8): The “black-birders” [kidnappers and smugglers] bartered their human cargoes for West Indian molasses, which, by a spirituous, if not a spiritual, process, became New England rum. “Old Medford” filled their holds, westerly winds filled their bellying sails, and the rum was soon converted into more slaves, to be in turn converted again into molasses in completing the gainful cycle. For a hundred and fifty years Rhode Island and Massachusetts competed successfully with England for the North American trade, and these colonies (with “God’s grace”) throve exceedingly. In the early years of the last century, however, the importation of slaves was interdicted and the last Yankee slaver converted the last rum-bought slave into cash, then, converting himself, he became an Abolitionist, and the well-known “New England conscience” was developed. (8)

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Discussion, Application, and Conclusion In this critical analysis, we have examined the discursive-linguistic sites and semiotic processes through which Ambrose Gonzales divides and hierarchizes languages and stigmatizes notions of linguistic variation in The Black Border, as well as how his representations of Gullah and African languages engage with larger deterministic theories of difference as innate deficiency and inferiority. In particular, the analysis reveals how metalinguistic discourses of racial difference and deviance employ rhetorical strategies (like intertextuality and allusion, lexical selection, and figurative language) through the semiotic processes of iconicity, fractal recursivity, and erasure to reify biological racism and narratives of inherent Black linguistic and cultural inferiority, much like other eugenicist texts of the day. An analysis of the foreword also demonstrates that how we talk about languages and their speech communities is grounded in larger and older social institutions, reflects our positionalities as writers or scholars, and can perpetuate biases and broader traditions (such as subordination, exclusion, and other social injustices). Academic scholarship has since disproven the paradigm of biological determinism, invalidating claims about genetic bases for ethnoracial categories and for perceived sociobehavioral differences between groups. Science now acknowledges that sociobehavioral differences emerge from a variety of factors or sources, and it is structural forces in concert with human agency that shapes our social world and lives. That all peoples and their language practices are inherently equal should be established as a foundation for learning (Lippi-Green 2012). The social values they bear are products of human definition and perception. The fallacy and invalidation of paradigms of biological difference must be emphasized to restrain the spread of malignant myths turned into scientific theories and broader cultural assumptions. Doing so also illustrates the half-life of ‘facts,’ the potential fallibility or limits of even expert knowledge, which is vulnerable to its embedding sociocultural milieu, and therefore the need for active and critical thinking, especially in academic enterprises. This fallibility also calls into question the objectivist stance in human observation, that is, the notion of objectively standing above and outside of social phenomena, and shows instead how expert knowledge can also be implicated in, co-construct, and derive from its sociohistorical context and the positionality of the observer (see SmithermanDonaldson 1988; Washington 2018). Given the pervasion and wide reach of scientific racism through biological determinism across nineteenth and twentieth-century societies, and likely even earlier, a necessary goal moving forward is to understand how these paradigms

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persist through current assumptions about innate difference and inferiority (such as stigmatizations of language diversity) in modern discourses, whether in the public domain or academia. This endeavor of course requires further critical analyses to locate and identify such cultural narratives. Speaking on the educational sector, Baker-Bell observes, “No doubt, the Anti-Black Linguistic Racism that is used to diminish Black Language and Black students in schools is not separate from the rampant and deliberate anti-Black racism and violence inflicted upon Black people in society” (2020: 3). Linguists (such as Baugh 2016; Rickford and King 2016) have also clearly demonstrated how the essential relationships we assume between human beings and their languages produce new forms of bias and prejudice that impact issues of inclusion, justice, and basic safety. This concern is further validated by the documented persistence of biological determinism and eugenic principles in other areas of modern science (see racial biases in the assessment and treatment of pain among Black and white patients in Hoffman et al. 2016; race-norming in medicine in Braun 2014, 2020, and in neuropsychological tests of cognition among football players retired from the National Football League in The Associated Press 2021). Critical reflection on how our modern assumptions about human variation connect to and propagate historical perspectives about supremacy and innate difference is imperative. However removed Gonzales’s text appears to be from modern thinking considering the social context in which it was produced, we should openly confront the fact that this foreword has striking similarities with some of our current deterministic representations and descriptions of human diversity and linguistic variation (for example, not only ‘bad English’ but also ‘broken English’ and the like, or essentializing links between ‘good English’ and obtaining ‘good jobs,’ which condemns nondominant language varieties and perpetuates social and economic exclusion of their interlocutors). Vershawn Young notes how racial subordination continues through policies for linguistic segregation, which relegate nondominant language varieties to the home: “Since black English is restricted in school and the mainstream public, it is, in effect, rendered inferior” (Young 2009: 55). Smitherman (1973) lamented nearly fifty years after Gonzales’s text and fifty years before this one the alarming parallels and therefore contemporary implications of The Black Border for the educational enterprise: Well, even though Gonzales and Krapp were writing in […] the “olden days,” ain’t nothin changed. In a recent record, The Dialect of Black Americans, distributed for educational purposes by Western Electric, we are told of Joseph, a recent Black high school graduate, who was refused a job because “his speech carries no respect. In fact it generates negative attitudes, and the middle-class Black must be careful of the language he uses–or which language he uses.” Sound familiar? Sure, just another variation on the linguistic purist/ class

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anxiety theme of Lowth, Murray, and Fries; and the linguistic ethnocentricism and rampant racism of Gonzales and Krapp. (Outside thought: still at 1763 and it’s 1973). (Smitherman 1973: 830)

As Smitherman noted then and as we note now, not enough has changed in terms of how we perceive and treat language diversity (see also Baker-Bell 2020). This critical revisitation of the foreword to The Black Border has hopefully furthered the work necessary to help identify, unpack, and eradicate contemporary discourses of inborn difference from academia and beyond. In particular, we hope to have shown readers how racialized discourses of difference and deviance play out in mundane spaces including everyday text and talk.

Acknowledgments We thank Dr. Janira Teague and Dr. Uzzie Cannon for providing valuable feedback on this manuscript. We also want to express our gratitude to the editors for their careful review of the manuscript and for the opportunity to contribute to this important collection through our chapter. Finally, Dr. Washington conveys her heartfelt appreciation to her mother, Eleanor Holmes Washington, a mother tongue speaker of Gullah and lifelong educator, for always modeling love of self, family, and community and a cultural pride that inspired the first author’s profound appreciation for her heritage and a commitment to studying language and culture.

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Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard

Sowing the Seeds: Illness as Social Imbalance and Instrument of Social Change in Octavia Butler’s Speculative Fiction

Abstract: This essay analyzes the representation of illness in Seed to Harvest, African American Octavia Butler’s tetralogy of speculative fiction published between 1976 and 1984, particularly its third volume, which dwells on the onset of a mysterious and highly contagious disease. An extraterrestrial virus effectively turns human beings into aliens by quickly modifying their bodily characteristics, but its full effect can only be measured in the descendants of the infected. Seed to Harvest introduces and juxtaposes two populations: the Clayarks, the offspring of those infected by the virus, and the Patternists, endowed with extraordinary mind powers. At various points in the cycle, both populations are shown as outcasts and their predicament as a curse that isolates them from the larger society. Eventually, the modifications of the human body and mind give rise to a real shift of power on the planet, but they are shown to occur insidiously among the poor and the disinherited in our day and in our past. The ‘dangerous classes’ – the uncontrollable, filthy, diseased, unbounded, in some cases unable to work for their own sustenance – are depicted as already living in our midst. This chapter explores changes in social status, physical appearance, and bodily appetites of the diseased. It analyzes how the illness fits in with the depicted world’s social issues, becoming one of the master illnesses, expressing “a sense of dissatisfaction with the society as such” (Susan Sontag 1978).

In speculative fiction penned by Octavia Butler, the celebrated African American science-fiction prize-winning novelist, change is the only constant; Ytasha Womack postulates that Butler has been “rediscovered and reframed by Afrofuturists as social change agent” (2013: 17). Butler’s work supports the productive cycle of change: As old forms of identity are doomed to die, new ones are born; those who had no agency can gain it in altered circumstances, as the collective biography of humanity is constantly, or periodically, rewritten. At the same time, her narratives also dramatize the resilience, the persistence of some undesirable characteristics. Change is rarely wished for and imagined by her protagonists, then made real. Rather, her characters are forced to react https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-009

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when faced with an unusual, terrifying predicament. The agent of change is often a disease. Some texts in which illness results in the birth of a new community are the short stories “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) and “Speech Sounds” (1983), and the tetralogy Seed to Harvest (2007 [1976 – 1984]). Diseases and overcoming them are also important in Fledgling (2005) and Dawn (1987), the latter containing an alien’s aesthetic evaluation of cancer. The very way in which Butler presents illnesses in her work calls on us to interrogate the notion of disease and the related terms, in particular disability. While in recent scholarship and activism the two have been dissociated, disability and disease share certain characteristics. Medical discourse and the discourse of normative society claim that “people with disabilities, like people with diseases, are rendered worse off in virtue of these functional impairments, and the explanatory burden of their disadvantage is borne chiefly by the failure of their physiology or psychology to perform a natural function” (Murphy 2021). In Butler’s work, however, the contention that a disease makes one somehow less than other people is repeatedly questioned, as is the quality of “natural” function. Her imagined illnesses in fact sometimes tend to add to the capacities of the organism. Furthermore, if we consider that a disease is a temporary condition whereas a disability is a permanent one, Butler’s ailments tend to blur the border between the two. Apart from that, qualifying a condition as an illness calls upon a certain system of norms and values: “to call something a disease involves both a claim about the abnormal functioning of some bodily system and a judgment that the resulting abnormality is a bad one” (Murphy 2021). Once again, Butler’s representation of changing health can be used to question the validity of the term ‘illness’ as applied to what happens to her characters’ bodies. Finally, her work dramatizes the possibility of using diagnostic labels as instruments of oppression both by medical establishment and by government officials. This chapter will focus on the representation of illness in Clay’s Ark (1984), the third volume of Octavia Butler’s tetralogy Seed to Harvest. It should be noted that Clay’s Ark is the last of the cycle to have been written, but in the chronology of the depicted world it is the penultimate. It is also the only book of the tetralogy that features no Patternists, who are a collective protagonist of the three remaining novels of Seed to Harvest, but focuses exclusively on Clayarks, a group that is presented in the final volume of the cycle, Patternmaster (1976), as the enemies of Patternists. Therefore, Clay’s Ark stands out in the tetralogy, which otherwise shows the slow rise of the Patternist dominion. One of the underlying issues in the cycle are the dangers of colonization and abuses of power, another is the struggle between one’s ideals and values, on the one hand, and mindless drives, on the other. In Butler’s world, the power does not necessarily, or even primarily, stem from reason. The science fiction she wrote was not about the con-

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quest of other planets and the submission of the natives: In her work, humans are often subjugated, but the process of subjugation does not only trigger human resistance; it is also a source of empowerment and pleasure. Planetary spaces and living places are shared by members of different intelligent species, but this does not exclude dominance fights. “The trope of a radically, sometimes violently, remade homo sapiens, altered either due to its own mutations or as a consequence of its encounters with other kinds of beings, runs” throughout her fiction (Kilgore and Samantrai 2010: 355). Clay’s Ark ¹ dwells on the onset of a mysterious and highly contagious disease and provides the missing origin narrative of the infected group. Like the cyborg origin stories evoked by Donna Haraway, this tale of new beginnings focuses on “the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that has marked them as other” (Haraway 1991: 175). As there are no innocent beginnings, there will be no utopian future and no salvation story, either. In the novel, the organism of extraterrestrial origin, brought from the second planet of Proxima Centauri, turns human beings into aliens by quickly modifying their bodily characteristics, but its full effect can only be measured in the descendants of the infected. Patternmaster, written before all the other volumes of the cycle, whose plot is set many centuries after Clay’s Ark, introduces Clayarks as a non-human species. It is hinted that the Clayark disease is contagious, extraterrestrial, and, last but not least, incurable: it is an ailment that no Patternist healer can handle. The opening section of Patternmaster presents Clayarks as characteristically clumsy when resorting to using hands and as enjoying direct killing of their enemies. As Patternmaster is told from the point of view of Patternists, it reproduces their controlling images of Clayarks, the xenophobic discourse in which Clayarks “function as mute bodies [whose] language, culture, and history are non-communicable” (Davis 2013: 104), and the only thing that they can transmit is the alien organism. The two populations speak different languages, wage war on one another, and rarely communicate. Clay’s Ark fills the gaps in Patternmaster’s readers’ knowledge, and it makes our understanding of their condition more complex. Heather Schell calls Clay’s Ark a novel that depicts “a new stage in human evolution” (2002: 809), and this is indeed the impression the reader may have at the end of the novel. This narrative restores the balance, missing from the earlier volumes, in so far as it intro-

 In this chapter, Clay’s Ark refers to the title of the novel, Clay’s Ark (without italics) is the name of the spaceship that has gone to Proxima Centauri, and Clayarks are the people contaminated with the organism from Proxima Centauri and their descendants.

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duces the Clayarks’ point of view and their lived experience, as if Butler wanted to make up for the earlier novels, in which Patternists, having become the cognitive majority, sought to erase the memory of Clayarks as human and to silence their voice. Clay’s Ark can be read as a science-fiction novel, complete with alien invasion and a starship. However, it can usefully be read as a realistic narrative about emerging illnesses and as a visionary tale about the possibilities of social change. Brian Attebery rightly points out that “the interesting question about any given story is not whether or not it is fantasy or science fiction or realistic novel, but rather what happens when we read it as one of those things” (2014: 38).

Clayark Disease Clay’s Ark, ironically enough set in 2021, the current pandemic time, opens by presenting the disease through the experiential lenses of its carriers: The first character introduced in the narrative is the patient zero. Very soon, the second point of view is added as the reader is invited to see the carriers through the eyes of not-yet infected characters. The novel interweaves these points of view by alternating sections titled “Past” and “Present,” but also by devoting much space to dialogues and interior monologues describing the symptoms. The novel provides structure to what appears initially as chaotic felt experience of the illness and haphazard perception of its effects by bystanders. Only subsequently does the narrative introduce a third, more ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ point of view, based on research done on the organism that causes the disease. However, this scientific point of view is presented at one, or even several, removes: The characters involved in the investigation are dead in the narrative present, and what is left of their experiments and research is passed on by characters who are not medical practitioners. These narrative choices highlight the physical reality of the symptoms, which, as many characters feel, endangers their very humanity. Butler’s novel raises a certain number of issues. Is illness an inherent lack? What is normalcy? Whose voice matters when a new illness emerges? What rights are granted to the infected? The symptoms of the disease seem to indicate that this is a disease of excess, rather than lack, of addition and not of subtraction. The symptoms include a considerable sharpening of the senses of smell, hearing, and sight. The Clayarks can see in the dark, smell other people, animals, and water from a distance, as well as hear conversations through the walls. Their appetite increases, so that they have to eat much more than an uninfected human and are unable to bear hunger. Due to the modification of their senses of smell and taste, they

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favor unseasoned food and tend to prefer raw meat: “Living prey smelled wonderful” (Butler, Clay’s Ark 2007a: 514). Many times in the narrative, the infected people are shown hunting and consuming a live animal, which is a shock to the newly contaminated and to the observers alike. Besides, their strength and speed are vastly increased, which enables them to take the people they want to abduct by surprise: “a man who seemed to come from nowhere tore open her door, which had been locked” (2007a: 460, emphasis in the text). All these characteristics, even if they actually improve the functioning of their bodies, make the Clayarks doubt their humanity. They feel they are becoming animals, reverting to a natural and prehistoric state. This perception might result from their conceptualizing the disease as lack. While their bodies actually become more resilient and stronger, they nevertheless automatically associate illness with absence and with deterioration. And, of course, while their bodies grow more efficient, they also wax more ‘abnormal,’ which frightens them. The organism also influences the way the Clayarks interact with other people. First of all, the company of other humans is essential to them, because they need to infect them. This is a powerful overwhelming irresistible urge. For them, “being alone was terrifying, mind-numbing” (Butler 2007a: 517). Contamination occurs through scratching the skin or touching wounds. As a matter of fact, giving the Proxima organism to other people turns into a source of intense sexual pleasure, which is linked to the Clayarks’ irresistible sexual cravings, triggered by their sense of smell and by the need to beget offspring. Once they have been given the alien organism, “touching, even accidentally, became a startlingly intense sensual experience” (514). So strong is the sexual desire the infected feel that it overcomes all possible taboos, including incest (which is only avoided by several characters thanks to their deaths, as with Meda’s father and brothers, or to the forcible intervention of someone else, as with Keira and Blake). There are many children, because “the organism had turned them all into breeding animals” (541). Complicating the notions of desire and acceptance by “positioning erotic coercion and addiction as factors that may not necessarily be negative, even for the individual who is addicted or coerced,” is a frequent theme in Butler’s work (Fink 2010: 420). So, also from the relational and psychological point of view, Clayark’s disease is a disease of increase and of excess. Besides, Butler’s narrative insists on the unity of body and mind, as both are equally affected by the organism. Thirdly, the disease modifies the physical appearance of the carriers in a way that strikes all the observers. For example, Blake Maslin describes the patient zero, Eli, in the following terms: “He was a tall, thin man with skin that had gone gray with more than desert dust” (Butler 2007a: 461). One of Blake’s daughters, Rane, observes: “they were all scrawny and their eyes seemed larger than

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normal in their gaunt faces. They looked at her with hunger or lust. They looked so intently she felt as though they had reached for her with their thin fingers. She could imagine them all grabbing her” (519). She finds their bodies and their gaze disgusting, a threatening abomination. “If a stigmatized body is abominated, then its status as a threat becomes particularly acute when body boundaries are at risk, when the border between one body and another becomes fluid and (tres)passable” (Epstein 1992: 305). As a twin sister of Keira, who is terminally ill with cancer, Rane may feel even more exposed to the risk of having her bodily boundaries crossed by unwanted elements. By that moment in the narrative, the equation has already been made between her sister’s emaciation, due to cancer, and their kidnappers’ physical appearance. The link is made both by their father and by Eli, so that Keira’s thinness seems to predispose her to become one of them, in spite of her fragility. Rane feels the power of attraction of the abject: For her, it would be all too easy to be devoured, to lose her self. Up to that moment, Rane could observe her sister’s slow decline; it was her sister whose body housed “the elusive stranger, the monster, the tumor, the cancer” (Kristeva 1980: 19, my translation). Now, however, meeting the group of Clayarks makes her aware that her own body could also be invaded. Her father, Blake, who is a doctor, describes the symptoms of the disease in the following terms: “Diaphoresis, Blake thought. Excessive sweating – symptomatic of what? Emaciation, trembling, bad coloring, now sweating – plus surprising strength, speed, and coordination” (Butler 2007a: 478). His description is more balanced, in so far as it lists both positive and negative elements. However, the main issue for him at this stage is the mystery associated with the state he is describing. If physical changes in the first generation of the infected seem quite striking, they are slight compared to the alteration of the bodies of the second generation. The children born to the carriers of the disease are strikingly different both from their parents and from the general population, which makes certain characters reject them as animals. In Clay’s Ark, this rejection is a possibility feared by these children’s parents. An actualization of this possibility can be seen from the following account by a terrified witness: “The boy […] leaped to the bench on which Rane and Lupe sat. He landed next to Rane, who started violently. Jacob had leaped like a cat and landed on all fours. His legs and arms were clearly intended to be used this way. He was a quadruped. He had hands, however, and fingers” (2007a: 523). His body clearly does not conform to the idea that Rane has of a human child, and consequently is qualified by her, in the conversation with his mother, as an animal, a thing, and a monster. Nevertheless, she finds a certain beauty in him: “beautiful child head, sleek catlike body. A miniature sphinx” (524). Already in Patternmaster, Clayarks call themselves sphinxes: “Creatures out of ancient mythology, lion-bodied, human-headed. The descrip-

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tion was not really accurate. The Clayarks were furless and tailless, and they did possess hands” (Butler 2007c: 641). The blending of the human and the animal is more pronounced in the offspring of the first generation of the infected. In their bodies, “nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (Haraway 1990: 192). These children are not made in the image of their parents, and neither are they a reproduction of the earlier generations. This might seem to indicate that the system of the perpetuation of the changing-same, in which “opportunities for change are ostensibly provided while old hierarchies are replicated” (Collins 2010: 27, note 2), has been broken. As can be seen from the above examples, Clayark disease combines elements of several actual illnesses that have often been depicted in literature, and, more to the point, its description uses various metaphors associated with those illnesses. It shares numerous characteristics with cancer, a disease frequently referred to in Butler’s fiction, for example in Dawn. ² Like cancer, Clayark is a disease of a whole body, associated with losing weight because of an “invasion by alien cells” (Sontag 1978: 14), which are in this case quite literally the cells of an organism from outer space. Like cancer, Clayark disease can be called “the barbarian within” (Sontag 1978: 61) that prevents the infected from respecting cultural norms of their society, making them fear, and feel, that they are actually becoming animals, turning wild and devolving into pre-human beings. It develops in a chaotic way, “destroying the body’s normal cells, architecture, and functions” (63). It is noted several times that a subject needs to be quite strong and preferably not too slim in order to survive the onslaught of the organism. However, this is not an absolute rule. Keira, who is suffering from cancer, thrives after contamination, which may be read as an expression of sympathy between her cancer cells and the Clayark organism. The Clayarks’ humanity is called into question by others and even by themselves, and again, this enables us to draw a parallel with Sontag’s remark: “In cancer, non-intelligent […] cells are multiplying, and you are being replaced by the non-you” (67). Finally, it is literally a “cosmic disease” (Sontag 1978: 68), which occasionally makes humans miss Proxima’s sun that they have never seen: “The sun is too bright and … not red. I feel surprised that it isn’t red” (Butler 2007a: 521, ellipsis in original). In this way, Earth’s mission to Proxima, a research mission that may have had  Dawn’s protagonist Lilith was born into a family with genetic predisposition to cancer but is deprived of that characteristic by the aliens who have abducted her and who perceive cancer as easy to cure, aesthetically pleasing to their senses and offering alluring possibilities for genetic engineering. Besides, in the afterword to the short story “Speech Sounds,” Butler explains that when she was writing this story and Clay’s Ark, a close friend was dying of cancer.

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imperialistic or colonizing targets, turns against the humans as the only survivor serves as a carrier of alien colonization.³ However, Clayark disease also displays several characteristics that, according to Sontag, are associated with tuberculosis: It results in “increased appetite, exacerbated sexual desire” (Sontag 1978: 13); it is a condition that, like tuberculosis, brings out into the open hidden and secret passions: “TB is the disease that makes manifest intense desire” (45). Apart from tuberculosis and cancer, Clayark disease also betrays some kinship with AIDS mythologies known from public discourse of the early 1980s. The novel was published in the early stages of the epidemic, in the same year that the virus was independently isolated by two different research teams, so that the new discoveries may have influenced Butler. Thus, her imaginary illness is exotic, alien, invisible, soulless, superhumanly mobile, infectious, murderous, a threat to personal autonomy and to free will, as well as to the traditional family and religion, and, last but not least, it has been brought to Earth by a Black man. All those elements correspond to the picture the media drew of the AIDS pandemic during its first years. The Proxima organism affects the carriers by turning them into “people who cannot control their desires” and who “become coterminous with their alleged inability to restrain their appetites, and hence with those appetites themselves as reified demons,” which corresponds to the descriptions of gays at the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic (Epstein 1992: 302). It is found out in the novel by trial and error that combining contamination and sexual intercourse enhances the chances of survival for the freshly infected subjects. This, along with the overwhelming sexual desire experienced by the newly infected, points to the image of a transgressive illness, similar to AIDS. As Fink writes, “understandings of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus are based on the […] premise that the presence of a foreign body within our blood systems can radically alter our physical essence and behavior” (2010: 428). Such a radical modification of body and mind due to the presence of a pathogen, a “foreign body,” is what makes the Clayark disease so terrifying to its carriers. In Maria Ferreira’s words, “connected with this recurring anxiety about the loss of humanity is the fear of penetration and invasion or infection by the alien other, the tinkering with genetic identity at the molecular level” (2010: 407). However, while the organism does govern the behavior and the impulses of the infected, it is also the opposite of the above-mentioned diseases insofar as it offers the Clayarks many benefits, in terms of protection from the other illnesses, increased sensual pleasures, and highly augmented resilience.

 As I have written elsewhere, “this illness acts as a retaliation punishing human overreachers for overstepping the borders imposed by nature” (Kurjatto-Renard 2016: 65).

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Indeed, whereas there is a high mortality rate for the infected, especially if they are left alone without contact with the other infected, the Clayark disease shields its carriers from ailments once their bodies accept the presence of the organism. As one of the characters says, “We don’t seem to get other diseases once we have this one” (Butler 2007a: 531). The Clayark organism exterminates all other germs and in effect protects the health of the carriers or even restores it. The striking example is Keira, Blake’s 16-year-old daughter, who is dying of acute myeloblastic leukemia when she becomes infected with Clayark, but in spite of everyone’s expectations, she is the only family member to survive and her cancer disappears completely. At the end of the novel, it is Keira and her husband Stephen who are considering the future of the new society. Thus it may be argued that Keira’s healing from cancer and her resistance to (or ability to cooperate with) a potentially deadly alien virus “implies that human frailty, human variance, and oppression must be included in the national narrative” (Pickens 2015: 171). The organism also poisons various animals, such as rattlesnakes and dogs, so that if a carrier is bitten by a snake, it is the snake who dies. The protection against bodily harm operates on the psychological level as well, making it all but impossible for a carrier to commit suicide (one is successful, but only because he manages to kill himself before the alien cells have a complete hold on his body). Last but not least, the organism helps the body heal wounds, even very serious ones. The issue of testimonial injustice and the impact it can have on the relationship between doctors and patients is dramatized in the following exchange between Meda, one of the three Clayarks who kidnapped Blake, and Blake himself. When Meda explains the origin of the disease to Blake, she tells him: “it’s something like a virus […]. Except that it can live and multiply on its own for a few hours if it has warmth and moisture” (Butler 2007a: 486). This immediately arouses suspicions in the doctor, who automatically refuses to grant her any epistemic authority. For him, she is not a trustworthy source of information because he sees her as an uneducated country woman, and also because what he hears is not consistent with his knowledge of viruses. He would perhaps be ready to listen to her testimony as a patient, but not to any theory that she may want to share with him.⁴ Meda, however, refuses to be silenced and explains why she

 He might be unwilling to take her account of the disease seriously even if she were his patient. Sometimes patients die because of doctors’ refusal to grant them epistemic authority. In 2017, in France, to mention just one example, a young woman named Naomi Musenga was disbelieved when she tried to obtain help from an emergency ward and then a local hospital. She died soon after a phone call during which a medical practitioner mocked her. Since then, more and more similar cases have been coming to light.

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used the word “virus” in the first place: “It likes to attach itself to cells the way a virus does” (486). She then manages to make him listen by first claiming that she does not wish to usurp the position of a medical practitioner and then pointing out that the information provided may be of use to save Blake’s children’s lives. In this way, she manages to have him participate in empathetic dialogue with her, for which he had not been ready only a short time earlier. By the end of the conversation, she has managed to make him accept her epistemic status of a knower. “The organism doesn’t use cells up the way a virus does. It combines with them, lives with them, divides with them, changes them just a little” (487). In this exchange, Meda repeats what she has been told by Eli, who heard this from his late wife, so it is medical discourse twice removed: Eli’s wife was a doctor of medicine, he himself is a geologist, and Meda has grown up on a farm and probably has never been to university. This gradual introduction of medical discourse permits Butler to better focus on the felt experience of the ill. Of course, the organism is of extraterrestrial origin so the language used to describe it may be found lacking. When Blake, a medical doctor, looks at flesh and sweat samples through the analyzer, he notices that the organism is somewhat “like plasmids invading and making themselves at home in bacteria,” except that it is more complex and seeks out more complex bodies to infect and modify (Butler 2007a: 497). The characters Blake observes have been carriers for long enough to develop a certain tolerance to the presence of the alien organism: “In time the organism changed, adapted, and chemically encouraged its host to adapt. Its by-products ceased to be toxic to its host and the host ceased to react as strongly to increased sexual needs and heightened sensory awareness – inevitable effects of the disease” (494). In spite of constant fears of dehumanization, Clayarks are described as trying to contain the contagion, preventing it from spreading all over the world. Ultimately, they are unsuccessful, but the character who is responsible for spreading the organism out of the isolated position they had managed to keep it in is not one of them. In fact, Blake, who by that time had been contaminated, is attacked and left for dead by a stranger, who then flees the scene in his truck. Because this man has been in contact with Blake, he will spread the disease wherever he goes and will be deprived of the other Clayarks’ aid.

Clayarks’ Community Like most of Butler’s works, Clay’s Ark can be read as a call for creating a community while also questioning the interactions between the community and its members. “Many of Butler’s novels feature beings […] that can be alternately

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viewed as enslaving or symbiotically living with their human partners” (Jue 2017: 179). This interest in biological interactions between species leads to dramatizing tensions between community and individual as well as between coercion and free choice. It also helps to question the way a new community can be built and to potentially indicate a way out of chaos and apocalypse. Butler’s speculative fiction is, as Tananarive Due perceives, “a prism through which she examines ills in American society” (2015: 264). Clay’s Ark shows, among other things, what could happen if we send a starship to a planet whose life is relatively similar to life on Earth, but also what could happen if the welfare state and social solidarity keep dissolving. Who will be enslaved, and who will become the new master? Who will survive, and what will the new society be like? I would now like to focus on the construction of community among Clayarks, for whom, as has been said, living together is extremely important. The term community is an elastic concept describing the space to which various minority or disempowered groups are assigned: “in essence, the embodied, premodern, ‘dark’ side of society, ostensibly characterized by its irrationality and emotionality” (Collins 2010: 10). Very often it is considered as close to the notion of family, which on the one hand contributes to seeing it as natural while on the other may reinforce its links with segregation (along the line private/ public, blood ties/affinity) and slavery (see Collins 2000: 59). The romantic view of community presents it as a “shield from the harshness of […] modernity” and as a natural, harmonious and safe space for its members, while “pejorative viewpoints on communities see them as backward places that make unreasonable demands on family members, retard assimilation into larger society, and attenuate the personal freedom of individuals” (Collins 2020: 54). A negative vision of community also implies that an ideal community “denies the difference between subjects,” since it “presumes subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves” (Young 1990: 302). Community is often considered as a site of affirmation and identification and as a place where one’s voice is heard, and as such can be used to fight for social justice and/or for political power. Because Clay’s Ark presents the birth of a new community, all those elements can be helpful in analyzing what the novel has to say about living together. Even though the novel begins and ends symmetrically with a solitary man, infected with the Proxima Centauri organism, wandering through the desert, this symmetry is only superficial. Contrary to the nameless driver who kills Blake, Eli is also the founder of a community. As Priscilla Wald says, “the interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact” (2008: 2). From one point of view, the inchoate

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Clayark community is in fact a space of acceptance and safety whose members can “be honest with one another and find recognition” (Collins 2005, 297). The Clayarks share a solidarity against all odds, overcoming the barriers of education, class, race, and gender to build a coalition. I am referring here to what Collins called for in Black Sexual Politics, indicating the necessity to resist oppression through an ethics of care. “Responding to HIV/AIDS requires building Black communities that encompass both meanings of community, namely, a revitalized Black identity politics that recognize the significance of gender and sexuality, and political communities that work for Black empowerment, primarily as part of broader coalitions with other groups” (Collins 2005: 298). The means to build this coalition, however, are somewhat surprising, and question the possibility for humans to overcome the limits imposed on them by the flaws of their humanity. First of all, the infected crave each other’s company and need to attract new people to widen their group. In the novel, this appears not only, or even not at all, as a psychological need for belonging and love, but as a strong physical drive. To achieve this goal, they tend to abduct passersby who are crossing the desert. This is how Blake and his two daughters are forced to join the group. Their car is stopped in the desert, and the door is forcibly opened. Eli and Ingraham, the two infected men, wield guns to threaten them, even if by the time they all reach the ranch where Clayarks live, Blake no longer feels menaced, and later Eli explains that the gun would not have been used. Attracting new members to the group is an instinctive compulsion, especially in women who are not pregnant at the moment. Tellingly, Eli calls the newcomers “converts” (Butler 2007a: 489), as if the ranch were home to a sect. This may be accurate in a tongue-in-cheek way. The ranch itself is located far from the main road and used to belong to Meda’s parents. Her family kept animals and grew their own food for subsistence farming. Her father was clearly a very religious man, and the isolation of the farm may have been one of its attractions for him, as he wanted to protect his family from the moral decline of city life. However, the decline – if we consider it as such – came in the form of an apparently lost and wounded stranger, Eli, whose spaceship crashed some thirty kilometers away and who found the house thanks to his sense of smell. He was taken care of by Meda’s family moved by Christian charity, but of course contaminated them all, which resulted in the deaths of her parents, her brothers, and her unborn nephew. What happened when Eli arrived at their farm is typical of outbreak narratives: “The conflation of illness with outsiderhood is an established trend in disease narratives, solidifying the cultural axiom that ‘wherever you are, plague always comes from

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somewhere else’” (Fink 2010: 428). It also points to one of the central concerns in the novel: the issue of risk and security. The society the Clayarks are shown to create is thus torn between conflicting urges: the desire to contaminate as many people as possible and the wish to protect as many healthy people as possible from contagion. This conflict makes them kidnap people from time to time, as has been said before, but it also makes them wear gloves when they go shopping in town so as to avoid accidental scratching of others, which would result in rapid spread of the organism. Besides, as one of the characters explains, once you are contaminated, “you aren’t ever going to be comfortable among ordinary people again” (Butler 2007a: 489). In this community, indeed, the members understand one another, but they also feel that it is impossible for them to return to their previous lives; they cannot ever be assimilated into the dominant society. This is one of the reasons why having their own space is so important to them. Nonetheless, theirs is not always a harmonious community. The organism can increase the level of violence by making the infected wage dominance fights (at least at first) that can be very violent (cf. 573). Because the Clayarks see themselves as a threat to the rest of humanity, they relinquish the idea of escaping from the farm and trying to make contact with their original families. One of their central preoccupations is “maintaining borders and policing who belongs within them” (Collins 2010: 13), which makes their community akin to gated communities of all kinds. They are regularly shown deliberating whether and when new members should be sought and, once included, the new members immediately think about reducing the risk to their former family. For example, when Stephen, who eventually marries Keira, was kidnapped, he was married and had a child, but he has never tried to see them again. In this way, the Clayarks respect the principle that “individuals must take responsibility both for their own well-being and for the public health” (Epstein 1992: 300 – 301), which obviously they have thoroughly internalized. Ironically, it would appear that they are better equipped to help the other contaminated than the medical professionals, for the Clayark organism does not respond well to medical treatments used on board the spaceship and to the procedure of keeping the infected in isolation. The authority of the physicians is questioned both implicitly and explicitly in the novel. What makes Clayarks stay hidden in the desert is not only their wish to protect their uninfected families and to limit the risk of the leakage of the alien organism, but also the fear of what would happen to them if their existence were discovered by the scientists. In the end, “policing disease does not work any better than does policing desire” (Epstein 1992: 302), so their isolation cannot be maintained.

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It is easy to draw a parallel between Eli and the protagonist of Dawn, Lilith. Like Lilith, Eli sees himself very much “as being a ‘Judas goat’ leading humanity to an undesired mutation” (Peppers 1995: 50). He is responsible for turning the infected women into females whose destiny is to “give birth to a monstrous brood of children,” which is one of Lilith’s fears (Peppers 1995: 49). His presence literally spells the death of the Christian family that accepts him to heal him from what they imagine to be simply malnutrition and dog-inflicted wounds. In this way, the founder of the community is also explicitly guilty of destruction: This origin story does not depend on innocence, bliss, or purity, but instead on guilt, suffering, and contagion. However, in Butler’s narrative, the fact that the Clayarks have been violently and permanently self-removed from society makes it possible for them to create a new social order based on self-reliance, personal accountability, and direct democracy. In their midst, all members are equal and participate in the community effort to the extent of their abilities. It seems that violent destruction might be necessary to open up new possibilities of adopting a new personality and a new way of life. The illness fits in the depicted world’s social issues, so that it becomes one of the master illnesses, expressing “a sense of dissatisfaction with the society as such” (Sontag 1978: 73). The community that they manage to build is closely knit and based on “cooperation, interdependence, honesty, and complex understandings of power” (Morris 2012: 156). On the one hand, the infected do not have much choice; they are definitely dependent on one another, so that they have to cooperate. Besides, although they are not endowed with telepathic abilities, they can deduce a great deal about others’ emotions by scent and by reading body language, so it is difficult for them to lie to one another. But the group they build is able to offer redemption to some of them. For instance, the reader is told that Ingraham used to be a criminal but turned into a good person in the community. Susana Morris generalizes about Butler’s intention: “Butler’s fiction is fundamentally interested in critiquing conventional systems of power and dominance and offering futurist solutions based on cooperation and egalitarian ethics” (2012: 155). In her essay on Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Emily S. Davis examines the use of the trope of contagion as a tool for analyzing the questions of human rights and shared vulnerability. In conventional disease and epidemic outbreak narratives, the patient zero and, more broadly, the first cluster, are outcasts and/or foreigners. In various contexts, they may be transnational migrants, citizens of a foreign country, members of sexual or ethnic minorities, the poor, and so on. The question that arises is, do the ill have human rights? Davis phrases this question in terms of citizenship: “given the fact that the subject of human rights is the citizen, who is supposed to be guaranteed these rights by the legal and political apparatuses of the nation-state, how can we under-

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stand the human rights of illegal immigrants, refugees, the stateless?” (2013: 101). In Clay’s Ark, as indeed in all Butler’s novels, the nation-state, which is ideally supposed to be the “purveyor and guarantor of rights,” is weak, non-existent, or seen as the “agent responsible for human rights violations, whether against citizens or noncitizens” (Davis 2013: 102). This operates on two levels in the novel: on the one hand, through the description of fears related to the fate of Clayarks should they be discovered by medical authorities, and on the other, through the way the rest of the society in the depicted world is presented. The infected are scared of being treated as scientific curiosities by the medical establishment and resist the idea that they should seek medical treatment for their condition. The initial reaction to the outbreak of the disease on board the spaceship was to confine the contaminated and to look for the means to free their bodies of the alien organism. This, however, was a total failure: No cure was discovered, and the confined patients invariably died. Later, Blake and Rane keep suggesting that the infected should contact a hospital, but this suggestion is rejected by the diseased. Instead of relying on medical science, the infected try to contain their condition in a limited space and to seek relational help from their companions. They are persuaded that twenty-first-century medicine would treat them and their children as monsters, a point of view expressed by Rane when she sees Jacob. In Clay’s Ark, identity, kinship, and intimacy are reimagined and the new family is hybrid and non-monogamous. In fact, as has been said above, the organism modifies certain behaviors to such an extent that the Clayarks may seem to revert to a previous stage of civilization with their preference for the raw to the cooked and their difficulty in respecting the taboo on incest. This is a source of anxiety to numerous characters, and the idea that their group seems to undergo a reverse evolution, from culture to nature, keeps haunting them. Likewise, in Patternmaster (published before Clay’s Ark) Clayarks are immediately presented as bloodthirsty barbarians who brutally kill the Patternmaster’s lead wife at the opening of the novel. However, Clay’s Ark goes to great length to show their struggle against violence and efforts to protect their humanity. It also shows them as caring parents, in contrast to their enemies, the Patternists. Clayark’s new community is also post-racial, and I would now like to analyze briefly the place of race, gender, and class in it. It can appear quite conservative gender-wise, since the organism makes women desire pregnancy above all – for example, when Meda’s family is dying, she is shocked by her own wish to have regular and frequent sex with Eli. There seems to be no place for homosexuality among Clayarks. However, the differences of race and class are erased by the organism – the small group consists of a Black man; an Asian American man (both of whom used to be middle-class and received a good education and a-

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chieved a high social status before contamination); a Latino woman who, before being incorporated into the community, lived in her truck and worked as a private hauler; two white women stemming from poor and religious families; a former criminal; and finally, Blake and his two daughters, who are middle-class, mixed race (that is to say, Blake’s wife, now dead, was Black). Their different upbringing, status, and economic situation do not matter anymore, as they form, albeit somewhat unwillingly, a new community. “Butler’s fantasies posit racial hybridity as the potential root of good family and blessed community life, a preference she attributed to her experience growing up in places not strictly segregated by race” (Kilgore and Samantrai 2010: 355 – 356). To racial hybridity we can add class and environment hybridity. The disease erases the differences between the protagonists, so that the community they eventually build is not so much a product of exchange of their differently situated knowledges, but rather, a quickly created new epistemology. The novel proposes to give back to the Clayarks the epistemic authority that the Patternists deny them. The Clayarks’ community may not be a utopia, but it is based on coalition and power sharing. It also demonstrates that the concept of the nation-state is a myth by “highlighting transmissions between rural and urban areas within the nation as well as within regions” (Davis 2013: 103). In contrast, the wider depicted world, outside the Clayark community, is characterized by persistence of race-related problems, such as they appeared in 1980s when the novel was written. For example, we are told that Keira, who is half-black, does not recover from her leukemia even though she is being given the treatment that is supposed to work on everyone. While she belongs to a well-to-do family and her father is a medical doctor, this failure to treat her condition might possibly be the outcome of her being regarded as a second-class patient. Indeed, as Stephanie Coontz observed about the 1980s and 1990s, “Blacks, regardless of income, receive less intensive and high-tech medical treatment for their diseases than do whites” (2000: 233). During the 1980s, poverty levels rose in the Black community and life expectancy declined. Besides, violence is rife in the depicted world. Keira’s mother Jorah was killed by a teenager who simply wanted to try out his new gun. Blake and Jorah, who grew up in the 1990s, were deeply idealistic in their youth, especially Jorah. Blake remembers that when he and Jorah were young, they wanted to make the world a better place: “He was going to fight diseases of the body and she, diseases of a society that seemed to her too shortsighted and indifferent to survive” (Butler 2007a: 588). However, the fight for social justice resulted in Jorah’s death. Crossing the desert where the ranch is located is a dangerous endeavor because of the high criminality rate and the probability of being attacked, mugged, and killed, not to mention the presence of organized gangs, such as the

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one that kidnaps Blake and his daughters after they have been infected. It appears that the state apparatus is powerless to fight the criminals, so that the citizens are left to fend for themselves. In contrast with those images of violence, “the ethics of intimacy and family in the face of dystopia and apocalypse” (Morris 2012: 151) appears as one of the central issues in the novel. “Dominant groups tend to accord epistemic authority to themselves and withhold it from subordinates by constructing stigmatizing stereotypes of subordinates as incompetent or dishonest” (Anderson 2020). A diversity of educational and class backgrounds among the first Clayarks and the refusal of epistemic authority to some of them by Blake mirror, in a way, the similar refusal of epistemic authority that later-day Clayarks, well established by then, suffer from Patternists.⁵ It also shows the possible extent of the judgment of someone’s epistemic authority. For example, Blake takes Eli, who is Black, for “another semieducated product of city sewers” (Butler 2007a: 471), although the latter is in fact the last surviving astronaut of Clay’s Ark and has had a thorough education. This quick attribution of a label to Eli can be explained by several elements. First of all, speaking to strangers, he tends to adopt a fake African American lower-class idiom, which Meda regards as dumb. Secondly, he attacks Blake in the desert, which corresponds to the widespread controlling image of Black men as criminals. He looks unhealthy, which Blake puts down to drugs. As it turns out, none of these elements is really true. The reader can gather from the narrative that the spaces inhabited by the dominant society depicted in the novel belong to three types of areas: the enclaves for the well-to-do, the new version of gated communities; the ghettos for the very poor; and finally, the zones situated in their midst, in the in-between, which are the most open and the most defenseless, inhabited by the middle class: “islands surrounded by vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness connecting cesspools – economic ghettos that regularly chewed their inhabitants up and spat the pieces into surrounding communities” (Butler 2007a: 483). Eli was born in LA but says it is a deadly city. For Blake, the link between poor health, disability, and living place is blatant. He remembers the “patients from city sewers – people so mutilated they no longer looked human, would never look human again in spite of

 The visible, perhaps illusory, absence of written records, or any records, makes them less human in Patternists’ eyes. And yet, when Teray meets the nameless Clayark, the latter recognizes him as Rayal’s son – which is correct. Clayarks cannot read others’ minds, so Teray assumes that maybe once a Clayark made a drawing of Rayal, after the attack during which Teray’s father was given the organism. He never assumes that the information may have been passed on in writing, or by oral storytelling, or in any way that requires using language or technology.

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twenty-first century medicine” (570). Because the nation-state in the novel is no longer capable of monitoring what goes on in the ghettos, let alone trying to remedy the situation by providing respectable employment, educational opportunities, and adequate housing, the place where one lives determines one’s humanity. At the same time, when there is a shift in controlling spaces, when a living place changes its owner, this is usually shown to be achieved by violence and generally leads to degradation. A ranch not far from Eli and Meda’s farm is conquered by a degenerate gang that enslaves or kills its initial owners; the same happens to a service station close by, so that in comparison, Eli’s contamination of Meda’s family may appear as a relatively kind way of taking over property. Most of the living spaces referred to in the novel are shown to be fortresses of some kind, with limited and strictly supervised access, whose current inhabitants do not hesitate to kill in order to prevent others from entering their living place. The ecological degradation contributes to the picture of desolation: In this origin story, the Garden of Eden is replaced by the desert. This presentation of urban and rural communities could be read as dystopic, but it also corresponds to lived experience in many places in our world. The activist Adrienne Maree Brown thinks that currently “many abandoned urban communities are postapocalyptic in nature” (qtd. in Womack 2013: 180). The extraterrestrial organism that modifies human bodies in Clay’s Ark forces the altered humans to adopt a new behavior and social organization. However, as always in Butler’s fiction, this evolution is seen in an ambivalent way. The novel dramatizes the links between body, trust, and collective solidarity. Embodied trust, trust possible thanks to modifications of the body, is what makes it possible to dissolve social barriers and to build a new community of knowledge and collaboration. The Clayarks are depicted as able to accept and love their offspring even if the children are alien-looking. If the narrative is divided into sections about the past and about the present, what could be said about the future? Its vision is displaced into Patternmaster, where the Clayark population is presented as unassimilable aliens, othered, stigmatized. They remain the parasites, the disease-bearing aliens living in the midst of the population that considers itself the crown of the (auto)creation. I am writing this in the second year of world-wide pandemic, when it is often claimed that the virus (not the Clayark organism) has revealed “the fragile and uncertain state of our rational civilization” because it sprang out of crevices, rifts, and cracks in the infallible Western world (Nancy 2020: 8, my translation). Both the coronavirus (called communovirus in some parts of the world) and the Clayark organism are strongly related to the failure, or achievement, of progress. In Butler’s universe, the gap dividing the haves and the have-nots is even wider than in our world. The poor are the litter produced by the increase of wealth that

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is never shared with them. Sending a ship to the stars may seem to crown the efforts of many generations of scientists. But Butler is not interested in describing the planet where the organism originated. Instead, she describes the aftermath, and the social cost of preferring to develop multimillion colonial projects rather than address the social needs of the disinherited. The Clayark organism no doubt allows the infected to survive in an environment that is becoming more and more hostile; the gangs that roam the desert are not a real match for them. Nothing can halt the progress of the Clayarks – or so it seems, because in the end they do not dominate the whole planet, contrary to the expectations raised by the epilogue of the novel. To paraphrase a statement quoted by JeanLuc Nancy, the Clayark organism arrives on board the starship financed by the rich but will explode among the poor.⁶

Works Cited Anderson, Elizabeth, 2020. “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.” In: Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Attebery, Brian. 2014. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Octavia. 1988. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press. Butler, Octavia. 1996a. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night.” In: Octavia Butler. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press. 35 – 68. Butler, Octavia. 1996b. “Speech Sounds.” In: Octavia Butler. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press. 87 – 108. Butler, Octavia. 2005. Fledgling. New York: Seven Stories Press. Butler, Octavia. 2007a (1984). Clay’s Ark. In: Octavia Butler, Seed to Harvest (includes Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster). New York: Grand Central Publishing. 453 – 624. Butler, Octavia. 2007b (2000). Dawn. In: Octavia Butler. Lilith’s Brood (includes Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago). New York: Grand Central Publishing. 1 – 248. Butler, Octavia. 2007c (1976). Patternmaster. In: Octavia Butler, Seed to Harvest (includes Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster). New York: Grand Central Publishing. 625 – 765. Butler, Octavia. 2007d. Seed to Harvest (includes Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster). New York: Grand Central Publishing. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. New York and London: Routledge.

 “Le virus ‘arrive en avion, avec les riches et va exploser chez les pauvres,’ comme le dit un responsable brésilien” (Nancy 2020: 31).

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Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York and London: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2010. “The New Politics of Community.” American Sociological Review 75(1): 7 – 30. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2020. “The New Politics of Community Revisited.” The Pluralist 15(1): 54 – 73. Coontz, Stephanie. 2000. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books. Davis, Emily S. 2013. “Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, and Human Rights in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” College Literature 40(3), special issue on “Human Rights and Cultural Forms”: 99 – 112. Due, Tananarive. 2015. “The Only Lasting Truth.” In: Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds.). Octavia’s Brood. Oakland, CA: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 259 – 277. Epstein, Julia. 1992. “AIDS, Stigma, and Narratives of Containment.” American Imago 49(3), special issue on “AIDS and Homophobia”: 293 – 310. Ferreira, Maria Aline. 2010. “Symbiotic Bodies and Evolutionary Tropes in the Work of Octavia Butler.” Science Fiction Studies 37(3): 401 – 415. Fink, Marty. 2010. “AIDS Vampires: Reimagining Illness in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” Science Fiction Studies 37(3): 416 – 432. Haraway, Donna. 1990. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” In: Linda J. Nicholson (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge. 190 – 233. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In: Donna Haraway. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 149 – 181. “HIV and AIDS Timeline.” 2020. National Prevention Information Network, 21 Oct. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Jue, Melody. 2017. “Intimate Objectivity: On Nnedi Okorafor’s Oceanic Afrofuturism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45(1/2): 171 – 188. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, and Ranu Samantrai. 2010. “A Memorial to Octavia Butler.” Science Fiction Studies 37(3): 353 – 361. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Kurjatto-Renard, Patrycja. 2016. “Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’ and Fledgling: An Ironic Gaze at Women’s Roles as Caretakers and Angels in the House?” Résonances 16, special issue on “La Vocation au féminin/Women and Vocation, part II”: 61 – 75. Morris, Susana M. 2012. “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40(3/4): 146 – 166. Murphy, Dominic. 2021. “Concepts of Disease and Health” In: Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2020. Un Virus trop humain. Paris: Bayard. Peppers, Cathy. 1995. “Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s Xenogenesis.” Science Fiction Studies 22(1): 47 – 62.

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Pickens, Therí A. 2015. “Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel.” Hypatia 30(1), special issue on “New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies”: 167 – 180. Schell, Heather. 2002. “The Sexist Gene: Science Fiction and the Germ Theory of History.” American Literary History 14(4), special issue on “Contagion and Culture”: 805 – 827. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Womack, Ytasha. 2013. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” In: Linda J. Nicholson (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge. 300 – 323.

Cathy C. Waegner

Aliens Without and Within: Abjection from Tetter to Tumor in Toni Morrison’s Novels Abstract: Toni Morrison decries a racist creation of “the illusion of power through the process of inventing an Other” in The Origin of Others (2017: 24). An insidious method for “inventing an Other” is to brand an ethnic group as unclean, even contagious, to associate the ethnic subject with the disgust and perilousness connected with vermin, infectious pathogens, and bodily fluids. The resulting perception of worthlessness is applied to and subsequently internalized by the othered, isolated, and usually economically disadvantaged group. Toni Morrison skillfully applies the dialectical movements of debilitating abjection and disease from without to within and from above to below in her complex canonical novels of narrative experimentation. This chapter interweaves analysis of relevant novelistic strategies in four of Morrison’s novels (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and Home) with theoretical concepts of abjection: psychological and social abjection leading to disintegration of self (Julia Kristeva, Rina Arya); stigmatism in modernity’s rise of colonialism and capitalism, with its (physical) branding of slaves as commodities (Imogen Tyler); association of illness with the poor, the primitive, and the foreign (Susan Sontag on the AIDS epidemic perceived by Western countries in connection with the African continent); and the “slow violence” of neoliberal environmental and health policies that exponentially negatively affect Indigenous peoples and the underprivileged (Rob Nixon). Morrison calls the reading public’s attention to historical and present-day inequities, her works encoding a spectrum of stratagems and practices to counter abjective othering.

The disgust, avoidance and isolation, perceptions of worthlessness and uncleanliness, contagion and perilousness associated with vermin, infectious pathogens, and body fluids has often, even systematically, been transferred hegemonically to and then internalized by ethnic groups. In Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory, a somatic symptom can become a dangerous Other that has penetrated from outside and/or sinisterly grown from within: “a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear”; the proliferation of this symptom can lead to disintegration of the self (1982: 11). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-010

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Closely examining critical works of art, Rina Arya extends Kristeva’s focus on psychological abjection immured in products of the self, such as viscous waste, to “social abjection,” since “fear of the [ethnic] other is central to abjection”; marginalized groups and diseased people have traditionally been viewed “as being dirty and contaminating […] and measures were taken to discourage them from being considered part of mainstream society” (2014: 7). Placing the notion of social abjection more specifically in modernity’s rise of colonialism and capitalism, with its (physical) branding of slaves as commodities, Imogen Tyler in her incisive study Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (2020) reveals the power-constellations underlying stigmatization. She advises us to “rethink stigma from the outside in, retraining our gaze upwards, onto the social, political and economic function of practices of stigmatisation […,] re-coupling the concept of stigma to […] processes through which it becomes attached to bodies (and places), by whom, and for whose gain” (Tyler 2020: 89).¹ Susan Sontag in fact anticipated Tyler’s emphasis on the strength of economic benefit and cultural images based on abject, hegemonic stigma in Sontag’s 1980s discussion of AIDS, perceived by Western countries as an epidemic arising from the threatening but resource-rich African continent: “The fact that illness is associated with the poor – who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst – reinforces the association of illness with the foreign, with an exotic, often primitive place” (1989: 51). Rather than the swift damage of an epidemic, as lethal as that is, the incremental, long-term “slow violence” of neoliberal environmental and health policies that exponentially negatively affect Indigenous peoples and the underprivileged interests Rob Nixon in his Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Toni Morrison skillfully and “viscerally”² applies the dialectical movements of debilitating racial abjection and illness from without to within and from above to below in her complex canonical novels of narrative experimentation.

 An earlier book of Tyler’s, punningly titled Revolting Subjects (2013), is an astute study of social abjection in the context of neoliberal Britain’s policies that increasingly create “waste populations” (cf. 20), subaltern groups that demonstrate growing resistance. She pinpoints the locus classicus of the term “abjection” as a 1934 essay by Georges Bataille titled “L’Abjection et les formes misérables” in which Bataille outlines the way sovereign power necessarily entails outcast populations represented from the outside as disgusting and expendable (Tyler 2013: 19 – 20).  In an interview with Claudia Tate, formative for Morrison studies, Toni Morrison stresses that she addresses the reader “viscerally” in her novels: “The language has to be quiet; it has to engage your participation. I never describe characters very much. My writing expects, demands participatory reading […] 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, explanatory brackets in the original).

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After configuring some of the theoretical concepts espoused by Kristeva, Arya, Tyler, Sonntag, and Nixon, I will offer readings of four of Morrison’s novels that imaginatively encode those dialectical movements of abjection and disease. The Bluest Eye (1970) employs, among many other tactics, the postmodern strategy of listing with a meta-rhetorical overvoice to depict a deleterious internalization by African American characters of paternalistic, hegemonic dogma of filth and worthlessness. Sula (1973) presents a chain of individual and community epiphany that moves toward countering alienating or systemic traumata, rooted in race and embodied in tetter (skin disease) and tumor. An elaborate narrative strategy of spiraling allows Beloved (1991) to connect the physical and psychological atrocities of enslavement to scarring stigmatization that continues long after official Emancipation. Finally, Morrison’s late novel Home (2012) utilizes a multileveled dialogic structure to spin the painful process of a black sibling pair’s transmutation from violable dis-membering and discardability to at least partial healing and sense of self-value.

“Casting Out” and “Finding the Impossible Within”: Theoretical Considerations on Abjection It is doubtful that the Bulgarian French scholar Kristeva had read Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), before writing her influential Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). Kristeva finds abjection in the works of such European authors as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Artaud, and above all Céline.³ Reading her essay through the filter of The Bluest Eye, however, one cannot help but note the striking relevance – as delineated in the longer analysis below – to the character of the scorned black girl Pecola Breedlove in Morrison’s novel. The abject rests on “a twisted braid of affects and thoughts” that combine repulsion and desire (Kristeva 1982: 1). The abject subject strives to fulfil the “desire of the other,” in Freudian and Lacanian terms the father or the master (2), but feels threatened by this diffuse hegemony that “seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside” (1). Paradoxically, the loathing reaction such as “spasms and vomiting” to viscous waste like inedible food, “filth, waste, or dung,” wounds, body fluids, the “acrid smell of sweat, of decay” (2– 3) both immerses the abjectant transgressively in and protects him/her from such bodily “muck” and personal “defilement,” providing a shaky guarantee that expectations are being upheld: “Abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture” (2).  Kristeva does deal with the Argentinian ‘magical realist’ Jorge Luis Borges, however.

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Psychological and physical self-abasement underscores this attempt to adhere to outside expectations; in the end this effort always falls short, giving the abjectant a feeling of inadequacy: “That subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (5). Indeed, in clinging to his/her (self‐)loathing, the abjectant feels that the deeper danger can perhaps be avoided, the danger of annihilation of the self in a “place where meaning collapses” (2), where clear lines become confusingly fluid: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Hence, according to Kristeva’s exposition, the abjectant cannot deal productively with a postmodern sense of “both/and” rather than “either/or,” with hybridity and liminality, but is doomed to dwell in such a bastard space: “Thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing” (10, italics in original). The step to Pecola’s increasingly mad desire to acquire blue eyes, to be considered beautiful in the powerful terms of society’s “master narrative,”⁴ to her final schizophrenic dialogue between a black self and a blue-eyed one, is predictable in Kristeva’s concept of abjection: “A vortex of summons and repulsion place the one haunted by [the threat of annihilation] literally beside himself” (1). Perhaps unexpectedly, an affective, often painful jouissance can arise in the “repulsive gift” by the Other; according to Kristeva, “one thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones” (9). The psychological “master” and society’s “master narrative” meld in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror – and in Morrison’s novels. Arya’s account of abjection implies that the power of the master in both psychological and sociological contexts is questionable, that the master is also in some ways an abjectant, particularly through fear. His “fear of the other” is modulated into society’s prejudice toward certain ethnicities: The fear “may be displaced on to individuals and groups in society who are on the fringes and are stigmatized because their differences are not understood,” and through the stigmatization these marginalized ones become abject subjects, “lowly and despicable” (Arya 2014: 7). Society’s way of dealing with the perceived threat is exclusion, the exclusion “from the social fabric” being “legitimize[d]” by the supposed danger arising from those Others, who are “abject” in an etymological sense of “‘cast away.’”

 Morrison has famously defined the “master narrative” as the “ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else” (Moyers 1990: 8:10 – 9:10 min/sec).

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Arya lists a sampling of those cast away: “Groups who at various times have been so positioned in history (but no longer necessarily remain there) include women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, AIDS sufferers, criminals, the mentally ill and lepers.” In “the same vein as bodily waste,” these groups have been associated with uncleanliness and pathogens. The guardians of the master narrative found, and in many cases continue to find, it beneficial to “increas[e] suspicion” of those excluded as a way to “warding them off” like an imperiling social alter ego (all preceding quotes 7). This is the converse of Kristeva’s picture of an alter ego of the Other dwelling within the subaltern abject subjectivity. Morrison’s corpus is filled with the injustices and violence brought about by the hegemonic “warding off” and excluding of African Americans in a deeply raced society, from her first novel to her final volume of essays titled Mouth Full of Blood (2019). The discrimination is often signaled by images of visceral filth involving both the white and black abject subjects, such as, in the 1950s setting of Morrison’s novel Home (2012), when rotten egg yolks thrown by white bystanders at the occupants of a Jim Crow train car stick to a train window like “phlegm” (2012: 25). In a lecture titled “Being or Becoming the Stranger,” Morrison emphasizes that the “universe” of slaveholding is one “in which being literally enslaved, being the despised and abused Other, shines its most revealing light on the enslavers – those who relished, maintained, and profited from the socalled peculiar institution” (2017: 26). She recounts several pages of “explicit examples of sadism” from slave narratives, and then concludes that the perpetrator turns him/herself into a hegemonic form of abjector-Other: As fascinatingly repulsive as these incidents of violence are, to my mind the question that surfaces, one that is far more revealing than the severity of the punishment, is, who are these people? How hard they work to define the slave as inhuman, savage, when in fact the definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher. […] Such extreme pain seems to be designed for the pleasure of the one with the lash. The necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal. The urgency of distinguishing between those who belong to the human race and those who are decidedly non-human is so powerful the spotlight turns away and shines not on the object of degradation but on its creator. Even assuming exaggeration by the slaves, the sensibility of slave owners is gothic. […] The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racial-ized rank is to lose one’s own valued and enshrined difference. (Morrison 2017: 29 – 30, hyphenization in original)

Latter-day racism is, as Morrison makes clear in the same essay, a variant of the self-damaging sadism and inhumaneness of the plantation master who brands, beats, and abuses his slaves: “Blacks are [still] so vital to a white definition of humanity,” resulting in an “exaggerated fear of the stranger, […] the outcast,”

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and “the illusion of power through the process of inventing an Other” (2017: 19 – 24). Tyler’s study of stigma supports this long-term view of hegemonic Othering. In tracing the historic entanglements of physical slave-branding with the rise of colonialism and capitalism, Empire, and the formation of the liberal democratic state, asserting that profits from slavery financed the industrialization of England (and other Western states) and the development of civic infrastructure (2020: 14), Tyler convincing shows how the brutal “material practice of bodily marking and subordination” in sites of slavery have led to the “humiliating social interactions” embedded in the assault “upon human dignity that is a major characteristic of the current global authoritarian turn” (7– 9). She is committed to providing though her book “a better understanding of how stigma is propagated as a governmental technology of division and dehumanisation” (7), which she describes as engineered stigma machines of abjection (cf. 18); she develops “a more psycho-political understanding of stigma,” reconceptualizing past and present stigma as “a form of power that is written on the body and gets under the skin” (9). Stigma is a form of top-down “classificatory violence” that “devalues people, places and communities” (27), making them disposable when no longer of commodifiable worth to those in economic and political power. In Beloved the deep scars on Sethe’s back as stigmata of slavery⁵ have emotionally lodged “under the skin” (Tyler 2020: 9), resulting in Sethe’s desperate resisting act of killing her own daughter. Thus, ironically, by bloodily transforming the child and herself as murderess into “disposable” abject waste for her owner, she liberates her family, at inordinately high personal cost, from the violence and dehumanization of the slave system. This traumatic revolt against the “stigma machine” contrasts with other, gradual post-slavery manifestations of abject stigma: “In liberal societies the violence of stigma is often symbolic, diffuse, slow and indirect” (Tyler 2020: 15). Sontag’s discussion of nefarious cultural metaphors of disease (Illness as Metaphor 1978) as well as Nixon’s investigation of the “slow violence” of environmental, economic, and health policies that steadily increase social inequities reveal some of these gradual manifestations of abject stigma. Sontag sees the ill person as stigmatized by the “lurid metaphors with which [disease] has been landscaped” (1978: 4), especially with regard to cancer and its association with body parts that are “embarrassing to acknowledge” (17). The abjectly diseased patient of tuberculosis, cancer, or AIDS is commonly viewed as contaminated and contaminating, “morally, if not literally,” and is to be shunned, with contact often “the

 Sethe’s mother was actually branded: “Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin” (Morrison 1991a: 76).

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violation of a taboo” (6). Sontag would certainly add COVID-19 to this list if she were writing today. Cancer is frequently described in language of capitalist economics gone rogue, with the tumor’s “unregulated, abnormal, incoherent growth” (62). Such an economic metaphor tends to scapegoat the patient and cloaks, Sontag opines, “our inability to construct an advanced industrial society which properly [and justly] regulates consumption” (87– 88). Writing more than thirty years after Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Nixon delivers a devastating accounting of that advanced industrial society’s unwillingness to regulate consumption. The destruction of “ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism” (2011: 4), those destroyed ecosystems having been the bases of sustenance for countless “remaindered humans” (34), is a study in the creation of an abjected population, with “a widening divide separating the gated über-rich from the unhoused ultrapoor within and between nations” (41).⁶ Morrison offers a microcosm of such “slow violence” in the Great Depression setting of Sula, as the gap between the white town with its golf-playing suburbanites and the poverty-stricken black community in Medallion/Ohio⁷ steadily increases and the strong-willed protagonist Sula becomes the “othered” scapegoat. The ecological imbalance signaled by a plague of robins and the accumulating history of racial discrimination gradually turn inward, into intra-racial hate and illness: Her betrayed and bitter erstwhile-friend Nel’s disturbing phantasm of a gray “ball of fur and string and hair” (Morrison 1991b: 109) mutates, as it were, into Sula’s deadly tumor.

“Like Flies They Hovered”: The Bluest Eye and Overvoice In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison exposes how the external unfavorable view of the disadvantaged and vulnerable is literally em-bodied. Lightskinned Geraldine, for instance, a migrant mother from the South to Lorain/Ohio with middle-class ambitions, considers Pecola Breedlove and other poor black girls to be unclean pests: “like flies they hovered; like flies they settled” (1999: 72). Abject excretions such as Pecola’s first and disturbing menstrual blood and her father Cholly’s transgressive, impregnating semen, confirm the

 Morrison is very clear in her notion of the racialized poor: “There is no printable word for ‘poor’ that does not connote ‘race’” (2019b: 36).  In Morrison’s summarizing preface, we are told that the black neighborhood called “the Bottom” has been razed to make way for a golf course (Sula Part One 3).

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girl’s credo that she is filthy and ugly.⁸ This leads her, and others in the hopehungry black community, to seek out the con-man spiritualist Soaphead Church from the Caribbean, who has interiorized the white gaze and finds Pecola “pitifully unattractive” (137); stigmatized and desperate Pecola is prepared to pay any price for Caucasian blue eyes. Emphasizing here and elsewhere in the novel the postmodern strategy of listing with a meta-rhetorical overvoice, Morrison recounts the seekers’ humiliating pleas to Soaphead, for whom their “decay, vice, filth, and disorder” is repulsive (137), each seeker “wrapped […] in a shroud stitched with anger, yearning, pride, vengeance, loneliness, misery, defeat, and hunger” (136). Pecola succumbs to psychological and social abjection and declines into schizophrenic madness, fulfilling the threat Kristeva feared of a collapsing self. The novel is largely narrated in first-person by Pecola’s peer Claudia MacTeer. However, Claudia, along with her sister Frieda, ages nine and ten at the beginning of the diegesis in the early 1940s, fight against the cloak of abjectness that the white world and to a great extent the adult black one attempt to enfold them in. Claudia and her family have abject encounters in their house “peopled by roaches and mice” (Morrison 1999: 5), such as their male boarder’s effort to sexually abuse Frieda, but the girls’ parents’ support, though often ambivalent, strengthens them. An opening scene vividly presents images of (viscous) abjection and Claudia’s attempt to reject it. After the family has gathered up remnants of coal outside in chilly autumnal weather, Claudia develops bronchitis, her lungs “packed tight with phlegm.” Her mother blames her for the illness: “How many times do I have to tell you to wear something on your head? You must be the biggest fool in this town” while roughly smearing “Vicks salve” on Claudia’s chest. Her mother is furious when Claudia vomits on the bedclothes: “The puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet – green-gray, with flecks of orange. It moves like the insides of an uncooked egg. Stubbornly clinging to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed.” Claudia contemplates how she wants to please her mother by becoming as “stubborn” as the

 Althea Tait analyzes what she befittingly calls the “soul murder-wounds” in The Bluest Eye and other Morrison novels. She points out the intergenerational passing on of a branding soul murder-wound; Pecola’s mother Pauline “ultimately chooses [her] soul wound over her daughter; the mother’s physical response to her own soul wound is to revisit it upon her daughter, marking the daughter’s body and soul” (2017: 222). An egregious example occurs when Pauline ferociously beats Pecola (at least according to community gossip, cf. Morrison 1999: 149) after the girl has been raped the first time by drunken Cholly. The term “soul wound” derives from psychologist Eduardo Duran’s Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native Peoples (2006), which deals with Indigenous concepts of post-Contact damage and amelioration.

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repulsive vomit and will eventually show her inner strength: “By and by I will not get sick; I will refuse to” – but for now she is crying, “making more snot.” The older Claudia who is recollecting the scene in autobiographical double-consciousness reads her mother’s rough care as positive, as warding off extreme abjection: “When I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die” (all quotes 6 – 7); as Kristeva reminds us, “the corpse […] is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (Kristeva 1982: 4). Pecola does not have Claudia’s strong sense of ego or the buttressing of her family (the surname “Breedlove” is highly ironic) needed to fight off the abject. The Breedloves live in a makeshift home, an uncomfortable storefront that announces their suffering from systemic racial poverty and displays their internalization of society’s assessment of them: “The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly” (Morrison 1999: 28). The new couch they painfully purchase with monthly payments becomes an objective correlative for their abjectness: It is torn upon delivery and infects their domestic space, becoming like a cancer, a “sore tooth,” a “fretful malaise” that spreads illness to the rest of the body (27). The overvoice-seasoning of Claudia’s perspective spells out the dialectical movement between inner malaise and outer devaluation: You looked at [the Breedloves] and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each of them a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. [… Pecola] hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed – peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask. (28 – 29)

The narrative perspective slides into spheres young Claudia has no access to, such as the listing of “pains” and physical work endured by Cholly’s Aunt Jimmy and her ancient woman-friends: “childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles. All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth – harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stooping, kneeling, picking.” A decisive difference to Pecola’s suffering is that they do not hide “behind the shroud” of abjection but rather communally share their “bruises” with each other, proactively performing multifarious tasks including “shroud[ing] the dead” (all quotes 107– 108). Any attempted proactions on Pecola’s part end in a retreat to the mantle of abjection. Her determination to purchase and gorge on three pennies worth of Mary Jane candy, for instance, with the picture on the wrapper of a smiling

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blond-haired, blue-eyed girl, results in a reinforcement of her belief that she is repulsive. The immigrant owner of “Yacobowski’s Fresh Veg. Meat and Sundries Store,” potentially an outsider in the Ohio town, uses the power of his “bleardropped,” phlegmy blue eyes to let the insecure black child know “he need not waste the effort of a glance” at her: “She has seen [distaste] lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes” (Morrison 1999: 36 – 37). It is not only white peoples’ eyes that radiate disrespect for Pecola. In her desperate encounter with pedophilic Soaphead, the pattern of the overvoice’s interpretation of abject fear and longing is repeated, but this time from the black trickster’s third-person point of view. The list of his loathings is long. Soaphead rejects all bodily waste: “He abhorred flesh on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him. The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts – all the natural excretions and protections the body was capable of – disquieted him” (131– 132). But he has no scruples about fondling girls and instrumentalizing Pecola to poison his neighbor’s irritatingly “mangy” dog, whose eyes uncannily resemble Mr. Yacobowski’s except for the color: The canine’s “exhausted eyes ran with a seagreen matter around which gnats and flies clustered” (136). Soaphead gives Pecola a packet of poisoned, “dark sticky meat” (139) and promises her that if she feeds it to the dog, she will be granted blue eyes. On the verge of vomiting, Pecola watches the animal die as it gags, chokes, stumbles. To protect herself from a similar lethally abject fate, the girl stares into a mirror and, split into two, carries on dialogues about her now bright blue eyes with an imaginary friend. Pecola’s dissociative resolution contrasts with Claudia’s final narrative view of Pecola as an inhabitant of the bastard, liminal space Kristeva forecast for the abjected; discardable Pecola wanders “on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town,” “among all the waste and beauty of the world (164, 162).⁹

 In the Ingersoll lecture in 2012, Morrison describes narrator Claudia’s realization at the close of The Bluest Eye that “it’s too late” to prevent the sowing of the seeds of abjection among “the garbage and the sunflowers” “of the entire country” (all quotes 1999: 164) as “moral clarity” (Morrison 2019a: 19): “my own understanding of goodness: the acquisition of self-knowledge. A satisfactory or good ending for me is when the protagonist learns something vital and morally insightful that she or he did not know at the beginning” (19).

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Stinging Eyes and Closed Muddy Places: Epiphany in Sula In Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), the local teenage “tetter heads” – “tetter” being a Southern US word for skin disease, such as ringworm, eczema, and herpes, characterized by eruptions and itching – look for a person less fortunate than themselves whom they can “goad,” and choose the outsider Shadrack traumatized by the slaughter on World War I battlefields (1991b: 15). Through the narrative strategy of the epiphany, we see Shadrack, Sula, and Nel struggle with and gain insights into their individual though interrelated wounds and sorrows, linked through such foul motifs as “a gray ball” of refuse (109); twitching and stinging eyes; “the smell of overripe green things” (108); dark, closed muddy places. Sula prides herself on living for the “free fall” (e. g. 120) and the “cutting edge” (122), which includes audaciously cutting off the tip of her own finger with a paring knife to threaten white bullies – but her status as “roach” (112) and even increasingly “pariah” (122) culminates in her painful illness, presumably a malignant tumor, Kristeva’s “non-assimilable alien.” Indeed, the entire black community in this Ohio town has been suffering from the “slow violence” of a governmental system that has exploited the community members and neglected to create the basis for sustainable livelihoods. On an unexpectedly warm and sunny day in January, on Shadrack’s annual “National Suicide Day,” the townspeople of color, including those teenage tetter heads, “laughing, dancing, calling to one another” form a parade, a “pied piper’s band behind Shadrack” (159) ringing his doomsday bell, to open a “slit in the veil” with the same hope that kept them picking beans for other farmers; kept them from finally leaving [the town] as they talked of doing; kept them knee-deep in other people’s dirt; kept them excited about other people’s wars; kept them solicitous of white people’s children; kept them convinced that some magic “government” was going to lift them up, out and away from that dirt, those beans, those wars. (160)

The slow violence has exploded into a danse macabre of Kristeva’s “jouissance,” then becomes alienating trauma, as the unfinished tunnel under the river, for which no black construction workers were ever permitted to be hired, ironically and apocalyptically collapses on the joyfully rioting marchers. Looking carefully at the motif of stinging, twitching eyes, we can trace the links among Shadrack, Sula, and Nel. Shadrack’s PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) manifests itself in a grotesque vision of viscosity: He constantly sees in his food the brain tissue sliding down a wounded soldier’s back. Untreated

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by military hospitalization facilities, Shadrack’s hallucinations become a part of the “adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids” (Morrison 1991b: 4), pain that an omniscient but sympathetic narrator of the prologue to Part One has already told the reader marks the local inhabitants of “the Bottom,” the black neighborhood on the outskirts of Medallion. The hallucinations take a somewhat different turn when Shadrack sees through the girl Sula’s face to her skull: He envisions “the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone” (157), imagining her as the corpse she will become. When he glimpses her actual corpse at the coroner’s years later, it arouses a “feeling that touched his eyes and made him blink” (157), a stark re-realization of mortality. In a similar negative epiphany, young Sula feels “a sting in her eye” when she overhears her mother Hannah say she does not “like” Sula, although she perfunctorily “loves” her (57). The shock of this revelation interpenetrates the deaths of Hannah and the boy Chicken Little in which Sula is involved in different ways. The motif reemerges in Nel’s final epiphany that concludes the novel, following a wordless, chance encounter with Shadrack in the town cemetery: “Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little” (174); she realizes that she misses her childhood friend Sula and can finally mourn for her. The ball of fur, hair, and string that has abjectly haunted Nel and mutated into Sula’s tumor bursts, turning into seeds of renewal: “A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze” (174). We recall that Kristeva limned the perilousness of the “place where meaning collapses” (2), of “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Kristeva’s description of the chief source of abjection appears to describe Sula herself: a disturber, disrespectful of all rules, moving inbetween black and white venues, (presumably) committing, in the eyes of the community, the ultimate violation, “the dirt that could not ever be washed away,” “nothing filthier” (Morrison 1991b: 112– 113): sleeping with white men. Narratorily one could read the novel Sula as an attempt on the part of the girlfriends Sula and Nel to make sense of a distressing experience they shared: the death – murder? – of Chicken Little. It is the climax of a sequence of unsettling incidents. It occurs shortly after Sula has heard her mother say the wounding words about “not liking” her daughter; the girl dispels her “dark thoughts” by playing in the “bright, hot daylight” (57) with Nel, engaging in some pre-pubescent, semi-sexual play, stroking blades of grass, stripping twigs of bark, poking the twigs “rhythmically and intensely into the earth” (58). They sweatily dig a hole in the mud and throw “debris” and “all of the small defiling things they could find” into it, then “cover the entire grave with uprooted grass” (59). A small boy known as Chicken Little trespasses on the unseemly scene, “pick[ing] his nose” and “‘eatin’ snot’” (59). The

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girls cannot begin to understand why, after Sula swings the child over the river and lets go of his hands, like casting away debris, they watch him drown and attempt no help, seek no one to rescue him, never tell anyone about the event: “The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. […] Both girls stared at the water” (61). They are concerned, however, that Shadrack might have witnessed the ‘accident.’ Their secret guilt re-emerges in the imagery of later upsetting situations: “There was stirring, a movement of mud and dead leaves” and “the mud shifted, the leaves stirred, the smell of overripe things enveloped her” (107– 108) when Nel tries to comprehend Sula’s treacherous seduction of Jude, Nel’s husband. Only after many years does Nel realize that, at least in affect, she was an actual accomplice to the drowning, not just to the subsequent cover-up: “‘How come it felt so good to see him fall?’” (170). This insight still comes with a question mark, a “why,” in the muddy place of abjectly ambiguous meaning. Nel remains the respectable community member, however, and transgressive Sula the expelled “roach,” like ego and alter-ego. Sula’s stigma is em-bodied in the transmogrifying birthmark over her eye. Unlike Sethe’s scars in Beloved, Sula’s stigmatic marking was not inflicted directly by hegemonic agency, but rather produced innately. Nonetheless, the shape and interpretation changes with the viewer. The narrative voice tells us that at age twelve, Sula’s birthmark, which “spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow” is “shaped something like a stemmed rose” (Morrison 1991b: 52). Despite the felicitous association with a rose, it casts a tinge of danger: “It gave her otherwise plain face a broken excitement and blue-blade threat” (52). The birthmark “was to grow dark as the years passed,” whereas her presumed association with white society thickened. Jude calls the birthmark a poisonous “copperhead” snake (103) and the community decides that it is “Hannah’s ashes,” not forgetting that Sula watched her mother burn without going to her aid (114). When Sula returns in 1937 after a ten-year absence amid a mysterious plague of robins “flying and dying,” the birds stoned by the children (89), all calamities that occur in the black neighborhood are blamed on Sula’s presence. When Shadrack “tips his hat” at Sula, the community women pronounce them “two devils” (and the woman who witnessed this promptly develops a stinging sty in her eye from seeing the supposed evil, 117). However, after Sula’s death and the “burial of [that] witch” (150), the townspeople acknowledging “the most magnificent hatred they had ever known” (173), the Bottom is plagued by early ice and all of the inhabitants grow ill: “everybody under fifteen had croup, or scarlet fever, and those over had chilblains, rheumatism, pleurisy, ear-aches and a world of other ailments” (152– 153). Systemic injustices such as “lost jobs,” “third-class coal,” “thieving insurance men” (150) continue. The disposing of the stigmatized scape-

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goat, actually one of their own daughters, clearly brings no relief to the black community’s abject sufferings.

“Erupting into Separate Parts”: Beloved and Spiraling Beloved (1991), followed by Jazz (1992), triggered Morrison’s well-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. From Beloved Tyler could have abstracted her entire, sweeping argument about the power-constellations of colonialism and capitalism arising from and resting on the historical stigmatization of the black body. Morrison’s research into the atrocities of the slave trade, slavery practices, and their aftermath of continued bloodshed and discrimination¹⁰ produced a powerful novel replete with occurrences and images of abjection – and potential healing. I have chosen for particular analysis one of her many sophisticated narrative strategies, one I call spiraling. The narrative spirals around key moments in the story, each turn of the spiral revealing new information and perspectives: such central moments as Sethe’s desperate act of infanticide in Cincinnati, the preceding escape from Sweet Home in Kentucky, Sethe’s recognizing Beloved as her daughter, the account of younger daughter Denver’s birth, Paul D’s and Sethe’s horrendous humiliations at the hands of white people in authority. The striking image of Sethe “turning,” “circling,” “wheel[ing],” “spinning” around her kitchen, around Paul D (1991a: 195 – 197), as she dizzily labors to tell her version of murdering her little daughter¹¹ resonates increasingly with the recurrent and oth-

 Morrison also inserts two vignettes encapsulating the attempted genocide and historical injustice toward Native peoples. Paul D’s escaped chain gang comes upon “a camp of sick Cherokee” fugitives, who free the convicts of their chains and for weeks tell them tribal stories (1991a: 136 – 138). Later, in Cincinnati, every evening Paul D leaves his job at the pig slaughterhouse where he has breathed the “stench of offal” for twelve hours to walk home; his route takes him through an ancient cemetery of the Miami Nation graveyard. The voices of the Native dead haunt the bourgeoning slaughterhouse-city (190). It is in A Mercy (2008) that Morrison most fully develops the historical othering of Native Americans, specifically through the enslaving of Lena. See Waegner (2009) for a discussion of Morrison’s intertwining of black and Native subaltern experiences in A Mercy.  Linda Wagner-Martin labels this scene a “magisterial” moment in the structure of the novel (2019: 80); Daniel Stein reads the spinning scene not only as an enactment of the difficulty and the hesitancy the characters (and Morrison) experience in relating the horrors of slavery, but also as one of Morrison’s strategies for inverting the melodrama of a Harriet Stowe-like depiction of slavehood injustices (2007: 275 – 276). Numerous critics have emphasized circularity – rather

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erwise esoteric image of the hummingbirds’ beating wings as they fly around Sethe’s head, their beaks pricking her scalp, making it itch like “lice” (240) whenever she anticipates or experiences violation (cf. 200, 214, 231, 238, 240, 322). Sethe’s “spinning” around Paul D at this juncture is to no avail; like white Schoolteacher, who calls the murdering mother a vicious “creature” (184), Paul D holds the infanticide worthy only of an animalistic perpetrator with “four” feet (202). Likewise, the repetitive, intensely spiraling conversations with her now-grown daughter Beloved, who has returned as a mighty ghost presence, fail to convince Beloved that Sethe’s deed was an act of love (cf. 309). Condemned, feared, and ostracized, a “throw-away” person of no value (104), Sethe sinks into infirmity while Beloved, succubus-like, flourishes – until Beloved ultimately loses her battle for selfhood and abjectly “erupts into her separate parts” (336) after belated community support for Sethe. The spiraling dynamics of Sethe’s “four feet” dehumanization reflects what J. Brooks Bouson aptly calls “learned cultural shame” imposed by racist shamers and internalized by the Africa-descended in the US (2000: ix). Looking more closely at the spiraling, pricking hummingbirds in connection with the gradual narrative revelation of Sethe’s at least threefold humiliation by the slaveowners, the reader can move toward grasping the novel’s vortex of shaming. As if she were experiencing a form of scientific voodoo, Sethe’s “scalp was prickly” (Morrison 1991a: 238) when she heard Schoolteacher ‘enlighten’ his nephews about her animal vs. human characteristics, to be written down carefully on their school pages and body parts inductively measured: “my head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp” (238). The mixture of bodily fluids, of milk and blood in the nephews’ mammary rape and brutal beating of Sethe resurfaces in the slavecatchers’ report of the infanticide scenario. As painful and degrading as those experiences of rape and whipping were for Sethe, she places the ur-shaming of slavery in its deliberate, abjecting dehumanization; in an indirect monolog to Beloved she emphasizes the motivation for her successful escape from Kentucky and thus for the subsequent infanticide: “No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither” (243). The noxious danger of white power to dehumanize is all prevalent, even in Ohio, a venue described at a climactic moment in terms of putridity: “It was three in the afternoon on a Friday so wet and hot Cincinnati’s stench had traveled to the country: from the canal, from hanging meat and things rotting in jars; from small animals dead in the fields, town sewers and factories” (316 – 317).

than spiraling – in the novel, as shown in the respective titles of studies by Philip Page (1992) and Gurleen Grewal (1998).

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In this setting Sethe reviles and fears white power: “All news of [white people] was rot. […] All news of them should have stopped with the birds in her hair,” but the “whitefolks” “at any moment […] could […] send the birds twittering back into her hair” (231). Through Sethe’s disgust and her resistance to dissipation of self, Morrison “invokes the shaming race- and class-inflected discourse of dirt and defilement” (Bouson 2000: 5): That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. (Morrison 1991a: 308)

In a last attempt (in the diegetic present) to save her ghost-daughter Beloved from that noxious danger, Sethe is warned yet again by the voodoo pricks of the master’s defining pen and this time directs her weapon toward the white world, not toward her own child: “She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings” (322), and reflexively moves to stab the white male intruder with her – image appropriate – icepick. The woman power of thirty community members, however, alerted to Sethe’s desperation by reclusive Denver’s having finally circled through the black neighborhood, prevents the deranged Sethe from killing the supportive abolitionist Mr. Bodwin and thus from descending into a further downspiral of blood, shame, and loss of self. Like Sethe’s, Paul D’s biography also emerges in spiral form. Early on we know that he locks feelings and shame in a “tobacco tin buried in his chest […] Its lid rusted shut” (Morrison 1991a: 89). The palimpsest of atrocious experiences emerges from the rusted tin not layer by layer, but rather by a thickening return to each layer. Paul D’s time at Sweet Home dehumanized him, had him “working like an ass and living like a dog” (51), and only much later do we know that he was brutally “collared like a beast” there (335). He resumes living “like a dog” (229) in a church cellar after he condemns and leaves Sethe. His post-Emancipation sojourn in Georgia in a prison-grave, his “trembling in a box built into the ground” (51), and working on a chain gang takes on more abject features with later recollection, from rats, snakes, and retching to matter-offact breakfast-time raping of the convicts by the sordid guards.¹² Creating a version of Kristeva’s picture of abjection as a “twisted braid of affects and

 Rats and raping and many other abject images and experiences (re)appear in the very significant calling up of the Middle Passage in Morrison’s novel, particularly in Beloved’s associative monologue. I recommend Claudine Raynaud’s richly detailed study of that monologue, “The Poetics of Abjection in Beloved” (1999).

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thoughts,” Sethe’s and Paul D’s stories twist around each other with regard to images of the abject and of resilience. At the end, the healing act¹³ of seeing the two stories as a unit is forecast when Paul D “wants to put his story next to hers” (335). On a metalevel, the reader has been performing that very exercise throughout perusal of the spiraling narrative. Jennifer L. J. Heinert appears to object to Morrison’s novelistic presentation of the damaging ramifications of the slave system: “The way Morrison disrupts conventions complicates readers’ and critics’ abilities to assert with certainty much of the events or facts of the novel” (2009: 94, my italics). But surely Morrison could read this critique as a confirmation of the success of her deliberately “complicating” spiraling tactics. In Beloved Morrison implies that a judgment on Sethe’s reactions to the atrocities of slavery must move far beyond any simple quest for “events or facts of the novel.” When Paul D proposes to Sethe that they should put their stories next to each other, he invokes the indomitable Sweet Home slave Sixo’s statement about his (Sixo’s) much loved “Thirty-Mile Woman”: “‘She is a friend of my mind. […] The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order’” (Morrison 1991a: 335). This gathering and right-ordering is, however, the role of the empathetic lover, not the appreciative reader. Bouson attempts to describe the art of Morrison’s “complicating” strategies: “Morrison, by creating verbally rich and complexly designed fiction, has earned the pride of place among contemporary American novelists as she explores the woundedness of African-American life in an idealized artform that conveys, but also aesthetically contains and controls, intense feelings of anger, shame, and pain” (2000: 21).¹⁴

 Laughter explicitly serves as a healing balm in at least one instance, when dejected Paul D and Stamp Paid finally acknowledge their common humanity with Sethe: Paul D says, “‘Damn. That woman is crazy. Crazy.’ [Stamp replies,] ‘Yeah, well, ain’t we all?’ They laughed then. A rusty chuckle at first and then more, louder and louder” (Morrison 1991a: 325 – 326).  Marianne Noble has coined the term “sentimental wounding” for “a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with the pain of another” in sentimental or melodramatic literature (1997: 295). In Morrison’s work, literary depiction of psychological and historical abjectness serve to counter such “sentimental wounding” of the reader as well as “pornography of pain” in which the reader becomes a voyeur to physical atrocities. See Page Laws (2021) for a sharp application of the term “pornography of pain” to the film 12 Years a Slave.

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“Gutter” to “Gutted”: Home and Dialogic Structure Morrison’s penultimate novel, Home (2012), offers a transmuting mirror image of the lush plantation Sweet Home in Beloved. Sethe constantly rememories the natural bounty of Sweet Home, its “lacy” sycamores (Morrison 1991a: 7) contrasting sharply with the treelike network of scars branded on her back. In Home, the dialogic structure of the novel transforms the drab and oppressive Southern hamlet of Lotus/Georgia into a colorful venue of kindness, comfort, and opportunity – though darkly qualified by traces of the still present past of slavery and racism. The male protagonist Frank Money, displaced by the Klan with his parents and sister from Depression-era Texas to Lotus, experiences both the time before enlisting for the Korean War and postwar racism as no less traumatizing than the war itself, signaled by images of visceral filth or pests: The “clouds of gnats” (Morrison 2012: 3) that harm his and his sister’s eyes just before they as children witness the surreptitious burial of a black father forced by white thrill-seekers to face his son in a human “dogfight” (138) or the blood dripping through his eugenicized adult-sister’s clothing (115) vie with scattered body parts on the battlefield. Frank finds himself inexplicably and violently enraged: “He went ape every now and then” (18). To deal with and understand the outer and inner threats, Frank engages in a multifaceted dialogue with his past experiences and unreliable memories, with his sister and her attempts to grow in an environment of obstacles, and, in radical narrative form, with the “author” of the book itself who is recording and interpreting his life story. A tangible part of Frank’s rage arises from his battlefield experiences. He and two other “‘homeboys’” (Morrison 2012: 15) from Lotus had enlisted together, and Frank witnesses the gory destruction of his friends and many of his fellow soldiers, the visceral details emblazoned in his memory: “blood seeped from Stuff’s blasted arm” (98); “frosted urine on Mike’s pants” (22); a boy “pushing his entrails back in” (20); a fallen comrade “with only the bottom half of his face intact (20). Frank reenvisages “dodging the scattered parts of men” (98), and his nightmares are “dappled with body parts” (16). A seemingly minor wartime incident involving a young Korean girl rummaging in the trash pile and a brutal guard takes on inordinate abject-flavored significance for Frank: The guard “blows her away [with his gun]. Only the hand remains in the trash, clutching its treasure, a spotted, rotting orange” (95). He feels anger every time he rememories this scene. The narrative voice analyzes: “Back was the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault” (15). Through dialogic interaction, Frank learns that the incident is linked with his

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own abject desire and self-depreciation, and he finally admits to the “author” of the book that he was the one who “shot the Korean girl in her face” (133, italics in original), having been aroused by the girl who resembled his little sister. The forbidden desire was violently quelled: “How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know was in me?” (134, italics in original).¹⁵ Frank’s beloved sister Ycidra (“Cee”), constantly called a “gutter child” (passim) by their resentful step-grandmother, moves from gutter to “gutted” (Morrison 2012: 132) when she becomes a “slop jar,” “a privy” (122) for a eugenicist white doctor’s nearly fatal experiments with her genitalia and womb. Her female black body can thus be viewed as a form of the Foucauldian “heterotopia of deviation” (Foucault 1986: 25), trespassed with forced entry by the empowered physician who deems Cee a disrespected ‘other,’ violable and discardable.¹⁶ One principle of Foucault’s heterotopias is that the entry and exit is limited through “a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (26); a “heterotopia of deviation” is a space “in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (25), such as prisons. The racial structure of the USA, Home teaches us, brands those with the marker of dark skin as “deviant” from the white “norm” and thus “isolate[d]” through discrimination as well as “penetrable” by the hegemonically powerful who control the entry and exit to their social spaces. This structure, however, underestimates the strength of “deviant” others within the heterotopia. The women of Lotus, especially the gifted gardener Ethel, heal the bloodied and nearly dead Cee through herbs, nutrition, “sunsmack[ing]” (Morrison 2012: 124), and, for emotional wounds, conversation and storying. Ethel aggressively guards her garden “from the whole predatory world” (130) with natural pesticides, and she also encourages Cee to protect herself from unhealthy violation. In an image that recalls the shattering of self in abjection theory and in previous female figures in Morrison’s novels, we are told that, even before the eugenicist doctor experimented with and sterilized Cee, she was shattered by the treatment her unscrupulous husband had inflicted on her: “She was broken. Not broken up but broken down, down into her separate parts” (54). The female companionship and iron-handed nurture that greets Cee upon her return to the so-called “deviant” heterotopia of Lotus rebuild her,

 Frank’s conversations with the person (or self) writing down his life story are italicized in Morrison’s text.  Silvia Martínez-Falquina’s 2020 article compares Home to the novel The Round House by Native American author Louise Erdrich, taking the stance that the two novels encode “the same sexist colonial system which perceives women of color as inherently impure and available for the taking” (119).

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treating her illness as an enemy from without rather than within: “The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping” (121).¹⁷ Frank must escape from a particular heterotopia to rescue his sister from the eugenicist’s suburban office in Atlanta after receiving a message from the doctor’s black housekeeper that Cee is in grave danger. The hallucinating veteran is imprisoned in a mental hospital in a Northern city. A black minister aids him, pointing out the inhuman way African American soldiers are treated in their raced country: “‘You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better’” (Morrison 2012: 18). This subhuman treatment merges with the “men-treated-like-dog fights” (138) that Frank and Cee were traumatically exposed to in their youth, which in turn melds with his experiences and phantasms of body parts such as the quivering foot of the “dog fight” man as he is being buried. Jean Wyatt convincingly outlines Frank’s psychological path to at least partial healing in his newly perceived town of Lotus by his facing the uncanny “return of the repressed” with its succession of “severed limbs” (2017: chapter 6 passim). Her reading can be productively enhanced by recalling Sontag’s association of the racialized poor’s illness “with the foreign, with an exotic, often primitive place” in the realization that this “foreign,” “often primitive place” can be one’s very own home, one’s country or hometown. According to Home, however, sources and methods of cure are possibly also available in that venue.

“The Dirty Business of Racism”: Conclusion The black cultural analyst and novelist Calvin Baker is discouraged about the US American society’s progress since the Emancipation Proclamation. In his recent book A More Perfect Union: Race, Integration, and the Future of America (2020), he criticizes both the right-wing blockade of measures to change systemic racism and the liberal tendency to superficially support change toward full integration but still maintain privileging. More than 150 years of half-hearted steps forward or outright reversals of promising policy have prevented the abolition of a disadvantaged racial underclass, and “the toxic, shared mythology of race […] remains in attitudes, in coded speech, in theatrics of protest, in policy, in fact” (Baker 2020: 242). The current unrest, particularly with regard to institutional police violence, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and disproportionate

 This formulation also describes Prince, Cee’s criminal, egotistic black husband.

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COVID-19 infection, reflects the continued urgency of redressing historical inequalities. Toni Morrison’s novels serve to call the reading public’s attention to these historical and present-day inequities. The late eminent African American scholar Nellie McKay attested to Morrison’s achievement: “Her powerful words, on behalf of millions, give voice to a profound lament” (McKay 1999: 3). Morrison chooses a discourse that admits the language, images, and movements of abjection – certainly not to depict horrors and filth for sensational purposes, but rather, in Bouson’s vivid phrasing, to “force readers into uncomfortable confrontations with the dirty business of racism” (2000: x). Daniel Stein rightly emphasizes the “slow recovery” through “storytelling” in Beloved from the personal and social damage caused by the slave system (2007: 275). Healing may be slow, but Morrison’s novels tell us that to some measure abjection – both hegemonic and subaltern, both from without and within – can be countered by such strategies as feistiness and storytelling. Claudia’s defiance, Sula’s violation of norms, Nel’s openness to epiphany, Sethe’s and Paul D’s rememorying, Frank’s self-questioning, for example, serve to initiate conversations, interrogation, individual and communal storytelling, and community solidarity that can modulate the master narrative. The imagination and “spiritual richness” of Morrison’s own storytelling with the “complexities of its layers of meaning embedded in meticulously crafted yet passionate prose” focus on “the healing process that returns dignity to a people from whom it had been unceremoniously stripped” (McKay 1999: 10).

Works Cited Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. Houndmills, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, Calvin. 2020. A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America. New York: Bold Type Books. Bouson, J. Brooks. 2000. Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16(1): 22 – 27 (translation by Jay Miskowiec of Foucault’s 1967 lecture). Grewal, Gurleen. 1998. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Heinert, Jennifer Lee Jordan. 2009. Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press (original publication Pouvoirs de l’horreur, Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

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Laws, Page R. 2021. “Crossing the Boundaries of Decency? 12 Years a Slave and the Pornography of Pain.” In: Astrid M. Fellner (ed.). Narratives of Border Crossings: Literary Approaches and Negotiations. Baden-Baden: Nomos. 207 – 222. McKay, Nellie Y. 1999. “Introduction.” In: William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay (eds.). Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3 – 19. Martínez-Falquina, Silvia. 2020. “My Body Not My Own: An Intersectional View on Relationality in Fiction by Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich.” Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat 26: 117 – 132. Morrison, Toni. 1991a (1987). Beloved. New York: Signet. Morrison, Toni. 1991b (1973). Sula. London: Picador. Morrison, Toni. 1999 (1970). The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage. Morrison, Toni. 2012. Home. New York: Knopf. Morrison, Toni. 2017. The Origin of Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morrison, Toni. 2019a. “Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination, Ingersoll Lecture 2012.” In: Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (eds.). Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard Divinity School’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 13 – 19. Morrison, Toni. 2019b. Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. London: Chatto & Windus. Moyers, Bill. 1990. “Toni Morrison: Interview on her Life and Career.” World of Ideas, 11 March 1990. [accessed 10 March 2022]. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noble, Marianne. 1997. “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10(2): 295 – 320. Page, Philip. 1992. “Circularity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 26(1): 31 – 39. Raynaud, Claudine. 1999. “The Poetics of Abjection in Beloved.” In: Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen (eds.). Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 70 – 85. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag, Susan. 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stein, Daniel. 2007. “Rememorizing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Transformation of Race Melodrama in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In: Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer (eds.). Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 263 – 282. Tait, Althea. 2017. “Black Motherhood, Beauty and Soul Murder-Wound [cross-out in original].” In: Lee Baxter and Martha Satz (eds.). Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood. Bradford/Canada: Demeter Press. 214 – 237. Tate, Claudia. 1983. “Toni Morrison.” In: Claudia Tate (ed.). Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum. 117 – 131. Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Tyler, Imogen. 2020. Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality. London: Zed Books.

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Waegner, Cathy Covell. 2009. “Ruthless Epic Footsteps: Shoes, Migrants, and the Settlement of the Americas in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” In: Jopi Nyman (ed.). Post-National Enquiries: Essays on Ethnic and Racial Border Crossings. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 91 – 112. Wagner-Martin, Linda. 2019. Toni Morrison and the Maternal: From The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child. New York: Peter Lang. Wyatt, Jean. 2017. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Regina E. Brisgone

African American Women and Stigma: Reactions to Medical Targeting for HIV and COVID-19 Abstract: The legacy of the medical system in the United States and its treatment of Black women on the margins of society is a fraught one, fostered by a history of medical neglect and misuse. This chapter examines findings for two groups of similarly situated African American poor urban women: 1) Adult drug users and sex workers in the age of HIV/AIDS, and 2) low-income older women who are substance users and sex workers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes into account the history of medical misuse and experimentation of African American peoples in the United States and interrogates a racialized approach that targeted African American groups for HIV/AIDS testing and treatment based on risky drug use and sexual practices. The two qualitative research studies, nineteen years apart, involve African American women whom the medical establishment considered high risk for diseases of great public concern. Researchers have reported that African Americans are at higher risk for COVID-19 relative to other groups due to higher rates of chronic illnesses. In both studies, women’s narratives uncovered fear of a highly publicized disease, a fatalistic approach to infection, and mistrust of a medical system attempting to target them for testing, prevention, and treatment.

Since the time of slavery African Americans have suffered more than profited from their relations with medical and public health systems in the United States. The severe non-consensual and invasive experimentation during slavery was echoed in subsequent disease regimes. Today’s health and disease agenda, like those historically, continues to intertwine tropes of Blackness with sexuality and menace. Such racist viewpoints, the legacy of slavery, and the wrongs of that era and beyond, have continued to influence the United States’ medical and public health systems in its responses to African Americans. The culture of American enslavement of Africans and their descendants required justifications about the slaves being less worthy than White peoples who enslaved them. These have included tropes that Blacks were less sensitive to pain, were sexually promiscuous and disease prone, needed control. An appropriate theoretical context for this discussion can be found in Foucault’s writing about power relations and control https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-011

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of diseased bodies, as summarized by Geoffroy de Laforcade: “Michel Foucault’s core argument on the emergence of discipline and securitization in Western industrial states is that they emerged as correctives to the abnormal, in response to plagues beginning with the quarantining of cities” (de Laforcade in this volume, drawing on Foucault 1977: 198). The Foucauldian tracing of the rise of modern security states from Medieval attempts to enclose and contain what was commonly called the “black plague” is relevant to the more recent plagues of HIV/ AIDS and the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to racialized ideas about health. This chapter will incorporate responses that link race and sexuality to disease risk and control. My empirical research examines the effects of the HIV/AIDS threat that quarantined women of color, if not literally, then at least through technology and treatment; likewise, the effects of efforts to contain COVID-19 targeted African American women in racialized ways. My chapter is based on two studies: The first was conducted with women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s (average age 33) under HIV and AIDS regimes. The second, in the summer of 2020 as COVID-19 medical testing and surveillance rolled out, involved 35 African American women (average age 55 but as old as 70 years), who feared COVID-19 but resisted the intrusions of medical authorities and media coverage that focused on the high risks for infection and death for minorities, particularly African Americans.¹ The interviewees in this study, whose narratives are used to illustrate the themes of my chapter, are identified by pseudonyms, not their legal names, to preserve confidentiality. The women chose their own pseudonyms, some deliberately stereotypical, perhaps as an ironic comment on social stigmatization. Although women in the two studies were frightened by these diseases, they were fatalistic about contracting them, and equally resistive to efforts that targeted them. Women in both studies, though largely of different ages, came from similar inner-city minority communities, battled addictions to drugs and alcohol, and engaged in sex work to obtain their substances of choice. Because of these factors, the women, above all those from the earlier HIV based research, ducked the health system to avoid stigmatization and humiliation before their families and their communities. Especially for the women with children, the authorities of any kind were best left in the dark. The mistrust of social and health institutions, and the women’s avoidance of them, have been well warranted; as

 See Brisgone 2008 and Ryder and Brisgone 2013, published findings, and 2019, submitted manuscript, of the first ethnographic study of women in the time of HIV/AIDS public health programs. The second study, on similarly situated women two decades later, is presented in Brisgone 2020.

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the following evidence will show, resistance to racialized responses to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic is not unjustified.

Medical History and the Legacy of Slavery The history of the United States, given its long investment in Black slavery, shows the deep impact of racialized stereotypes and their influence on Black health that inform the record of medical neglect, abuse, and mistreatment of this minority group. It can be maintained that African Americans are aware of this record, either by reading about the case studies or by information passed along in families for generations. I have selected four examples of documented medical abuse linking the sexuality of the Black body to prejudicial treatment. During slavery (mid-1800s), fourteen Black slave women underwent invasive gynecological experimentation without their consent and without pain blocking anesthesia (though it existed), according to the historical account by Kathleen Bachynski, a post-doctoral fellow in Medical Humanities at New York University (2018). One of the women underwent 30 surgeries. Those experiments, conducted by Dr. Marion J. Sims, benefited slave owners, who unethically had given him sole use of the slave women for his work. The corollary results were groundbreaking treatments that saved lives, and Sims has been dubbed the father of modern gynecology – but the primary goal was to ensure that Black slave women produced healthy infants to expand the slave population and were able to resume hard slave work following complicated births with injuries. In the probably best-known historical example of racialized medical mistreatment, the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (Alabama), begun in 1932, 600 Black free men, 399 of them with syphilis, underwent decades of unmedicated observation for a longitudinal study on the life course of untreated syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease with severe consequences for the untreated. It was conducted by federal public health researchers and without informed consent. The men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term that described syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In exchange, researchers provided the men with free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. The study participants were not administered penicillin, a common treatment for syphilis by 1943. The study was finally stopped in 1972 following press coverage and the determination by a federal government committee that

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the results of the study were paltry compared to the harm it caused its participants.² Less well known but well documented by Khary O. Polk (2020: 129 – 132) was the labeling of Black military men as venereal disease carriers and subsequent quarantining and neglect of these men at military installations. This practice was widespread within military circles in the United States and stretched between the two great world wars. Polk emphasizes one case study in Illinois. The quarantine there imposed by the military authorities was based on faulty science and few direct examinations, but predicated on prevailing beliefs about Black men, sexuality and disease-proneness. Black troops were quarantined wholesale in a camp that mixed the sick with the healthy. The military did little to treat them. Historical memos attribute lack of treatment to the White medical staff’s fear of Black genitals. This medical quarantine and the decision to ban Black troops from foreign service were based on prevailing views of Blacks in America as having uncontrollable sexual appetites, and thus, susceptible to syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. Lack of care came from countervailing beliefs about the immunity of strong black bodies toughened by the hardships of past slavery. The overall effect was to stigmatize these men in the eyes of their White military counterparts. The public nature of the quarantine and the restrictions on their activities led White soldiers to label the Black troops lazy and unfit for military life. The last of the examples, “the myth of the crack baby,” is pertinent to the discussion of my empirical research because this medical moral panic resulted in legislation that allowed authorities to sever parental ties of women who gave birth with crack cocaine in their systems and to be subject to charges of neglect, manslaughter, and murder (see Martin 2010 and Editorial Board New York Times 2018). This legislation is commented on by affected mothers in some of the interview excerpts discussed below.

Women, Drugs, Sexuality, and Disease Regimes in the 2000s–2020 The in-depth interviews I conducted with nearly 100 women of color during two studies support the idea of this volume’s title, “Aliens Within.” In responding to

 Reparations to study participants and their families have included all necessary medical care for survivors of the study and their families. The last participant died in 2004. For more information see the Centers for Disease Control webpage, “The Tuskegee Timeline,” last updated in 2021.

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questions covering lifeways and health, perceptions of the medical system, the impact of health programs during times of epidemic, and US criminal justice policy, the voices of poor minority women tell stories of stigmatization and racialized prejudice. The first study focuses on women’s responses to a federal HIV and AIDS agenda that entailed federally funded clinics where testing, surveillance, and services were offered, including a clinic for drug-involved pregnant women. The second study revealed that the older women interviewed during the COVID-19 epidemic had been inundated with televised advice from federal disease authorities that was often contradictory and media that focused on the high risks for infection and death of minority people. The hangover of slave practices and medical views on the disease susceptibility of African Americans makes up the backbone of medical mistrust among this ethnic group. As the interviewees in the second study attest, this distrust has led to avoidance of medical and public health initiatives for COVID-19 despite the women’s status as older African Americans, a factor that medical research argues places them at higher risk for contracting the virus and having deadly outcomes. The historical view of Blacks as disease-prone and as vectors of disease continues to denigrate them and encourage racial isolation. As Liesl Nydegger and Mandy Hill argue, there are “clear overlaps” (2020: 655) between the HIV/AIDS and the COVID-19 virus episodes in African American disease outcomes, medical mistrust, and stigmatization. The first qualitative study reflects the women’s perceptions of society’s negative views about them in relation to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The study of older women and COVID contrasts the women’s ready acknowledgement of their own chronic illnesses (respiratory disease, overweight, diabetes, and heart disease), with a refusal to link themselves individually as at risk for the pandemic virus or to actively pursue testing and treatment. The study participants’ narratives exemplify themes of this book: That women of color from poor communities, under the gaze of the medical establishment and criminal justice system, are – from the public viewpoint – not women in need of help but “aliens within,” to be separated, monitored, and acted upon. The qualitative methodology and philosophy that supports this research is described by Norman K. Denzin, a noted qualitative methodologist, who states that the persons acted upon by public policy are those best suited to describe how efforts are carried out, how well the measures perform, and what flaws manifest themselves (1989).

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HIV and AIDS: How the Crack Cocaine Epidemic Became an Epidemic of Shame, Isolation, and Stigma for African American Women Drug Users The monikers “Crack ‘Hos” and “Skeezers” were such well-known labels for African American women crack users that public health researchers Mindy T. Fullilove, E. Anne Lown, and Robert E. Fullilove used them in their research article’s title (1992). Greater than ever numbers of women who had not been in the drug scene were drawn to the streets by the invention of crack, a cheap version of cocaine.³ Because the women were novices, they were at much greater risk for violence.⁴ The women also became a focus of the criminal justice system and its “War on Drugs” rhetoric. As Barbara Bloom, Meda Chesney-Lind, and Barbara Owen wrote: “Without any fanfare, the ‘war on drugs’ has become a war on women” (1994: 1). Lisa Maher says these women were “hidden in the light” of popular opinion and public policy that stereotyped them and their children as lost generations doomed by pathology: “They are hidden in that, although we hear much about them, we hear little from them” (1996: 145). Women who used crack, particularly those who engaged in prostitution for small amounts of cash that roughly coincided with the $5 to $15 costs for crack vials, were depicted as devalued women who degraded themselves, neglected their children, hurt family reputations, and disturbed the neighborhood peace. These ideas were not lost on the women in my qualitative research study of 76 women in a city in northern New Jersey who were heavy users of heroin and crack cocaine, engaged in street solicitation and prostitution for small amounts of cash. The participants were primarily women of color (76 % African American; 21 % Hispanic; 3 % White). Sixty-seven percent of the study participants were mothers though 85 % of the mothers lost legal custody of their children over troubles with drugs (Brisgone 2008). In my study, 68 of the women used crack and 62 of the women used heroin; 54 of the women in this study were poly-drug users of heroin and cocaine. They engaged in prostitution with men in cars who pulled up to a starkly vacant warehouse district, negotiated with strolling women, and conducted mostly oral sex for $15, enough to purchase one vial of crack and a packet of heroin. Violence was a daily risk in the prostitution area, an isolated street of empty buildings and scrub that was known to all as

 Bloom et al. 1994 and Cross et al. 2000 document the rise of female crack users.  In addition to the studies mentioned in the preceding footnote, see Maher 1996; Erickson et al. 2000.

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“the stroll.” Women in the study describe their stigmatized status in various ways: Baby, a 30-year-old Puerto-Rican woman and addict of 13 years, says she can feel how people look at her: “When people are addicts, people treat them like garbage. People look at me like I’m nothing. I never got that look before, like you don’t mean nothing.” “On the stroll, no one’s business is everyone’s business. Too many people know each other. I know too many people. Say I was on the stroll selling pussy and you saw me, somebody [a man] asking me for something. I can’t say [later] I wasn’t doing nothing. You say: ‘Bitch, I just saw you on the stroll’” (Sweety, African American, age 32). Shawnice, a thin African American woman in her 30s with a messy Afro, partial to high heels, also lost her reputation. A prostitution client who owned a garage near the prostitution area drove up with the police and accused her of robbery. Three months later, the charges were dropped; a light-skinned and boyish Hispanic woman was charged. Shawnice says that experience convinced her that women like her are disgraced and faceless to the straight world. It comes down to what they do on the street: “I got locked up. The cops jumped out of the car with guns and yelled at me to ‘get against the fence.’ A john [client] said: ‘She robbed me.’ They didn’t listen to me. Three months in jail they took from me. I didn’t have no gun. I had two dollars in my pocket, and I was illin (in heroin withdrawal). They know what I do. They know I’m a ‘ho.’ They know I’m a black person and I don’t have no man.” There were other humiliations. Celeste, 32, an African American user of heroin and cocaine in her 30s, was drug free and out of prostitution for about 24 months of the 36 months of the study. One of the shocks that strengthened her resolve to quit was being attacked and beaten by young boys at the prostitution area. She saw the revulsion in their eyes. “These boys hate the hookers – the girls. One of them got off his bike and punched me. It was ‘spic and span’ daytime, just consider that!”

The Angry Eyes: Men and Everyday Menace and Humiliation As Celeste mentioned above, young, violent males made a reprehensible sport of harassing the street prostitutes. Lena, a 34-year-old Hispanic heroin user, recalls a summer of stalking: “Guys were coming around with water guns, about 19 – 20 years old, and squirting you down. […] If you talk back to them, they come back

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with a car full of guys. They try to throw the car on you. They call you all kind of nasty names. Some of the guys are reckless out there. You say something to them, and they might come back and hurt you.” Men came to beat, rob, and to rape the women. The result is that nearly every woman in the study reported she had been attacked. Some suffered multiple attacks. Their assailants carried iron pipes, wooden bats, sticks, knives, and guns. Cory, 40, a rookie prostitute, was pursued and attacked by a trio of rough young locals who played a cruel game of “cat-and-mouse” before capturing her. “These young boys are rough, kind of arrogant, [saying] like: ‘I want some old pussy.’ They have no respect. They call you all kind of ‘hos’ and bitches. They disrespect you all kind of ways. I got away once [during the attack], but the guy who wanted to date me? He got me, he punched me. He was yelling: ‘You running from me bitch? You crazy!’ […] These boys have no respect for women. You don’t think he got a mother? A sister?” Many attacks against the women appeared well-planned, the work of serial predators posing as clients who robbed the prostitutes and beat them for resisting. A handful of rapists worked their way through the stroll before the prostitutes could warn one another. In a nearly deadly attack, Sugar, 33, an African American heroin and crack user known for swindling cash from would-be clients, was shot in the head execution-style one night as her boyfriend watched helplessly. Two men wearing ski masks overtook Sugar on the street, ordered her to kneel, and shot her. The last Sugar remembers before losing consciousness was feeling a sharp punch to her head. The attackers took nothing from her, fueling rumors that it was some sort of payback. Sugar’s memory is cloudy about that time. Emergency room physicians discovered Sugar had been shot in the head. “I was in a coma. I got a [tracheotomy] hole in my neck. They didn’t take the bullet out because I was going to die.” She survived, following a coma and nine months of rehabilitation, but suffered headaches, cognitive difficulties, and intermittent slurred speech. She relapsed, picking up both heroin and cocaine, and resorted to prostitution despite its risks. “It’s harder for me now.”

HIV and AIDS – Targeting, Testing, and Unwanted Help Women in the study became the recipients of an HIV outreach effort funded by the federal government centered on minority communities that had replaced earlier risk groups as the cynosure of HIV prevention efforts. Minority women came

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into sharp focus, particularly minority women in communities with high rates of HIV and injection drug use. The city in which the study was conducted had both. The regime targeted the women for testing, surveillance, and treatment but was only barely successful, compared to similar efforts targeting drug-involved minority gay and transgender men. The clinics tried to attract the women by offering food coupons and groceries. Its best effort was an apartment-like storefront with a kitchen, bathroom, and washer-dryer to provide necessities to the drugusing women who bounced from house-to-house, lived in abandoned buildings, and engaged in prostitution at the stroll. Many came, most tried, but the success was limited. They were distrustful of helping agencies because of negative experiences with the law and the state child welfare agencies that had taken away their children. KK, a Black woman in her 30s whose husband died of AIDS complications, was attached to one of the clinics, but, like others in her group, complained about being pressured to make a lengthy sexual activity inventory that included detailed counting of sexual partners. KK started the survey, but walked away without completing it, telling me the intrusive questions about multiple sexual partners made her feel ashamed, depressed, and guilty. Many women came for the services, some for the educational programs, yet most avoided taking the HIV test. Tina, SUNY Buffalo drop-out with a severe drug habit and a rap sheet to match, spent an entire interview repeating the term “that’s a Reality Check,” as she catalogued the dangers (violence, drug overdose, HIV) of her lifestyle that she had learned at a clinic. But she did not get tested. Doreen, another of the participants at risk for HIV infection (two intimate partners had died of AIDS), also avoided testing, telling me she would rather not know. Most of the women took a defeatist view of the HIV testing and services, preferring to live out their lives and deal with an HIV infection if they got sick. Most admitted to skipping the use of condoms during sex, especially when they were intoxicated or desperate for drugs, even though condoms were a good way to protect themselves from HIV infection. Some men would pay more for unprotected sex, and other risky practices. Sugar, 34, a crack and heroin user, often went for it. “I take it any way, including anal. You don’t get that all the time. Well, but if you give me $100 to do something, I’m-a-gonna do it!” Of the 76 women in the study, eight disclosed their HIV positive status to me during interviews. None of the women were free of drugs and they still worked in prostitution. None of them disclosed their HIV status to clients, saying that they took precautions and could be killed for admitting their status. One of them, Tasha, an African American woman in her early 30s, was undergoing the HIV treatment available at the time. She was mostly but not completely drug free and nearly free from prostitution and was re-engaging with her young daughter.

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Juicy, a 28-year-old, lost two children to special programs for HIV-infected babies and toddlers. She was heartbroken but neither drug-free nor avoiding prostitution. Pecan, a slim woman in her 30s, was living her life on two tracks. She was writing her will, re-establishing contact with her White, managerial class husband and her young son, and preparing the adoption of her infant (fathered by a prostitution client) to her parents in New York. But otherwise, Pecan was running wild, engaging in prostitution including “threesomes,” and injecting and smoking heroin and cocaine. The impact of HIV and AIDS on the women in this study was serious. Doreen, 36, a Hispanic and one of the most heavily involved poly-drug users in the study, had two intimate partners who died from AIDS. Pumpkin, 33, an African American who used heroin and crack and had tested positive for HIV, talked often about aunts and uncles dying of AIDS during her lifetime. Since she was often sick, she was engaged with the HIV outreach clinic, seeking medical help for related illnesses. She worked in prostitution and used drugs off-and-on. A client who found out her status stalked her at the stroll, cursing her and threatening to murder her, and indeed tried to run over her with his car. In my last interview with Pumpkin, she was frightened, having nightmares about the man in the car and about dying. She died of AIDS complications a month later, a fact relayed to me by a registered letter I had sent. Given the women’s silence around HIV, it is likely that more of the women in the study were infected. Because of widespread beliefs in the community that HIV was a death sentence, and because many women lost loved ones to HIV and AIDS, it is unsurprising that women wanted to avoid talk about the epidemic surrounding them. Pecan, cited above, said she ran “wild” following her positive test for HIV, got pregnant from a prostitution customer, and kept the news from everyone. On the day she delivered, she had walked out of a crack house, down the street to the city hospital, and gave birth to her second child. Following a blood test that she insists told the nurses all they needed to know about her HIV status and drug addiction, she fled the hospital. She was convinced that the state would not have let her leave with her baby: “At first, they [the nurses] were good. Then, they knew I do drugs. That I’m HIV positive. They didn’t like it. You could just see it in their eyes: ‘You’re not going home with that […] baby.’” Pecan was correct. The HIV surveillance of minority women led to intensified scrutiny of drug-using women in their childbearing years starting in the 2000s. The more significant impact was a New Jersey state law giving child welfare authorities the right to seize newborns from women who gave birth under the influence of illicit drugs. The New Jersey State Supreme Court upheld a state law that tied a newborn’s addiction and symptoms of withdrawal, combined with

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a mother’s failure to provide care, to authorize the termination of parental rights.⁵ Women in the study who were pregnant seemed unaware of this law initially. Of the 14 women in my study who were pregnant over the course of the 36month study, five lost their newborns; four more were in special medical programs designed to keep them from taking drugs though most continued to use illicit drugs and were likely to face loss of their newborns as well. The women lost their children before getting a chance to name them. The women’s reactions were disbelief and rage against legal and medical systems that allowed monitoring of their bodies and the forced taking of their infants. Shy, 33, a heroin and crack-using prostitute, said she felt tricked by authorities into thinking she would keep her baby. The baby had tested positive for heroin and had respiratory problems. Unknown to her, the authorities had cited her for neglect. One night when Shy arrived at the hospital, her infant was no longer there: “I went to see her every night. I’d go up, wash my hands, ask the nurses to get her for me, and then feed her. Then one night I go up there all happy because I’m going to see my baby, and they done took her. You don’t do that! They did it behind my back. That was three weeks ago, I haven’t seen her since. She got bronchitis and they took her away. I had got used to seeing her and touching her and smelling her.” The father of her newborn, an Italian man with a heroin problem, had been ordered to undergo drug treatment and live with a relative in Florida. His parents, after nearly accepting his African American partner and their bi-racial child, turned against her after the state intervention. Shy found herself alone, guilty, angry, and mourning the loss of her son in addition to her newborn: “We haven’t even named her yet,” Shy had cried. “Why didn’t he [the father] come and get her? I expected his mother to. […] It’s his first baby and he’s 36 years old. He’s running from his responsibility. He needs to get the money to go up there and get [our child]. Why should she be in foster care? I already have a three-year-old son in foster care. I don’t even know him. I don’t want another kid who’s a complete stranger.” The HIV outreach clinic was referring women in my study to a prenatal program that would monitor them closely to prevent low birth weights, as well as to promote sobriety to avoid the intervention of the state into their family lives. Melzie, a 26-year-old African American woman, was adhering to her clinic visits but having difficulty avoiding crack binges during her pregnancy. She had had a

 The New Jersey law was part of a public-supported nationwide push starting in the late 1990s, early 2000s into women’s reproductive rights. It focused on drug use during pregnancy, though its effect was to punish primarily women of color addicted to drugs. See Dailard and Nash 2000.

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stillbirth two years earlier. Melzie talked about how the clinic was helping her to understand the consequences of drug use and the new state law. One day she came for an interview with a black eye. She refused to talk about that, but declared that her drug use was done at least until she delivered her baby: “I’m going into my eighth month now. […] I been with the prenatal [program]. In June I started going to them. I go every month. Every time I go in each month they check for drugs and disease, that’s about it. […] I don’t be out there [the stroll] anymore because I’m getting near to having my baby and I don’t want them to take my baby from me. I can’t do drugs until the baby’s born.” Zena, 35, a White woman and heroin user, internalized the prejudices of mainstream society, the racialized and sexualized view of women who took drugs, prostituted themselves, neglected their children, and seemed to care little for their own reputations. Zena did her best to avoid the label of prostitute, getting her hair done every week, working in the African American area to avoid being spotted by friends and family, and by structuring and controlling her intake and prostitution to times and places to avoid arrest and detection by her working-class family. Injecting heroin with an HIV-infected prostitute friend changed all that. She was blindsided by an HIV positive test result. Zena was devastated, and her drug use and behavior spiraled out of control, like the African American women she had often complained about, as she recalls: “Ever since [the positive HIV diagnosis], I don’t care. I won’t look for a job. Got nothing to look forward to. I’m depressed. Started drinking in the summertime. Because I don’t care. I’m drinking three [beer] cans of 24 ounces. A lot of times I would go out, make my stuff, and then would get high like a Black person, putting a needle in my arm and passing out. One time I rolled down the stairs. A neighbor saw it. I’m afraid to go home. [My brother] says I’m a trifling ass.”

Fatalism, Resistance, and Avoiding the Issue: Responses to a Pandemic “It’s like AIDS all over again.” That was the comment of a woman walking away after answering questions about the COVID-19 public health regimes in my qualitative study on aging African American women in a Hampton Roads city in Virginia. The women in this study in 2020 were poor, resided in run-down neighborhoods, abused substances (mainly crack cocaine), and solicited sex for cash transactions on the local streets to finance their drug use. To say these women lived on the margins was an understatement. The group of 35, 30 of whom

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were active substance users, sometimes full-time sex workers, lived in makeshift housing arrangements and intermittently accessed health care for a variety of chronic diseases, including lung and heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, that put them at risk for contracting COVID-19, with severe outcomes, including death. The study was conducted in the summer and fall of 2020, following an excruciating spring of multiplying COVID-19 rates and deaths. The study occurred during a brief respite, though lockdowns continued as did a scarcity of goods and services. Headlines and television programs roared the latest incidents of public turmoil over the extent of risk of the disease, the economic devastation caused by the lockdown of citizens and the closing of businesses, and disagreements over whether governments had the right to order mask-wearing to prevent disease transmission. The women were not adherents to social distancing or masking in their private lives but complied when the research team provided masks and gloves and conducted interviews six feet apart in loud voices muffled by a large, loud fan inside a room in an anti-poverty center. In fact, women in this study shared views of the pro-Trump, anti-vax and anti-COVID crowd that fought against masks and lockdowns. Women argued against these measures despite their group risks, failing to mask and distance themselves in their sex work and when using drugs with others in closed spaces. Cupcake, 45, an alcoholic crack cocaine user and sex worker who had Type 2 diabetes, major depression, anxiety, as well as carpal tunnel syndrome, illustrates a group view of public health policy surrounding COVID-19. “Wearing a mask? I don’t wear a mask. You know [prostitution] be skin-to-skin. You know what I’m saying? Out there they [all] doing what I’m doing.” Cupcake epitomized the risks and attitudes about COVID-19 among the study participants. They complained about the lockdown, its effects on drug supplies and prices, and feeling lonely, but avoided discussion of any personal connection to COVID-19 as if it were the plague. Though they regaled me with details of chronic illnesses like any senior citizen, the women dodged and ducked questions about their personal involvement with COVID-19. Women in this study, particularly those most active in drug use and sex work, were the most resistant. Perhaps because the epidemic and its discourse were so public, the women viewed the high risk of COVID infection through unmasked sex work with indifference. They were angry about the isolation that the lockdown had brought, and bitter about the constant media attention to the risks to African Americans. The women felt targeted, hounded, and terrorized by the warnings and media attention of which they were intensely aware, including vulnerable Cupcake. She resented the drumbeat of news about COVID-19 and its focus on people like her:

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“Black American females are suffering from depression. We don’t want to hear that [the warnings]. We suffer from that all over again. It feels like the world is going to end. We’re not making money. They stopped your jobs. […] They’re giving out money [stimulus checks] to people who have money instead of giving it to the women out on the street. For real, for real. They don’t have anybody that been in our shoes. […] Black America is depressed, bi-polar, and it’s in us women, this negative talk about why people [African Americans in the street, using drugs] still doing what they doing.” The women felt besieged by the public discourse and their greater risk of COVID-19 but dispirited too over their own reckless behavior in the face of such danger. The women also reported that all the attention felt like the authorities were blaming the victims of a pandemic that preyed on the elderly and on minorities, particularly those with chronic lung and heart disease. These contradictory feelings pushed women into defiant postures of willful ignorance and obstinance. Women in interviews spoke as if the entire African American urban community was in a no-COVID-19 bubble. The women avoided discussions about the personal effects of the disease; more common were complaints that the government was failing to address immediate needs, such as housing and poverty. As a result, in interviews and in separate surveys (filled out privately and reviewed by a research assistant) women uniformly said “No,” to all questions about COVID-19, speaking to the isolation and groupthink about COVID-19. Braids, 51, an alcoholic, says: “I don’t know anyone with COVID. People don’t go to the doctor.” Rose, 65, an active crack user and sometime sex worker, says: “I use hand sanitizer. I will take the medicine if I get it. I don’t know anyone who got it.” And, Cali, a 50-year-old crack user, who was one of the most visible of street sex workers, and contending with untreated bipolar 2 syndrome, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress syndrome, was worried about sexually transmitted disease and the lack of condoms but was unconcerned about COVID-19: “They need more condoms in the stores. I don’t know nobody who had it [COVID-19]. I think you have a higher tolerance [to COVID-19] when you’re around people and spend time outside in the elements.” Movie, at 69, and an active crack smoker and sex worker, refused to contemplate COVID-19: “COVID did not stop me. No, I haven’t got tested. At the hospital I got my temperature checked. No. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be around it. People aren’t scared [of the virus]. But they talk about the things they can’t do because of it.” These views speak to the marginalized status of the African American women and men in the drug scene. Few, if any, spoke of the history of abuse and neglect of African Americans as the scholars and activists portray it, but displayed an adversarial stance to the medical authorities and to the intrusions into

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their lives that speaks to a group shorthand-acknowledgement of such scholarly findings. The world that women in this study inhabit is quite different from the mainstream world that clings to every new advisory about COVID-19. The women were poor, lived in haphazard housing arrangements, paying by the day, week, or month, or in situations in which they provided home health care and housekeeping for sick elderly persons who had disability payments and social security benefits to share. That they were lonely, not seeing family members because of the pandemic, added another layer of disorder to already disrupted lives characterized by scarcity, drug use, and chronic illness. Many of the women in this study had come from large, impoverished families, endured endless hardships, and had begun taking drugs to escape their difficult lives. Their drug-use was long term but interrupted by partnerships, childbirth, and incarceration. Their indifference to the virus lies to a large extent in the women’s mistrust of medicine and their environment. The interviews for the study took place in a community center in a run-down neighborhood. Men of all ages walked the streets, approached women for sex, and spent a great deal of time in their own backyards. Whenever outsiders (police or White people) approached, the sounds of whistles from the backyard men echoed down the street to warn the prostitutes, drug users, and drug sellers that trouble was coming. In numerous narratives, women in the study stuck to talking points about COVID-19 that were acceptable for their group. The streets emptied because of the lockdown, making already difficult lives more difficult and dangerous. Dealers would not risk arrest by traveling empty highways. This caused drug shortages, and the substitution of dangerous fentanyl, an often toxic opioid, which easily led to overdoses. People frequently mistook fentanyl for heroin or hazarded a try to stave off withdrawal. This phenomenon was complicated by the dealers’ practice of packaging cocaine in capsules (“pills,” the women called them) to resemble higher-priced and more potent prescription opioids. The women reluctantly bought “dog food,” low-grade heroin or crack so called because it “tasted and smelled terrible,” as Movie describes below. Included in the COVID-19 litany was the complaint by the interviewees that they paid higher prices for substances and desperately walked the streets at all hours in the hot sun and the humid nights, searching for sex clients and drugs. These developments led Big Mama, 60, a decades-long user of crack and heroin, to quit heroin. “My girlfriend died; I’m talking about a year ago. I didn’t want to mess with that anymore. I had five friends pass. I remember one day six people OD’d [overdosed] on that street one block from here.” One study participant, Queen, who at 43 was one of the youngest members of the study group and one of the most active crack and heroin users and prostitutes, overdosed on fentanyl, but lived to tell her tale. She told me in an inter-

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view that when drugs were scarce, she had reached into a jacket pocket, found a pill, and took it. She walked to her aunt’s house and passed out, prompting a phone call to her mother to hospitalize her. Queen awoke in a psychiatric ward on a court-ordered hold for observation. She disputes the suicide attempt. “It was the fentanyl,” Queen says. “Had I known it was fentanyl I never would have done it. The fentanyl did it.” Queen returned to drug use and the streets soon afterward, saying the humiliation of the episode angered her and made her unable to stay sober. Of the COVID-19 hardships, particularly the drug drought, Queen adds: “That’s affecting people, they’re going kind of crazy.” Movie, the 69-year-old, said the “drug drought,” as the women called it, prompted drug users to travel long distances each day to obtain drugs. She moved easily among drug dealers and people on the street, but her mainstream and older appearance allowed her to hide in plain sight, going about her business. As she tells it, the drug shortage for cocaine and heroin lasted from the start of the lockdown in the spring until about June. It slowed, but did not stop the women from drug use: “When we went to buy it, it was garbage. We call it dog food. There was a drought, whatever. They selled it for whatever they want because they knew there’s not much around. It tasted and smelled terrible, and it was just a little for your money. When I found something, I would have to get myself together to go and get it. It took a long time to find. It was hard to find gas. I had to drive for it.” Of the few women who acknowledged the risks for COVID-19 transmission, Bubbles, 55, an active cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol user, with diabetes, brittle bones, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and schizophrenia, says she is worried but sees little that will change the behavior of women in the street: “A lot of people are not taking this serious. People are saying: ‘Why you putting a mask on when you tricking [prostituting] with someone?’ You all know what we are not doing. You want more drugs. You want to drink more. It’s not going to stop. Smoking weed, passing it around. People won’t wear a mask until it hits home.” The level of risk-taking by drug-using sex workers, both in the HIV-era study and the newer study of aging African American women, reveals resistance and anger toward the mainstream and toward a health system that does not see them or attend to their greatest needs. Women in both studies, though it was more pronounced in the earlier study, avoided interactions with health services if they could. The first study underscored that minority women who used drugs were believed to be criminals, deviants, bad mothers. Their distrust of the authorities was great, and because of a high rate of arrests for prostitution and drug use, they hid from social, health, and criminal justice systems to maintain the tenuous links to their children (who were mostly with family members), to

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spare themselves and families from humiliation, and to maintain a sliver of a foothold in the straight, mainstream world. The elderly women in the COVID19 study were as hostile to public health regimes as the younger women, insofar as they, like the women in the first study group, were immersed in deviant networks of sex work and illegal drug use. The elderly women had more prevalent health problems than the younger ones. Perhaps because of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), more of the elderly women benefited from health services and diagnoses. What was incipient for the younger group was for the older women more likely to be a diagnosed chronic disease, such as Type 2 diabetes or COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). The millennial era HIV/AIDS health programs came to focus more on African American populations, particularly on “high-risk” females who engaged in drug use and sex work. These policies marginalized poor women of color. These women were subjected to state laws in the 2000s that civilly or criminally punished them for delivering drug-addicted newborns. The laws and the publicity surrounding the seizing of drug-addicted infants from drug-using mothers evoked societal anger, particularly in opposition to the high-risk females. Women who might have drawn sympathy and help in an earlier era were scorned and punished for the disease of addiction. The “myth of the crack baby,” which predicted a hard-to-control and mentally deficient generation ruined by their mother’s crack cocaine use, was particularly detrimental to the reputation of African American women. Counter-anger mobilized resistance by the women (and activism to help them as well). The public’s perception was that women in the era of HIV and AIDS put themselves at risk through heedless sex work with multiple partners spurred by a desire for crack cocaine. Just eight women in the study reported their infections with HIV, and others expressed a sense of resignation about the deadly disease. The contours of this regime, with its feel of quarantine and intrusions into pregnancy (of drug-using pregnant women), hark back to Polk’s reportage of military authorities judging African American soldiers as sexually promiscuous and, thus, prone to contracting syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. The pregnancy legislation during the HIV and crack eras to control African American pregnancy likewise harks back to the gynecologic experiments on Black slave women. In the COVID-19 public health response there are fewer echoes to slave-age medical abuse. But to COVID-19 study participants, the situation felt claustrophobic, as if they had seen this story play out before. Resistance was expressed as a complaint about lack of basic health care and about poor living conditions arising from a dearth in economic equity. Behaviorally, women in this study acted out their anger by refusing to wear masks, even during sexual activities – virologically

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a (self‐)destructive act – and ignoring health warnings and precautions aimed in their direction. Women in this COVID-19 study perceived they were set apart from society by their race, gender, and economic status. They felt over-scrutinized for disease risk and stigmatized as chronic sufferers of lung and heart disease (due to generational medical neglect). The HIV group resisted the quarantining effects of testing and treatments, continuing risky behavior (engaging in sex acts with multiple unknown men, failing to consistently use condoms to prevent disease transmission during sex) and playing the odds rather than getting tested for the potentially deadly disease. In each case, the women contrast with the mainstream society consumed by the danger of the modern plagues. These female outsiders, identified by race, economics, and behavior, stand apart as “aliens within.”

Works Cited Bachynski, Kathleen. 2018. “American Medicine Was Built on the Backs of Slaves. And It Still Affects How Doctors Treat Patients Today.” The Washington Post, 4 June 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Bloom, Barbara, Meda Chesney Lind, and Barbara Owen. 1994. Women in California Prisons: Hidden Victims of the War on Drugs. San Francisco: Report of Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. 1 – 10. Brisgone, Regina E. 2008. “Varieties of Behavior Across and Within Persons in Drug-Using Street Prostitutes: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study” (3326962). Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest UMI. 507 pages. Brisgone, Regina E. 2019. Running Hard but Trying to Do Good: Life Changes in Women Who Use Drugs and Engage in Street Prostitution. Submitted to Lynne Rienner Publishers. Boulder, CO. 332 pages. Brisgone, Regina E. 2020. “Grant Report: Summer Research on African American Women, Health, Substance Use and Sex Work and Effects of Aging in a Tidewater, Virginia Sample.” Submitted to Norfolk State University, Center for Teaching and Learning, 18 Aug. 2020. 17 pages. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2021. “Tuskegee Timeline.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Dailard, Cynthia, and Elizabeth Nash. 2000. “State Responses to Substance Abuse Among Pregnant Women.” The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 3(6). [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Editorial Board of The New York Times. 2018. “A Woman’s Rights Part 4: Slandering the Unborn: How Bad Science and a Moral Panic, Fueled in Part by the News Media Demonized Mothers and Defamed a Generation.” Online interactive series Opinion. 28

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Dec. 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Denzin, Norman K. 1989. Interpretive Interactionism. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books. Fullilove, Mindy T., E. Anne Lown, and Robert E. Fullilove. 1992. “Crack ‘Hos and Skeezers: Traumatic Experiences of Women Crack Users.” Journal of Sex Research 29(2): 275 – 287. Maher, Lisa. 1996. “Hidden in the Light: Occupational Norms among Crack-Using Street-Level Sex Workers.” Journal of Sex Issues 26(1): 143 – 176. Martin, Michele (Host). 2010. “Crack Babies: Twenty Years Later.” Tell Me More [Radio Broadcast, 3 May 2010]. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Nydegger, Liesl A., and Mandy J. Hill. 2020. “Examining COVID-19 and HIV: The Impact of Intersectional Stigma on Short- and Long-Term Health Outcomes among African Americans.” International Social Work 63(5): 655 – 659. Polk, Khary Oronde. 2020. Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898 – 1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ryder, Judith A., and Regina E. Brisgone. 2013. “Cracked Perspectives: Reflections of Women and Girls in the Aftermath of the Crack Cocaine Era.” Feminist Criminology 8: 40 – 62.

Displacement: Constructing and Countering Collapse

Hunter H. Gardner

Spilling Over: Morality and Epidemiology in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts Abstract: This chapter identifies ancient roots of contemporary discussions of epidemic disease that link the inhabitants of specific geographic regions with a natural world depicted as either pristine but vulnerable or threatening and vengeful. Two significant texts considered are the Hippocratic Corpus and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Discussion of emerging infectious diseases, while acknowledging physical realities of climate that foster the evolution of microbes, is frequently scripted as a morally tinged drama in which the sinister forces of the industrialized world transgress a vulnerable natural world. While, as others have argued, personification is perhaps inevitable in scientific discourse, the author suggests that ancient ideas linking geography, climate, and habits of life to disease transmission help explain the purchasing power of such rhetoric but also force us to question the impact of representations that (however ennobling) conceptually bind human populations with their natural environments.

“Spillover” is a term popularized by David Quammen in a 2012 book of the same name to describe the activity of a zoonois, that is, an animal infection that can be transmitted to humans (2012: 14). HIV, the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, is perhaps the most notorious example of a zoonosis, though epidemiologists studying the current pandemic have also postulated that the virus causing COVID 19, SARS-CoV-2, was originally transferred from bats to humans, possibly through a host mammal.¹ In the present essay, I’ll be taking a bit of scholarly license in using the term to describe another kind of spill, this time from one discursive field to another – from morality to epidemiology – rather than from one species to the next. I want to use that license to think through precisely the kinds of rhetoric used by Quammen and others like him who have quite laudably investigated how human interventions in rel-

 Perhaps one traded at the seafood market in Wuhan China, where many of the index cases were identified, though the evidence is far from clear; see e. g. the New York Times opinion piece by Zeynep Tufekci (25 June 2021) on the possibility that the virus emerged as the result of insufficient lab safety protocols. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-012

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atively undeveloped parts of the world have increased the threats to humanity posed by emerging pathogens. Disease transmission has always offered itself as a vehicle for moral discourse. As Susan Sontag (1990) demonstrates not only of the moral implications that accompanied a cancer or TB diagnosis, but also of the rhetoric surrounding the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, contracting a certain illness signified certain habits of life, or “mores,” a term born from the Latin root (mos) that signified character, disposition, and ways of being in the world.² Certain illnesses have emerged in the popular imagination as not necessarily punitive measures,³ so much as outward expressions of an inner self (Sontag 1990: 43), a physical manifestation of mores. Moreover, as figurative language is used to define the material conditions of the body, we confuse that language with lived and suffered experience, ultimately redoubling the exclusionary force of disease on the individual: If we describe the growth of cancerous cells as an “invasion,” language drawn from the field of warfare, the human being experiencing that growth is rendered precarious, vulnerable, and unstable. Cancer and tuberculosis are diseases thought to emerge from personal passions: Sontag cites numerous literary portraits that draw on the perception of tuberculosis as a disease of the breath, and by extension, the soul, especially evident in the Romantic poets; the same portraits inform our understanding of it as a disease of love that conferred on its victims appealing vulnerability and superior sensitivity (1990: 35 – 36). Cancer’s origins in the passions she traces primarily to Wilhelm Reich who, in theorizing Freud’s cancer, identified it as the “bioenergetic shrinking” that follows resignation and loss of hope (23). The two diseases have thus frequently conferred distinctive characteristics upon their victims. Sontag even goes so far as to suggest that it is through aestheticized literary portraits of the suffering tuberculosis victim that “the idea of individual illness was articulated […] and in the images that collected around the disease one can see emerging a modern idea of individuality” (30). At times, artists have willingly ascribed to and indeed promulgated the myth of soul’s refinement and elevation under the force of tuberculosis: Indeed, Percy Bysshe Shelley affirms a causative link between the condition and artistic genius in reminding his good friend and fellow TB sufferer John Keats that “consumption” (i. e., tuberculosis) is especially fond of “people who write such good verses” (qtd. in Sontag 1990: 32). While cancer victims have been distinguished by a less ethereal, and frequently less

 See Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. mos, moris, especially 4– 5, plural usages.  Or not merely punitive, as, for example, cirrhosis of the liver is viewed as a punishment for excessive alcohol consumption.

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attractive set of traits, the disease gradually assumed the privileged place held by tuberculosis as the condition that, in the twentieth century, isolated and further defined the individual, often by signaling those psychological characteristics (e. g. melancholy or sexual repression) that were thought to be the cause of the cancer. Such conflations of representational language about disease and the material realities of any pathogen, however, can also have the opposite effect, and erode individual identity by discursively creating sick communities.⁴ Sontag observes that certain contagious diseases, such as cholera, bubonic plague, and more recently AIDS, “simplif[y] a complex self, reduce it to sick environment” (1990: 37). Though its victims escape the stigma of a sexually transmitted disease, COVID 19 has been prevalent among certain populations, such as the elderly, front line workers, low-income wage earners unable to work from home, in ways that encourage us to view certain places, for example rent controlled housing and nursing homes, as more susceptible to and defined by the virus. While we decry the inequality blatantly exposed through statistics locating higher COVID rates among lower income communities, we also avoid places and people deemed vulnerable. Within the context of the current pandemic, perhaps the most striking “reduction” of a physical space and its inhabitants to Sontag’s sick environment has been the global response to mainland China, where the disease is thought to have originated, resulting in xenophobic outcries against US citizens of Asian descent, whether or not those citizens have ever set foot outside the continental United States. As we shall see, Galen, Lucretius, and the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus laid the foundation for this kind of moralizing and characterizing through disease discourse long before either the first whispers of the “gay disease” in the early 1980s or the former US President’s recent stigmatizing rhetoric surrounding COVID 19’s origins would further marginalize already marginalized populations.⁵ But since Sontag and others have exposed the pernicious effects of rhetoric that wed habits of life to suffering through illness, a new kind of morality tale has become evident: This tale determines the way we study the origins and opera-

 For a critique of Sontag, see Porter and Rousseau (1998), who argue that medical metaphors can positively heighten individual identity and expression of self. They concede however a more destructive force of illness metaphors in so far as they are applied to communities and collective groups.  This is not to discount the significant role played by AIDS in mobilizing the gay community and inspiring a generation of vocal activists. For an insightful look at how the narrative of AIDS in the US evolved in the late twentieth century, see especially the documentary produced by David France, How to Survive a Plague (2012).

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tions of disease pathogens; its narrative is often one in which the sinister forces of the industrialized world transgress a vulnerable (occasionally beatific, occasionally vengeful) natural world. I should say off the bat that I don’t think this story is untrue and that it is one way to report what we know about the process of Quammen’s spillover and what we can do to manage it. I’m simply recommending that we parse the rhetoric of the story and consider how protagonists and antagonists, the industrialists from the “developed” world and the people whose geographic origins bind them conceptually to the natural world, are forced into roles which they might not wish to play. I suggest in the present chapter that looking to ancient ideas linking geography, climate, and habits of life to disease transmission allows us a clearer view of the origins of such rhetoric and a better means of evaluating its purchasing power. I will also observe a particular strand of disease rhetoric – or “trickle,” to stick with the spillover metaphor – that effectively breaks down the barriers between homo sapiens and the natural world: spilling over in Quammen’s formulation literally and figuratively engulfs us among the millions of other planetary species we imagine ourselves to be above.

The Geography of Illness in Ancient Medical Writing Let’s begin by examining how geography, morality, and disease transmission are intertwined in Greek and Roman thought. Greek writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, as well as medical writers operating within the Roman empire, especially Celsus (c. 30 CE) and Galen (129 – 216 CE), the latter of whom survived the devastating Antonine plague,⁶ demonstrate a belief that epidemics were caused and transmitted by corrupt air (rather than being the result of direct physical contact with a sick individual), an explanation of disease known as miasma theory.⁷ It is

 The initial outbreak occurred in 165/6 CE, though waves of the epidemic recurred periodically throughout the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Gilliam compiles the relatively scarce evidence for the plague, including Galen’s comments on it (1961: 227– 228); cf. Jackson (1988: 174– 175). DuncanJones (1996) evaluates physical evidence for the Antonine plague against the backdrop of ancient literary accounts of pestilence. For an excellent overview of this disease event, as well as its implications in Rome’s imperial expansion, see Harper 2016.  On miasma, see further below. While some conditions, e. g. tuberculosis, psora (scabies), and lippitudo, were recognized as communicable, that communication was thought to occur through inhalation of exhaled diseased air rather than the transmission of microbes; cf. Jackson (1988: 172) and further below.

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worth noting that corrupt air was not mutually exclusive of divine forces as a cause of disease, and in fact many ancient perspectives viewed multiple causes working concurrently to effect an outbreak. For instance, the ancient Roman historian Livy, writing in the late-first-century BCE about an epidemic of the fifthcentury BCE, implies that both season/climate (tempus anni), and the gods (pace deum impetrata) are responsible for an especially virulent epidemic, as well as its eventual abatement (Ab urbe condita, 3.8.1). In addition to recognizing foul air as a cause of disease, ancient writers associate susceptibility to disease with proximity of place (e. g. Cels. 1.10; Vitr. 1.2.7; Varro 1.4.5; Col. 1.5.6), and in turn recommend travel away from the site of an outbreak toward a healing spa or shrine. Certain geographic regions or topographic features (and the weather patterns, or “constitutions,” experienced in those regions, from κατάστασις, e. g. Epidemics 1.9) were considered harmful; this develops a line of thinking that extends to the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of texts by various authors, some of which may have been in circulation as early as the fifth c. BCE.⁸ The geographic indications of the Hippocratic Corpus, especially those examined in Airs, Waters, Places, mark certain regions as inherently unhealthy or salubrious. Illnesses, moreover, were manifested in the form of foul odors linked to putrefying materials and frequently considered to emanate from stagnant water supplies (cf. Airs, Waters, Places 8). That smells pervading the air were considered threatening in and of themselves is reflected in references to “cures” aimed at neutralizing bad odors.⁹ The writers of the Hippocratic Corpus (HC) viewed the human body as constantly interacting with its environment, often reporting those interactions in terms that parade objectivity and posing as dispassionate observers of the material world. Yet the same contributors to the HC also betray value judgements, the kind that look forward to Sontag’s exposure of language characterizing victims of AIDS, cancer, and TB. For instance, a city exposed to certain hot winds at certain times of year and whose waters are brackish will be inhabited by people whose heads are “moist and full of phlegm,” in turn causing their digestive organs “to become agitated” (ἐκταράσσεσθαι, or “become deranged” in Jones’s 1923 translation); as a result, these “weak-headed” people are poor eaters and drinkers (Airs, Waters, Places, 3.1– 20). Other locations have an even more pronounced effect on temperament,

 While evidence for the legendary physician Hippocrates makes him a contemporary of Socrates, the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus are difficult to date; the texts in the HC were subject to revision and addition well into the Roman imperial period.  For instance, Diogenes Laertius notes that a plague in Selinus, cured by the philosopher Empedocles, was caused by a foul smell (D.L. 8.70; cited in Nutton 2000: 67).

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with the result that, for example, some produce a human population “incline[d] to fierceness, rather than mildness” (4.30). Alternatively, inhabitants lucky enough to live in a city that lies toward the rising sun, experiencing more moderate heat and cold, are purified by the sun’s rising, have a rosier complexion, better attitude, and are all around more intelligent: Those that lie toward the risings of the sun are likely to be healthier than those facing the north and those exposed to the hot winds even though they are but a furlong apart. […] For the sun, shining down upon them when it rises, purifies them. The persons of the inhabitants are of better complexion and more blooming than elsewhere, unless some disease prevents this. They are clear-voiced, and with better temper and intelligence than those who are exposed to the north, just as all things growing there are better […] the diseases, while resembling those which we said occur in cities facing the hot winds, are both fewer and less severe. The women there very readily conceive and have easy deliveries. (Airs, Waters, Places 5.10 – 28)

Importantly, the gods play no explicit role in managing diseases from this perspective, and any moral judgment must slip in through the back door, as the unfortunate outcome of being born in a bad location or the fortunate result of inhabiting a good one, but slip in it does. The maladies that haunt the weakheaded people exposed to hot winds at the wrong time of year are not the result of a social or religious transgression, and yet the very location of these people imbues them with a disturbed or “agitated” condition that in turn generates a wide range of pathologies. I should stress that the diseases referred to here are endemic, arising from within a population,¹⁰ and thus are not ones that the ancients would have considered pestilential. Plagues in ancient thought tend to beset a people unexpectedly from outside the population, with no regard for the physical constitution of the inhabitants (“plagues” – as an instantiation of epi-demic disease – were in some respects considered beyond the purview of Hippocratic medicine, a point I return to below). Instead, these implicit diagnoses of endemic diseases play a crucial role in conceptually binding certain physical maladies to certain places and further cementing that relationship through habits of life and bodily

 The terms “endemic” and “epidemic” are used to describe the origins of diseases that afflict a population, whether they occur repeatedly and arise within a community (endemic) or sporadically and outside the population (epidemic). Ancient writers do not use such terms, though Crawfurd (1914) recognized in his early twentieth-century survey of plague discourses the endemic status of many diseases in Rome (e. g. malaria). For the moral implication of endemic disease in historical accounts of pestilence in Rome, see Gardner 2019, particularly 18 – 19; 45 – 75.

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composition inextricably tied to those habits, modes of life (δίαιτα) interacting with the humors of the body.

Humoral Theory, Moral Culpability, and Contagion The notion that the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) constitute the human body and determine its health was developed by the Hippocratic authors as well as Aristotle and would be defended by Galen in particular (Hays 1998: 10). When writers shift the burden of explanation for diseases to that of the humors, they acknowledge that particular constitutions are affected differently under certain atmospheric conditions, an acknowledgement that also implicitly establishes a degree of uniformity among the afflicted, in the event of a disease spreading rapidly and with similar symptoms throughout a population. And despite the fact that, as noted above, epidemic disease was thought to remain beyond the purview of medical arts because it did not appear to be affected by individual regimen,¹¹ some diseases defined as “plague” (νόσος or λοιμός in Greek) were thought to be impacted by diet and lifestyle or even geographic movement; thus even “plagues” in certain instances could presuppose both similar constitutions and habits.¹² Such attitudes are reflected in anecdotes confirming a popular notion of shared humoral balance and general receptivity to disease among certain groups (Nutton 1983: 16). In reporting a third-century epidemic experienced by Alexander Severus’ troops encamped in northern Syria, and the subsequent abatement of disease once the men retreated to Antioch, the historian Herodian confirms a persistent understanding that similarly constituted bodies will respond some-

 See especially, within the HC, the Nature of Man 9: “Diseases arise, in some cases from regimen, in other cases from the air by the inspiration of which we live. The distinction between the two should be made in the following way. Whenever many men are attacked by one disease at the same time, the cause should be assigned to that which is most common, and which we all use most. This it is (i. e., the air) which we breathe in.”  As with Livy’s notation of scabies (a disease considered treatable) in the countryside that erupts as a pestilentia in the city (Ab Urbe Condita, 4.30. 8 – 9). Moreover, Galen’s approach to treating a soldier stricken with the Antonine “plague” relies heavily on his understanding of the humors (Methodus Medendi 12; cf. Jackson 1988: 174). Part of the problem here is the frustratingly vague lexicography of disease; to assert a class of diseases that cannot be cured by rebalancing the humors, the Hippocratic Nature of Man (9) uses νοῦσος/νοσήμα, which can refer to a range of epidemic and non-epidemic diseases (cf. the Latin morbus).

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what uniformly when confronted with a change of environment (Histories 6.6.2; cf. Nutton 2000: 65). Humoral theory, at least in some cases, thus strengthens the homogenizing effects of a disease outbreak, iterating, along with the virulence of a disease, the similarity among certain types of people who tend to succumb to it; as a result, diseases that we would describe as “contagious” tend to level status and eradicate perception of difference among members within a group. Not only is the resulting population similarly stricken, but the same population, when healthy, must be similarly constituted – and share in certain habits of life – in order to be predisposed to the illness. Since humors required agents to act on them in the event of illness, ancient medical writers broach the notion of contagion with some hesitation when considering agents beyond immediate atmospheric and geographic factors. Thucydides’ influential account of Athenian plague indicates awareness, if not actual understanding, of contagion through physical contact between individuals (Longrigg 1995: 35 – 36; see also Rusten 1989), and similar observations are detectible in an account of an epidemic in Thasos in the Hippocratic Corpus (Epidemics 1.1). Vivian Nutton’s treatment of Galen’s references to the seeds (σπέρματα) of disease suggests that the polymath and practicing doctor had some awareness of the transmissibility of disease-causing particles in the air, although the harmful potential of such particles was only actualized when they impinged on suitably receptive bodies (Nutton 1983: 7) – that is, bodies with the appropriate humoral balance: Suppose, for instance, that certain seeds of plague (τινα λοιμοῦ σπέρματα) are carried in the surrounding air, and of the bodies sharing it some are full of various residues already suitable to become putrefied (σήπεσθαι), while others are free of residues and clean. And let us add that in the former there is a blockage of pores, a so-called plethora and idle life given to gluttony, drink, sex and all the digestive disorders that necessarily come with them. The others, which are clean and lacking such residues, as well as being fine in and of themselves, all have a wholesome transpiration through pores neither blocked nor constricted; they take appropriate exercise and lead a temperate life. Assuming all this, which of these bodies is most likely to be affected by the inhalation of rotting air? (τῶν ἀναπνεομένων εῖς σηπεδονωνδῶν ἀέρων; Galen, On different types of fever 1.6= vol. 7: 289 – 291 in Kühn’s text; translation modified from Nutton 1983)

For our purposes, it is crucial to emphasize that Galen’s remarks on the seeds of disease are embedded within a discussion of plague and putrid atmospheres, including swamps and the air surrounding unburied dead bodies on the battlefield. The putrid air associated with certain places and the bad habits of some individuals work in tandem to create sick bodies. The physician’s use of σήπω (“rot, become putrefied”) and its cognates reflects a perception that decaying or-

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ganic matter, and the stench emanating from it, was a source of disease.¹³ Galen attempts to ground knowledge of disease-causing particles within a context of quasi-empirical observation, based on the flow and restriction of these particles throughout the body. But, most importantly for our purposes, he casts a moral shadow over disease by explicitly judging certain lifestyles, those that accumulate “various residues,” as more susceptible to the putrescence in foul atmospheres that define certain locations. The passage from Galen also recognizes, however dubiously, the possibility that noxious seeds (which, according to the terms of the metaphor, function as living entities with the potential for growth; Nutton 1983: 3) might be exhaled from one body and impinge on another. Thus even if Galen is more interested in the interaction of his seeds with the constitution of individual bodies, and wishes to argue against the notion that a disease pathogen could infect a person with a healthy humoral balance, he reflects an ancient awareness that illness might be spread through proximity and social contact – not only should places beset by corrupt air be avoided, but sick individuals as well. Accounts of disease in Latin also imply an observation if not comprehension of contagion, and it is within Latin literature that there emerges a terminology of transmission through social proximity or “touch”: Greek writers discussing disease lack the equivalent to Latin contagium, which they might have used to indicate the transmission of disease through physical contact with sufferers (Nutton 1983: 5 n.16). The threat of corruption and pollution through contact was of course well-articulated through the Greek concept of miasma, which was negotiated and avoided through recognition of boundaries, whose overstepping constituted moral transgressions as well as physical ones.¹⁴ But it is the Romans who explicitly tie the language of boundaries and their transgression through touch to the language of disease. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae cites multiple instances in which Latin writers in all genres use contactus, contagio, contag(is), and contagium to indicate the spread of physical disease; the same writers apply identical terminology as they chart the spread of socially acquired habits, or mores (TLL vol. 4, 624.68 – 628.17) – to such an extent that the social network enabling physical corruption becomes hopelessly entangled with that enabling the spread of certain habits and the values that subtend them. Where Thucydides observes the “coming and going” (πρόσειμι; cf. 2.47, 51) of healthy patients among sick ones as a  Epidemics 3 of the Hippocratic Corpus, in describing the symptomology of what may have been the Athenian plague, observes the presence of growths on preexisting sores, which the author terms “rot” (σήψ; cf. Jones 1923: 143).  See the articles collected in the volume Air, Miasmes et Contagion (Bazin-Tacchella, Quéruel, and Samara, eds. 2001), especially Jacques Jouanna’s introductory essay (9 – 28).

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means of spreading disease,¹⁵ it is with Lucretius (on whom, see further below) and the Latin writers following him that “touch” explicitly signals transmission of physical maladies that are readily converted into spiritual ones.¹⁶ Galen’s morally inflected medical model linking corrupt habits of life with susceptibility to disease, combined with the power of social proximity as vehicle for contagion developed in Latin literature, not only expands the figurative potential of disease in ancient thought, but also looks forward to that potential in future discursive traditions, including the twentieth and twenty-first-century discourses of contagion in popular journalism, especially variations on the ever popular “outbreak” narrative. Priscilla Wald cites articles in Newsweek and USA Today that, in the wake of early twentieth-first-century SARS outbreaks, dubbed Asia as a “hot zone” and “incubator” for contagious diseases: The cumulative effect of such rhetoric is anxiety, mounting “with every monstrous microbe that emerges from the contagious spaces of a primitive hot zone to bring terror and destruction to the vulnerable, civilized world” (2008: 269). The moral inflection in such journalism is less pronounced than it is in the explicitly observed character defects catalogued in Airs, Waters, Places, but there is an implicit judgement that such places, and the people who live there, are an inherent threat to industrialized countries like the US. As Margaret Healy notes: “From classical times through the Renaissance and beyond, endogenous explanations of disease combined with exopathic ones to produce a model of infectious disease in which outer pollution could only corrupt a body suitably disordered and susceptible (physically and/or morally)” (2001: 22). As I hope to have demonstrated, Greek medical writers in particular established a persistent link between pathogens (both endemic and epidemic) and the moral and physical corruption of those populations susceptible to such pathogens. From the perspective of an increasingly globalized and industrialized world, this creates an uncomfortable framework for locating the origins of emerging diseases, especially zoonotic ones, in relatively undeveloped parts of the world. Journalists who wish to avoid marginalizing or demonizing the inhabitants of undeveloped regions must find new antagonists and protagonists in the drama, an attempt to

 He also uses the verb ἀναπίμπλημι (lit. “fulfill, fill up”) to refer to infection, which suggests a rather different process of transmission than the Latin terms related to contingo (lit., “touch”).  In Book 3 of DRN, Lucretius uses contagium and its cognates, without a negative valence, to describe the touching of atoms that comprise the animus with those that comprise the body. (3.345, cf. 3.734, 740). In the same book, however, contagium marks the corruptive effects of the “contagion of disease” on the mind (contagia morbi, 3.471) as proof of the mind’s mortality. His use of contagia in the plague episode of Book 6 introduces the explicitly destructive and demoralizing impact of disease (6.1243).

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neutralize the stigmatizing rhetoric that has defined earlier outbreak narratives, but one that (as I hope to show) brings with it a new set of discursive conundrums.

Natura’s Retribution: A New Role for an Ancient Goddess in Contemporary Epidemiology Less than twenty years before Quammen’s work popularized the concept of spilling over, conceptually fusing microbes and humans, Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague (1994) issued a dire warning to readers by explicitly linking emerging diseases to disturbances within ecosystems resulting from industrialization. With The Coming Plague Garrett has scripted a drama in which humans have overstepped boundaries, not only those imposed by physical reality but also boundaries of moral propriety, in so far as such steps are represented as in conflict with a natural world whose protection is regarded as a moral imperative. Homo sapiens of the developed world has invaded developing countries,¹⁷ polluting them and deteriorating the living conditions of other homo sapiens there. This process Garrett refers to as “thirdworldization,” a term that has the unfortunate effect of rhetorically linking disease origins and emergence to regions already challenged by poverty.¹⁸ In Garrett’s work, spaces described as formerly bucolic, pristine, and ancient are transformed into slums and refuse heaps (1994: 8 – 9), sites for emerging pathogens that ultimately will not respect boundaries between the developed and developing worlds. And yet, the same rhetoric perhaps intended to ennoble the victims of predatory practices of industrialized nations can also stigmatize and occasionally dehumanize. In the third part of this paper, I’d like to make a few observations about how discursive spillover contributes to those processes, in such a way that the toxicity (to homo sapiens, at least) of certain “hot zones” infects the inhabitants of such zones, further marginalizing populations already marginalized by low income and inadequate health care systems. As Susan Sontag puts it: “the demonization of the illness to the attribu The terminology that distinguishes industrialized, developed nations from “developing” ones is notoriously fraught. In general, I will use the terms “developed” or “industrialized” and “developing” to indicate regions of the globe that have relatively high income and access to technology vs. those that are lower income (according to their GDP) and have limited access to technology. On the problems and inherent limitations of any terminology based on regional generalizations, see Marc Silver’s (2015) brief, but thoughtful NPR contribution.  Thus Garrett’s rhetoric contributes to a process that Paul Farmer has described as the “biologizing” of social forces and global inequities (Farmer 1999; cf. Wald 2008: 46).

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tion of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt” (1990: 99). One way out of this moral conundrum, rhetorically speaking, has been to align a disease event with “nature” rather than the native population, although the break between nature and the populations she¹⁹ impacts is, as we shall observe, never as clean as we might like. And it is largely with Lucretius, I argue, that the forging of a role for “nature” in the outbreak narrative begins.²⁰ Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher whose De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) was published in the mid-first-century BCE, develops within an Epicurean rubric the Hippocratic notion that the inhabitants of certain places experiencing peculiar weather patterns will develop certain diseases that we would describe as endemic: Quae cum quattuor inter se diversa videmus Quattuor a ventis et caeli partibus esse, Tum color et facies hominum distare videntur Largiter et morbi generatim saecla tenere. Est elephas morbus qui propter flumina Nili Gignitur Aegypto in media neque praeterea usquam. Atthide temptantur gressus, oculique in Achaeis Finibus. Inde aliis alius locus est inimicus Partibus ac membris; varius concinnat id aer.²¹ [And as we see these four climates differ among themselves under the four winds and the regions of heaven, just so do the color and appearance of men seem to differ greatly and their successive generations experience diseases according to their nations. There is the elephant disease which emerges from the Nile river in the middle of Egypt, and only there. In Attica the feet are attacked, and the eyes within Achaean borders. Hence different places are threatening to different parts and limbs; variety in the air brings that about (6.1110 – 1118).]

 I am aware of a large body of scholarship that rightly challenges the conceptual link between nature and “the feminine” or “woman.” My decision to gender natura here is an effort to avoid confusion, since the earliest references to nature discussed in this section are in the poetry of Lucretius (see below), who explicitly feminizes the entity.  I should stress that the poet is aware of the problems of using metaphor to describe natural processes, while also conceding its explanatory force. Lucretius rejects the use of musical harmony to describe the relationship between mind and body at DRN 3.124– 135, cited in Sontag (1990: 95 – 96). She describes the passage as “the earliest attack I know on metaphoric thinking about illness and health” (95). While Sontag’s point concerning the particular metaphor she cites is valid, Lucretius necessarily employs metaphoric language throughout his poem, a tendency Kelly has succinctly described as the use of res apertae to illuminate res caecae (1980: 96).  The text is that of Rouse/Smith (1997, repr.).

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The variety of aer among different regions is a natural consequence of the movement of semina (“seeds”) in the atmosphere. It is the movement of an atmosphere to a population unfamiliar with it (an alienum caelum or aer inimicus, 1119 – 1120), putting people and air in an adverse relationship, that results in what we would describe as an epidemic, or plague, besetting a people for the first time, such as the famous Athenian plague that the poet goes on to narrate at the end of Book 6. Like the Hippocratic writers, Lucretius ostensibly avoids morally inflecting the propensity of certain nations to certain diseases, for instance, the “elephant disease” found in mid-Egypt.²² At the same time, as Steel Commager observed over half a century ago (1957), the poet’s treatment of the Athenian plague is rife with judgement on habits of life that prevent the local population from succumbing with equanimity to what is ultimately a natural, if unusual process. Moreover, one implication in Lucretius’ dramatization of a demoralized Athens in the grip of disease, an implication that will resurge periodically in the tradition of disease discourse, is that natura prevails as both indifferent and vengeful, the governess of a corrupt caelum whose importation of a plague appears both perfunctory and a deliberate demonstration of human folly: Nec refert utrum nos in loca deveniamus Nobis adversa in caeli mutemus amictum, An caelum nobis ultro natura corruptum Deferat aut aliquid quo non consuevimus uti, Quod non adventu possit temptare recenti. [Nor does it matter whether we arrive in places unwholesome for ourselves, or whether we change the veil of sky above us, or whether Nature of her own accord brings upon us a corrupt atmosphere or something we are unaccustomed to experience, which, by its sudden arrival, is able to attack us (6.1132– 1137).]

Much has been said about natura’s embodiment as a feminine force in the poem, subordinate to but working in close conjunction with the goddess Venus, and equally aligned with mater tellus (“mother earth”).²³ Ultro natura, the same gen-

 Elephantiasis, a tropical skin disease otherwise rarely attested in ancient literature; cf. Godwin 1991: 171.  Hanses (2021) demonstrates a clear correlation in the poem between natura as creatrix rerum and mater tellus as genetrix (cf. DRN 2.589 – 2.599). On the feminization of nature in the poem more generally see especially Nugent 1995, as well as Sharrock 2006, discussed further below. Hanses also reviews scholarship on the topic within the last three decades and argues for a contrast between Lucretius’ highly feminized deity in DRN and Vergil’s relatively genderless, or even masculine natural world in the Georgics.

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erative creatrix rerum celebrated elsewhere in the poem (1.629), imbues the poem’s titular force with an agency whose impact proves devastating to the Athenians and contributes to the very anti-Lucretianism “chez Lucrece” that twentieth-century scholars once frequently located in his accounts of suffering throughout the poem (cf. Sharrock 2006: 258). More importantly, natura is equipped in the plague episode with the power to harness disease as a weapon against a humankind that constantly challenges her limits. Where she (that is, natura regularly personified as feminine) begins the poem as a creative force subject to the dictates of an ever-generative Venus (DRN 1.21: quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas, “since you alone govern the nature of things”²⁴), by her final mention in DRN, this time disentangled from the res she frequently attends, natura gains an autonomy that puts her ultimately on less friendly terms with homo sapiens. She receives ample air time at the end of Book 3, in her famous harangue of the human fear of death and desire to extend life beyond those limits she deems appropriate (cur non ut plenus vitae conviva recedes / aequo animoque capis securam, stulte, quietam? 3.938, “why won’t you withdraw, like a banqueter fed full of life, and, fool, accept untroubled peace with a quiet mind”). Her judgement of human folly is overt, and it re-emerges in Book 6 as she functions doubly as a cause of pestilence and an undercurrent to the poet’s implicit denigration of Athenians who resist death in the wake of disease. As Alison Sharrock notes, with reference to another passage personifying nature as the fabricator of thunder-bolts, natura in DRN “sits uneasily as a free agent, not subject to control by the traditional pantheon, but also slipping in divine agency through the back door” (2006: 260). Yet such rhetorical power comes with the seeds of its own destruction, and the personification of nature also allows for her manipulation in scientific discourses. She is easily personified because she is “feminine” in principle: “Nature is the female principle that can stand up to the thunder god: one possible feminist reading of this could appropriate it for celebration of liberty, but the nagging alternative is that nature can only do this because she isn’t real” (Sharrock 2006: 262). Natura will continue to experience her share of harnessing, probing, unveiling, and penetrating in the history of scientific discourses, but Lucretius gives his readers a glimpse of her power, through Book 6’s account of plague in Athens, an early instance of the vengeance she might casually inflict – ultro, “of her own accord” – on a corrupt human race. In this depiction of natura, Lucretius predicts her struggle with homo sapiens that will impact the more popular accounts of disease emergence in the late twentieth century. In concluding this essay, I turn away from ancient disease

 Translations of Lucretius are mine unless otherwise noted.

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discourses to some of the more recent literary practices it may have inspired, with a particular emphasis on the evolution of natura. “Nature’s” independence as a potential adversary to human life is distinctly signaled in Garrett’s chapter entitled “Nature and Homo Sapiens” (1994: 550 – 591). For Garrett, nature is vulnerable to human overreach, but she keeps pushing back. Scientists have accounted for the spread of Lyme disease, named for a town filled with “pockets of picturesque, pastoral scenery” and formerly “untroubled, quiet woods” (553), as the result of deforestation throughout New England. While New England is hardly representative of those territories in the developing world that Garrett discusses elsewhere in her book, it is important to note that the outbreak she describes is temporally remote and explicitly signals a period of colonization and industrialization in North America. The deforestation process, going back as far as eighteenth-century attempts to fuel the iron smelting industry, had robbed the area of natural predators, leaving an unchecked population of deer, preferred food of the ticks that carry Lyme, to encroach upon human settlements. Garrett writes of the attempts to counter that spread: As the invasion of I. dammini ticks and deer into artificially reforested areas demonstrated, no matter how hard Homo sapiens struggled to pave the world, Nature never ceased trying to force its way back. (555; cf. 553, where “Nature would constantly wish to push its way back in.”)

On the one hand, her reference to humans according to species designation suggests that Garrett tries to flatten the hierarchy that holds humans above and distinct from the natural world. On the other, capitalizing and personifying a defensive Nature as nemesis only redraws that distinction. In other passages, Garrett posits a contentious relationship between homo sapiens and the “Earth’s ecology” (9, 618; cf. Wald 2008: 268), a move that dissipates the force of a vengeful “Nature,” but, as with Lucretius’ parallel between natura and mater tellus, persists in assuming a contentious relationship between the two players, along with the indication that the contest can be won. As Wald has demonstrated, discourses about disease in popular scientific journalism consistently betray a reluctance to accept Nature’s indifference, ultimately aligning her with the microbes that have been increasingly animated and imbued with a predatory agency, aggressors but also respondents to “ecological disequilibrium” (2008: 40). Such disequilibrium, as well as nature’s role in correcting it, also underpins Richard Preston’s roughly contemporaneous The Hot Zone (1995), focused primarily on the threat of the filovirus Ebola, emerging in Africa in the 1970s and nearly erupting on US soil in the following decade. Ebola’s reemergence as a palpable threat was made especially apparent during the

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outbreak of 2014– 2016 in Western Africa that killed over 11,000 people.²⁵ I should note that the World Health Organization has chronicled subsequent outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which experienced an outbreak of Ebola as recently as spring 2021²⁶; while its spread was controlled by vaccine developments, the mortality rate still hovers at over 50 %. And of course the potentially sensationalizing headlines afforded by this disease were quickly overwritten by the current pandemic, a disease event of lower mortality rates, but a drastically higher death toll. Ebola, one of the viruses that causes hemorrhagic fever, replicates within the blood cells with such intensity and determination that the internal organs of its host gradually liquefy. A victim of the disease will die from various causes (heart failure, brain damage, liver failure), but that death is often accompanied by bleeding from nearly every orifice of the body. Preston’s sensationalizing book drew attention to such processes in a way that entangled Ebola within a frightening network of representations. These representations foreground the dehumanizing effects of contagion, but also implicate “nature” in a drama that simultaneously casts humans in a state of powerlessness and assigns them (us!) the role of arch-villain. While Preston’s investigative powers are as laudable as his documentation is thorough, his construction of a narrative that will generate fear and dread in his readership inevitably casts certain places as dangerously resistant to human intervention (central Africa, a primary “hot” zone); certain characters and institutions, moreover, are portrayed as occasionally irresponsible (the Centers for Disease Control; USAMRIID) or lethally indifferent (the virus itself). The book opens in Nairobi with the story of a French expat, “Charles Monet,” who in January of 1980 nearly instigated an outbreak of the Marburg virus, a filovirus, like Ebola, that causes hemorrhagic fever. The effects of Marburg upon its victims are described in terms reminiscent of contemporary cinematic discourses of the living dead: Preston writes that “(Monet) began to look like a zombie […] his personality became changed, he became sullen”; details about his changing outward demeanor are matched by an excruciatingly detailed account of internal physiological transformation: His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking

 According to a history of the outbreak published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].  See [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live. (1995: 18 – 19)

By focusing on animalistic aspects of the human brain (“the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain”), Preston not only dehumanizes the victim, but also links him explicitly with the natural world. With less literary flourish but a similar emphasis on the virus’s power to reduce the human host to an indistinguishable mass of rapidly dissolving tissues, Preston also notes: It could multiply in many different kinds of meat. It was an invasive life form, devastating and promiscuous. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty […] It did not know boundaries. It did not know what humans are; or perhaps you could say that it knew only too well what humans are: it knew that humans are meat. (1995: 139, my emphasis)

Evident in both passages is the virus’ lethal lack of discrimination, a failure to recognize boundaries, which facilitates transmission and in turn makes its victims indistinguishable as human beings: Organic matter is simply and efficiently converted into meat. Nature, meanwhile, is neither beatific nor especially vengeful, but is metonymically linked to the virus’ obscenely cold and calculating will to survive. The threat of this particular villain in Preston’s story lies in its power to rob us of our status as individuals – a powerful, best-selling rhetoric, but one we must parse carefully before allowing it to color our responses to actual victims of the disease and the “hot” areas, especially Central Africa, most affected by it. Meanwhile, nature in Preston’s account vacillates in her role as the sight of mechanistic, lethal, morally indifferent operations and the victim of homo sapiens’ thoughtless expansion and consumption. In describing Mt. Elgon, a volcanic mountain whose national park was visited by Charles Monet before he contracted the Marburg virus, Preston observes: The villages form a ring of human settlement around the volcano, and the ring is steadily closing around the forest on its slopes, a noose that is strangling the wild habitat of the mountain. The forest is being cleared away, the trees are being cut down for firewood or to make room for grazing land, and the elephants are vanishing. (1995: 8 – 9)

While Preston does not explicitly invoke nature in the passage, his personification of a “wild habitat” on the verge of strangulation clearly signals a natural world in need of protection. Of course, as the mountain is also the site of Kitum Cave, where Preston and others conjecture that Monet came into contact

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with the Marburg virus, nature, rather than being strangled by a noose of homo sapiens’ contriving, may end up with the last laugh. Despite this implied antagonism between humans and the natural world, on a very fundamental level, Preston’s discourse operates to confuse categories that we would like to keep distinct, especially the human and the non-human (“Ebola can’t tell the difference between and human being and a monkey. The virus jumps easily back and forth between them” 1995: 67). Although David Quammen, in his more recent Spillover, is careful to de-sensationalize some of the symptoms attributed to Preston’s Ebola, on this point he follows suit: “Pondering [zoonoses] as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth […] that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health” (2012: 14). Quammen adjusts the roles assigned in the drama that stages a confrontation between humans and their natural environment, making the microbes we all too casually disturb a more sinister predator to admittedly culpable homo sapiens (2012: 23; cf. 39 – 41); but, as we shall see, he also works harder to erase the divide between homo sapiens and the millions of other species that populate planet earth. Quammen will conclude his call to more responsible stewardship of the planet with the somewhat dismal recognition that “we are an outbreak” (497). This is the culmination of an episode describing an explosion of the population of tent caterpillars in Montana that threatened to ravenously consume hardwood trees throughout the author’s neighborhood. This was an “outbreak” of tent caterpillars, in the sense that an outbreak is “any vast, sudden population increase by a single species” (495). The ecological transformation wrought by the gluttony of homo sapiens has far surpassed that of tent caterpillars. Considering our own livestock consumption, Quammen observes: A trillion pounds of cows, fattening in feedlots and grazing on landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They’re a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. (497)

Quammen also occasionally summons the rhetorical force of nature, but, as if in direct response to his predecessors, he diminishes her role as an antagonist to human beings. Thus, for Quammen, processes can be described as in accordance with nature (e. g. infectious disease as a “natural” mortar binding different species together, or processes that operate under “natural” conditions, 20), but he denies nature autonomous agency in a struggle with humankind. Zoonotic disease, in eroding the boundaries between one species to another, reminds us

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that “we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no ‘natural world,’ it’s a bad and artificial phrase. There is only the world” (518).

Concluding and Looking Forward In closing, I return to antiquity and the spilling over, discursively and microbially, that has set the parameters of how we articulate and thus navigate the relationship between homo sapiens, natura, and the microbes that erode the conceptual divide between them. Duncan Kennedy has located the roots of the language of scientific reductionism in Lucretius’ exposition of atomic theory, a language that carries a masculine bias in its claims to a reality composed of aggressive, warring, highly individualistic and occasionally reconciling elements. Such reductionist rhetoric is frequently constructed in counterpoint to the invocation of natura: “when [Lucretius] resorts to holistic forms of explanation, whereby a system with many components may collectively exhibit emergent qualities that are absent at the level of the individual component […,] his preferred imagery, that of a personified ‘Nature,’ is feminine” (2006: 247). Sharrock, as noted earlier, has observed a similar tendency in Lucretius’ natura. And, as I hope to have shown above, nature’s conciliatory power in De Rerum Natura (a power often gendered feminine) is matched by a provocation to act “on her own accord” (ultro), both explicitly and implicitly as a response to human folly. Of course, as Kennedy and various other critics of scientific discourses have consistently observed, we cannot avoid a degree of anthropomorphism in any story told from a human perspective. Science as logos emerges in tandem with science as mythos and, like other myths, myths of science can function as morality tales: Mary Midgley, in asserting that “science is our myth” also claims that “myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world” (2003: 1). Laurie Garrett’s creation and invocation of a Nature who has reached her breaking point is not made as an affront to the scientific truth that the material world does not care about whether or not we pollute her; it does reflect and reflect upon a larger mythos that has viewed humans in an increasingly contentious relationship with the world in which they live. This is a mythos we should attend to if we hope to ensure stability among all planetary species; but we should also keep in mind the pernicious effects of ethnographically binding peoples to disease-prone places, however pristine, primordial, and allied with the natural world, as the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus do in cas-

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ual remarks about phlegmatic temperaments of people whose geography pivots them opposite the setting sun.²⁷ As Mary Douglas observed in her influential essay on pollution, Purity and Danger, there is a frequent causal link in some cultures between social transgressions and contagious disease, and through such a link “the laws of nature are dragged in to sanction the moral code: this kind of disease is caused by adultery, that by incest, etc. […] The whole universe is harnessed to men’s attempts to force one another into good citizenship” (2002: 3). Indeed, we have seen how, in Lucretius’ drama of Athenian plague, the poet implicitly uses a disease wrought by natura to indict the city state for rampant bad citizenship, whether or not the Epicurean and philosopher would admit to staging such a contest. More recent treatments of disease discourse demonstrate however that there are new actors emerging in this morality play: Preston, Garrett, and Quammen differ in their approaches to depicting nature as a leading lady, able to be personified while abstract from human life; yet all three also invoke contagious disease as a law of nature used to sanction a moral code. But that code no longer governs relations within the community, like Douglas’ human actors forced into good citizenship; instead, the law of nature is harnessed to manage the increasingly fragile relationship between homo sapiens and the rest of the planet. Perhaps what we have here is veiled optimism, or (more cynically) a coping mechanism: For if homo sapiens is an actor with agency in the drama (even if a villain), then we can at least imagine changing its (our) behavior and rewriting what at this stage looks to be a fairly dismal denouement.

Works Cited Bazin-Tacchella, Sylvie, Danielle Quéruel, and Évelyne Samara (eds.). 2001. Air, miasmes et contagion: Les e´pide´mies dans l’Antiquite´ et au Moyen Age. Langres: D. Guéniot. Commager, H. S., Jr. 1957. “Lucretius’ Interpretation of the Plague.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 62: 105 – 118. Crawfurd, Raymond. 1914. Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art. Oxford: Clarendon. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Duncan-Jones, R. P. 1996. “The Impact of the Antonine Plague.” Journal of Roman Archeology 9: 108 – 136.

 The clarion call that ends Wald’s work on the outbreak narrative in fact suggests that the personification of nature and of the microbes harnessed in her power shift attention away from the economic disparities across the globe that fuel crises in public health (2008: 269).

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Farmer, Paul. 1999. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gardner, Hunter. 2019. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garrett, Laurie. 1994. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gilliam, J. F. 1961. “The Plague under Marcus Aurelius.” American Journal of Philology 82(3): 225 – 251. Godwin, John. 1991. translator and commentator. 1991. Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Hanses, Erin. 2021. “Embodying Nature: Vergil’s Defeminization of Lucretian Natura in the Georgics.” Vergilius 67, special issue on “Vergil and the Feminine”: 207 – 224. Harper, Kyle. 2016. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hays, J. H. 1998. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Healy, Margaret. 2001. Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, Ralph. 1988. Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire. London: British Museum. Jones, W. H. S., translator. 1923. Hippocrates. Volume II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kelly, R. T. 1980. “The Last Line of the De Rerum Natura.” Latomus 39: 95 – 97. Kennedy, Duncan. 2006. “Atoms, Individuals, and Myths.” In: Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (eds.). Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 233 – 252. Longrigg, James. 1995. “Epidemic, Ideas and Classical Athenian Society.” In: Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds.). Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21 – 44. Midgley, Mary. 2003. The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge. Nugent, S. G. 1995. “Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.” Colby Quarterly 30: 179 – 205. Nutton, Vivian. 1983. “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Medical History 27: 1 – 34. Nutton, Vivian. 2000. “Medical Thoughts on Urban Pollution.” In: Valerie M. Hope and Eireann Marshall (eds.). Death and Disease in the Ancient City. London and New York: Routledge. 65 – 73. Porter, Roy, and G. S. Rousseau. 1998. Gout: The Patrician Malady. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Preston, Richard. 1995. The Hot Zone. New York: Random House. Quammen, David. 2012. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. New York: Norton. Rouse, W. H. D., and Martin F. Smith, translators. 1992. Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rusten, Jeffrey S. (ed.). 1989. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sharrock, Alison. 2006. “The Philosopher and the Mother Cow: Towards a Gendered Reading of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.” In: Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (eds.). Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 253 – 274. Silver, Marc. 2015. “If You Shouldn’t Call It the Third World, What Should You Call It?” National Public Radio, 4 Jan. 2015. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Sontag, Susan. 1990. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tufekci, Zeynep. 2021. “Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.” The New York Times, 25 June 2021. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagion: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

David Metzger

Socrates in the City of Bones: Plato’s Republic and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean Abstract: This chapter examines how August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean might serve as a counter-statement to Plato’s Republic where disease comes to figure the political ills of an embodied city (polis) requiring philosophical interventions/healing. Gem of the Ocean is the first play (but not the first produced on stage) in Wilson’s “Centenary” or “Pittsburgh” cycle of ten plays chronicling the African experience in America for each decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of the play, Wilson scripts both the collapse of an American social contract and the potential for its repair. In the first section of the chapter, Wilson’s dramatic project is shown to include the invention and performance of a ritual to counter the magic of the collapsing “West” and the ritualized readings that symbolically support it (sometimes in the name of Socrates or Plato). In the second section, Wilson’s project is compared to Wole Soyinka’s powerful return to ritual and myth in order to identify to what extent Wilson may address the concerns of Soyinka’s critics. Finally, when sharpened against Soyinka’s critics, Wilson’s project appears as a call for and the creation of a new universal (one not fueled by collapse) when other terms for the universal have been exhausted.

The Socrates invoked in the title of this chapter is an ancestor, or is he? Socrates is the one who drank hemlock and whose spirit is, from time to time, conjured to re-start the Western canon, Western thought, Western politics, and Western peoples as an “all of us” for some. This is the Socrates whose dialectic leads us to see that when we are deprived of what others have told us, when we are deprived of what we as embodied subjects know through our own experience, we still feel the impulse to know and follow our thoughts to find their agent and thereby realize something invisible: our souls. However, the city we will be exploring is not so much the Kallipolis (“beautiful city”) of Plato’s Republic. We are headed, rather, to the City of Bones, a place where American playwright August Wilson will take us in Gem of the Ocean, the first play (but not the first produced on stage) in his “Centenary” or “Pittsburgh” cycle of ten plays chronicling the African experience in America for each decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of this play, Wilson scripts both the collapse of an American social conhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-013

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tract and the potential for its repair. In the first section of this essay, I will further specify Wilson’s dramatic project as the invention and performance of a ritual to counter the magic of the “West” and the ritualized readings, sometimes performed in the name of Socrates, that help to sustain it. In the second section, I will relate Wilson’s project to Wole Soyinka’s powerful return to ritual in order to identify to what extent Wilson may address the concerns of Soyinka’s critics. To get to the “City of Bones” we will need someone other than Socrates, another ancestor to guide us: Aunt Ester – one of Wilson’s characters and of whom he says, “[she] has emerged for me as the most significant person of the cycle” (Wilson 2000). Aunt Ester will show us the way: It’s only a half mile by a half mile but that’s a city. It’s made of bones. Pearly white bones. All the buildings and everything is made of bones. I seen it, I been there. I got an aunt and three uncles live there down there in that city made of bones. […] That’s the center of the world. In time it will all come to light. The people made a kingdom out of nothing. They were the people that didn’t make it across the water. (I,2: 52)

Even if we were to treat both Wilson’s City of Bones and Plato’s Republic as “cities in speech,” there is a key difference between Plato’s Kallipolis (beautiful city) and Wilson’s City of Bones: The City of Bones is not the architectural plan for those whose souls are rotten. The City of Bones is for those who have lost sight of their dignity and a sense of who they are, those who have forgotten their song. More particularly, the City of Bones is for those who “know they ain’t African, but they know they ain’t European either! There has to be an inherent feeling of self-worth,” as Wilson explains to Abiola Sinclair in a 1990 interview (Sinclair 2006: 99). There is another key difference between these two cities: Aunt Ester has relatives who live in hers, and their lives evoke tragedy. In contrast, if some of Socrates’ relatives (or Plato’s) lived in his Kallilpolis, then we would imagine ourselves as party to an inside joke: Kallipolis is a parody of Plato’s Athens. That is, Kallipolis would be an ideal (a just and good city) that, if realized, would only materialize the same gaps and discontinuities of Athenian/Greek/Western souls and cities as they attempt to use words to make their desires visible. A joke the Republic may well be, since Plato does place his brothers (Glaucon and Adeimantus) in the dialogue, and their words and desires do contribute to the city’s failed construction in speech (Books II–VII). In fact, the construction project of Books II–VII is such a failure that, in Book IX, Socrates must find another piece of real estate on which to build his just and good city: the soul. Kallipolis becomes, as Socrates intimates, “the city that exists in each individual’s soul” (Plato 1991: 592b, 275). A sick soul leads to a sick city, so cities need their doctors, too; the language of disease becomes the source do-

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main for the way we language our relationships with others (Mitchell-Boyask 2009: 18 – 44). So enters the philosopher on the political stage – pursued by a bear. How different might be the ritual that perpetually revives the West if it were understood as a cry for help? First, we might explore how ritual is the locus of continuity and revival in change. Second, we might even see philosophy itself as a kind of ritual – not simply a set of beliefs that prompt us to action but a set of actions that help us conjure those invisible beings/entities to which we might know or learn how to respond. And the West or the European that this ritual makes real, what of it? It would no longer be a set of ideals or promises (broken for many), but a history of acts unmediated by those ideals. The Platonic philosophy whose reading gives sustenance to the West does not come simply from Plato but a particular way of reading and thinking about Plato and Greek philosophy in general, probably inherited from the late eighteenth century when “historians of philosophy began to deny that African and Asian peoples were philosophical [as opposed to simply “religious”]” (Park 2013: 1). We might even wonder what the word “Platonic” might mean if it is not conceived as a set of important answers to important questions. Indeed, a good deal of academic/philosophical activity regarding Plato focuses on how he might have answered a particular question through his sometimes willful puppet, Socrates – questions such as “What is virtue? What is knowledge? What is justice?” But rarely do we find explorations of what Plato might have been trying to do apart from finding answers to these questions and charting the deficiencies of those answers. It is assumed that both the questions and the answers proposed and examined in the dialogues are important. So, when we ask, “for whom are these questions and answers important?” the answer is more often than not some “all of us”: “all of us in the philosophy business,” or “all of us, we humans [we Allegory of the Cave dwellers],” or “all of us, we, who live in the Republic.” Recently, the noted anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has made similar observations regarding religious studies. And she has proposed that we restart our study of religions, not with a “presumption of belief.” That is, we do not start with the idea that belief is a cause for what people do: so-and-so prays because he/she/they believe; so-and-so sings and drums because he/she/they believe. No, let us restart our study of religion, she says, with “the question of whether the effort people invest in their faith helps them to feel that their gods and spirits are real” (Luhrman 2020: x). Is this assumption and this proposed repair possible for philosophy where this same assumption (belief leads to action) predictably encourages us to construct a list of those beliefs and explore the relationship among those beliefs? To the extent that these beliefs are deemed logical,

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then those beliefs are realized (made real) if only in the court of reason, “our” ongoing conversations and readings. Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean asks even more of us. In religious studies, the methods for the realization of the invisible may go by the name “rituals.” But it is not so apparent that there are rituals of secularization that also make other invisible things (like culture itself) real. Yet, this is precisely what August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean asks (some of) us to do. And, more importantly, I believe this is precisely what his plays accomplish. Let’s turn to Gem of the Ocean and see what invisible things, what city, his rituals make real. Gem of the Ocean begins with a death that occurs offstage but is reported onstage. Garret Brown, a worker in a Pittsburgh tin mill, drowns in a river while a crowd and the local constabulary watch. Mr. Brown had been accused of stealing a bucket of nails, and Mr. Brown jumped into the freezing river to avoid abduction. A crowd listens to Mr. Brown declaim his innocence against the accusations of the constabulary. For some of the characters, this incident is simply the news of the day; for others, their reactions to the event provide us with a glimpse of their orientation to life. For all the characters in Gem of the Ocean, their connection to the event is more intimate and more resonant than it at first appears; their reactions provide a summary of the first act of this remarkable play: For Eli (one of the members of Aunt Ester’s household): They had a man named Garret Brown who jumped into the river. Caesar chased him and he jumped in and wouldn’t come out. They say he stole a bucket of nails. He said he didn’t do it. They having his funeral today. […] They gonna bury him out of Reverent Tolliver’s church. They was supposed to bury him yesterday out of Reverend Flowers’ church but Caesar stopped them. He went up to Reverent Flowers and told him it was against the law. The Christian law. Man ain’t set foot in a church for thirty years talking about the Christian law. Caesar’s just mad at him ‘cause he didn’t get a chance at him. (I,1: 11)

For Rutherford Selig (a traveling salesman, the only “European” in Gem of the Ocean and one of the few in the play cycle as a whole, Selig also appears in the third play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone): If he jumped in the river and didn’t come out I’d have to believe he didn’t do it. They had a man down in Kentucky was accused of stealing a horse. He said he didn’t do it. Turned him into an outlaw. Made him the biggest horse thief in Kentucky. He lived to steal horses. He must of stole five hundred horses. And every one he sent back word: I stole that one but I didn’t steal the first one. I stole that one but I didn’t steal the first one. They never did catch him. He died and the horse thieving stopped. My daddy told me about it. (I,1: 12)

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For Black Mary (a member of Aunt Ester’s household and the constable’s sister): “He could have come out of the water” (I,1: 11). For Caesar (the constable and Black Mary’s brother): I’d say I didn’t do it too if the law was after me. You arrest somebody for loitering and they’ll swear they ain’t standing there. That don’t mean nothing to me ‘cause he say he didn’t do it. I had witnesses. Five hundred people standing around watching the man drown. I tried to break it up. Get them to go home. But they wanna stand around and watch a damn fool drown himself in the river. I tried to save him but he ain’t had enough sense to save himself. People wanna blame me but I got to keep order. (I,3: 35)

For Solly Two Kings (a formerly enslaved person who changed his name to avoid recapture): “Caesar’s the kind of people I would want working for me. If I ever get me a plantation I’m gonna hire him to keep my n****** in line” (I,1: 15). For the character, Citizen Barlow, who did, in fact, steal the bucket of nails, his culpability prompts him to seek out Aunt Ester so that she might cleanse his soul: I stole a bucket of nails. The mill wouldn’t pay me so I stole a bucket of nails. They say Garret Brown stole it he ran and jumped in the river. I told myself to tell them I did it but every time I started to tell them something got in the way. I thought he was gonna come out the water but he never did. I looked up and he had drowned. It’s like I got a hole inside me. If I ain’t careful seem like everything would leak out that hole. What to do, Miss Tyler? (I,5: 46)

For Aunt Ester (whom Wilson calls “the embodiment of African wisdom and tradition – the person who has been alive since 1619 […] and has remained with us” [Dezell 2006: 255]): “That’s the only way he had to say he was innocent. It must have meant an awful lot for him to say that. He was willing to die to say that” (I,5: 47). At the end of the first act, we are told that the tin mill where Mr. Brown worked is now on fire, presumably the crowd’s response to Mr. Brown’s death. But why did the crowd not channel that power earlier and help Mr. Brown? For Wilson, I suspect the reporting of Garret Brown’s death introduces the social contract which African Americans can chose to sign or not. This contract is a common reference in Wilson’s interviews. Here is one instance: “[T]here are thousands who are willing to say ‘no’ to this social contract which reads: If you are willing to deny who you are, you can participate in this society; and here, we got a bunch of people to show you who have been willing to do that” (Sinclair 2006: 98). Or, more particularly, in another variant of this theme: I think that is certainly a part of black American culture, particularly over the past forty years, when white America issued a social contract that said you can participate in the so-

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ciety if you are willing to deny the fact that you are African: that you cannot bring your Africanness inside the door. I think that the fundamental question that has confronted blacks since the Emancipation Proclamation is, Are we going to adopt the values of the dominant culture, or are we going to maintain our cultural separateness and continue to develop the culture that has been developing in the southern United States for some two to three hundred years? […] I want to place myself in that long continuum that goes all the way back to the first African who set foot on the continent. The African who arrived chained and malnourished in the hold of a 350-ton Portuguese vessel – he has not vanished from the face of the earth; he is here, in whatever manifestation, alive in the thirty million black people who are in this country now. (Sheppard 2006: 105 – 106)

The connection between culture and ritual becomes more precise when we consider his definition of culture as “the transformation of impulse and sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural rituals that define and celebrate ourselves as men and women of high purpose” (qtd. in Nadel 2010: 104). Ritual, for Wilson, is more than an isolated incident or ceremony within a cultural context; ritual is the sum of actions that can attributed to a culture understood as a way of and a way into a happy life. With a word, an innocent person (Garret Brown) is guilty of stealing a bucket of nails; with a piece of paper, persons are transformed into property. With the birth of philosophy passed down to its rightful heirs, thousands of years of intellectual labor in Asia and Africa are consigned to reason’s dustbin. As strange as it may seem, I think one answer to the question, “Why didn’t the crowd assist Mr. Brown?” is as follows: The crowd (understood as a group of individuals at least as diverse as the characters of the play) were held by the magic of spectacle and the rituals of the spectator. The counter to such an event must be more powerfully magical. If that were not the case, then how can we account for the fact, as we will see, that the ritual performed in Act II of the play is successful? Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean is the performance of a counter-magic. The ritual that enables one’s passage to the City of Bones is a case in point. Over the course of eight pages of dialogue, Citizen Barlow travels to the City of Bones under the guidance of Aunt Ester. Like a play within a play, this ritual has its props or ceremonial instruments: two pennies, a piece of iron, and a bill of sale. And in the universe of this play the semantic weight of these objects is palpable. Citizen Barlow (who wants to have his soul cleansed) found the two pennies on the ground with Lincoln’s head showing on both. A piece of iron is also a requirement, so Solly Two Kings lends Citizen a link from an iron chain, which is Solly Two King’s good luck piece and a link from a leg chain that Solly wore when he was an enslaved person. One also needs a piece of paper, which will function as the “boat” on Citizen’s journey to the City; the piece of paper is Aunt Ester’s

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bill of sale. Throughout this ritual, there are songs; there is dancing, and there is a narration of events as Aunt Ester tells Citizen what he should be seeing. There is also the transformation of Citizen Barlow. In fact, the ritual’s dramatic form follows the contours of Citizen Barlow’s actions and reactions. As the ritual begins to take hold, Citizen Barlow exclaims that he can feel the boat moving; then, he says that he can see the stairs that will take him below deck. As Citizen Barlow follows Aunt Ester’s voice down the stairs into the darkness, he starts to hear people talking out of the darkness. But only when Eli and Solly (now wearing what a stage direction terms “European masks” II,2: 69) symbolically chain him to the bottom of the boat can he see those who are speaking chained along with him. Aunt Ester tells Citizen that the City of Bones is near. Second, Citizen is horror stricken when he observes that all those chained to the boat “look like me. They all got my face!” (II,2: 69). And he finds he can no longer breathe. Third, Black Mary comes to Citizen’s aid and asks him to breathe and focus his attention on her. Citizen asks Black Mary where he is, and she reminds him that he is on a boat headed for the City of Bones. Citizen rejects the ritual at this point and throws down his boat/bill of sale. Immediately, a storm comes up, and Black Mary tells him to get his boat. He struggles to do so as the masked Solly and Eli symbolically brand him and whip him; then they throw him into the ship’s hold. In the hold, Citizen is alone; he cannot see the stars and he begins to sing an African lullaby that his mother taught him. Then, Citizen calls to the (m)Other: He’s thirsty and he needs water. Aunt Ester responds, but she says that all the water was lost overboard in the storm; what little water remained was taken by the ship’s captain to sustain him as he escaped the storm. This is the law of the sea: “Life is above all.” That’s life on board: “You got a duty to live” (II,2: 71). One might think that the captain too had already learned that lesson, but this reading is precisely what the ritual is designed to foreclose. Life is life on the boat – surviving with others. The captain merely stole the water (made life more difficult for others) but in the world of this ritual, he could not be alive because he did not devote himself to life. At this point, Citizen could choose to identify with his fellow thief and, dare I say, father; but then the ritual would not cleanse his soul. Only at this point does Citizen say that he can see the City of Bones, but he has not caught sight of its inhabitants (those who speak with tongues of fire). He sees only one of the city’s twelve gates; perhaps, the one that was meant for him. He encounters one of the guards. Aunt Ester directs him to share his name with the gatekeeper so that he can be written in the book. How much water has this book crossed over the millennia? Is it a reference to the book of life in Deuteronomy, the ship’s logs or ship’s inventory? All of these little pieces of paper are themselves and so much more.

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Citizen, however, cannot yet move on with his life; his voyage is not completed. The gatekeeper will not accept his two pennies. When Citizen looks into the gatekeeper’s eyes, he sees that the gatekeeper is Garret Brown, the man who jumped into the river when accused of stealing a bucket of nails. The city’s gate opens only when Citizen admits that he stole the bucket of nails. Stage directions tell us that Citizen is now “overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the city and the people with their tongues of fire” and he is “now reborn as a man of the people” (II,2: 73). His first action after this rebirth: He sits down and begins to weep. Solly Two Kings removes his European mask, and Citizen’s journey is over. Black Mary again comes to Citizen and wipes his brow and chest. Aunt Ester says, “‘You made it back’” (II,2: 73), and she begins to sing with the others, “Back from the City of Bones.” This could be understood as the end of the ritual, but the semantic weight of ritual objects is carried outside of it. The celebration at the end of the ritual is interrupted by a knock at the door; Caesar, Black Mary’s brother, says that he knows Solly started the fire that eventually destroyed the mill. Solly escapes by striking Caesar with his walking stick, the same walking stick that has notches for each of the people Solly Two Kings shepherded to Canada (“Freedomland”) via the Underground Railroad. The resonance of objects can be overwhelming when itemized outside of their ritual context. Solly’s walking stick, for example, has already been the subject of a conversation between Solly and Caesar. Caesar says it is a weapon, and thus illegal. For Solly, he – like Ulysses S. Grant – carries a “walking stick”; this is the same “walking stick” that, in a conversation with another character, Solly calls his “bone breaker” (passim). The “bone breaker” is something Solly’s father told him every man should carry outside of the house. Apart from these associations, there are others: the staff of a king (his name is, after all, “Solly Two Kings”), Moses’s staff and its use in the divine battle against Pharoah, a warrior’s staff. It is an object that has traveled far. Perhaps, it is also the staff of Osanyin, “the crippled King who, crushed to half his size, gained insight into the human condition, an image that is now indelibly Atlantic” both in Western Nigeria and Eastern Benin, as well as western Cuba and Brazil (Thompson 1984: 43). These objects are not the materials for an allegory. Through the precise structure of Wilson’s narrative, they are sites of creation and the accumulation of historic powers, repositories of memories forged with what Wilson might call “the impeccable logic of metaphor” (Sheppard 107). Their function? We might borrow a phrase from a text that Wilson himself references, Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit, and say the following: These objects “will safeguard [their] people’s passage through the storms of time” (Thompson 1984: 96). Ritual helps these objects to gain their proper symbolic weight; these objects mark the passages between passivity and action, inner and outer, flesh and spirit,

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and they themselves become actants (they move us) in ritual performance. We only get a sense of how much they move when we try to explain their meaning. Once introduced in Act II, Wilson’s passage ritual carries us to the end of the play and beyond. At the end of the play as Citizen exits the stage and walks into the world, he takes up Solly’s walking stick, hat, and his coat where he discovers a letter from Solly’s sister asking him to help her escape the South. But Gem of the Ocean is not only Citizen’s story. Black Mary is changed, too. She talks back to Aunt Ester: I got my own way of doing things. I like the fire high. That’s the way I cook. You like it down. That’s the way you cook. […] It’s been 3 years now I can’t do nothing to satisfy you. I’m tired of it! Your way ain’t always the best. I got my own way and that’s the way I’m doing it. If I stay around here I’m doing it my own way. (II,3: 77)

Rather than criticize Black Mary for her reply, Aunt Ester asks, “What took you so long?” (II,3: 77). For Wilson, ritual is essentially an act of creation, and the evidence for a ritual’s success is a liberation within and from habit (a.k.a. culture). Ritual is a site for invention inasmuch as a person has his/her/their own way of doing things and that, too, is part of a whole way of doing things. However, to see this whole requires an expansion and contraction of scene. The scene is not merely a box within which agents perform a series of actions nor is it simply the boundary for agency – the place into which agents disappear when they have no agency. Scene is both a box and boundary, and then again something more, as well. But how do we see and speak this more? How do we experience it? How do we construct it? How do we name it? The last words of the play provide the most succinct answer possible: “So live!” In other circumstances, Wilson’s answer is more expansive: So, let’s explore the value of black culture, and relate that, so you can see there is no idea outside of black life. Black life is large enough; there is no idea that I cannot contain that is not already a part of it – so that you have a whole – complete. This is not a “sub-culture!” You have a whole complete world view – a whole complete cultural philosophy, religion, mythology, history – whatever Maulana Karenga says the criteria for culture is. That’s what in fact we have. […] So that when you leave your parents’ house, you are not naked. You have acquired from them ideas of justice and morality. You’ve acquired eating habits, concepts of pleasure and pain; you have a solid ground to stand upon. So when you go out into the world you are complete. You don’t need anybody else’s thing to make you whole. (Sinclair 2006: 97– 98)

There may be echoes of Wilson’s project in the work of Wole Soyinka, who also explores the powers and boundaries of ritual in his drama; in this regard, I am

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thinking even of his attraction for and translation of Euripides’ Bacchae where the contestation against the introduction of Dionysian rituals is contested. But, more importantly, Soyinka, like Wilson, identifies this more/beyond as an expanded perspective at the crossroads of myth, literature, and world, and he, too, gives it a name, “Life”: The Yoruba is not, like European man, concerned with the purely conceptual aspects of time; they are too concretely realized in his own life, religion, sensitivity, to be mere tags for explaining the metaphysical order of his world. If we may put the same thing in fleshed-out cognitions, life, present life, contains within it manifestations of the ancestral, the living and the unborn. All are vitally within the intimations and affectiveness of life, beyond mere abstract conceptualization. (Soyinka 1976: 144)

Soyinka, as he develops this argument in the same chapter, underscores that he is not proposing a conflation of myth, literature, and world nor the complementary conflation of the divine, the human, and the natural. For Soyinka, there is indeed a beyond but one understood as the crossing of domains – those strange moments when the Biblical Joseph, searching for his brothers, happens to meet a man who can give him directions, or Jacob meets and wrestles with a man (or was he Esau’s protective spirit?). The scene is not any one of these domains; the scene is the experience of the crossing of these domains, a crossing that is never abstract and always a beginning or end that leaves its mark (whether the story of Joseph’s captivity narrative or Jacob’s tender hip). Critical responses to Soyinka’s approach have asked the following questions: 1) Does Soyinka construct a monolithic African identity by treating Yoruban myth as a synecdoche for African? 2) If the answer is yes to question 1, then doesn’t Soyinka leave unexamined the processes by which a monolithic (and probably contentless) “West” has been constructed? 3) Although an embodied practice, isn’t Soyinka’s phenomenology (as it focuses on the now of, if not the instant of, crossing) phenomenologically thin? In his Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life, Omedi Ochieng has identified these three questions with three stances regarding what Africa is or ought to be: the inflationary stance, the deflationary stance, and the eliminativist stance (Ochieng 2017: 120 – 123). When operationalized, the inflationary stance involves two moves: an attack on the Euro-centric and the development of the Afro-centric. The deflationary stance involves the rejection of the inflationary stance (what Paulin Hountondji would call “ethnophilosophies”) by foregrounding Africa as a geographical and empirical fact (Houtondji 1983: 66). The eliminativist stance (with Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe as an example) argues that something called “African knowledges” may have, at one time existed, but they were eliminated by Western totalitarian discourses, “silenced

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radically or, in most cases, converted by conquering Western discourses” (Mudimbe 1994: xiv). One of the powers of Ochieng’s summary is that it expresses the logical relationship among these three stances (how they speak over and against each other) as well as how each stance would indirectly voice the others. When spoken by the eliminativist stance, the promise of the inflationary stance is scripted as an impossibility (that which never ceases not-being voiced). What the eliminativist stance marks as an impossibility is transformed into a necessity (that which never ceases being voiced). And the deflationist stance suggests in both of those locations a possibility (that which is sometimes voiced, as if a fact at some point had to be a possibility). Since Ochieng proposes a fourth alternative (which, in revising Bakhtin, he calls a chronotopian account), we might also look to see whether it too might be associated with a logical modality. At the level of voicing, this fourth position might be expressed as “stops being voiced.” And there are two items that would stop being voiced: Africa and the West. In this act of predication, Africa stops being voiced and “The West” stops being voiced, but the effects of this predication are not the same. Ochieng’s way of creating a stance foregrounds possibility, as does the deflationist stance, but it doubles down in negation: There is a positive negation that results in “Africa” as a storied and diverse continent (i. e., not a monolith) and another negation that results in the substitution of “West” with “the entanglements of power in global and planetary flows” (Ochieng 2017: 123). The two faces of this negation are quite familiar to students of global rhetorics. On the one hand, the global subject is diverse, a repository of affect situated in histories that may cross over but nevertheless remain distinct. On the other, the global subject is the same, a repository of the effects situated in the wake of the global markets’ failing attempts to redistribute wealth: “Africa” is considered not as an essence nor simply an immaterial “invention” but a diverse continent with a history that cannot be boiled down to a single story. And nor do I take for granted the notion of the “West.” In an attempt to indicate my departure from the convention of taking it for granted, I wish to bring it into question. When I mean to designate particular intellectual traditions – principally those of the United States, England, France, and Germany – I use the term “North Atlantic” traditions in part to anchor the term to its geopolitical use-value in the NATO alliance. I do not consider the alternative – “North Atlantic” – an adequate substitute. But it goes some way toward naming the entanglements of geopolitical designations in global and planetary flows. (Ochieng 2017: 123)

It is interesting that in writing about the West, Ochieng speaks of the “West” as a notion, and Africa as a diverse continent. Here, he seems to accept or voice something akin to the deflationary stance: “Africa” as geographical fact (read

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fact as the result of political configurations). With regard to the West, he voices something of the eliminativist stance, but whereas the eliminativist would see the West as Western discourses radically silencing African discourses, Ochieng reads Western institutions subverting/de-normalizing/undermining/preventing/ corrupting African institutions. There is struggle in logics, cultural logics, here. We are acquainted with its basic formula – most recently in the call and response of Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter. The statement, “Black Lives Matter” assumes that “All Lives Matter, but you/we are acting as if this were not the case.” However, as a response to the statement, “Black Lives Matter,” rather than its prompt, “All Lives Matter” means “you can’t say Black Lives Matter” without not-saying “All Lives Matter.” The difference is between “I’m saying Black Lives Matter [and All Lives Matter], and “I’m saying that All Lives Matter [even if I act as if Black Lives Don’t]” or “All Lives Matter [but Black lives do not participate in that All].” How might Gem of the Ocean respond to Ochieng’s critique? Wilson finds power where one might continue to connect with the connection: What “Africa” is or is not emerges from the kinds of social relations/communities empowered by its name and by what is vital in that name – what of Africa continues to sustain life and what of Africa had made the passage with him. As Wilson notes in an interview, his history begins – not in Africa – but “when the first African died on the continent of North America” (Lyons 2006: 210). Think of the African lullaby that Citizen remembers at a crucial moment in his journey to the City of Bones. It did not provide him with water or escape, but his memory did answer his call nevertheless, helping him remain present and visible, whole and above ground in his moment of great distress. Although Citizen could not see it at the time, there was also a community there: the figure of Aunt Ester leading him through his passage as well as Eli and Solly Two Kings, who played various roles in the ritual. Black Mary was there, too, to comfort him and tell him where he was when he became disoriented. The ritual helped Citizen see what he believed; his actions had meaning just as the actions of the rituals have meaning. Once the invisible had become real for him, he knew how to act; he knew what he was doing and what he might do because he knew on what ground he stood. And Africa? Gem of the Ocean claims it as a heritage reborn in ritual, codes of conduct (eating, walking, speaking, storytelling, traveling) – the wholeness of culture. That “Africa” should be a counter-magic to the “European West” does not lessen his claim on America nor on the universal. And here his views are as much in conversation with Ralph Ellison as they are with Amiri Baraka. But we will need to redo the universal. It is not a metaphor, especially the metaphor of civic health that empowers and naturalizes hierarchies where others are

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scripted as unhealthy versions of a dominant “We.” If that metaphor tried to enter Wilson’s world, we would hardly notice it, since it would find no sustenance there. For Wilson, the universal to be explored is not so much a generalization or an abstraction or even an ever-thickening overlapping of contact zones (we will leave that to the objects of ritual) as it is a series of passages/journeys that always leave their mark in feelings and upon bone. And Europe? Wilson’s passage ritual “resonates with both African and EuroChristian rites of communion. In its unique syncretism and in its social and symbolic meanings, it represents an act that is decidedly African American” (Elam 2007: 85). Like the West African Goddesses who in their travels acquire the powers and names of saints in Cuba and Brazil, the City of Bones does not simply disrupt but uses rituals to retake life when the invisible “West” is conjured by some. By identifying the crossing itself as a place, the City of Bones suspends or arrests the West’s movement before it is realized as a positive term (the West as a set of cities/places/books), or realized as a dialectical term (as in the binary, West/non-West), or as an ultimate term in the name of which all other terms might be sacrificed in order to preserve them as the West (the West as a self, a moral/political commodity to ship, sell, or defend globally). But if not for the “West,” then wither goes the universal? Perhaps, this is our opportunity to call for another universal. The Call: Another universal, yes. But for this universal, what other terms are left? The Response: In his 2007 collection of poems, City of Bones, Kwame Dawes draws from the richness of Wilson’s plays and discovers Aunt Ester’s other name “Mother Ola.” And what is Mother Ola’s response to our question? There may be no other words except “poetry” or “song” or “a history of courageous speech,” words that can bear the weight of memory. That may be true if our cultural lives were not already a ritual that works for some of us and if we always knew to whom our words were responding. No, it is better to find our terms for the universal in the choice to get up in the morning and the choice to go out into the world and act: “He [the poet] thinks he found me somewhere in his head, / thinks he made me out of nothing much, / just scraps of dreams on his hot bed, / some discarded conversations like the mulch / of fantasy; but what he doesn’t know / is I came to him” (Dawes 2017: “Mother Ola and the Poet” 207). While Wilson does not need Plato in order to effect his crossing of the West, both Wilson and Plato might caution us to reconsider how we imagine the scene of that crossing. To be sure, there are a growing number of classicists who are calling our attention to particular circumstances or social ills, never pleasant, for which Plato might see Socratic action (dialectic or philosophy) as a cure: plague, wars, political revolutions. We may see glimpses of this Plato particularly in the “dramatic frames” provided for some of his dialogues; for example, readers

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learn of the adult Theaetetus’s death from battle injuries and dysentery before they are introduced to the young Theaetetus who engages in dialogue with Socrates. And there is the Socrates whose death still haunts the dialogues especially when he does not serve as a principal interlocuter (for example, in the “Sophist” and “Statesmen”). Socrates left his family; he left his companions, all for what? In the name of what? This is the Socrates whose last words, if written by Plato’s hand, could be a smirk at those anticipating their hero’s last words but also Plato’s exploration of his own experience of loss: “Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?” (Plato 1997: “Phaedo” 118a, 100). What debt could Socrates owe to Asklepios, the son of Apollo and patron of doctors and healers, who was killed by the gods when he discovered the power to resurrect the dead? What “Socrates in the City of Bones” proposes is another syncretism, another ritual, another way of crossing – cities (Pittsburgh and Athens), geographies (Africa, Europe), writers (Plato and Wilson) – leading to a new universal that does not require an alien within, a universal to which we might direct our calls and to which we must respond and pay our debts.

Works Cited Dawes, Kwame. 2017. City of Bones: A Testament. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Dezell, Maureen. 2006. “A 10-Play Odyssey Continues with Gem of the Ocean.” In: Jackson R. Bryer and Marty C. Hartig (eds.). Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 253 – 256. Elam, Harry, Jr. 2007. “Gem of the Ocean and the Redemptive Power of History.” In: Christopher Bigsby (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 75 – 88. Houtondji, Paulin J. 1983. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Translated by E. Evans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luhrman, Tanja M. 2020. How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lyons, Bonnie. 2006. “An Interview with August Wilson.” In: Jackson R. Bryer and Marty C. Hartig (eds.). Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 204 – 222. Mitchell-Boyask, Robin. 2009. Plague and the Athenian Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nadel, Alan. 2010. August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Ochieng, Omedi. 2017. Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life. New York: Routledge. Park, Peter K. J. 2013. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Plato. 1991. The Republic of Plato. Translated by Allen Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hacket. Sheppard, Vera. 2006. “August Wilson: An Interview.” In: Jackson R. Bryer and Marty C. Hartig (eds.). Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 101 – 117. Sinclair, Abiola. 2006. “Black Aesthetic: A Conversation with Playwright August Wilson.” In: Jackson R. Bryer and Marty C. Hartig (eds.). Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 90 – 100. Soyinka, Wole. 1976. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage. Wilson, August. 2000. “Sailing the Stream of Black Culture.” New York Times, 3 Apr. 2000, Section 2: 1. Wilson, August. 2006. Gem of the Ocean. New York: Theatre Group International.

Chrysovalantis Kampragkos

Displacement and Discipline: Refugees and the Unemployed in Living and Public Spaces in Greece

Abstract: The minimization of the value of labor power has been defined as a precondition for the reestablishment of capitalist profit. Apart from quantitative economic measures, such a reduction requires state policies that aim at the absolute subjugation of everyday life by way of enforcing discipline within the spaces where this is organized. Governmental spatial methods of discipline are evident in Greece with the handling of refugee inflows and the control of the unemployed. Kept inside camps, refugees are classified according to nationality and education to be gradually allowed to enter Europe. Their torments in camps become a preparatory conditioning period before they are fed into the European labor market, while Greece receives funds from the European Union to contain the “refugee threat” within its territories. The imposition of a state of surveillance on housing and transportation functions as a form of discipline for precarious and displaced social subjects with an aim to deprive them of their right to negotiate working conditions by effectively imposing a condition of confinement and displacement on them. Using novel and film, this chapter connects refugee/unemployment management and David Harvey’s theory of “accumulation by dispossession,” for the spatial regulation of those who have been dispossessed of their country and/or work is now a prerequisite for the augmentation of profit.

In left-wing and liberal media and political discourse, there is a prevalent perception of Greece as a great victim of the neoliberal policies of the Germanled administration of the European Union (EU). According to this narrative, international political and monetary institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank, and the European Commission have been coercing Greek governments to ratify bills that impose a neocolonial debt regime which, apart from greatly undermining living conditions, has caused a loss of national sovereignty. The discourse of a Greek state victimized by the international financial powers that be reinforces an understanding of society as an imagined national community, which in Benedict Anderson’s conception constitutes a cross-class “deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991: 16). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-014

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There is a certain degree of misconception in this portrayal, as the Greek state and the economic interests it serves have profited from the austerity bailout agreements of 2010 – 2015 and have exercised their own diplomatic tactics in order to gain the most from capitalist restructuring. Since the onset of the financial crisis, the minimization of the cost of labor power has been regarded as one of the main preconditions for the reestablishment of economic growth. The policy of labor power devaluation and privatizations had been a demand of businesses since the early 2000s, but it achieved legitimacy during the crisis years in Greece and the subsequent international agreements. However, apart from quantitative measures, such devaluation requires policies which aim at the absolute subjugation of all aspects of everyday life by way of enforcing discipline within the public and private spaces where this is organized. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu, “[social] space is one of the sites where power is asserted and exercised, and, no doubt in its subtlest form, as symbolic violence that goes unperceived as violence” (1999: 126). Spatial discipline methods have become particularly evident in the increase of police presence in the streets, the privatization of public and natural sites, and, more importantly, the regulation of population movement, which has been more evident in the control of refugee inflows and of passenger transport within the urban landscape. Following Fredric Jameson’s suggestion in Representing Capital (2011) that populations such as the unemployed be reconsidered in terms of exploitation rather than domination, space could be viewed in a similar manner. The cases of refugee imprisonment in camps and the deprivation of unemployed citizens’ right to free public transport in Athens can be highlighted not only as governance techniques that aim at regulating the behavior of the oppressed to secure obedience. More than that, control through the redefinition of public and living space and the surveillance/mapping of populations becomes the prerequisite for the achievement of a maximum level of labor exploitation of refugees/migrants and of the unemployed.

The Refugee Camp as Economic Opportunity It could be claimed that refugee camps are constructed so as to keep refugees the farthest possible from urban centers with a view to appeasing the racism and xenophobia of a large part of Greek society. This claim has an ostensible validity, as the Europe-wide declining electoral pool of traditional right-wing and social democratic parties has moved further to the extreme Right and is forcing governments to exercise a tighter migration policy that would not grant equal rights to refugees so as to maintain the allegiance of their constituencies. It is also assert-

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ed – mainly by the Left – that the stranding of refugees is also the result of Greece being assigned the role of the watchdog of Fortress Europe on the strength of the Dublin II Regulation, which dictates that countries receiving immigrants are responsible for accommodating them during their asylum application examination process, or the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement, according to which all migrants entering Greek soil via Turkey are to be relocated back to Turkey. Being a main entry point for refugees and immigrants from Asia, Greece is allegedly coerced into keeping refugees from moving to Europe, caught in the middle as it is between Turkey using the influx of refugees as a way of gaining economic benefits and Europe itself being reluctant to accept more foreigners. Time and again, left-wing and liberal personalities mourn the betrayal of the cosmopolitan constituent values of the EU, namely multiculturalism and tolerance. In 2016 former Belgium Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt castigated the EU-Turkey agreement as “not just immoral, but fundamentally flawed,” pointing out that “the European Union is a community of nations which, despite being ravaged by two world wars and divided by the cold war, managed to come together to deliver peace, security and prosperity for a generation” (2016), while UK Labour Party politician David Miliband claims that “when we [Westerners] fail refugees we betray our own history” (2017). The refusal of wealthy European countries to provide asylum seekers with a safe haven is condemned as a negation of globalization, as if refugees and immigrants fled their countries of origin driven by the spirit of multiculturalism, and not due to war, famine, or persecution. Such views fail to account for the immensely severe conditions in the camps and generate mystifications with regard to the nature of capitalist exploitation, which retains its features, regardless of the existence or not of borders. Despite the sizable funding provided to Greece via the EU and the United Nations Refugee Agency or the large presence of non-governmental organizations claiming to intervene to the refugees’ best interests in the absence of adequate health services, those dislocated people – officially over ninety-one thousand as of February 2021 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2021) – die of preventable diseases, gas poisoning, or frost, or commit suicide due to despair. Riots are frequent and brutally suppressed, and those who escape the camps are frequently detained irregularly in criminal law prisons. Moreover, scores of refugees live in make-shift tents outside camps. So, while there is a certain degree of validity in the aforementioned explanations, the Greek authorities place the refugees in shelters (the words “place” and “shelters” constituting euphemisms for ‘imprison’ and ‘concentration camps,’ respectively) primarily to utilize them as a negotiating tool for greater financial aid from Europe, and, more importantly, to prepare their entry into the cheap labor force.

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Greece has patently taken advantage of its position between Asia and Europe. On the strength of Dublin II, Greece has received hundreds of millions of Euros to accommodate immigrants. That funding skyrocketed after the entry of Greece in the bailout agreements with the EU and the IMF,¹ leading to camps being constructed throughout the country and immigrants being abducted from the center of Athens in sweeping police operations.² Greece is increasingly treating incoming flows of immigrants and refugees as an opportunity to seek more financial aid in exchange for keeping them within its territory. In March 2015 Nikos Kotzias, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the center-left government of SYRIZA during 2015 – 2019, stated that should Greece collapse financially, millions of immigrants and thousands of jihadists will enter Europe, calling for Germany to change its stance toward Greece (Dempsey 2015). Similarly, Panos Kammenos, Minister of Defense and president of ANEL, the right-wing minor partner in the SYRIZA government cabinet, warned that “if the European creditors deal a blow to Greece, then they should know Greece will suspend the Dublin II treaty, and migrants will get their ID and documents and will travel to Berlin” (Waterfield 2015). In other words, the SYRIZA-ANEL governing coalition employed the geographic location of the country as a geopolitical asset. In her book Weapons of Mass Migration, political scientist and US government consultant Kelly Greenhill describes numerous examples of governments engineering or utilizing migration flows with the goal of gaining concessions from other states. She cites, among others, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who, in a fashion similar to the Greek Defense Minister, warned that “if the Europeans don’t pay, we will not protect Europe from these flows” (Greenhill 2010: 19). Greenhill classifies state sponsors of coercive migrations into three types: the generators, who “directly create or threaten to create cross-border population movements unless targets concede to their demands” (23); the agents provocateurs, who “do not create crises directly, but rather deliberately act in ways designed to incite others to generate outflows” (23); and the opportunists, who “play no direct role in the creation of migration crises, but simply exploit for their own gain the existence of outflows generated or catalyzed by others” (30). Greece would be possibly grouped with the third category. By threatening tο allow refugees to move into Europe,

 As per the European Commission, Greece received about 2.81 billion euros via various European institutions (2020). Additionally, journalists David Howden and Apostolis Fotiadis (2017) have provided figures on additional funding amounting to a total of 803 million dollars, thereby calling it “the most expensive humanitarian response in history.”  This police operation, which led to the first large-scale immigrant camps, was ironically codenamed Xenios Zeus, which was a name attributed to Zeus in ancient Greek mythology in order to underline the importance of hospitality in ancient Greece (Cossé 2013).

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Greece has secured massive funds that do not go simply into the care of refugees. The refugee crisis has become a novel profitable outlet for the rekindling of economic growth of diverse economic interests. Included are construction firms and hygiene companies that install and maintain housing containers that are in horrible conditions, food catering businesses that have been reported to prepare fewer meals than they have been paid for, landlords in the various provinces renting apartments to camp employees, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which have flocked to Greece since 2015 and provide various services from legal aid and escorting unaccompanied children to education and yoga lessons. Even more importantly, after the elections of 2019, the current neoliberal government of Nea Dimokratia has been continuously accused of lack of transparency and providing hefty sums of money to media and businesses that support it. One such instance is the decision of Minister of Migration and Asylum Notis Mitarakis to create a secret fund to tackle the migration crisis, raising concerns about what kind of economic interests are going to benefit from this (Fotiadis 2020). It is evident that refugee camps and hotspots have been transformed into an unprecedented space of financial activity that opened up after the beginning of the great financial recession. In David Harvey’s view, capital builds new geographical landscapes to alleviate the shocks of such a crisis; to do so, surpluses of capital and labor are required (2014: 121). In the case of refugee camps a surplus of the labor force is employed primarily in NGOs but also under temporary contracts with state agencies; a non-permanent and precarious model of employment is emerging. Under this work pattern, workers’ compensation and medical care are not guaranteed, while job contracts are conditionally renewed every few months. Refugee camps could also be viewed along the lines of Harvey’s concept of spatio-temporal fixes, since the imprisonment of refugees in space and time has offered a fix for business profitability (2014: 121). Most importantly, the imprisonment of refugees provides a long-term fix in terms of labor exploitation through the education and conditioning of refugees in subhuman conditions that will discipline them into accepting any job. Greece has had a long history of exploiting immigrants. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, immigrants from Albania, Bulgaria, and the former Soviet Union arrived in Greece in order to find a better living. They have been primarily employed as agricultural or construction workers under the harshest of conditions, while many women have been devoured by the sex industry. A predominant characteristic of Greek economy is that a considerable part of capital is concentrated in small businesses and the service sector, rather than in large in-

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dustrial firms,³ and that large profits are generated in the rampant black labor market,⁴ which means that workers are not insured by employers, who evade taxation for informal income made via non-declared exploitation of immigrants. It could be argued that the ailing Greek economy might have collapsed much sooner had it not been for the back-breaking work of Eastern European and South Asian workers. Immigrants have been living in a semi-legal status of civic exclusion that forces them into submission so as not to be reported to the police. Furthermore, thousands are the cases of immigrants being given housing in barns, basements, and tiny apartments, a condition that precipitates their condition of subjugation.

Greeted with Open Arms? There are three types of refugee camps: hot spots, which are the identification centers on the eastern Aegean islands; the so-called shelters across the mainland for those awaiting asylum after the closure of the Balkan borders; and the preremoval detention centers, which function as prisons for incomers not entitled to asylum application, and thus designated for deportation. At the five existing hot spots, incoming refugees and immigrants are documented on reaching Greek shores, and classified according to nationality, which essentially defines whether they are eligible for asylum in Europe or not. Prior to the March 2016 EU-Turkey agreement, hot spots were referred to as “open reception and identification centers,” but since then they have been transformed into closed detention centers. The most notorious example is that of Moria on the island of Lesvos, well-known for the freezing temperatures leading to refugee deaths during the winter of 2017 – about which former Immigration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas controversially stated that they made his government wiser (“Winter Has Arrived” 2017) – and the frequent riots initiated by refugees who demand their freedom. Those who are deemed fit for entry into Europe are transported to the mainland camps to await the verdict on their application, while Moria turns into a prison for those to be deported, mainly people from the Maghreb and South Asia, who in the abstract language of bureaucracy are not refugees but illegal immigrants not having the right to asylum.  Small and medium-sized enterprises in Greece generate 63.5 % of the added value of Greek economy and employ 87.9 of the country’s official labor force (European Commission Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, 2019).  Undeclared work in Greece was estimated at 24 % in 2017 by the International Labour Organization (2017).

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The division between refugees eligible for asylum and illegal immigrants is not due to humanitarian concern for war victims; on the contrary, it constitutes a classification of whose labor power will be most profitable. European countries have exhibited preference to Syrians due to their higher level of education, better economic standing, and thereby more ‘civil’ manners in contrast to the ‘barbaric instincts’ of Algerians, Afghans, or Somalis, for instance.⁵ This can be inferred by the explicit reference to Syrians in the EU-Turkey statement and the complete omission of any other nationalities in it (Corrao 2021). In mid-2016 Germany took in one hundred thousand refugees who, as journalist Laura Kasinof (2017) claims, were destined for one-euro jobs; the concept was to integrate refugees into the host society via integration in the labor market. In order to leave behind the nightmare of a war in Syria that very quickly shattered a seemingly stable country, people of higher education may be more willing to do whatever job they are given or tolerate more humiliations in order to retain their asylum and work. Nanni Balestrini describes the type of foreigner desired by the West in We Want Everything, his novel of working-class dissent in late-1960s Italy, when he talks of immigrant figures from Southern Italy: “The assembly lines at Volkswagen and Fiat needed them all. […] The type of worker they needed [was] a worker who could do any job on the line, who had been a labourer or a road digger in the south and who could, when necessary, just as easily be unemployed” (2016: 3). In Balestrini’s description of potential Fiat workers, many penniless men migrating from the South to Turin resort to spending their nights inside a waiting room at the Porta Nuova train station, which was given to Fiat by the state free of charge (2016: 58). This space is reminiscent of the refugee camps, especially if it is taken into account that “it was patrolled by the police, who made sure that

 Within the generalized racist economy of the management of refugees and the growing Islamophobic tendencies, Syrians receive a slightly preferential treatment as a national group eligible for refugee status, in contrast to populations from Africa (mainly Algerians and Somalis) or Asia (mainly Afghans, Pakistanis, or Iraqis). This has been mentioned to me in personal visits in camps, where individuals of other ethnicities have complained about what they perceive of as Syrians enjoying far more privileges than other inmates. In conjunction with this, Greek media (both mainstream and far-right ones) are far more prone to indicate Algerians, Afghans, Pakistanis, or Somalis as perpetrators of gang violence in the center of Athens, even going as far as to blame them for the closure of business ventures (Καλαφάτης 2020). If it is taken into account that even the former MP of the now-banned neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn Ilias Panagiotaros, who is now convicted of violence against migrants and political activists, has been quoted inside the Hellenic Parliament as saying that only Syrians should be allowed to enter Greece and that Algerians and Afghans have no place in the country (“ΙΖ’ Περίοδος” 2018: 221), it becomes clear that there is a gradation in how refugees and immigrants are treated.

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journalists didn’t get near it. To get [in …] you had to show your Fiat ID card if you were already working there, or the letter from Fiat that said you should come for an interview (58). Balestrini’s description of the internal migrant bears strong resemblance to the mindset according to which refugees are classified: “He is the Southern proletarian adept at a thousand trades because he has no trade, without a single professional quality even when he possesses a diploma, lacking a steady job and often unemployed or forced into casual service” (195). A devalued worker like this, having already experienced the barbarity of all-out war in their country, cannot but bear the characteristics of what Balestrini described as “ideological estrangement from work and from any professional ethic, the inability to present himself as the bearer of a trade and identify himself in it” (196). The hot spots are those contemporary locations that enable the state to identify the refugees who more adequately fit the model portrayed by Balestrini. The spaces of classification are followed by the spaces of accommodation on the Greek mainland, which are mainly abandoned factories or former army barracks in the middle of nowhere. The shelters function as warehouses in which refugees are stored as a reserve labor army being maintained or scrapped according to the demands of an increasingly devalued labor market, while their asylum applications are accepted or rejected in proportion to those demands. The horrible living conditions are not a result of insufficient funding or personnel but a strategic choice so that refugees are trained to sell their labor power in the most desirable manner. Upon their entry to the Western world, the reproduction of their labor power assumes the form of reeducation during their long-term imprisonment. Refugees live under a curfew regime, allowed to enter and exit the camps during daylight, which constitutes a militarized management aimed at the internalization of discipline. The process initiated at the hot spots, where the refugees’ data and fingerprints are recorded onto a Europe-wide identification system, marks the beginning of biopolitical control over their lives. If prior to arriving at Europe it was the threat of death at the hands of dictatorships or non-state militias that governed them, Europe guarantees their survival and a place in democracy in return for absolute control over them. This process passes through Isabel Lorey’s analysis of precarization, which “has become an instrument of governing and, at the same time, a basis for capitalist accumulation that serves social regulation and control” (2015: 1). This form of “neoliberal governing proceeds primarily through social insecurity, through regulating the minimum of assurance while simultaneously increasing instability” (2). Biopolitics, in Michel Foucault’s thought, preserves the life of citizens, consolidating a technique of governance that promotes self-government so as to exercise what he described as “a ‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of possibilities” that “could structure the possible field of action of others” (1994, 341). Well-being is entangled

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with the economy and citizens – refugees in this case – are conditioned to obey the requirements of capital not only through repression but through self-control. The neoliberal capitalist restructuring that was initiated in the 1970s triggered both a massive loss of jobs and a refusal of employers to meet the demands of safe labor. However, while unemployment has skyrocketed, it is well-known that throughout the advanced West, the natives are not willing to take up manual and low-paid jobs, thus causing the contradictory effect of labor shortage that has been filled by immigrants. While it is claimed that Western capitalism has become a post-industrial, service-based economy, thereby leading to a perceived disappearance of the working class as defined by orthodox socialist theories, this is far from accurate. Manual, industrial, and land labor is still widespread in the West; but for the main part it is invisible, for the immigrants and refugees who execute it are largely invisible themselves. In A Seventh Man, his exposition of the migrant experience in 1970s Europe, John Berger states that “it is absurd to consider the health of migrant workers as though they were healthy or sick like others. Their function, the conditions of their presence here, are incompatible with the norms of preventive and clinical medicine” (Berger and Mohr 2010: 151). He highlights the fact that most of them choose to do the most grueling jobs in order to secure more savings to send back home, while at the same time hoping no diseases caused by work will arise. It goes without saying that the forced choice of immigrants to work harder is more profitable for capitalists. In Berger’s account this was further encouraged by the organization of the room barracks housing refugees he witnessed in Geneva. As he says, “for most men in the barracks time off is prolonged and wasted” (171), and beyond the present of work and his own exertion, the rest of his life is reduced to a series of fixed images related to past and future. […] Only by applying his energy to work does he overcome the frustration of this, for he believes that by saving his wages he will be able to rejoin these images and animate them. (175)

The succession of SYRIZA in power by the neoliberal Nea Dimokratia in 2019 and the consequent conservative shift brought about an even more rigid stance against refugees. The placement of MP Sofia Voultepsi as Deputy Minister of Migration tasked with the integration of refugees is indicative of the government’s logic, as she has been quoted as calling refugees “unarmed invaders, weapons in the hands of the Turks” with regard to a 2014 refugee shipwreck tragedy in the Aegean Sea (Dimitras 2018). The lowest point in the treatment of refugees took place in September 2020, when the announcement of a COVID-19 cluster in Moria led to the outbreak of violent riots and a fire that destroyed the camp al-

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most completely, leaving almost 13,000 refugees homeless (Smith 2020). The response of the government was to relocate them at Kara Tepe, a former army shooting range which is situated on the coast of Lesvos, in conditions of extreme cold and gale. Not only does the relocation to a shooting range add to the symbolism of the militarization of life in the camps, but it also threatens refugees with lead poisoning due to the high concentration of used ammunition (Yeung and Kapantais 2020). The biopolitical control in the camps involves a strategic precarization of the conditions of existence which could also be thought of along the lines of Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession, the politics of which “takes over as a primary means for the extraction of income and wealth from vulnerable populations, including the working class” (2014: 68). If in the neoliberal logic this involves depriving populations of basic social rights such as healthcare, pensions, and public education, for refugees and migrants these benefits were not there in the first place; instead, they are offered by the benevolent West at the most minimal scale and in conditions of invisibility and constant monitoring. Whereas most citizens would have to cede a portion of their liberties to enjoy security, what refugees are being dispossessed of is their very freedom of movement and choice to live wherever and however they desire. Denial of their liberty in exchange for the most rudimentary forms of housing, food, and education effectively deprives them of the right to freely choose how to sell their labor power, which is considered a fundamental function of a capitalist economy. In this sense, one should not make mention only of disposable populations destined to be employed inhumanely; on the contrary, the furthering of absolute capitalist domination over the working class that becomes progressively freer of any legislative constraints reaches a higher level in the refugee/immigrant case. The absence of any kind of regulation of the labor of migrants and refugees, resulting in the dispossession of their freedom in concentration camps, points to the swelling of an informal profit-making economy based on refugee labor and to the “descent of capital into lawlessness” (Harvey 2014: 195), ranging from the concealment of employer profits from public taxation to the sexual exploitation of the bodies of refugees, both female and male, adult and underage. George Caffentzis is even more explicit on how this “ur-level of capitalist hell that collects all the coerced labor of this so-called ‘postslavery’ era: prison labor, military labor, ‘sex slavery,’ indentured servitude, child labor” constitutes an integral part of capitalist activities “that dwarf the ‘formal world of work’ in spatio-temporal and value terms” (2013: 68). When the training of refugees in these dehumanizing conditions is over, it is expected that they will gratefully accept any job because that will probably be better than living in the mud, snow, or snake-infested Greek countryside. More-

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over, they will be receptive to the social treatment they will be subjected to, for their training will have taught them to be self-regulated and submissive. Foucault’s conceptualization of social control again proves prophetic when he says that the development of capitalism “would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (1978: 141). The controlled entry of trained refugees into the present-day conditions of capitalist production is utilized as an element of wage management. Thus, in a manner of speaking, refugee concentration camps could be thought of as gigantic invisible social factories of labor reproduction. The invisibility of refugees, their lack of freedom and civic recognition is parallel to the strict regulation of their price for the capitalist machine, on the thin line between legality and illegality, with their asylum always being conditional and dependent on their good conduct and unrecognized by the institutionalized preconditions of labor unionization and bargaining.

Unemployment in Greece: Where Welfare and Coercion Are One Earlier I referred to refugees as a reserve army of labor, a concept originally formulated by Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital to describe the unemployed. For Marx, “it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces […] a relatively redundant working population” (1990 – 1991: 1: 782), or, in other words, “a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost” (784). As mentioned above, refugees are imprisoned and treated as commodities destined for future use. Along with them, the other population sector that faces the most intense devaluation is the unemployed. Briefly, the official unemployment rate in Greece in the last quarter of 2020 was 16.2 %, that is, over 750,000 citizens, of which only 19.4 % received an unemployment benefit of one year maximum (Hellenic Statistical Authority 2021).⁶

 In reality, the unemployment rate is higher, as there is a terminological differentiation between those who are officially registered as unemployed and those who are described as “economically inactive under the age of 75, i. e., the person who are neither working nor looking for a job” (Hellenic Statistical Authority 2021: 1). This technical classification is employed so as to artificially reduce the unemployment rate and was first introduced by the Hellenic Statistical Authority under the incumbent government of Nea Dimokratia in the first quarter of 2020, that is,

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There are a number of schemes implemented by the state unemployment agency OAED (Manpower Employment Organization) to boost employment, including the hiring of long-term unemployed people in various municipal positions for periods of a few months, during which they are not allowed to go on strike, while businesses have also been funded to temporarily hire jobless citizens without paying wages, which amounts to a state-sponsored encouragement of workers’ exploitation by the private sector. The policies of OAED in recent years reveal a radical shift from passive policies centered on providing unemployment benefits, free healthcare, and free commuting, to active ones, whose focus is on coercing the unemployed into accepting any kind of job. In 2016, OAED provided businesses with access to the résumés of registered unemployed citizens, so that they may choose future employees based on their profile (“Πρόσβαση στα βιογραφικά” 2016). Regulations announced by OAED in 2018 (Οργανισμός Απασχόλησης Εργατικού Δυναμικού 2019) stipulate that the unemployed must prove they are actively looking for work. Long-term non-working beneficiaries registered with OAED are obliged to draft a curriculum vitae, and, when a job opening arises, they have to attend an interview. Jobless citizens who have never been employed, in particular, have to accept any job provided by OAED. Refusal to comply with any of the above clauses entails suspension of the unemployment benefit and removal from unemployment registries. This marks the passage from welfare to workfare, under which accepting a job is the basic requirement for receiving basic financial aid. Moreover, it is quite evident that these regulations amount to blackmailing a jobless individual into working without even having the right to negotiate their wage, time schedule, or tasks with their potential employer. Evidently, the state unemployment agency assumed an active role in shaping new conditions of profit for capital during the 2015 – 2019 SYRIZA’s tenure in power. In reality, the aforementioned policies paved the way for a more aggressive discourse on the issue of unemployment by the now-governing party of Nea Dimokratia, whose stated goal is the abolition of working and trade-union rights as a prerequisite for increased employment through the creation of a more attractive environment for investments. The ruling party’s rationale is evident in MP Konstantinos Kyranakis’s statement that there is a high unemployment rate because the jobless do not actively search on the Internet for work and they have not drafted a proper résumé (“Κυρανάκης” 2020), while the government commissioned Nobel Prize in Economics Laureate Christopher Pissarides and a committee under him to draft a report with propos-

during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first wave of job losses and labor contract suspensions.

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als for the growth of the Greek economy. The neoliberal view of the unemployed as a burden encompasses this report, in which it is claimed that those out of work do not possess the skills required in the job market and it is further suggested that they be trained by private education centers so as to potentially be hired by businesses or even work on a voluntary basis if they are considered “unskilled” (Πισσαρίδης et al. 2020). To anyone who has watched Ken Loach’s 2015 film I, Daniel Blake, the aforementioned policies will definitely sound familiar. The film’s namesake protagonist, who has suffered a heart attack and has applied for a sickness benefit, is forced by the British workforce agency to enter a program that will provide him with jobseeker’s allowance on condition that he proves to be actively searching for a job. To that end, he must learn how to draft a résumé, provide receipts from job interviews, and go through a series of difficulties submitting applications as he is not computer-literate. Having been denied welfare benefits, he suffers fatal cardiac arrest during a legal battle. It is worth mentioning that the above measures were announced a few months after the film’s screening in Greece; while Ken Loach created a realistic cinematic portrayal of cannibalistic policies imposed upon the unemployed, in the Greek case, Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” would find its perfect embodiment, as if the left-wing then-government’s unemployment policies had been inspired by a film director whose political allegiance is also on the Left.

Mass Means of Transport and Social Control In I, Daniel Blake the legal system manages to entangle the protagonist in a tortuous search for justice that eventually leads to his demise despite his heroic persistence in fighting for his cause. Yet, obliging great numbers of unemployed workers to work under conditions they cannot control would require much more than making life difficult for them at unemployment offices. It would necessitate an expansion of the field of control over their day-to-day living. If refugees can be beaten into submission via a denial of their existence, this cannot as easily be imposed on indigenous citizens. Even though the unemployed are patently ignored and excluded from workers’ unions, thus rendering virtually impossible the potential of coordinated struggle, they are not as invisible as refugees, and may gain – at least momentarily – the sympathy of society, as is the case with Daniel Blake, who performs a sit-in outside the unemployment agency and is cheered by passers-by. However, in 2017 the Greek state set into motion a plan for the transformation of the Athens transportation system that will function as a panopticon for the whole society; for the unemployed, who at that

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time constituted 21.2 % of the Greek labor force (Hellenic Statistical Authority 2018), it may also constitute a measure of exclusion and acceptance of forced labor. The transportation system in Athens consists of buses, trams, the suburban railway, and three lines of the underground metro. Until October 2017, citizens commuted with paper tickets and monthly cards, while the unemployed had been entitled to free entry since the 2015 bank capital controls. In 2017 the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks announced a plan to introduce an electronic system of passenger entry which would do away with paper tickets. The purported rationale behind this change is the massive loss of profit due to high numbers of fare dodgers and the free commuting of the unemployed. The new entry system involves the installation of checkpoints fitted with automatic opening/closing bars, which allows entry only to holders of an electronic card containing their personal information such as their taxpayer registration and social security numbers. Passengers are required to go through the electronic checkpoints not only upon entry but also when they reach their destination. In this way, passengers will be monitored throughout their whole trip, which implies that the aim is not solely to prevent fare dodgers from taking advantage of the transport system. Obviously, this system’s goal is citizen surveillance, and for this reason the Data Protection Authority (DPA) initially blocked its implementation, raising concerns pertinent to anonymity and freedom of transport (Αρχή Προστασίας Δεδομένων Προσωπικού Χαρακτήρα 2017). Yet, it was put into effect in December 2017, and after a pilot period during which bars were gradually installed, the system became fully operational on 15 May 2018. There are two ways in which someone could bypass surveillance. The one is using rechargeable electronic tickets issued on automatic ticket-issuing machines. However, reduced-price tickets for students and pensioners, that is, population sectors enjoying particular welfare benefits, are not printed by the machines and one has to wait in a line to buy them from a counter. The other way is to obtain an “impersonal” electronic card, which does not carry the owner’s information, but is considerably more expensive than a personalized e-card. Consequently, one is led to acquire a customized card. The surveillance possibilities of such a system are immense, from creating customized advertisements about entertainment options at destinations derived from passengers’ frequent stops to identifying people who go to demonstrations. It is also a ready-made gift to potential buyers of the metro in case of privatization, so that they would not have to install such advanced passenger checkpoints themselves. However, although such concerns have been raised by the DPA, I want to focus on how this surveillance system targets the unemployed in a very particular manner.

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The privatization of the public urban space of the metro through the installation of the e-card surveillance system proceeds in two manners. First, by placing stricter regulations on the free entry of passengers the state abolishes once and for all the concept of free transport for all citizens who essentially subsidize the operation of the metro through taxation. Privatization does not only include public infrastructures being acquired by private corporations; it is also present when logistical and financial criteria are introduced to citizen accessibility to social welfare provisions such as education, healthcare, and transport. More significantly, however, the most striking degree of metro privatization is the obvious exclusion of civilians from entry if they do not possess the new e-cards or cannot afford to pay for a ticket. Since the unemployed are to be removed from registries should they not obey the job search regulations of OAED, this also entails a large number of citizens being barred from using public transport. Consequently, many may consent to the work regulations ratified by the state so as not to lose their right to commuting.⁷ The punishment of losing long-term unemployment points for a potential short-term work position would perhaps be tolerated; however, the emotional and social repercussions of being excluded from moving to different parts of the city seems unbearable for people who are already out of production. Moreover, the jobless citizens’ potential exclusion via the e-card metro system has also a symbolic dimension besides the practical one. Their prevention from commuting is visualized in the form of the metal-and-glass bars that are the equivalent of prison bars; as prisoners are kept from the outside world confined behind bars, so the unemployed will be barred from socialization and entertainment at the metro checkpoints. Controlling the growing population sector mired in unemployment is intrinsically linked with the control of the working class as a whole. In Marx’s analysis, the reserve army of the unemployed is utilized by capital as a noose around the necks of already employed workers so that the latter are pressured into delivering much more labor in less time and for lower wages; without an increase in the number of employees, more exploitation-intensive surplus value is produced. The necessity of an obedient reserve army is obvious. By extorting already employed workers, and more specifically skilled and experienced ones to put in more productivity, capitalists gain more. This is achieved via the threat of layoffs  Shortly before the finalization of this article, in April 2022, Nea Dimokratia did eventually enact a bill ironically named “Jobs Again” which dictates the active removal from unemployment registries of jobless citizens who reject job offers thrice, along with other unemployed people who do not meet specific financial criteria, leading to the loss of any provisions they are entitled to (Black 2022).

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and is accompanied by a decrease in wages, which ought to be accepted as there is an abundance of unemployed workers waiting to be employed at an even lower cost or who will accept being employed if they have to choose between forced labor and not being allowed to use public transportation. In Marx’s words, “the condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and vice versa, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists” (1990 – 1991: 1: 789). In the third volume of Capital, Marx quotes several reports of working conditions, where there is mention of workers volunteering in any kind of public work so as to receive financial relief from British state agencies in the form of “starvation wages” (that is, wages below the level of subsistence). It is noted that the entire bourgeoisie stood guard over the workers. If starvation wages were offered and a worker was unwilling to accept them, the Relief Committee struck him off the relief list. This was a real golden age for the factory-owning gentlemen, in as much as the workers either starved or had to work at the price most profitable for the bourgeoisie, while the Relief Committees acted as their guard-dogs. (1990 – 1991: 3: 229)

This was a report from October 1863, indicative of the immanence of the logic of workfare across centuries. Yet, the subjection of the unemployed to forced labor under the threat of losing meager benefits was not limited to those early stages of capitalism. The regulation of the lives of the unemployed attained an immense size, aided by the utilization of public space as a means of surveillance, during the later years of the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic and the first years of Nazi Germany. In the late 1920s, social democratic governments ratified an unemployment insurance law, the aim of which was to provide satisfactory financial relief to the unemployed coupled with vocational guidance and job procurement. To that end, a massive mapping of population movement was carried out, aiming to distinguish jobless citizens in search of work across Germany from common vagrants (Peukert 1987: 136). This policy was expanded by the Nazis; as historian Detlev Peukert has argued, the Nazis inherited the mapping records and used them to punish those considered asocial for abstaining from work and those who refused to take badly-paid jobs offered by labor exchanges. Punishment was exacted by committing the “work-shy” to concentration camps, expanding racial ideas of social degeneration that were first directed against Romani people (Peukert 1987). In terms of social mapping, Peukert claims that “the National Socialist public welfare authorities’ call for a fundamental distinction between ‘respectable and non-respectable travelers’ chimed entirely with long-standing reformist efforts on the part of non-fascist welfare workers” (212). As such, the drop in unemployment during Hitler’s rule was achieved through “the ‘voluntary’ detailing of unemployed workers into Labour Service (Arbeitsdienst) camps and so-

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called emergency labour camps, where they were drafted to work mainly on public prestige projects for minimal wages” (56). Similarly, according to Timothy Mason (1993), a significant part in the reduction of unemployment during the early years of the Third Reich was played by forced labor; in 1934 over one million unemployed German citizens worked on farms or in mines to avoid losing their unemployment benefits or worked for breadcrumbs. Almost one hundred and sixty years after Marx’s reports, and nearly a century after interwar-era Germany, the Greek social democratic government of SYRIZA aspired to create an equally ambitious plan to map the movement of citizens via the reorganized spaces of public transport. It is definitely not coincidental that while all other citizens have the chance to choose between personalized cards and tickets, the unemployed – along with disabled citizens – are the only social groups that cannot avoid obtaining an electronic card. The new checkpoints monitoring a passenger’s entry and exit could provide crucial information about an unemployed person’s travelling capacity, so as to direct them to jobs near the places they frequently travel to and from. Moreover, it is a widespread phenomenon in Greece for unemployed people to work off the books for a supplementary income even if they receive an unemployment benefit. Detailed surveillance of possible everyday routes of beneficiaries of unemployment support may prove useful to the state to locate undeclared work, thus enabling OAED to punish the unemployed for wasting the state’s money. The unemployed individual must be disciplined and obedient whether they receive a benefit or not. Enjoying the very few advantages arising from being registered as jobless will be dependent on the regulations of forced labor. In this sense, the mutation of the transport system into an electronic panopticon is very much connected to the treatment of the vulnerable unemployed as a burden for the state. The metro is transformed into a space of exclusion for those jobless citizens who are disobedient, and therefore into an instrument for the biopolitical management of the reserve workforce.

Conclusion: The Eternal Return of Barbarity In his own day, Marx said that “the factory owners also placed obstacles to emigration, as far as they could, in secret agreement with the government, partly so as to keep their capital in constant readiness (in the form of workers’ flesh and blood)” (1990 – 1991: 3: 230). In this day and age, it is the state which steps up to do so for the sake of capital. On the one hand, refugee concentration camps prevent refugees from moving freely and maintain them at a minimum level so that they will be ready for work whenever that is deemed necessary; on the other, un-

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employed people may be forced to work in jobs not of their choosing in exchange for freedom of transport. The refugee camps and the transportation checkpoints reveal a process in which lived and public spaces previously touted as infrastructures of social welfare become sites of the biopolitical regulation of insecurity, discipline, and exclusion of those considered dangerous and burdensome for the well-being of the economy and society. In these sites, the enforcement of class relations of power upon the most precarious social layers foreshadows the encroachment of capitalist restructuring on the few remaining rights protecting the working class from absolute exploitation. There is a conspicuous continuity in the implementation of this strategy of capitalist restructuring on the part of both social democratic and neoliberal/conservative governments, the only difference between which lies in the intensity of implementation and kind of propaganda that are employed. If the frequent use of phrases such as financial crisis, succession of social democratic and right-wing governments, racial minorities, unemployment, and concentration camps is compared to the period of the Weimar Republic, what is revealed is a blueprint for the rise of fascism; it should be hoped that this recurrent pattern will be purely coincidental.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Balestrini, Nanni. 2016. We Want Everything. London: Verso. Berger, John, and Jean Mohr (photographer). 2010. A Seventh Man. London: Verso. Black, Derek. 2022. “K. Hatzidakis: These are the Changes in OAED, Unemployment Benefit, Training.” World Stock Market, 10 Mar. 2022. [accessed 25 Apr. 2022]. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. “Site Effects.” In: Pierre Bourdieu, et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. 123 – 129. Caffentzis, George. 2013. In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Corrao, Ignazio. 2021. “Towards a New Policy on Migration: EU-Turkey Statement and Action Plan.” Legislative Train Schedule 8 (Apr. 2021), European Parliament. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Cossé, Eva. 2013. “Xenios Zeus and the True Meaning of Greek Hospitality.” Open Democracy 9 July 2013, Human Rights Watch. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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Dempsey, Judy. 2015. “Greece’s Cynical Anti-German Rhetoric.” Judy Dempsey’s Strategic Europe, 12 Mar. 2015. Carnegie Europe. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Dimitras, Panayote. 2018. “Racist Discourse in Greece’s Mainstream Politics and Media.” Racist Crimes Watch, 22 Oct. 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. European Commission. 2020. Managing Migration: EU Financial Support to Greece. European Commission. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. European Commission Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. 2019. Greece – 2019 SBA Fact Sheet. European Commission. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Fotiadis, Apostolis. 2020. “Transparency Concerns in Greece over Migration Ministry ‘Black Fund.’” Balkan Insight, 13 May 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Power. London: Penguin. Greenhill, Kelly M. 2010. Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harvey, David. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London: Profile. Hellenic Statistical Authority. 2018. Labour Force Survey: 4th quarter 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Hellenic Statistical Authority. 2021. Labour Force Survey: 4th quarter 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Howden, David, and Apostolis Fotiadis. 2017. “Where Did the Money Go? How Greece Fumbled the Refugee Crisis.” The Guardian, 9 Mar. 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. International Labour Organization. 2017. Undeclared Work in Greece: Nature, Drivers and Way Forward. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Jameson, Fredric. 2011. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. London: Verso. Kasinof, Laura. 2017. “Refugees Paid One Euro an Hour by German Employment Program.” Coda Story, 16 Feb. 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1990 – 1991. Capital (Vols. 1 – 3). London: Penguin. Mason, Timothy W. 1993. Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Community.” Oxford: Berg. Miliband, David. 2017. “We Can Find an Answer to the Refugee Crisis by Working Together.” Time, 18 Dec. 2017.

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[accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Peukert, Detlev J. K. 1987. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Peukert, Detlev J. K. 1993. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New York: Hill and Wang. Smith, Helena. 2020. “Greek Riot Police Fire Teargas at Refugees Campaigning to Leave Lesbos.” The Guardian, 12 Sept. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2021. UNHCR Greece Bi-annual Factsheet February 2021. Refugees Operational Data Portal. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Verhofstadt, Guy. 2016. “This Turkish Deal Is Illegal and Betrays Europe’s Values.” The Guardian, 10 Mar. 2016. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Waterfield, Bruno. 2015. “Greece’s Defence Minister Threatens to Send Migrants Including Jihadists to Western Europe.” The Telegraph, 9 Mar. 2015. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. “Winter Has Arrived: Thousands Left at the Mercy of Winter in Greek Hot-spots.” 2017. Refugee Support Aegean, 25 Oct. 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Yeung, Peter, and Pavlos Kapantais. 2020. “Lead Poisoning Fears at Greek Refugee Camp Built on Military Site.” Al Jazeera, 2 Oct. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Αρχή Προστασίας Δεδομένων Προσωπικού Χαρακτήρα. 2017. Γνωμοδότηση 1/2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. “ΙΖ’ Περίοδος Προεδρευομένης Κοινοβουλευτικής Δημοκρατίας – Σύνοδος Γ’ – Συνεδρίαση ΡΙΗ.” 2018. Βουλή των Ελλήνων, 15 May 2018. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Καλαφάτης, Αλέξανδρος. 2020. “Ντοκουμέντο: Οι ναρκομαφίες έβαλαν λουκέτο στα ιστορικά στέκια των Εξαρχείων (pics).” Έθνος, 12 Jan. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. “Κυρανάκης: Οι νέοι είναι άνεργοι επειδή δεν ψάχνουν δουλειά στο ίντερνετ! (video).” 2020. Η Αυγή, 1 Sept. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Οργανισμός Απασχόλησης Εργατικού Δυναμικού. 2019. Απολογισμός Δράσεων, Μάρτιος 2015-Ιούνιος 2019. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Πισσαρίδης, Χριστόφορος, et al. 2020. Σχέδιο Ανάπτυξης για την Ελληνική Οικονομία: Ενδιάμεση Έκθεση. ΣΚΑΪ, 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022].

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Sarah Ryniker

Resettled Refugees in the American South: Discourses of Victimization and Transgression in Clarkston, Georgia Abstract: Clarkston, Georgia, has become an unlikely home to refugees from over 50 countries in the last 30 years. While the city itself has evolved, so have its representations of refugees, challenging imaginative geographies and complicating the once black-white binary description of the US South. Within the South, which itself was once deemed an “internal spatial other” (Jansson 2003), there are representations of refugees and immigrants constructed as both assets and adversaries to local communities. This chapter analyzes 14 years of Clarkston City Council minutes to examine the multiple competing representations of refugees and immigrants constructed through local politics over time. Council members and residents construct refugees and immigrants as beneficial to the local economy and construe their “diversity” as an economic advantage; these members also use coded language to cast refugees as both racialized victims and transgressors. Inherent in the city’s representation of refugees is a neoliberal multicultural representation of the town itself. These findings highlight a need to include the marginalized communities’ voices within local decision-making, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a need for more scholarly attention to neoliberal multiculturalism at the local scale.

About five years ago, along with a newly elected city government, Clarkston settled on a pro-refugee branding that established the city’s diversity and multiculturalism at the forefront: Clarkston, Georgia, would be known as “the Ellis Island of the South” (Graham 2017; Lerner 2017). As part of the “New South,” as Jamie Winders (2006) describes, the inclusion of new immigrant and refugee groups transformed the city and drew attention locally, regionally, and nationwide. This “new image and direction” features the city as a model for refugee resettlement in the South, although key figures in Clarkston have not always supported resettlement (City of Clarkston, “About” 2021). In the past few decades, Clarkston has undergone a change from a small town to a diverse locale with residents from more than fifty countries and six continents (City of Clarkston, “About”). While Clarkston was selected by refugee asylum programs in the 1990s as an “ideal” refugee resettlement site, there has been much conflict over refugees within the city. In the mid-2000s, the city expehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-015

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rienced internal conflict between those who supported refugees and those who did not. I argue that Clarkston has spent the past two decades grappling with its identity as a city, concluding that it works best when it embraces its diversity, or at least, becomes ambivalent toward it. However, this recognition – and eventual profit – does not come freely or fairly. Clarkston’s refugees and immigrants have faced decades of racism and discrimination. Even today, the city’s “positive” representation of refugees can be exploitative. Building on neoliberal multicultural literature, my discourse analysis of Clarkston’s city council minutes shows the ways representations of refugees have shifted over time. In the early 2000s, the city council, other city officials, and residents who spoke at public meetings tended to portray refugees as both victims and transgressors, sometimes simultaneously and in competing, contradictory ways. Later, discourses shifted to construct refugees and immigrants as beneficial to the local economy while they construed refugees’ “diversity” as an economic advantage. It is important to note these representations of life in Clarkston are colored by political stances and vested interests. In the following section of the chapter, I lay out a framework for my analysis that demonstrates the shifting contexts of refugee resettlement within the United States, particularly in the US South. Next, I highlight how previous literature on neoliberal multiculturalism can shed light on the various discourses surrounding refugees in Clarkston. In the subsequent sections, my argument is threefold: First, I establish the need for research on refugee resettlement and other immigration policy implementation by the local state. Second, I demonstrate how in the past twenty years, dominant representations of refugees have changed over time, contrasting and coinciding with each other at times. Key figures within Clarkston, and particularly within Clarkston’s local government, have used specific discourses to represent refugees and immigrants for their own interests. Hegemonic notions of inclusion and belonging have shifted to reflect the local state’s ambivalence towards refugees seen in Clarkston today. Finally, I address the implications and significance of this research.

Shifting Contexts for Refugee Resettlement New research pathways explore immigrants and refugees throughout the migration process, from their time in camps to the adjustments in life after resettlement (Ehrkamp and Leitner 2006; Nagel 2016; Culcasi 2017; Ehrkamp 2017). This paper focuses on refugee life after resettlement and the complicated and entangled discursive relationships between place and refugees. Refugees enter a socio-political space already filled with discourses produced at the local, region-

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al, and national scales. Then a relational process takes place to produce new and different discourses, and these are accepted or contested, and the cycle repeats. While the media at times portrays the refugee resettlement process as brief and inexhaustive, scholarship on refugees and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s policies on refugee resettlement demonstrate refugee placement as a careful, lengthy process including multiple United States governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and other resettlement service providers (UNHCR 2020; IRC 2021). When a refugee arrives in the United States, it is the job of one of the nine non-governmental organizations, in partnership with the federal government, to find a suitable place to settle them. Usually, refugees are placed in urban centers near friends, family, or an established community with a shared culture (IRC). These organizations also consider various factors, including the cost of living and access to services (IRC). For many refugees, their resettlement and integration into American society are only deemed “successful” by non-governmental organizations and the federal government when they become economically self-sufficient (Fix et al. 2017). Thus, it is critical to pay attention to what discourses on refugees are produced and circulated by the state, including not only the nation-state, but local state agencies and non-governmental agencies. As of 2020, there were approximately 26 million refugees worldwide, but the United States limited resettlement to 18,000 refugees. For 2021, the resettlement cap was set at 15,000 refugees – the lowest the limit has been since the Refugee Act of 1980 established caps (Fact Sheet: U.S. Refugee Resettlement 2020). The United States admits refugees from over 60 countries, but most come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, or Ukraine. In the past, refugees followed similar migration pathways as other immigrants to the US; however, new gateways have emerged, including Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia (Fact Sheet). Resettlement organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, aid in assisting refugees after their arrival, with tasks from furnishing their homes to arranging medical services. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement works with states and resettlement organizations to encourage refugees to be independent by three months. After one year in the United States, all refugees are required to apply for a green card to become permanent residents with the ultimate goal to become United States citizens (Fact Sheet). Since the 1980s, scholars, such as Winders (2006), argue that refugee resettlement has transformed cities and towns across the Southern United States, shifted ethnic and political compositions, and challenged prior understandings of race, place, and diversity. In her scholarship on Nashville and other Southern cities, Winders finds that the arrival of new immigrant groups to the South has

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created challenges for the black/white color line and defied cultural imaginaries. These new groups of people are racialized and othered within the South, which itself was once deemed an “internal spatial other” (Jansson 2003: 295). For refugees of color, racialization and racism are fundamentals of the resettlement process. Race cannot altogether be left out of the immigrant and refugee experience; we must address social forces of discrimination and racism, particularly in the context of the racialized South. Drawing attention to racism, Adam Bledsoe et al. write, “Racism is not just a southern problem, but the political landscape of the South has long mattered in historical, social, political, and economic processes of racialization. So, too, have innovative practices of Black survival and resistance been inseparable from the production of southern spaces” (2017: 3). In agreement, Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria argue, “Space also informs our imaginations” (2018: 568). As the social and political landscape of the South evolves, so do the ways racialization takes place. Thus, cultural geographers pay attention to spatial and temporal conditions as well as social relations and representations. Scholarship on the intersection of race and immigration suggests “status” can sometimes be asserted over race in different situations to validate refugees’ sense of belonging, inclusion, and legitimacy. Once they had arrived, Mary C. Waters’s interviews revealed that the West Indian immigrants related more to other immigrants with “foreign” statuses through their experiences of discrimination and prejudice than to those of black Americans (Waters 1991). Nimo Abdi’s research finds Somali immigrants resist “Blackness” in the same manner that generations of immigrants have strived for Whiteness (Abdi 2020). Kimberle Crenshaw’s piece on women’s shelters in Los Angeles minority neighborhoods demonstrated the complicated relationship among race, immigration policy, and violence while noting the importance of geographic scales of the body, home, and state (Crenshaw 1993). Together, these studies show how the refugee and immigrant “status” can validate refugees’ sense of belonging, inclusion, and legitimacy while refugees learn to navigate new social, cultural, and political environments. Scholarship on intersectionality (Mollett and Faria 2018) and new immigration pathways to the South (Winders 2006, 2007) provides a framework for understanding relationships forged on the ground in Clarkston. Within the United States, scholars argue that government policies create new immigrant gateways that shape local responses (Furuseth et al. 2015). Local governments can contribute to inclusive environments by including immigrant and ethnic communities in their decision-making (Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad 2008). Governments can empower immigrant and refugee organizations through political representation; research shows that local governments with a heterogeneous ethnic city council have more positive relationships with ethnic organiza-

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tions (Ramakrishnan and Bloemraad). As scholars like Winders (2008) argue, local governments should make attempts to address new immigrant populations because they play a large role in developing inclusive communities within and around their cities. In this piece, I draw on Mathew Coleman’s argument that despite there being federal contexts that shape immigration as a whole, it is important that we pay attention to the site-specific effects on vulnerable populations within the US South (Coleman 2012). Drawing critical attention to these new gateways can offer insights into refugee resettlement and neoliberal multiculturalism.

Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the State in Refugee Resettlement Neoliberalism, across several disciplines, refers to a globalizing reorganization of the economy, social order, and governance that supports free trade, privatization, market and financial liberalization (Melamed 2006; Leitner et al. 2007). In Jamie Peck’s piece on explaining neoliberalism, he details how neoliberalism is never constant and must be examined among the institutions it resides in (Peck 2013). Similarly, Mitchell Dean argues that neoliberalization is never “quite as simple as lining up a list of attributes of neoliberalism, such as privatization, deregulation and the limited state, and showing whether or not they correspond to the current ‘institutional reality’ of the state” (2012: 75). In other words, neoliberalism is not static or found in only one state or social form; this is evident in how neoliberal policies are visible through institutions at various scales, including the local. For example, Leitner et al.’s research highlights how cities faced with state and national pressures have begun to implement neoliberal urban agendas to maintain international competitiveness. In this chapter, I use a definition of neoliberalism as defined by Jodi Melamed, “a set of economic regulatory policies which includes privatization of public resources, financial liberation, market liberalization, and global economic management” (2006: 14– 15). However, other scholars, such as Will Kymlicka (2013) and Wendy Brown (2003), take a more magnified view, focusing primarily on individual subjectivities, social relationships, and identities. In terms of identities, Melamed argues that neoliberalism and multiculturalism merged as an evolution of racial liberalism to become a tool used by the United States to legitimize neoliberal power structures and shape social and political order. Multiculturalism originated in the 1970s as a form of resistance towards European and American values and white racism and transformed into a political and cultural

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movement in support of cultural diversity (Melamed 2006). Katharyne Mitchell argues that multiculturalism is not just an acceptance of diversity but also a way to achieve diversity; at times, neoliberal multiculturalism uses cultural equality to cover, or provide cover for, economic inequality (Mitchell 2004). However, as Patricia Richards maintains, “multicultural policies and discourses are frequently assimilationist in their effects” and can often refer to the efforts of liberal democratic governments to embrace ethnic differences (2010: 65). Further, Melamed’s research finds that neoliberal multiculturalism often masks racism while producing new privileges and encouraging inequality. In other words, multicultural discourses may be used to encourage diversity while reproducing existing power structures in a neoliberal nation-state. Because of the state’s critical role in establishing and reinforcing neoliberal structures, scholars such as Chandra Mohanty have argued that there is a great need to examine neoliberal power by the state (Mohanty 2013). In their own independent research, both Laura Pulido (2018) and Ruth Gilmore (2002) focus on state-centered racism and racialization of ethnic minorities, as well as on how neoliberal multiculturalism has also led to increased discriminatory state activities, including security and policing. Pulido’s research argues that ethnic studies, typically conducted from the white/colonial point of view, have led to overlooking race debates. On how these power relations affect minorities, Gilmore argues, “Racism functions as a limiting force that pushes disproportionate costs of participating in an increasingly monetized and profit-driven world onto those who, due to the frictions of political distance, cannot reach the variable levers of power that might relieve them of those costs” (2002: 16). Throughout the history of the United States, the federal government has perpetuated stereotypes and encouraged “othering” of people and cultures outside of the US. Marik Xavier-Brier (2016) maintains that the federal government attempted to amplify the United States as progressive while demonstrating that other countries were far more barbaric. Joshua Inwood’s research details this process, noting that through neoliberal discourses, governments and institutions relocated conceptions of race away from a privilege earned through racism to a right achieved through individual effort, shifting the blame for racist policies away from structures (Inwood 2018). Turning to the local state, research demonstrates that neoliberal multicultural policies implemented by local governments discriminate as they attempt to manifest diversity and belonging. For instance, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the local state’s addition of neoliberal policies to bolster economic gain encouraged racial and economic divides that excluded populations (Loyd and Bonds 2018). Jenna Loyd and Anne Bonds analyze a specific zip code of Milwaukee, noting that discursive constructions surrounding the neighborhood purposefully con-

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ceal decades of segregation and economic restructuring. These policies unintentionally created long-lasting exclusionary effects, such as marking immigrants “permanently out of place” and situating them as “the other,” as Smith and Winders argue (2008: 65). Patricia Ehrkamp’s 2013 study on spatial practices of female immigrants from Turkey demonstrates how difficult navigating gender roles can be through time and space, particularly as representations of immigrants complicate spaces. This racialization and discrimination by the local state has increased in recent decades, and particularly since 9/11, since discourses that frame refugees and migrants as “security threats” have led to increased violence and hatred towards immigrants, affecting immigrants in their everyday lives (Ehrkamp 2013; see also Staeheli and Nagel 2008). Case studies offer several examples of local state policies that illustrate how neoliberal multiculturalism adds to exclusion of immigrants and newly settled refugees; however, I turn to scholarship on community policing to inform my research on Clarkston. Dorothy Williams (2007) details how Montreal’s local government turned to community policing when neighborhoods began to shift because of black immigrants. In a similar vein, Ted Rutland (2020) builds on these findings, arguing community policing has a long history of appearing as a racialized strategy by local governments. However, cities assert they use community policing to mitigate police racism with community dialogue. But an alternative interpretation comes from critical policing studies, which see community policing as having a counter-insurgency logic, “in which the police mobilize their relations with some community members to wage a more thorough war on other community members” (Rutland 2020: 9). In my research, these insights are crucial for reading city documents on police-refugee encounters in the locality of Clarkston. My research takes a case study approach to a municipality to understand the ambivalent effects of representations of refugees on the locality and on the refugees themselves. My work is informed by Yun-Joo Park and Patricia Richards’s study of Indigenous workers in Chile (2007), who argue that the effects of neoliberal multiculturalism are more complicated than many scholars believe; highlighting policies at the municipal, regional, and national levels, they claim these policies can offer spaces for Indigenous peoples to engage in resistance and consent in their daily life. Further contemplating neoliberal effects, Richards asserts that “the process of creating neoliberal multicultural citizens is not only composed from above, but is actually informed by local-level social relationships” (2020: 60). Kymlicka agrees that there is too often a focus on large-scale neoliberalism and calls for research on how multicultural policies “shape the social identities, networks, narratives, and cultural resources available to individuals and groups” (2013: 106).

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Constructed as an ideology and social organization that contributes to racial contradictions on a national and international scale, neoliberal multiculturalism replaced older anthropological notions of race (Melamed 2006). In its newest forms, scholars argue that rather than explicit racism, neoliberal multiculturalism uses antiracism to brand some forms of humanity, such as the working class or minorities, less worthy while still managing to exploit difference. As Kymlicka argues, “the defining feature of neoliberal multiculturalism is the belief that ethnic identities and attachments can be assets to market actors and hence that they can legitimately be supported by the neoliberal state” (2013: 109). Neoliberal multiculturalism has continued to shape social and racial order throughout the US, to undermine achievements since the civil rights movement (Melamed 2006). Within neoliberalism, racism does not take the form of a black/white color line (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Darder and Torres 2004). Instead, Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres argue that racism must be examined through structural lenses and that race holds little value without the social, cultural, and political context. Similarly, Barber (2006) argues that multicultural policies reflect national differences and colonial histories. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva grapples with the concept of a bi-racial stratification in the United States, emphasizing recent Latin American immigration changes (2004). In regard to neoliberal multiculturalism through the lens of colonization, Caroline Nagel writes, “[cultural differences] are often folded into discourses of multiculturalism and cultural diversity, and at times are looked at favorably by elements of dominant societies who see cultural differences and exotic spaces as marketable commodities” (2011: 119). Regarding the exploitive role of immigrants in neoliberal multiculturalism, Kymlicka opines, “Neoliberal multiculturalism for immigrants affirms – even valorizes – ethnic immigrant entrepreneurship, strategic cosmopolitanism, and transnational commercial linkages and remittances but silences debates on economic redistribution, racial inequality, unemployment, economic restructuring, and labor rights” (2013: 112). Thus, cherished aspects of minorities’ cultures, such as food or clothing, become pieces that entertain and delight the ruling class and allow them to reap the benefits as minority groups suffer. Some feminist scholars focus on how neoliberal multicultural policies at different scales affect minorities, including women, people of color, and immigrants. Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Evangelia Tastsoglou argue that as Western states develop more neoliberal policies, the effects land on the backs of women, particularly in healthcare and education areas (2016). Wendy Larner (2012) critiques neoliberal multiculturalism by exploring the impact of the “New Zealand Experiment” policies of the 1980s–1990s. While the policies were internationally renowned as a neoliberal success, they situated New Zealanders as “human re-

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sources” and increased class differences for women (Larner 2012: 158). Specifically, the Maori women faced challenges because of the loss of benefits and the rise in poverty. Inherently, the term “refugee” is imbued with political meaning; the word is state-centered and implies specific socio-political commitments by nation-states (Ehrkamp 2017). The label itself stigmatizes individuals before they even arrive in the US. Further, the discourse of refugees as victims has contributed to a sense of “the refugee condition,” whereby refugees are reduced to passive, racialized “others” perpetually out of place (Ehrkamp 2017: 818). In other words, refugees enter a neoliberal multicultural system in which existing power structures have already placed racialized minorities and immigrants at the bottom.

Competing Discourses in Clarkston The materials for this piece come primarily from the City of Clarkston’s monthly Council Meeting Archive of meeting notes from 2006 – 2021. These materials include meeting agendas, transcripts of city council meetings, and specific committee meeting transcripts. Most of these materials can be found on the City of Clarkston’s website. I also attended (virtually) eight meetings between May 2020 and May 2021. I gathered material from media sources, US Senate hearings, local websites, and newspaper archives, including local papers such as The Neighbor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Dekalb County’s newspaper The Champion, and national and international news sites, including USA Today and The Guardian between 2000 and 2021. Using Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke’s methods for thematic analysis, including identifying, organizing, and offering insight into patterns, I used thematic coding when analyzing the materials, including field notes, media, and archival data, first doing in vivo coding and then conducting multiple re-readings for latent codes. Next, I grouped pieces into categorical themes by hand and selected the themes most prominent. In doing so, it became clear that there was a temporal aspect related to the discourses in Clarkston. Throughout the materials from the City of Clarkston, I found competing constructions of refugees presented as both victims and transgressors at different times during Clarkston’s history as a refugee resettlement site. In this section, I demonstrate how the dominant representations of refugees have changed over time within Clarkston and discuss how the neoliberal multicultural strategies deployed in Clarkston reinforce the ambivalence towards refugees.

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Refugees Are Clarkston’s Burden This sub-section explores the first main theme in how city officials, local elites, and city residents construct Clarkston’s refugee representations. Particularly during the 2000s, representations of refugees and immigrants as dangerous, illegal, burdensome, and unsafe were hegemonic in the city’s discussions of the local economy. These depictions are a product of the public’s perception of refugees either consciously or unconsciously and ultimately served to “other” refugees as separate from American-born residents to delegitimize refugees as citizens of Clarkston and maintain the status quo. These discourses were typically produced by the mayor, the city council, residents, and local institutions and circulated through multiscalar policies, the news media, and even hometown plays (see Smith 2013). While much of this discourse occurs in the early 2000s, there are overlapping and competing discourses during this time. In addition, discourses that support the theme “Refugees are Clarkston’s Burden” can also be found later on into the 2010s and some are even still present in statements by city leaders within Clarkston. Several representations of refugees produced during city council meetings imply that refugees need to know how to do things for themselves, perpetuating multicultural neoliberal ideals that refugees are only successful when they are self-sufficient and independent. For example, during a council meeting in late 2006, a resident asked a question about after-school childcare for the Vietnamese community. A chairperson of the Planning and Development Commission responded, “It is not the City’s responsibility to fund such programs but that the parents should look for solutions” (“Minutes” 2006). At the same meeting, during the citizens’ comments portion, a member of the community explained that he felt there was a problem with communication between the Clarkston government and the refugee community and that different refugee and immigrant groups had felt left out of the process. Mayor Lee Swaney responded that he was always available to anyone who had questions or concerns, and the council’s response was twofold: One member said she had plans to hold a town hall meeting, while another stated they had personally informed ethnic business owners and community members in the past. Then a resident stated, “if anyone wants information on what is going on in the City that they need to go to City Hall […]. [I]f [I] lived in another country they aren’t going to form a special committee to invite [me] to communicate, that is an individual’s responsibility […] Everyone needs to educate their communities and to stop waiting for the government to do all the work.” The Planning and Development chairperson then restated, “the refugee community needs to take responsibility for seeking the information that has been made available” (“Minutes”

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2006). These neoliberal multicultural discourses shift structural problems onto individual minorities and have unintentional exclusionary effects that stop members of the community from obtaining the aid they need. Former Mayor Swaney, who served two terms during 2002– 2009, is an essential agent for the antipathy seen towards refugees by the Clarkston City Council. The discourses Swaney used during this time are reflective of the ones used by others on the city council and within the city. Swaney often called himself the “Champion for Old Clarkston” and was hostile to refugee resettlement within the town (Hansen 2020). Swaney commonly described immigrants negatively, justifying this animosity by invoking a politics of scale that claims municipal exclusion from other scales of decision-making, particularly the state level. Swaney repeatedly blames the State of Georgia, the federal system, and local decisionmakers for Clarkston’s economic woes due to the added hardship that refugee resettlement has placed on the city. Swaney argues that his hostility towards refugees is not racism or prejudice, but a miscommunication at the local scale in that resettlement agencies did not warn the city about refugees being placed in Clarkston (St. John 2007). Swaney also used the power-laden discourse that refugees are an economic and social hardship to the city. Emphasizing the excessive cost of refugees for Clarkston, Swaney suggested the “refugees placed excessive burdens on already scarce resources” because “the city did not receive extra money to address the special needs of this population” (United States, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations 2010). These discourses are common among local communities that are compelled to carry the extra onus of cutbacks and funding shortfalls at the federal level and reflect the federal government’s findings in the early 2000s (Fix et al. 2017). For example, in the report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, refugees are differentiated from other immigrants because they lack community support networks to enable social support (United States, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations). These discourses construct refugees as burdensome and needy, and, ultimately, unable to assimilate. Swaney’s comments on refugee resettlement reinforce othering discourses, particularly in his use of “we” and “them” in the following example, representative of many of his comments on refugees: “We were not part of the process of bringing them here. We were told after the fact that they were coming” (United States, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, author’s emphasis). He uses familiar immigrant tropes, such as to imply that refugees do not understand apartment living or would overcrowd the city (“Minutes” 1 September 2009). In another example, Swaney portrays Clarkston as “a small community […] that was shattered under the pressure of a broken refugee resettlement system” in a report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate (United States,

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Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations). Here, Clarkston’s resettlement program and the national policies that brought them to town are characterized as burdens on Clarkston. While Swaney is a key figure in the local government, these representations of refugees were found in other parts of the city and were quite common within Clarkston. For example, in first-generation Egyptian American Suehyla El-Attar’s play based on her experiences in Clarkston, a faceless cast member shouts from among the audience, “I just want to know one thing: How do we stop the refugees from coming here?” (Smith 2013, emphasis in original). Such “we/them”discourse, critiqued by El-Attar in her play, perpetuates notions of Orientalism and also contributes to the “othering” of refugees. This discourse serves two tasks: first, it helps unite Clarkston’s residents under a banner of economic hardship, and second, it purposefully excludes refugees from the community and represents them as strains to the city. This theme continues during the next decade: City council meeting minutes are marked by discourses constructing refugees and immigrants, specifically black and brown refugees from Africa, South Asia, and South America, as dangerous and out of place. There is a pattern of city council members and non-refugee residents using discourse that refers to refugees and immigrants as criminals, and city elites rarely refute or contradict these constructions. At a meeting during a discussion on Clarkston’s resources for crime prevention, a council member boasts: “I want to make a statement that we will not tolerate those who come to our community to make diversity an opportunity to commit a crime” (“Minutes” 8 December 2010). When multiple residents discuss gang violence and gunshots in the city, the chief of police states that most of the criminal activity is coming from within the Somali community, and he is working with the FBI on the issue (“Minutes” 3 March 2009). These examples illustrate how Clarkston’s city officials are complicit in circulating discourses that describe refugees as deviants or criminals, serving to demonize, criminalize, and exclude refugees (see Pickering 2001, 2008). During this time period, the preeminent way city officials said they were attempting to strengthen ties with refugee communities is through community policing. In support of community policing, Clarkston’s city manager says he feels citizens should know officers by their first names. The chief of police follows with, “the Police Department is all about community policing and has already made a promise to the citizens that they are going to know our police officers” (“Minutes” 2013). At another meeting, the city manager notes the council had asked police officers to walk around apartment complexes and businesses and meet the residents. The Chief of Police pointed out that officers were told to leave cards on cars to notify the community of the patrols. Multiple non-refugee

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residents mention their support for this (“Minutes” 2008). During a separate council meeting, city officials discuss how a new FBI unit will foster relationships with the refugee community to prevent crime (“Minutes” 2008). Within Clarkston, community policing serves to “other” refugees, constructing them as both victims in constant need of protection and transgressors who need continual surveillance. Clarkston’s deployment of community policing strategies reinforces existing socio-spatial hierarchies of race and racism (Rutland). In 2008, in conjunction with the community policing initiatives, the city of Clarkston instituted a crime mapping software, by which recent crime data became publicly available online. Data on the time, location, and incident are available at the street level (CrimeMapping 2008). During several city council meetings, the crime mapping project was discussed in terms of public safety, including instances of the council and city officials asking locals to be vigilant of crime. It is also commonly mentioned in references to “family” at the meetings (“Minutes” 2 November 2010). Here, the council uses public safety and family rhetoric to shift police responsibility onto the public by creating an emotional attachment to place, home, and community. Clarkston residents were tasked with becoming defenders of the city – they must be vigilant at all times, and anyone could be a threat. These discourses are similar to community policing discourses through which police seek to mobilize residents for information on suspicious behaviors in places refugees are not welcome (Rutland 2020). However, in 2010, during the time the crime mapping software was first implemented, the software found that most victims of crime within Clarkston were refugees (“Minutes” 2 Nov. 2010). These results show how destructive neoliberal multicultural policies can be to those who are not members of the elite ruling class.

Refugees Can Make It on Their Own, with Clarkston’s Help A second theme that is prominent is that refugees can make it on their own, with Clarkston’s help. This type of discourse is found most often during 2000 – 2010 and is often in conversation or in conflict with the previous discourse. Within this theme, there is evidence of multiple, competing discourses encircling Clarkston’s refugees, including those that impute criminality and those that emphasize refugees’ roles in the local economy. I argue that the addition of these discourses was driven by the city’s move toward strategies for deriving material benefit from the rebranding of refugees and thereby the city as ‘diverse,’ which is indicative of neoliberal multiculturalism. The city council’s discourses follow two main threads here. First, refugees need the city’s help for success. Second, a distinct but interdependent, even contradictory, discourse is that ref-

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ugees should become economically and socially independent residents of Clarkston to be successful citizens, and with successful citizens, Clarkston will be successful. Examples of this discourse include a council member detailing how a refugee from outside of Clarkston approached her for assistance. Within 36 hours, “carloads of items were collected [… and residents] provided household items for a family of four […] which had no means of support and a sick child” (“Minutes” 3 March 2009). Another time, in his Mayor’s Report for the month of March, Mayor Tygrett takes time to note how he worked with a company to supply a refugee children’s sports team with sleeping bags so they can go camping during their spring break and that he has also worked with the company to supply other equipment for a trip with refugees that he will participate in at a later date (“Minutes” 2 March 2010). In one instance, a city council member describes how she attended DeKalb County Board of Health Center’s United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture and told the city council members in attendance they could never assume they knew what a person has gone through when they settle in Clarkston (“Minutes” 7 July 2009). Though seeming to inspire sympathy, rarely do these discourses help integrate or include refugees. Instead, they further isolate refugees by constructing them as helpless victims cemented in crisis and perpetuate colonial legacies of Orientalism (Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019). During these years, representations of refugees also became integral to representations of the city itself. At one meeting, council members discussed the need for aid for refugee services because, “This will have a big impact on the City of Clarkston, on the Community Center” (“Minutes” 2011). It became typical for residents to speak of Clarkston and its growth and to demonstrate support for more refugees to come to town. Council members repeatedly extolled themselves for the inclusive positions the city was taking, and the active role Clarkston had in communicating with its residents. Mayor Ransom noted his interest in creating coalitions with council members, local and state politicians, and regional business owners to “discuss how Clarkston has become a model for integrating the refugee and immigrant populations into our City” (“Minutes” 2012). These interdependent discourses remove any sense of agency by refugees and immigrants and collectively exploit their experiences. The city positions itself within a hierarchy powered by refugees who nevertheless are at the bottom. During this time, the city council’s racism and racialization of refugees appear in patterns that attempt to support refugees but justify an uneven dispersal of aid.

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Clarkston as a “Welcoming” City of Refuge The third and final theme I will discuss in this chapter is “Clarkston as a ‘Welcoming’ City of Refuge.” This discourse is most evident during the 2010s, but different figures use it at different times within Clarkston. As cities and local governments have continued to face pressure by new federal policies on immigration, some cities have begun to adopt inclusive immigrant-related policies, particularly those that intend to support immigrants through social and economic means rather than those focusing on law enforcement (Huang and Liu 2018). Some of these policy positions are admirable, in cases where cities might face real sanctions by federal or state agencies. Nevertheless, some cities see immigrant-inclusive policy as not simply a principled position, but as good for business. During the 2010s, it became common for the mayor and city council members to mention the local, state, and federal events that they participated in related to refugees and immigrants during city council meetings, such as in the following example: At the July 2018 council meeting, councilwoman Andrea Cervone reported on her participation with the Taiwan Mosaic Fellowship program, “at no expense to Clarkston” (“Minutes” 2018). Each year, Clarkston’s diversity is honored at the local Culture Fest, sponsored in part by the city government (“Minutes” 2017). The city council has recognized multiple events and multicultural celebrations for immigrants and refugees, going so far as to proclaim February 14 as “Clarkston Loves Refugees Day” during the February 2017 council meeting and celebrate it annually (“Minutes” 2017). These events, many of which were held on municipal property, celebrate and boost refugee and immigrant presence within Clarkston and draw regional and state attention while advertising Clarkston’s diversity for profit. Such planned occasions demonstrate a clear link to neoliberal multiculturalism, where ethnic identities are molded into profitable commodities (Melamed 2006). While these occasions show significant support for refugees and other minorities within Clarkston, the city needs to reflect on its events and policies to ensure they reflect the objective needs of the refugees they continue to profit from. For example, in recent years, the city has started to hold language, citizenship, and business classes. It is through these types of support that refugees and immigrants are expected to become active citizens within Clarkston. Currently, two immigrants hold positions on the city council. An immigrant from Eritrea, Councilman Awet Eyasu’s presence on the council since 2015, and in his role as Vice Mayor, has contributed to many pro-refugee policies. Councilman Ahmed Hassan, an immigrant from Somalia, was elected to the council in 2013.

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As a response to the terror attacks in France in 2015, the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, signed an executive order to declare that no Syrian refugees would be allowed to enter Georgia. There were multiple issues with this order, particularly that the Constitution places the federal government in charge of immigration and deportation, not individual states, and that it contributed to racism while it ignored the careful screening process Syrian refugees go through to arrive in the United States (Crawford 2015). At the time, about 100 Syrian refugees resided in Clarkston. On the topic of the executive order, Mayor Ted Terry spoke, “If we decide to take in more Syrian refugees, or more refugees from other parts of the world, Clarkston will do our part. We’re a compassionate and welcoming city” (Crawford). However, Terry added, “The reality is, within six to eight months, these people have jobs, their kids are in schools, they’re paying taxes, contributing to the community, in some cases they’re creating new businesses and creating more jobs” (Crawford). In this example, Clarkston is represented as a welcoming place while refugees are once again positioned as assets to the city through their economic value. In 2017 President Donald Trump publicly denounced “sanctuary cities” that did not fully comply with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE], and he attempted to block funding to local municipalities that did not support his policies. Across Georgia, undocumented immigrants were being swept up and arrested, including in Clarkston. In May 2017, the council debated whether they should pass a policy that limited cooperation with federal officers. Members of the city council and residents discussed the policy at a town hall meeting, in a Public Safety Meeting, with ICE agents at the Ocilla facility, and during multiple city council meetings. Backed by several immigrant rights groups, including Project South, the policy would stop Clarkston authorities from detaining people to be transferred into ICE’s custody. At the time, Terry said, “Clarkston wants to consider itself a city of refuge. We want to make sure there is as much comfort with still interacting with the Clarkston police and not worrying about deportation” (Redmon 2017). Other council members discussed the policy regarding support for the entire city and its residents (“Minutes” 2017). Under the policy, “City officials and employees shall communicate and cooperate with ICE with regard to reporting immigration status information, but that the City of Clarkston would not detain or extend the detention of any individual at the request of ICE unless ICE first presents the City of Clarkston with a judicially issued warrant authorizing such detention” (“Minutes” 2017). However, Clarkston’s Chief of Police said her department had not received any ICE detainers since she had been in command in the last five years (before President Trump’s election). Further, the Clarkston Police Department

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did not ask about legal residency status and did not operate a jail or detention center (“Minutes” 2017). Ultimately, the policy passed. Thus, this non-detainer policy is little more than a gesture to quell fears within the refugee community and a public notice that the city will not attempt to stand in the way of federal immigration legislation – possibly to ensure the town keeps its federal funding. While this policy appears to support refugees on the surface, it represents more of a symbolic gesture than a form of resistance. Clarkston’s approach to ICE and President Trump’s declarations are examples of scalar politics – these federal neoliberal multicultural policies are reworked at the local scale for Clarkston officials to attempt to shift accountability and frame the ICE controversy as under control within the city (see Van Lieshout et al. 2012).

Clarkston’s Future as a Refugee Resettlement Site and a Thriving Multicultural Community While attention to this topic may create more questions than answers, it is necessary to explore the geopolitical understandings of immigration and resettlement by the local state. In this chapter, I examined the neoliberal multicultural discourses involving refugees and immigrants employed by Clarkston’s city council over the last two decades, identifying the racialized representations of refugees. At times, these discourses were competing and contradictory, shifting hegemonic notions of inclusion and belonging. Often these discourses are power-laden and serve either social or political purposes. Neoliberal multicultural policies “other” refugees and mark them “out of place.” Through this work, I drew attention to how Clarkston’s neoliberal multicultural policies use ethnic identities as commodities to market the city during social and cultural events. These representations cement refugees into perpetual legacies of colonialism and Orientalism. Recent waves of refugees and immigrants to the South are altering understandings of race, ethnicity, and everyday life. New frameworks need to include research on diversity, inclusion, and belonging during daily life and in public spaces. Scholars will need to grapple with the duality of discourses surrounding refugees and immigrants as criminals and victims. The onus of a “successful resettlement” has been placed on individual refugees (Fix et al. 2017), while still ensuring rights were gained through individual effort (Inwood 2018), even as city officials sustain representations of refugees as victims. Refugees cannot maintain a “refugee condition” and be expected to become economically inde-

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pendent within a national context criticizing ethnicity, citizenship, and race. It is critical that municipalities intending to profit from diversity take steps to ensure communities are not further divided by race and wealth gaps and that scholars continue to emphasize the role of neoliberal multiculturalism at the local scale. This research also has important implications for conceptualizing how neoliberal multicultural policies contribute to racialization in local institutions. These are best illustrated, I argue, through attention to specific case studies, such as through Clarkston’s police department’s policies. Community policing and crime mapping led to racism and racialization of refugees throughout the community. The addition of new groups of people challenges the complex geographies of racialization and existing social and political legacies. Geographers must continue to examine immigrant destinations in the “New South” through research interrogating municipals that have different institutional and racial contexts than other parts of the United States. New immigrant destinations, like Nashville and Clarkston, will continue to see new growth over the next decades. The racialized representations of refugees in Clarkston still exist within a historical context in which legacies of racism and othering followed a black/white binary and are different from traditional urban gateways. As the South continues to grow economically, immigration to the South will continue, and so will cities’ use of representations of refugees in place marketing for economic benefits.

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Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Zachary. 2020. “Former Clarkston Mayor, 81, Dies from COVID-19 Complications.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11 Dec. 2020. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Herna´ndez Castillo, Rosalva A. 2002. National Law and Indigenous Customary Law: The Struggle for Justice of Indigenous Women in Chiapas, Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyndman, Jennifer, and Wenona Giles. 2018. Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge. London and New York: Routledge. Huang, Xi, and Cathy Yang Liu. 2018. “Welcoming Cities: Immigration Policy at the Local Government Level.” Urban Affairs Review 54(1): 3 – 32. Inwood, Joshua F. J. 2018. “‘It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’: Political Geographies of White Supremacy, the Construction of White Innocence, and the Flint Water Crisis.” Geography Compass 12(3): 1 – 11 (e12361). 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Loyd, Jenna, and Anne Bonds. 2018. “Where Do Black Lives Matter? Race, Stigma, and Place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” The Sociological Review 66(4): 898 – 918. Melamed, Jodi. 2006. “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism.” Social Text 89: 1 – 24. Mitchell, Katharyne. 2004. “Geographies of Identity: Multiculturalism Unplugged.” Progress in Human Geography 28(5): 641 – 651. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2013. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4): 967 – 991. Mollett, Sharlene, and Caroline Faria. 2018. “The Spatialities of Intersectional Thinking: Fashioning Feminist Geographic Futures.” Gender, Place & Culture 25(4): 565 – 577. Nagel, Caroline. 2011. “Belonging.” In: Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr. et al. (eds.). A Companion to Social Geography. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 108 – 124.

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Nagel, Caroline. 2016. “Southern Hospitality? Islamophobia and the Politicization of Refugees in South Carolina during the 2016 Election Season.” Southeastern Geographer 56(3): 283 – 290. Park, Yun-Joo, and Patricia Richards. 2007. “Negotiating Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Mapuche Workers in the Chilean State.” Social Forces 85(3): 1319 – 1339. Peck, Jamie. 2013. “Explaining (with) Neoliberalism.” Territory, Politics, Governance 1(2): 132 – 157. Pickering, Sharon. 2001. “Common Sense and Original Deviancy: News Discourses and Asylum Seekers in Australia.” Journal of Refugee Studies 14(2): 169 – 186. Pickering, Sharon. 2008. “The New Criminals: Refugees and Asylum Seekers.” In: Thalia Anthony and Chris Cunneen (eds.). The Critical Criminology Companion. Leichhardt, AUS: Hawkins Press. 169 – 179. Pulido, Laura. 2018. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity III: Settler Colonialism and Nonnative People of Color.” Progress in Human Geography 42(2): 309 – 318. Ramakrishnan, S. Karthick, and Irene Bloemraad, editors. 2008. Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Redmond, Jeremy. 2017. “Activists to Call on Clarkston, Atlanta to Limit Cooperation with ICE.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 26 Apr. 2017. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Richards, Patricia. 2010. “Of Indians and Terrorists: How the State and Local Elites Construct the Mapuche in Neoliberal Multicultural Chile.” Journal of Latin American Studies 42(1): 59 – 90. Rutland, Ted. 2020. “Profiling the Future: The Long Struggle against Police Racial Profiling in Montreal.” American Review of Canadian Studies 50(3): 270 – 292. Smith, Barbara Ellen, and Jamie Winders. 2008. “‘We’re here to stay’: Economic Restructuring, Latino Migration and Place‐Making in the US South.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(1): 60 – 72. Smith, Ben. 2013. “Transformed by Refugees, Clarkston Takes Stage in ‘Third Country.’” SaportaReport, 21 Oct. 2013. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. St. John, Warren. 2007. “Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field.” The New York Times, 21 Jan. 2007. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Staeheli, Lynn A., and Caroline R. Nagel. 2008. “Rethinking Security: Perspectives from Arab-American and British Arab Activists.” Antipode 40(5): 780 – 801. Tastsoglou, Evangelia. 2006. “Gender, Migration and Citizenship: Immigrant Women and the Politics of Belonging in the Canadian Maritimes.” In: Evangelia Tastsoglou and Alexandra Dobrowolsky (eds.). Women, Migration and Citizenship: Making Local, National and Transnational Connections. London and New York: Routledge. 201 – 230. UNHCR. 2020. “Resettlement in the United States.” [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. United States, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations. 2010. Abandoned upon Arrival: Implications for Refugees and Local Communities Burdened by a U.S. Resettlement System that Is Not Working. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 12 July

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2010. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Van Lieshout, Maartje, et al. 2012. “Doing Scalar Politics: Interactive Scale Framing for Managing Accountability in Complex Policy Processes.” Critical Policy Studies 6(2): 163 – 181. Waters, Mary C. 1991. “The Role of Lineage in Identity Formation among Black Americans.” Qualitative Sociology 14(1): 57 – 76. Williams, Dorothy. 2007. The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal. Montreal: Véhicule Press. Winders, Jamie. 2006. “‘New Americans’ in a ‘New-South’ City? Immigrant and Refugee Politics in the Music City.” Social & Cultural Geography 7(3): 421 – 435. Winders, Jamie. 2007. “Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration, Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South.” Antipode 39(5): 920 – 942. Winders, Jamie. 2008. “An ‘Incomplete’ Picture? Race, Latino Migration, and Urban Politics in Nashville, Tennessee.” Urban Geography 29(3): 246 – 263. Xavier-Brier, Marik. 2016. Red, White, and Gay?: American Identity, White Savior Complex, and Pink Policing (unpublished dissertation). Georgia State University. Selected Clarkston City Council Minutes: “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 5 September 2006.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 1 April 2008.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 6 January 2009.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 3 March 2009.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 7 July 2009.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 1 September 2009.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Wednesday, 2 December 2009.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 2 March 2010.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 2 November 2010.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Wednesday, 8 December 2010.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 6 December 2011.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 7 February 2012.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 2 April 2013.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 7 February 2017.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Tuesday, 2 May 2017.” “Minutes of Council Meeting, Thursday, 5 July 2018.” “Minutes of Council Meeting by Teleconference, Tuesday, 7 July 2020.”

Michele E. Rozga

Making the Beams of Architectural Poetry out of the Rubble of Displacement: Czesław Miłosz, Taha Muhammad Ali, and the Lyric of Constructed World Citizenry Abstract: Czesław Miłosz (1911– 2004) and Taha Muhammad Ali (1931– 2011) are poets of place who chronicle the dual experience of living with the obliteration of major world political and economic systems and the concomitant reshaping of the spaces of their cultures. Though these two poets occupy different geographic spheres, both meet in the center of a Venn diagram with the shared purpose of mounting a fierce defense and creative resurrection of the world citizen, driven out of his or her homeland under thinly derived, monstrous rationales of racial or ethnic inferiority. Miłosz, a Roman Catholic from Polish Lithuania, lived in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation and subsequent liberation by the Soviet Army, and later became a permanent exile from his native land. Ali escaped the destruction of his birthplace, Saffuriyya, by the Israeli Army during the ArabIsraeli War of 1948, then returned to live in nearby Nazareth. Each of these writers, then, as Joel J. Janicki has said of Miłosz, creates out of “his experience of the human condition [… as] refracted through his personal geography and history, the specific times and places of his sojourn on this earth” (2012: 2). Each poet speaks as an architect, building via the material of the language of “the lonely / forgotten by the world” (Miłosz 1998: 35). Out of their own forgotten worlds, these poets build structures to hold world memory and culture.

In 1945 Czesław Miłosz (1911– 2004) – Polish Catholic refugee and survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, subsequent ardent Polish socialist who then could no longer support the cause because of its totalitarian bent toward Stalinism, the political twin of the Nazi terror, émigré to America as of 1960, after taking asylum in Paris – addressed his war-torn homeland in a poem called “A Nation.” The poem casts a pitiless eye on the forces, and especially on the people, who sold out, who did not fight hard enough against the forces of totalitarian tyranny, the people who took part in “Elevating men with the conscience of brothel-keepers” (Miłosz 1988: 91). But, also, Miłosz acknowledges the large pool of those caught up in the in-between spaces of World War II: people with no possessions, or homes, no source of income, no place; these people, the ones without the power to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-016

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build a place, either literally or imaginatively, these people are also a nation, for Miłosz: “A nation in crumpled caps, carrying all they own, / They go west and south searching for a place to live. / It has no cities, no monuments, no painting or sculpture, / Only the word passed from mouth to mouth / and the prophesy of poets” (91– 92). In 1945, Taha Mohammad Ali (1931– 2011), a self-taught Palestinian poet and short story writer with “four years of formal education” (Hoffman 2009: 7), was fourteen years old, living in the village of Saffuriyya, in Galilee, and would not write his first poem until he was fifty-two years old, in 1983, thirty-five years after the destruction of his home in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and three years after Czesław Miłosz won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980. Ali went, carrying all he owned, south, from Saffuriyya (now called Tzippori), to Nazareth for a place to live. In Nazareth, Ali had a family, wrote, and made a living by selling souvenirs from a small shop. He became known as a poet and entertained visitors in Nazareth, and he also traveled to read his works in public, to pass his words along from mouth to mouth, if not as a prophet, then certainly as a purveyor of art. These poets, connected by conflicts – World War II, the subsequent Arab-Israeli War – turned to poetry as a form to fill political voids, to address homelessness, and to examine fresh borders drawn like wounds across the places they knew and loved, utterly transfigured places perhaps often, even to this day, defined by the ways “the dead crowd the horizon / and doorways” (“Exodus,” Ali 2006: 31). For both writers, displacement by war became a complex of associations that constructed a way to be in the world. It is not that the language of these writers replaces the need for the places like Polish Wilno (Vilnius, now in Lithuania), where Miłosz grew up, or Saffuriyya, Palestine, where Ali did. It is more that the beams of what they build of words have been set down onto the invisible and yet indestructible framing of place – the type of place that has meaning for people, traditions, memories, families, and creation is place that lives as “spontaneous space / made of stars and spikes of wheat” (Ali 2006: 53) because it imaginatively ignores borders, nations, and political barriers, even when it is erased from a current map, or when its buildings have been bombed or razed. As the poet Adonis remarks in An Introduction to Arab Poetics, there is deep world historical precedent from the Middle Eastern cradles of civilization for thinking of the architecture of poetic language as being where places, once built, can remain, in spite of humans’ destructiveness to other humans often taking the form of displacing the other and destroying their homes and refuges – the precedent has to do with the ways that poetic language, for Adonis, is antithetical, and therefore destructive of, its opposition, the language of encoded power:

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Legislation and codification go against the nature of poetic language, for this language, since it is man’s expression of his explosive moods, his impetuousness, his difference, is incandescent, constantly renewing itself, heterogeneous, kinetic and explosive, always a disrupter of codes and systems. It is the search for the self, and the return to the self, but by means of a perpetual exodus away from the self. (Adonis 2003: 33 – 34)

The Japanese scholar Kojin Karatani, in his work Architecture as Metaphor, synthesizes a geographical and traditional counterpoint to Adonis, as he indicates that his reading of the Western tradition of language is that it is often a failure, because it cannot take such a both/and position on language and construction such as Adonis does. Karatani writes that “Plato admired the architect as a metaphor but despised the architect as an earthly laborer, because the actual architect, and even architecture itself, are exposed to contingency” (1995: xxxix). In Karatani’s view, this contingency need not, as he believes the Western tradition espouses, lead anyone to abandon any actual building (in language or in brick and mortar) on the hunt for a perfect metaphor. On the contrary, Karatani seems to want to show that contingency opens the doors of structures to the other/ Other: Contingency does not imply, however, that, as opposed to the designer’s ideal, the actual architecture is secondary and constantly in danger of collapse. Rather, contingency insures that no architect is able to determine a design free from the relationship with the “other” […]. All architects face this other. Architecture is thus a form of communication conditioned to occur without common rules – it is a communication with the other, who, by definition, does not follow the same set of rules. (xxxix–xi)

This discussion of the poets Taha Muhammad Ali and Czesław Miłosz, then, builds on the shared contingent nature of their lives, and of their poetries, this contingent nature not a flaw, but a source of strength, irony, and humor. As each poet became unhoused, such a state raised the internal and the communal need to write poems for continuous temporary shelter, and for the housing of culture.

Saffuriyya and Wilno Saffuriyya, a former village in Palestine, was destroyed in 1948 during the ArabIsraeli War – it was itself living on in memory right next to the site of an ancient archaeological ruin called Sepphoris, a place “inhabited at one time or another by Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Byzantines, Crusaders, and Muslims” (Levin 2000: 23). Anthony Shadid, a reporter for the New York Times before

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his death in 2012, wrote of the Levantine region, the former Ottoman Empire including Palestine, as being a place that bound together a remarkable tapestry of ethnicities, religions, nationalities, and languages that, unencumbered by borders, comprised a culture far greater than its individual parts. It survived as it did because of its pluralism and its own notion of tolerance. Albanians and Greeks, Armenians and Serbs, Arabs and Hungarians served the government; Christians filled the ranks of its janissaries; Muslims and Christians, Jews and Samaritans, Circassians and Araba, Armenians and Kurds inhabited lands not too distant from Marjayoun [Shadid’s ancestral hometown]. (2012: 21)

The region was vast: “Spanning three continents and more than six centuries, it was Islam’s equivalent of Rome, reigning over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans” (Shadid 2012: 20). Furthermore, according to Shadid, “since [the] fall [of the Ottoman Empire] after World War I, never has such a mosaic of cultures existed over such a breadth of land” (21). The biographer of Taha Muhammad Ali, Adina Hoffman, who knew him before he died, relays that the poet had a sense of his own place as viewed through the grim, but also beautiful, kaleidoscope of history: “Taha has often, and not without irony, likened his Saffuriyya, to Homer’s Troy, a ‘lost’ city whose mythic essence has fueled the imaginations of writers and readers for more than thirty centuries” (2009: 7). Wilno, the place that Czesław Miłosz lost and that he therefore often imaginatively reconstructs in his poems and prose, is, he writes in Beginning with My Streets, a capital city of “‘another,’ less known Europe” (1991: x) that included the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a place resting on contested soil in the Baltics from its inception, restored to Lithuania in 1939 by the Soviets, who then annexed the country and deported ethnic Lithuanians from Wilno (now Vilnius) in large numbers from 1946 – 1950. Miłosz was born in Wilno in 1911, about a decade before the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the reaches of which ended a bit to the south of Miłosz’s place of birth. Nonetheless, Miłosz writes of where he comes from as being both specific and permanently indistinct, as was the borderless Levant where Ali was born twenty years after Miłosz. In the preface to Beginning with My Streets, Miłosz describes his own origins like this: “I myself coming precisely from that Grand Duchy [of Lithuania], have always had great difficulty in explaining the innumerable imbroglios resulting from the geography and history of that corner of Europe. Even for the Poles, though I write in Polish, I am somebody who comes from outside and whose tales deal with the unfamiliar” (1991: ix). Miłosz aligns his origin story with an existential gesture toward the story of identity being unmoored from place, when he writes: “Perhaps one’s country of origin is not so important in view of the progressing unification of the earth. After all, man is confronted every-

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where with existential problems, and our bond of being born in the same time, thus being contemporaries, is already stronger than that of being born in the same country” (1991: iv). There is a wistful tone here. Maybe Miłosz sensed that he had to embrace a form of displacement as a residence, even as he often reconstructs his childhood streets in prose and poetry, as does Taha Muhammad Ali. “Being born in the same time, thus being contemporaries,” even though unknown to one another, Miłosz and Ali share the impulse to construct their worlds, their whole mental/architectural maps of disappeared homes, building in Polish and Arabic respectively. Ali’s biographer, Hoffman, took many of the stories of his Palestinian village life, pre-1948, not from him alone but from oral histories of other descendants of Saffuriyya, many of whom also fled to Nazareth (Hoffman 2009; Selinger 2009). Gabriel Levin, one of Ali’s translators along with Hoffman’s husband, Peter Cole, relays in the introduction to Ali’s small volume, Never Mind, by Ibis Editions in Israel, that Saffuriyya, or at least the village of his [Ali’s] childhood, where myth and reality converged, shone in the poet’s mind as a place of prelapsarian innocence and embodied, in Palestinian terms, that period before the “great catastrophe,” al-nakba, brought about by the ArabIsraeli War of 1948 and the consequent shattering and exodus of the Palestinian community. (2000: 21)

Ali, who by several accounts was a cheerful and undaunted man, once drove Levin through the Israeli community of Tzippori, which had replaced his ancestral village, and “casually pointed from the window of his car at a couple of large, broken stones […]: ‘Our home was here,’ he said, and drove on” (Levin 2000: 23). In this casual gesture, Ali seemed to echo his poetic style, a combination of tragedy and self-deprecation that serves to describe the intertwining of unbearable loss with unbearable lightness, as if he is living by and through such casual (and yet artistic) gestures, “writing and rewriting the world with light and shadow” (The Salt of the Earth, Wenders and Salgado 2014). As in the famous documentary film just quoted, which depicts the life of Sebastião Salgado and his efforts to photograph and therefore document the racialized poor of our planet, Ali’s light touch with the shadows of grief and danger in his existence serves his culture’s memory indelibly, as if photographed for posterity. Miłosz, writing about language in the early history of Poland and Lithuania, asserts that the Lithuanians were “the last pagans of the Western world” (1968: 8), as if to say that the Lithuanians were anachronisms of their times, and not understood as people or as communicators, but rather more as aliens within. In this same book, Native Realm, there is a parallel between Latin being elevated, then Polish, into the “language of culture, that is, the language of the ruling

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class,” while Lithuanian “passed into the category of ‘folk speech’” (1968: 12). In these ideas, the reader senses that Miłosz has tied his identity to his Lithuanian roots, but that he acknowledges his initial audience came from his ability to write in the “language of the ruling class.” Miłosz gained a much wider audience when he was translated into English, and he also translated much of his own work, and composed in English as well, especially after around 1973 (Nathan and Quinn 1991). Taha Muhammad Ali had a similarly fraught relationship to his poetic idioms and language. Ali was a self-taught man, and he “schooled himself not just on Arabic and European models but on English and American ones” (Selinger 2009: 6).

Doorways, Bells, Brick and Stone It might be helpful to think of Miłosz and Ali as constructing spaces again and again in their words, as a constant imaginary homegoing that takes the place of being able to walk through a doorway. Doorways imply walls, order, and places to get to, as well as ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing. But, as mentioned above, Ali asserts in the poem “Exodus” that “the dead crowd the horizon / and doorways”; repetitive acts of doorway construction in language create rooms for the past and the present to mingle and remain visible to one another. The British scholar of Arabic literature, Julia Bray, speaks of repetition in Arabic poetry as being a device that exists at first to serve memory, but then that such repetition transforms into a device that relives the past. In the poem “Campo di Fiori,” Miłosz uses an image of a tongue to open the doorway of the world by force of language; for whom the world has been destroyed, he seems to say, there is always that door created by concrete words: “Those dying here, the lonely / forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them / the language of an ancient planet,” and the doors between the living and the dead seem to swing open (1988: 35). It does not seem that nostalgia is the correct word to capture Ali’s or Miłosz’s particular forms of place or home construction in their works – nostalgia indicates a falsely sepia-toned longing for things to be as they no longer can be. Neither of these writers has nostalgia as a central tone or goal, but rather each man has set himself the task of using language to attach their memories to the physical world. Their words therefore are not metaphysical, nor are they symbolic, even when they do create enduring symbols. Their placeness is a form of attaching words to the world instead of to the merely representational or the abstract. In the poem “The Bell at Forty: The Destruction of a Village,” Ali lays an image from the past right next to a remembered structure: “The past dozes beside me / as the ringing does / beneath its grandfather bell” (2006: 107). In this short

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poem, the place the poet actually occupies while hearing the bell is not clear – is the bell in Nazareth, or is the bell in Saffuriyya, and therefore destroyed? The structure the poet chooses collapses created and imagined space into one waking moment when the ringing of a bell radiates out from its physical origin and merges with time and memory. In the poem “Mittelbergheim,” Miłosz uses the sound of a bell to make a similar build of time and memory, but he is more explicit in explaining that the bell’s noise is not in the present, but rather being used to map out the place he used to live, in this case, behind his closed eyes: I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards Of Mittelbergheim. […] I keep my eyes closed. Do not rush me, You, fire, power, might, for it is too early. I have lived through many years, and, as in this half-dream, I felt I was attaining the moving frontier Beyond which color and sound come true And the things of this earth are united. (1988: 107)

Inside the architecture of a bell, sound is produced and then it attaches to memory and therefore to place. The sound is physical, and it reproduces a place with great meaning to the poets. In the poem “A Legend,” Miłosz describes a city in political terms, both its creation and its destruction, as if it is the action of building such a place that demonstrates and solidifies power rather than creating home, as if, therefore, it is the action of destroying such a place that reminds people of what a home should be, as if a sort of homeless state can be affiliated, then, with true nationhood: “And then, sitting where once it had stood, / That beautiful city, sifting through our fingers / The sand of the barrens, we discovered / The sweet name of our country. It was no more / Than the sand and the rustle of the wind in wormwood” (1988: 103). In these passages, the architecture of a city is pulverized and then is run through the fingers of the people. The poet distances himself from personal loss at the end of the poem: “Pride then left us and we rendered homage / To men and women who once lived and ever since / We have had our home founded in history” (104). Taha Muhammad Ali is more oblique in his politics and in his sense of loss over the destruction of his childhood village in the poem “The Place Itself, or I Hope You Can’t Digest It,” which opens with these lines: “And so I come to the place itself, / but the place is not / its dust and stones and open space” (2006: 157). Then, the poem moves into a series of questions about the things that used to be present in this place, such as “Where are the fields we played / our games of hide-and-seek in?” And “Where are the windows […]?” (157). Con-

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fronted with the empty spaces in this poem, Ali gestures toward construction of place by listing that place’s former inhabitants in the form of multiple questions, running his fingers through his memories, but not coming out feeling that he is content or at peace, one of a long line of people who have been displaced; for Ali, in this work, history is too close and he won’t stand in its queue. The poem ends with an old woman yelling at the sky, yelling at a bird (a kite) that has swooped down and scooped up a plump hen: “I hope you can’t digest it”! (159). As Eric Selinger cautions, it is “hard not to read this ending, at least for a moment, as a sort of political allegory” with the kite as Israel, the hen as Palestine (2009: 5). But, Selinger’s assessment that such an allegorical reading robs the poem of its details and its subtle construction of place seems apt (5). Ali’s place cannot be folded into history or reduced into historical interpretation so easily. Miłosz also often wavers at the task of standing in line, waiting for others to assess his history – his view of that history is sometimes presented with a buffer of irony, however, that is different from Ali’s intimate variety of that technique. For example, in the poem “Child of Europe,” Miłosz’s immediate loss of home is cast aside in favor of his desire to use the reversal of loss, a form of savage ironic distance, to indict the totalitarian power structures of lies that wish to obliterate individual details as a form of power – in language, and in war. He writes, “He who has power, has it by historical logic,” demonstrating his and his audiences’ awareness of the falsehoods and circular logic of both the Nazis and the Communists that took his home from him. The power of the state that proves that the power of the state is ordained is then further demonstrated and ironized in these lines from the same poem: “Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision. / Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction” (1988: 87). These ironic lines are intellectually devastating, and yet, the construction of them stands in stark contrast to the more personal use of irony that Ali demonstrates. Miłosz, after all, did leave Europe. Ali never left the Levant, though he did travel to attend poetry festivals after he became well-known and loved. Miłosz writes that as he reproduced Wilno, Vilnius, out of his childhood memory, and when he, during this reproduction, walked virtually through the streets, explaining them by explaining his travels, he first “walked past the dock on the way to Antokol” (1991: 6). Second on his encounters on this journey, a bridge: “Then, the bridge or, rather, the bridge across the Wilenka where it flows into the Wilia. Antokol itself is, first of all, the boredom of a long, only partly built-up street, a muscular memory in the legs, about a space ‘in between’” (6). This “muscular memory in the legs,” of a place where the poet no longer walks, connects words to physicality and to an architecture of place that is somehow connected to motion in the past, in living memory, as opposed to any static

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nostalgia or longing for the past to be reimposed on the present like a museum piece. I connect Miłosz’s muscle memory to Ali’s term “spontaneous space” in the poem “The Evening Wine of Aged Sorrow” (2006: 47– 53). In this poem, the poet jumps from memory to memory, each laid out like stepping stones on a path that ends with a reconnection to something alive and responsive. “At dusk,” the poem begins, and “time collapses / like towering bridges / and vaults” (47). In that opening, the poet uses the timing of nightfall to, at first, travel into memory, or at least travel into his own memories, where “time collapses.” Then, the poet addresses a listener, Amina, and takes his inner journey and attaches it to the phenomena outside of himself, exclaiming to her “the birds and rivers as well recall / their homeland at dusk” (49). Here, the poet expresses the naturalness of creating an inner geography, an inner place, at regular intervals, when the time is right, as it is at nightfall, a transitional moment, when the poet becomes a “witness [to the] calamity / of sundials in retreat, / like ships that lost / track of their ports –” (49). In this passage, sundials lose their purpose at sundown, and therefore lose their ability to track their reason for existence, the sun, and Ali is creating an intricate analogy about home, and how it disappears and reappears on the horizon of life, whether that is a house, a town, or a country. And yet, as the poem unfolds, it travels from that sadness of returning dusk, and therefore of returning uncertainty and displacement, to a sort of joy, a “muscle memory in the legs”: “And, nevertheless, / ever since / I first caressed / the air of this world / with the tips of my fingers – / I’ve been dreaming… / […] dreaming of streets and forests / that cover the slopes and seasons / and cross the hours’ gardens / and seep through spontaneous space / made of stars and spikes of wheat” (51– 53). In the foregoing passage, the gloom of dusk has given way to “streets and forests” repopulating the memory and words of the poet, and then “seeping” through a “spontaneous space” that seems to combine the natural world, poetic language, memory, and place into a renewal of the poet’s personhood, even though he is writing of loss. The poet Adonis, in An Introduction to Arab Poetics, writes of pre-Islamic poetry in Arabic as being “not only a conscious application of speech, but also a conscious participation in the act of existence” (2003: 32). Taha Muhammad Ali’s work has been situated in the pre-Islamic tradition of Arabic poetics that stretches back to the oral tradition, which is connected to the view that language is at its best immediate, rather than overly mediated; the oral tradition in Arabic is quite different from the way that poetic language in Arabic came to be seen later in large city centers, as a way to gain cultural power (Bray 2014). It is as if Ali, then, works within a set of values that is powerfully honest, concrete, and expressive, and yet resistant to the rhetorical use of the language of political power. In his work Word Play: What Happens When People Talk, Peter Farb seems

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to assert a parallel set of ideas about the concrete uses of language (poetic or not), when he creates the metaphor of language as a multidimensional network: “the ecology” of language – the web formed by strands uniting the kind of language spoken, its history, the social conventions of the community in which it is spoken, the influence of neighboring languages, and even the physical environment in which the language is spoken. This metaphor emphasizes that the function of language is to relate its speakers to one another and to the world they live in. (1988: 17)

This sort of language is also political, but it is differently so – a language of relatedness, of construction, of the world, of things, is a language that does not use itself to comment on what it signifies. Each of these poets seems to return frequently to the desire to get out of their own ways, rhetorically, as if they continuously realize that language itself is part of the problem standing in the way of an architecture of a new world. In the poem “Ars Poetica?” Miłosz poses what one of the obstacles might be when he writes of the “intimacy between strangers” (a term inspired by an essay, “Childhood and Poetry,” by Pablo Neruda) that poetry allows: “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person, / for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will” (1988: 212). In the poem “Empty Words,” Ali indicts the betrayal that can so often happen in his poems, as if writing is personified as an intimate who has gone on to be disappointing: “Ah, little notebook, […] I’ve protected you / from dampness and rodents / and entrusted you with / my sadness and fear […] / though in exchange I’ve gotten from you / only disobedience and betrayal” (2006: 109). For each poet, the architecture wavers and shimmers on the horizon, and as Miłosz says, at the end of “Ars Poetica?,” “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument” (212).

“Ecstatic Pessimists” In The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czesław Miłosz, Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn refer to “the ecstatic pessimism of Ulro” (1991: 99), which is a reference to their reading of Miłosz’s work in The Land of Ulro, an extended meditation in prose on the origins of his poetic thinking. Subsequently, Robert Royal picked up and used the term as the title for his 2005 in memoriam article for Miłosz in Wilson Quarterly. Royal wrote that Miłosz “refused to see the world bleakly” (2005: 72), in spite of what he endured. This resilience can also be seen in the works of Taha Mu-

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hammad Ali, and in the ways he is described by his biographer, Adina Hoffman, and his translator, Gabriel Levin. These two poets, though they of course also employ metaphors and other constructions of language that hover above the real world of place or person, are also employing a sleight of hand to use their language to anchor themselves into places that they can no longer access. Furthermore, this is not an act of nostalgia, but an act of creation as a flag planted into the ground in protest against the erasures of identity that politicized speech, that border-drawing and border-enforcing, can attempt to enact against vulnerable persons, such as the racialized and enforced poverty of the Palestinian people and the conquests of Miłosz’s old world Lithuanian places, whose “sparsely inhabited forests […] provided ample room for colonizing and clearing [by] Poles, Germans, even Scotsmen” (Miłosz, 1968: 21). Miłosz writes extensively of this in his works about totalitarianism and how it creates a form of living death within people and societies using language as a destructive form of empty power, restricting physical access to places, and then marginalizing people who can be classified as having fallen just outside the borders of a designated place – physically, linguistically, or culturally. In the short story “So What” by Taha Muhammad Ali, he writes about an impoverished boy: I went barefoot the first ten years of my life, and while I was bitter about being deprived of shoes, and my incessant desire to get hold of a pair overwhelmed me, my suffering on the day the Moroccan shoe salesman came to our village – on that day alone, by God – my suffering on that single day was such that it surpassed the torment I had suffered at having gone barefoot for the ten previous years combined. (2006: 179)

The boy ends up with two right shoes, and cannot walk in them. Eventually the shoes are returned to the merchant— the boy sleeps restlessly, and “every few minutes he’d start up with a fright and scream ‘So what?’ at his phantom critics (193). To want a shoe, even an ill-fitting one, is a good metaphor for the desire to use even awkwardly fitted poetic language to construct a reality that allows a person to make a form of escape from his historical position. To be reduced to history is to be denied individuality, but it is also to be denied community. It is as if these two poets, by force of history and power, were returned to their own languages in order to embrace them as places. They are two men who act antithetically to power, propping their beams and poles of poetry and prose up against the lofty and impending emptiness pressing down on them due to exile, creating a place to live there, co-opting the empty tent of power for those who need shelter. In a counterpoint to the idea that any work of art, or poetry, could have this constructive power, in addition to its descriptive or mimetic

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power, Cinqué Hicks writes, in his essay “The In-Between: Identity and Global Anxiety,” that the idea that modern experience is an engagement with neither specific origins nor destinations but with transit itself is a useful one [… as] globalization has begun to chip away at the notion of identity even for those who are relatively stationary. The condition of already having discarded one cultural matrix without yet having arrived at a new one; the dislocating experience of being suspended between worldviews; the disorientation of “here” and “there” never quite standing still: artists are exploring all of these conditions, which may already be new norms for the human species. (2012: 164)

It seems that Hicks is willing to accept that art, or language, can be used as a creative tool without it also being associated with the physicality of the world, or a home or place. However, I think that Ali and Miłosz are indeed a counterpoint to the extraction of creativity from the physical world. I share Hicks’ view that for some, especially those who are not economically disadvantaged, it can seem that global citizenship is equal to a sort of unmooring from specific physical origins or environments. However, there is plenty of evidence that the creative tension that arises from having no place from which to create gives artists and writers a sort of excavationist, physical, ecology-or-home-rebuilding function in the early twenty-first century, rather than a function that drives human life more toward the abstract. In his extraordinary work of extended meditation on what drove him to be a poet and writer, The Land of Ulro, Miłosz speaks to his sustained and embodied rejection of what Hicks accepts about that unmoored quality of modern existence and art: “Here we should be reminded that man is above all an organizer of space, both internal and external, and that this in fact is what is meant by imagination. We are that pulsation of blood, that rhythm, that organism which transposes external spatial structures into internal spaces” (Miłosz 1984: 245). Taha Muhammad Ali might, given a chance, expand on Miłosz, as he does poetically in his piece “Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum,” from 1973, about ten years before The Land of Ulro was published: I’ll linger on – a piece of shrapnel the size of a penknife lodged in the neck; I’ll remain – a blood stain the size of a cloud on the shirt of this world! (2006: 17)

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In this passage, which ends the poem, Ali’s imagination makes a move from internal to external, as it becomes one with the physical markers of trauma and subjugation, not in death, but in a subversion of death, a resurrection via the means by which he and his society have been bloodied. Ali’s is a triumph of the imagination, an act of taking, of imaginative transposition, that claims space in the body exactly where the body has been wounded – in the neck, and via the blood. Czesław Miłosz and Taha Muhammad Ali were able to keep creating out of exile, and their bodies of work are humane housing for the spirit of the other that they see and acknowledge outside of themselves, and outside of the intermediary of language.

Works Cited Adonis. 2003. An Introduction to Arab Poetics. Translated by Catherine Cobham. London: Saqi Books. Ali, Taha Muhammad. 2006. So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971 – 2005. Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. Bray, Julia. 2014. “Human Chain.” St. John’s College Lecture on Arabic Literature. [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Farb, Peter. 1988. Word Play: What Happens When People Talk. New York: Bantam. Hicks, Cinqué. 2012. “The In-Between: Identity and Global Anxiety.” In: Jerry Cullum, Catherine Fox, and Cinqué Hicks. Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape. New York: Possible Futures. 163 – 167. Hoffman, Adina. 2009. My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Janicki, Joel J. 2012. “Miłosz’s Quest for Affirmation and His Reflections on US-American Culture.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14(5), special issue on “New Work about the Journey and its Portrayals.” [accessed 10 Mar. 2022]. Karatani, Kojin. 1995. Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money. Translated by Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levin, Gabriel. 2000. “On Taha Muhammad Ali.” In: Taha Muhammad Ali. Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story. Jerusalem: Ibis Editions. 13 – 37. Miłosz, Czeslaw. 1968. Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Translated by Catherine S. Leach. New York: Doubleday. Miłosz, Czeslaw. 1984. The Land of Ulro. Translated by Louis Iribarne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miłosz, Czeslaw. 1988. The Collected Poems. New York: Ecco. Miłosz, Czeslaw. 1991. Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Nathan, Leonard, and Arthur Quinn. 1991. The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czesław Miłosz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Royal, Robert. 2005. “The Ecstatic Pessimist.” Wilson Quarterly 29(1): 72 – 82.

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The Salt of the Earth 2014. Dir. Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. Decia Films et al. Selinger, Eric Murphy. 2009. “Men from Galilee.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 31(1 – 2): 72 – 83. Shadid, Anthony. 2012. House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Notes on Contributors Verena Adamik currently teaches and researches at the University of Potsdam, and is the author of In Search of the Utopian States of America: Intentional Communities in Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century (2020). She holds a PhD in American Studies, and her academic interests include utopian studies and communalism, political participation, African American science fiction and horror, and Gothic/horror literature. Noel Allende Goitia is an independent scholar who received his PhD in Music Composition (with an emphasis on ethnomusicology) from Michigan State University. He has published extensively in Spanish on Puerto Rican and Afro-diasporic music, most recently Las músicas de los Puerto Ricos: Una breve introducción a su studio (2018). Regina E. Brisgone is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Norfolk State University. Dr. Brisgone specializes in effects of race and gender on drug use and sex work in community contexts, using the life course developmental approach. Her publications include “Cracked Perspectives: Reflections of Women and Girls in the Aftermath of the Crack Cocaine Era” (with Judith A. Ryder) in Feminist Criminology. Hunter H. Gardner is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, USA. Her books include Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature (2019) and the coedited volume Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (2014). Chrysovalantis Kampragkos is a doctoral candidate in American Literature and Culture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His thesis negotiates contemporary theatrical portrayals of state violence, nationalism, and border control. He has published on theater, political history, and imperialism, and is the assistant editor of Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard teaches at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale and is an associate member of an interdisciplinary research unit for history, languages, and literatures. She obtained her PhD from the University of Tours, France, and specializes in women’s studies, African American, Asian, and Native American fiction. Geoffroy de Laforcade is Professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and World History at Norfolk State University. Among his coedited books are Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape (2020); In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History (2015); and Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other (2011). Page R. Laws is founding Dean Emerita of the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University and retired Professor of English, as well as a former Fulbright Scholar in Germany and Austria. Her books include the coedited works Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other (2015) and Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape (2020). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-017

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Ludmila Martanovschi is Associate Professor of American Studies at Ovidius University in Constanta, Romania. Her coedited works include Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of American Literature and Culture in the New Millennium (2020) and (Im)Migration Patterns: Displacement and Relocation in Contemporary America (2016). She is the Secretary of the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA). David Metzger is Professor of English, Dean of the Patricia & Douglas Perry Honors College, and founder of the Institute for Jewish Studies and Interfaith Understanding at Old Dominion University, Virginia. His books include The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan (1995) and the coedited volume Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference (2005). Dana Mihăilescu is Associate Professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest in Romania. Her books include Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890 – 1930: Struggles for Recognition (2018), Regimes of Vulnerability in Jewish American Media and Literature (2015), Ethnic Identity Dilemmas in Early Twentieth Century East European Jewish Immigrant Narratives in the United States (2012), the coedited work Romanian Culture in the Global Age (2010). Briana Lee Robinson earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Special Education and a minor in Psychology from Norfolk State University. She also graduated from the Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College. Her presented research has explored questions surrounding language and social life. Michele E. Rozga is Associate Professor of English at Norfolk State University. She has published a collection of her poems, My Adversary Came onto the Windowsill of Another Dream, as a Bluebird (2020) and has won numerous prizes for her poetry. She has worked in performance art and specializes in women’s studies, film, contemporary literature, and methods for teaching composition. Sarah Ryniker is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her previous research explored nineteenth-century Irish immigration and residential patterns of immigrants in Savannah, Georgia. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Ryniker teaches cultural geography courses including the Geography of Race in the US. She is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork on refugees, place, and identity politics in Clarkston, Georgia. Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre (2021) and coeditor of the volumes Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape (2020) and NineteenthCentury Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s – 1860s (2019). He is also one of the editors of Anglia: Journal of English Philology. Cathy C. Waegner taught American Studies at the University of Siegen until her retirement in 2013. She edited Mediating Indianness (2015), and her coedited books include Migration, Diaspora, Exile: Narratives of Affiliation and Escape (2020), Ethnic Resonances in Performance,

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Literature, and Identity (2019), Transculturality and Perceptions of the Immigrant Other (2015). Adrienne Ronee Washington is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at West Virginia University. She is a fellow of the American Association of University Women (2021 – 2022). Her research in sociocultural linguistics engages with critical studies of race, gender, and religion in intersectional communities in the African diaspora, including the eastern US and northeastern Brazil. Her work has appeared in, among others, Gender and Language, Journal of Africana Religions, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader.

Index Abjection 13, 46, 52, 148, 209 – 229 Aferim! 10, 85, 87 – 89, 92 Agency 2, 7, 9, 21, 57 – 60, 67 – 77, 115 – 117, 120 – 128, 142, 166, 179, 187, 221, 268 – 274, 285, 328 AIDS 7, 12, 194, 210, 213 – 214, 235, 237, 241 – 244, 255 – 259 – HIV/AIDS 13, 153, 198, 233 – 234, 237 – 238, 240 – 242, 249 Ali, Taha Muhammad 15, 337 – 349 Alterity 7, 136 Antisemitism 97, 108, 109, 129 Apocalypse 1, 22, 125, 150, 197, 203, 219 Baldwin, James 27, 32 Balestrini, Nanni 15, 299 – 300 Ballad of Black Tom 10, 113, 114, 124, 126 Belonging 1, 140, 198, 316, 318, 320, 331 Beloved 13, 209, 211, 214, 221 – 226, 229 The Bluest Eye 13, 209, 211, 215, 216, 218 Bong Joon Ho 8, 21 – 25, 31 – 41 The Black Border: Gullah Stories from the Carolina Coast 12, 162 – 181 Black Lives Matter 14, 228, 288 Boukman 135, 138, 143, 145 Buntline, Ned 9, 45 – 50, 53 – 63 Butler, Octavia 12, 188 – 205 Camus, Albert 3, 22, 24 Cancer 12, 188, 192 – 195, 209, 213 – 217, 256 – 259 Capital 294, 303, 308 Catlin, George 48, 49 Citizenry 48, 338 City Crimes; or Life in New York and Boston 48, 51, 53, 61 City of Bones 14, 277 – 284, 288 – 290 City mysteries=>serial city mysteries Clarkston, Georgia 15, 315 – 332 Clarkston City Council 315, 325 Clay’s Ark 12, 188 – 193, 196 – 197, 201, 203 – 204 – Clay’s Ark (spaceship) 189, 203 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110789799-018

– Clayarks (contaminated people) 12, 187 – 205 – Clayark disease 189, 190 – 191, 193 – 195 Climate 22, 125, 255, 258 – 259, 266 Collapse 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 15 – 16, 94, 95, 138, 142, 154, 212, 219, 220, 277, 296, 298, 339, 343. 345 Conspiracy theory 3, 108 Contagion 1 – 5, 10, 13 – 14, 45 – 46, 49 – 50, 135, 140, 143, 148 – 149, 151 – 154, 196, 199 – 200, 209, 261 – 264, 270 Contamination 50, 153, 191, 193 – 194, 292 COVID-19 4, 13, 135, 215, 229, 233 – 237, 244 – 250, 255 – 257, 301 – 304, 316 Crack cocaine 236, 238, 244 – 245, 249 Cthulhu 113, 115, 117 – 119, 121 – 124 Dawes, Kwame 14, 289 The Dead Nation 10, 85 – 87, 92 – 104 Degeneration/degenerate 1 – 2, 4 – 6, 73, 78, 116, 135, 137, 140 – 141, 148 – 149, 152 – 153, 167, 172, 174 204, 308 Dehumanize 137, 148, 175, 178, 214, 223 – 224, 270 – 271, 302 Deviance 3, 5, 11, 153, 165 – 168, 170, 173, 179, 181, 227, 248 – 249, 326 – Deviant spaces 53 – Heterotopia of deviation=>heterotopia Dickens, Charles 5, 9, 49, 54, 59 – Dickensian 116, 124 Disaster capitalism 11, 135 – 136, 154 Discipline 1, 3, 7, 15, 136, 144 – 145, 234, 293 – 294, 297, 300, 309 – 310 Diversity 11 – 12, 48, 57, 68, 77, 79, 161, 166, 168, 180, 303, 315 – 332 Dorian, Emil 93 – 101 Dutty, Boukman=>Boukman Ebola 269 – 272 Ellison, Ralph 8, 22 – 41 Epidemic 46 – 49, 63, 123, 142, 194, 200, 209 – 210, 235 – 245, 255 – 267

356

Index

Erasure 2, 12, 72, 127, 168 – 175, 179, 190, 201 – 202, 272, 338, 347 Eugenics 6, 7, 12, 30, 143, 152 – 153, 161 – 165, 173 – 178 European Union 15, 106 – 107, 293 – 295 Exclusion 1, 5, 11, 93, 98 – 101, 117, 162, 169, 179 – 180, 212 – 213, 256, 298, 306 – 310, 321, 325

Immigration=>migration Immunity/immunization 4, 236 Indigenous peoples 209, 210, 216, 321 Infection 2, 11, 60, 148 – 149, 194, 229, 233 – 249, 256, 264 Introduction to Arab Poetics 338, 345 Invisible Man 8, 21 – 40 Jude, Radu 10, 85 – 109

Five Points 9, 45 – 63, 124 Foucault, Michel 3, 13, 136, 137, 227, 233 – 234, 300, 303 Fractal recursivity 12, 168, 174, 175, 179 Framing 11, 16, 142, 321 – Reframing 162 Gaze 9, 58, 67 – 68, 80, 82, 162, 192, 210, 216, 237 – Lettered gaze 9, 67 Gem of the Ocean 14, 277, 280 – 282, 285 – 288 Ghost 1, 6, 9, 23, 34 – 39, 128, 223 – 24 Globalization 3 – 4, 6, 118, 136, 295, 319, 348 Gonzales, Ambrose 11 – 12, 162 – 181 Great replacement 3, 129 Gullah 12, 162 – 181 Haitian revolution 12, 50, 138 – 154 Hammers on Bone 10, 114, 122 – 123 Harvey, David 15, 294, 297, 302 Hegemony/hegemonic 9, 11, 13 – 14, 16, 32, 36, 144, 209 – 214, 221, 227 – 229, 316, 324, 331 Heterotopia 227, 228 Hippocratic 14, 255 – 273 HIV=>AIDS Holocaust 10, 85 – 109 Home 13, 209, 211, 213, 226 – 228 The Host 8, 21 – 40 Hot zone 14, 264 – 269 I, Daniel Blake 15, 305 I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians 10, 85, 92 – 101 Iconization 168, 174, 175 Illness as Metaphor 39, 214, 215

Khaw, Cassandra 10, 113 – 115, 122 – 125, 128 Kristeva, Julia 13, 192, 209 – 213, 216 – 220, 224 LaValle, Victor 10, 113 – 115, 124 – 125 Lippard, George 45 – 63 Loach, Ken 15, 305 Local scale 15, 315, 325, 331 – 332 Lovecraft Country 10, 113 – 114, 126 – 127 Lovecraft, H. P. 10 – 11, 114 – 129 Lucretius 14, 255, 264 – 269, 273 – 274 The Man Who Lived Underground 8, 21 – 25, 28 Marx, Karl 303, 307 – 309 – Marxist 37, 41, 97 Mbembe, Achille 45, 136, 152 – 153, 294, 296 – 297, 301, 316 – 319, 322, 329 – 332 Migration 3, 7, 8, 15, 46, 62 Miłosz, Czesław 15 – 16, 337 – 349 Minority/minorities 5, 86 – 90, 114, 121, 165 – 166, 176, 197, 200, 213, 234 – 248, 310, 320 – 329 Monster 22, 25, 31 – 35, 40, 123 – 129, 150, 192, 209 Morrison, Toni 13, 210 – 229 Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life 9, 47 – 48, 50, 53, 56 Nation 1, 6, 46, 47, 70 – 72, 81, 90, 104, 120, 136, 145, 152, 153, 202, 222, 337 – 338 – Nation-state 4, 12, 14, 200, 202, 204, 317, 320, 323 – Nationalism/nationalist 30, 96, 99, 102 – 104, 108 – 109, 139, 147, 150 – 152, 167

Index

Neoliberal 4, 13, 15, 33, 209 – 210, 293, 297, 300 – 302, 305, 310, 315 – 316, 319 – 332 – Neoliberal multiculturalism 15, 315 – 316, 320 – 332 New Orleans 47, 48, 50, 63, 76 New Wave of Romanian cinema 10, 85, 104 New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million 48, 48, 51, 52 Nora, Pierre 1, 11, 14 Notes from Underground 40, 42 On the stroll 13, 239 Othering 4, 7, 9, 67, 116 – 117, 166, 210, 214, 222, 320, 325 – 326, 332 Outbreak 2, 31, 139, 301 – Outbreak of disease 1, 46 – 47, 145, 194, 201, 258 – 272 – Outbreak narrative 14, 198, 200, 264 – 266, 274 Pandemic 1 – 15, 42, 52, 142, 153 – 154, 190, 194, 204, 234 – 237, 244 – 247, 255 – 257, 270, 304, 315 Parasite 8, 21 – 23, 31 – 32, 35 – 42 Pathology/pathologizing 7, 11 – 12, 140 – 141, 164, 238, 260 – Pathogen/s 4, 12, 14, 142, 94, 210, 213, 256 – 258, 263 – 265 Pedreira, Antonio Salvador 69, 70, 72, 80 Plague 3, 4, 13, 24 – 25, 51 – 52, 136, 138, 198, 215, 234, 245, 250, 257 – 68, 274, 289 Plato 14, 28 – 29, 277 – 279, 289, 290, 339 Postmemory 1, 6, 16 Poverty-shame nexus 9, 22, 37, 41 Prostitution 48, 238 – 245, 248 Puerto Rico 9, 67, 69 – 75, 77 – 81, 140, 151 – Puerto Rican identity 67, 72 72 – 3, 80 – 82 Quarantine 4, 34, 140, 234, 236, 249 Racialized poor 7, 8, 14, 41, 47, 49, 57, 87, 109, 113 – 115, 126, 128 – 129, 154, 215, 228, 341 Roma peoples 10, 85 – 109 Republic (Plato) 14, 277 – 279

357

Ritual 14, 116, 127, 144, 149, 277 – 288 Ruff, Matt 10, 113 – 115, 126 – 128 Saffuriyya 337 – 343 Savage(y) 5, 57, 72,76, 78, 90, 92, 139, 141, 144, 146 – 148, 151, 170, 344 Security 1, 4, 6, 57, 81, 95, 148, 199, 234, 247, 295, 302, 320 – 321 – Insecurity 4, 300, 310 – Securitization/securitized 3, 13, 136, 234 Serial/seriality 9, 45, 47, 48, 49, 63, 240 Shoah=>Holocaust Sontag, Susan 7 – 8, 13 – 14, 39, 187, 193 – 194, 200, 209 – 210, 214 – 215, 228, 256 – 259, 265 – 266 Soundscape 10, 70, 93, 99 Soyinka, Wole 14, 277 – 278, 285 – 286 Spectacle 9, 56 – 58, 63, 282 Speculative fiction 12, 187, 197 Spillover 14, 255, 258, 265, 272 Stigma 13, 210, 214, 233, 238, 257 – Stigmatized/stigmatization 4 – 14, 86, 88, 93, 164, 174, 180, 203, 210 – 212, 222, 234 – 237, 257, 265 Sula 13, 209, 211, 215, 219 – 220 Surveillance 13, 15, 109, 142, 148, 234, 237, 241 – 242, 294, 306 – 309, 327 Thompson, George 45 – 48, 52 – 53, 55 – 57, 61, 63 Trump, Donald 3, 10 – 11, 113 – 114, 119 – 128, 245, 330 – 331 Underground 8 – 9, 21 – 31, 34 – 35, 38, 40 – 42, 54 – 57, 60 – 62, 106, 144, 284, 306 Universal (n.) 14, 272, 288 – 290 Virus 14, 33 – 34, 38, 149, 194 – 196, 204 – 205, 237, 246 – 247, 255, 257, 269 – 272 – Coronavirus 13, 42, 204 – Extraterrestrial virus 12, 188, 195 Vodou 11, 136, 138, 143 – 148, 151 We Want Everything 15, 299 White supremacy 11, 113 – 126, 129, 136, 163, 167, 170, 174

358

Index

Wilno 338 – 340, 344 Wilson, August 14, 277 – 282, 285 – 290 Wright, Richard 8, 21 – 32, 36 – 37, 40 – 41

Zavattari, Edoardo 170, 175 Zombie 1, 5, 11, 135, 147 – 150, 270