The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature [1 ed.] 9781009204200

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          Whether invisible or hypervisible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the Black body has been rendered in myriad forms. This volume tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent presence and absence in American literature. It provides an invaluable guide for teachers and students interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The book is divided into three sections that highlight Black embodiment through conceptual flashpoints that emphasize various aspects of the human body in its visual and textual manifestations. This Companion engages past and continuing debates about the nature of embodiment by showcasing how writers from multiple eras and communities defined and challenged the limits of what constitutes a body in relation to human and nonhuman environments. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities and Chair of English at Pomona College, California. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (); Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (); two poetry collections, Vixen () and Grimoire (); and the editor of A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance ().

A complete list of books in the series is at the back of the book.

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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

THE BLACK BODY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE EDITED BY

CHERENE SHERRARD-JOHNSON Pomona College

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  ,   Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press & Assessment  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene, - editor. : The Cambridge companion to the Black body in American literature / edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Pomona College, California. : Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . j Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) j   (ebook) j   (hardback) j   (paperback) j   (ebook) : : American literature–History and criticism. j Black race–Philosophy. j Human body in literature. j Black people in literature. j Race in literature. j : Literary criticism. j Essays. :  .   (print) j  . (ebook) j  .–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback  ---- Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Celestial Bodies: An Introduction  -

page vii ix xv 

     1

Theorizing Black Bodies  



2

The Black Body and the Medical Archive  . , .



3

Laboring Bodies  . 



4

Animalia Americana  



5

Black Ecological Insurgencies . . 



6

The Black Body in Nature  



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    :    7

Synesthetic Embodiment  



8

Dancing Bodies  



9

Celebrity Bodies  



10 Embodied Black Aliveness  



11 Staging Racial Passing  . 



12 Passing Bodies                         .     ´   



 

 

13 Body of Knowledge: Audre Lorde’s Zami  



14 The Black Body, Violence, and Religion  -



15 Black Cripistemologies   



16 Black Erotic Bodies   



Notes Bibliography Index

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245 273 295

FIGURES

. Winold Reiss, Drawing in Two Colors, between  and . page . Lyle Ashton Harris, Toussaint L’Ouverture, from The Good Life series, ,  x -inch dye-diffusion Polaroids. . Jacob Lawrence, General Toussaint L’Ouverture, from “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series, , screenprint. Collection of Harriet and Harmon Kelley. . Edward Steichen, Paul Robeson as the Emperor Jones, , photograph, John Springer Collection. . Beginning of Passing film . Irene’s distorted gaze in Passing . The objective gaze in Passing . Homoeroticism on screen in Passing () . Homoeroticism on screen in Passing ()

118

129

134 138 178 180 181 183 184

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sam Plasencia is an assistant professor in the English department at Colby College, where she specializes in early Black intellectual history. Her work has appeared in Early American Literature, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, where she has published on Phillis Wheatley Peters’s political theology, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (), Harriet Wilson’s  fictionalized autobiography, Our Nig: Or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, and on the oratory tradition that emerged in  to celebrate the US withdrawal from the transatlantic slave trade. Dr. Plasencia’s interest in Black meaning-making also informs her book project, Signifying Against Anti-Blackness, which argues that early Black writers were philosophers of language whose orientation toward the world-making potential of language underwrote their formation of interpersonal and material networks, including churches and newspapers. Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also serves as Director of the English Honors Program. Specializing in Afro-diasporic literature and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, Black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation (), published by New York University Press, and has begun work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Fleming’s work appears in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo, and The James Baldwin Review. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo, he is currently serving as Associate Editor of Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. Fleming has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute.

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      Crystal S. Donkor is an assistant professor of English, specializing in African American and multicultural literature at SUNY New Paltz. Her research interests are nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black women’s literature, African American print culture, literary history, and the digital humanities. Her current book project, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy: The Pursuit of Pleasure in Black Women’s Literature, –, studies pleasure at the intersection of African American women’s literature and African American print culture. Joshua Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and an M.A. in Theater and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Joshua is a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, ); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, ), which was a winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, ), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, ), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; and The Sobbing School (Penguin, ), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the Black expressive tradition. J. T. Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, ), is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Anissa Janine Wardi is Professor of English and African American literature at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her scholarship is at the intersection of African American literature and ecocriticism. She is a past contributor to journals such as Callaloo, ISLE, and African American Review. She is the author of Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective, and Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color. Yanie Fecu is a scholar specializing in race, media technologies, and the Caribbean. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University and held x

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   a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in the departments of Music and Africana Studies before joining the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of English. Her work has appeared in American Literary History and The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure. Her first book project examines the convergence of literary, musical, and technological experiments with sound production and perception in Caribbean cultural production in the wake of global anticolonial struggles. Rachel Farebrother teaches American Studies at Swansea University, United Kingdom. She is the author of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (Ashgate, ). Her essays have appeared in Comparative American Studies, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, Modernism/modernity, and various edited collections. With Miriam Thaggert (SUNY-Buffalo), she has coedited The History of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, ) and African American Literature in Transition, – (Cambridge University Press, ). Samantha Pinto is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, core faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies, and affiliated faculty of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, ) and Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke UP, ). She also coedited Writing Beyond the State (Palgrave, ) with Alexandra S. Moore and The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (Routledge, ) with Jennifer C. Nash. She coedits the Duke University Press book series “Black Feminism on the Edge” with Jennifer C. Nash. She is currently working on a third book on race, internal embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African diaspora culture, as well as books on feminist ambivalence and on divorce. Kyle C. Frisina is an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where she writes on the affordances of theatrical form in drama and performance, in American literature, and in civic life. She has published on contemporary Black playwriting in Modern Drama; on the theatricality of autotheory in Arizona Quarterly; and on public humanities and contemporary arts in ASAP/J. Her writing has also appeared in Theatre Journal, MLN: Comparative Literature, and Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. As a dramaturg and producer, her previous roles include director of play development at Second Stage Theater and associate producer at New York Stage and Film. Lisa Woolfork is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she specializes in African American literature and culture. The University of Illinois Press published her book Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture in . In addition, her work concerns televisual representations, including an article on blood mixing in HBO’s True Blood in the South xi

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      Carolina Review and a chapter on All in the Family and The Jeffersons titled “Looking for Lionel” in Race-ing for Ratings: African Americans in Television, edited by Lisa Guerrero and David Leonard. Professor Woolfork primarily teaches courses on Fictions of Black Identity, Black Women Writers, and Contemporary African American literature. In the summer of , Professor Woolfork became a founding member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville. This group protested against the white supremacist insurgency that had taken hold of the city. She was on the ground on August  and  in a variety of capacities, including nonviolent direct action, working with the bail fund, sewing for a creative arts team, and participating in a media collective. Her essay “‘This Class of Persons’: When UVA’s White Supremacist Past Meets Its Future” was published in a collection of essays about the terror events in Charlottesville. Lisa Mendelman is the author of Modern Sentimentalism (Oxford University Press, ), which chronicles the emotional history of the modern woman and the corollary reinvention of sentimentalism in US interwar fiction. Her new book project examines the history of mental health. Her writing has been published in venues such as American Literary History, Modernism/modernity, The Journal of Cultural Analytics, Games and Culture, ASAP/J, Arizona Quarterly, and Modern Fiction Studies. An NEH Research Fellow at The Huntington Library (– ), Mendelman is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Menlo College. Octavio R. González is the author of the monograph Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Pennsylvania State University Press, ) and the poetry collections Limerence (Rebel Satori Press, ) and The Book of Ours (University of Notre Dame & Momotombo Press, ). A distinguished visiting scholar at The University at Buffalo (–), as well as a Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellow in Poetry (–), González is Associate Professor of English and creative writing at Wellesley College. Alexandria Smith (she/her) is an assistant professor of gender and sexuality in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, where she was a – postdoctoral research fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University and a B.A. in comparative women’s studies and international studies from Spelman College. Alexandria is working on a manuscript which examines how contemporary Black queer literary authors have engaged and troubled the question of what it means to be a Black woman. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is Assistant Professor of African American religious studies at the Divinity School at Harvard University. He is the author of Underworld Work: xii

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   Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, which is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in the Class  series. Anna LaQawn Hinton is an assistant professor of disability studies and Black literature and culture in the English department at the University of North Texas. She has published on disability regarding constructions of Black motherhood, masculinity in hip-hop, spaces of incarceration, reproductive justice in literature, and African and Afro-diasporic spiritual practice as technology in outlets such as the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and the CLA Journal, as well as The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body and The Palgrave Handbook on Reproductive Justice and Literature. She is currently writing her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Contemporary Black Women’s Writing, which approaches conversations about aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity. Dr. Hinton is also Public Relations Director for the College Language Association, Forum Executive Committee, TC Disability Studies, and a member of the Committee for Persons with Disabilities for the City of Denton (Texas). Julian Kevon Glover is a scholar and artist who graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. They hold an M.P.A. from Indiana University and earned a Ph.D. in Black Studies from Northwestern University. They are currently an assistant professor in the department of Genders, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Department of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, where their research focuses on Black/brown queer cultural formations, performance, ethnography, embodied knowledge, performance theory and Black futurity. They were awarded a Franke Fellowship at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and their work appears in journals including American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Souls, GLQ and Text & Performance Quarterly. In , they were inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University and are a longtime member of the ballroom scene. They have also worked with the Grammy award-winning Swedish singer Robyn and appeared in the music video for the title track of her  album Honey. A classically trained cellist, their creative work is multidisciplinary and engages sonic, visual, affective, written, and kinesthetic registers with the aim of bringing viewers into critical dialogue with themselves toward psychic, spiritual, and interpersonal transformation.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Emerald Rutledge, who was an integral part of this project from start to finish, for her editorial assistance.

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CHERENE SHERRARD-JOHNSON

Celestial Bodies An Introduction

In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though European hegemonies stole bodies – some of them female – out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” For you to be willing. Is enough. It exists to the human eye. Not as a sphere. But as a colored star. As part of the endless. Outnumbering firmament. As the nightly. Whispered message. That we may not reach. What inspires us to grasp. Yona Harvey, “You Don’t have to go to Mars for Love.”

A celestial body is any natural body outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Some are very large, like the moon, sun, or other planets; others can be quite small, such as asteroids and varieties of comets and natural satellites. These bodies are in motion in the dark matter that is space. They exist in relation. Bodies, after all, is plural – an assemblage. Marking Black bodies as “celestial” is partially an Afrofuturist impulse. It is a nod to how the speculative turn in Black studies has expanded our intellectual and creative horizons. I understand the Black body as always already in relation to its environment and its kin, inseparable from its consciousness in a radical rejection of the division wrought by racial capitalism and its philosophical justifications. Zora Neale Hurston famously quipped that “all my skinfolk aint my kinfolk,” but what about nonhuman beings? Can they too be kin? “We are stardust brought to life” (Tyson, : ) says Neil De Grasse Tyson, or as the Bible pronounces, we come from dust and to dust we shall return. When 

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      -  

I say celestial bodies, I am pushing away from Bare Life. I am looking up towards a transcendent field. “Celestial Bodies” is a voyage through and away from the fiery ecologies of white supremacy foretold by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and impending environmental calamities precipitated by the ongoing extractive practices of empire and racial capitalism. In naming Black bodies as celestial, I am dreaming diasporically, pushing beyond national and dare-I-say planetary boundaries, as well as the page. And while several of the authors and their texts look to the stars for inspiration, I take my title from a more intimate usage found in one of Toni Morrison’s understudied novels, Love. While exploring iterations of its titular theme, Love also charts the entanglement of valuation and ownership around land and the body, what in the US context is known as property. Love is a multiple-narrator intergenerational novel that traces the rise and fall of a Black family, helmed by a patriarch with a capitalist vision for Black empowerment. The wreckage of this heteropatriarchy is borne and witnessed by the Black women in his life, including his wives, lovers, daughters, and employees. The central tension/ relationship in the novel is the friendship turned rancid between Christine and Heed the Night. Across colorist and class lines, a vibrant intimacy grows between the two girls, who the narrator tells us were each other’s first love () until their closeness is violently interrupted, and they become adversaries. In the novel’s contextual ecology, the phrase “Hey, Celestial,” (Morrison, : ) is shorthand for a transgressive ontology: Playing at the beach one day, when they were about ten years old, they heard a man call out “Hey, Celestial,” to a young woman in a red sunback dress. His voice had humor in it, a kind of private knowing along with a touch of envy. The woman didn’t look around to see who called her. Her profile was etched against the seascape; her head held high. She turned instead to look at them. Her face was cut from cheek to ear. A fine scar like a pencil mark an eraser could turn into a flawless face. Her eyes locking theirs were cold and scary, until she winked at them, making their toes clench and curl with happiness. After they asked May who she was, this Celestial. “Stay as far away from her as you can,” May said. Cross the road when you see her coming your way.” They asked why and May answered, “Because there is nothing a sporting woman won’t do” ().

Although a sporting woman is a vernacular term for sex worker, the girls understand it as a type of daring persona that can be inhabited at will. In warning the girls to stay away from Celestial, a woman who carried her facial blemish with pride, a woman who knows her worth enough to shrug off catcalls and instead offer a sisterly wink, May might as well have poured 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

kerosene on the fire of their longing. Celestial becomes a touchstone, a totem that props and pumps them up through their girlhood and remains even after trauma wedges them apart. Celestial is more than a sobriquet for feminine mischief, it is also a place – the girls create a Celestial Palace. Celestial is an utterance, a woman, her scarification, her “sporting” attitude, and the foundation of a Celestial Palace situated on a Black-owned beach: in “a keeled-over row-boat long abandoned to sea grass” where the girls have “shade,” “privacy,” and provisions (). Celestial comes to denote courageous, indulgent pleasure: “And from then on, to say, ‘Amen,’ or acknowledge a particularly bold, smart risky thing, they mimicked the male voice crying ‘Hey, Celestial.’” For two young girls, best friends in love with each other despite their class difference and familial background, “Hey, Celestial,” becomes “their most private code” (), an aspirational acknowledgment of the promise of womanhood. Unfortunately, misogynoir intrudes on their refuge. Their love is undone by Christine’s grandfather’s pedophilic lust for a prepubescent spouse he can shape and control. One afternoon, Heed, fresh from the sands of the Celestial Palace, is accosted by “the handsome giant who nobody sasses.” Frozen in his authoritative gaze, Heed internalizes blame for his assault on her undeveloped body, wrongly thinking that “[her] hip-wriggling came first—then him” (). And when she sees that Christine has vomit on her bathing suit, she believes that her friend has witnessed, not the grandfather’s horrific act, but her “inside dirtiness” (). In actuality, Christine regurgitates her lunch after coming upon her grandfather masturbating on her bed after fondling her best friend’s – and soon to be child-bride – nipple. This violation ends their girlhood and severs their friendship, and they collectively recoil from the bodily harm that is done. They do not realize that the scarring on Celestial’s face might in fact represent the cost of gender transgression. Later will they come to understand how to shed shame and refuse the bands of ownership. At the novel’s conclusion, Celestial sits cross-legged on her lover’s grave in a red dress that hides “the insult: Ideal Husband. Perfect Father,” inscribed on his tombstone, and the narrator observes that her “scar has disappeared.” () No longer visible on the surface of the skin, the scar has been absorbed inward, perhaps into the calcium of bone, heard only in the “raunchy” blues song she sings in elegy. Tracking Love’s various definitions of “Celestial,” two girls engage in a world-building project in which Celestial denotes a safe space for intimacy and exploration, a woman they admire, covet, and imitate, as well as a provocation to transgress. In short, they build a Black ecology around the concept of Celestial. Morrison’s literary oeuvre from her first novel 

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The Bluest Eye forward has been asserting Black girls’ visibility and value within the power hierarchies of a world set against them. Through the invocation of “Hey, Celestial” the girls open a space for shapeshifting and healing. Aimee Meredith Cox identifies how “corporeal readings and assessments” made about Black women’s bodies were based upon “long-standing assumptions about the dangerous visibility of Black female bodies as always already representing material excess in addition to excess flesh.” When we think about shapeshifting in Black women’s literature, Octavia Butler’s speculative fictional universe comes immediately to mind. Cox invokes Butler’s physically malleable characters featured in novels like Wild Seed (), whose iconic mass market cover resonates with the collage aesthetic of Wardell Milan’s billboards – one of which serves as the cover image. Butler’s efforts to creatively negotiate and then subsequently explode the white male–dominated genre of science fiction can be productively aligned with the “social choreography and performance arts practices of young Black women.” For instance, Butler’s Wild Seed’s Anyanwu transforms into a variety of human and nonhuman beings, while Dana, heroine of Kindred, travels through time. In each iteration, there’s a cost – for Dana, it is the loss of her arm, as Butler explains, “I couldn’t let [Dana] come back whole” from the experience of enslavement, however fleeting, impermanent, or anachronistic. If Black women’s texts provide shapeshifting templates, “Celestial Bodies” is the entrée to a collection that is also “bold, smart, and risky” (). In perusing this Companion, I anticipate moments in which readers will echo the girls’ acknowledgment with an oral response to a particularly compelling insight, observation, and excavation found within the subsequent chapters. While reading, “Hey, Celestial” is the proper response. How do we attend to and envision Black embodiment in American literature with care? How do theorists and literary scholars avoid trafficking in narratives of abjection and death, or celebrating hard-earned nimble survival skills as magical or superhuman? This companion takes Black thinking about the body as its point of departure, and while in amiable conversation with Travis Foster’s The Companion to the Body in American Literature, it is distinct in its focus and scale. This volume dives deep into the Black studies theoretical and literary canon, probing familiar narratives as well as spotlighting emergent literary and cultural texts to build a textured, interdisciplinary archive that explores and addresses the particular circumstances of Black embodiment in American literature. Whether invisible or hypervisible, adored or reviled, from the inception of American literature the embodied Black subject has been rendered in myriad forms. This collection tracks and uncovers the Black body as a persistent 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

presence and absence in American literature. In a time when Black Lives Matter, a slogan that underscores the value of the Black life and galvanized an international movement, it is essential that scholars, authors, teachers, and readers return with new eyes to the wealth of literature that has both inscribed and challenged how Black bodies have been represented. In the public sphere, the optics of Black death is on perpetual repeat. Just as lynching portraits were once circulated as souvenirs and cautionary mementos, screen shots and snuff films of Black death flood our streams via multiple media outlets. This companion is an extension and expansion of the work Toni Morrison initiated in her landmark essay collection, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (), where she identified the Africanist presence animating canonical American literature. One of her most salient points is that the Black body is often hidden in plain sight: It takes a willful blindness not to see how crucial Blackness is to the foundation of whiteness. Writing and thinking about the Black body produces a visceral affect that cannot be denied. That charge is amplified by the experience of watching the spectacle of Black bodies being executed by police violence and left to signify nothing; it is the suffocating despair triggered by a lack of animating breath or being riddled with bullets; it is the strange fruit left to rot, the bones that sink to the sea floor becoming aquatic bioterrain. In this collection, authors account for these affects and representations. Just as certain chapters seek to explore the erotic pleasure of bodily studies and imagine the aesthetic intrigue of movement and flex, others delve into the regurgitative properties of the visceral. An affect that can make us turn away and hold our ears when the text gives us material we are “too delicate” to hear, whether it is Harriet Jacobs’ revelatory narrative, Frederick Douglass’ rendering of Aunt Hester’s scream as his bloody baptism into enslavement, or George Floyd calling for his mother. We reel from the synesthesia of Black trauma, but Black “bodyminds,” to borrow disability studies scholar Sami Schalk’s term for the feminist conglomerate of the mental and physical, also have the capacity to receive, refract, and absorb the nourishment that is Black art, food, music, lovemaking, and spirit. Centering the Black body also encourages celebration. We can explore the Black body at pleasure and at play, and not just as a fungible object from which to extract value, or an abject figure to pity. It is important to remember that even as we focus on the materiality of the body, we should remain wary of disaggregating flesh from consciousness. The chapters in this volume provide a balanced treatment that is rigorously transhistorical and collated around temporal flashpoints in which the Black body appears to have heightened corporeal or conceptual impact. I credit Black feminist scholarship for the Companion’s primary conceptual 

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framework. My oft-cited epigraph from Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Baby,” is, for instance, a theoretical cornerstone for the subsequent chapters. Spillers’ identification of how slavery and the middle passage “ungendered” and then rendered the Black body into flesh in a transformative process she terms “pornotroping,” a process of objectification or “thingification,” is central to understanding the Black body’s evolution in American literature. Following Spillers, Saidiya Hartman’s identification of “the figurative capacities of Blackness [with] the fungibility of the commodity” provides language that undergirds the extractive nature of racial capitalism and the legal ramifications of how “chattel” confounded the legal system and exposed the contradiction of our constitutional democracy. C. Riley Snorton’s take on Spillers’ conception of enslaved flesh is that, “captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as a mutable and amendable form of being.” This type of Black transintervention has ushered in a paradigm shift that expands our understanding of the continual production of gender normativity and Black gender as always understood as both crucial to the production of this normativity while also being excluded from its categorization. Building from Spillers and Sylvia Wynter’s meditation on the human, Alexander Weheliye hypothesizes that flesh “operates as a vestibular gash in the armor of Man, simultaneously a tool of dehumanization and a relational vestibule to alternate ways of being that do not possess the luxury of eliding phenomenology with biology.” Weheliye prompted a resurgence of ontological scholarship and studies of Black being, like Zakiyyah Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (), which eviscerates the elision in Western thought, Black personhood, and animality. Jennifer Nash and other scholars invested in bodily pleasure seek to create breathing room amidst the “repeated sadistic white pleasure in black female suffering” that powers the concept of the pornotrope by looking to the visual field as a site for salvage and remediation. As Nicole Fleetwood notes: “It is a strategic enactment of certain black female artists and entertainers to deploy hypervisibility as constitutive of black femaleness in dominant visual culture.” These are just a few of the interlocutors with whom the contributors to this volume engage in expansive dialogue. As the divergent arguments within the volume demonstrate, proposing a rigid definition of how to distinguish between body/flesh/personhood/human is not necessarily a useful interpretive matrix. To look for or examine the Black body in American literature is to understand that what a body is, is debatable, even beyond the baseline of the consciousness that abides within the skinsuit. Text can be about the body, or the body itself can be text. It can 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

be read, looked at, and ascribed meaning by the beholder. Power is what allows the beholder’s meaning to stick, to accrue, and ultimately to win. Like when philosopher and psychologist Franz Fanon describes how the utterance, “Look a Negro,” simultaneously arrests and fixes one’s identity. One response to such vernacular violence and objectification is to center Black thinking and Black experiences of embodiment. This is not only critical but also just, so while the chapters might work with different ways of explaining or defining the rift between flesh and body, the baseline is always back to Black. Working from Spillers’ lexical articulation of the distinction between body and flesh, throughout this volume authors grapple with and define embodiment on their own terms. To be clear, the body is a conglomerate of skin, muscle, fluid, and other matter that you inhabit. The you is your conscious mind or spirit. On Earth, you do not exist without the body. Without an animating force, the body becomes dormant, dead. A body that moves or labors without the you is a zombie. Some argue that race is what came along to reduce everything that comprises the you (culture, language, feelings, kinship ties) to capital. In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, a novel concerned with how racialization become codified in the early colonial Americas, a stolen woman called Minha Mae reflects that under enslavement, “I was not a person from my country, nor from my families” (Morrison, : ). Morrison vividly imagines the lived experience of the instantiation of racial capitalism: a world system in which racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing. It begins, as Cedric Robinson identifies, with the centralization of racial hierarchies in structuring labor and sociality within developing capitalist economies and necessitates what Minha Mae experiences as a profound severance and reduction: “Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song—all of it cooked together in the color of my skin” (). This collection is not a reification of Black resilience, but there is something extraordinary about the Black body’s malleability as an opportunity for transformation, rather than as an abstraction that leads only to fungibility. These chapters home in on the radical potential of the Black body to destabilize the status quo simply by virtue of its matter. Sharon Holland, Maria Ochoa, and Kyla Tompkins’ deployment of the term bioterrain in their introduction to the GLQ issue “On the Visceral,” resonates with my approach to studies of the body because it “registers anxieties about place” as well as gendered and racial taxonomies. They name the hermaphroditic body as a bioterrain that “upset[s] the stability of a patriarchal society bent on differentiating between humans and animals, foreigners and members of the community/emerging nation-state.” In medical terms, 

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bioterrain, short for biological terrain, considers the health of an organism within its cellular environment. Disruptions and imbalance in one area impact the whole. Several Companion chapters are spatially attuned to the Black body’s textual location as an ecology – the study of the oftenintertwined experience of relationships among humans, and among humans and nonhuman nature. Works like Anissa Wardi’s “The Black Body in Nature” and J.T. Roane’s “Black Ecological Insurgencies” position Black bodies as a bioterrain. Shapeshifting between Black bodyminds to Black bioterrain maps new formulations and creative assemblages, from enfleshment to embodiment, from animality to spirituality. After all, part of the body is released with the breath, through what Christina Sharpe terms aspiration in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (). One of the aspects that make interdisciplinarity foundational to this collation of bodily perspectives is that the body exceeds the containing structure of the page, and the literary is a mode of representation that interacts with other mediums, especially in the visual domain. The Companion takes its cover from visual artist Wardell Milan’s  Indices on a Tortured Body, a series of billboards commissioned by the Benton Museum and placed at various sites throughout the Campus of Pomona college. The images include: The Black Male Body, The Female Body, The Migrant Body, The Quarantine Body, and The Trans Body. What struck me about the placement and content of these billboards, which I visited often during their installation, is that their collage structure includes the markers of marginalization as well as the tools to unmake it. The white outline of a swan overlays the upturned face and neck of the central figure in The Trans Body and the bright orange of the gerbera daisy both relieves and indexes the fragmentation and abstraction of The Black Male Body, holding in tension its capacities and vulnerabilities. The intimate inseparability of the embracing women in the foreground of The Migrant Body contravenes the stooped resilience acquired through agricultural labor. The billboards tell stories that simultaneously uphold and refute what a body is supposed to look like. I sent students from my class on “Race, Gender, and the Environment,” which I cotaught with environmental scholar and activist Aimee Bahng, outdoors to view the billboards in groups. Fortified by newly learned pedagogies of slow violence, debility, and intersectionality, they dissected the images’ visual entanglements. Most applauded Milan’s crafty collages, but a few resisted the image of The Black Female Body, describing it as a scrapbook version of an idealized woman adjacent to a Black landfill. Milan’s project is an extension of our obsessive preoccupation with our own bodies and the bodies of others; in displaying these meditative placards outside the museum, Milan’s public art is a productive participant in 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

conversations about the Black outdoors. Only one of his images graces the collection’s cover, but his series can be thought of as an unsolicited, ephemeral chapter, experienced locally outside while the billboards remain on display, and accessed digitally once returned to museum archives. Together the series underscores how the visual grammar of the body is always in conversation with its environmental and textual manifestations. The Black Body Is/Is Not a Metaphor Assembling a textual archive focused on Black embodiment means expanding the boundaries of the literary so that versions of enfleshment spill over from the big, small, and mid screen as well as court documents and medical narratives that track acts of Black insurgency. Several chapters explicitly blur the edges where the literary and the textual abut. The fleshy affect of stories and their sensual engagement underscore that reading can be an embodied experience. When reading with the body in mind, we are alert to the contours of what Amber Musser identifies as “fleshiness” – an attentiveness to the sensual features that prick and massage the skin. If, as Musser contends, “theorizing is a fleshy activity” because theory and positionality emerge from and is enacted by bodies, reading also has fleshy qualities to which we can also attend. Embodied reading can enable a penetrating form of empathy beyond surface identification. One that lubricates the consciousness and stimulates transformation. What makes explorations of the Black body in literature compelling is that while any body can be read as a metaphor that works like synecdoche or assemblage, Blackness has a specific material function that cannot be overlooked or obscured by the lyric or textual maneuvers of narrative. Story with its oral/aural features becomes even more resonant, especially when we recall that the genealogy of the African American interartistic literary tradition can be traced to what was retained and passed down in the body/mind of the griot. Storytelling, testimony, and memory remain connective animating forces in the African diasporic literary tradition. An anthology that looks for and at the Black Body in American literature changes our relation to and our understanding of what narrative is. There is also pleasure that comes from drawing on the erotic and generative potential of flesh in ways that are both artistically and physically restorative. Understanding the body as both/ and, eliding the slash as it were, allows for a broader comprehension of reading as an embodied experience, both tactile and tactical in its ability to draw from the text. While I hold tight to the idea of the celestial, which conjures opacity, the ephemeral, and the spiritual, one cannot ignore the material realities facing 

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Black subjects as they move through carceral sites of surveillance and negotiate the specular precarity engineered by antiblackness. On the one hand, Afrofuturism encourages freedom dreams of dark matter in the expanding universe. As Amber Musser contends, “To think with the flesh and to inhabit the pornotrope is to hold violence and possibility in the same frame.” Such journeys are made manifest, for example, in Lisa Woolfork’s chapter in this book, “Embodied Black Aliveness,” where she charts the intergalactic journey of a Black female body through alternative realities and histories in the HBO Series Lovecraft Country. But I also take note of communities of care here on earth, however fleeting, like Amira Lundy-Harris’ revelatory work on STAR house: a safe home for unhoused trans-youth started and supported by the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in the s. STAR house is a celestial echo of the worldmaking accomplished by the transient and ephemeral community of women assembled in the convent in Morrison’s novel Paradise which provided an abolitionist sanctuary for women who would otherwise have been criminalized by the carceral state.17 Such fictive constellations can be the proving grounds for new forms of Black embodiment studied in this Companion. Chapter Summaries Desiring a uniform coherence, I initially requested that all chapter titles include “bodies.” This imperative was ambivalently received. Some contributors readily agreed, others countered with alternatives. I appreciated how they transformed their assignations, often exceeding the latitudinal and longitudinal sightlines I had traced for them. “Animal Bodies” became “Animalia Americana” and “Religious Bodies” became “The Black Body, Violence, and Religion.” Contrary to this, chapters initially titled “Black Bodies and Modernism” and “Bodily Performativity” became “Dancing Bodies” and “Synesthetic Embodiment,” respectively. Navigating the Table of Contents should be a tactile experience of friction and smoothness, as if running your hand along tight-fitting satin that accommodates itself to the curves and valleys of skin, muscle, and bone. Structurally, the Companion is organized into three parts that zero in on seemingly contradictory manifestations of the Black body. Part I, “Extraction and Abstraction,” considers how American literature has addressed the rendering of Black bodies into capital, property, and legally fungible commodities, allowing for maximum extraction of labor foundational to the United States. This process began in the seventeenth century and continues to evolve in the twenty-first, as Michelle Alexander’s painstaking account of the prison industrial complex, The New Jim Crow Mass 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (), aptly demonstrates. From the inauguration of the slave narrative through contemporary innovations in poetic form, writers have alternatively acknowledged or ignored how material gains drawn from Black laboring bodies are inseparable from how abstraction and othering processes maintain and justify treatment, class hierarchies, and disenfranchisement. Part II, “Black Optics: Invisibility and Hypervisibility,” focuses on visuality and image-rich texts, with particular emphasis on how visibility and hypervisibility manifest separately and simultaneously. Whether as hypersexualized characters based on stereotypes drawn from blackface minstrelsy, the racially mutability of the passing figure, or erotic power of Black feminist celebrations of body positivity, the contributions in this part consider how writers have turned presumed deficits into powerful models of affirmation and resistance. That very fungibility has given rise to fugitive practices that manifest, or as Treva Ellison and Kai Green name tranifest, an undoing and rethinking of gender binaries. Finally, in recognition of how Black queer theory has transformed Black feminist inquiry, Black studies, and LGBTQ studies, Part III is devoted to Quare Bodies, thinking with the most capacious definition of queerness, is appropriate. Following from E. Patrick Johnson’s redefinition of queer as “quare,” this part builds from ongoing efforts to broaden and transform understandings of literature and the literary by centering on Black queer people. Given that the ungendering of Blackness is also the context for imagining gender as subject to rearrangement, Snorton uses the terms “transitive” and “tranversal” to mark how “fungibility became a critical practicecum-performance for black in the antebellum period.” Black bodies’ fungibility has been deployed in fugitive ways that undermined enslavement, such as through passing or cross-dressing to attain freedom. These chameleon practices, then, are part of the genealogy not only of gender performances and practices such as cross-dressing but mark the properties of Blackness itself as queer. Trans-scholarship has already laid the groundwork that makes this type of reading possible, and all the chapters that follow draw heavily on their lexicon, part of a grammar of representation that has a long genealogy in Black feminist thought (Spillers, Hill-Collins, Lorde, and more recently Hartman). In Chapter , “Theorizing Black Bodies,” Sam Plasencia commences this collection with an overview of how the earliest Black writers theorized the body through experience. This chapter is a gateway to historical and current approaches to Black embodiment, synthesized and mined for applicative value. Such epistemological groundings illustrate this companion’s commitment to centering Black thinking about the body, rather than taking 

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anti-Black theorizing as its point of departure. Building on Plasencia’s theoretical overview, in “The Black Body and the Medical Archive,” Julius B. Fleming, Jr. foregrounds the literary as opposed to conjecture or physicians’ narratives to illustrate how “the aesthetic affordances of literature” have been essential to the shaping of modern medicine’s racial hierarchies. Fleming’s rigorously historicized account of the Black medical archive explains how racialized accounts and thingification were constitutive factors in the development of the medical industrial complex. Fleming anticipates Anna LaQuawn Hinton’s chapter in Part III on “Black Cripistemologies,” which centers Black resistance to narratives of medical racism and white centrality that privileges scientific advancements at the expense of Black humanity. Crystal S. Donkor’s “Laboring Bodies,” reads Harriet Jacobs’ and Harriet Wilson’s testimonies of enslavement and abuse as narratives of disability, alongside their other generic features. Pinpointing the convergence of discourses of mental and physical debility, Donkor demonstrates how enslavement and indenture fomented disability as foundational to the extractive nature of racial capitalism and its lingering material effects on the body. In “Animalia Americana,” poet/scholar/essayist Joshua Bennett meditates on why, amidst struggles to be seen and understood as human beings, Black writers concern themselves with animal bodies. This chapter reveals how works like Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha illuminate interspecies entanglement between Black bodies and animal bodies by sharpening one’s vision and “look[ing] low.” Bennett’s meditation on ethics superbly answers Plasencia’s call for centering Black ways of knowing as a foundation for theoretical maneuvers. J.T. Roane’s “Black Ecological Insurgencies” examines a fascinating archive that incorporates an archival food studies framework that turns inwards towards the interior functions of the body. Roane excavates the testimonies of oystermen and situates the early American seascape as a counter to traditional knowledge about how enslaved humans related to and understood the land by resisting “the industrial extraction of the waterscape.” This part concludes with Anissa Wardi’s “The Black Body in Nature,” which positions Christian Cooper’s  incident of “birding while Black” as prelude to her discussion of the Black pastoral tradition. From Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to W.E.B. Du Bois’ photographic illustrations of his theory of double consciousness, America has had to contend with both the invisibility and hypervisibility of “we who are dark.” The chapters in Part II consider the optics and illusions of Black embodiment through a variety of perspectives, beginning with Yanie Fecu’s “Synesthetic Embodiment,” which focuses on stillness. Fecu provides a very different take on Brooks than Bennett, pinpointing Brooks’ “pointillist” technique to place 

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Celestial Bodies: An Introduction

embodiment discourse in conversation with Black sound work and the haptic. The result is an inward immobility cultivated by synesthetic stillness. In contrast, Rachel Farebrother’s “Dancing Bodies” is concerned with movement. She explores Black embodiment in modernist literature from the new Negro and Harlem Renaissance era as an expressive performance of liberation. Through a sustained reading of Rudolph Fisher’s “High Yella,” Farebrother follows the sinuous path of the dancing body through “Jim Crowed” scenes of Harlem cabaret. A series of visually evocative juxtapositions reflects/refracts sensationalized themes of colorism. Samantha Pinto’s “Celebrity Bodies” tracks multiple representations of Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian revolution, in a variety of interdisciplinary mediums as a flashpoint for complex political negotiations of masculine embodiment. Within the context of his fame and charisma, Pinto shows how innovative interpretations and characterizations of Louverture signal the evolution of Black freedom dreams across genre, centuries, and continents. Speaking of traveling dreamscapes, Lisa Woolfork’s “Embodied Black Aliveness” reveals cinematic mechanisms of representing enfleshment in Lovecraft Country, examining the series transformation of a s housewife into an enhanced body capable of interstellar time travel. Her Afrofuturist journeys give new meaning to the concept of celestial Black bodies, opening an expanse that blurs the boundaries between the human and nonhuman. The two final chapters in Part II deal with narratives of racial passing and ambiguously raced bodies from the perspective of performance, on the stage and screen. Kyle Frisina examines the technologies we rely on for representational accuracy as she effectively illustrates how the affordances of drama allow for meaningful audience engagement. Spotlighting Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ interpretation of Dion Boucicault’s Octoroon, Frisina integrates a discussion of opacity as applied to Zoe’s histrionic performance and misrecognition of the ensemble Black female characters, illustrating how casting decisions and stage directions draw on slavery’s “affective scripts.” Lisa Mendelman and Octavio González provocatively suggest that “Passing is about the swirl” as they track how Nella Larsen’s famous novel translates to the screen; “Passing Bodies” treats passing as a curated performance, amplified by cinematic optics. “Body of Knowledge,” Alexandria Smith’s chapter on transnational corporeality and erotic embodiment in Audre Lorde’s Zami, opens Part III “Quare Bodies” with an analysis of a foundational, queer Black feminist text that foregrounds sensation and fleshly affects. Smith’s keen analysis demonstrates how Lorde’s theorizing derived from her narration of intimate relationships in her biomythography. Smith’s chapter serves as counterpoint and bookend to the final chapter in this section, Julian Kevon Glover’s “Black 

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Erotic Bodies,” which illustrates how Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power tranifests in twenty-first century literature. Ahmad Greene-Hayes explores Black embodiment within Black religious contexts in a chapter that engages philosophical and intellectual debates about the nature of existence and the flesh. Anna LaQuawn Hinton centers analytics drawn from Black disability studies to challenge notions of ableism through an incisive reading of Toni Morrison’s Home that not only walks us through the disability studies toolkit but shows how forms of interspecies entanglement around scientific experimentation open new ways of thinking that distinguish debility from disability. Hinton shows how reading Black embodiment through and alongside frameworks drawn from the medical humanities can reveal ableist assumptions. In turn, she offers “Black Cripistemologies” as a strategy for negotiating or mediating harm. In the concluding chapter, Glover looks to fictive portraits of the erotic potential afforded by gender-affirming surgery and new fugitive figurations of the self. It is the idiosyncratic nature of soliciting and building an anthology, during a global pandemic no less, that there will always be unavoidable gaps. I had hoped to include chapters dealing more directly with carcerality, sports culture, and digital media, just to name a few lacunae. And as always, certain regions or time periods may be more represented than others. To that end, this collection is an invitation to continue the dialogue about the Black body. My hope is that scholars interested in embodied reading and writing will apply the Companion’s critical resources to works such as Roxane Gay’s Hunger, a memoir about how the trauma of sexual violence alters the interior and exterior self, or Samantha Irby’s Meaty, which refuses to hide the material reality, visceral nature, and literal leakiness of living in a body with IBS. Irby’s text rejects victimhood and martyrdom, using humor and bodily pleasure to overturn assumptions about Black female corporeality and “excess flesh.” One thing is certain, the Black body has been and remains a central concern and we have an obligation to read and write about it with care. I have learned so much from how my contributors and collaborators have approached and reimagined studies of the Black body in ways that center Black ontologies, ecologies, and ways of knowing, rather than spending intellectual and creative energy on objectified, othering, or anti-Black perspectives. Readers and teachers will find this companion a versatile toolkit for examining Black embodiment through excavations of the past, the intense interior stasis of the present, and the nascent, amorphous, celestial forms of the future.

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Extraction and Abstraction

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 SAM PLASENCIA

Theorizing Black Bodies

Black bodies are “signifying property plus”: sites of meaning so overdetermined by mythologies that its agents are buried under ideas built up across space and time. Early Black writers in the United States are thus laboring under and against multiple disciplines of meaning-making, such as enslavement, which rendered them a means of material and sexual production; science, which treated them as exoticized specimens and objects of experimentation; white Christianity, which saw them as savage and degraded souls in need of conversion; and abolitionism, which portrayed them as objects in pain in order to evoke sympathy from white readers. Black persons and bodies are malleable because under racial capitalism their social and economic value is extracted. They are thus made, as Saidiya Hartman argues, “fungible”: a replaceable “abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.” Not surprisingly then, the knowledges and practices produced by enslavers, race scientists, white Christians, and white abolitionists tell us more about the discipliners than the Africandescended persons and bodies they have rendered objects for their use. As my rendition of this history suggests, this chapter is indebted to, and in conversation with, contemporary work on Black being and ontology. Afropessimism, for instance, informs my understanding of anti-Blackness as a constitutive political ontology in the western hemisphere, while the transdisciplinary strands of thought on Black Aliveness, critical theory, and fugitivity shape my descriptions of how early Black writers created breaks and fissures within that political ontology to experiment with other ways of being and thinking. While I never lose sight of the macro meaning-making contexts within which Black writers labor, my goal is always to demonstrate that Black thought exceeds those epistemic horizons. In what follows I argue that early Black theorists built on the grounds of embodied experience, and on that basis, interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood. *** 

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Western sites of knowledge production take the Black body as the starting point for distinction. According to Thomas Jefferson, “the difference is fixed in nature” (Jefferson, : ). Presuming himself an objective observer, he claims that Black people are imaginatively “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (), have less body hair, “glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour,” high heat tolerance, a lack of “forethought,” and a savageness that makes them pursue lust more “ardent[ly]” (). Based on these perceived bodily differences, Jefferson concludes that African-descended persons “are inferior in the faculties of reason” (). Ideologically, alongside Jefferson were “learned” men like the Dutch phrenologist Petrus Camper, who sought to demonstrate that African facial angles were geometrically more similar to ape species than white peoples’, and nineteenth-century doctors of the American South like Thomas Hamilton and J. Marion Sims, who insisted that Black people did not feel pain and were thus useful objects for medical experimentation. Even abolitionists were invested in mythologies about Black intellectual inferiority, delayed civilizing, and the need for white moral stewardship. Hortense Spillers calls this system of variegated anti-Black knowledge “an American Grammar,” a sociopolitical order that produces Blackness as a site of woundedness and “territory of cultural and political maneuver,” devoid of “gender differentiation” so that male and female “adhere to no symbolic integrity.” As a material referent of symbolic negation, the captive is thus rendered “flesh”: ruptured and altered tissue, wounded, and available to atomization. This seared, torn, bloody, and scarred bodily tissue – a “hieroglyphics of the flesh” – marks the cultural and bodily distance between Black people and “the culture, whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, ‘owners,’ ‘soul drivers,’ ‘overseers,’ and ‘men of God,’” collude to control and destroy them. This chapter attempts to track an alternative symbolic order that also takes as its starting point the Black body, not as a distinct biological entity but rather as a socially constructed embodied experience. In the early national and antebellum eras, the North gradually emancipated enslaved persons but kept its free Black population socioeconomically precarious. Meanwhile, the South expanded enslavement westward through a regime of genocide, land theft, and sexual and physical terror that killed and displaced Native populations, and controlled enslaved populations in order to produce enslavable bodies as a raw good. And so, while Black people across the South were reduced to what Katherine McKittrick calls “the mathematics of the unliving” – the “ledgers, accounts, price tags, and descriptors of economic worth and financial probability” – Black communities in the North were increasingly circumscribed by disenfranchisement, 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

segregated public spaces, job ceilings, and limited educational opportunities. In a speech delivered before an audience in Boston, the activist Maria Stewart theorized that these limitations had psychosomatic consequences that appeared to prove the lie of Black inferiority: continual fear and laborious servitude have in some degree lessened in us that natural force and energy which belong to man; or else, in defiance of opposition, our men, before this, would have nobly and boldly contended for their rights. But give the man of color an equal opportunity with the white man from the cradle to manhood, and from manhood to the grave, and you would discover the dignified statesman, the man of science, and the philosopher. But there is no such opportunity for the sons of Africa. (Stewart, : )

Stewart describes racialized Blackness as an embodied experience that includes existential fear, servility, and depleted psychological energies. The subject of this trifecta is systematically kept from gaining political power and intellectual influence, but these material, physical, and psychological conditions – attributed by enslavers, race scientists, white Christians, and often abolitionists to race as a biological and/or cultural and/or moral category – are made by denying “the man of color an equal opportunity.” For Stewart “equal opportunity” is not a single event, but rather a life structure, “from the cradle to manhood, and from manhood to the grave.” For an opportunity to be available from the cradle it has to be inherited, which means it is generational. In other words, if “the man of color” had the generational privileges of “the white man,” he too would occupy seats of power and knowledge production. For Stewart, any perceived inferiority had been carefully engineered at both sociopolitical and embodied registers. The structural deprivation that Stewart argues constitutes racial Blackness as an embodied experience also cohered nineteenth-century racial whiteness. As Ashley Byock puts it, Black bodies functioned as “a kind of dark matter” that helped give shape to an “American identity” vis-à-vis “biopolitical negation.” This “decorporation” defined “US constitutional personhood around Enlightenment principles of willful agency, corporeal selfhood, and political personhood.” Black writers were consistently theorizing this material and cognitive category of whiteness. The civic leader William J. Wilson – writing under his pseudonym Ethiop – famously asked, “What Shall We do with the White People?” (), in an article published by the first Black literary magazine, The Anglo-African Magazine. A year earlier, in her fictionalized autobiography, Our Nig: or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (), Harriet Wilson makes use of generational character couplings (father–son/aunt–niece/mother–daughter) and repeated scenes of violence to dramatize how the white psyche is constituted through anti-Black violence, 

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and how white people inherit both that psychic identity and the violent practices that create/maintain it. Despite a very real “racial calculus” that “imperiled and devalued” Black lives, pre-civil war Northern Black writers produced a corpus of critical theory about gender, labor, race, citizenship, and theology that took as its intellectual starting point the overdetermination of the Black(ened) body. *** Over thirty years ago Barbara Christian reminded us that “people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic . . . our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language.” For instance, Harriet Wilson used non-linear storytelling to dramatize how whiteness is forged through violence. Thirty years earlier, David Walker used typography and historiography to theorize anti-Blackness as a language practice that strategically obscures white violence. Like Adam Smith or Immanuel Kant, these writers were theorists. However, instead of using abstract logic and specialized vocabulary, they deployed textual structuring, figurative language, tropology, typology, and narration. In the last thirty years scholars have turned with renewed attention to how early Black writers theorized embodied realities. Carla Peterson, for instance, considered how Black women expanded reform theory to include their embodied presence. More recently, Derrick R. Spires described how Black activists theorized a form of embodied, practice-based citizenship. In different ways, both John Ernest and Brigitte Fielder have shown that early Black thinkers were theorizing race beyond phenotype, biology, and linear temporality – indeed, in ways that anticipate some of the most complex and intersectional contemporary social-construction theories. It is now indisputable that Black writers well before W. E. B. DuBois were theologians, labor theorists, existential philosophers, political theorists, humanists, and thinkers of embodiment and science. The Black body is at the interpretative center of much early Black critical theory, but not as an object of extraction, experimentation, moral conversion, or pain. The Black (ened) body is, instead, a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. As Alexander Weheliye has more recently put it, racialization is “a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.” This “conglomerate” of disciplining relations are “racializing assemblages” that “etch abstract forces of power onto human physiology and flesh in order to create the appearance of a 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

naturally expressive relationship between phenotype and sociopolitical status.” Early Black theorists name these forces of power and narrate the processes by which they racialize. In what follows I offer detailed examples of this alternative theoretical tradition by focalizing three areas of critical interrogation: moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality. “whose morals and humanity are so inverted” In The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life (), Loguen theorizes white morality by drawing on his mother’s childhood experience of being kidnapped from freeborn parents in the US North and sold in the South. When Loguen’s mother first arrived at her enslavers, their “aspect” (i.e. physical appearance, predominantly facial) and “conduct” showed “sympathy for her manifest wretchedness,” even “tenderness and concern” (Loguen, : ). But when she told them she had been stolen from family in Ohio, “every expression of sympathy vanished, and their faces were covered with frowns. Their kind words changed into threats and curses” (). She was whipped and “of course she could but beg and suffer, and at the conclusion promise she would never again repeat the offensive fact of her freedom. Thus was this innocent child, according to the customary mode in such cases, metamorphosed from a human being into a chattel” (). Scholars have long read such passages for the manifold practices by which enslavers “made” slaves. However, what interests me about this personal history is how it establishes the experiential foundation for Loguen’s theorization of the white enslaver’s moral schema: Free colored persons have no right or privilege beyond a permitted residence in slave states, and such residence gives them nothing that deserves the name of protection from the wrongs of white men. The kidnapping and enslaving this little girl therefore, could not be looked upon as very bad, by men like the Logues, and the body of slaveholders, whose morals and humanity are so inverted, as to suppose, that by making her a slave, they raised her from the lowest to a higher condition, and furnished her with protection and privileges not to be enjoyed in a state of freedom . . . we have mentioned [this], incidentally, to relieve the Logues from the inference that their principles and habits were barbarous beyond public sentiment and the laws of the land. ()

Loguen’s use of the term “inverted” to describe the Logues’ morality suggests that it is the opposite of what it should be. They should think that kidnapping, enslaving, and beating a child is bad, but instead they see it as benevolent: as having “raised her from the lowest” position – that of being free and autonomous – to “the higher condition” of being enslaved and under the surveillance of a white person. This “inverted epistemology,” as 

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the late philosopher Charles Mills puts it, signifies captivity under white supremacy as “protection” and “privilege.” Such inversion is not merely the Logues’ moral schema, it is “public sentiment” codified into US law by the highest court. Two years before Loguen published his narrative, Chief Justice Roger Taney infamously stated in his Supreme Court majority decision for Dred Scott v. Sanford () that African Americans “are so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Laws do not protect Black people from “the wrongs of white men” because in the inverted morality of white supremacy, Black people are not seen as having rights that can be wronged. Loguen’s narrative structure guides his reader through the actual process of moral inversion. First, he introduces us to free white men who display sympathy towards a Black child they interpret as enslaved, and then he compels us to witness how those men become violent when that child insists on the fact of her freedom. This dramatizes racialization in the United States: Black freedom is experienced as antagonistic to white freedom, and so when his mother told her kidnappers that she was free, they transformed from seemingly sympathetic and tender to “covered with frowns.” Their kind words changed into “threats and curses.” This represents another form of metamorphosis, one that emerges when internalized narratives about Black inferiority encounter Black freedom. Koritha Mitchell calls this “know-yourplace aggression,” and argues that it is a form of “reactionary” antiBlackness that results from Black success, prosperity, domestic stability, etc. With this passage Loguen demonstrates that the white psyche is utterly dependent on Black subjection for peace. White moral depravity is also at the center of how New York activist Adam Carman, in his Oration () on the US withdrawal from the international slave trade, describes the process by which African-descended persons “became viewed and considered as commercial commodities” (Carman, : ). But for Carman the scope of the problem is hemispheric. Speaking before a predominantly Black congregation, Carman explains how the “tranquil scenes of our forefathers” were “metamorphosed into scenes the most woeful” by a “facinerious [sic] trade” that was started by the Portuguese, developed by the Spanish, and brought to “its climax” by the British (). Carman undermines the British Protestant construction of the Black Legend, which demonized the Spanish Empire as excessively cruel, by arguing that while reason naturally leads us to suppose [the British] would have spurned at such unparalleled scenes of perfidy and infernal cruelty, as was practised [sic] then 

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Theorizing Black Bodies among the Portuguese and Spaniards, and disdain to countenance so gross a violation of nature’s law . . . to the sad reverse they confederated with them, heart to heart, hand to hand, in practising [sic] such unheard of, unnatural and disgraceful outrages, that takes the detestable pre-eminence of all heinous acts that ever disgraced the page of history. ()

Not only do the British join in the existing “violation of nature’s law” when they legalize the slave trade, their cruelty surpasses “all heinousness acts” ever documented. Carman thus enacts his own moral reversal when he (re) signifies a nation long “distinguished above every nation on the earth for arts, arms, civilization, polished manners, and extensive commerce” as a nation distinguished for “outrages” so “disgraceful” and “unnatural” as to never have been heard of before (). By centering Black bodies and drawing on narrative techniques of inversion/reversal and metamorphosis, both Loguen and Carman theorize whiteness as a racial formation that is materially violent and morally compromised. “wanton Tyranny” The claim that “all men are created equal” () was not an immutable principle of equality because for Jefferson and his contemporaries, the bodies of Africans and African-descended persons were the locus of irrational uncivilized chaos. These thinkers drew on the Lockean natural rights tradition to argue that enslavement was justified because Africans had violated the natural law of rationality. Mary Nyquist has shown that John Locke distinguished tyrannical power, an illegitimate overextension of power that had been conferred by the consent of the people, from despotic power, which he defines as a legitimate power exerted over prisoners of a justifiable war against the transgression of rationality. This double agenda “systematically dichotomize[d] the innocent and the culpable, the victim and the . . . aggressor . . . the just and unjust war.” The US founding – as Justice Taney’s decision eighty years later – was thus informed by a “partitioned social ontology” wherein white Westerners were rational and justifiable enslavers of Africans and African-descended persons. Black writers challenged this racialization by disrupting its terms of engagement, (re)presenting Westerners as having transgressed natural law. For example, speaking before the African Church in lower Manhattan New York in , twenty-two-year-old abolitionist Peter Williams described the propellant behind the slave trade as avarice, an “unnatural monster” (Williams, : ). Drawing on a Christian informed tropology and Greek epic imagery, Williams signifies avarice as a behemoth, an affect outside rational proportions – an unbalanced love of gain that drove the 

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invasion of an otherwise content continent. In this figuration, African persons existed harmoniously in an Eden-like “garden,” but “the enterprising spirit of European genius” spread its “avaricious disposition” by exciting constant war (). War then produced prisoners, which “furnished a specious pretext for the prosecution of this inhuman traffic” (). Like Carman would do three years later, Williams (re)signifies European “genius” so that instead of referring to cultural or scientific innovation it gestures to the violent creation of material conditions that are then exploited as the pretext to enslave. Williams thus theorizes a kind of psycho-social political theory that – unlike Locke’s – brings into sharp relief the Western transgression of natural rights. For many Black writers, the embodied experience of enslavement and oppression made them an authority on freedom, and it was on that basis that they challenged self-serving Western political theories. For instance, in her poem to the Earl of Dartmouth – a member of the British aristocracy who was then serving as Secretary of State for the Colonies – the transatlantic enslaved poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters wrote: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Other may never feel tyrannic sway? (Wheatley, : )

This poem was written in October , when tensions were brewing between Britain and its colonies over political control. Wheatley Peters steps into this debate by scrambling its premises. Grammatically, she gives Africa the agential capacity to conceive (“fancy’d”) itself as “happy.” This challenges the alignment of Africa with irrational governance and civic suffering, undercutting the claim that enslavement was a civilizing mission. She also gestures to the fact that African conceptions of happiness were different than Europe’s and thus perhaps illegible to their invaders. Having established Africa as happy – and by association, well governed – Wheatley Peters then locates the origins of her “love of Freedom” and desire for a “common good” in two life-altering experiences that disrupted that originary happiness: her kidnapping and familial displacement. 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

By signifying Africa as happy and grounding her understanding of freedom in slavery, Wheatley Peters crafts an embodied, experiential foundation for her revision of the term tyranny. In her poem, tyranny includes kidnapping, familial separation, forced displacement, and enslavement. She thus theoretically relocates those forms of violence from the category of legitimate despotic power to illegitimate power. Moreover, she insists that only “feeling hearts” can understand tyranny. She offers two definitional categories of “feeling hearts”: those whose first-hand experience with racialized terror has produced “excruciating” “pangs,” and those who – in contrast to “steel’d” souls – are “mov’d” when seeing a babe (like her) “seiz’d” from their parents. Over eighty years later Rev. Loguen will represent his mother’s enslavers as precisely such “steel’d” souls. Thus, Wheatley Peters insists that to understand tyranny you either have to have experienced forced separation and enslavement, or be so moved by it that you, as Carman put it, “spurned at such unparalleled scenes of perfidy and infernal cruelty” (). Given that England and its colonies were well over a hundred years into such “perfidy,” they would have been unable to understand tyranny. This is not merely a discrediting of political theory emerging out of Western enslaving countries, but also a discrediting of the colonies’ attestations to suffering under tyrannous political slavery. Wheatley Peters’s retheorizing of “tyranny” thus demands that we reread the opening stanza, which offers a present-day representation of America: HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn, Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn: ... No more, America, in mournful strain Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain, No longer shalt though dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land ()

The use of “when” as an adverb to modify “happy day” projects the time of a happy freedom to a future. In conceptual and temporal contrast to that future is the “mournful” present day of wanton tyranny, a time of “lawless” and unrestrained enslaving, of “wrongs, and grievance unredress’d.” Four years later Wheatley Peters will again write to a political leader petitioning for redress that does not come. This time it is General George Washington, to whom she writes: “Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore” (). Participating in a rigorous tradition of Black petitioning (a tradition that Justice Taney reacted to), Wheatley Peters’s revision of tyranny works to represent enslaved persons as aggrieved and deserving of legal redress. While neither Dartmouth (the colonial representative), nor Washington (the new 

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nation’s first president), ameliorate the tyrannical conditions Wheatley Peters describes, her poem actively hails that future by forcing readers to encounter a different system of valuation. While “land” was often used as a synonym for a nation state, I want to suggest that when Wheatley Peters says “meant t’enslave the land,” she indexes both the enslavement of Black people in the British colonies and the (mis)use of Indigenous land. Shelby Johnson has demonstrated that in “ in Distress for her Children slain by ,” Wheatley Peters represents “disrupted affiliation . . . through an evanescent expression of grief that echoes across a larger environmental order.” And indeed, in her poem to Dartmouth, Wheatley Peters’s invocation of land immediately precedes her description of her kidnapping, or we might say, her “disrupted affiliation.” I thus follow Johnson’s call that we consider Wheatley Peters an ecocritical poet by taking literally her use of the word “land.” Wheatley Peters lived down the street from a port that, in , exported “ tons [of] pearl ash, and twice as much potash . . . , barrels of common tar, s of turpentine, and  masts, yard and bow-sprits.” Boston was also “the third port of export to Great Britain of oak plank and barrel staves . . . second for pine plank.” To these “forest products” we could also add furs, skins, flaxseed, and hops. Wheatley Peters would thus have borne witness to the landscape and wildlife being cut, atomized, and reduced to commodities while its Native stewards since time immemorial were killed and displaced – not unlike how African bodies were made into Black flesh through displacement, forced migration, and enslavement. Tiffany Lethabo King reminds us that the violations endured by Black and Native peoples “do not have an edge. While the force of their haunt has distinct feelings at the stress points and instantiations of Black fungibility and Native genocide, the violence moves as one.”  The terror of enslavement and “conquest” flow into one another because both “the Native and Black Other” are conceived as “a space of death” by “conquistador humanism”– the same Enlightenment humanism that produced natural rights theories for British and American governance. It is thus probable that Wheatley Peters would have theorized “tyranny” not merely as an illegitimate control over people but also over land. Both cases would have revealed to her, as she put the case in a letter to Samson Occom (Mohegan), “how well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree” (). “You never knew ...” I have been arguing that early Black writers understood the Black(ened) body as an experiential locus of sociopolitical meaning and interrogated 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

the construction of those experiences in order to theorize anti-Black moral schemas and natural rights theory. Such interrogations also carried the potential to interrupt white racialized identity formation. Black writers held a mirror up to white society and, in revealing the ugly reality behind their illusory (and delusional) mythologies of nation and selfhood, offered readers other ways of being in the world. I want to conclude with a reading of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (), which I argue theorizes the radical alterity of Black bodily experiences, interrupting the affective logics of sentimentality in order to offer white readers an alternative path to moral action. Jacobs was the first woman in the United States to publish a slave narrative. Like those who published before her, she had to contend with white readers’ distrust both in the construction of her narrative and its publishing: publishers refused to print her without an endorsement and introduction by a notable abolitionist and, unlike men like Frederick Douglass or Henry Bibb, Jacobs faced the challenge of representing her enslaver’s sexual predation to readers who would have considered such topics inappropriate and been predisposed to see her as sexually unchaste by nature of her race. White abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child (who wrote Jacobs’s introduction) believed sentimentality could overcome the experiential gulf between Black and white women, so they called on white readers to identify with Black women as wives and mothers and then imagine how they would feel if placed in similar circumstances. This presents a significant problem that scholars of sentimentality have gestured to in different ways: sympathy requires the observer – by way of their imagination – to substitute themselves for the sufferer, consider how they might feel, and then, essentially, sympathize with their own imagined suffering self.38 Hershini Bhana Young calls this “a fetishistic replacing/erasure of the subject by the reader/voyeur” that elides “the traumatized black body” and replaces her with “the ‘privileged’ body of the reader,” repeating the “maneuver that creates the category of the Other.” As Hartman describes it, this is a “flight of imagination and slipping into the captive’s body” that leads readers to feel for themselves “rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach.” As with other sociopolitical processes, this serves white people because it uses Black people’s “anguish” “to build the character and influence of the more privileged.” Such character building is an explicitly stated affective project in the paradigmatic abolitionist text, Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe told her readers: “what can an individual do? They can see to it that they feel right” (). Affect management thus supplants meaningful sociopolitical change. 

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For decades scholars have acknowledged that Jacobs disrupts this “fantasy of experiential equivalence.” Hartman, for instance, argues that Jacobs deploys a “narrative strategy” of “duplicity” that appears confessional but also denies the reader the authority to judge by effecting “a reversal in which the standards of virtue are deemed inappropriate in measuring the lives of enslaved women.” This narrative approach enables her to build an “alliance” with readers while refusing an “analogy” between them. Put differently, by manipulating multiple interpretative frameworks she is able to evoke sympathy and simultaneously call out her readers’ complicity. Her discursive power thus comes from assuming a “mode” of “distrust” that prioritizes her interpretations of events. One example of Jacobs’s narrative approach can be seen when she finally reunites with her son after more than eight years apart: “O reader, can you imagine my joy? No, you cannot, unless you have been a slave mother” (Jacobs, : ). This claim echoes her preface, where she states that “only by experience can anyone realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations” she and other enslaved women suffer (). Whereas sentimentality tries to inspire moral action through sympathy, Jacobs’s insistence on the radical alterity of her racialized experiences creates an alternative ethical pathway to social action. Jacobs refuses the logic of sentimentality, in part, because she learned from her childhood enslaver that white Christians did not recognize her as their peer, and so could not behave ethically towards her. That enslaver taught Jacobs how to read and instructed her from the Bible, but when she died she “bequeathed” Jacobs to her five-year-old niece (). “So vanished our hopes” Jacobs writes. “My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor” (). At first glance her enslaver’s actions might seem contradictory, or hypocritical. But Jacobs astutely theorizes the problem: she was not recognized as a neighbor. Jacobs is not merely talking about political recognition, wherein one is written into laws as a person with innate rights. Indeed, she was legally classified as chattel until she committed a crime. She is referring here to symbolic recognition: our capacity to see a person whose existence is radically unlike ours – whose existence is even unimaginable to us – and still see them as someone worthy of legal rights, protections, and our moral action. But enslavement, as Hartman demonstrates, constituted and was maintained through a “selective recognition of humanity” that only granted enslaved persons the “minimal standards of existence” on the basis that doing so secured “public tranquility.” From this perspective her enslaver’s actions were logically consistent: If she does not recognize the people she enslaves as 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

humans-cum-neighbors, why would she love them by the same standard she would love herself, or her niece? Jacobs learned early in life that sympathy was an ineffective form of persuasion against cognitive and moral perspectives that did not recognize her. And so unlike Stowe, who tries to create identification between her reader and fictional subjects by repeatedly asking “imagine if you . . .,” Jacobs generates moral feeling by insisting on her radical difference: Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others. (–)

Here Jacobs insists that, because her readers could never imagine or experience what enslaved women live through, they should not judge enslaved women by their standards. Hartman argues that this is a “reversal” of “virtue” because it deems white moral schemas inadequate for judging enslaved women. In Loguen’s terms, Jacobs deems white women’s virtue an inverted morality, calibrated for the benefit of aggressors. She thus enacts a similar theoretical gesture as Carman and Williams, who (re)signify “distinguished” and “genius” in a way that highlights white violence. If sentimentality offers white readers cathartic tears and reassures them that they can indeed imagine the enslaved experience, Jacobs’s insistence that they can never know creates a very different set of feelings. Without assurance one is unsure. Without the sense of control that emerges from containing an idea within one’s imaginative horizon, vulnerability may seep in. Nervousness, dispossession, and fear emerge when one confronts the unknown. These affects are, in many ways, constitutive of Black life lived under the reign of white terror. They are also affects kept at bay by forms of Enlightenment personhood grounded in willful agency, rationality, and symbolic recognition because this racialized subjectivity is firmly rooted in mastery, in the potential to conquer. The logic of sentimentality thus maintains “masterful subjects” who can conquer the unknowability of racial difference through identification. But by centering the alterity of the Black (ened) woman’s bodily experience, Jacobs disrupts this affective structure. If sentimentality is, as Schuller argues, a biopolitical technology designed to refine “the feelings of civilized individuals” in ways that align with state 

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goals – to commandeer evolutionary development at a species level by regulating sense impressions – then Jacobs’s text also stalls this eugenic project. Her embodied theorizing throws a wrench in the anti-Black machine(ry), creating a break – as Fred Moten might put it – wherein she cultivates another way of affectively being-in-the-world-with-others. To what end? Jacobs’s hacking of this biopolitical mechanism may have several outcomes, but there’s one in particular I want to draw attention to: listening. Sentimentality relies on the presumption that the white reader can know; an imaginative mastery that gives primacy to white people’s conception of a situation and their ideas about how to rectify that situation. What does it mean that the primary affective structure for moving a US citizen to moral action does not listen to those laboring under inequities? Does not, in effect, believe that those who most directly experience inequity actually understand it? Jacobs needed Child to endorse the truthfulness of her testimony because Northern white readers were disinclined to believe a Black woman. George Washington did not listen to Wheatley Peters when she asked him to “Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore” (). William Lloyd Garrison did not listen to Frederick Douglass when Douglass insisted that it was important to have a Black-edited newspaper.55 The South Carolina Legislature did not listen to Thomas E. Miller in , when he asked them not to pass a literacy requirement that would disenfranchise Black voters. The history of the United States is the history of white people not listening to Black people, an egotistical epistemic that presumes to know better. Jacobs’s insistence that white readers will never know offers an alternative route to moral action, one that prioritizes listening, believing, and being willing to be civically guided by those with first-hand experiential knowledge. Jacobs, Williams, Carmen, Wheatley Peters, Loguen, and Stewart are only a few of the thinkers who make up a rich and transdisciplinary canon of early Black critical theory. Their work engages with, interrogates, challenges, and produces knowledge in excess of the Western epistemologies that shaped our world through logics of extraction, expropriation, enslavement, and use-value. That early Black writers are rarely part of the critical canons that make up contemporary disciplines like Philosophy, History, Political Science, Theology, and Economics reflects the fact that disciplinarity is a white supremacist project, the afterlives of the imperialist and Enlightenment drive to control by cataloging and taxonomizing. This is why, as Christina Sharpe so astutely put it, “we must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of leaving the archives of slavery.” It is my contention that early Black theorists were already undisciplined, traversing categories of thought 

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Theorizing Black Bodies

with a disciplinary transness that reflects their embodied experience of racialized Blackness. For these thinkers and those that follow, racialized Blackness is by definition unfixed, a “territory of cultural and political maneuver[ing]” onto which settler-enslaving nations attempt to fix a variety of meanings that are useful for their domination. But precisely because it is open, Blackness is also irreducible to the maneuvers and meanings white supremacy and settler colonialism attempts to give it. As C. Riley Snorton argues in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, transness and Blackness “find expression and continuous circulation” within each other because both signify conditions of possibility that are free-flowing, unfixed, changeable, and in motion – loci of potentiality that preexist the “various calcifications of meaning” imposed on it by disciplines of knowledge. Indeed, it is from this space of openness – this “primordial being” – that all difference is formed. Western ways of knowing confront such ontological potentiality with terror and consequently code it negatively, as chaos, and project it onto the continent of Africa and those who descended from it. Persons racialized as Black thereby come to represent – within the governing order of the West – the malleable, changeable, fungible flesh. But the very qualities that mark Black flesh as fungible also create the potential for fugitivity, loopholes of retreat from Western categories of being, as Snorton describes it by way of Jacobs. This is “the seemingly paradoxical construction of fungible fugitivity” that becomes visible when Snorton “pursue[s] flesh as a capacitating structure for alternative modes of being.” By anchoring their critical theories in the embodied experiences of Blackness, early Black thinkers work from a set of coordinates that are unfixed by Western ways of thinking while still moving through them – as such, they model “transdisciplinarity,” a mode of thinking from which the contemporary academy has much to learn.



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 JULIUS B. FLEMING, JR.

The Black Body and the Medical Archive

Since at least the eighteenth century, Black literature has framed the medical exploitation of Black people as essential to the lifeblood of slavery and colonialism, and as a key arena for attempts to colonize the Black body. From slave narratives to contemporary fiction, Black writers have rendered the relationship between race and medicine as an important intertext of the Black literary tradition as well as a vital concern of Black political modernity. Ira Aldridge’s  play, The Black Doctor, is among the earliest works in this tradition to demonstrate how the medical exploitation of Black people has been critical to transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and their afterlives. Set geographically between colonial France and the “Isle of Bourbon,” a French colony, this romantic melodrama follows the life of its eponymous Black doctor, Fabian: “a mulatto, and a slave,” who became “the most eminent physician in all the island” (Aldridge, : ). Having twice saved the life of Pauline Reynerie, the daughter of French aristocrats who owned “estates in France” and plantations in Bourbon, Fabian earns the favor of the Reyneries, who ultimately free him from slavery and sponsor his removal from the colony to the metropole (Aldridge: ). To be sure, the most prominent dimension of Aldridge’s under-studied plot is the illicit love affair between Pauline, a white woman, and Fabian, a Black man. But what interests me here is a theme that the play and its title (The Black Doctor) foreground, but one that is rarely considered in the limited body of scholarship that examines this play: that is, the relationship between race and medicine. A skilled “physician,” Fabian is beloved by French colonials in the Isle of Bourbon. As one character, a wine shop owner, puts it: “everybody likes the Black Doctor” (Aldridge: ). On another occasion, one member of the Reynerie family even goes so far as to dub the Black Doctor “the good genius of our family,” a declaration that seems to write the former slave into the folds of white French aristocracy (Aldridge: ). Ultimately, however, the Black Doctor’s blackness renders this lofty claim of kinship tenuous at best. 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

On this front, a valet for the Reyneries – who tellingly refers to Fabian as “an enfranchised slave” – contends that the family “couldn’t do without him [Fabian]; though, by-the-by,” they did not “much relish his being [t]here” (Aldridge: ). Therefore, even as the Black Doctor is fairly well liked by colonial aristocrats, who provide him affordances like servants and “a noble house,” they value him only insofar as they can conscript his medical labor into restoring the health of white French colonials and, in doing so, into nurturing the health of the French empire and its global campaigns to exploit and colonize Black bodies (Aldridge: ). I begin by foregrounding the interconnection of race and medicine in Aldridge’s little-known play in order to begin a deeper discussion of how Black artists have used literature to document the medical exploitation of Black people, and to situate medicine as a key cog in the wheels of chattel slavery, colonialism, and their legacies of anti-Black violence. Admittedly, Fabian’s encounter with Black medical exploitation was relatively absent of the gratuitous styles of medicalized violence – from sterilizations to lobotomies – that target Black people and their bodies across the Black literary tradition. Aldridge’s play, nonetheless, helps to inaugurate a longstanding practice of using Black literature to document and engage the habits of Black medical exploitation that became a hallmark of global modernity and that continue to inflect the racial unconscious of modern medicine. Considered from this vantage point, what is most often read as a tragic story of prohibited interracial love is, at the same time, one of the earliest Black-authored stories to detail the tragedy of race, medicine, and modernity, and their formative role in the historical quest to colonize Black bodies. From the eighteenth century onward, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive: the transhistorical, multi-modal collection of stories that Black people have used to narrate and preserve Black subjects’ experiences of medicine under the violent regimes of slavery, colonialism, and their afterlives. The genres that constitute the Black medical archive range from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Health and Physique of the American Negro () – a social scientific study of Black health disparities – to films by Black queer filmmaker Marlon Riggs that explore the racialized dynamics of HIV/AIDS to the stories that everyday Black people share with their medical professionals. However, in focusing on literature as a vital dimension of the Black medical archive, my goal is to underscore the importance of Black writing to this vast repository of Black medical memory. In doing so, 

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I contend that the Black literary tradition is a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine – a field about which I will say more later – has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine. That so many of the earliest Black writers linked medicine to slavery, colonialism, and their afterlives is not a fluke. It is no coincidence, for instance, that Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois all incorporated the racially exploitative behaviors of white doctors – many of whom were slave owners – as important plot points in their writings. Nor is it a fluke that subsequent generations of Black writers – from Walter White, Ralph Ellison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison to June Jordan, Olympia Vernon, Colson Whitehead, and Bettina Judd – have continued to use literature to document the enduring practices of Black medical exploitation that persist in our post(chattel) slavery and postcolonial worlds. Whether considering the racial politics of the lobotomy in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (), or the reproductive and psychiatric experiments in Toni Morrison’s novel Home (), or the histories of medical experimentation on Black women in Bettina Judd’s poetry collection Patient (), we recognize that Black writers have mobilized the aesthetic affordances of literature to show how medicine has helped to underwrite slavery, colonialism, and their ongoing relations to Black people and Black bodies. These relations have been essential to the shaping of modern medicine and to the making of modernity’s racial order. In foregrounding the written terrains of the Black medical archive, I make three primary arguments. First, I suggest that paying attention to Black writers’ persistent engagement with the intersections of race and medicine uncovers a key framework for reading the Black literary tradition, while demonstrating how medicine has been integral to the social, cultural, and political fabric of Black life. My point is not that we do not already know or study many of these stories, but rather that we need to read them in relation and regard to their intertextual connections as a defining feature of the Black literary tradition. Second, this attention to the literary arm of the Black medical archive challenges tendencies to cast Black people’s practices of medical storytelling as a purely oral enterprise. In her brilliant study of African American medical exploitation – tellingly entitled Medical Apartheid – Harriet A. Washington urges her readers to unlearn habits of downplaying and ignoring Black people’s narratives of medical violence, while calling attention to the importance of orality as a critical mode of Black medical storytelling. Why, Washington asks, do we 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

“give the physicians’ medical narratives more credence than the numerous contentions of slaves, sharecroppers, and contemporary African Americans that they have been subjected to abusive medical research?” “Until now,” she adds, “the discussion has suffered greatly from our Western literary bias, which encourages us to believe planters’ and physicians’ writings about the health and medical issues of African Americans, but to give insufficient weight to a rich oral history passed down by African Americans, a history that has preserved the memory of medical abuses.” Washington’s fieldshifting study rightly highlights a deeply ingrained bias towards writing within Western systems of knowledge, communication, and value. For Black people, who were legally denied access to literacy under slavery – and then deprived of educational resources even when Black literacy was no longer an illegality – the material consequences of this bias have been lasting and often devastating. Under these conditions of strategic deprivation, surveillance, and punishment, Black people have embraced and creatively deployed non-written modes of expression, like orality. And yet, studying the Black literary tradition reveals how Black people have defied the racialized proscriptions of literacy, wresting the power of writing from the enclosures of race, class, and gender that have historically worked to position Blackness and writing as necessarily incompatible. Therefore, to downplay the written forms that help to constitute the Black medical archive is to downplay the valuable stories of race, medicine, and colonial modernity that this writing has captured. Taking Black writing seriously as an enduring and fugitive mode of medical storytelling would disrupt proclivities to frame orality as the only condition of possibility for Black people’s medical stories, leaving us better equipped to identify and analyze the myriad forms, textures, and content of Black people’s medical narratives. Third, focusing on the literary front of the Black medical archive helps to re-envision the utility of literature as it is currently configured in narrative medicine scholarship. There its chief function is to operate as a vector of “narrative competence.” According to Rita Charon, who coined the term “narrative medicine” and founded the field, narrative medicine is a “medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness . . . A medicine practiced with narrative competence,” she contends, “will lead to more humane, ethical, and perhaps more effective care.” Charon’s point here is that narratives, or stories, open up channels of knowledge and communication that can impact and hopefully improve care. Therefore, it behooves medical professionals to become more effective interpreters of stories – or, in other words, to develop narrative competence. 

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I want to build on Charon’s important argument by suggesting that, alongside narrative competence, medical professionals should be as invested in developing historical consciousness as well – and should, in fact, regard historical consciousness as part and parcel of narrative competence. In their article “Making the Case for History in Medical Education,” a distinguished group of History of Medicine and History of Science scholars detail the importance of history to “medical knowledge, reasoning, and practice.” They show how a more robust comprehension of medicine’s historical contexts can help to spotlight issues related, for instance, to social power and inequality. In fact, they contend that “historical analysis can contribute to medical education in exactly the same ways as anatomy, biochemistry, or pathophysiology, as a fundamental component of medical knowledge.” Focusing on the importance of historical consciousness for treating Black patients in particular, Harriet A. Washington puts it this way: “[H]istorical silence is a grave omission, because trying to ameliorate African American health without understanding the pertinent history of medical care is like trying to treat a patient without eliciting a thorough medical history: a hazardous, and probably futile, approach.” What these scholars suggest, in short, is that historical competence is as critical to medicine as those more prioritized competencies that are strictly grounded in biomedicine. With this argument in mind, I contend that revisiting the uses to which we put Black literature in medicine, namely by foregrounding its status as a site of historical knowledge – as an archive – would help to cultivate a thicker historical and structural understanding of Black people’s medical stories. Whereas narrative medicine has a proclivity to prioritize individual patients and stories, Black literature furnishes a portal into the history of medicine that invites a conceptual reorientation of narrative competence, one that would attune this benchmark to collectivity and structural analysis as much as it attends to singularity and individual medical stories. Situating individual narratives within this wider framework of understanding would bring into clearer focus the routinized and transhistorical nature of anti-Black medical violence, shining light on its grounding in slavery and colonialism. Let’s turn now to the literary origins of the Black medical archive. Blackness, Aesthetics, and the Origins of Modern Medicine Literature and aesthetics are no strangers to the still-unfolding relationship between race and medicine. As colonialism and transatlantic slavery took root, the travel writings of slave ship doctors were important genres of transnational literary production that helped to fashion a literature of and for the New World. At the same time, these texts were valuable sources for 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

the production of medical knowledge and were crucial to building the infrastructure of modern medicine. This convergence of slavery and colonialism, of racial capital and Black medical experimentation, helped to set the stage for the medical industrial complex while situating literature and aesthetics as important vehicles in the production of modern medicine. In this network of relations, the enslaved Black body was an object of the white literary and medical imaginations: a thing to be experimented on and written about in the interest of breathing life into the racial, financial, and intellectual economies of slavery and colonial modernity. In many ways, then, modern medicine was always a site of narrative medicine. In these instances, however, narrative operated as a terrain and tool of anti-Black terror, extraction, and experimentation. Similarly, the wildly popular tradition of the nineteenth-century medicine show was also grounded in this violent New World assemblage of Blackembodied extraction and experimentation. Situated at the intersections of medicine and aesthetics, medicine shows routinely appropriated Black performance aesthetics – particularly minstrelsy – as a way to stage experiments in Black bodily caricature that allowed them to achieve pathbreaking levels of financial and cultural success. Writing about this relationship between medicine shows and minstrelsy, one critic posits, in fact, that the medicine show “extended the life of a form [minstrelsy] that had lost its viability in the marketplace.” That is, if minstrelsy earned its profits by trafficking in gross racial stereotypes that pigeonholed Black people within strategic fictions of the white racial imagination, medicine shows figured out a way to rehabilitate this declining tradition by yoking it to the burgeoning field of medicine. Although the primary characters of medicine shows, known as “medicine doctors,” are often characterized in scholarly discourses as “quack” – usually as a way of indexing their fraudulence and illegitimacy – there was not such a huge chasm between medicine shows and modern medicine in this nascent phase of medicine’s development. Not only did doctors generally lack formal training, but they were not governed by rigorous standards and oversight and, in some cases, were even illiterate. Thus, rather than read the medicine show as an illicit mimicry of modern medicine, we should instead read its racial, financial, and aesthetic economies as part and parcel of nineteenth-century medicine. The history of medicine shows and the writings of slave ship doctors are two examples of how anti-Black medical violence has not only existed as a biomedical act but has entailed a vibrant tradition of aesthetic experimentation as well, whether on the theatrical stage or the slave ship. At the heart of both projects is an attempt to colonize Black bodies. Viewed from this angle, Black medical experimentation is a practice whereby white “doctors” 

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use Black bodies as raw material for the making of modern medicine as well as for the innovation of experimental aesthetic forms – for the invention of New World literature and culture. In other words, modern medicine and colonial aesthetics alike were enabled, in large part, by their extractive and experimental relationships to Blackness and Black bodies. This racialized practice of modern cultural formation traffics in a historical phenomenon that Toni Morrison refers to as “playing in the dark,” or using Blackness as a shadow-like building block of cultural creation – and, I would add to this, of medical innovation. But even as the historical relationship between medicine and aesthetics has often been mired in relations of violence and exploitation, Black writers have radically reconfigured this relation, using it to mount radical acts of Black medical storytelling. If, for slave ship doctors and medicine show proprietors, the Black body’s relationship to the aesthetic was steeped in racial exploitation and sought to discipline and colonize the Black body, Black writers, on the other hand, have used literary aesthetics to expose anti-Black medical violence while working to decolonize the Black body. It is important that we listen to the stories that they tell across the time and space of more than two centuries. It is necessary that we attune our ears to the structural and historical frequencies of Black writers’ medical stories, which are also stories of race and colonial modernity. In what follows, I turn to a small sample of these stories. Medicine and Plantation Slavery In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, The African (), the eponymous protagonist – a former slave and abolitionist – details a nearly fatal assault that he suffered at the hands of “one Doctor Perkins” in the slave-holding state of Georgia (Equiano, : ). Having disembarked from a ship on which he worked as a slave, Equiano decided to visit “some negroes, in their master’s yard, in the town of Savannah” (Equiano: ). But he was soon accosted by their master, Doctor Perkins – a man whom Equiano describes as “severe and cruel,” and who did not like to “see any strange negroes in his yard” (Equiano: ). Severely intoxicated, Doctor Perkins beat Equiano to the brink of death, before placing him in jail the next morning. Noticing that Equiano was missing, the captain of his ship began to make inquiries before setting out in search of the missing deckhand himself. Upon finding Equiano in jail brutally beaten, the captain “sent for the best doctors in the place” (Equiano: ). But they all “declared it as their opinion that [Equiano] could not recover” (Equiano: ). By some grace of fate, one Doctor Brady 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

agreed to care for Equiano. The enslaved man “began at last to amend” (Equiano: ). Tucked away in the pages of Equiano’s epic narrative, this fleeting glimpse into race and medicine in the eighteenth century illuminates a set of racial relations that continue to haunt modern medicine and to redound across the diverse geographies of the Black literary tradition. At the outset, Equiano introduces the trope of the white doctor who is also a slave owner. Though he provides practically no information about Doctor Perkins or his medical reputation, he nonetheless offers key insights that help us to gauge the doctor’s character. Not only does Doctor Perkins own slaves, but his hate for Black people is so profound that he is willing to nearly murder Equiano for setting foot in his yard. It is hardly surprising, then, that Doctor Perkins offers no medical treatment to the badly beaten slave. This was likely an easy decision because Equiano was not his property. Therefore, the slave’s injury and imminent death would pose no loss of property, and therefore no loss of money, for the doctor–slave owner. Further, it is worth pausing on the fact that, when Equiano’s captain solicited treatment from other doctors, all of them, with the exception of one, declared that he “could not recover,” essentially consigning the injured slave to death. Equiano, who goes to great lengths to detail the kindness and generosity of others throughout his narrative, praises the “skillfulness” of Doctor Brady, who ultimately enables his recovery (Equiano: ). Without question, it is important that Black people have access to open, skilled medical professionals like Dr. Brady. And yet, the possibility of Black medical recovery should not be left to the chance of a random, altruistic encounter. If we consider the extensive and ongoing history of Black medical neglect, the other doctors’ consensus on the impossibility of Black recovery leaves one to wonder if their inaction and grim outlook are motivated by the fact that Equiano is an enslaved Black man. To be sure, when the captain solicits an attorney to hold Doctor Perkins accountable for his violent assault, he was roundly rebuffed and told that they could “do nothing for [Equiano] as [he] was a negro” (Equiano, : ). As Equiano lay in dire need of medical care, it is reasonable to wonder if the “best doctors in the place,” like “all the lawyers in the town,” could “do nothing for [Equiano] as [he] was a negro” (Equiano: –). In the years following the publication of Equiano’s narrative, Black artists and activists continued to use writing to grapple with the most urgent social and political concerns shaping the course of colonial modernity. As Black political aesthetics developed into a thriving racial art, medicine became a vital dimension of the Black literary imagination. Shortly after the publication of Aldridge’s The Black Doctor (), Harriet Jacobs, a formerly 

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enslaved Black woman, published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (). This autobiographical bildungsroman follows the journey of an enslaved Black girl, Linda Brent, from the terrors of plantation slavery to legal freedom. Importantly, Jacobs constructs her narrative such that readers are routinely reminded that Brent’s violent and sexually abusive master, Dr. Flint, is not only a slave owner, but also a medical doctor. Flint’s character is based on the life of Dr. James Norcom, Jacobs’s actual slave owner in Edenton, North Carolina – a town that literary critic Sarah L. Berry has characterized as “full of doctors who also owned slaves.” As Jacobs chronicles Brent’s traumatic experiences of slavery, she details her fierce but debilitating fight against the sexually craven Dr. Flint, who attempts to force her into a concubinage arrangement. Sexual assault and reproductive violence are consistent thematics in Black women’s historical and contemporary fiction. Published in , Jacobs’s narrative of Brent’s encounter with Dr. Flint’s violence is one of the earliest stories in the Black medical archive to expose the bodily injuries that medical professionals inflicted on Black women in particular. Writing to a primarily Northern audience of white women, Jacobs takes great pains to package her portrayal of Dr. Flint’s sexual violence in the gendered conventions of Victorian propriety and to contour her storytelling strategies to the narrative constraints of these orthodoxies. Along these lines, it is not surprising that Jacobs relies more on gesture and innuendo than spectacular portraits of Dr. Flint’s sexual violence – or that she chooses, as Toni Morrison puts it, to “drop a veil over those proceedings too terrible to relate.” But considering Dr. Flint’s ravenous sexual violence, one cringes upon discovering that he was also Brent’s doctor. After becoming “ill in mind and body” while pregnant, Brent laments: “I could not have any doctor but my master” (Jacobs, : ). When Dr. Flint enters her room, she “began to scream” (Jacobs: ). Not wanting the slave’s rage to agitate her condition, and possibly provoke her death – and thus a loss of property and money – Dr. Flint “withdrew” from the room (Jacobs: ). This visceral eruption from an otherwise hushed Brent recalls and conjures the screams of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester as she endured a savage beating from her own master in the opening of Douglass’s  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. As literary critic Fred Moten might put it: “You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream as it bears, at the moment of articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagination constituting the whole of the voice, the whole of the story.” Whereas Aunt Hester’s “story” is “one of the most well-known scenes of torture in the literature of slavery,” as literary critic Saidiya Hartman has argued, Brent’s scream against Dr. Flint’s threats of medical violence is rarely an object of critical concern. And yet, it is no 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

less radical in its use of Black women’s vocality, specifically the scream, to strain against the terrors of slavery and medicine alike. Scholars such as Farah Jasmine Griffin, Daphne Brooks, and Emily Lordi have theorized the enunciative power of Black women’s voices, clarifying their capacities to “heal a crisis . . . as well as provoke one,” as Griffin puts it. This framing of Black women’s vocality between the interstices of healing and provocation is salient, especially for understanding the historical relationship between Black women’s voices and anti-Black medical violence. In detailing how Brent’s scream repels Dr. Flint and his violence, Jacobs casts Black women’s voices as instruments that provoke, producing and calling forth a different relation of power – even if momentarily. The enslaved woman’s scream pressures and renegotiates the conventional relationship between slave and master within the gendered economy of the plantation South. At the same time, Jacobs frames Black women’s voices as agents of healing. Though fleeting, Brent’s scream ultimately provides a reprieve that affords her more time and space to heal in the face of Dr. Flint’s medical and sexual violence. In this regard, alongside hearing the well-known screams of Black women like Aunt Hester and jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl invites us to explore the broader soundscapes of Black women’s screams. It beckons us to listen more closely to Black women who have lifted their voices to provoke and heal, including those who have screamed against the grain of anti-Black medical violence, from Linda Brent to Serena Williams to the enslaved Black women at the heart of Dr. J. Marion Sims’s medical experiments. In the final analysis, reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a radical act of Black medical storytelling provides insight into the long history of anti-Black medical violence, while illuminating how Black people have resisted the racial terrors of medicine. Brent’s scream is enough to repel Dr. Flint and to avert his threats of medical injury, if only for a moment. The “Black Doctor” Perhaps the Black writer who most consistently engaged the relationship between race and medicine in the nineteenth century is William Wells Brown. An abolitionist, medical doctor, and former slave, Brown’s writings cast the interconnections of race and medicine as a vital node of plantation slavery, settler colonialism, and the arrangements of racial power these systems engendered. A prolific writer, Brown’s work ranged in form from poetry, drama, and a novel to essays, history, and autobiography. Against this backdrop, it is noteworthy that across the generic expansiveness 

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of his writing, Brown routinely returns to the intersections of race and medicine, framing this relation as an important lens for examining racial formation under slavery, colonialism, and their afterlives. In , Brown published his only novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, widely considered the first novel published by an African American. Rather than launching directly into the novel and its plot, Brown begins the publication with his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown. Importantly, in the opening paragraph of this wide-ranging text, Brown turns immediately to the intimacies of race, medicine, and slavery. He opens by observing that his enslaved mother was the property of John Young, a doctor, who was also the “owner of forty or fifty slaves” (Brown, : ). By the second paragraph, Brown adds that “[a]t an early age, [he] was separated from his mother, she being worked in the field, and he as a servant in his master’s medical department” (Brown: ). It is noteworthy that Brown, a formerly enslaved person with a deeply layered and diverse set of personal experiences, commences his narrative of self with two references to race, medicine, and plantation slavery. As is common for the slave narrative genre, these opening paragraphs articulate a story of origins, of self-beginnings. In Brown’s versioning of this narrative strategy, however, the art of establishing the Black self entails a distinct nod to the significance of race and medicine to his life, to be sure, but also to the infrastructure of slavery across generations. Considering the import that Brown accords the intersections of race and medicine in his autobiography, it is not surprising that he returns to this topic in Clotel, specifically through an enslaved character named Sam and his owner. Obviously based on Brown’s personal experiences, Sam, like Brown, worked as an enslaved apprentice in his master’s medical practice – a “large practice” dedicated to “doctoring both masters and slaves” (Brown: ). As the doctor taught Sam to grind up ointment, make pills, bleed, pull teeth, and administer medicine to slaves, the “young student grew older and became more practiced in his profession, [and] his services were of more importance to the doctor” (Brown: ). On one occasion, Sam’s master became ill and, for the first time, enlisted Sam to treat an enslaved man. Attempting to prove that he was “no sham doctor,” Sam “cut a rare figure . . . placing himself directly opposite his patient, and folding his arms across his breast and looking very knowingly” (Brown: ). “What’s de matter wid you?” Sam queries, as he starts the exam. “I is sick,” the patient replied. “Where is you sick?” Sam pressed. Placing his hand on his stomach, the enslaved man signaled the area of concern. Having checked the man’s tongue and pulse, Sam conferred with the doctor, who agreed with Sam’s 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

treatment: “bleed him and give him a dose of calomel,” a favored but generally ineffective treatment as modern medicine clawed its way into existence during the nineteenth century (Brown: ). Sam’s medical skills eventually earned him the title the “Black Doctor” among fellow slaves (Brown: ). Like Aldridge’s Black doctor, Sam’s master exploits him, and likewise conscripts his medical knowledge and labor into the service of energizing slavery and colonialism. As was the case for enslaved people who worked in fields and performed other tasks, these Black doctors and their bodies were victims of Black labor exploitation. Their slave masters–doctors viewed illness and medicine as they would a boll of cotton: something to be managed and monetized through the violent extraction of enslaved Black people’s embodied labors. Interestingly, alongside William Wells Brown, perhaps the most vocal observer of anti-Black medical violence in this period was Dr. James McCune Smith, a Black doctor and abolitionist who also happened to be one of Aldridge’s childhood classmates. “No man in this country,” Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery than does Dr. Smith” (Stauffer, : XIV). The first Black person to earn a medical degree, to own a pharmacy, and to publish in a peer-reviewed medical journal, Smith brought this consciousness to his study of medicine. Similar to Brown’s and Aldridge’s Black doctors, Dr. Smith was forced to navigate the currents of anti-Black medical violence but used his medical bona fides to shine light on the racial unconscious of modern medicine. At the same time, Smith also understood the importance of Black art to negotiating these struggles. Having been denied admission to medical school in the United States because of his race, Smith watched Aldridge weather similar race-based restrictions in his acting career. Having attended several plays, he was so impressed with his childhood classmate that, in a feature article, he boldly queried and declared: “With . . . Ira Aldridge, the first of living actors, who will have the hardihood to deny that the negro, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is fully entitled to the first place in the Temple of Art?” (Smith, : ). Also a fan of Aldridge’s “great dramatic power” was William Wells Brown, who would try his own hand at playwrighting just over a decade after Aldridge completed The Black Doctor, and five years after the publication of Clotel (Brown, : ). In , Brown published a play entitled The Escape; or, a Leap from Freedom. In this five-act melodrama, Brown not only returns to and re-elaborates the history of exploiting Black doctors but uses the play to take a more expansive look at the intersections of race, medicine, and plantation slavery. As is the case in Clotel, these intersections 

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figure prominently in the play’s opening dialogue, featuring Dr. Gaines, a physician and slave owner, and Mrs. Gaines, his wife. DR. GAINES: Well, my dear, my practice is steadily increasing. I forgot to tell you that neighbor Wyman engaged me yesterday as his family physician; and I hope that the fever and ague, which is now taking hold of the people, will give me more patients. I see by the New Orleans papers that the yellow fever is raging there to a fearful extent. Men of my profession are reaping a harvest in that section this year. I would that we could have a touch of the yellow fever here, for I think I could invent a medicine that would cure it. But the yellow fever is a luxury that we medical men in this climate can’t expect to enjoy; yet we may hope for the cholera. MRS. GAINES: Yes, I would be glad to see more sickly here, so that your business might prosper. But we are always unfortunate. Everybody here seems to be in good health, and I am afraid that they’ll keep so. However, we must hope for the best. We must trust in the Lord. Providence may possibly send some disease among us for our benefit (Brown, : ).

This dialogue exposes how unscrupulous desires for capital accumulation have motivated the practice of medicine and medical research. Dr. and Mrs. Gaines are so thirsty for money and social status that they yearn for the trauma, sickness, and death of a viral outbreak like cholera or yellow fever, which both wreaked havoc on nineteenth-century America. Mapping a problematic relationship between illness and profit, Dr. Gaines and his wife stage an early embrace of a medical paradigm that regards good health as a threat to capital accumulation. Importantly, the majority of the money that Dr. Gaines stands to earn from a viral outbreak would flow from his treatment of neighbors’ slaves, who far outnumber their owners, and upon whose health the US plantation economy depended. After initially shirking off a slave trader’s interest in purchasing his slaves, Dr. Gaines so palpably fears the financial loss that a viral outbreak would pose that he reconsiders the trader’s offer. “[T]he doctors say that we are likely to have a touch of the cholera this summer,” Gaines laments, “and if that’s the case, I suppose I had better turn as many of my slaves into cash as I can” (Brown, : ). “Yes, doctor, that is very true,” the trader agrees. “The cholera is death on slaves, and a thousand dollars in your pocket is a great deal better than a nigger in the field, with cholera at his heels” (Brown: ). This link between slavery, medicine, and racial capital is also at the heart of a conversation that Dr. Gaines has with Mr. Campbell, a neighboring slave owner. Having grown increasingly perturbed with Dr. Jones, his current physician, Campbell entreats Dr. Gaines to assume these duties. 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

His primary grievance: Dr. Jones had caused him to lose “another very valuable nigger under his treatment” (Brown, : ). Motivated by an unrestrained desire for profit, Dr. Gaines is eager to oblige. “I shall be most happy to become your doctor,” he replies, before asking a clarifying question: “Of course, you want me to attend to your niggers, as well as to your family?” “Certainly, sir,” Mr. Campbell confirms. “I have twenty-three servants. What will you charge me by the year?” After agreeing to five hundred dollars per year, Campbell leaves, and Dr. Gaines gushes with pride to his wife: “There, my dear, what do you think of that? Five hundred dollars more added to our income. That’s patronage worth having!” The conversation pivots immediately to the importance of Cato – Dr. Gaines’s enslaved medical apprentice – to the Gaines’s financial ambitions. The doctor observes that Cato “is becoming very useful to me in the shop . . . A valuable boy, Cato!” (Brown: ). At this point, the setting shifts to the doctor’s shop. There we find Cato making “ointment,” “bread pills,” and “tater pills” (Brown: ). In this repurposed scene from Clotel, Dr. Gaines, like Sam’s master, instructs his enslaved apprentice to attend to any slaves who might come seeking medical assistance, but to tell any “gentlemen” (read white men) that he “shall be in this afternoon.” Similar to Sam’s master, Dr. Gaines orders Cato to follow the same rote treatment plan for his enslaved patients: “look at their tongues, bleed them, and give them each a dose of calomel” (Brown: ). Cato is happy to assume the role of the Black Doctor. But in the final analysis, Dr. Gaines subjects him to Black medical exploitation as a means of lining his own coffers. In these and other early texts in the Black medical archive, Black writers craft medical stories that clarify how the origins of modern medicine were rooted in slavery and colonialism, and their efforts to colonize the Black body. Further, even as slavery and colonialism have morphed into new and more complex arrangements, and Black people have secured varying degrees of legal freedom, the modern world has continued to traffic in (and profit from) an exploitative relationship between race, medicine, and the Black body. The literary arm of the Black medical archive has persisted in narrating and documenting these dynamics and has remained a critical terrain for the practice of narrative medicine. Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery In the wake of US emancipation, Black writers continued to view the intersection of race and medicine as an important dimension of Black freedom dreams, and as a fertile ground of Black political aesthetics. During the post-bellum/pre-Harlem era of the Black literary tradition, 

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writers like Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline E. Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois used literature to cast race and medicine as a vital element of their struggles to convert the legal abolition of slavery into forms of Black citizenship that would have legs. On this front, we can consider works like Frances E. W. Harper’s  novel, Iola Leroy. Not only is the novel’s eponymous protagonist a nurse, and a hospital key to its setting, but the plot is largely organized around an interracial trio of doctors whom Harper uses to address some of the most urgent social and political issues facing Black people and the nation in the wake of emancipation. Through her development of Drs. Gresham, Latrobe, and Latimer – a mixed-race Black man, a racist white Southerner, and a relatively liberal white Union physician, respectively – Harper grapples with the thick tensions brewing between the US North and South; she exposes the limitations of white liberals who proclaim to be allies of the Black freedom struggle but continue to traffic in anti-Blackness; and she critiques physicians who advance pseudo-scientific theories of race as a way to solidify cultural and biological conceptions of Black inferiority. Like Harper’s Iola Leroy, Pauline E. Hopkins’s serialized novel Of One Blood (–) uses the friendship and eventual rivalry between Dr. Reuel Briggs (a mixed-race physician) and Dr. Aubrey Livingston (a Southern-born white doctor) to illuminate the racial conditions of postemancipation America and the racial unconscious of modern medicine. Livingston’s father, also a doctor, was “deeply interested in the science of medicine,” and had made some “valuable discoveries along the lines of mesmeric phenomena, for some two or three of his books are referred to even at this advanced stage of discovery, as marvellous [sic] in some of their data” (Hopkins, : ). But considering that the elder Dr. Livingston “owned a large plantation of slaves,” one is left to ponder the degree to which these “valuable discoveries” were enabled through experiments on his slaves. Though not enslaved, Belton Piedmont in Sutton Griggs’s  novel, Imperium in Imperio, barely escapes the clutches of Black medical experimentation. After being kidnapped by a white mob in Louisiana, he dodges a lynching but falls into the hands of Dr. Zakeland, a white doctor who is as thirsty to ravage and consume his Black body as the mob. Having successfully offered the mob a keg of whiskey in exchange for Belton, Dr. Zakeland was thrilled to take the man’s body to his office where he could begin dissection. “Look[ing] down on Belton with a happy smile,” Dr. Zakeland was overjoyed. “To have such a robust, well-formed handsome nigger to dissect and examine he regarded as one of the greatest boons of his medical career” (Griggs, , ). Fortunately, Belton awakes before the doctor is 

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The Black Body and the Medical Archive

able to dismember his body. He eventually kills Zakeland and avoids the fatal terror of Black medical experimentation. Published a few years later, Charles Chesnutt’s  novel, The Marrow of Tradition, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Passing of the FirstBorn” – which he includes in The Souls of Black Folk () – use the figure of the Black child to grapple with ongoing attempts to colonize the Black body in the wake of slavery, while signaling how medicine continued to serve as an accomplice in these efforts. During this period, the figure of the child was often emblematic of a deep investment in the “new” and in futurity, concepts that were at the heart of modernity and of modernist art and thought. And yet, for Black writers, intellectuals, and everyday citizens, the modern Black child was routinely imagined as a site of Black death and precarity – a figure of animate pasts that functioned as a symbol of aborted Black futures rather than an optimistic bellwether of better times that are yet to come. This is certainly the case for Chesnutt and Du Bois. In his brief but grim account, Du Bois details the tragedy of losing his own son after the medical politics of Jim Crowism denied him life-saving care in the state of Georgia, solely because he was Black. In Chestnutt’s novel, the son of prominent Black physician Dr. William Miller succumbs after being killed by a white mob. Ironically, when the son of Major Carteret – a racist white newspaper owner who helped to incite this mob – falls ill, he entreats Dr. Miller to save the boy’s life. Considering the circumstances of this ask, this is nothing less than the kind of Black medical exploitation that we have seen hurled at Black doctors from the beginnings of the Afro-diasporic literary tradition. My aim in gesturing briefly towards these writers is not to provide an exhaustive catalog of Black literary texts that engage the historical relationship between race and medicine and its role in attempts to colonize the Black body. To be sure, that list would include texts such as Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (), Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (), and the novels in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, all of which are frequently studied for their complex explorations of race and medicine. But alongside these usual suspects, we have an opportunity to expand our understanding of the vast body of Black writing that helps to constitute the Black medical archive. These works would include, for instance, Walter White’s  novel The Fire in the Flint, Ethridge Knight’s poem “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” (), Calvin Hernton’s poetry collection Medicine Man (), Pearl Cleage’s plays Blues for an Alabama Sky () and Bourbon at the Border (), Olympia Vernon’s novel Eden (), and Colson Whitehead’s  novel The Underground Railroad. Exploring issues like race and family planning, the racialized 

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violences of medical technology, racial terror groups who target Black doctors, and medical schools who commission grave robbers to steal Black bodies, these works use literary aesthetics to expose and grapple with the gross acts of medical violence that fuel the afterlives of slavery and colonialism and their ongoing efforts to colonize Black bodies. In the final analysis, studying the long history of Black writing that grapples with race and medicine expands our view of the Black medical archive and furnishes a different frame for reading the Black literary tradition. It allows us to avail ourselves of Black medical stories, histories, and knowledge that are often suppressed, overlooked, and disavowed. Providing a different aperture into the fullness of the Black medical archive, Black literature exposes the deep time of anti-Black medical violence and illuminates how medicine has been essential to the global project of colonizing Black people and their bodies. This literary-historical knowledge helps us to become better interpreters of stories, and ultimately aids in achieving more historically conscious, ethical, and effective practices of medicine – practices that would enable us to work towards decolonizing the Black body.



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 CRYSTAL S. DONKOR

Laboring Bodies

Brent’s spatial options are painful; the garret serves as a disturbing, but meaningful, response to slavery. Disabling, oppressive, dark, and cramped surroundings are more liberatory than moving about under the gaze of Dr. Flint who threatens her “at every turn.” Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Not that she was well, or would ever be; but she had recovered so far as rendered it hopeful she might provide for her own wants. Harriet E. Wilson, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Reginald H. Pitts, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.

“. . .I still suffer very much from my left side,” reports Harriet Jacobs in her letter to Amy Kirby Post on December ,  (Jacobs, : ). Writing from Idlewild in New York’s Hudson Valley, Jacobs likely recalls an old injury, one she acquired while hidden in the nine by seven garret space of her grandmother’s attic. Within the pages of her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (), Jacobs hints that her seven years spent in the tight confines of Molly Horniblow’s attic space has left lasting impressions upon her body (Jacobs, :). What begins as cramped, numb, and stiffening limbs in the garret, ultimately leads to Jacobs’s rheumatism that would plague her for the rest of her life, but the origin of Jacobs’s additional bodily ailments suffered throughout her lifetime begin in her girlhood, long before her confinement in the garret at age twenty. For Jacobs and other African American women with histories of captivity and bondage in the nineteenth century, like Harriet Wilson, their lifelong relationships with disability and labor start early and evolve beyond familiar refrains of suffering. This chapter reorients our relationship to women whose stories we have come to know well through their self-authorship. I offer readings of the (semi)autobiographical narratives of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents and Harriet 

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Wilson’s Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black () to underscore the inextricable links between girlhoods, labor, and disability. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. In my framing of disability discourses, I am especially attentive to Jasbir K. Puar’s notion that “debilitation is a necessary component that both exposes and situates the non-disabled/disabled binary” for its relevance to women like Jacobs and Wilson, who move along the spectrum of ability throughout their lives. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance. It is neither a simple nor linear task to trace Jacobs’s disability to her (expected) girlhood labors. Writing under the pseudonym, Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs exposes the distinct risks of sexual violence for enslaved girls and women alongside their complicated strategies for survival. The use of the pseudonym provides Jacobs with an element of removal, allowing her necessary distance with which to process the disturbing, intimate, and controversial events of her girlhood. Tracing the seeds of disability sown upon Harriet Wilson’s body in her girlhood requires its own disentanglement. Our Nig relates the crude violence endured by Frado, a child indentured servant working in a Northern home. Literary historian, P. Gabrielle Foreman’s authenticating study of the text reveals that “from the beginning to the end and with very few exceptions, Wilson’s narrative corresponds to the historical record.” Situating the narrative as an “autobiography characterized by its complex novelistic qualities just as surely as it can be considered a brilliant novel that makes substantive autobiographical claims” allows us to track Wilson’s early life in accordance with her narrative portrayal. Frado or “Nig” becomes a stand-in for Wilson’s own indentured childhood, much in the way that Linda Brent acts as a proxy for Jacobs in Incidents, allowing Wilson to similarly disassociate from the harsh realities of her childhood that led to her disablement. The extreme conditions under which young Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson were “put to work” produced significant physical and psychological trauma. In her study of each woman’s mid-nineteenth-century narrative, Black girlhood scholar Nazeera Wright identifies the distress of Jacobs’s “premature knowing” and Frado’s “education in pain” as all too familiar passages in the life of captive Black girls. Histories of Black childhood in the nineteenth century reveal much about the value of children’s labor to systems of indenture and servitude. That value was even more critical for 

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Laboring Bodies

Black girls who were not only judged for their domestic skill, but also for their sexual function and reproductive capacity. Crystal Lynn Webster’s recognition of the nonuniversality of experiences of Black childhood helps to frame the ways that we can understand Jacobs’s and Wilson’s disparate experiences of Black girlhood. The perversities of slavery permitted Jacobs to live under constant sexual threat of her enslaver, Dr. Flint, while Northern racism enabled Frado’s wanton physical abuse at the hands of her employer, Mrs. Bellmont. Like Webster, historian Wilma King’s work invites us to think about the destabilization of the category of childhood for Black children, but with attention to the variable and gendered circumstances which governed how they labored. For example, sexual labor is expected of Jacobs, even in youth, because of her race and gender, whereas the endurance of harsh physical punishment is a rationalized aspect of Frado’s domestic work because she is a Black girlchild in a white home. After processing these girlhood traumas, I discover the presence of disability in their adult lives to illustrate how Wilson and Jacobs reappropriate their labor and demonstrate unexpected ability. The Road to Disability Jennifer Barclay’s argument that applying a disability studies framework to enslavement provides “more thorough, critical examinations of how race and disability shaped black life in the post-emancipation decades” encourages my analysis of the aftermath of Jacobs’s enslavement and Wilson’s indenture. Their disabilities, first hinted at in their (semi)autobiographies, become even more starkly visible as they reshape and restructure their futures around their bodily capacities once self-emancipated. Like a physically manifested “mark” of the institution itself, disability’s remnants cannot be left behind and remain, in fact, a bridge between the narrative and postcaptivity experience. Drawing upon Barclay’s work makes disability not only legible in the histories of captivity in the nineteenth century, it also makes more apparent these legacies in the texts that chronicle life outside of captivity. Inasmuch as we must attend to disability “as a socially constructed phenomenon and systemic social discourse which determines how body minds and behaviors are labeled, valued, represented, and treated,” we must also be attentive to disability as an economically situated matter. For the formerly enslaved and indentured, the state sanctioned systems which disabled them through abuse and facilitated the theft of their labor, thus disrupting their economic potential. I pursue Puar’s notion that “the term ‘debilitation’ is distinct from the term ‘disablement’ because it foregrounds 

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the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled” to consider that systems of enslavement and indenture aimed to break the will of those it held with a full understanding that, in many cases, they would be breaking down bodies over time. When Puar speaks of bodies that may be “disabled but also capacitated,” she provides a lens through which we can understand how Jacobs and Wilson mobilized their bodyminds in defiance of their supposed limitations. Barclay reminds us that in scholarship about slavery and the body, “bod [ies] today considered ‘disabled’ are uncomfortably passed over with only a few exceptions.” Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson are not the exceptions. While their bodies have been the subject of scholarly inquiry around all manner of violence, including physical pain, mental trauma, and the threat of sexual abuse and sadism, the prolonged impact of such violence has, more often than not, been discussed discretely. The abuses their bodies and minds suffered are often cited as the origin of their shame, pain, and trauma, but they are rarely interrogated as the origin of their disabilities. Perhaps the disabled lives of Black women formerly held in captivity has largely elided scholarly attention because of the racial exclusion of disability studies. Or perhaps, even though “disability is everywhere [but], for all sorts of important reasons, not claimed as such” we are unable to lay precise claim to this exclusion. In response to such absences, I explore what a disability studies framework might offer us in understanding Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson as shaped in the compendium of writings about their lives. Recruitment as a feminist disability studies strategy that “find[s] and claim [s] work that is not explicitly announced as being about disability or that is not authored by women who identify as disabled but that nevertheless captures disability experiences,” provides a useful analytic for reading Jacobs’s and Wilson’s chronicled life stories as disability narratives. This chapter participates in the work of “politicizing and historicizing textual representations of disability” by expanding the discussion to each author’s life writings, offering a more robust representation. Moreover, it draws from the conceptual frameworks of Black feminist thinkers like Sami Schalk, Therí Alyce Pickens, and Diana Louis, who critically nuance disability to include mental instability and secondary health impacts as a model for widening the scope of disability. In the cases of Jacobs and Wilson, I do not measure disability purely as a single sustained illness over the course of a significant period or lifetime, although Jacobs’s lifelong battle with rheumatism certainly does qualify along these traditional definitions of disability. Instead, I employ Jasbir K. Puar’s claim that “disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility” to 

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Laboring Bodies

assert that Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson migrate across spectrums of disability and ability in their adult lives. I consider disability in the lives of these women as the frequent, successive, varying, and sometimes interrelated known and unknown illnesses that left both women in cyclical states of debility and poor health, with intermittent periods of relief. The Injuries of Girlhood Perhaps the most easily discernible scene of the disabling of Harriet Jacobs’s physical body occurs in the chapter of Incidents entitled, “The Loophole of Retreat.” In it, Jacobs recalls the following sleeping conditions: “A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the roof” (Jacobs, :). Carl R. Lounsbury’s scaled illustration of the garret space above the small shed appended to Jacobs’s grandmother’s home, alongside Jacobs’s own narration of her hiding, present possibilities for understanding the physical consequences of her captivity in this space. Molly Horniblow’s home faced south toward King Street, while other homes bounded her property on the north, east, and west sides (Jacobs, : ). Facing south, Jacobs viewed the desired sightings of her children and the less desired sightings of Dr. Norcom parading up and down King Street, on which he also resided. The shed of the Horniblow home, with its deeply sloped pent roof, sat affixed to the right side of the house. Jacobs likely laid with her head positioned toward the roof’s acute angle, thus making it difficult to turn to the other side without hitting the roof. She faced south often, and perhaps slept in that direction as well, it being her only source of light and offering some modicum of peace as she listened to her children’s “merry” laughter and gazed upon their “two sweet little faces” (Jacobs, : ). Unable to stand in her small space or even move erect, Jacobs must have lain on her left side when she was not crawling around the space for exercise. In fact, she often lay “in bed all day to keep comfortable and needing the light to read and sew,” she faced her hole (). Over the course of seven years, Jacobs wearied the left side of her body to look south onto King Street, facing her primary sources of fresh air, light, and entertainment. When Jacobs writes to Amy Post some thirteen years after her ordeal, she still carries the bodily trauma of her confinement. For Harriet Jacobs, mental trauma occurs much earlier in the narrative. “The Trials of Girlhood” introduces readers to the sexual pursuit of Linda Brent by her enslaver, Dr. Flint. Jacobs details Dr. Flint’s relentless desire to compromise Linda’s much prided virtue in his lust to make her his concubine: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to 

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him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there” (). Though Linda adamantly refuses Dr. Flint and thwarts his many attempts, her resistance is not met without consequences. When Linda tries to make her own claim to love with a free-born “colored carpenter” who wanted to purchase her, she is struck by Dr. Flint for the first time in her narrative when “he sprang upon [her] like a tiger, and gave [her] a stunning blow” (). While Jacobs suggests physical violence is uncommon, the numerous acts of harassment she endures helps to drive the mental anguish and demonstrates that under enslavement, “mental trauma is inseparable from physical trauma, and vice versa.” The serious mental anxieties Linda experiences while under the tyranny of Dr. Flint become exacerbated when his wife also begins to harass her. Feeling threatened by her husband’s blatant desire and pursuit of Linda, Mrs. Flint begins a nightly vigil of keeping watch over Linda as she slept: Sometimes I woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she startled me on such occasion, she would glide stealthily away; and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my sleep, and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful for my life . . . what an unpleasant sensation it must produce to wake up in the sea of night and find a jealous woman being over you. (Jacobs, : –)

The weight of these torments weighs heavily upon Linda and ultimately manifest in her expressed desire to die. From her own pen Jacobs confesses that she had “often prayed for death” (). This is not a singular admission by Linda in the narrative but an oft repeated one, each instance representative of the compounded trauma of her terrorism by Dr. Flint. At the age of fifteen, Linda surrenders to another gentleman’s advances, hoping that this desperate calculation may stymie Dr. Flint’s efforts and possibly secure freedom for the children likely to come from their sexual union. Linda’s girlhood deliberations and executions compound her stress, producing two children whom Dr. Flint often threatens to sell. When Dr. Flint finally promises to remove Linda to a solo retreat in a cabin, thereby securing her alone for no purpose but his own desires, she laments, “I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death” (). For Jacobs, the obstacles of her own life and those of other girls and women who endured the threat and fulfillment of sexual exploitation, death was, at times, a desired and welcome outcome. According to Diana Louis, “Jacobs articulates various ways that the 

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Laboring Bodies

institution psychologically wounded women, illustrating the devastating mental harm caused by forms of violence that were integral to the practice of slavery vis-a-vis Black women – sexualized violence, forced and controlled reproduction, separation from children between and within plantations.” Louis reads Jacobs’s slave narrative and others like it as an opportunity to speak more acutely to mental health conditions of Black women in bondage, suggesting that Jacobs herself believed “southern slavery created psychological illness through confinement, sheer terror, and ongoing abuse.” More explicitly, the “sheer terror” of sexual abuse is not only continuous, but as “Jacobs makes clear . . . psychological torment due to sexualized violence begins early in enslaved women’s lives.” Jacobs’s girlhood is the origin point of her psychological torment as a result of sexualized violence and, I argue, the initial locus of her disabilities that encompass her adult life. Harriet Wilson’s childhood charts a very clear path between childhood, labor, and disability when examined through the lens of her (semi)autobiography. Wilson emphasizes that labor and violence go hand in hand, for rarely is Frado seen at work without receiving a strike or some other form of bodily punishment. Wilson blends the notion of labor as abuse in describing Frado’s day-to-day life: A large amount of dish-washing for small hands followed dinner. Then the same after tea and going after the cows finished her first day’s work. It was a new discipline to the child . . .. The same routine followed day after day, with slight variations; adding a little more work, and spicing the toil with “words that burn,” and frequent blows on the head. She was often greatly wearied, and silently wept over her sad fate. At first she wept aloud, which Mrs. Bellmont noticed by applying a raw-hide, always at hand in the kitchen. (Wilson, : )

Abuse is a natural accompaniment to Frado’s daily toil, as are the tools of violence. The rawhide is kept at ready hand in the site where Frado performs much of her labor. In fact, most of the scenes of abuse that occur in the narrative happen in the kitchen, the center of the domestic sphere, which seems to lie out of eye shot from the men who occupy the Bellmont home. Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary are rarely caught applying the rawhide or the bit, hurling the carving knife, or striking a blow with their hands or feet to Frado. The tasks to which Frado is put from the age of five further cement the relationship between labor and abuse. Preceding her kitchen work of dishwashing at dinner time, thus described, Frado was to begin her day “feed [ing] the hens, she was then . . . to drive the cows to pasture . . . to wash the common dishes [following breakfast] . . . to be waiting always to bring wood and chips, to run hither and thither from room to room” (–). 

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These tasks were judged suitable for Frado’s “small hands” and mounted as her little body grew. At nine years old, Frado ceased her three years of intermittent schooling and resumed a daily schedule which submitted all of “her time and person” to Mrs. Bellmont (). It seemed that part of Frado’s labor was to indulge Mrs. Bellmont’s violent fancies so that “no matter what occurred to ruffle her . . . a few blows on Nig seemed to relieve her of all notion of ill-will” (). Thus, the unwritten terms of Frado’s work agreement constituted abuse at the hands of Mrs. Bellmont. In addition to this form of brutal labor, new tasks were added to Frado’s work responsibilities: “She must now milk the cows, she had then only to drive. Flocks of sheep had been added to the farm, which daily claimed a portion of her time. In the absence of the men, she must harness the horse . . . in short, do the work of a boy” (). By the time Frado reached age fourteen, she was charged with all of the household duties and was “the only moving power in the house” (). Working from dusk till dawn, Frado began to show signs of illness. The environmental conditions of Frado’s labor exacerbated illness, for she often worked in extreme heat or cold, ill clad and barefoot in the winter. When Frado finds herself overwhelmed bodily by the burden of her illness she can seek no reprieve and continues to work while sitting, lest she be beaten. The impact of this overwork is not lost on Wilson’s characters. James Bellmont admonishes his mother, stating that they “shall ruin her [Frado’s] health by making her work so hard, and sleep in such a place” (). Mrs. Bellmont also recognizes the link between labor, disability, and economic independence when she declares, “I’ll beat the money out of her, if I can’t get her worth any other way” (). She intends to exhaust Frado’s life in the pursuit of her labor and expresses surprise, but not regret, that Frado still lives given her ill use. In “beat[ing] the money out” of Frado, Mrs. Bellmont understands that she will effectively disable Frado from having any economic earning potential for herself and, in fact, it is her intention to cripple her in such a fashion (). Because violence and labor go hand and hand, it is hard to extract which of these abuses lead to Frado’s frequent sickness and later disability, but it is indisputable that the path to disability for Frado (and by extension, Harriet Wilson), begins in childhood. Childhood is a critical site, for it lays the foundation for Jacobs’s and Wilson’s relationships with disability in their adult lives. For both women, their childhood traumas, either psychological or physical, predispose them to the chronic illnesses that later render them disabled. In scientific terms, this predisposition is referred to as one’s allostatic load. As “a theory for health disparities,” allostatic load helps us to understand “how psychosocial stress translates into poorer biological health.” It is during Jacobs’s girlhood that she undergoes significant levels of psychic and reproductive 

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Laboring Bodies

stress that predisposed her to illness. Research shows that “exposure to acute environmental stressors early in the life course appears to promote elevated levels of inflammatory biomarkers . . . and metabolic abnormalities in adulthood.” In other words, “adverse childhood and adolescent experiences become biologically programmed in a durable fashion, leaving people vulnerable to poor health in later life.” What happens in one’s childhood has long-lasting effects on one’s health. For Jacobs, in particular, seven years of bodily contortion and near total isolation was a crucial, physically disabling event in her life, leading to rheumatism but, as noted previously, her captivity in the garret began after she had transitioned into the age of womanhood. What is the traceable cause of the numerous and sometimes mysterious ailments from which she suffered as an adult? Might they have originated from the psychosocial stresses of her young life under the torment of sexual abuse and harassment? Tales of Reinvention As an adult, Jacobs navigated a host of disabilities that appear as a catalog of sometimes obscure, seemingly unrelated and debilitating illnesses. Jacobs discloses these many illnesses in her correspondence with Amy Post and, in some cases, her illness becomes the subject of the other’s correspondence. In a letter dated July , , Jacobs presents one of the most robust reports of her failing health to be found in her correspondence: . . . I have been very ill and am still a close prisoner to the house doubtless you heard of Mr. Nells visit. . .I was feeling very miserable at the time . . . the day he left I went to bed in the evening and did not leave my room and for three weeks and since I have not been able to resume my duties the Doctor says that I must give up five Months and he can cure he insist on my going Eest he says that I need the salt air the trouble dear Amy is with my womb I cannot tell you how much I have suffered during my illness . . . I have not done much the last two months not the scratch of a pen when William was here. (Jacobs, : )

This communication tells several stories. For one, it provides vaguely specific insight into the nature of Jacobs’s illness, for what is a womb problem? Elsewhere, Jacobs shares that her doctor reports that her “womb have became hard as a stone” (–). Is it a tumor as her doctor suspects, or possibly fibroids (an issue we now know to be commonplace among African American women)? This “womb problem” has kept Jacobs from her duties, though to which duties she refers is unclear. Jacobs is surely unable to perform her domestic work for the Willis family with whom she has been living for intermittent periods as a fugitive from slavery. But she is 

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also unable to pen a letter, and quite likely, passages of her novel, which she was already writing at this time (). Here, the relationship between her labor and disability is directly established, since her illness keeps her from the work she must do to earn her living, the work she wants to do to stay in community with friends, and the challenging work of committing her life story to the page for public reception. In March , Jacobs complains of “a severe Cough” that compelled her to leave the convening of the twenty-fourth meeting of the American AntiSlavery Society (–). Just three months later, in June , Jacobs reveals that she has “been quite ill – threatened with another attack of congestion of the lungs” (). Finally, on May , , in a letter regretting her inability to attend the upcoming twenty-fifth meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society convention and see Amy Post in person, Jacobs simply expresses “I am not very well” (). This litany of infirmities and others thus excluded, stitch a web of disability in Jacobs’s life divulged in personal letters. Following her escape from slavery in Edenton, NC in , Jacobs spends much of the s on the move across several northeastern cities including Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Rochester, before ultimately settling in the home of Nathaniel and Cornelia Willis in Idlewild, NY in . This next decade would catalog the illnesses thus previewed, but by the s, narration of Jacobs’s health in the documents takes a startling turn. For Harriet Jacobs, the s represented a change in her health trajectory that directly correlated with the changing fates of the enslaved in the South and established a renegotiation of the relationship between labor and disability in her own life. While residing with the Willises, Jacobs confesses, “I can never get well while I am at service” (). She says nothing more regarding her own health in this  letter, but her meaning is profound. Being available for the use and care of the Willis family is in direct opposition to her state of well-being. Rest, not labor, is what Jacobs needs for wellness. Yet, by the s, somehow, Jacobs finds wellness without rest. Through the two and a half decades that followed the publication of Incidents in , Harriet Jacobs would commit herself to relief work in service of the contraband refugees of the Civil War and the formerly enslaved. This period would be among the most active of Jacobs’s entire life and it would find her (as far as the story of the documents can reveal) in relatively good health. Throughout the Civil War years, Jacobs was a staunch advocate for the poor, vulnerable, and disabled refugees who came within Union Army lines. Armed with a newfound strength, Harriet Jacobs took on officials like Reverend Albert Gladwin, superintendent of contrabands, and accused 

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Laboring Bodies

him of unethical rental practices that took financial advantage of the Black poor while providing them substandard living conditions, and inappropriate transfer operations which unnecessarily separated Black families. With her partner in relief work, Quaker schoolteacher Julia Wilbur, Jacobs becomes a champion for the poor and formerly enslaved. Witnessing Harriet Jacobs at work, Wilbur writes, “I am very glad to have her here. She can do many things better than I can do” (). Indeed, Jacobs does do a great many things. She travels from Washington to Alexandria, VA, and to Savannah to perform relief work. At each site, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa, who is often at her side, encounter the formerly enslaved in deplorable conditions and work to remedy the crisis by applying to Northern friends and organizations for financial support, raising public awareness through the press and, most crucially, empowering the formerly enslaved to action in their own cause. Writing remained a constant companion for Jacobs as she became a wartime reporter of sorts, chronicling conditions for the formerly enslaved across Union Army lines in papers such as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Amidst all of Jacobs’s activity in the service of others, little is written of her own health. A lone remark in a December ,  letter to Amy Kirby Post is a powerful indicator of the role that this kind of relief work had on Jacobs’s life: “my health is better than it has been for years the good God has spared me for this work & the last six months has been the happiest of all my life” (). This earnest report of good health is suggestive of the remedy that Jacobs needed. It was not rest from labor but a different cause for which to labor that would subdue the torrent of illness that had plagued Jacobs while in the Willises employ. Her vibrant activity as a relief worker and reformer testifies to her stamina in spite of her bodily pain. Disability casts a painful shadow over Harriet Wilson’s adult life, but it also inspired her to creative forms of work. The end of Wilson’s narrative unveils the permanent impact of the cruel labor practices she endured. As if to visibly christen Frado with the mark of her disability, she suffers a fall in the summer before leaving the Bellmont home which renders her lame. Once gone from the Bellmont home, Frado finds employment with neighborhood friends, but soon falls sick from overwork and suffers frequent bodily pain. The prospects for her full recovery are dismal, but there is also no mystery about who is to blame for Frado’s condition. When Mrs. Bellmont refuses to provide asylum for Frado during one of her bouts of sickness, Wilson narrates that “all felt that the place where her declining health began, should be the place of relief, so they applied once more for a shelter” (Wilson: ). Wilson does not shy away from condemning the Bellmont family and in so doing, indicts other Northern families who would not intervene in 

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the ill-treatment and abuse of a young girl. Frado soon goes into public care, suffering “three years weary sickness” (). A brief account of Wilson’s marriage, desertion by her husband, and childbirth attend other health complaints before the narrative abruptly comes to a close. The text itself stands as Wilson’s last-ditch effort to experiment with a form of labor that would not “extinguish” her “feeble life” (Wilson, Preface). But writing Our Nig is not Wilson’s first attempt at making a life for herself outside of care work after she comes of age and leaves her situation. As P. Gabrielle Foreman discovers, “we now know that as early as , Wilson sold ‘hair dressing’ and ‘hair regenerator’ in a business that would eventually be based in Manchester, New Hampshire.” Two years before she published her  narrative, Wilson began an enterprise that would sustain her living for some time. When failing health hindered Wilson from this work she “resorts to another method of procuring her bread – that of writing an Autobiography” (Wilson: ). Appended documents to the narrative contextualize Wilson’s future fortunes. Allida’s testimony, for example, authenticates Wilson’s tale and the events which succeeded the end of her captivity in the Bellmont home. It positions the book as an autobiography in its own time, challenging any notion that Wilson was writing a novel rather than an autobiography with novelistic qualities. But secondly, and perhaps, equally important, newspaper advertisements of “Mrs. Wilson’s Hair Regenerator” help to contradict the view of Wilson as entirely feeble bodied, a perception that the writing of a narrative does little to disrupt. To manufacture and sell hairdressing were not markers of bodily inactivity, as Foreman imagines that “Wilson almost certainly marketed her products door to door.” Wilson’s “bottle selling” does more than “modestly augment our understanding of antebellum black labor,” it thoroughly reconfigures our understanding of the capacity of debilitated bodies. Harriet Wilson’s work as a “colored medium” attests to other forms of capacity in the face of bodily disablement. Citing frequent advertisements in the Spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, Foreman traces Wilson’s long career as a trance reader from the late s with references to her Spiritualist affiliations, dating back as far as the late s. The work of the spirit transforms the limitations of the body, giving support to Puar’s notion that “debility may well simultaneously appropriate bodily capacities closing off, perhaps to give rise to a new set of bodily capacities.” Harriet Wilson sought creative forms of work that her body could sustain because she was disabled. While she never fully abandons domestic labor, her career paths as a writer, entrepreneur, and medium evidence her strength of mind, body, and spirit. The (semi)autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson perform key functions of the slave and captivity narrative. In addition to advocating 

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Laboring Bodies

for freedom and equal rights through calls for abolition and other forms of justice, these texts focus on the will to represent the self. Self-representation was a core objective for those who wrote autobiographies to depict their origins, their trials, and their triumphs as they labored and, eventually, escaped systems of bondage. The documents which flesh out the (semi) autobiographies of Jacobs and Wilson do more than represent them, they make disability legible throughout their lives by telling the story of each woman’s will to reinvent herself through labor.



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 JOSHUA BENNETT

Animalia Americana

Call me your deepest urge Toward survival Call me And my brothers and sisters In the sharp smell of your refusal Call me Roach and presumptuous Nightmare on your white pillow Your itch to destroy The indestructible Part of yourself. Audre Lorde, “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches”

Pets I grew up about a ten-minute drive away from the man who would one day come to be known, on-wax and elsewhere, as DMX – an abbreviation, of course, of his evocative nom de plume, Dark Man X – in the city of Yonkers, New York. From the time I was fairly young, his exploits as both an auteur and an outlaw, a man of faith and a disaffected malcontent, were wellknown throughout the city. However, there is one story about the artist formerly known as Earl Simmons that I only heard later in life, from a documentary on the Ruff Ryders – the performance collective he claimed as lifelong collaborators and kin. Therein, X describes his relationship to his beloved animal companion, an American pit bull terrier named Boomer: Sometimes I would rob people with my dog. He was about  pounds, a little pit bull. I have him tattooed on my back. There was a time we both had warrants [out] for us. A gun is only as powerful as the person behind it. I’ve taken guns out of people’s hands before. A dog is like a bullet that will chase you. 

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Animalia Americana

In the middle of X’s retelling, the screen flashes an image of the tattoo in question, which reads, in bold black ink, “One Love,” then, “Boomer” just below it. Though only about two minutes or so of the documentary are dedicated to the vignette, I found it especially compelling and have returned to the sequence several times over the years, in no small part because of a family history that first brought these sorts of images to my mind many years ago. In , as a seventeen-year-old boy, my father integrated his high school in Alabama. The memories he would share with me about the experience, it seemed, were both a set of historical lessons and the basic cosmological precepts I would need in order to survive; his way of describing the way the world had once been, and what I should dare to imagine it might one day become. The most vivid of his stories involved a combination of the schoolroom and the street. Classmates stabbing him with pens as he walked down the hallway to English class. The brutal, daily reality of white parents, children, and police on every corner, dead set against the freedom dreams of Black human beings who dared refuse a modern world system – expressed locally in the form of murderous sociolegal protocols working under the banner of Jim Crow – that every day refused them. And not only in the form of discrete moments of violence or violation, but a pervasive structure of feeling that gave those moments their texture and tone: Anti-blackness as a kind of atmosphere, anti-blackness as a contaminant of the water they drank and the air they breathed. My father’s stories almost always involved animals. Especially dogs: The locally trained K- units set upon him and others by Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police Department, daily acts of state-sanctioned terror and remnants, we are told, of a barbaric, bygone era. After graduating from high school, and serving in the Vietnam War shortly after his eighteenth birthday, my father moved to Queens to stay with three of his brothers. One day, after coming home from work – the details on this part get fuzzier each time he tells the tale – he discovered that his house was now also home to a pair of dogs: A German Shepherd for his big brother, Jerry, and a Great Dane, named Donna, for him. Donna went with my father everywhere. To the grocery store, to sleep, on long walks through their neighborhood just as dawn began to unspool across the horizon. How, I often wondered, did he hold these disparate realities together? Both the ways that dogs had been used against him by the carceral state, and this strange, new, and irreducible truth of a loving animal companion? Finding a language for the pain my father had to work through in order to know Donna – to love and care for this complex, living being despite the history standing between them – became a question I could 

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  

not shake. I wanted to find a way to name the unsayable, to better understand the bonds that centuries of unspeakable anguish could not break. Property The standard version of the argument goes something like this: Given not only the harrowing effects of the afterlife of chattel slavery but also the array of anti-black images in American literature, film, print culture, and scientific practice that explicitly compare Black human beings to nonhuman animals, there is an especially fraught relationship between Black cultural practice, social movements focused on animal rights activism, and environmentalism more broadly. The latter is often explicitly linked to the exclusionary, racist ideologies of individual environmentalists such as John Muir, but even outside of this particular context, there reigns a sense that the natural world is simply not hospitable to Black life. Examples of this antagonism abound, especially as it pertains to the various kinds of environmental racism that marks the lives of Black people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. Think of a city like Detroit, which has the highest population, percentage-wise, of Black inhabitants of any major city in the United States. There, eighty-two percent of Black students go to school in the most polluted parts of the city. A -page study conducted by the United Church of Christ’s Racial Justice Commission in , and again in  – and supported by new research as recently as  – showed that sixty percent of Black Americans lived in direct proximity to an unregulated toxic waste facility. And all this is to say nothing of historical images produced by photographers like Stetson Kennedy, images of the residents of Chicago and New York City tenements where Black children were attacked by rats and other pest animals as they slept. My mother was one such child. When she tells the story of her early life, she always begins with the bite marks. Never the music of the era, never the sounds and colors emanating from The Apollo Theater uptown, or how she felt the night the Jackson  played the best live show she had ever seen. Not the berets and black leather jackets chanting “Black Power” or even the girls on the block double-dutching for hours, their high-flying jump ropes like twin helixes long enough to lasso gods. Without fail, any story of the late s-era South Bronx my mother lived in begins with the tenement she called home back then – with the roaches and rats, and the nightly war they waged on her and the seven other family members with whom she shared an overcrowded kitchenette. My grandparents had left behind a life of sharecropping in Wilmington, North Carolina, to pursue a dream they had heard tell of but never touched: 

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Animalia Americana

New York City. The modern metropolis spread before them, all skyscrapers and high-speed trains, every square inch adorned in gold. The reality, once they got up North, bore little resemblance to this vision. What my grandparents found – and what my mother inherited – was instead a set of living conditions that served as a reflection of the inequitable social order they knew all too well. Let my mother tell it, to sleep every night surrounded by the sound of vermin was to be reminded of one’s place in the racial hierarchy, to have it confirmed that she was considered by some to be a lower order of organism. Given what my parents witnessed, what they survived, a more dominant understanding of how animals registered in the Black cultural imagination – as indices of untenable conditions, objects of racist comparison, or else instruments of physical violence outright – made sense to me. But there was also something more. A sense that even if the workings of the world were set against them, those systems did not get to have the final say. My mother also asserted, always, that her living conditions did not represent the totality of the social world she inhabited. Her family, her classmates, even the bullies down the street, the ushers and the deacons and the choir members at Salvation Baptist Church, everyone she knew was likewise making it through what they were never meant to make it through. And in the midst of that poverty there bloomed a way of being alongside one another, a set of social practices that exceeded the regulatory forces all around them. In their collective flight from a world that demanded blood, and called their very living a crime, they crafted something that could not be killed. Decades later, as a graduate student, I had pushed most of these questions to the back of the mind, focusing instead on what felt like more explicitly literary concerns. Then, during a first-year English seminar at Princeton, everything changed. I was assigned the  short story collection, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales by Charles Chesnutt. The “conjure tales” are a genre marked by metamorphosis. Each tale begins with more or less the same setup: A white northerner named John has recently purchased a vineyard, largely to create a life in a warmer climate for his wife, Annie, who has had recent health troubles. To work this new land, he hires Julius McAdoo: A formerly enslaved Black man, and singular storyteller. Every conjure tale, on its face, is a story that Julius shares to offer folk wisdom about the land John has just laid claim to. But in truth, each tale also offers a conjuring act of a different kind; a way for Julius to navigate his new position under terms that are more amenable to him. In the stories, there is a constant blurring between Black characters and the plants and animals with whom they are forced to share space on the plantation. In “Po’ Sandy,” for 

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  

instance, the eponymous protagonist is transformed into a tree as a means of remaining with the woman he loves over and against the whims of those who claim ownership over his flesh. Though he is eventually felled by loggers, Sandy nonetheless fights to the very end, resisting even from within the bounds of his new body. “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” involves a similar transformation, this time with the protagonist turning into a wolf. He too is committed to pursuing a line of flight toward love, and away from the extractive everyday protocols of plantation life. Chesnutt’s choice to celebrate this sort of narrative fewer than forty years after the legal abolition of chattel slavery initially took me aback. Why would a Black American writer embrace animals this way, embrace the natural world, given their historically fraught relationship to it? Would it not make more sense, would it not be the more intuitive choice, to refuse the animals, and the trees, and the air, and the sea altogether and opt instead into the dominant vision of what it means to be a human being? That is, the human subject as one whose prime imperative is to impose dominion over the earth and all its creatures? What I found instead in Chesnutt was an unrelenting impulse toward entanglement. A desire for his readers to linger with the painful, revelatory recognition that the position of Blackness – indelibly marked as it is by general dishonor and gratuitous violence – is also a vantage from which one can better theorize the social worlds of other derogated forms of life. From within the crawlspace of Blackness, this vestibule in which we are hemmed in on all sides but not yet destroyed, one can see the earth before the end of the world. This enclosure is also an opening into other forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing. You learn how to read in the dark. You learn how to read the darkness. After reading Chesnutt that first year, I knew I was onto something. Mostly because I started seeing the strange entanglements he highlighted in his work everywhere: In novels and essays, films, conversations about writers I had never heard described as nature poets or eco-critics. After talking the ideas through with my advisors and a handful of friends, I realized that I had found my dissertation topic. The impulse I discovered in Chesnutt, I came to learn, was present throughout the African American literary canon. I began to see books like the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I had first encountered in high school, with new eyes. Moments that had appeared only or primarily as tragic, unthinkable, now seemed to be instances where Douglass was also forming an alternative articulation of human beauty, imagination, and value: 

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Animalia Americana We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination.

The first three sentences of this scene, where Douglass and his kin are sold alongside a range of nonliving objects and nonhuman animals, have always stood out to me. In particular, the repetition, though it is conjugated variably, of the word rank. And right next to it, in the third sentence, a bit of western philosophy: [T]he scale of being. For Douglass, as well as his coconspirators in the Black expressive tradition, these issues, too, were at the core of the brutality of chattel slavery. Not just the material violence of the everyday, but the semiotic structure that makes it possible. I soon realized that taking up this problematic was not only the task of my project, but perhaps of Black literary studies broadly construed. We were not meant to simply assert Black humanity in the dominant grammar, but rather to reimagine the scale of being as such, to offer new terms, new poetics, new and better dreams for the human project. And in doing so, craft alternate ways of stewarding the planet we share. Pests Set on a path by Chesnutt and Douglass, I began to see animals running free in the work of Black writers everywhere. Take the following example from Nikki Giovanni and her poem “Allowables,” where in the interplay between speaker and spider, person and pest, we are meant to read a vexed similitude between the position of the pest animal and that of not only Black people in the US context, but, she seems to say, every single one of us, across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, species. The experience of Blackness and animality – which emerges from the historical, literal proximities akin to what Douglass describes – is juxtaposed to guide us toward a more capacious set of ethical practices: I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn’t 

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   And she scared me And I smashed her I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened.

To look low is to sharpen one’s vision. There is a preferential option for the least of these that represents both a way of reading the word and structuring social life. I found the same phenomenon in the work of another poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, and it is on grand display in her lone foray into the world of fiction, the masterful  novella, Maud Martha. The book is a bildungsroman centered around the interior life of its eponymous central figure; we watch Maud grow from a vexed girlhood to her time as a mother and wife in a world where an overwhelming set of inexorable social forces – sexism, colorism, generational poverty – work against her at every turn. In the midst of it all, Maud remains optimistic, and alive to the beauty of the everyday and ordinary. Midway through the novel, in a chapter called “Maud Martha spares the mouse,” we are presented with a scene that further clarifies the sheer scope of feelings we find in African American literature once animals enter the frame: “It shook its little self, as best it could, in the trap. Its bright black eyes contained no appeal – the little creature seemed to understand that there was no hope of mercy from the eternal enemy, no hope of reprieve or postponement – but a fine small dignity. It waited. It looked at Maud Martha.” This is a theory for living and dying: The image of a defiant pest, its deep black eyes, its willingness to embrace the untimely death it dodged with all its might for weeks. Brooks represents the mouse as having a robust inner life, not only a longing to persist, but also an intellectual labor that attends that longing, a kind of work that is irreducible to what most would call animal instinct. This is no mere anthropomorphism, I think, but rather a meaningful engagement with the rat as an actor with its own internal universe, an entire world that is largely opaque to Maud, though she might guess at its features, and even dare to sketch them out in her mind. She imagines a life for the mouse that is not reducible to its ostensibly given status as an inconvenience awaiting erasure, to take seriously its cleverness, the kinesthetic brilliance behind its maneuvers, its dignity in the face of certain death at Maud’s own hand. In this sense, Maud Martha illuminates the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: 

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Animalia Americana

Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced: “A life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed. ‘Why,’ she thought, as her height doubled, ‘why I’m good! I am good.’ Her eyes were mild, and soft with a godlike loving-kindness.” What does it mean, or cost, to spare that which does not belong to us in the first place? What does it mean to feel proud of the act of letting the animal live? What is at stake here, of course, is the logic of humaneness, what defines the humane individual. That is, the notion that all nonhuman life is in a position to be spared, that living in relation to a nonhuman entity, and not enacting violence upon it, is a mark of exceptional character. In the contemporary moment, this logic can be seen everywhere from the rhetoric of PETA – who are especially adept at adopting Black cultural references and slogans as a means of advancing their particular brand of the culture of humaneness – to the ongoing public trial of Michael Vick. In , after being charged with helping finance an interstate dogfighting ring, Vick was not only sentenced to a year and a half in a federal prison, but continued, up to his final days as a professional athlete, to have animal rights activists show up at his games, largely in order to protest his continued employment by the National Football League. At one point, it was suggested by Fox News correspondent Tucker Carlson that Vick should have been executed. Rather than finding comfort in such righteous rage on the animal’s behalf or refusing to see animals as alive in any meaningful sense, writers like Brooks urge the reader instead to linger in the space of indeterminacy inbetween. To maintain both the desire for empathy, as well as the reality of an animal other that can never be fully comprehended. What is more, she demands that we think in nuanced ways about what makes certain kinds of empathy possible, and to question who, or what, is barred from its reach. In Maud Martha, Brooks depicts a complex vision of the proximity between Blackness and animality, one that makes a fierce claim to the humanity of Black flesh, while leaving room for its protagonist to see herself where she is not, to think beyond the limits of the human, and in doing so, present the reader with alternative ways of mapping the distinction between person and nonperson, citizen and outsider, dead and living. Pursuit The first time I saw a Black man on a horse, I was nineteen and entirely unprepared. It was a Saturday. It was summertime. I was on my way to a 

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  

poetry reading in North Philadelphia and witnessed a group of three riders on horseback, galloping down the block at what seemed like a medium pace, even to my untrained eye. The two in front were barely a year or so older than me, if that. One was only a boy, about the same age my little brother would be soon, and just as tall and elegant. I had no language, in that moment, for where they came from, or how they had come to sit astride these animals I knew best from watching Bonanza with my father in the early s, or else reading Black Beauty back in elementary school. But here they were, in real time, as far removed from those representations as I was from childhood moments in front of a book or screen. There was something dignified, undeniable, about them. This was the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, I later learned. Its members are not cowboys in any traditional sense, but let the current president of the club, Ellis Ferrell, tell it: He and his ever-expanding collective of student riders are “urban cowboys,” inheritors of a tradition of Black riders in North Philly that spans over a century. And although one online media outlet refers to the club as a “youth crime and drug prevention program,” in a recent video profiling Fletcher Street, Ferrell takes the claim a bit further, and into more interesting territory: “You can take a . . . kid that has problems and give them a horse to take care of and their attitude will change . . . their whole life will change.” There is something downright transformative, Ferrell seems to say, about the encounters between horses and the young people he seeks to recruit for the riding club – some trace of the Animal that the students carry with them, even when they are not riding. In , the Algerian–French artist Mohamed Bouroissa debuted an exhibit at the Philadelphia-based Barnes Foundation called Urban Riders, intended to reflect the beauty and breadth of the club’s social practice. In its final form, the show was a collaboration between Bouroissa and a number of visual artists, all of whom contributed work that was directly linked to the larger festival he created in tandem with members of the club weeks earlier: A day-long event known only as Horse Day. To my mind, the most compelling work in the show was Bouroissa’s The Ride. The Ride is made entirely from car parts, each panel bearing images of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and their horses. And although Bouroissa does not directly reference the specific historical intersection of Black men, horses, and automobiles in the city, the work nonetheless carries the weight of that legacy in its body. According to an interview with John Morris, owner of the th Street stables not too far from Fletcher, in the s many of the local Black men who worked as junk and trash collectors – a number of whom were not a part of this larger community of riders – could 

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Animalia Americana

not, due to low wages, afford to buy the cars or trucks that would have made their work sustainable. And so, Morris says, his smile full and downright luminous at this point, they opted for horses instead. In an attempt to make a life in the midst of overwhelming poverty, deprivation, and violence on all sides, these men turned to their animal collaborators for a way out, a way forward, and in the process helped contribute to a tradition that carries on that spirit of kinship and mutual reliance today. When they are riding together, these boys and men, these horses are uncatchable, unkillable. They are fugitive practice given flesh and form, bearers of a language shared only between them and their companions. There is life beyond one’s own life here, over and against the forces that would constrain their dreams, curtail their joy. Within the blur of their entanglement, the bulls-eye fades. Death does not carry the day. They have built a world all their own, and within its bounds, they are infinite.



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 J. T. ROANE

Black Ecological Insurgencies

Negroes are the objects of other people’s words. Malcom Ferdinand

In June  an enslaved woman, Nan, stood before the Oyer and Terminer Court in colonial Essex County, Virginia, accused, along with two other enslaved people, Harry and George, of lighting fires at both doors of the residence of her master in an attempt to burn the home along with its owner to ashes. Given the nature of colonial courts and mid-eighteenth-century slavery in Virginia, the case’s outcome is perhaps unsurprising: The crown’s county representatives most likely convicted and executed the group following the proceedings. There are limited court documents that render the scenario sequentially from the retrospective vantage of the master’s accusation through to the court’s decision to try and probably execute all three in what was likely a macabre public spectacle. The conditioning of Black life in the archive here underscores Malcom Ferdinand’s epigraphic quote which places the production of “Negroes” as the objects of the dominant subject, western “Man’s” possession – in this case, the state as a representative of the Crown and the vested interest of the crown in the planter. In relation to the Black body, these documents perpetually reestablish the objecthood of the accused and their truncation to thingness, as well as the preservation of the anticipated scene of their violent condemnation, by means of the refusal of the obdurate paper record to bear any approximation of their subjectivity except in culpability, disposability, and death. From these records, no matter how I might approach them, I cannot definitely recover any of the three individuals or the relationship that drew them into a conspiracy to destroy Nan’s master and the “mansion” symbolizing his power, nor can I even confirm that they set the fires, let alone affirm the fire as some expression of their will to destroy the colonial regime of slavery. Ultimately, I cannot recover them from their bodies as sites of expected 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

extraction, a fleeting resistance to that objectivity documented only in the words of their captors, and the action of the vested sovereign power to condemn and likely dispose of their earthly lives. As Ferdinand expounds, expropriation and grammatical possession of both “Negroes” and earth as land constituted a double matricidal operation breaking relations to the earth and de-territorializing the collectivities of human and more than human life into the appropriable, extractable, enclosable, fungible, sellable, and disposable associated with the reterritorialization of Blackness through its radical liquidity associated with the expansion of markets. In Virginia’s Tidewater, this system was defined from the mid-eighteenth century by reproductive slavery, the expropriation of African kinship through the legal adoption of partis sequitir ventrem. As Jennifer Morgan writes, Virginia’s  legislation entrenched the bequeathing of chattel status through the condition of the mother, appropriating and colonizing enslaved women’s bodies as flesh to the prerogatives of planters and the overall political economy of the colony. The construction of the “Negro” as object has a deep historical intimacy with the expropriation of the earth as land – or as sellable property bound to the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous territory, the institution of the miningplantation extractive complex across the Americas, and the development of a global market underwritten by the transatlantic, regional, and domestic slave trades. The enfleshment of Blackness – the systematic breakdown of the body as a whole and its radical redeployment in indistinguishable aggregate to meet the energetic demands of empire, was a primary basis of continental expansion driving the expropriation of Indigenous nations and the reterritorialization of what was considered untamed land and waterscapes and plantation enclosure fueled by slave labor. These processes engendered the Black body into the fungible raw material for schemes of competing imperialisms – creating the objectified body of the Negro as slave, and the perquisite for metaphorical and other kinds of symbolic signifying as Hortense Spillers elucidates. By the mid-eighteenth century, nearly a century after its enactment as colonial law, this form of racialized gendering constituted through expropriation of Black reproduction was quotidian. On March , , an enslaved woman identified in the archived bills of sales and wills for Essex County as Betty was transferred along with all of her unnamed and unenumerated children and any future children from one white family to another as part of the resolution of a debt. “Know all men by these presents that . . . in consideration of the six fifteen pounds current money to me on hand faced. . .have bargained sold and delivered unto the said, all my right, title and interest of a negro woman named Betty together with all her increase 

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which she now has or shall or may hereafter have and do warrant the said Negroe from me [and] my heirs.” Here the “I” subject of the court document creates the somatic and subjective continuity through the everyday transaction of property that also codifies Betty as capital and currency, as the object of the primary transactions of colonial inhabitation. This document underscores the conditioning of the Black body as a productive and reproductive unit and a form of direct currency in the context of the latecolonial era in Virginia. The signers of these documents configure the Black body through the matter-of-fact possession and objectification of planters and the state supporting their ongoing effort to reterritorialization of the region through the production of Black people and their future kin into expandable raw material for the colonization of Indigenous land. European travelers and later colonizers and slavers across the Atlantic world inscribed Africans as enslaveable through an emphasis on African women’s bodies and modalities of kinship emphasizing supposed anatomical differences to underscore a relationship with animality and to what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson describes as “the discursive-material plasticity of black(ened) flesh.” By the mid-eighteenth century in Virginia and through the Civil War, “men and women were moved around like checkers” as Toni Morrison writes. Delores Williams makes the connections between ecocide and the racialized gendering of anti-Blackness, comparing strip mining and the history of slavery, particularly the exploitation of so-called “breeder women” – sold at a premium for their capacity to reproduce the enslaved population under the logics of chattel, the institution, and the legal principle of Black kin dispossession. Daina Ramey Berry historicizes the production of value across the life cycle of the enslaved, from the speculative calculation of future increase of young girls and women through to what she describes as “ghost value,” monetary gain and currency with captive cadavers.  In this context, I linger on the enslaved’s alleged weaponization of heat and light through fire at the center of Nan’s coup d’incendie. Whether real or forged in the imagination of the master, the rubrics of the believable and the verifiable in colonial court index the insurgent-by-fire tradition and a figuration of the Black body as a vehicle of the willful subject extending outside the dictates of chattel status. As the suspected leader of the attempted destruction, Nan might be read through an acknowledged tactical failure to escape the objectification already documented and preserved by the archive, as her attempt to reverse the metabolism of gendered anti-Black expropriation in colonial Virginia’s plantation context. Nan embraced and attempted to reverse the dynamics of social combustion, gathering the flickering materiality and immateriality of flames to ground her master and to recommit him and what her and others laborers materialized into capital 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

back to the earth. She and her co-conspirators attempted to end her master’s line, to uproot his line permanently from the land through the cleansing flames. Nan and her condemned co-conspirators embraced the elemental, creating an alternative relationality between the then recognized forces of the universe, including the figure of the Devil in British colonial cosmology, along with organic chemical compounds, oxygen, and the force of gravity. Through incineration they conjured a fleeting horizon open but, as the outcome of their case underscores, not at all guaranteed, for the possible reconjoining of the body and the subject. According to the extant court record, “she the said Negro Nan not having the fear of God before her eyes” was stirred up by the “instigation and malice of the Devil” and thus she acted to commit her master, his family, and his property to ruin. The embrace of the incendiary, Nan’s actions that render her the embodiment of the “malice of the devil” perhaps suggests a working approximate of the coordinates of her rage against dominion – the white Christian God ordained extraction of people and their commodification as slaves as well as the parameters of their labor extraction. Nan’s cultivation of fire is more aligned with the politics of the maroon in the sense that Yannick Marshall describes, as a figuration of Black political expression seeking not resolution with the colonial order and its institutional artifice in the crown and the state through supplication, but rather the destruction of that order and the production of a new one, either beyond its bounds or, as in this case, in its ashes. This speculative or prospective act of narration in relation to Nan and the limited records remaining from her case suggests my desire to locate within the act of the alleged fire what Kathryn Benjamin describes as the practices of “insurgent ecology,” or here the alternative use of the elemental and the ecological to create the conditions of what, in this case, resulted in a highly circumscribed freedom. Perhaps even in death we can register Nan and her fellow conspirators as having marooned themselves from the plane of the living, absconding across the terror of execution from their own cellular enslavement, the legal and social mechanisms by which the emergent settlerplantation order colonized their physiology and reproductive capacity to the articulation of settlement and colonial inhabitation through property and plantations. The concerted effort at incineration for Nan’s master’s mansion inverts the digestion of colonial slavery, recombining the dynamics of combustion to generate an alternative if unrecoverable horizon. The trio’s connection in alleged conspiracy, prior to their trial and execution, suggests a field of communication, signification, and gathering, outside the terrain of mastery or generated within and between its seams. Perhaps it was in their more quotidian cultivation of otherwise connections to and 

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through landscapes designed for captivity that they forged their unsuccessful plot. Black insurgent ecologies entangled Black people’s bodies in configurations of sociality and the ecological that challenged mastery and which evolved alongside the regime of Black people’s deterritorialization as flesh. These register in formal archives primarily, like Nan’s case, through the condemnation of courts and in repression. They also register in narratives like that which was collected from Minnie Fulkes as she recalled the weaponization of enslaved peoples’ knowledge of the terrain of captivity and their renegotiation through “darkness” of master time and the geographies of captivity to create fleeting autonomous spaces of prayer, ecstatic worship, and a radical reworking of Christian theology in the hands of the enslaved. She recalled the use of “a great big iron put at the door” that slaves used to dampen the sounds of their worship and to prevent the old “paddy rollers” who “would come and horse whip every last one of them, just cause poor souls were praying to God to free ‘em from that awful bondage.” In the century after Nan’s case the conditions of enslaved people in Virginia deteriorated further as the state fueled the expansion of enslaved populations into the nascent plantation zone of the cotton kingdom. The plasticity associated with expropriated “Black(ened) flesh,” conjoined with the parceling of property underwriting empire, fueled rapid territorial expansion of the plantation system and subsidiary forms of land tenure associated with poor whites in the upcountry blocked from the primary land of the Black Belt centering cotton. Fulkes also recalled the worshippers tying: grape vines an’ other vines across th’ road, den when de Paddy rollers come galantin’ wid their horses runnin’ so fast you see dem vines would tangle ‘em up an’ cause th’ horses to stumble and fall. An’ lots of times, badly dey would break dere legs and horses too; one interval one ol’ poor devil got tangled so an’ de horse kept a carryin’ him, ‘til he fell off horse and next day a sucker was found in road whar dem vines wuz wind aroun’ his neck so many times yes had choked him, dey said, ‘He totely dead.’ Serve him right ‘cause dem ol’ white folks treated us so mean.

When interviewed by Octavia Roberts Albert as part of the  The House of Bondage, Charlotte Brooks recalled the trauma of slavery as ongoing, embodied for her as insomnia and persistent physical discomfort. In Brooks’s memory – here an intersubjective archive, the vehicle of personal and collective meaning-making about the past rather than a simple reproduction of past events – her pain and inability to sleep resulted from having worked in conditions that sapped her vitality. On the plantation, her master demanded that she and the others “go out before day, in high grass and 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

heavy dews” where she “caught cold” and “lost all of [her] health.” As Tony Perry writes in relation to exposure on plantations in Maryland, “Cold weather uniquely informed slavery in the US, touching the lives of the enslaved far beyond inhibiting agricultural production during the winter.” Indifference to suffering or the active weaponization of the weather, including the cold, structured the debilitating regime of slavery, extending the caprice and violence of Brooks’s master, who also “sometimes . . . would get mad about something going wrong on the place, and . . . beat every one of us and lock us up in a jail he made for us.” As her recollection suggests, the elemental torture, everyday exposures, and likely outcomes of physical exhaustion and depletion structured emancipation and post-emancipation life through the body and its debilitation under slavery. The effects of physical debilitation were amplified by the dislocation and displacement of insulating familial and social relations. As Brooks noted, she had been sold from Virginia to Louisiana and, between the three masters who claimed ownership over her before slavery’s demise, she had lost everything. For Brooks this was devastating as she “never seen or heard” from her siblings or mother after her forced relocation to Louisiana in her teenage years. Brooks’s familial loss after her sale from Virginia was compounded by the social and cultural isolation that she experienced in the context of Louisiana’s sugar plantations. While her mother had taken her and her sisters and brothers to “church every Sunday” and was visited regularly by a traveling preacher when she “came to Louisiana,” she did not go to church anymore, because “everybody was Catholic.” Catholicism remained strange to her since she “had never seen that sort of religion that has people praying on beads.” Additionally, her master spoke Creole, rendering basic communication nearly impossible. Against the backdrop of social dissolution and isolation, Brooks found a new source of possibility in fleeting forms of unsanctioned collectivity among the condemned. Four years into her permanent dislocation from Virginia to Louisiana, Brooks heard that “the speculators brought another woman” from Virginia to a plantation near the one where she was enslaved in Louisiana. Uncontainable in her anticipation that the woman “might be some of [her] kinsfolk, or somebody that knew [her] mother,” Brooks used the first available opportunity to search out the woman. Despite her masters’ prohibitions against leaving the plantation and his working of her and the others even on Sundays, she stole a free moment to find this recent arrival from Virginia. “I went to see who the woman was,” she remembered, “and I tell you, my child, when I got in the road going I could not go fast enough.” Despite her anticipation of a possible direct familial connection with the woman from Virginia, Jane Lee was “no kin.” 

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Notwithstanding the lack of an identifiable blood or social kinship, Brooks and Lee found great comfort despite their losses in their cultural connection reformulated and reconstituted from memories of fugitive Black social life in the context of plantations and farms in Virginia. They found shared comfort upon their initial meeting, when the women “talked and cried . . . till nearly dark.” Like Brooks, Lee had lost everything in her forced relocation through sale to Louisiana. Lee’s “old marster got in debt, and sold her to pay his debts,” destroying her connection to her children, including her five-year-old, her youngest. Comforting one another in the sting of their losses, Lee “prayed and sang” for Brooks, which caused Brooks to “think of [her] old Virginia home and [her] mother.” The hymn’s line “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land” drew Brooks back to Lee after an extended period of absence, dictated by the demands of “rolling season” on the sugar plantations, when everyone “was so busy working night and day” and when her master most often used the “jail he made” to confine her and others to ensure that his crop would not rot before processing. Despite the prohibitions of both of their masters against prayer meetings and other forms of unsolicited gathering, Brooks and Lee formed a rogue spiritual congregation defined by ecstatic consecration, shared collectivity centering affective states and experiences defined by the momentary breaching of the twinned violence of confinement and forced movement, with sometimes disorienting intensity, pleasure, and an overwhelming embodiment blurring the edges of space and time dictated by slave mastery and dominion. While Lee’s master sometimes permitted her to go and see Brooks, this was not nearly with the frequency she desired, so she sometimes “slip[ped] away from her place and come to see” Brooks without sanction. This embodiment of sociality precedes and exceeds the violence of dislocation and ecocide. The shared intoning associated with “getting happy” in a clearing or within a cabin signifies an alternative mode of embodiment, a formulation of cultural reproduction embodied but not encasing the self within the body entangled with the woods, swamps, and other sites of illegibility within the ocular cultures associated with the technology of the land survey. This touching and being touched through familiarity across a great expanse of social loss replays the forms of queer connection associated with what Omise’eke Tinsley underscores as the Black queer Atlantic. Here, queer signifies the legally prohibited or alegal, non-normative social relations embodied through shared experience of sensation within the fleeting temporal and spatial capacities rendered through Black geographies, Black ecologies, and the otherwise possibilities of the ecstatic socialities in the interstices of plantations. This form of queerness is always already 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

associated with Blackness through anti-Blackness, inaugurated first by the dictates of domineering power over the enslaved body through the sovereign capacity to destroy life through exposure or direct deadly assault, combined with the stripping of the elemental social bonds over a life course heightened by dislocation. Queerness names a formulation of collective interiority, a maroon site of being and becoming that redefines the Black body as a site of possibility for kinship, connection, and care countering the atomization associated in the case of Blackness/anti-Blackness not with any form of meaningful autonomous individuality, but rather with its radical inverse, fungibility bound with chattelization and the geographic expansion of markets. This narrative materializes through recollection and retelling the power of the ingenious remixing of Black anti-plantation counter-cartographies and epistemologies across serial, intergenerational removal. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the limited integrity between Black communities and the ecological interstices and marooned and other insurgent uses of the interstices of plantations across mass dislocation was further dissolved, especially along the primary theaters of the total war in the upper South, Virginia, and along the Mississippi River valley. Nevertheless, for two decades following the termination of the US Civil War, free Black communities mobilized to partially realize ecologies of integrity and possibility through a reciprocal cultivation of emancipated social relations and the land and waterscapes of the tattered plantation landscape of their previous captivity. In the period between Radical Reconstruction’s fleeting promises and the full erection of Jim Crow during the turbulent s–s, Black communities built out from the central ethos of Black social-ecological integrity to partially realize a vision of social and familial integrity that materialized the possibility for collective sustenance and social reproduction. Here, by referencing the co-cultivation of freedom as well as the land and water, I draw on Carlyn Ferrari’s compelling engagement, in another context, with the way that Anne Spence crafted poetry in a dynamic relation with her cultivation of outdoor gardens. In the Tidewater, Black agriculturalists and aquaculturalists combined strategies of small-scale production that could sustain and build the material requirements for selfdetermination. In one small Tidewater community in Essex County, Black Virginia families combined agricultural and aquacultural production on their small holdings, illustrating the enduring legacy of the visions of cultivation articulated in relation to the plot. Black farmers and aquaculturalists operated primarily along the Rappahannock at a scale commensurate with a strategy of subsistence and, in times when harvests exceeded the burden of taxes and the speculative rent on riparian land, perhaps even small excess, consistent with the visions of self-sufficiency that emerged as a central theme 

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in post-emancipation life. These families sought stability and basic social and familial soundness and not necessarily massive wealth derived from an everexpanding holding. Despite the skills attributed to Black oystermen, outside observers like Ernest Ingersoll could only read the actions of autonomous Black fishers as ineffective and inefficient. While, as he observed, “tonging in Virginia is probably equally as profitable as in Maryland,” there was a discrepancy in the productivity of oystermen with Maryland-based tongsmen extracting and profiting more from the business. According to him, this discrepancy was of a racial character, “explained by the fact that the proportion of negroes is larger in Virginia than in Maryland, and these people are more generally inclined to be indolent than the whites.” According to Ingersoll, Black oystermen in Virginia were defined by the uncertain “habits and thrift of the men is plainly marked, in particular in dislike of steady industry.” As he noted, “Few of them ever pretend to work on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, those days being consumed in going to market and returning, though there is nothing to prevent their going home on Saturday night, or at least on Sunday morning. Many of them have a small piece of land and a house, but their efforts at accumulation do not seem to go beyond living from ‘hand to mouth.’” What Ingersoll overwrote as indolence and a penchant for leisure over labor and excess profitability suggests the way that Black oystermen in Virginia used their demographic concentration in the emergent fishery to exert control over their labor, combining their own self-preservation from grueling labor with exerting less detrimental pressure for extraction on the oysters. This rendered these workers less financially competitive with the white watermen of Maryland, but also within a trend toward what would be considered a more tenable long-term strategy of raking and selling the bivalves in a mode of self-sufficiency rather than radical exploitation. This is further evidenced in extant records from the period’s consolidation of the oyster fishery. The Fauntleroy family was exemplary in this vision. Lawrence was born in  in Virginia and likely in Essex County as a slave. He was nearly thirty at the outset of the Civil War and in , aged fortythree, he owned a small acreage of land near the post office at Center Cross. Lawrence and his family tilled eight acres, dedicated a half-acre to an orchard or meadow, and left seven acres as unimproved timberland. In addition to his farm land, in  Lawrence began to rent one half-acre of river bottom for oyster planting, likely as part of the diversification of his small holding and in collaboration with Richard, his oysterman son. Oystering allowed the Fauntleroy family to improve their stability: Harvesting from artificially seeded oyster beds they leased for a dollar a 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

year, in addition to natural beds, to sustain their humble income between seasons. Black communities used these small-scale practices of familial and collective cultivation to build and sustain a new set of landed institutions, underwriting significant strides toward an integrity between Black bodies, Black autonomous subjectivity, and alternative ecological stewardship. Autonomous aquacultural cultivation underwrote collective efforts in the development of autonomous institutions including churches, institutions of secondary education in the half-century before Virginia’s allocation of resources for the education of Black communities beyond primary school, and even autonomous unincorporated “towns.” Just after the Emancipation Day celebration held at Gloucester Court House on New Years Day, , W. B. Weaver, the editor of the newly formed Gloucester Letter – the organ designed to support the founding and building fund for the Middle Peninsula of Virginia’s first Black high school – noted in the publication that the school’s board had raised less money than it had anticipated at the emancipation celebration because of a downturn in local oyster production negatively affecting the incomes of those supporting the fledgling school. At the turn of the twentieth century an unincorporated Black place, Litwalton, Virginia, emerged from the concerted efforts of Black families in Lancaster County, Virginia, to translate their labor in relation to local waterways as oyster tongers into independence and some semblance of spatial power. Although Litwalton remained wedged between the interests of the planters who controlled the richest land along the region’s waterways, its residents were able to use their particular connection to oysters and the water to create a dynamic Black sense of place, regulated by the rhythms of autonomy and collectivity in the face of the interests of landed white supremacy and its grafting of these relations onto the tidal waters of the Chesapeake system. Lancaster, like many of the counties in the Tidewater, is organized as a large municipal tract corresponding primarily through its orientation with the large brackish river that serves as its predominant hydrological feature along with the Chesapeake Bay. Litwalton’s founders established their community a few miles away from the Morattico oyster grounds in the Rappahannock River, one of the upper reaches of the Indigenous Chesapeake oyster’s salinity limits for survivability. Coinciding with the emergence of self-determined Black ecological and social relations, Virginia’s Tidewater endured a violent economic, social, and political reterritorialization. Steam-powered industrialization and the codification of Jim Crow’s social architecture followed the diminution of Mahoneism in the election of  and the statewide collapse of the Readjuster Movement that signaled the blunting of emancipation’s potential 

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for Black autonomy and self-determination. In this context, industrial oystering operators, often directly owned or serviced by steamship companies, remade rural geographies and towns prompted by the sudden lucrative run on the local species of bivalves for profit. Whereas Black communities capitalized on their unique historical knowledge of raking oysters prior to emancipation to create the possibilities for personal and familial autonomy, by the turn of the twentieth century they were increasingly relegated to the precarity of dredging and shucking labor. Part of the conditioning of these forms of labor was the embrace of forms of unfree labor that, while not exactly slavery, drew forward and amended the regime of exhaustion, nutritional violence, and the physical austerity of ramshackle housing that had plagued slaves. Between  and  industrial oyster operators transformed places along the Chesapeake littoral. The emergence of postCivil War steamship lines transformed the spatial and temporal coordinates of the Chesapeake, deriving new relations of elastic place and time coordinated through the rhythms of the schedule and its recombination of place precipitated through the steam-powered traversal of large expanses of brackish territory. In , as Virginia’s oyster industries began to consolidate, a Virginia captain took violent seizure of a crew of oyster drudgers, seeking to force them into the conditions of perpetual labor during the oyster harvesting season. The story made the Washington Post because several of the white men held captive had managed to acquire a pistol and demanded to be released. They reported the rogue captain to police out of fear for a German immigrant who the captain refused to let go before spring when oyster dredging ended for the year. While those who had escaped worried solely for the German known as Albert, they also reported the captain’s kidnapping of Black men as far away as North Carolina in order to conscript them to work on the vessel. Those reporting the violent seizure of Albert suggested that the captain used his knowledge of a sparsely vegetated sandy island in the Chesapeake Bay to isolate, starve, and torture the men into submission for his around-the-clock work, dredging oysters legally during the daytime in Virginia’s waters where the vessel was registered and illegally in Maryland’s segment of the Bay under the cover of darkness and out of view from the state’s oyster navy. Not only were the men on the ship starved, they were also forced to sleep on the cold and wet wooden panels of the deck in freezing conditions. This captivity of the barely-mentioned captive Black oyster harvesters and their extractability from place, being kidnapped from another state, illustrated the ways that the industrialization of the region’s waterscape at the turn of the nineteenth century were underwritten by the renewed elasticity and fungibility ascribed to Blackness in the nascent reterritorialization of Jim Crow, including human extractability in the shifting 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

political economy of the period, as well as the ways that this regime underwrote the violent unmaking of oyster beds. Within wider popular cultural imaginaries, the ascription of Black laboring in intimacy with water and its profundity outside the purview of white industrialist control came to be understood as a sign of Black indolence. Like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-Black stereotypes, including those of the minstrel stage and in other popular formats, the images circulating in the publications constituting the literate white American reading public sought to render the complex interior worlds of Black collective self-fashioning in intimacy with the nonhuman species of the subaquatic to a form of Black inferiority. As Patricia Hill Collins defines controlling images and their ideological function in relation to Black women, these powerful constructions hide “racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice” in plain sight, making them “appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life.” While Collins’s interpretation of controlling images reflects the “problem-space” of her work’s s production centering questions about how “controlling images” help to regulate Black women’s labor from slavery into the late twentieth century, her formulation can be extended to mark a distinctive function in relation to territoriality and ecology, and in particular the use of “controlling images” related to the enduring relations of the Black commons. The artists, photographers, and editors who employed these images related to fishing and hunting sought to tame complex collective relationships through access to an unenclosed commons, deploying the bafoonish Black fisher living hand to mouth and embodying indolence in order to augment the power conjoined through the technologies of labor law and laws regulating access to uses of the water that might autonomy as well as which cast off the accumulations centered in racial capitalist extractivism. The majority of these images are explicitly derisive; produced by white artists and circulated among various white reading publics and, as such, depicting Black people in caricature or with titles that suggest something askew about Black peoples’ connection with the water through angling. For example, an  illustration by Edward King depicts a Black person line fishing along a pier with the caption “Southern Types – Catching his Breakfast,” associating the procurement of fish in this way as part of a regional typology, pathologizing the act of catching one’s own breakfast and decontextualizing what is understood as the proximity of Blackness to material lack, and the need to provide only for the present and the requisite abandonment of consideration for the future from the collapse of the southern agrarian system and the transformation of the region in the turbulent post–Civil War context. Other contemporary and later images underscore 

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this overall construction of Black fishing as part of a cultural and social embrace of haplessness. Thomas Worth’s  illustration, “Black fishing,” depicts ten caricatured boys and men crowded together with their lines on the end of a pier. The denotation of this as a racialized form suggests a problematic and blurred relationship between labor as the work required to facilitate social reproduction and leisure. This derisive depiction of Black fishers is further underscored by images that depart from the generic illustration of Black boys and men as fishing and illustrate women. Painter Alice Ravenal Huger’s  image depicts two formless Black figures, one distinguished from an apron and skirt and the other bent forward with no face, an indeterminate part of the backdrop. These figures are distinguished by the illustration’s caption: “Near the bridge two negro women are fishing.” Related contemporary imagery highlights the supposed inane and useless “wisdom” underwriting Black connections and collectivities centering the water, helping along with the wider tide to undermine Black epistemologies of place and ecology by relegating them to the realm of the categorically useless or nonsensical. An undated image suggests the inaneness of Black thought. Captioned as “Overestimated Intelligence,” a caricatured Black man walks with his pole and line as well as a basket of fish in hand, moving away from a group of cats who have gathered to eat his catch. The hyperbolic, racist subcaption fixes Black folk wisdom to stupidity and absurdity: “Talk ‘bout cats not hevin’ ‘telegence! Dey knows I hab fish in dis yeah baskit’s well’s I do myse’f. G’long off, you scound’els, an’ wait fur de bones.” These images depict Black laborers in activities related to industrial fisheries. They naturalize Black laboring bodies as part of the industrial extraction of the waterscape – the manipulation of the zone between land and water to render subaquatic species life into profitable commodities. The critical departure between the observational and the caricature modes of depicting Black engagements with waterways and subaquatic life depicts the derision of the integrity between small-scale cultivation across land and water, alternative ecological stewardship, and Black self-determination. The contrast helps to mischaracterize the approach to the nature and commons as a means of collective self-creation, survival, and meaning-making around place. It suggests that Black intellectual traditions relate to water and to the procuring of fish and the intimacy with the rhythms of other nonhuman life, as well as with the cyclical geological and cosmic temporalities that shape when and where you can attain a load of fish. These are acts of active alienation that reveal at once the ideological outlook of the propagandist, but which also index something about the rich interface between Black physical autonomy and a reconfiguration of ecologies in the decades between emancipation and Jim Crow’s consolidation 

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Black Ecological Insurgencies

as well as in direct contradistinction with Jim Crow’s enclosure of rural land and waterways. In this chapter, I have charted the formation of an insurgent ecological tradition in the Tidewater of Virginia from slavery through the emergence of Jim Crow, underscoring the relationship between these formations and the re-grounding of Black subjectivity within the Black body in contrast to the latter’s abstraction and extraction in the service of expropriation and accumulation associated with plantation and post-emancipation transformations of the landscape. This history and the dialectic drawn out here between white supremacist, ecocidal enclosure associated with originary plantation reconfigurations of the landscape through genocide and slavery, and Black autonomous cultivation and plotting, is relevant history for the contemporary rural enclosures associated with “green” capitalism. In Essex County, Virginia, for example, the plantation extractive model has gained renewed vigor with speculative massive purchasing of forested land for the anticipated generation of biofuels in Virginia and globally.



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 ANISSA WARDI

The Black Body in Nature

Christian Cooper is a lifelong birder, spending time, as birders do, marveling at Red-winged Blackbirds, Peregrine falcons, and Acadian flycatchers. In May , Cooper, a science writer who loves “spreading the gospel of birding” was in Ramble, an area of Central Park known for its good bird watching. He asked a white woman – Amy Cooper (ironically with the same surname, but ostensibly no relation) – to obey the leash laws, which, intending to protect birds, are clearly marked throughout the park. Amy called the police and performed a histrionic racist display, falsely claiming that Cooper was threatening her safety, an act which could have put his life in danger. Cooper, who taped this incident on his cell phone, was punished for being a Black man in nature. According to Drew Lanham, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Cooper’s personal friend, birding is one of the “whitest things you could do.” He should know. He’s a Black man, an avid birder, and sits on the boards of the National Audubon Society and the American Birding Association. He is also a leading public intellectual who, with poignancy and circumspection, explores the nexus of nature and race – identifying the hegemonic gaze that circumscribes and limits his passion: “Even when I escape to watch birds, that’s part of the question. Am I in a safe place? Are others watching me as I watch birds? How am I going to be perceived as a black man with binoculars, in a place where people might not want me to be?” (Adler, ). Lanham’s identity is predicated on race and nature, a configuration that, in an American context, continues to be fraught: “I am as much a scientist as I am a Black man. My skin defines me no more than my heart does. But somehow my color often casts my love affair with nature in shadow” (Lanham, ). In “ Rules for the Black Birdwatcher,” Lanham theorizes the Black naturalist position, crafting what are essentially a set of safety rules that may mitigate the dangers associated with being outdoors: “Carry your binoculars – and three forms of identification – at all times,” “Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.,” and “Nocturnal birding is a no-no” 

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The Black Body in Nature

(Lanham, ). According to Lanham, this list represents a “satirical take on some of the challenges I’ve faced as a birder who just happens to be a relative rarity among the largely white flock. My hope is that the Nine Rules somehow move us into conversations about how to make the environment and conservation more colorful both in composition and consideration” (Lanham, ). Lanham’s enumeration is rooted in the very real exigencies of being Black in nature, which is to say feeling threatened in nature, a sentiment echoed throughout the African American expressive tradition. Witnessing the Wilderness: The Woods and the African American Pastoral Tradition African American writers have persistently attended to their physical environments, conceptualizing the living world as inscribed with the nation’s history. This section considers various twentieth century writers who, in their critical and imaginative work, map the contours of an African American nature writing tradition. Evelyn White in “Black Women and the Wilderness” casts the living world as a repository of racial terror: “I wanted to sit outside and listen to the roar of the ocean, but I was afraid. I wanted to walk through the redwoods, but I was afraid. I wanted to glide in a kayak and feel the cool water splash on my face, but I was afraid” (White, : ). White’s fear is historically justified, geographically grounded, and aligns with Lanham’s “ Rules for the Black Birdwatcher.” In the African American cultural imagination, the outdoors is often paired with terror: “The association between nature, particularly the woods, and Black death is so strong that in Jordan Peele’s  film Get Out, the opening credits set the eerie tone for the rest of the film through a montage of a car rushing past endless forests. The protagonist of the film, Chris, is warned by his best friend, Rod, not to go into the woods with white people. Chris doesn’t listen and the result is tragic.” In African American literature nature emerges as politically charged, racialized, and imprinted with a history of slavery, racism, and barbaric Jim Crow practices where the “woods, forests, and swamps” are not merely unspoiled sites of wilderness but “natural places where blacks were hunted and mauled or lynched and hung from trees.” Unlike the romanticized environmental thought proffered by white naturalists, African American authors recognize the violence lurking in thickets and woods. Poet Camille Dungy elucidates that, “in a great deal of African American poetry we see poems written from the perspective of the workers of the field. Though these poems defy the pastoral conventions of Western poetry, are they not pastorals? The poems describe moss, rivers, trees, dirt, caves, dogs, fields: Elements of an environment steeped in a legacy of 

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violence, forced labor, torture and death.” Here, Dungy outlines the broad contours – intricacies and complexities – of the Black nature writing tradition. These spaces are presented in the literary tradition as threatening precisely because they are secluded and could – and did – harbor terrorists. But this is not the entire story. The Black environmental tradition is complex and nuanced and not circumscribed exclusively by white terrorism. Indeed, literary critic Stefanie Dunning in Black to Nature relates a painful racist incident that she endured at a summer camp in which none of her peers or counselors came to her aid. She leaves the meeting hall and ventures into the dark night: Their laughter and voices disappear beneath soft, gentle outside noises. I allow the coo of an owl and the rustling of leaves, and the slight murmur of wind, to suppress the memory of my peers . . . So striking was the starry sky that for one second, I almost could not catch my breath. Tended by moonlight, I survived through the manna of the wilderness. This powerful moment in nature did not in any way strike a blow against those white campers; but it did bolster and sustain me. So while my argument is not that nature is the “cure” for the social ills of racism. I do contend that natural space enables an affective experience of freedom that is not only a (temporary) relief from the persistence of oppression; its appearance in Black texts is a gesture toward another world and another space of being.

In this passage, Dunning importantly acknowledges the respite that she received from the nonhuman world and dispels the notion that the balm of nature can undo the toxicity of racism. Further, she tethers this material experience to the representation of nature in literature, exploring how portrayals of such spaces open up other ways of being in the world. Juxtaposing White and Dunning’s varying perspective of the outdoors, I am reminded of Jean Toomer’s Cane, one of the earliest and most important literary works in the African American nature writing tradition. Cane, Toomer’s  Harlem Renaissance masterpiece, was groundbreaking because it shaped the African American environmental imagination. It offers a sophisticated portrayal of the oppression and beauty associated with the rural experience, not alternately, but concomitantly, an inseparability found throughout the pages of Toomer’s experimental text. In Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature, I conceptualize Cane as an emblematic African American pastoral text that posits the ecological world, specifically the rural American South, as a place of ancestry and home, a site of deep belonging that is held alongside the history of terror, death, and exile. In Cane, Toomer takes the reader from the rural South to the urban North, and back to the agrarian South through a series of poetic vignettes, character sketches, and drama. Through the 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Black Body in Nature

trajectory of Cane’s tripartite design, Toomer maps the history of the nation through its spatial and cultural geography. Although Cane is set in the post-Reconstruction period, the vestiges of chattel slavery are omnipresent throughout as Toomer reminds readers that the institution of enslavement accounted for the large numbers of African Americans living in the rural South. In fact, as late as ,  percent of African Americans resided in the American South, the overwhelming majority in agricultural areas. Owing to urban migration, which changed the demographics of the nation, African Americans became associated with urban northern enclaves. Indeed, “over six million Black Americans left the southern United States between  and .” Though there were several causes that spurred migration, racial violence was the most salient, propelling rural Southern residents to abandon extended kinship networks and ancestral homes. Or, as Dunning lays bare: “The cities we now associate with Black America rose because of the terrorism of lynching.” The cities in America, then, tell the story of migration and displacement. Toomer’s modernist text underscores how the nation’s official history and its ugly underside are mapped onto geography; the rural South and the urban North are material reminders that the land bears the imprint of the lives and stories of those who came before. By closing section one with “Blood Burning Moon,” a powerful lynching narrative, Toomer underscores the urgency of urban migration. Following the depiction of this trauma, despite Cane’s deep pastoral sentiment, the book cuts ties with the South and migrates North. The characters, though displaced from their homeland and “severed from the soil” carry the rural South with them. In fact, in a  correspondence, Toomer discussed his plans for his forthcoming text in which the ecological world is brought to the fore: I’ve had the impulse to collect my sketches and poems under the title perhaps of CANE. Such pieces as Karintha, Carma, Avey and Kabnis (revised) coming under the sub head of Cane Stalks and Choruses [sic]. Poems under the sub head of Leaves and Syrup Songs. And my vignettes, which I have any number, under Leaf Traceries in Washington.” (qtd in Scruggs and Van Demarr, : –)

Though these subheadings are absent in the final draft, it is noteworthy that Toomer conceptualized his characters’ lives through the lens of the botanical world. Such enmeshment could potentially devolve into primitivism, but in Toomer’s able hands, it does not. In the dominant literary discourse of the time, African Americans’ closeness with nature was exploited and used as fodder for racist caricature. The “primitive,” whose humanity is diminished through an elision with flora and fauna, is a stereotype that political scientist Kimberly K. Smith in African American Environmental Thought claims is associated with “scientific racism and racial essentialism.” Dunning, too, 

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reasons that “iterations of primitivism are anchored in both time and space, marking the African, and eventually Black people, as geo-temporal anomalies, anathema to Western progress and civilization. This rendering of the African, and ultimately the Black person, as “primitive” as “nature itself in the same way that nonhuman animals are nature, propels a rupture between the Black person and nature by incentivizing Black disavowal of it.” The pervasiveness of this distorted and demeaning caricature gave rise, in part, to African American estrangement from the living world. As those in the dominant culture were positioned as the embodiment of progress and civilization, African Americans became a stand-in for “nature” and thus deemed backwards and primitive. Jean Toomer and other Black writers disentangle this spurious linkage while honoring the natural world as a site of ancestry. Toomer not only rejects the stereotype of the primitive, but portrays characters who are spiritually sustained and ennobled by their connection to the living world of their ancestors, or as he writes in Cane, “I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate . . . When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, most anything can come to one” (Toomer, : ). Here, Toomer reveals that a seemingly ordinary landscape of cane and cotton fields can be a rich site of the extraordinary. Implicitly responding to the prevailing ideology that equated the urban North with sophistication and progress, Toomer dignified the rural experience, elevating it to the metaphysical. Indeed, the author does not merely turn his attention to agrarian lives, but limns the landscape as haunted by chattel slavery and its aftermath while simultaneously recognizing it as consecrated, rich with ancestral history. With arresting lyricism Cane emblematizes the paradox pervasive in the African American nature writing tradition. In poetic verse and lyrical prose, Toomer implores the reader to witness the palpable richness in the land and the people, which compelled writer Waldo Frank to declare that the book, “is the South . . . the aesthetic equivalent to the land.” In “Karintha,” the opening piece of Cane, the narrator pleads with the reader to bear witness to the heroine’s rare beauty: “Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, / O can’t you see it, O, can’t you see it, / Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon . . . When the sun goes down” (Toomer: ). Her beauty is complicated, corrupted, and, like the agrarian South, marred by violence. Karintha’s loveliness evokes a predatory response and results in her soul becoming “a growing thing ripened too soon” (Toomer: ). In “Kabnis,” the final piece in the collection, Toomer responds to the call he issued in “Karintha.” Kabnis, a northerner living in Georgia, is overwhelmed by the endemic violence and wanders into the night. He is caught unaware by the magnificence that surrounds him, a configuration so jarring that he drops to 

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The Black Body in Nature

his knees and beseeches: “Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heaving with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and . . . tortures me” (Toomer: ). Kabnis’ torment lies in his vacillation between praise for – and condemnation of – the southern land of his forebears. He is paralyzed by this juxtaposition, and Toomer does not relieve the reader of this dilemma, but asks us to hold it in our hands – to bear witness to pain and beauty. Ernest Gaines, author of such classics as A Lesson Before Dying and A Gathering of Old Men, is a literary descendant of Jean Toomer. As one of the most prominent African American nature writers of the twentieth century, Gaines returned, in his literary imagination, to the Louisiana countryside of his youth and spoke of the environmental resonance in his writing in provocative terms: “I think that’s what I have in my writing – you have that pastoral, agrarian thing – the fields, and the streams and the trees, and all that sort of thing, but then there’s that other thing going on all the time” (Lowe, : ). Gaines’s literature suggests a profoundly reworked and revised environmental writing tradition, where “that other thing” – encompassing the manifold manifestations of racism – is as integral to Louisiana (read the South, the nation) as are the fields, streams, and trees. Gaines’s presentation of a robust African American pastoralism in his literary canon is reinforced in his many interviews where he unequivocally voiced his deep sense of attachment to the living world. For Gaines, the sugarcane fields, the forests, and the Louisiana quarters materialize the past and allow for ancestral communion. Lucille Clifton’s poem entitled, “surely I am able to write poems,” rhetorically echoes Gaines’s exploration of his own multilayered environmental fiction as both writers employ vague diction to gesture towards the ineffability of trauma that their community has endured. The speaker of Clifton’s poem remarks: “Surely I am able to write poems / celebrating grass and how the blue / in the sky can flow green or red” but “why / is there under that poem always an other poem?” (Dungy, : no pagination). The enjambments in this poem create a quick pacing – a layering of Middle Passage and lynching imagery – that ends with an ominous final line. The poem moves quickly from grass and trees to a recognition that any reflection on the natural world inevitably leads to the “other” poem, loaded diction that mirrors the ambiguous, yet racially charged sentiment of Gaines’s “other thing going on.” For Gaines, though, this complexity is his inheritance or as he exhorts in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: “This earth is yours and don’t let that man out there take it from you . . . It’s yours because your people’s bones lay in it; it’s yours because their sweat and their blood done drenched this earth . . . . Your people’s bones and their dust make this place yours more than anything else” (Gaines, : ). Here, Gaines implicitly 

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refutes the ideology that the biotic world and the nature writing tradition are solely the province of white male authors. Literary critics have narrowly conceptualized nature writing, focusing their attention on authors who wax eloquently about the beauty and majesty of the living world. Often this tradition is apolitical, save for leveling a critique against industrialization and other forms of development – the “machine in the garden” – that threaten to upend the writer’s solitary union with nature. African American literature is not solely elegiac about the environment, mourning a loss that comes with its development or degradation; rather, what emerges is nature as a layered site of ancestral and national history. African American writers repeatedly turn to the living world in their writing with a keen recognition that “nature” can never be separated from “culture.” Seeding the Soil: Gardening as Ancestral Communion In recent years, writers and critics have insisted on claiming African American literature as part of the nature writing tradition, exploring Black Americans’ deep connection with the land. Dungy, editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, explains that “the poems and essays collected here serve as an introduction to a new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.” She elaborates on some of the contours of the tradition: “They explore sources of connection to, but also alienation from, the land. African Americans are tied up in the toil and soil involved in working this land in the country we know today. Viewed once as chattel, part of a farm’s livestock or an asset in a banker’s ledger, African Americans developed a complex relationship to land, animals, and vegetation in American culture.” In the “Introduction” to We Are Each Other’s Harvest, Food and Environmental Justice scholar Analena Hope Hassberg regards soil as fundamental to Black liberation and cites leaders such as Malcolm X who, “proclaimed land as the basis of independence, revolution, justice, and equality.” Hassberg argues, “We can find respite in the soil and abundance in times of scarcity,” and powerfully declares, “Food and farming have long been a form of resistance and ritual.” Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar, echoes this sentiment. She reminds us that gardening, touching the soil in our own backyards, can be a conduit to the ancestors – a “declaration that Black land matters”: “To this day, my mother, an avid gardener, grows collard greens in a corner of her backyard. ‘Staying connected to the soil,’ she likes to say, ‘is in our DNA.’” In “Mississippi Gardens” from Dungy’s collection, Stephanie Pruitt also reconfigures the garden at the nexus of body, memory, and soil. The first 

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The Black Body in Nature

line, “slaves, she answers, as I sink / my fingers beneath the roots” is the mother’s response to her daughter’s question: “Mama what did they used to grow here?” (Pruitt, : ). While the poem is ostensibly a meditation on gardening and the horticultural knowledge necessary to cultivate the land, the root metaphor is unmistakable. Not only were enslaved people caretakers of the land – growing crops and tending to the soil – but, in this poem, their bodies returned to the land and thus any engagement with the soil becomes a material communion with ancestral history and the ancestors themselves. This soil/human elision is highlighted in the description of the dirt as “denser, darker, moister, a little more red in some places” (ibid.), a graphic description that encarnalizes the land. Perhaps no writer offers a more comprehensive presentation of the Black body’s alignment with nonhuman nature than Ross Gay – community orchardist, gardener, poet, and essayist. Particular attention will be paid to Gay’s work throughout the remainder of this piece because he is the most contemporary nature writer under consideration and is thus the inheritor of a complex African American pastoral tradition. In Catalog of Unabashed Joy, The Book of Delights, and other collections, Gay offers a profound vision of intimacy with the land through highlighting the enmeshment of the body in nature and reminding us that we are all embodied with the living world. In “Burial,” for example, the speaker unmasks the “sanitized” bags of soil amendments bought and sold in garden stores. These fertilizers, essential for plant growth, are composed of dead organisms or what living things produce, hence Gay’s attention to decayed fish and placentas. Identifying these starkly embodied elements provides a context for the speaker’s planting of his deceased father’s ashes in the soil. The relationship between flora and fauna is unmistakable here and powerfully underscores the porousness between the human and more-than-human spheres. This is not the first time that Gay lays bare the corporeality of gardens. In his informative and humorous essay, “Get Thee to the Nutrient Cycle!,” he admits to collecting his urine to add to the garden soil: “I was peeing into the bottle so I could discreetly pour it into my watering can to give my garden plants a shot of nitrogen, which the pee has in abundance” (Gay, a: ). Here, Gay muses on the, “bounty our bodies produce, and our forgotten station in the nutrient cycle” and wonders, “if this simple forgetting, this collective amnesia, that we are, in fact, part of the nutrient cycle is the source of our gravest problem, namely, that we are in the long process of making our planet uninhabitable to many species, including ourselves” (Gay, a: ). “Burial,” too, is a reminder that humans are merely part of the biocultural landscape. Interring the father’s body in his garden becomes a sacred act of human/plant enmeshment that Gay casts as beneficial to both the living and the dead. 

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The speaker plants his father’s remains along with two plum trees: “[T]he magic dust our bodies become / cast spells on the roots” (Gay, b: ). He recognizes that there are chemical processes in the body that fertilize the land, but insists that to him, it is “just magic” (ibid). In spreading his father’s ashes in the earth, the wind deposits “a slight gust into [his] nose and mouth” (ibid) in what reads as a gesture of embodiment with the father and soil; to eat the fruit of the land in Gay’s poetry is always to be reminded that we are encarnalized. William Logan, arborist and writer, exposes soil as comprised of the dead in his monograph Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth: “[T]he trees and the plants, the dead and the digested, the eaters and the eaten, make the soil.” In planting his father’s ashes, the speaker of “Burial” revels in the father’s transubstantiated life; he is now part of the soil, a “naturalized citizen” of “simple joy” (Gay, b: ). In walking barefoot in the garden, the speaker replaces the final memories of his father’s dying (medicalized) body with a vision of his life spread throughout the fruitbearing trees. He joyously eats the plums, enacting a communion with the trees grafted with the body of the dead. The final image of the father, “almost dancing now in the plum,/ in the tree, the way he did as a person” (Gay, b: ) reflects the poet’s deep recognition of nature, loss, and life. The father’s body is not imperviously sealed in a coffin and cordoned off in a cemetery with tightly controlled plant life; rather, he is dispersed in his son’s backyard garden – enriching his soil, and nourishing the varied botanical life. It is here that Gay communes with the dead, bending his ear to the earth to hear his father whisper, “Good morning” (Gay, b: ). Turning to the garden, the poet conjures back his father. The poem’s diction – “stain glass cathedrals,” “prayer,” and “grace” – sacralizes the burial and yet this final rite is not officiated by a clergy, nor punctuated with Biblical verse. In fact, the speaker only briefly considers reciting a solemn poem, a formal refrain with the, “oh father oh father kind of stuff” (Gay, b: ), but quickly rejects the impulse. Instead, the son bears witness to his father’s life with garden shears and bare root trees. Yearning to free his father from the jar in which he has been confined, and “lonely for him and hoping to coax him back” (Gay, b: ), the poet turns to the earth. The metamorphosis of man to plant literalizes the poet’s continued relationship with the father. The plum’s prodigious fruiting promises that there’s more to come in what reads as a cycle of loss and life. In an interview with Callie Siskel, Gay characterizes his work as a “lament” and a “praise,” which he reminds us “are very intertwined” (Gay, a). This evocative phrase, resonant of beauty, transcendence, and mourning, is particularly brought to bear in “Burial,” and consistent across African American nature writing. 

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The Black Body in Nature

Gay’s poem “Thank you” reads as a companion piece to “Burial” insofar as the speaker once again renders the garden as a liminal space of life and death. The earth speaks to the poet of mortality: “[Y]ou are the air of the now and gone . . . all you love will turn to dust, and will meet you there” (Gay, : ). The dust of the father’s cremated body, ingested through air and fruit, will eventually join with Gay, with all of us, in a materialization of life’s ephemerality and beauty. The poet cautions us to refrain from protesting; rather, in the face of this realization, dig deeper in the grass, praise the “dormant garden,” and give thanks. Notably, it is not only the abundant growth of the spring garden that is worthy of attention – the winter garden, seemingly without life, also occasions praise. For Gay, the only response to this joining is gratitude. Indeed, Gay’s philosophy is manifest in the many odes in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, the most relevant here being “Ode to Drinking Water from my Hands,” a poem which again begins in the garden. There is a temporal break as the speaker is reminded of another green space, a graveyard, where his grandfather taught him how to use his hands as a vessel to quench his thirst. Although graveyards are not typically conceived of as garden spaces, it is profitable to return to Gay’s essay, “Infinity,” where he muses that if something – an idea, a landscape, a philosophy – is watered, it is a garden (Gay, b: ). This observation suggests that that which we tend to becomes a living, growing thing. To further the graveyard as garden concept, Gay punctuates his ode with references to plant life. The speaker watches his grandfather tend to his wife’s grave, arranging and watering small floral bouquets. Recognizing his grandson’s longing, he moves from plants to people: the grandfather “cranked the rusty red pump” and made a “lagoon” from his hands, quenching his grandson’s thirst (Gay, c: ). The speaker recalls the grandfather creating a “fountain” in his own hands from water redolent with soil. Drinking from the same source that hydrates the graveyard flora, the speaker does not avoid the settling dirt, but welcomes the liquid, heavy with sediment: “I drink to the bottom of my fountain” (Gay, c: ). This evocative detail underscores that the grandson not only ingests from the grandfather’s hands, a connection to family and lineage, but, drinking from the pump imbibes graveyard dirt. Here and in “Burial,” Gay does not shy away from exposing the transcorporeal exchange between the living and the dead. The material turn in the field of ecocriticism, as Heather Sullivan notes, “rejects the human body as a closed ‘self’ engaging only by choice with the world according to his or her whim. Instead, our bodies exist among other bodies, enmeshed, and intraacting trans-corporeally, with all sorts of substances.” For Gay, his body is linked to other human bodies, and is also connected to the botanical world; 

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the strict borders and boundaries that we erect to separate flora and fauna is illusory. Heeding lessons from the garden, with its “invisible parade of dying and bloom” (Gay, a: ), Gay advances the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. As a gardener, Gay is surrounded by the transmogrification of dead material into new life and nods to this continuous cycle through the poem’s enjambment: “I can see / the silty bottom / drifting while I drink / and drink and / my grandfather waters the flowers / on the graves” (Gay, c: –). There is a shared witnessing of death as the grandfather, with a marked grave aside his wife’s, faces his impending mortality, but does not do so alone; rather, the speaker, “join[s] him / in his work” (Gay, c: ). The emotional landscape of the poem is such that the speaker joins him in tending to his people’s graves, “unfinished and patient” (Gay, c: ), and in time will join his grandfather, with all living things, in the life cycle. Characteristic of Gay’s poetry is its “breathlessness” (Gay, b: ), which I submit is not merely rhetorical flourish, but is a discursive materialization of Gay’s philosophy of “our wholeness, our togetherness” which, according to the poet, “is the truth” (Gay, b: ). In “A Small Needful Fact,” death is paired again with the garden, but here Gay turns his attention to Eric Garner, who was murdered in  by police officers in New York City for selling cigarettes. Garner, who was known as a “peacemaker” in Staten Island, died after police put him in an unlawful chokehold. Garner’s plea of “I can’t breathe” eleven times became a rallying cry at marches for racial justice. Gay’s elegiac poem lifts up Garner as a creator of life, a man who once worked for the “Parks and Rec” Horticultural Department and who surely would have gardened with his “very large hands.” Here, Gay re-narrates the Black male body, wresting it away from the white supremacist gaze that regards it as unruly, violent, and criminal. In Gay’s hands, Garner is tender, “gently” tending to the earth, a legacy in plants that survives after the gardener’s murder since, “some of them in all likelihood continue to grow” (Gay, a). Gay speculates that these plants provide shelter for animals, beautify the land, and create oxygen, “making it easier for us to breathe” (Gay, a). Highlighting the entanglement between humanity and plants, Gay’s poem underscores the fact that, “Plants have mastered a rather miraculous biochemical trick: Photosynthesis . . . producing the molecules on which the rest of life depends and of which it is composed.” This single stanza poem captures a side of Garner undisclosed in media, but a necessary or “needful” fact for the poet. Returning to the ontology of the garden, Garner as gardener was involved in what literary scholar Robert P. Harrison in Gardens: Essays on the Human Condition characterizes as a “vocation of care.” Gay’s poem highlights that Garner helped to put 

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The Black Body in Nature

oxygen in a world but was met with suffocation, an allusion not only to his violent murder, but a recognition of racism in America. For Gay, often the only respite from the daily assails of racism is in the garden; the natural world is held in relief against social landscapes of bigotry and hatred. If “plants surround us and nurture us along with the entire community of species on the planet” then it stands to reason that Gay, in eulogizing Garner, turns to botanical life as that Kingdom is capable of nurturing Garner – and by extension all those who are marginalized and brutalized – in ways that humans consistently have not. The reciprocal relationship between plants and people that Gay advances in his work is particularly stark in “A Small Needful Fact,” which is not to suggest that the poet sees the garden in terms of escapism. As Harrison avers, “History without gardens would be a wasteland. A garden severed from history would be superfluous.” Thus, Gay’s garden in Bloomington, Indiana cannot in any meaningful way be separated from the nation. Gay’s green space is not represented as a prelapsarian Eden, yet the poet does insist on the “transformative possibility of the earth” (Gay, ), which, given the exigencies of a racist society, offers a particular sanctuary for African Americans. In fact, bell hooks, in her ecocritical memoir, Belonging: A Culture of Place, unequivocally regards the natural world as restorative: “Collective healing for black folks in the diaspora can happen only as we remember in ways that move us to action our agrarian past.” She further asserts that, “Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the ways of our ancestors.” Throughout her body of work, hooks, with nuance and vision, confronted the manifold traumas associated with institutionalized racism, and did not dispense with that when she turned her attention to the living world. She did not look to nature to escape this reality; rather, she remained optimistic about the liberating possibilities of the ecological world precisely because of African Americans’ historic relationship to the land. Drew Lanham likewise identifies the living world as a repository of ancestral history, an often-unacknowledged imprint in flora and fauna: “the obvious links between Black enslavement and avian conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry rice fields become clear. Hundreds of thousands of acres of rich habitat exist now because of Black people bound to the land by a racist institution. The birds we see now are there because of what they did under compulsion then. I see culture and conservation as inextricably linked.” (Lanham, ). For Lanham, the wild is capacious: Birds, rice, and fields are placed alongside race, racism, and human involvement with the land, offering a complex configuration and reconceptualization of wild(er)ness that encompasses the nation and its nature, both human and nonhuman. 

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        

We cannot be disentangled from the biosphere, or as Lanham deftly explains: “The science of birds inevitably led back to the land, which then proved intrinsically tied up with the life of humans . . . there’s little separation between the life of birds and the life of people” (Brown, b), a confluence made evident in Christian Cooper’s experience. Cooper’s story trended on social media for a while. Those of us who are particularly interested in nature, birding, or social justice remember this incident. But, maybe you don’t. After all, Cooper was threatened in Central Park in New York City on May , , the same day that police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. For a minor infraction, Floyd was pinned to the ground by a police officer who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck despite his repeated plea of “I can’t breathe.” Floyd was brutally assaulted on the street,  miles away from Cooper, murdered outside, in plain view. The slaying of George Floyd sparked an international movement that insisted, simply and profoundly, that Black Lives Matter. Yes, being in nature is therapeutic for the mind and body. The research is conclusive, and the list of benefits is extensive and far reaching. Being in nature lowers pulse rate, reduces cortisol, high blood pressure, and heart disease. There is good evidence to suggest that touching the soil is particularly beneficial. In soil, there is a bacterium – Mycobacterium vaccae – which stimulates serotonin production, the chemical in the body that contributes to our well-being. Exposure to outdoor microbes is also linked to a more robust and healthy immune system. This is the science, indisputably so, but these benefits can only be realized if our social landscapes are healthy. In fact, Jim Robbins in “Ecopsychology” identifies the many advantages of human/ nature interaction but offers a key qualification: “[T]ime in nature – as long as people feel safe – is an antidote for stress.” Racism and acts of white supremacy are toxic to our communities and infect our biosphere, exiling people from the land precisely because they do not feel safe. Lanham rails against such estrangement, proclaims his enchantment with nature, and declares: “I hear joy in birdsongs [and] worship every bird I see” (Lanham, ). For this naturalist, our living world is not merely a site of pleasure, but a place where our highest values are realized: “In talking about my love of something greater than any of us, I become a freer me. I am reborn” (Lanham, ). To achieve the kind of union with the ecological world that Ross Gay, bell hooks, Ernest Gaines, Jean Toomer, Drew Lanham, and many, many others envision – an intimacy with the earth that is our shared birthright – the Black body must first be free to be in nature.



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 

Black Optics Invisibility and Hypervisibility

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 YANIE FECU

Synesthetic Embodiment

Spectacular scenes of musical performance feature prominently in modern African American literature. James Baldwin’s  short story “Sonny’s Blues,” a meditation on Black brotherhood, marginalized communities, and music as a means of communication, ends with a jazz ensemble taking the stage. While sitting at the piano, Sonny engages in a rich dialogue with his bandmates; they patiently wait, “for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let [them] know that Sonny was in the water” (Baldwin, : ). Sound’s vibratory qualities mean it is not only an aural phenomenon, but a haptic one. Baldwin’s recurring imagery rooted in water – diving, breathing, and drowning – amplifies music’s multisensory nature. Paule Marshall’s  novel The Fisher King traces the tensions within an African American and Caribbean family tethered to each other through the memory of Sonny-Rett and the uncertain fate of his grandson Sonny Jr.. In a flashback, readers witness the near mythical origins of Sonny-Rett as he improvises, “unleash[ing] a dazzling pyrotechnic of chords (you could almost see the colors) . . . and ideas – fresh, brash, outrageous ideas . . . and feelings . . . lit from time to time by flashes of the recognizable melody” (Marshall, : –). In both scenes, jazz musicians named Sonny – whom we must situate in a lineage that stretches towards Sonny Rollins and Sun Ra – push the boundaries of established musical repertoires. Both authors render these performances through a mixture of synesthetic details that ultimately transforms the audience’s and reader’s understanding of what it means to play and listen to Black music. The multisensory dimensions of these performances must be examined alongside their public nature. The exploration of synesthetic experience seems linked, however subtly, to the multiplicity of the audience who bears witness. These male musicians do not play for a family member or friend or private gathering. Instead they take center stage in established venues at the heart of their communities. In Baldwin’s story, Sonny and his brother are surrounded by Harlem locals eager to hear Sonny’s tentative and ultimately 

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 

triumphant return following his stint in a drug rehabilitation center, while in Marshall’s novel, Brooklynites watch with astonishment as Everett Payne transforms into the legendary Sonny-Rett before their very eyes. The synesthetic descriptions that follow allow readers to imagine how the same music interacts not just with different senses within the same individual, but different senses across the crowd as sound cascades through multiple bodies. Gwendolyn Brooks’s  novel Maud Martha, which follows a Black girl from Chicago who becomes a woman, wife, and mother over the course of thirty-four vignettes, appears to venture into similar territory early on. The eponymous protagonist attends a popular singer’s concert; though she describes Howie Joe Jones’s “thickly pomaded waves,” “cocky teeth,” and “‘rugged honey’” voice in detail, she soon realizes “[s]he had not been able to thrill” (Brooks, : –). Moreover, she recognizes that the audience, quick to applaud and whistle, becomes “dull again” as soon as the show ends. Though Martha recognizes the limits of this type of performance, she does not entirely dismiss the singer’s success. As Houston A. Baker explains in his essay “To Move without Moving,” “Making black expressiveness a commodity, therefore, is not simply a gesture in a bourgeois economics of art. Rather, it is a crucial move in a repertoire of black survival motions” (Baker, : ). The singer’s notes, “thundered out, with passionate seriousness, with deep meaning, with high-purpose,” (Brooks: ) align with the normative sociocultural expectations about Black vocality that Nina Sun Eidsheim interrogates in her study of the racialization of timbre. The issue is not primarily that the musician’s assertive display jars with Martha’s own method of engaging with the world, but rather that society values public displays of Blackness over any other kind. Martha cannot grasp why individuals are willing to “exhibit their precious private identities; shake themselves about; be very foolish for a thousand eyes” (). She comes away from the performance with a counterintuitive stance, and the scene takes a turn not often found in other performance-inflected Black diasporic texts. Martha, though exquisitely attuned to the world around her, feels reaffirmed in her desire to retreat inward. There she believes she will uncover the best of what she has to offer others. Ultimately, she decides “[s]he was going to keep herself to herself” () – a form of self-preservation within a racist and sexist society. Still, she does not strive for self-isolation; what she wants is “to donate to the world a good Maud Martha” (). Throughout the novel Brooks explores how sensory entanglements serve as an entry point into Black inner life. Sensation has always been inextricably linked to subject formation and knowledge production. By attending to the interplay of all the senses, African American writers provide nuanced 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

understandings of how the perceptual and the political converge, diverge, and organize each other at the same time as seeking to reorder the material and affective dimensions of global anti-Blackness. I begin with this constellation of textual performances to draw attention to what I call synesthetic stillness. Rooted in Black feminist thought alongside Kevin Quashie’s theorization of Black quiet, synesthetic stillness is an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through the experimental overlay of perceptual faculties in order to challenge the entrenched representational logics which continue to flatten and caricaturize Blackness. Despite Brooks’s status in American literature as a lauded poet, her only novel has remained underexamined due to its focus on the heroine’s ordinary life. Synesthetic stillness, then, becomes a way to recuperate the depth and breadth of lives too often dismissed as insignificant. I wish to foreground how Martha struggles against the intersecting forces of racism, sexism, classism, and colorism by cultivating an acute sensitivity to multisensory experience. Synesthetic stillness is marked by three key features: The subject’s contemplative and curious stance towards stimuli both real and imagined; the spontaneous comingling of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch in unexpected arrangements; and a preoccupation with the quotidian, the minor, and the easily forgotten. Ultimately, this expressive mode has a dual nature: Both astonishingly precise and suggestively impressionistic, synesthetic stillness enables Black cultural producers to draw on abstract and realist representational strategies in their efforts to dismantle entrenched sensory stereotypes. I build on Quashie’s work, which moves away from the tendency to conceive of Black resistance as outwardly demonstrative and Black identity as always already public and publicized. He argues that such assumptions persist because of a long-standing historical discourse which asserts that, “since the black subject is made, misnamed, and violated in the public sphere, it is through the public sphere that she can be liberated.” This misbelief obscures the significance of quiet – the metaphor he deploys to stand in for a quality of being involving inwardness, vulnerability, and intimacy. Quiet emerges as a viable political gesture and form of protest. In his examples, taken from live events and literature, he foregrounds moments that we have failed to acknowledge as moments of profound disruption. Quashie is careful to explain that quiet and silence are not interchangeable terms; the latter carries with it a sense of something suppressed. His work provides crucial insights for parsing the varied permutations of Black resistance that have emerged throughout centuries of dehumanization and exploitation. Synesthetic stillness, positioned within the same conceptual constellation, is one manner of giving shape to the interior and the new configurations of sense and sensation that emerge within. 

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 

Within scholarly and popular discourse, race is still primarily understood through the visual register, while racialized experience is rendered as the metaphorical and literal oscillation between hypervisibility and invisibility. Synesthesia not only draws attention to the inherently multivalent nature of each individual sense – it also registers new, unpredictable combinations. In the sections that follow, I demonstrate how synesthetic stillness interrupts the binary structure of hypervisibility and invisibility and instead privileges Black individuals as perceiving subjects rather than perceived objects. I reveal how stillness, for Brooks, becomes not the waning or absence of sensory stimulation, but the slowing and deepening of multisensory experience. The purposefully stilled Black body that seeks out and undergoes these multisensory experiences is neither disengaged nor paralyzed, neither captured nor tamed. Instead, this body is deliberately restrained, committed to a state of anticipation and dreaming. To claim that synesthetic stillness emerges from careful or close observation of one’s environment would be reductive. Moreover, the phrase “close observation” seems to reassert visual dominance over the other senses. Synesthetic stillness makes possible the recuperation of imaginative play that culminates in what we might more accurately call close sensation – a simultaneous burrowing into and out of the self, not limited by what the world is, but encountered as it could be.

Everyday Spectacles In the postwar era, white America struggled to reconcile the position of African Americans within the private and public spheres. For Black writers caught between the traumatic aftermath of war abroad and the ongoing horrors of war at home against institutionalized racism, somatic perception became its own epistemological battlefield. Although the sensory turn within the humanities and social sciences has motivated a rich vein of research, the question of the human sensorium as a whole remains underexplored, particularly within African American literature. Maud Martha refuses misreadings that would diminish its narrative scale and scope by staging moments of synesthetic stillness which reveal the kaleidoscopic contours of Black inner life. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry Annie Allen () just three years prior to Maud Martha’s publication, but the novel’s reception at the time ranged from perfunctory to sexist. Mary Helen Washington notes the condescending “ladylike treatment” from reviewers who ignored the incisive portrayal of Black social life and “assured its dismissal.” My own analysis is informed by the elegant readings offered by Quashie and Hortense Spillers. Like them, I wish to mine the novel for its 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

formal and thematic subtleties to better understand the sensorial dimensions of race and racialization. Maud Martha is a lesson in generation through subtraction, with careful attention paid to the remainders. Our first introduction to Martha returns to the value of the quotidian again and again: “What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky” (Brooks: ). Elaborating on this catalog of delights, she offers a philosophical slant in her observation about dandelions: “[S]he liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower” (ibid). As Martha ages from seven years old to eighteen and beyond, she grows more attuned to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch around her. Her fascination with the commonplace shapes the care with which she moves through domestic spaces, including three different kinds of homes: Her grandmother’s nursing home, her childhood home, and her marital home. During a visit to the nursing home to see her dying grandmother, Martha is preoccupied with an odor no one else seems to notice: “What was that smell? When would her mother go? She could not stand much more. What was that smell? She turned her gaze away for a while” (). Her reaction to an undesirable smell is to redirect her gaze. This moment brings to mind Maurice MerleauPonty’s influential, phenomenological account of perception which insists that unity is an untenable assumption. Martha’s idiosyncratic response is an early sign that sensory stimulants and attendant psychosomatic reactions will not cleanly align in Brooks’s novel. Although the senses often work in concert, sharpening and amplifying each other, they may also come into conflict. Martha’s experience in the nursing home foreshadows how she moves and feels her way through her childhood home. She grows up during the Great Depression, a time during which Black home ownership came under even greater economic threat. When her family verges on losing their house, she takes time to contemplate “[t]he chairs, which cried when people sat in them. The tables, that grieved audibly if anyone rested more than two fingers upon them. The huge cabinets, old and tired (when you shut their doors or drawers there was a sick, bickering little sound)” (). The passage exhibits more than simple personification. Martha highlights the auditory dimensions of objects not typically thought of as sonorous. Although Martha fondly recalls the furniture’s structural weaknesses as characteristic quirks, she also struggles with the flaws of her childhood home. She describes “a small hole in the sad-colored rug near the sofa. Not an outrageous hole. But she shuddered. She dashed to the sofa, maneuvered it till the hole could not 

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 

be seen. She sniffed a couple of times” (). The hole elicits a visceral reaction, and she takes immediate steps to change her environment. The hole here is not a habitable or hibernatory space, as it is for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. At the start of Ellison’s seminal novel, the eponymous narrator finds solace in an underground dwelling surrounded by hundreds of electric lights that siphon off power from the city’s grid and a phonograph that plays Louis Armstrong’s records at the highest volume. Amidst what some might deem an excess or extravagance of light and sound, he narrates his experience of racial trauma and meditates on the advantages and disadvantages of his social invisibility. For Martha, the hole instead functions as a frightening void, a manifestation of the absence of sensation that paradoxically produces a number of disorienting percepts. For Martha, the hole seems to represent a personal failing that requires concealment. However, her tacit belief in this moment – out of sight, out of mind – is immediately challenged by a threat to another sense organ. In the next sentence she pointedly smells the air, recalling the common assumption that “colored people’s houses necessarily had a certain heavy, unpleasant smell. Nonsense, that was. Vicious – and nonsense. But she raised every window” (). Martha’s anxiety is triggered by the anticipated arrival of a white schoolmate, though the vignette ends before his supervised visit takes place. Though she attempts to dismiss the sensory stereotypes that spring to mind, she nevertheless feels compelled to act in accordance with them. This is a rare moment: Faced with the risk of overlooking, or rather, of under-sensing undesirable percepts, she reacts to sensory stimuli that may or may not be present. In a few taut sentences, Brooks reveals how the possibility of Martha’s personal failing morphs into the haunting, racist accusation of a collective failing. This brief scene encapsulates how Maud Martha’s attention to overlapping sensory domains is imbricated within the US racial regime. Brooks’s rendering of Maud Martha’s experience is striking because the impetus behind her synesthetic experience does not arise from unusual or sublime phenomena. Instead, these experiences are generated by mundane objects, simple tasks, and routinized racism. Erich Auerbach posits that the ordinary contains a particular potency for authors; a focus on the everyday can impart “confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.” Readers mistake Maud Martha’s formal and thematic spareness for smallness. But as everyday objects become objects of sensorial delight and displeasure, this expansive sense of what merits attention throws into relief the edges of an always unfolding interiority that knows no bounds. Elizabeth Alexander describes the interior as an “inner space in which black 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t, or should be.” In other words, access to this inner space offers an alternative to constraining prescriptions about Black life that masquerade as mere descriptions. By the start of the next vignette, Martha is able to find a way back to her beliefs, values, and aspirations. When she turns inward, she regains a sense of equilibrium not tied to the sensory stereotypes circulating in the public sphere. Martha’s meditations on the quotidian draw their power not only from their startling, synesthetic framing, but from their juxtaposition alongside the commonplace denigration of Black life. The idea of “the everyday,” then, rightfully commands our attention not only because it contains the possibility for wonder, but the inevitability of racial terror. When Martha’s white acquaintance Miss Ingram cavalierly says, “I work like a nigger to make a few pennies,” violent, systemic oppression reveals itself as the banality of the everyday. Martha and her husband move into a small kitchenette apartment where they must share a public bathroom with four other families. She initially dreams of redecorating it into a beautiful home. The changes she proposes are superficial: A new couch, new blinds, a rug. Their landlord immediately rejects these plans, stating that they will have to keep it as is. Unable to affect her grim surroundings in any way, she grows increasingly resentful. Synesthetic stillness manifests as a disjointed experience of both sensory saturation and deprivation: “She was becoming aware of an oddness in color and sound and smell about her . . . The color was gray, and the smell and sound had taken on a suggestion of the properties of color, and impressed one as gray, too” (). Here readers observe a synesthetic transference of qualities that simultaneously functions as the fading and ultimate erasure of all sensory specificity. Through the walls she hears “[t]he sobbings, the frustrations, the small hates, the large and ugly hates, the little pushing-through love, the boredom” as they shift through different registers of sound. These sounds, which encompass “speech and scream and sigh,” are all equally gray (). She goes on to describe this interminable and indeterminable grayness through “the smells of various types of sweat, and of bathing and bodily functions . . . and of fresh or stale love-making, which rushed in thick fumes to your nostrils as you walked down the hall, or down the stairs – these were gray” (). Rather than inspire thoughtful reflections on the marvels of the commonplace, this ceaseless flow of external stimuli exhausts Martha. Like Brooks’s portrait poems, Maud Martha hones in on characters’ inner lives as much as their outer circumstances. In “kitchenette building,” the second poem in the  collection A Street in Bronzeville, the speaker ponders whether art, beauty, and dreaming can flourish in such 

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 

impoverished conditions, observing that “[w]e are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, / Grayed in, and gray” (). While Martha feels trapped by the endless permutations of grayness surrounding her, she never entirely loses her capacity to imaginatively engage with the world. This capacity is what inspires her to spare a mouse that slips into her grayed out home. As anthropologist David Howes notes, “[s]ensory relations are social relations.” We witness how Martha’s inward turn does not isolate her from others, but connects her more deeply to both human and nonhuman experiences. Maud Martha’s Disappearing Acts Through Martha, Brooks provides readers with an opportunity and, most importantly, a model for how to access new avenues of perception. Martha’s attunement to the people and places she encounters, however, is not without its drawbacks. Her attentiveness to the grain of the world sets her apart, but it is also precisely that which simultaneously eclipses her from the view of others. In several chapters, readers witness how people, both familiar and unknown, overlook, underestimate, and misrecognize her. Though Martha does not wish to take center stage, in any literal or metaphorical sense, she does wish to be understood and cherished. Martha values, protects, and often single-handedly repairs her familial, platonic, and romantic relationships. She draws on a deep well of compassion to forgive her loved ones’ missteps and limitations: The loving parents who nevertheless dote on her lighter-skinned sister; the sibling who pursues her teenage crush; the husband who prioritizes his own shallow desire to impress others. It is easy for readers, like the characters in Martha’s life, to misunderstand her decision to bear these thoughtless slights and heavy burdens in silence. However, Martha is neither weak-willed nor cowardly; it is strength of character that enables her to silently endure, rather than any misbeliefs about her worth. She understands that just as her experience of synesthetic pleasures and displeasures are fleeting, so, too, are the words and actions of others. For Washington, Maud Martha’s greatest accomplishment is that she demonstrates how an ordinary Black woman can be, if only for the span of a slim novel, the center of the universe. Although sound facilitates many of Martha’s intellectual and emotional insights, Washington nevertheless frames the character as a voiceless figure caught between rage and silence, with limited regard for what is made possible by the character’s finely tuned perceptual faculties. Washington, who finds Martha’s outward persona “stiff, unyielding and tight-lipped,” argues that just as the vignettes “withhold information about Maud,” so, too, does the protagonist withhold her feelings from other characters. However, it is important to note that the 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

impulse to withhold does not stem from a lack of sensitivity, but rather from an abundance. While I agree that Martha’s anger often seems to paralyze her, I want to suggest that the apparent absence of voice does not preclude the experience of intense, internal upheaval represented on the page. In her  essay, “An Order of Constancy: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine,” Spillers astutely describes how the novel explores a state which “is not the condition of passivity, but, rather, the will to be receptive – an activity under concealment.” In my view, the act of withholding, whether provoked by anger or not, becomes essential in that it initiates Martha’s imaginative restructuring of the external world and her place in it. Black feminist scholars have studied Black women’s long-standing use of dissimulating techniques; the interplay between revealing and concealing allows them to “creat[e] the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma.” Martha’s exquisite sensitivity to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch – and the meditations on self-knowledge, morality, and suffering which often follow – make her reticence a dissembling tactic rather than a weakness. Martha’s imaginative capacity is so keen that she is able to gather sensory details from two-dimensional magazine spreads and create fully realized fantasies that temporarily envelop her. She “loved it when her magazines said ‘New York,’ described ‘good’ objects there, wonderful people there, recalled fine talk, the bristling or the creamy or the tactfully shimmering ways of life. They showed pictures of rooms with wood paneling, softly glowing . . . There were bits of dreamlike crystal; a taste of leather . . . Her whole body become a hunger” (Brooks: ). Through a simple reading scene, we observe how one kind of interior reaches into another. The surprising couplings of synesthetic stillness leap out: The sharpness of bristles against the softness of creams; leather tasted rather than touched; the lingering ambiguity around what it means to pair the plain necessity of tact with the extravagance of shine. These depictions evoke Tina Campt’s concept of listening to images, a practice which reveals how photography’s overlooked haptic dimension elicits new affective relations. In her exploration of Black diasporic archives that range from South Africa to England to the US South, Campt emphasizes how the interplay of multiple sensory registers draws together physical and emotional touch. Whether a viewer recognizes the figures, objects, or sites in a given photograph, their interaction with images enables them to form intimate bonds with their past experiences and their future aspirations, with their loved ones and with strangers. We see this development bear out in Brooks’s novella as Martha pores over her magazines. While others dip in and out of the shallowest ends of sensation, she ventures into its depths. Unlike Campt’s racialized 

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identification photography, which features Black subjects, Martha’s magazine images are racialized through the absence of Black figures. Through synesthetic stillness, however, Martha inserts herself into these scenes and is able to find herself “on Fifth Avenue whenever she wanted to be” (). Like Brooks and Quashie, Campt is interested in the convergence of quiet and quotidian life. She articulates what Brooks illustrates through portrayals of synesthetic stillness – namely that “the quotidian must be understood as a practice rather than an act/ion. It is a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” Aware of the societal restrictions placed upon her because of race, gender, and class, Martha knows this scene of “[c]almly rushing” life (Brooks: ) and tasteful luxury “was not for her. Yet” (). The indeterminable duration signaled by “yet” does not discourage her, for “[w]hat she wanted to dream, and dreamed, was her affair. It pleased her to dwell upon color and soft bready textures and light, on a complex beauty, on gemlike surfaces. What was the matter with that?” (). Martha does not simply follow others’ perceptual cues; she creates new trails and elaborates upon them like the two Sonnys do with their music. Moreover, this vignette subtly interpellates Brooks’s readers, prompting us to reflect upon how her words operate on our psyches and take us down perceptual paths of our own. Brooks does not attempt to conduct an exhaustive survey of her character’s interior; she recognizes the futility of such an approach. Rather, she represents Martha’s experience through pointillist strokes that coalesce, allowing one sense to brush against another and another. Spillers reads this fragmentation differently to Washington, stating that it allows readers to “imagine not so much a structure of physical and physiological traits called ‘Maud Martha’ as we do a profoundly active poetic sensibility.” Spillers goes on to describe an “imaginative integrity” that sustains Martha, and endows her with the “capacity to draw the world into oneself.” To focus on Martha’s household routines and responsibilities is to focus on the private aspirations, personal rituals, and small-scale peregrinations of a Black woman which take place far from any public stage. What we discover is that the world does not disappear from view when we do so. Though the majority of Martha’s experiences of synesthetic stillness take place in domestic settings, readers also witness her outside the home. In one vignette, Paul is elated to receive an invitation to the Foxy Cats Club, a group of men preoccupied with “being ‘hep’” (). Martha knows he will not want to take her, partially because of her plain appearance and partially because he wants the opportunity to flirt with other women. But she is also self-aware enough to know that he will have to take her because he will not 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

be able to find a kind way to do otherwise. A lavish veneer shrouds the venue: Upon entering, Maud Martha notices the fake marble pillars and a “golden, glazed” floor (). The orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” while attendees circulate in their finery, dining at the banquet table, drinking, and dancing. In a slow unfurling, Martha registers: . . . the drowsy lights; the smells of food and flowers, the smell of Murray’s pomade, the body perfumes, natural and superimposed; the sensuous heaviness of the wine-colored draperies at the many windows; the music, now steamy and slow, now as clear and fragile as glass, now raging, passionate, now moaning and thickly gray. The Ball made toys of her emotions, stirred her variously. But she was anxious to have it end, she was anxious to be at home again, with the door closed behind herself and her husband. Then, he might be warm. ()

Music transmutates, not only shifting from loud to soft, but from gas (steam) to solid (glass). The grayness that haunted her in previous chapters briefly reemerges here, as thick and impenetrable as ever. For Martha, a stream of synesthetic description typically precedes moments of quiet delight as she turns over the commonplace in her mind, apprehending it with all her overlapping senses. Here, however, this moment of overwhelming perceptual awareness produces anxiety and a desire to retreat – not on her own, but with Paul, who is unaware and unwilling to consider the impact these sensory stimuli have on both his behavior and his emotions. Rather than bringing pleasure, these percepts bring pain, which seems to partly stem from their frenetic nature. By vacillating for no apparent reasons, these sensorial objects seem to play a cruel trick, to dismiss Martha and her profound sensitivity by making “toys of her emotions” (). Paul similarly trivializes her emotions and abandons her to dance with a fair-skinned, redhaired woman. At first Martha sits by the wall, paradoxically “trying not to show the inferiority she did not feel” (). She accepts one man’s invitation to dance, but when he leans in to tell her, “You’re a real babe,” she becomes overwhelmed by his scent, for he “reeked excitingly of tobacco, liquor, pinesoap, toilet water, and Sen Sen” (). This multilayered odor propels her into a dissociative state; she thinks “of her parents’ back yard. Fresh. Clean. Smokeless” () and contemplates the fading and eventual disappearance of a “snowball bush” from her childhood. Paul’s aloof treatment began in the days leading up to the Ball, but the club’s sensory landscape deepens his emotional distance. All too aware of the power of desirable and undesirable percepts, Martha believes that if they can escape this sensory overload, “he might be the tree she had a great need to lean against, in this 

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‘emergency’” (). The term emergency, which seemingly refers to the Ball itself, nevertheless gestures beyond the plot and the page in its signifying power. I read this term as an evocation of a larger emergency: The perpetual precarity of Black life which is rendered through the perceptual crises found in postwar African American literature. Maud Martha makes an intervention within this literary canon with its ostensibly small scale and its concern with interiors – in terms of setting and self. In doing so, the novel bridges the material and immaterial, revealing synesthetic stillness as a unique and vital phenomenological experience. Conclusion Brooks’s strategic oscillation between the surplus and loss of perceptual acuity emerges in the context of the always precarious task and status of Black knowledge production. Her aesthetic tactics, I contend, are part of a broader attempt to register a shift in thinking about consciousness alongside sensuousness as a way to counter the continued devaluation of Black lives. Brooks is, in her own way, not only describing perception, but theorizing it as an analytic. Martha’s experience becomes a way to grasp connections between the simultaneously embodied and ephemeral nature of Black interiority. As much as the effects of racism and sexism shape her perceptual faculties, Martha reclaims her ability to perceive herself and the world by using moments of synesthetic stillness to fill an inner reservoir. Rather than being reduced to yet another avenue through which Black bodies are disciplined and denigrated, sensory experience becomes a vital way to cope with racial trauma and to integrate past, present, and future selves. Brooks’s literary conjuring of perceptual modalities convey alternative modes of apprehending a world that refuses to apprehend Martha and that, at times, aspires to be wholly anesthetized to the Black experience. Despite Martha’s attentiveness to the multisensory nature of everyday life, she does not believe she can create or become a permanent record of these small, evanescent marvels. She does not surround herself with multiple phonographs and stacks of musical records and attempt to insert herself into their many grooves, as the Invisible Man aspires to do. But the ephemerality of what she chooses to bear witness to transforms her stilled body into an archive of impermanence. In a state of synesthetic stillness, her mind captures, but it does not keep. In this way, the experience of synesthetic stillness comes close to the experience of dreaming. However, the stilled body of the former is poised, even arched towards activity while the stilled body of the latter is inaccessible to the conscious mind. In Martha’s waking moments it is the passage of intermingling sensory details that alchemically 

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Synesthetic Embodiment

transforms her inner and outer worlds. As Spillers suggests, Black interiority cannot be solely interpreted as a space – it must also be understood as the passage of time. She imagines interiority as “not an arrival but a departure, not a goal but a process.” Martha’s interiority is not only figured as evershifting terrains, but as the seasons which pass over them. Maud Martha is, above all else, an exploration of a Black woman’s capacity for dreaming.



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 RACHEL FAREBROTHER

Dancing Bodies

Langston Hughes’s famous account of “the period when the Negro was in vogue” in his autobiography The Big Sea () places dance at the heart of Harlem’s storied reputation during the Jazz Age (Hughes, : ). He observes that the “vogue” that brought white people to Harlem en masse was set in motion by the “pre-Charleston kick” of the popular musical Shuffle Along (), with its “danceable, singable tunes,” before spreading to other cultural forms like literature, music, and African sculpture (, ). Recalling the “so-called Negro Renaissance of the ‘s” in , Hughes contends that the reality of the period was obscured by its sparkly surface (). In retrospect, the renaissance – which included dance crazes like the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, and the Stomp – seemed like a passing fad that did little to disrupt segregation, economic inequality, and racism. Resisting an enduring tendency to romanticize Harlem cabarets, Hughes underscores how such social and cultural spaces were marked by the everyday realities of racism and inequality. Indeed, aside from the performers, waiters, and a handful of celebrities like the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Cotton Club – the best-known cabaret in Harlem at the time – was a “Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites” (–). This contrast between the “swift,” “rollicking” dynamism of the choreography and music in Shuffle Along and the tight, restricted social spaces of Harlem itself is a recurring trope in visual and literary representations of the dancing body during the New Negro renaissance (). In this chapter, I argue that, for some New Negro writers and artists, representations of the dancing body opened the way for creative engagement with the spatial dynamics of segregation and overcrowding in Harlem, which was fascinated by the look, the sound, and the feel of dance. Thomas F. DeFrantz, scholar of Performance Studies, argues that cultural representations of Black dance “reconstitute narratives of identity and politics by choreographing the body’s expressivity within the crevices of hegemonic racist systems.” In addition, I argue that these cultural 

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Dancing Bodies

representations are imbued with emotional complexity. It is difficult to miss the preoccupation with conjuring a mood in visual representations of dancing in cabarets by Aaron Douglas, Miguel Covarrubias, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Winold Reiss – a space that, as Shane Vogel reminds us, also inspired writers to imagine “new ways of performing, witnessing, and writing the racial and sexual self.” Iconic images, such as Motley’s Blues () – with its vivid portrayal of couples packed together on the dance floor, swaying to the music, interspersed with fragments of a trumpet, a clarinet, and a trombone slide – create syncopated, improvisatory visual effects that evoke the sound of the blues. The image conjures sensations and feelings through sound, color, and movement. Moreover, in short stories such as Rudolph Fisher’s “High Yaller” () and Langston Hughes’s “Poor Little Black Fellow” () dance and bodily movement are integral to probing explorations of the affective or subjective dimensions of segregation and colorism. If Fisher’s story is a manifestation of what Vogel calls a “dancerly text,” mapping characters’ movements across racialized spaces in New York to explore isolation and overcrowding, segregation and congregation, in Hughes’s story, dance expresses expansiveness, sexual desire, and the emancipatory potential of internationalism. In what follows, I will consider how the cabaret was depicted in social histories of Harlem and in visual art, establishing the cultural backdrop for Fisher’s and Hughes’s engagement with dance in their short fiction. The Look and Feel of the Cabaret The social and cultural space of the cabaret occupied a central, if ambivalent, place in assessments of Black American cultural expression in the s and s. What Shane Vogel has called “the scene of Harlem cabaret” became a touchstone in debates about art and politics, with some commentators worrying that a preoccupation with night life was fundamentally “at odds with a project of racial self-definition.” At the same time, analysis of the cabaret necessitated a reckoning with the commodification of Black performance and changing patterns of urban social leisure. The consolidation of Jim Crow and the “territorial racialization of the city” in the early twentieth century occurred in tandem with the rise of new forms of mass popular culture – the film industry, the recording industry, the cabarets, and Tin Pan Alley, among others – that had “representations, re-creations, and reproductions of black voices, black bodies, and black culture” at their heart. In this context, it is hardly surprising that the question of the cabaret’s social and cultural significance loomed large in contemporary assessments of 

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 

the flowering of Black culture in the s. In his influential cultural history, Black Manhattan (), James Weldon Johnson considered the implications of Harlem’s emergent reputation as an “exotic, colourful, and sensuous” entertainment district (Johnson, : ). His optimism about the transformative impact of Black music and dance on US popular culture was tempered by anxiety about the superficiality of white engagement with Black life and culture. Johnson’s unease about commodification and spectacle is captured in a slippage between sensation and sensationalism, wherein his portrait of a shallow curiosity never gets beyond voyeurism. “Some of these seekers after new sensations go beyond the gay nightclubs,” he writes, “they peep in under the more seamy side of things; they nose down into lower strata of life” (ibid). By contrast, Wallace Thurman’s Little Blue Book, Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section (), attempts to document Harlem night life in all its diversity. As well as delineating the patrons, décor, ownership, and performances at various clubs, he celebrates the sensual pleasures of dance. Notice, for instance, the emphasis upon the body in Thurman’s account of dancers crammed into the Sugar Cane Club doing the slow drag: “finding one another’s bodies, [they] sweat gloriously together, with shoulders hunched, limbs obscenely intertwined and hips wiggling; animal beings urged on by liquor and music and physical contact” (Thurman, : ). Thurman’s description of the slow drag is animated by contradictions. On the one hand, it celebrates the “glory” of sensuality. Dance inspires experimentation: The fragmented syntax, which comprises a series of sharp visual vignettes that sketch specific poses and movements, mimics the movement of the dancers’ intertwining bodies. On the other hand, through references to sweating, obscenity, and “animal beings,” the passage resorts to primitivist stereotypes that bracket the dancers with physical rather than cerebral culture. Thurman highlights the consequences of a white “invasion” that transformed some nightclubs into “side shows staged for sensation-seeking whites” (). He never loses sight of structural inequalities, reminding readers that “white patronage is so profitable and so abundant that Negroes find themselves crowded out and even segregated in their own places of jazz” (). Moreover, he emphasizes how none of the establishments were “owned or operated” by Black people, resulting in the profits flowing out of Harlem (). Nevertheless, his analysis also dwells upon the expressive possibilities of dance for Black Harlemites. According to Thurman, the appeal of self-expression and intimacy in cabarets and dance halls like the Savoy, the Renaissance Casino, and the Manhattan Casino 

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Dancing Bodies

cannot be disentangled from the social and political pressures faced by Black Americans. In Harlem, cabarets served as “a welcome and feverish outlet . . . where the struggle to live is so intensely complex” (ibid). For Thurman, dancers at rent parties and in cabarets embody the liberatory potential of defying the strictures of social uplift and bourgeois respectability: “The dancers will use their bodies and the bodies of their partners without regard to the conventions . . . Happy individuals will do solo specialities, will sing, dance – have Charleston and Black Bottom contests and breakdowns . . . Here ‘low’ Harlem is in its glory, primitive and unashamed” (–). Thurman’s celebration of the improvisatory freedom of the cabaret, with its focus on fluidity, freedom, and primitivism, amounts to an intervention in discourse around the distinction between high and low cultural forms. Aligned with modernity, pleasure, and freedom, dance symbolizes defiant self-expression, the bold challenging of censorship, and a refusal to be confined by social expectations. Tensions between liberation and confinement, modernity and primitivism, dynamism and stasis, and choreographed steps and individual selfexpression also animate visual representations of Black social dance. As Cheryl A. Wall notes, “[t]he desire to represent dance inspired visual artists as well as writers.” Given my focus on the spatial dynamics of cultural representations of the dancing body, I am particularly interested in visual representations of dance that depict dancing bodies within urban environments, often as a means of exploring the emotional cultural politics of segregation, colorism, and overcrowding. Take, as an example, the German immigrant artist Winold Reiss’s “Drawing in Two Colors: Interpretation of Harlem Jazz,” a lithograph of two dancing Black figures, one male and the other female, that featured alongside J. A. Rogers’s essay “Jazz at Home” in Alain Locke’s special issue of the Survey Graphic: “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” () (Figure .). Reiss conjures up the sights, sounds, and experiences of the cabaret through his collage-like delineation of a fragmented backdrop, with snatched glances of a woman’s leg, a glass of whiskey on a lounge table, an African mask, and a banjo appearing amid geometric patterns that create a sense of dislocation and sensory overload. The picture is dominated by two dancing figures whose angular silhouettes, with their flexed knees and elbows, give visual shape to the “polyrhythmic, improvisatory” qualities of the dance. The prominence given to the male dancer’s energetic movements aligns with Rogers’s description of “jazz dance” as characterized by “brilliant, acrobatic execution and nifty footwork.” Reiss’s visual rendering of dance is stylized and self

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 

Figure . Winold Reiss, Drawing in Two Colors, between  and .

consciously modernist – although it also recapitulates tropes derived from minstrelsy – and the emphasis upon the dancing body in flight (as if suspended above the crowded cabaret scene) recalls Thurman’s observations about the expressive, even transcendent possibilities of social dance. As we will see, comparable tensions between stasis and movement, tradition and modernity also animate literary representations of the dancing body. 

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Dancing Bodies

The Feel of Dance Literary criticism of Rudolph Fisher’s two novels and fifteen short stories, including “High Yaller” (), which won the Crisis’s Amy Spingarn prize for fiction, has concentrated on his chronicling of Harlem. Critics have explored Fisher’s sensitivity to the “redrawing of tradition within the urban context” in representations of southern migrants’ adjustment to city life, and his synoptic, democratic view of Harlem’s inner diversity, which cuts across linguistic, social, and racial lines in its portrayal of characters from various social backgrounds “from the rattiest rat to the dicktiest dickty” (Fisher, : ). The spatial dynamics of Fisher’s fictionalized Harlem – its precise mapping of vertical and horizontal urban spaces from airshafts, overcrowded apartments, packed dance halls, and noisy subways to bustling streets and cramped movie theaters – have often been interpreted as an intervention in broader debates about the appropriate representation of Black culture in the New Negro movement. He rejects racial uplift and racial pride, turning a critical eye on the pretensions of the Harlem bourgeoise, hierarchies based upon class and skin color, and the cut-throat individualism of capitalism. Fisher’s memorable portrayal of embodied movement in dance halls and cabarets – with its careful choreography of physical proximity and distance – has occasionally featured in such commentary. In a perceptive discussion of Fisher’s lampooning of the General Improvement Association costume ball in The Walls of Jericho (), for instance, Maria Balshaw notes dance’s centrality to the portrayal of Harlem as “a commodified and spectacular site of desire for both black and white spectators/performers [that] facilitates the text’s ironic performance of urbanity and emphasises the contingency of racial identity.” All sections of Harlem society attend the ball, but the cabaret’s limitations as a space of social transformation are underscored by the persistence of social stratification and spatial separation. The Black bourgeoisie and white artistic patrons look down on the so-called rats, a group the dickties “prefer to ignore,” from an elevated balcony box in the Manhattan Casino (Fisher, : ). As Fisher explains, “Out on the dance floor, everyone, dickty and rat, rubbed joyous elbows, laughing, mingling, forgetting differences. But whenever the music stopped everyone immediately sought his own level” (). Nevertheless, critics have largely overlooked dance as a metaphor and structural principle in Fisher’s exploration of how Harlem life is riven with tensions and constraints relating to race, class, and gender. In addition to staging scenes in cabarets and dancehalls to explore how individuals navigate restricted social spaces shaped by de facto segregation and colorism, he 

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also uses embodied movement, which opens up countless “opportunities to observe and be observed,” to limn the emotional complexity of such experiences. Take, as an example, Fisher’s short story “High Yaller,” which portrays the brief relationship between Evelyn Brown, a light-skinned young woman who chooses to pass as white at the end of the story, and Jay Martin, a dark-skinned former Des Moines lieutenant who now works in real estate. Ironically, colorism, and Evelyn’s ill-fated attempt to undermine the accusation that she is “color struck,” is the catalyst for the pair’s closeness (Fisher, a: ). But the ubiquity of the “torture” of segregation – in urban spaces as diverse as the cabaret, the subway car, the ice cream parlor, Coney Island, and the movie theater – means a relationship that is mistakenly perceived as an interracial love affair cannot survive the stares and hostility of New York’s (Black and white) inhabitants (). Indeed, the shame created by “People staring” is a leitmotif in the story (). Significantly, “High Yaller” opens with a description of crowds filling the dance floor of the Manhattan Casino after a basketball game, which attends to horizontal and vertical space, noise, embodied movement, and the navigation of tight spaces. It establishes a template for interpreting Fisher’s precise mapping of racialized urban space (and the sensations and feelings that it provokes) in the story more generally. To begin with, readers view the dance floor from above, sharing Evelyn Brown’s distanced, detached perspective as she “look[s] down from the balcony on that dark mass of heads, . . . wonder[ing] how they all managed to enjoy it” (). The crowds that “flood” the dance floor are depicted as swarming “impatient multitudes,” “dense, crawling currents” that “surrender” to what Evelyn regards as “mob-torture,” in which individual agency is “submerged” as imagery of drowning, flooding, and sinking abounds (ibid). When Evelyn reluctantly joins the fray, the atmosphere is “vile – hot, full of breath and choking perfume. You were forever avoiding, colliding, marking time on the same spot” (ibid). This memorable description – with its rendering of constriction, denial, and stasis in terms of physical sensations such as “choking” – serves as the starting point for Fisher’s sustained exploration of the emotional dynamics of tight spaces, segregation, and passing in New York. Indeed, Fisher’s story might be seen as an example of what Shane Vogel has called a “dancerly text, one whose patterns, imagery, pace, and transfers of energy are designed to be read foremost as moving, dancing bodies, with other narrative strategies subordinated to this goal.” A capacious definition of choreography such as the one offered by Vogel opens the way for a spatial reading of “High Yaller.” What sets my approach apart from Vogel’s is a sustained focus on the emotional cultural politics of dance. I attend to bodily movement, dance, stillness, and the traversing of lines or borders in 

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Dancing Bodies

Harlem where segregation is a “structuring condition of . . . life.” Analysis of Jay and Evelyn’s navigation of restricted spaces brings into focus sensations and feelings that range from pleasure and fun to the mental strain of “everyone looking at you – laughing at you” (). Fisher’s precise portrayal of bodily movement in the Manhattan Casino establishes patterns that are reprised throughout “High Yaller,” as Evelyn and Jay venture into a series of leisure spaces inside Harlem and beyond it (including Coney Island). They seek pleasure only to be faced with hostility that leaves them “wishing the ground would swallow” them up (). The precariousness of their relationship amid such societal pressure is evident. Despite the apparent social fluidity of the cabaret, Jay and Evelyn’s decision to pair off leads to isolation in the midst of overcrowding that makes them vulnerable, “fragile,” ready to “break” (). When Jay finds a “corner” at the “far end of the terrace” where the couple can rest from the dance, they are isolated in the middle of noise and whirling dancing that at once suggests social belonging and the tight constriction of an obstructed airway. (It is difficult to miss the unity embodied in Fisher’s pun on “soles/souls,” but his portrayal of “the ceaseless stridor of soles mingled” conjures up the intense anxiety of struggling to breathe). More pointedly, Evelyn and Jay are likened to “refugees”: The crowd “seem[s] to wall them in, so that presently they felt alone together” (ibid). Another ill omen arrives in the shape of the “sharp, indecent epithet” uttered by a “Harlem adolescent” (), an “imp of malice” whose unjustified vengeance later puts Jay in a cell at the police station (). The scowling boy is only the first of a series of Black and white social gatekeepers who police where Jay and Evelyn can go as they are misperceived as an interracial couple. Such confrontations become increasingly violent as the story proceeds. In the final pages, once Evelyn has disappeared from Harlem to “Get out. Pass” (), two or three policemen, “red-faced ruffians,” beat Jay in “a back room in the police station,” demanding that he “leave white women alone” (). The incident leaves him “raw with bodily anguish” and the “sting” of injustice (). Finally, Evelyn’s unexamined prejudices are also exposed in the Manhattan Casino. By breaking up a fight, Jay earns a backhanded compliment when she reflects “I certainly like Jay Martin. He’s so – white” (). Fisher’s narrative is structured around the trauma of racial insults and the “painful embarrassment” of excessive scrutiny that Jay and Evelyn experience as they traverse the city (). Racism and colorism are represented in visceral terms that ricochet back onto the body. One dimension of Fisher’s portrayal of the couple’s navigation of racialized urban spaces is concerned with overcrowding. As Winston James notes, “Harlem’s black population 

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was notoriously densely packed,” with a population density that outstripped Black Chicago by five times. Harlem was “a vertical city (like much of Manhattan), with people living literally on top of one another in multistory or tenement apartment buildings” that were overcrowded because “scandalously high rents” forced families to take in lodgers. Imagery of constriction, enclosure, and even gothic entrapment accords with Wallace Thurman’s characterization of the neighborhood as an overcrowded, noisy section of the city where residents were “struggling for more room and for more air” (Thurman, : ). Fisher’s depiction of the “bedlam” and “crush” on the dance floor at the Manhattan Casino () – a venue that was located “well to the north of the boundaries of early black Harlem” on  West th Street, doubling as a basketball court because few buildings could accommodate large gatherings – persists throughout the narrative. Dick’s lunchroom is so cramped that it “seemed to have been designed so that the two waitresses could serve everybody without moving from where they stood” () while the front room in Evelyn’s flat is “too full of mockmahogany furniture about to collapse” (). Moreover, Jay’s employment in real estate means that he is “actively concerned in black Harlem’s extension” (), but the perils of transgressing Harlem’s borders are repeatedly emphasized, not least because of the risk of violent conflict with New York’s largely white population. Note, for instance, Fisher’s ironic juxtaposition of Jay “tak[ing] his opportunity with a Negro real estate firm” with a long personal history of violent confrontation with whites on Harlem’s “boundary” (ibid). In particular, a vignette of a childhood spent on th Street’s sidewalks (then “the northern boundary” of the “colony”) on “roller-skates [that] rattled and whirred” pits the innocent pleasure and freedom of physical mobility against the bruising barrier of “fight-fights” with white boys who subject him to racial insults at a time when it “would have been almost suicidal for one to appear unarmed on Irish Eighth” (ibid). The upper reaches of Harlem may have extended since Jay’s childhood, but his body still marks the limits of that shifting boundary. Indeed, Evelyn’s mother declares that Evelyn “may go any place [she] please[s], if [she] go[es] with Jay” (), but he is excluded from places “where Evelyn goes anytime she likes,” and the pair are “jimcrowed” at Hank’s cabaret because the waiter is “afraid to let the two of [them] be seen” () together in a cabaret where Black and white patrons “keep to their own parties” (). By tracking Jay and Evelyn’s movements through places that are either cordoned off as Black or white, or shared social spaces that separate Black and white people based upon “a principle of exclusion and social discipline,” Fisher also explores the psychological strain of everyday racism and 

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Dancing Bodies

colorism. “High Yaller” concludes with Jay’s bitter reflection on the “enormity” of being Black in a culture that associates “blackness” with “demons and ogres and ravens of fairy tales . . ., eclipses, night, the valley of the shadow, gloom, hell” while whiteness is figured as “the standard of goodness and perfection” (). But the emotional strain and distortions generated by such racialized cultural values are more often presented through spatial imagery of entrapment. When Jay and Evelyn are refused entry to Hank’s, for instance, they are “sidetracked” () into a “little room” () that is marked as gothic, replete with “a thick atmosphere of suppression, a sense of unspoken fears and half-drawn breaths and whispers” (). It is reached by climbing “padded stairs” and surrounded by “mysterious closed doors” () that muffle “strange, low sounds” and “a shrill laugh” that is “abruptly cut off as if by a stifling hand” (). There is even a “youth in a white coat” (ibid) – an image that likens the cabaret to an asylum – who turns out to be the scowling “Harlem adolescent” Jay and Evelyn first met at the Manhattan Casino (). Taken together with Jay’s and Evelyn’s strange, uneasy encounters with their respective doppelgangers – distorted visions of themselves who express their repressed insecurities – it is difficult to miss the implication that madness might be a rational response to a world where “a desert island that nobody could find” is “the only place [Evelyn] and Jay could be happy together” (). That said, playful humor, reveling as it does in the slipperiness of spectacle and performance, complicates the tone of Fisher’s portrayal of a precarious world that seems to be on the verge of collapse, from the “rackety mechanical piano” and tables with “dappled wire legs” in the ice cream parlor (where Jay is refused service because his presence is deemed “unprofitable”) to the “the rattle and bump” of the subway () and Evelyn’s “crumbling” efforts to “establish a defence of her own” against gossip and slander (). For one thing, the story is punctuated by a refrain from the song “Yaller Gal’s Gone Out o’ Style,” which is always laced with mocking humor. If the song spotlights the irony that Evelyn’s light skin affords her a mobility that is unavailable to Jay, it also undercuts the seriousness of the situation by aligning it with the fickleness of fads and fashions, which Shane Vogel has called “the fad logic” of “rapid adoption, wide circulation, and precipitous abandonment.” Such associations accentuate a demythologizing self-reflexivity and a taste for drama that consistently shadows Jay and Evelyn’s brief affair. In Hank’s, for instance, Evelyn’s worry that she is “a misfit” is sandwiched between “a tragic diminuendo” and the “thin strain” of the song, “like a snicker” (). The depiction of Evelyn and Jay’s aborted relationship pokes fun at Jay’s predicament, giving some credence to the idea that he is out of step with 

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the times, not least in the judgment that racial passing cannot be squared with “a conscience” (). Given Fisher’s fascination with spectacle, it is fitting that the tale ends in a movie theater. Consigned to the “balcony’s dimness” (), Jay is a figure of poignant isolation. He is distracted by painful reminiscences about the failed relationship: His mind buzzes with “quick-shifting scenes; not those on the screen at which he stared, but others, flashing out from his mind” (ibid). The appearance on the screen of “[t]wo chubby infants,” one Black and one white, apparently confirms the legibility of racial identity, but then Jay spots Evelyn (who is now passing as white) in the audience below with her white boyfriend (). Unlike Evelyn’s “escort,” Jay knows that she is passing (ibid). It is little comfort to Jay, but he is now staring rather than being stared at. In a manipulation of sightlines that confirms the aptness of Amy Robinson’s characterization of the “triangular theater of the pass” based upon relationships between the passer, the dupe, and the “in-group clairvoyant,” Jay (and readers) are assigned a ring-side seat from which to watch Evelyn’s “performance” of whiteness. The “dimness” even “seem[s] to lift mockingly,” as if Evelyn were under a spotlight on the stage (). Moreover, Fisher’s bitter humor, which presents “Yaller Girl’s Gone Out o’ Style” as a loud “guffaw,” revels in the “capital joke,” as James Weldon Johnson would put it, of Evelyn’s passing going undetected in a social world that polices the color line at every turn (Johnson, : ). The Politics of Dance If dancing and bodily movement are integral to Fisher’s sardonic exploration of racialized space in Harlem, associations between dance and the navigation of tight spaces reach towards the transnational and intercultural in Langston Hughes’s “Poor Little Black Fellow.” The story was written in  during Hughes’s sojourn in the Soviet Union, and later appeared in The Ways of White Folks (). The Soviet-backed film project that was the impetus for the trip never came to fruition, but, as Kate Baldwin has argued, Hughes’s interest in the Soviet project and the “complex identificatory processes at work in [his] unanthologized writings about Uzbekistan” influenced his “renegotiation of the Jim Crow boundaries in which he operated at home, [offering] him a new vocabulary for meditating on an interrelated blurring of normative routings of sexual desire.” “Poor Little Black Fellow” explores the galvanizing impact of a visit to Paris upon Arnie, the “fellow” of the title, an orphan who has been raised in rural New England by the Pembertons, a rich white family who employed his parents as servants. His childhood is characterized by isolation and cultural 

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Dancing Bodies

alienation. According to the white inhabitants of Mapleton, Arnie’s presence as “one dark spot in a world of whiteness” demonstrates their deep commitment to “Christian charity” (Hughes, : , ). In fact, his upbringing is geared towards stipulating his “place” () within a society defined by racial segregation, although his identity is complicated by the intersection of Blackness and class privilege. Once he enters adolescence, social interactions with his white peers are curtailed to forestall potential sexual relationships. In line with associations between dance, agency, and sexual desire that are fundamental to the story, Arnie attends the school prom, but he does not “dance with any of the girls” (). He is also consigned to a separate (but unequal) section of the house, “the whole top floor of the garage” (). Dancing, which is linked to fluidity, boundary crossing, and sexual desire, is an important motif in Hughes’s critique of racial segregation. The Pembertons’s decision to take Arnie to Paris the summer before they pack him off to Fisk University brings him into the orbit of the dancer Claudina Lawrence, “the new beauty of brown flesh behind footlights” who has “amassed” such “a terrible amount of fame and money” that even the Pembertons and Arnie have heard of her (). Modeled after the dancer Josephine Baker, who emerged as an international star thanks to her performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in La Revue Nègre in Paris, Claudina transforms Arnie’s life: “Everything would have gone perfectly, surely; and there would have been no story, and Arnie and the Pembertons would have continued in Christian love forever . . . had not Claudina Lawrence moved into the very hotel where the Pembertons were staying” (–). Claudina, who “danced like a dryad” (), models a new way of living, one rooted in “having a good time,” partying, music, dancing, and the criss-crossing of racial, spatial, and national borders (). Their friendship redirects Arnie’s experiences of Paris towards clubs and cabarets that not only facilitate his first meaningful encounter with Black US cultural expression, but also initiate him into an international, interracial social and cultural world where “color” “didn’t matter” (). Arnie’s immersion in Claudina’s sphere is achieved through the sensual pleasures of dance, which, according to Susan Leigh Foster, is “uniquely adept at configuring relations between body, self, and society.” The first woman he dances with in Claudina’s apartment assumes that he “must’ve brought a few of the latest steps with [him]” () and asks if he can do the Lindy Hop, a sign of Hughes’s openness to the cultural pluralism created by criss-crossing influences across the Atlantic. Imagery of fluidity, porousness, and “liquid” () jazz abounds as Arnie dances with “white girls and brown girls, and yellow girls” (). Arnie’s break with the Pembertons arrives because of his relationship with a Romanian music student named 

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Vivi, “a young white girl . . . who didn’t care about color” but is motivated by the radical possibilities of “Revolution” because “everywhere poor people are tired of being poor” (). Their interracial relationship – which scandalizes the Pembertons to such an extent that they misread Vivi as a “scarlet woman” rather than a “red,” “mistaking one ‘red’ for another” – is also aligned with the transgressive potential of dance (“How she could dance!” ()). The new (emotional and political) possibilities created by Arnie’s intimacy with Vivi are captured in his refusal of the bounded, “shutoff” racialized spaces that govern his life with the Pembertons (). The story’s final line (“Arnie went out” ()) underscores his embrace of transgression associated with dance and music that breaches boundaries, “float[ing] through the windows on the soft Paris air” () and mingling with the sounds of everyday city life, including honking automobiles. Yet, the liberatory potential of dance remains uncertain, if rich with possibility: Vivi is nowhere to be seen and Arnie is just as liable to misread her revolutionary politics as the Pembertons. Conclusion A brief survey of recent scholarship on New Negro representations of dancing bodies captures the richness of the dynamic interplay between dance, music, visual art, and literature in the period. Daphne Lamothe has argued that Harlem Renaissance writers and artists “habitually portrayed the dancer’s body as a site of and medium for the African American’s atavistic connection to her African roots.” Dance is also central to what Shane Vogel has termed the “sensuous Harlem Renaissance,” an aesthetic project that “turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception . . . to imagine new experiences of black pleasure and desire.” Richard Bruce Nugent’s fascination with dance in his artwork and writing, for instance, is connected to an “ephemerality” that “helps queer subjects to simultaneously be visible and get lost from history,” while the “swaying” bodies in Gwendolyn Bennett’s visual art, non-fiction, and poetry invite a reconsideration of concepts of authorship that valorize individuality and authenticity. This chapter has taken an alternative approach, testing the limits of the liberatory potential of dance as depicted in New Negro social and cultural history by luminaries such as Wallace Thurman and James Weldon Johnson, visual art by Winold Reiss, and short fiction by Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes. Reading these works side by side highlights some of the tensions that animate representations of the dancing body. If modernistic visual and literary portrayals of the dynamism of Black social dance 

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Dancing Bodies

sometimes flirt with primitivism or caricature to depict a mode of bodily dynamism that Sianne Ngai has termed “animatedness,” there is also an important story to tell about the emotional subtlety with which cultural representations of dance explore urban alienation and social integration. Indeed, such complexity comes to fruition in Fisher’s “Miss Cynthie,” a tale that tracks a grandmother’s conflicted feelings when watching her grandson’s performance as a vaudeville tap star. It is a journey from suspicion of “transgression” to insightful appreciation of dance as a vehicle for both individual and collective self-expression (Fisher, : ). “Absorbed . . . in the spectacle,” Miss Cynthie learns that, as Toni Morrison’s narrator explains in Jazz, “the body is the vehicle, not the point” (ibid, Morrison, : ). With her final judgment that “God moves in a mysterious way,” Miss Cynthie recognizes that her grandson’s virtuosity, which combines “crispness of execution” with an ability to “absorb into himself every measure of the energy” of the dancers who surround him, accommodates the values she taught him as a child: “[A]im high and go straight” (Fisher, b: ,). Indeed, under Miss Cynthie’s shrewd gaze, vaudeville emerges as underappreciated mode of racial storytelling and memorialization: The show fictionalizes migration from the South to Harlem where people “live like bees in a hive” (). Bees dance to communicate with each other. Consequently, Miss Cynthie’s simile underscores how analysis of moving bodies in the “dancerly text” at once demands a reckoning with the liberatory possibilities of dance and the emotional dimensions of segregation and overcrowding.



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 SAMANTHA PINTO

Celebrity Bodies

Touissaint Louverture and the Spectacle of Black Masculinity In his  series “The Good Life,” Lyle Ashton Harris poses himself and others in family portraits ranging from the mundane to the regal to the perverse. These shots are interspersed with him and others occupying the position of Black idols in a diaspora symbolic order, a roster of instantly recognizable, iconographic Black subjects of history including Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint Louverture (Figure .). Harris’s Toussaint sits on a plush red and ornate gold throne, with a fitted blue military style jacket and a splay of gold buttons offset by gold tasseled shoulder pads. His lips are painted red, his hat rises a-plume, his arms sit akimbo. Gilded, looking straight into the camera, Harris’s Toussaint is gorgeous, feminine, regal, and vulnerable. Harris references Toussaint here, but Toussaint through a spectacularized expressive genealogy of Black historical recovery. The most famous image in the “The Good Life” is not of the artist as Louverture and is not often attributed to Harris himself. It is “Venus,” a collaboration with Renee Cox as the model of nineteenth-century performer Sarah Baartman that often circulates as the self-portraiture of Cox alone. Both portraits are lush and confrontational. Louverture and Baartman: Are they equivalent or opposites in the realm of diaspora Black celebrity? Their genealogies as tragic heroes plot far differently even as both are remade, repeatedly, to negotiate new contemporary states of Black political life. Louverture, though, lands squarely on the hero side – his name gracing schools, buildings, parades, heroic modes of commemoration that engage with what Celeste Bernier and Gwendolyn Shaw have theorized through the trope of Black heroism and portraiture., Baartman is also close to the bone of vulnerability, her performative persona unequivocally a tragedy of racial representation even as Black feminist artists, writers, and scholars remake that legacy and its reception. As I have argued elsewhere, this version of grappling with Black celebrity eschews to the feminine, the embodied, the vulnerable, the 

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Celebrity Bodies

Figure . Lyle Ashton Harris, Toussaint L’Ouverture, from The Good Life series, ,  x -inch dye-diffusion Polaroids.



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always already sexual because always already public Black woman’s body. Black feminine and feminized celebrity is a mixed bag of recovery and lament, a delicate negotiation of the public forms that Black feminine bodies did and could take and their reception in their political afterlives, as they challenge dreams of agency and authorship amidst the complicated spectacle of their celebrity figuration in the US and abroad, historically and now. The work of Louverture is both similar and different, more obvious and more difficult to get at. He is the direct symbol of Black nationhood. He is the standing hero, captured and imprisoned by the French, who must be remade as Haiti is remade post-revolution, occupation, and globalization. He is also a celebrity made of myth, some self-made through archives of his letters and his autobiography, an appeal to Napoleon that is constantly renegotiated in the name of uncovering a more radical politics than its performances of statecraft immediately suggest. But whereas Baartman’s body is always the crucial terrain of representation and political negotiation, as in the Harris and Cox collaboration as part of “The Good Life,” Louverture’s body remains figured but unremarked. This chapter attempts to chart the presence of the celebrity body through Louverture’s repetitive appearance across North American literature in particular, to reimagine the Black political imagination through rather than against the crisis of what Erica Edwards terms “charisma,” or the fictions of heroic authorship, agency, and citizenship Louverture’s figured body often augurs. With Louverture’s repetitions, we get the “drama of history” ascribed to Toussaint’s story by C. L. R. James ( []) in the early twentieth century, encompassing the waves of reception of this towering, mythical figure in the Black diaspora imagination of “The New World,” particularly North America and the Caribbean. As Stuart Hall argued about Caribbean culture and identity, these convergences and repetitions can represent an impure hybridity as easily as a teleology of loss and return. () How has American literature told the story of Louverture as one of rise and fall? How else has he been staged, particularly through his body, as a way to understand the complexity of Black political subjectivity across different eras and aesthetics? Harris’s portrait provocatively asks what can Toussaint’s embodiment mean if it was claimed as both queer and as family – as intimate if not consistently revolutionary or radical? And what would the “drama of history” then mean beyond the representation and recovery of great mean or tragic narratives of Black political life? Toussaint Louverture, the formerly-enslaved hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day. He is the enslaved general who leads a revolution against French colonialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, creating the first free Black state. In this chapter, I trace the way 

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Celebrity Bodies

Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for what Michelle Stephens terms “Black Empire”, and, taken together as an oeuvre, as something altogether more vulnerable across American literary imagination. He “appears” or is referenced in texts as varied as Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (), C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins () and Toussaint L’Ouverture (), Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint ( []), and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls ( []), as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir. Louverture’s body can be read across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams” – a script that Robin Kelley himself challenges and a critique that comes to acute fruition regarding its legacy in African American literature in Erica Edwards’s theorization of “charisma” as a model and a limit for thinking about the Black masculine subject and Black politics. I argue that Louverture’s continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring “scenario” – a performance or scene that repeats – of Black political negotiation in key historical moments. Reading against the grain of the heroic romance of revolution, Louverture’s ever-present body across the literature of the Americas unsettles rather than fixes racial and gendered identification – rendering Black masculinity as a question instead of an answer in the American imagination. This involves the myths surrounding Louverture’s history and own expressive production of bodily metaphors in his autobiography and letters (Beard and Redpath , Girard ). His own memoir/manifesto/appeal itself was purportedly located intimately close to Louverture’s body, in varying reports that claim its secure place in a hat or handkerchief atop his head, as opposed to published or on a desk. His body is front and center, at stake, vulnerable, and so are its repetitions. Throughout this chapter, I will think through the particular genres of Louverture as a way to grapple with the figuration of Black masculine celebrity embodiment as material and metaphor for Black political thought and feeling. Louverture becomes a symbol of desire – for Black individual and collective autonomy, for the origin story of Black charismatic leadership, for a future of Black political sovereignty. He is also written on the cusp of failure and death, repeating in the genres we have come to know: Heroism, tragedy, romance, martyrdom, haunting, history, myth, biography. In this chapter I will consider Louverture’s body in these posthumous genres, the repetitions in its description and performance, as a way to look anew at the plot of Black political life. Louverture stands in the known plot of his rise and death, as well as the known trajectory of Haiti as the first Black state and its subsequent gutting as it became an imperially 

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occupied site. Harris gives us an opening that I will bring to the rest of this chapter: A self-portrait, a family portrait, a queer portrait to consider how Louverture’s body inhabits the Black political imagination through and against his celebrity figurations, through the heroic scenario’s repetition. This repetition happens through Louverture’s body’s form, its aesthetics, and its thick description in sometimes tense relationship to narrative, to the plot. In focusing on Louverture’s embodiment, I expand Edwards’s aforementioned work on singular Black male presence in fiction to include the materials and theories of Black cultural, performance, and visual studies, such as Richard Powell’s groundbreaking work on contemporary Black portraiture. A key writer on Harris’s work, Powell argues he “cuts a figure,” pierces the screen. Fellow art historians like Gwendolyn Shaw and Celeste Bernier have traced the history of Black portraiture, arguing for its significance in establishing the aesthetics and frame of Black heroism in the West. And work like Michelle Stephens’s Skin Acts rethinks the politics of objectification in relationship to the “screen” of Black masculine skin that follows the history and reception of figures like Paul Robeson, a surrogate Toussaint figure who, for a very short run, got to play the figure in the single staging of C. L. R. James’s Toussaint play ( []), and after years of pursuing the production of a biopic of the figure himself. Taken together, these critiques and alternate ways of imagining and understanding the heroic figuration of the Black male body in relationship to literary, cultural, and political plots help to map the meaning of Louverture’s repeated embodiment, acutely. What do fleshier embodiments of Toussaint Louverture give to the militaristic legacy of his particular celebrity, and Haiti’s as the first Black State? Sharon Marcus, staging a feminist conceptualization of celebrity, argues for the value of reception by defining the “drama of the audience” as a key factor in analysis. They also chart my own path through this chapter, and in line with my previous work, of thinking through celebrity embodiment as a way of engaging with the feminized and the vulnerable, the companion categories to what critic Nicole Fleetwood determines is the “venerated and denigrated” situatedness of the racial icon. Louverture’s embodiment in staged places and literary histories of the twentieth century engages in both the heroic scenario and the vulnerable directly in a single body and body of work. If scholar Amber Musser teases out working through psychoanalysis as paying attention to “one’s place in symbolic order” – family structures but also national, racial, and cultural structures – Louverture is the embodied figure that recurs in American literary imagination to think through the possibilities and pitfalls of the intimacies and affective currency of Black political life. He is the working out of Fanon’s “Look, a Negro” of history with a capital H, and hence his repetition signals the sight, site, and cite of historical material thinking across Black literary time. 

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Celebrity Bodies

Haiti, History, and the Symbolic Order of Celebrity Embodiment For years, the Haitian Revolution has been left out of official histories of the age of revolutions, a phenomenon that Michel-Rolph Trouillot infamously called “the silencing of the past.” This silencing, in Trouillot’s and other formulations, refuses to look squarely at the Enlightenment era’s reliance on enslaved and colonial labor and capitalism, eclipsing Haiti to create an order of things that elides Blackness. Of course, the era of the s and the US occupation of Haiti is yet another eruptive moment of Haiti’s history coming to the fore in a cycle of remembering, forgetting, and commemorating. Historians, playwrights, and artists such as Jacob Lawrence in his Toussaint series of the era (–) reinscribe Haiti into a story of Pan-African Black struggle, centering Louverture, and also Henri Christophe and JeanJacques Dessalines, in their alternate symbolic orders of Blackness, within Black Empire’s masculine family order. (Figure .) At stake in this section, as in the Harris portrait, are the ways that expressive culture scripts histories of Black political life through the repetition of the heroic scenario, and how that particular formulation through the body of Toussaint Louverture lends itself, perhaps ironically, to a feminized focus on the celebrity body. In this era of the s, Pan-Africanism, decolonial movements, nascent civil rights, and the global Harlem Renaissance make up the Black postReconstruction imagination, all hovering around psychoanalytic material analysis that unpacks the spectacle of nationalism that appends to the interwar period. Here C. L. R. James, the most influential author of Louverture, comes into view as a way of constellating the embodiment at the heart of charismatic leadership. I will begin here from transference – from the specter of Paul Robeson, and fantastic work done on his embodied political presence in the era, to Shana Redmond, Michelle Stephens, and Cedric Tolliver, as well as Madhu Dubey’s work on Fanon and the masculine state, and Neetu Khanna on the visceral logics of colonialism in the Cold War era. Together, these political histories orchestrate around the Black masculine body and subject as the form of Black History and Politics writ large. James indulges in the making of Louverture as a studied performance of charismatic leadership, explicitly – at once producing the heroic, charismatic scenario and emphasizing its inorganic nature: “Over and over again Toussaint read this passage: ‘A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he?’” (). Toussaint reads his way into heroism while making an, at first, “unobtrusive entrance into history” () in his account. James mythologizes the making of the man into a celebrity with his initial embodied description as well: “The man who so deliberately decided to join the revolution was  years of age, an advanced age for those times, grey already, and known to 

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Figure . Jacob Lawrence, General Toussaint L’Ouverture, from “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series, , screenprint. Collection of Harriet and Harmon Kelley.



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Celebrity Bodies

everyone as Old Toussaint” (–). Casting Louverture as the unlikeliest of heroes, at the same time James repeatedly describes him as an exceptional leader who “both in mind and body was far beyond the average slave. Slavery dulls the intellect and degrades the character of the slave. There was nothing of that dullness or degradation in Toussaint” (). James then posits the heroic scenario of Toussaint as exceptional by rhetorically pitting him against the body and the mind of “the average slave.” Throughout, there is a tension between the teleology of the Great Man of History that James underscores then undermines – at once performing the heroic scenario and undoing with long descriptions of Louverture’s physicality. James spends long paragraphs describing Louverture’s body and bodily capacity to introduce us to the figure. He waxes poetic on Louverture’s body in romantic passages about physical prowess in many instances: Besides his knowledge and experience, through natural strength of character he had acquired formidable mastery over himself, both mind and body: as a boy he was so frail and delicate that his parents hadn’t expected him to live, and he was nicknamed “Little Stick.” While still a child he determined to acquire not only knowledge but a strong body, and he strengthened himself by the severest exercises, so that by the time he was  he had surpassed all the boys of his age on the plantation in athletic feats. He could swim across a dangerous river, jump on a horse at full speed and do what he liked with it. When he was nearly  he was still the finest rider in San Domingo, habitually rode  miles a day, and sat his horse with such ease and grace that he was known as the centaur of the Savannahs. ()

This long shot of a life of athletic accomplishments sits next to less complimentary descriptions that nonetheless coalesce in the body of a leader. James’s acute physical description of Toussaint is often unflattering, sitting across the same page as the above: “He was very small, ugly and ill-shaped, but although his general expression was one of benevolence, he had eyes like steel and no one ever laughed in his presence” (). Toggling between predestined esteem and pull yourself up by the bootstraps self-making from an “orderly mind” (), James hones in on Louverture’s bodily capacity and “mastery” to tell the story of this larger than life political celebrity. Uncomfortably, his description of Louverture’s insistent “natural” physical capacities sits against James’s constant peppering-in of the figure’s exceptional nature among the enslaved themselves, mostly due, in James’ version, to Louverture’s physical and mental discipline. Louverture is made extraordinary, made heroic, through his body and against the stereotyped paradigm of enslaved body and mind. According to James’s characterization, Louverture’s mental and physical discipline also transferred, inspired, and formed the revolution itself. It is key that these longer passages of description come as the action of the revolution heats up: 

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The full allegorical weight, the transference of Louverture’s body, comportment, and organic nature to Haiti’s revolutionary national body, reaches fever pitch in these descriptions of his strengths and feats, with a constant tension between those qualities “born” in the body and those “mastered” by his mind. One can see this in brief commentary like, “Here is not only the born soldier but the born writer” (), or emphatic acute description such as, “He was as completely master of his body as of his mind. He slept but two hours every night, and for days would be satisfied with two bananas and a glass of water” (). Supernatural attendance to his own form balances against “reckless” masculine bravery in these formulations. His physicality is undergirded by Black women’s sustenance in one rare moment, only to underscore his own extraordinary body once again beyond care: Physically without fear, he had to guard against being poisoned, and in the various villages where he stayed he had old black women prepare for him callaloos, a kind of vegetable broth. He could trust these old women. They had no ambitions and were too proud of him to do him any harm. In the field he slept dressed, booted and spurred; in the towns he always kept near to his bed a pair of trousers. At all hours of the night couriers and officers found him ready to receive them with becoming dignity. ()

This staid dignity of bodily personhood with old women, food, fashion, and the domestic is posed as the dressing for a body ready to be agile, risky, improvisational. This unlikely meshing of his leadership skills with said physical heedlessness continues deep into the text, which at once emphasizes his “reckless physical bravery” and other “risks” with hyperbolic rehearsals of military feats (). Toussaint’s body is more than risk-prone here, but risk-seeking, as a measure of Black masculine leadership. His body’s ability to endure physical risk and challenge, for C. L. R. James, encapsulates the hope of a Black nation-state and, simultaneously, sets him apart from the body-politic he seeks to transform: Despite his awkwardness of build and ugliness of feature he managed in the end to make a strong impression upon all with whom he came in contact. He had in the last years an unusual distinction of carriage. His step was martial, his manner commanding. Simple in his private life, he wore 

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Celebrity Bodies resplendent uniforms on state occasions, and his aides-de-camp followed his example in elegance and display. He knew how to listen to a subordinate officer with dignity, public respect and affection while avoiding them with easy good nature. With all classes of people he found instinctually the right method. ()

It is Louverture’s body, and his imagined simultaneous discipline over it and refusal to cede to its human limits, that animates James’s “drama of history” (). As a character drawn at the center of James’s Black Haiti, Louverture is the star, and his body’s fate mirrors Haiti’s historical fate, as imagined in the first half of the twentieth century by James, a Marxist Pan-Africanist: “His jailers, still on Bonaparte’s advice, watched him eat his food, watched him perform his natural functions . . . . He had medical attendance at first, but his jailer soon dispensed with it. ‘The construction of Negroes being totally different to that of Europeans, I have dispensed with his doctor and his surgeon who would be useless to him.’” (). Louverture, a charismatic leader who embodies the spirit of revolution, is here, near death, overinterpreted by racist medical scripts of somatic difference. This biological racism literally takes its toll on Louverture’s narrated body. James envisions a dying, jailed Toussaint, “Shivering with cold . . . His iron frame, which had withstood the privations and fatigues of ten incredible years, now huddled before the logs measured out by the orders of Bonaparte . . . . His hitherto unsleeping intellect collapsed periodically into long hours of coma” (). Stripped of bodily autonomy and the private care of Black women in his own home and across the country in his military campaign, James narrates Louverture as stripped, starved, exhausted, meted out of existence by a dearth of warmth and attention – the attention a hero deserves. The grim conclusion to this embodied drama does more than haunt the frame of history; in James’s hand, Louverture’s body frames the heroic scenario of Black history. James’s “Toussaint” (always referred to by the intimacy of his first name) defies corporal, material limits to organize the masses – he is at once an example and exception, in true celebrity construction. James’s Louverture emphasizes discipline over the vulnerable body as a way to move forward in material Black politics and the Black political imagination. While James would also write a play on Louverture – one initially thought of as a poor precursor to the Black Jacobins, prose history, and now recorded in its limited run with the luminous star and Louvertureobsessed Paul Robeson – it is this prose drama for which his “Toussaint” is remembered. Here James asserts Louverture’s heroic plot plainly as history, equivalent. Claiming such significance in and through the Black masculine body, making myth around Louverture’s physicality, James remakes historical record and Black political imagination in his text through the imagined 

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Figure . Edward Steichen, Paul Robeson as the Emperor Jones, , photograph, John Springer Collection

materiality of Louverture’s body (Figure .). As this chapter moves to the spectacle of Louverture’s body on stage, it keeps in mind the tender balance of discipline/mastery and vulnerability that James foregrounds between Louverture and the enslaved masses, as well as between Louverture’s heroic body and the colonial forces that break its will. 

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Celebrity Bodies

Commemoration in the Age of Decolonialization: Performing Celebrity between Black Life and Death Just before James was writing his drama and history of Louverture, Left circles in the US were objecting to the military occupation of Haiti by the US (–). Eugene O’Neill responds to this and ongoing Jim Crow and civil rights issues in the US through his  play “Emperor Jones,” eventually to star Paul Robeson in the mid-s and in the film version in . “Emperor Jones,” about a fleeing African American porter who is then installed as Emperor of Haiti, is widely spoken about as both hailing Robeson as a star due to his deep interest in starring in a biopic about Louverture, and as being “based” on Dessalines. Langston Hughes’s The Emperor of Haiti (), written in the wake of his  trip to the island nation, is also said to center on Dessalines. Together, and with James’s  single-run play that was overshadowed by the prose history, these texts form a theatrical genealogy, an aura around Haiti that seems to cast Robeson in the generic likeness of hero of the revolution even before the  production of Toussaint Louverture with Robeson as its brief star. Haiti, contemporary and past, was on the Black political brain – in the left US, and in the PanAfrican and particularly Caribbean community, during this era of diasporic upheaval and artistic community that preceded and inspired decolonization and civil rights. The dramatic conflict of the Haitian Revolution, replete with the backdrop of colonialism in an era of imperialism and segregation, served as a catalyst, an inspiration, and an allegory for Western race relations in embodied form. This in an era where the recovery of the “primitive” cultures of non-Western peoples vied with and showed up in the proto-modernist left theater, the genre du jour of the major cosmopolitan metropoles, and a place where “literature” mingled with cinema to bring the former political and cultural cache. As Shane Vogel writes of the Calypso craze of the midtwentieth century, the performances of kitschy island life, even when done for serious high art and political plays, afforded chances for disturbing white primitivist gaze on half naked Black male and female skin, as well as knowing undoings and reversals on the part of Black performers, artists, and writers eager to work and to engage underrepresented histories of Black life. The choice of drama as the genre of Haitian post-coloniality gets at the thorny role of embodiment – its spectacle, its skin, its materiality – in imagining Black political life. As David Scott famously writes of pivoting from romance to tragedy as the genre in which to understand, to fully reckon with, and represent postcolonial history, this era keeps insisting that, as Rachel Douglas succinctly puts it, “Toussaint takes center stage” in 

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James’s “drama of history.” The genre casts a long shadow, as well, in the American imagination. As the allegory of Haiti gave way to commemoration, in  Glissant wrote Monsieur Toussaint, a play to be eventually performed at the prison where Toussaint died on the th anniversary of his death in . In , Aimé Céśaire wrote his own historical treatise on the Haitian Revolution, which he followed with a play, The Tragedy of King Christophe, in . Here I will dwell on Glissant’s text, as it begins where Louverture’s body ends for James’s Black Jacobins – dying in prison. Graphically, Glissant describes Toussaint’s body from the view of his captor’s henchman, Manuel: LANGLES: Is he properly cooked, the old fellow? MANUEL: His skin is cracked and oozes pus, he has the smell of old manure in September. Ah! It is a famous general! Seated in his armchair reviewing his troops. (to Toussaint): A less than warm February. Not so, Domingue? () This attention to Toussaint’s broken skin and body at the very opening of the play sets Glissant’s tenor far away from a story of triumph and instead as one framed by vulnerability. If, as Michelle Stephens so provocatively suggests in Skin Acts, we might think of the performative legacy of a figure such as Paul Robeson as affording a different look at Black masculinity through rather than against its object status, Glissant’s framing of a post-Robeson Toussaint through broken, oozing skin in the mid-twentieth century Americas, rendered live in , reframes Louverture through his celebrity body. Here is the “famous general,” repeated from and through fetish object into a visibly battered and broken version of Black historical and political imagination. One answer is to return to C. L. R. James’s scene of death, the moment where he pronounces that there is “no drama like the drama of history” but eschews the dying and dead body in favor of the legacy of his thick description of Toussaint’s living one. Glissant’s Louverture is less specter than the material remnant, aging, of charismatic Black history, surveying the costs, the intimacies, of enduring in the literary and political imagination in the midst of the realities of decolonial and Civil Rights Movements. Glissant’s Louverture is contemplative, speaking with local spiritual leaders and his wife – a few representative women – in reflection. This is counter not just to the masculine history outlined in previous iterations of Louverture’s celebrity, but to his own words, written in the confines of the prison wherein the action of Glissant’s play takes place. That document, much translated and with very different versions recovered, mentions Louverture’s family in stark and infrequent moments, without introducing intimacy or sentiment. 

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Celebrity Bodies

Glissant’s embodied Toussaint, on the brink of material death, calls not for his son or Napoleon, but instead reflects on his aging body to his wife’s mournful pleas about her ailing heart: “TOUSSAINT: With my cracked lips and my stiffened body I know it. You have counted my hairs, you have seen how they are gray. Leave me alone, leave me.”() This is not Louverture as master strategist and master of his body that we see, with tragic flaws, in James’s rendition. This is “Toussaint” unbound, not wanting to be seen as an undisciplined body. But Glissant dares to look, to stage, and in fact imagine the audience surrogate to be a transformed Manuel, colonial henchmen, altered by the encounter with Louverture’s vulnerability rather than his greatness or charisma: MANUEL (  ): Get back! What are you doing to him; Sorcerers, werewolves, whales, whales! Leave him alone! Is the cold not enough! His gums are blue and his lips drained of color . . . (as he exits): Commander! Commander! TOUSSAINT: Mackandal? . . . It is hot . . . I am burning . . . The snow from the pyre, all the heat from the depths of their winter! () Glissant imagines a history, a celebrity, a Toussaint, all the more salient as he is deplumed (counter to Lawrence’s portrait, and much later to Harris’s response to the Lawrence portrait) from the play’s start, where: “The play is set in Saint-Domingue and at the same time in a cell at the Fort de Joux where Toussaint is being held prisoner. He wears the uniform of a general of the Republic, a scarf knotted around his head, a plumed hat resting on his knees” (). Toussaint is in the uniform of his death, rather than the brief period of his power. As the play continues, he is methodically stripped of these vestiges of performative, colonial, militaristic power. In a late and brief scene, he is materially stripped of clothing over the course of the stage directions: “(Caffarelli enters the cell with two soldiers who are carrying clothes. He addresses Toussaint without approaching him.);” “(On his orders the soldiers remove Toussaint’s sash and uniform, they dress him in a peasant’s overalls.)”; “(The soldiers remove Toussaint’s boots and put clogs on his feet.)”; “(The soldiers take Toussaint’s hat from the table, break the plume in two, and tear off the cockade.)”; “(Toussaint turns around, goes to the back of the stage, takes the hat and dangles it from his hands.)” (–). Hanging between life and death, Glissant imagines the materiality of Louverture’s body and stages it as its own prison of the Black political imagination that holds it captive in a moment of “triumph”: “Each time the action takes place in Saint-Domingue and requires A ROOM, but it is understood that he never escapes from this ultimate prison, as he relives his 

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triumphant past. There is no clearly defined tier between the world of the prison in France and the lands of the Caribbean island” (). Glissant’s Louverture attempts to renegotiate the charismatic Black male political celebrity through Toussaint’s proximity to vulnerability, not away from it. Writing just as “Toussaint” becomes a namecheck in the afterlives of the Black arts movement, turned into one of a host of heroes recited in Walcott’s own dramatic Haitian Trilogy or by an imagined young diaspora rapper in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground () at the turn of the twentieth century, or in the latest iterations as a children’s book hero, Jaden Toussaint, or the name of the late King of Wakanda’s son in the second Black Panther film (), this play turns the audience back to Louverture as a fragile question of the heroic scenario rather than a destiny or destination for Black political order. The Black Queer Feminist Uses of Celebrity Glissant’s Cold War-era, decolonial recreation of Louverture is a fragile drama of masculine history, one that tentatively imagines relations to femininity and the Black feminist political imagination even as it stages political transformation as a scene between and amongst men. Women are symbols, secondary cast and catalysts to masculine citizenship and subject formation, to “the drama of history.” But in , in the wake of civil rights and decolonization and in the midst of Black arts and Black nationalist movements in the US, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls once again presents us with the celebrity body of “Toussaint,” this time invoked by a speaker recounting her youth in St. Louis. In Shange’s version, the embodied encounter with Toussaint is through History with a capital H, as the young girl goes to the “ADULT READING ROOM” and “carried dead Toussaint home in the book he held the citadel against the french wid the spirits of ol dead africans from outta the ground TOUSSAINT led they army of zombies” (). Rendered in the cadence of Black girlhood, Louverture’s “History” becomes fantastical, directly countering “ was not a good year for black girls” (), a different army, different vulnerable bodies to racist violence imagined, beyond men and beyond the strategies of statecraft. In Shange’s hands, Louverture represents beauty, desire, “strategy,” love, the familiar, and the spectacular in one, as “TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE became my secret lover at the age of  I entertained him in my bedroom widda flashlight under my covers” (). The illicitness of the ADULT READING ROOM merges with the fetish object of post-Robeson TOUSSAINT to openly if uncomfortably acknowledge the erotics of Black history. These erotics are not without complication and risk, as the little girl 

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Celebrity Bodies

encounters a stranger who says his name is Toussaint Jones, and she reckons with his everyday equivalence to the “Toussaint” of History as he is “eating an apple,” material, tempting, and mundane, in front of her (and as the specter of a Black girl, alone, at the river, encountering a strange man, hovers across the page). Precocious, risky, material – “TOUSSAINT” in Black feminist hands becomes “History” in new and surprising ways that do not escape the materiality of everyday life or the vagaries of personal and political desire. Shange’s staged monologue is a romp with Toussaint, funny and celebratory, and leveling all at the same time. Shange’s answer to what can celebrity culture do with, in, and through the literary and performative history of the Americas is made strange and familiar simultaneously, through the engagement of a story of Black girlhood that does not rely on innocence but does not end in tragedy, and through a dynamic encounter with reading. This dynamism reflects the drama of audience that Sharon Marcus posits as a way to encompass feminine fandom and feminized desire and consumption of celebrity formation and reception, and suggests that the drama of history – here Black historical consciousness and political history – is bound up with celebrity bodies. Rather than lament that boundedness, Shange suggests that this dynamic interdependence resides in and through the body of the reader, her experiences, desires, and present, in a way that the literary – the interpretive act of writing and reading – foregrounds. She imagines feeling Louverture and feeling history, not righteously, but queerly, twisted, askew, adapted. Shange’s combinations of Louverture’s flesh – alive and ghostly, familiar and extraordinary – mirror Harris’s “cutting figure” in a series that mixes spectacular Black icons and family portraits. Toussaint’s throne repeats in the series, asking: Who and how do we venerate? Through style, aesthetics, lush and thick repetitions with a difference, we come to know the value(s) of Toussaint – the malleability of being an embodied celebrity of Black political life. Toussaint in Harris and Shange’s hands exemplifies the queer Black feminist potential of Black celebrity – the ability to inhabit objectness and surface in order to stage attachment, vulnerability, desire beyond the impossibility of the promises of freedom, democracy, equality. I do not want to reclaim that impossibility by re-inserting Toussaint into his “rightful” place in the Black heroic scenario, but to think about what is excessive, fragile, undisciplined about his repetition and emergences inclusive of but also beyond this order. I also do not want to posit these feminist/queer repetitions-with-a-difference of Louverture as radical or revolutionary, but instead as spectacular, suspect, like celebrity itself. As in, politically compromised. As in, embodied rather than or in addition to the extractable heroism of the plot of the Haiti. 

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Louverture becomes part of the family of American and Caribbean literary imagination, his body and rendering repeated across family portraits of America, of Haiti, of Black revolution, of Black political possibility. He is “a cutting figure,” piercing the punctum of history and its reliance on certain figurations of the Black masculine body and subject and citizen that refuse flesh, that insist on a teleology that mirrors the heroic body we already know. This limited American literary history of Louverture offers, then, a different vision of the uses of the Black masculine celebrity body in the heroic scenario. In doing so, the celebrity body of Louverture replots ways of understanding and interpreting, not just rendering, Black histories, across time, geography, and political formations – across difference.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 LISA WOOLFORK

Embodied Black Aliveness

HBO’s Lovecraft Country is a television series that seamlessly combines Black history and horror. Set in Chicago in the summer of , the story is based upon Matt Ruff’s  dark fantasy novel of the same name and crafted for the screen by two Black women artists – showrunner Misha Green, who directed the acclaimed historical television drama Underground, and Shannon Houston, who helmed the team of writers. HBO’s version centers on the Freemans, a Black family tormented by white supremacist legacies of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft as well as by the legal and extralegal violence of Jim Crow America. Atticus Freeman leads a group of family and friends on a quest to find his missing father, Montrose Freeman. This journey takes them through dangerous territory, including sundown towns with murderous white sheriffs, houses haunted by past and ongoing racist violence, and remote woods stocked with menacing multieyed/tentacled Lovecraftian monsters. Lovecraft Country is unique in the arsenal of HBO programming for the ways in which it radically prioritizes and affirms what scholar Kevin Quashie would call “black aliveness.” Even in the midst of the quotidian anti-Black terrorism that circumscribed Black life in Jim Crow America, the show features particular episodes and scenes that relish in the celebratory brilliance that is Black joy and significantly engage powerful lines of thought in Black studies such as Afro-nostalgia, which Badia Ahad-Legardy observes, “functions as a form of memory work in the service of creating a public affective archive not generally assigned to black subjects.” Lovecraft Country is speculative historical fiction that invites an emotional connection (fear or delight) that is especially resonant with Black audiences. Misha Green, when asked what she would like Black viewers to take away from the series, offered: “I want them to take away that you can be joyful, even in the parts that are hard. I think that was important to see and understand. Yes, it can be hard and it’s an uphill battle, but that battle can be won if we stick together and we can continue to reclaim our legacy, and what we were 

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given and born with.” Green suggests that the series itself is a site for historical reflection that allows Black viewers to see the difficulties of Black life under these arduous conditions while also holding out the possibility of overcoming those challenges as a community. An examination of embodiment and the attention given to the representation of Black bodies is central to a critical reading of Lovecraft Country. As one might expect from a horror story with bloodthirsty monsters (both the human variety and those of Lovecraftian invention), the body is an abundant site of viscerally depicted physical violence (both spectral and systemic) – ritual evisceration, racist medical experimentation, explosively bloody body swaps, slow exsanguination, as well as Black bodies destroyed under conditions of war, and beaten and burned by white racist violence. And yet the Black body is depicted as more than a repository for abuse, torture, and murder. The series uses the means of embodiment, speculative fiction, and elements of Black feminist Afrofuturism as a fulcrum to shift the critical weight away from the grim reality of oppression and towards the possibility of escape and liberation. In particular, the journey of Hippolyta Freeman in episode , “I Am,” is an example of a revolutionary representation of the Black body. Hippolyta’s body is a conduit for self-discovery, a tool for circumventing anti-Blackness, and ultimately a vehicle for affirming a broader spectrum of Black aliveness that begins in the realm of speculative fiction but reverberates far beyond. Hippolyta’s interdimensional travels in this episode harness the energy of a spectacular and embodied Black aliveness that indexes the study of the body and flesh while also offering a therapeutic vantage from which to watch a middle-aged Black housewife unlock the secrets to the universe of Black freedom dreams. HBO’s Lovecraft Country is what Grant Farred () might call a “vernacular intellectual” formation; a form of public pedagogy that operates without/beyond academic credentialing. The series crafts speculative representations that allow for consideration of the robust scholarly discourses about embodiment. It is important to recognize Lovecraft Country’s useful detour into Black studies, while simultaneously noting that the series is always-already an extension of the scholarly cross-currents long active in the field of Black philosophy, literary, and cultural studies. Lovecraft Country Radio, the official podcast for the series, is hosted by show writer Shannon Houston and Black cultural critic Ashley C. Ford. The podcast regularly included citations for further reading. In addition, the Langston League, “a multi-consultant curriculum firm that specializes in designing culturally relevant instructional material . . . for multigenerational students,” crafted a detailed syllabus for each episode that included music, poetry, prose, and historical documentation to elucidate embedded 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Embodied Black Aliveness

references. The official podcast, along with the Langston League syllabi and commentaries such as the Safe Negro Podcast, form part of a broad paratextual landscape for the series. The strength of Lovecraft Country in general lies in the ways that it reclaims the pleasures of nostalgia while also inviting a recalibration of the disposition that only trauma lies in the Black past. In this way, the series is consonant with the claims scholar Badia Ahad-Legardy makes in her study of Afro-nostalgia: The art of black nostalgia conjures black historical moments as forms of restorative self-continuity in which the pain of the past gets imagined and subsequently reenacted and grappled with in the present through creative acts of pleasure-making. These artistic forms of black memory-making perform a therapeutic function for contemporary black subjects seeking to reconcile traumatic black history and its afterlife.

The structure and design of Lovecraft Country offer a broad invitation to its audience and one of unique value to Black viewers. The series premises its work on what might be described as a commitment to the mutually constitutive concepts of Black care and Black study which it both depicts and activates. The show as a whole emphasizes the “restorative self-continuity” and its “therapeutic function” as a care practice and philosophy. Representations of the past are folded in upon themselves as twenty-first century viewers are guided through the summer of  to other moments of recent or distant past racist harm. For each point of anti-Black violence, there are steps taken to reclaim, remember, and restore those who have been abused (episode  “Holy Ghost” and episode  “Rewind ” are compelling examples of this). Hippolyta’s travels enact the “therapeutic function” through her journeys to the past. If we consider self-care as articulated by Audre Lorde, Hippolyta’s journey emphasizes her long-deferred inward focus and prioritization, perhaps all the more radical for the time and place. The simultaneous practices of care (which attend to the body/soul) and study (which theorizes about the flesh) rise together under the mantle of Black aliveness as a praxis that can hold both joy and trauma. Afrofuturist Elements The seventh episode (“I Am”) in the ten-episode series focuses on Hippolyta Freeman, the aunt of the protagonist Atticus Freeman and widow of George Freeman. The Freeman family operates the Safe Negro Travel Guide, a periodically published guidebook for Black motorists (based on the reallife Green Book). Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis) is a stay-at-home mom and a 

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co-operator of the Travel Guide. She is intellectually curious and gifted in the field of astronomy, though that pursuit was hampered by racism. She rightly suspects that there is more to her husband’s death than Atticus (Jonathan Majors) has shared with her. Upon discovering a set of geographic coordinates inside an orrery (a D map of space) that she uses her skills to unlock, Hippolyta retrieves maps and other travel gear to embark on a solo trip to the destination. The coordinates lead her to an abandoned observatory that houses a large contraption, which turns out to be a multiverse machine. The building is protected by police partnered with the white supremacist sorcerer coven that has targeted the Freeman family. Hippolyta turns on the machine using the same math and science skills that she used to unlock the orrery. As she begins to operate the machine, she is attacked by police. Atticus rushes in and a group fight ensues. In the struggle, a stray bullet hits the machine opening a series of cosmic portals. Hippolyta, standing stunned by the chaos and the flashing vistas, is eventually pulled through the wall and into one of the flashing cosmic dimensions. In the next scene, two large robotic sentinels approach the screen as it fades to black, indicating Hippolyta’s loss of consciousness. The “I Am” episode is fittingly described as “Afrofuturist.” The definition offered by Nettrice R. Gaskins in her essay “Afrofuturism on Web .: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space” explains why. She notes that “Afrofuturism navigates past, present, and future simultaneously. Afrofuturism is counter-hegemonic and not concerned with representing the mainstream or the canon of Western art. Afrofuturism advocates for the revision of accepted, long-standing views, theories, historical events, and movements.” Similarly, Kodwo Eshun explains: Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro-diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. The manufacture, migration, and mutation of concepts and approaches within the fields of the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic, the visual and the architectural exemplifies the expanded field of Afrofuturism considered as a multimedia project distributed across the nodes, hubs, rings, and stars of the Black Atlantic.

It is clear that the “I Am” episode aligns with these descriptions of Afrofuturism. In the same way that the present-day  environs of Lovecraft Country tap into the liberatory properties of Afro-nostalgia by reimagining the past beyond its oppressive history, so too do the Afrofuturist elements of “I Am.” The episode features a multiverse machine that 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Embodied Black Aliveness

instantiates time travel; the tall, beautiful, Afroed space guide (who Hippolyta first sees as a guard); and the sleek austerity of the low-gravity spaceship. A voiceover by Sun Ra, the progenitor of Afrofuturism who invented his own cosmology and the experimental musicianship of free jazz, provides context and authority for the interpretation of the episode as one that looks to the stars to create a framework for Black liberation. In addition to raising Afrofuturism as a lens through which to envision Black freedom, the episode also engages with long-standing critical conversations about the meanings of the Black body and flesh. Enfleshment and Embodiment Beyond the aforementioned ways that the series engages Afrofuturism as a genre (in music and literature) and a modality (i.e., Black self-fashioning), Hippolyta’s body also indexes future freedom dreams in this episode . Discourses surrounding the body and the flesh as vital categories of analysis have been posited by Black studies scholars for decades. This episode of Lovecraft Country offers a space to see elements of those theories operate through a televised speculative narrative. Scholar Hortense Spillers’s groundbreaking  essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar” is foundational for Black studies, in part, for the distinction it draws between the body and flesh, which she defines as “the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions”. Spillers coined the term “pornotroping” to describe the process of reducing a person or group of people to mere flesh, stripped of personhood and made into the object of violent and sexual impulses. Alexander Weheliye’s book Habeas Viscus (“you shall have the flesh”) builds upon and engages with Hortense Spillers as well as the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter. These scholars have significantly shaped “the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity” through their analysis of the body, flesh, and the capacity for what people from philosophers (Kant) to politicians (Moynihan’s report) are able to perceive as Man. Hippolyta Freeman’s journey is a meditation on the flesh-body/captive-liberated distinction. Lovecraft Country sets the stage for a rich discussion of enfleshment and embodiment. The series’ commitment to the speculative horror genre animates the explicit ways that flesh and bodies are represented. The series provides a model for ways in which the flesh acts as a site for practicing liberation beyond the human. As indicated previously, in nearly every episode there are depictions of wounded bodies and mutilated flesh. A brief examination of Lovecraft Country’s technical representation of enfleshment 

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helps elucidate the degree to which the show relishes in the visual grotesquery of fleshy mutilation. As a work of speculative horror, part of the pleasure of the series is generated by spectatorship of shocking violence intended to yield a terrified response. By “pleasure” here I mean the complex yet ultimately positive emotional charge of spectatorship that is the result of the “play” inherent from the outset of production. Misha Green talks about the creation of Lovecraftian monsters and her own feelings of liberation in the process: “[You] go into the post-production and you’re designing monsters. I just didn’t know. You can’t even know that there’s a playground like this to play in until you’re in it. Just being able to play on this level, nothing could have prepared me for that. It was just fun and exciting. Basically, anything you can imagine, you can make happen.” Green relished the creativity and budget to use artistic special effects to give the fictional violence a semblance of flesh-crawling reality. The show’s commitment to enfleshment is revealed in the careful study it undertakes to create the visual markers for bodily transformation. In an episode (“Strange Case”) where one character emerges from the body of another, the skin-shedding scenes were vivid and gruesome. Visual effects supervisor Pietro Ponti notes that producing the verisimilitude of bodily metamorphosis required that “these skin pieces . . . be quite meaty, to be more than just the skin.” Ponti notes that Misha Green suggested that his team use the film The Fly as a reference for the transformation: “She loved the quality of that kind of chard, bumpy, disgusting skin. For Misha, as long as it looked realistic, for her, it was more about the timing of the reveal of what was underneath.” It is significant to note that a creative team was tasked to produce torn flesh realistically. Though the plot point was not about the torturous conditions of enslavement, the goal of the effect was to create what Hortense Spillers might call “ripped-apart” flesh, to develop “the look and feel of the tearing, peeling and falling skin pieces and blood.” This elaborate emphasis on the flesh positions Lovecraft Country as a series that engages scholarly questions about the body vital to Black studies. Alexander Weheliye’s question finds purchase in Lovecraft Country: “How might we go about thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to usher in different genres of human and how might we accomplish this task through the critical project of black studies?” Similarly, scholar Ashon Crawley notes, “To privilege the flesh is to consider the otherwise possibility of relationality as not grounded in our capacity to endure suffering. There is something that exceeds the totalizing force of seemingly ceaseless violence, some excessive force that was already in us, in us as flesh, that refuses to be suppressed.” In the same way that Black studies expand the critical and 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Embodied Black Aliveness

social thought about what it means to be human, Lovecraft Country illustrates new principles for being that exceed the deliberately cruel boundaries of Western Man. Hippolyta’s life has been predetermined by white supremacy since childhood with additional restrictions of patriarchy tacked on as a middle-aged Black wife/widow and mother. These life roles were intended to set boundaries around the possibility of her humanity and its enfleshment. Hippolyta’s involuntary yet ultimately revolutionary journey is novel in television history for the ways in which it affirms that “excessive force” of Black being as one of cosmic wholeness beyond the limits of quotidian violence. The “I Am” episode points to the otherwise possibility of the flesh and in so doing gestures towards Afrofuturism and an alternative sense of time as conduits for liberation. This is consonant with the following observation by Ashon Crawley: To have and be flesh, to be disallowed the chance to be exalted into the station of “Man,” to the zone of the citizen, to leave the vestibule . . . The episode dramatizes the vestibular gash that Spillers and others have theorized keeps Blackness ancillary to (rather than included in) the category of Western Man. The gash both a literal result of violence and representative of the divide between flesh/body, captive/liberated, vestibularity/aliveness. The flesh in this case is that of Hippolyta Freeman, a middleaged Black woman, widow, and mother with constantly thwarted dreams and ambitions. In particular, the spaceship is the site of new possibilities by articulating what Kevin Quashie describes as the poetics of Black aliveness. The Body Transcendent Hippolyta’s voyage through the multiverse is made possible by a transformative experience anchored in a radical re/articulation of herself. Guided by a Black celestial being that exceeds the boundaries of Western Man, Hippolyta learns to name herself and extend a more complete vision of aliveness. She is pulled by the observatory’s metaverse machine through alternate worlds to a location the script calls “Planet Earth .” The interior setting is described as “white room – timeless.” It is here that Hippolyta regains consciousness after being sedated by the two cybernetic sentinels she encounters upon arriving at Planet Earth . The script for the episode describes the scene this way: Hippolyta’s eyes flutter open. She’s NUDE. GROGGY. Slowly, she raises herself up. Bright LED light panels line the walls. She’s on a FLOATING platform. A JUMPSUIT laid out beside her looks like Ripley’s flight suit from ALIENS (). 

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           She quickly pulls it on. Notices something at the site of her radial artery – a piece of GLASS embedded into her skin! She taps it – small GLITTERY, GLOWING THINGS float around beneath it. A CHUNK of her skin was removed for whatever the hell these things are, and – it’s on BOTH WRISTS! She JUMPS down from the floating platform. RUNS around the room. Looking for a door, an escape, anything —

Hippolyta’s body in this scene is situated in a liminal location. She does not know where she is but she knows she is not on her Earth. This room without time reflects the concept of vestibularity theorized by Spillers and Weheliye. The vestibular here operates as a site of radical potential for Black being. The cosmic vestibule is an ancillary space that positions Hippolyta outside the boundary of Westernized man. Rather than being a site of marginalization and pornotroping, this episode of Lovecraft Country offers instead a vision for Black aliveness far past contemporary human knowledge and experience, one that bends time and space to the will of a Black woman. The scene opens with attention focused on Hippolyta’s face then panning to her nude body. She has been lying on her back, her head elevated on the steel table’s metal headrest. This prop suggests that her body has been positioned in a way to keep her spine in alignment, allowing her body to rest in a neutral position without stressing her vertebrae. This is important to consider in so far as Hippolyta has had devices implanted in her wrists, but the alien species seem uninterested in harming her. The focus on Hippolyta’s nude body and the mutilation/enhancement of her flesh open a space to examine the degree to which her body in this speculative future will be the conduit for a more expansive practice of Black aliveness. This setting contains another subtle but important prop to foreshadow Hippolyta’s futurist journey. The one-piece flight suit – a loosely fitting garment combining a jacket and trousers that the script attributes to Ripley, the protagonist of the  film Aliens – is a significant wardrobe choice. Hippolyta has, up to now, conformed to society’s and her family’s expectations. For instance, she regularly complied with her deceased husband’s prohibitions against her traveling alone. Hippolyta’s compliance is readily seen in her wardrobe. Throughout the series, we see young unmarried female characters wearing pants, trousers, or shorts. As a married woman, however, Hippolyta is always seen wearing dresses or skirts. This reflects her adherence to a contemporary societal standard assigned to proper married women. Previously, Hippolyta’s dress code was gendered by cultural norms that dictated the terms of respectability for middle-aged married women. In this new liminal space, however, her garb is utilitarian. 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Embodied Black Aliveness

When Hippolyta dons this flight suit, she crosses a gender barrier of her former life. This functional garment represents labor in the same way that Hippolyta’s aprons do. Unlike an apron, these one-piece jumpsuits are not uniforms for domestic labor. Also known as “boiler suits,” these garments are worn by those repairing heavy machinery like a boiler or furnace. Taken together, Hippolyta’s nudity and subsequent addition of the flight suit represent a new sort of uniform: One more suited for self-discovery, expanding consciousness, and bending space-time in a newfound understanding of “dismantling the master(s) clock(work universe).” Moving Beyond Time To this point, Afrofuturism has animated Hippolyta’s transformative journey. Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) offers additional interpretive lenses for the events of the episode. BQF situates the Black body beyond the pornotroping and other anti-Black violence used to prevent an ascendency into the category of Western Man. Its practitioners recognize that “the black body is the first technology in which man gathered and traveled from far and wide to finance to torture and control” while also recasting liberatory visions beyond current limitations. An example of the ways in which BQF promotes liberatory thinking is in its theories of time. Many Black studies scholars are familiar with Audre Lorde’s remark that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” BQF authors acknowledge the weaponization of time as a tool used against the captive Black body. Paraphrasing the work of Mark M. Smith in Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, Rasheedah Phillips notes “white southern slave masters adapted a mechanical clock time and corresponding linear time construct as the dominant temporal consciousness over that of nature-based timekeeping methods . . . [This] transition impacted the social order and reinforced values of discipline, economic gain, efficiency, and modernity.”22 BQF creatives acknowledge the coercive quality of master’s time and rather than simply dismantle it, they also reject its authority. Hippolyta’s vestibule is managed by a statuesque Black female otherworldly being. In the episode’s credits, this figure is listed as Seraphina AKA Beyond C’est, however when Hippolyta demands that she identify herself, she does not reply with either name attributed to her in the show’s documentation. Instead, she offers “I am.” This is an instantiation of BQF, to invest in self-naming is to tap into the African cosmological practice of “nommo,” a path to self-determination through self-articulation. This Black Quantum Futurist character exists on a plane beyond the reach of the episode, which is rooted in chronological mastered time. In the same way 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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that Black Quantum Futurists reject the “oppressive linear [time] constructs,” they also believe in an alternate vision of time, such as that at work in the series. It is consonant with this practice that this character would have three names but not be referred to by any of them. There seems to be a claim that it matters little what one is called or named by others: The full expression of aliveness is activated here by what one calls oneself. Initially perceived by Hippolyta to be her captor, the woman will be revealed as a guide that ushers Hippolyta into the limitless possibility of Black aliveness. A draft of the script describes Seraphina AKA Beyond C’est’s arrival in the timeless room as follows: An  FOOT TALL being in a TIGHT BLACK BODYSUIT, HELMET, and black COMBAT BOOTS enters. It slowly removes the helmet, REVEALING – a gigantic AEVIN DUGAS-sized Afro. Hippolyta can’t even see the being’s eyes covered by the hair. It pushes some of it out of the way, REVEALING – a woman. A very tall, very captivating WOMAN (BEYOND C’EST).

Seraphina/Beyond C’est/I Am is a figure with attributes linked to spiritual/ spectral expression and Black liberatory art. Seraphina describes a celestial being: An angel in some Christian traditions but also with significant meaning in Tarot. Tatiana King, a co-host of the Safe Negro Podcast Show, a limited series audio program focused on Lovecraft Country, notes that Seraphina is “actually considered a divine messenger.” King continues, “the angel Seraphina is known to guide you through your life, guide you through any challenges that will stimulate forthright discussion and that learning that the truth is very cleansing. The angel Seraphina is supposed to help you learn about your own feelings and your priorities on a deeper level and allows you to share with others in a deeply honest way.” King’s analysis suggests that Hippolyta is not being imprisoned in the vestibule, that site that keeps the captive Black body as ancillary to the category of Man. This vestibule is transitory, not purgatory. Hippolyta will be ushered through it toward a more expansive Black aliveness. The liberation available to Hippolyta will not be realized, however, until she is able to imagine a counter-possibility to her current worldview. She must be able to see beyond what is. This is why Beyond C’est (a homophone of “Beyoncé”) is a moniker that invokes an alternative vision of space-time. Casey Brown (a) explains, “C’est is ce (C’) combined with est (“is” form of the verb être). It translates to it is, this is . . .” This suggests that Beyond C’est is meant to represent an alternative approach to space and time. Like the work of BQF, the theory and praxis exists beyond chronological or linear understanding. To be “beyond what is” requires that one 

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Embodied Black Aliveness

become oblivious to the master’s tools and the master’s clock. While Hippolyta struggles to free herself from the vestibule, Seraphina/Beyond C’est/I am explains that Hippolyta is not a captive. In order to go through the vestibule, she must claim her full and complete self: HIPPOLYTA : Where am I? What are these things in my arms? You can’t keep me here. SERAPHINA /BEYOND C’EST /I AM : You are not in a prison. [Hippolyta rushes to attack but is pinned to the floor by an invisible force] HIPPOLYTA : Let me go! SERAPHINA /BEYOND C’EST /I AM : You are not in a prison. Where do you want to be? HIPPOLYTA : [groans] SERAPHINA /BEYOND C’EST /I AM : Name yourself. HIPPOLYTA : [laughs] SERAPHINA /BEYOND C’EST /I AM : Name yourself. HIPPOLYTA : What the fuck are you talking about?! SERAPHINA /BEYOND C’EST /I AM : Where do you want to be? Name it! Who do you want to be? Name it! HIPPOLYTA : I want to be dancing on stage in Paris with Josephine Baker! With these final words to her guide’s demanding questions, Hippolyta launches herself beyond the vestibule, beyond human limitation and through the metaverse. Her journeys take her back to and through the recent and distant past. She explores the distant past as a warrior in an ancient African civilization. She visits the recent past as a dancer for and confidant to Josephine Baker in Paris. She encounters her recently deceased husband for a joyful reunion marked by his accountability and apology for the consequences of his prohibitions. Hippolyta’s time with other Black women seems the most useful for her selfrecovery. In particular, her bodily experience with Josephine Baker represents a kinetic therapeutic self-recovery. Hippolyta’s stated goal was to dance on stage with Josephine Baker. However, the most formative part of her time with Baker occurs beyond the on-stage performances. Hippolyta, the woman who was once so conservative that she never wore pants, has followed Baker’s advice to “loosen up.” The production copy of the script includes stage directions that establish the ways in which Hippolyta is unfurling her tightly coiled identity: Hippolyta laughs all the way to the MAKESHIFT BAR to quench her thirst with a FRENCH KISS from the sexy, BARELY LEGAL, hawt brown-skin MOROCCAN BARTENDER. It’s clear they’ve been fucking. A lot. 

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           WIDEN TO REVEAL – she’s surrounded by bad PARISIAN HEAUXS partying – DANCING, DOING SNUFF and COKE, and MAKING OUT to the sounds of “SUGAR” by ETHEL WATERS.

Hippolyta is smoking, drinking, having sexual encounters with men and women, and exercising whole bodily autonomy. In another context, Hippolyta’s time in Baker’s Sapphic-centered salon might be called hedonistic, but for a Black woman new to unfettered expression of her full humanity, it is the physical expression of liberation she needs. The joyful transformation of staid Hippolyta was contagious for viewers who appreciated the cathartic expression from a long-repressed character. DJ BenHaMeen, co-host of the Safe Negro Podcast Show, approvingly noted of her sexual freedom and drug use, “Oh yeah, she was living good.” Hippolyta’s voyage through the multiverse is a manifestation of her own will. Pushed by Seraphina/Beyond C’est/I am, Hippolyta has accepted the invitation to experience liberation on her own terms. Hippolyta faced a myriad of restrictions and rejections on her Earth. She was the young astronomy prodigy who once named a constellation only to be denied credit because of her race. She was the curious young woman turned devoted wife whose husband did not allow her to travel. She was the respectable mother who compromised, complied, and did not wear trousers. In the following generative conversation with Josephine Baker, Hippolyta comes to terms with the restrictive conditions of her previous life (Lovecraft Country ): HIPPOLYTA : Now that I’m tasting it . . . freedom . . . JOSEPHINE BAKER : Hmm. HIPPOLYTA : Like I’ve never known before, I see what I was robbed of back then. All those years, I thought I had everything I ever wanted, only to come here and discover that all I ever was, was the exact kind of negro woman white folks wanted me to be. I feel like they just found a smart way to lynch me without me noticing the noose. Hippolyta’s journey to Josephine Baker is an example of the Black Quantum Futurist theory of “retrocurrences.” Consonant with their liberated vision of time, BQF theorists define “retrocurrence” as a “backwards happening, an event whose influence or effect is not discrete and timebound – it extends in all possible directions and encompasses all possible time modes.” Kodwo Eshun notes that “by creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory.” Hippolyta emerges from the spaceship’s vestibule empowered with a new capacity. After her cathartic journey to experience embodied joy (dancing 

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Embodied Black Aliveness

with Josephine Baker) and the physical expression of rage (fighting confederates and imperialists with Dahomey Amazons), Hippolyta returns to her Earth. In a gesture that might signal capitulation to the dominant order, Hippolyta factors her daughter in her decision to decline the invitation to join Seraphina/Beyond C’est/I Am. Hippolyta has become radically more expansive, complete, and free after her travels through the multiverse. She has thoroughly absorbed the unlimited imaginative principles of the Afrofuturist alien society. She no longer requires the adaptive devices implanted in her flesh to communicate with the celestial beings. Her body has explored countless realities. She is beyond the weaponized category of Western Man. Instead she is on the path to self-realization fueled by what Sun Ra might call mythological possibility and Kevin Quashie the poetics of Black aliveness. Liberatory Aliveness “Freedom is a huge theme in this episode,” notes Tatiana King of the Safe Negro Podcast Show. She adds, “particularly personal freedom, selfexpression, and even experimentation. Freedom called sexual freedom, the conflict of freedom and obligation.” King’s recognition of the liberatory energy that fuels Hippolyta’s journey suggests the ways that the episode images with complex issues that have informed Black studies within and beyond the academy. Kevin Quashie’s claims about Black aliveness incorporate Terrion L. Williamson’s view that Black aliveness is “the register of black experience that is not reducible to the terror that calls it into existence but is the rich remainder, the multifaceted artifact of black communal resistance and resilience that is expressed in black idioms, cultural forms, traditions, and ways of being.” The “rich remainder” is that which is irreducibly Black and alive. For as Quashie explains, “It may be true that subjection prefaces everything in an antiblack world, but in thinking through a black world, I am trying to surpass terror as the uninflected language of black being, as well as to suspend the anti/ante position of blackness.” “I Am” is capacious television programming invested in the rich remainder, crafting a world of endless possibility for Black aliveness. Its focus on Hippolyta’s multiverse travel reveals the ways in which Black imaginative fictions can craft visions of Black aliveness that affirm and empower Black audiences. As mentioned previously, Lovecraft Country engages with significant scholarly critiques in Black studies. It is important to note that, insofar as Hippolyta’s journey aligns with experimental theories of BQF, the series also resonates with creative intellectual work beyond the academy. This vernacular intellectual aspect is exemplified in Langston League’s 

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Lovecraft Country syllabus for this episode, praising its exploration “of all the ways we’ve been spirit murdered, while navigating systemic racism.” As part of the study of the episode itself, the syllabus creators note, “We were torn and healed throughout this episode, time and time again. Torn by some of our reflections. Healed by futures and what-ifs.” The catharsis of Hippolyta’s journey was rooted in the liminal space, the vestibule that in other contexts would mark her exclusion from the humanizing (and therefore validating) category of Western Man. Instead, through the lens of BQF, Hippolyta’s vestibularity reveals that it may be the category of Man itself that limits the horizons of and for Black aliveness. Hippolyta’s skill in astronomy, though thwarted by the racism of her time and place, is vital for her operation of the multiverse machine as well as understanding her position once she is transported to another world. For some Black viewers, Hippolyta’s travels through the multiverse was inspiring and cathartic: “From the moment of her mathematical and quantum mechanic prowess in the intergalactic spaceship, we were transfixed.” Safe Negro Podcast Show co-host DJ BenHaMeen was similarly moved by the episode, noting the sheer joy and enthusiasm he felt when watching Hippolyta party with Josephine Baker and later during her training montage with the Dahomey warriors. Through the lens of this episode, Lovecraft Country relishes in the rich remainder of Black aliveness. Watching Hippolyta exercise a more complete vision of her liberation conveyed special meaning to Black audiences. This speculative and experimental episode engages meaningful scholarship in Black studies while also empowering Black audiences to consider the interior constellations of limitless possibility for their Black aliveness.



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 KYLE C. FRISINA

Staging Racial Passing

This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, in which issues of embodiment are overlaid with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that contemporary passing literature might be read as a self-conscious, critical rejoinder to ever-expanding forms of literary transparency: Memoir, autofiction, autotheory, and even social media. Whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms, often locating interpersonal impenetrability at the thematic and structural heart of the narrative. At a moment in which many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter claims that, just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. Both embodiment and visuality are essential to dramatic form; as to sociality, drama might fairly be called the preeminent gathering art. Drama is furthermore flush with affordances for highlighting the construction of race and the generation of embodied experience. For all of these reasons, looking closely at the dramatic staging of the passing plot can offer valuable critical tools for reading passing literature across forms. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s campy, heady, twenty-first century play An Octoroon, first produced at Soho Rep in , which I take up most directly beginning in the chapter’s third section. While Jacobs-Jenkins tarries in various ways with the promise of racial revelation inherent to his source text, a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (), his metatheatrical riff on that play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for his audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization. 

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The Revival of a Genre The first recorded instance of American passing literature is Richard Hildreth’s  novel The Memoirs of Archy Moore. As the publication date of Jacobs-Jenkins’ source drama The Octoroon suggests, passing narratives quickly proliferated across forms. Peaking during the Jim Crow era, roughly –, the genre began to be renounced by Black authors and audiences beginning in the s and with increasing forcefulness in the s–s. Yet in recent decades, as Michele Elam writes, the genre has been “resurrected to assume a rather spectacular new life.” Works like Danzy Senna’s Caucasia () and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist () are lauded among the significant novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, while more recent passing narratives like Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half () have topped bestseller charts. Rebecca Hall’s film Passing (), which adapts the  novel of the same name by Nella Larsen – widely considered to be one of American literature’s ur-passing texts – won critical acclaim and inspired extensive cultural dissection. In seeking to answer the question “why passing narratives now?” it seems clear that the symbolic grammar of passing remains useful for helping us to conceptualize certain paradoxical conditions of contemporary racialized experience. For instance, the racial mutability of the passing figure illuminates the literal dimensions of a dominant dyad in the cultural discourse on Blackness, the invisibility and hypervisibility of race: In passing narratives, a person’s Blackness may be invisible to those who draw from appearance or other qualities to perceive her as white, while her Blackness may be hypervisible to those who see her only through the lens of her race. The passing figure also intervenes in racial discourses like colorblindness and postracialism, which suggest that, to paraphrase Martha J. Cutter, passing should be passé – in effect, because race should be invisible. The resurgence of passing literature indicates that the latter condition has not yet come to pass. Indeed, the inadequacies of such discourses are signaled by artists’ gravitation toward passing narratives as vehicles for addressing still-pressing questions of racialized embodiment, on the one hand, and audiences’ continued enthrallment with these stories, on the other. While passing literature often draws on tropes of invisibility and hypervisibility, it also engages the recent upsurge of critical and creative efforts taking up a different visual metaphor, what Édouard Glissant called the ethical “right to opacity.” Black feminist and other minoritarian critics, artists, and thinkers are currently working with striking shared urgency to investigate opacity’s many dimensions and functions: Insisting, for instance, 

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Staging Racial Passing

that opacity can be a tool for refusing an unwanted gaze; or, more fundamentally, that it underscores interpretive incomprehensibility between subjects. Opacity has meanwhile always been central to the story and structure of passing narratives. Take Kate Chopin’s late nineteenth-century story “Desiree’s Baby” (), which concerns a child born with darker skin than either of his parents. The story initially seems to suggest that the child’s countenance means his mother, a woman of mysterious background, was passing as white. Tragically the father’s suspicion of this possibility leads to the mother’s infanticide–suicide. Yet Chopin ultimately reveals that the child’s father has been the unwitting passer, his race obscured to him and to readers until the story’s final lines. Readers of passing narratives are constantly asked to orient themselves toward such unfolding enigmas, as with Larsen’s famous work Passing, which Cutter describes as revolving around the question of whether the fair-skinned Clare, whom her friend Irene has always known as Black, “view[s] herself as black, white, or neither.” Just as Clare’s body tells an illegible story about her racial background, the character’s self-conception of her own passing is also rendered opaque. This represents the crux of what passing narratives (can) do: Describe not only bodily unintelligibility but allude to, while not necessarily revealing, the private idiosyncrasies of the passer’s experience. Sami Schalk’s concept of “bodymind,” which insists that Blackness is not only an embodied phenomenon but a mental one, helps draw a useful connection with respect to passing narratives between invisibility and hypervisibility (typically concerning the body) and opacity and transparency (typically concerning the mind). Throughout Larsen’s novel, Irene’s investment in Clare seems to stem in part from how much Clare unsettles her. In the memorable scene in which Irene discovers that Clare not only passes as white but is married to a white man whose nickname for her is “Nig,” Irene catches her friend’s glance and encounters “[Clare’s] peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart.” Exemplified by an “expression so dark and deep,” Clare’s opacity to Irene – especially when contrasted with her hypervisibility, in Irene’s eyes, as a Black woman – explains why the ambiguity of Clare’s passing draws Irene in and makes her so uncomfortable. Given Irene’s own experience of racial embodiment, she finds utterly “unfathomable” her friend’s conception of the same phenomenon. The novel’s ending is famously obscure – did Clare fall to her death, or was she pushed by Irene? – but its rising tension is generated in large part by Irene’s inability to accept the gulf between Clare and herself. 

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The contradictory impulses behind Irene’s investment in Clare may anticipate the captivation of contemporary audiences with passing literature, as oblique passing characters like Clare exist in distinction to the avowedly apprehensible figures at the center of many currently popular forms. Interest in passing narratives, that is, may be spurred by the texts’ own defiance of the access readers have been primed to crave by the ubiquity of these seemingly transparent forms. The same defiance may also explain some of the attraction of contemporary Black artists to the genre, which thematizes and in some case formalizes a refusal of access, whether to characters’ racial history or to their feelings about racial embodiment (e.g., the flat narration of Senna’s New People []). In certain of these modern passing narratives, as in Glissant’s line of thinking, the opacity of the racialized other is not a tragedy but a hard-won success, preserving a personhood that cannot be “grasp[ed]” or acquired. In offering a suggestive alternative to the current vogue for genres of transparency, the passing narrative may further appeal to Black and other minoritarian writers for whom forms purporting to transparent aesthetics have long presented representational challenges: Efforts to make subjects visible, that is, can risk (re)producing their hypervisibility as subjects adhering to stereotype. Yet dramatic form can – at times – resist this risk, particularly in the context of the passing narrative. When writers design a passing narrative, they take on a plot inherently invested in the process of racialization. And when they produce such a plot for the stage, they signal a desire to implicate theatergoers as embodied participants in that process. In the chapter’s next section, “Blackness, Performance, and Passing,” a consideration of dramatic form’s resources for exploring Black embodiment in general and passing in particular lays theoretical groundwork for discussing An Octoroon, while the section that follows, “From The Octoroon, An Octoroon,” offers literary historical context for the play. Blackness, Performance, and Passing Contemporary Black dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks writes that (in her view, good) dramatic literature is fundamentally invested in “the marvel of live bodies on stage.” Even if we do not pick up a play with plans to stage it, engaging with written drama requires that we cast our imagination to the happening it scripts around the presence of those bodies: A gathering likely built on the collaboration of directors, actors, technical professionals (scenic, lighting, costume, and sound designers), stage managers, producers, and an audience. This last category, the audience, is crucial. Unlike most other forms of literature, the reception of drama is not only central to but 

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Staging Racial Passing

simultaneous with its production. This is what makes dramatic scenarios so exciting, even volatile. In performance studies, the word “scenario” is often associated with critic Diana Taylor, who reminds us that while “actions and behaviors arising from the setup [of a given performance scenario] might be predictable,” they are, “ultimately, flexible and open to change.” While Taylor is speaking specifically to rites of cultural performance and to everyday patterns of social performance, her language holds widely true in the context of theater itself, as we shall see with Jacobs-Jenkins’s play. It is no coincidence that the late twentieth century reemergence of passing narratives as a popular genre has coincided with a similarly-timed rise in “convey[ing] the social construction of race through the metaphorics of performance.” For theater and performance scholars, however, the link between race and performance is more foundational. Explains Harvey Young: “[T]he concept of race is supported by a series of performances and enactments that give it a material presence and an experiential component in everyday life.” Arguing that understandings of Blackness have been connected to theater and performance “from the arrival of the first African slaves on American soil,” Harry Elam reminds us that “definitions of race, like the processes of theater, fundamentally depend on the relationship between the seen and unseen, between the visibly marked and unmarked, between the ‘real’ and the illusionary.” And Ju Yon Kim makes a similar point about racial performance more broadly: “Both racialization and theatrical performance rely on a productive tension between what could be termed the ‘actor’ and the ‘role,’ a doubling that is mediated by ‘the eyes of others.’” Because of these synchronicities, the theatrical framing of racialized bodies can be particularly potent – and particularly unstable. Indeed Black artists have historically found theater to offer fertile ground for investigating various aspects of Black embodiment. In Elam’s words, “the black performance artist can purposefully utilize his or her ambivalent status – as a real person, as a theatrical representation, as a sociocultural construction – to expose and perhaps even explode definitions of blackness” (). Yet if Blackness and theater are already doubled subjects, the subject of passing – which plays a central role in An Octoroon at the levels of both plot and stagecraft – creates yet another refraction as a literally theatrical concept. When used as a gerund, the word implies action, that basic building block of theater. In everyday life, explains Amy Robinson, “the pass can be regarded as a triangular theater of identity” involving the passer, the person who suspects the pass, and the one who is oblivious. As such, theater puts the passing form under particular pressure. In the staging of a passing plot, different from its inscription in most other literary forms, audiences are 

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directly implicated in the live work of settling a character’s racial identity – as collapsed with or distinct from identity of the actor on stage. The classic example of racial passing on the American stage is minstrelsy, whose origins trace to the antebellum white performer T. D. Rice. As legend has it, Rice was short on inspiration for his theatrical act when he encountered the work of an indigent Black street performer. Borrowing the man’s clothes and darkening his face with makeup, Rice mimicked the street performer’s moves for his own audience. The effect was electric, writes Young: “The audience, recognizing the impersonation, marveled at Rice’s ability to transform himself into the black performer. The ability of the white man to become black and to channel blackness was rewarded with thunderous applause.” In effect, what made the entertainment so dynamic was the audience’s felt sense of participation in affirming that the character was Black, even as they simultaneously congratulated themselves on seeing past the pass to the performer’s “true” identity as white. Such dynamics have repeated across representations of racial passing on the stage ever since. From The Octoroon, An Octoroon Educated in playwriting at Juilliard and with a master’s degree in performance studies from NYU, Jacobs-Jenkins is deeply attuned to the history of Black embodiment in the American theater. An Octoroon is part of a series of plays, including Neighbors () and Appropriate (), which the playwright describes as “not technically a trilogy” but which nonetheless all “explore the historical relationship between American theatrical forms and the question of blackness.” For its part, An Octoroon draws inspiration and, in many passages, literal language from Dion Boucicault’s  play The Octoroon. Boucicault was a prolific Irish writer whose melodramas saw major success in England and America; James Leverett calls The Octoroon “the most prominent contemporary fiction about American slavery” after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The story in its briefest form goes like this: After the death of the plantation owner Judge Peyton, Peyton’s northern nephew George arrives to take over the family estate. George falls in love with Peyton’s illegitimate daughter Zoe (the play’s titular octoroon), but their love is doomed when it is revealed that Peyton’s property must be sold to pay his significant debt. That “property” includes Zoe, who is devastated to discover that the letter freeing her with her father’s death is invalidated by what he owes. Seeing an opportunity to seize Zoe for his own, the plantation’s evil white overseer M’Closky schemes to win the plantation through trickery and murder. While M’Closky is eventually caught and hanged, the news does not reach the estate before Zoe decides to kill herself 

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Staging Racial Passing

for George’s sake, having overheard him cry, “I’d rather see her dead than his” (). (The British version of the play ends on a more positive note with a merely unconscious Zoe rescued by George, an ending impossible in a country as opposed to interracial marriage as was much of America in .) Like other literature of its day, The Octoroon deployed its mulatta character as a writerly strategy for exploring new and draconian forms of race relations. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson argues that the literary trope of the mulatta emerged from “a vortex of sensationalized social, anthropological, and racial mythology,” even as it was often invoked by writers with antislavery aims, with exemplars appearing in short stories by Lydia Maria Child (“The Quadroons,” ; and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” ); in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (); and in each version of William Wells Brown’s Clotel (first published in ). In sketching plots common to nineteenth-century narratives featuring mulatto/a figures, Eva Allegra Raimon offers an almost word-for-word description of events in The Octoroon: “The story of an educated light-skinned heroine whose white benefactor and paramour (sometimes also the young woman’s father) dies, leaving her to the auction block and/or the sexual designs of a malevolent creditor. The protagonist, sheltered from the outside world, is driven to desperation by her predicament and perhaps to an early death.” Kim Manganelli situates The Octoroon not only alongside American abolitionist fiction but amidst a second category of literature, British sensationalist fiction, which she shows was derived from the first. Manganelli argues that it was via sensationalist fiction – which developed an emphasis on “mysterious identities, sexual transgressions, madness, and violence” – that the mulatta transformed from the sentimental figure of abolitionist fiction into “a figure of mystery.” In nineteenth-century plots, this transformation came about through the violent impositions of slavery. More recent passing narratives, however, suggest that the concept of the mulatta as a woman of intrigue has endured well past slavery’s official demise. An Octoroon’s engagement with Boucicault begins with its metatheatrical framing, and, as the play progresses, carries over into a full-blown adaptation of The Octoroon itself. As we will see in the two sections that follow, Jacobs-Jenkins strategically cites and then manipulates the historical iconography of the passing figure, first and foremost by jettisoning the mystery that has long surrounded her. Other changes, as Rosa Schneider notes, include an ending that deemphasizes Zoe’s plight while elevating the experiences of the plantation’s enslaved female characters. In short, in Jacobs-Jenkins’s rewrite of The Octoroon, the racial identity and passing of the title character is, surprisingly, the drama’s least interesting element. Yet the playwright 

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nonetheless demonstrates an investment in common with other contemporary writers who are drawn to the passing genre by requiring his audience to become more broadly acquainted with opacity in the context of racialized embodiment. Staging the Twenty-First Century Passing Plot An Octoroon begins with a contemporary Black character who shares the same initials as Jacobs-Jenkins preparing to perform an adaptation of The Octoroon, a play he has long admired. BJJ explains that the idea was suggested by his therapist as a cure for writer’s block: “Try to adapt this Octoroon – for fun,” he quotes her as saying (). On BJJ’s first try, however, “All the white guys quit. / And then [he] couldn’t find anymore white guys / to play any of the white-guy parts, / because they all felt it was too ‘melodramatic’” (). The therapist’s next question would seem to have inspired the play we are watching: “Who needs white guys?” she asks. “Why can’t you just play the parts?” While other characters soon join BJJ onstage to enact his second try at adaptation, the therapist’s line implies that these individuals are brought to embodied life through BJJ’s eyes and for his benefit. From BJJ’s application of whiteface makeup while listening to “loud, crude, bass-heavy, hypermasculine rap music” () to the unexplained appearance of a silent, human-sized Brer Rabbit who occasionally wanders through the action, Jacobs-Jenkins needles his audience with provocative yet cryptic invitations to reflect on their own role as witnesses to – which in the realm of theater also means participants in – the process by which others get into “character.” At the level of plot, the central instance of passing in An Octoroon remains Zoe’s (in the Soho Rep production, the character was played by the light-skinned biracial actor Amber Gray). Zoe confesses her racially mixed status to George by enlisting him in a practice of re-reading her “non-white” features, for example, “Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a . . . bluish tinge?” (). When George proves unwilling to piece together her hints, Zoe finally blurts out that she bears “the dark, fatal mark of Cain.” In the Boucicault, George is painted as a “good” white figure for refusing to withdraw his love for Zoe, whereas Jacobs-Jenkins’s twenty-first century audience is made significantly more skeptical of George by the emphasis on his abiding racism. Jacobs-Jenkins’s Zoe does display the racial self-hatred of Boucicault’s heroine – but, in another departure, only up to a point. When George invites Zoe to abandon her deference to the white plantation mistress who would disapprove of their love, she offers a retort that nuances our understanding of how she thinks of herself: “I’d rather be 

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Staging Racial Passing

black than ungrateful” (). Even as Zoe falls into stereotype as a tragic mulatta whose racial status causes her great moral agony, Jacobs-Jenkins’s version of the character easily chooses Blackness over other qualities she deems less desirable. Given the literary historical traditions of passing narratives with which the play is engaged, Zoe’s passing should make her a special, enigmatic character. But while she is clearly an object of desire for the (white) men in An Octoroon, Zoe’s exceptional status is repeatedly cut down by other functions of Jacobs-Jenkins’s dramaturgy. Leaning on the not-so-subtle stylings of its nineteenth-century inspiration, even lifting many of her speeches straight from the original, An Octoroon makes Zoe’s passion and woe entirely transparent: So transparent, in fact, that by contemporary dramatic standards the character becomes fairly boring. This effectively decenters her in the play-within-the play, whose other characters directly remark on her tediousness, as well as in metatheatrical frame. In the twenty-first century, Zoe’s histrionics are simply too much. At this point it may seem as though An Octoroon belies the claim made at the chapter’s outset: That contemporary writers find in passing narratives the opportunity to investigate the ethics of opacity in interpersonal relations. However, the play’s richness as a case study for this argument stems from the fact that its investment in opacity is paired with a critique of the alternative. That is, while its elaborate quotation of melodrama’s heavy-handed dialogue and acting and its gleeful engagement with melodrama’s reliance on stereotype call back to an earlier era, these elements also point up the aesthetics of modern arenas (e.g., social media) that are also short on ambiguity. Through Zoe’s overblown eagerness to confess her true feelings to anyone who will listen, and even to those who will not, the play satirizes contemporary cultural forms and scenarios in which attention flows most quickly to the appearance of characterological transparency. In tying Zoe’s emotionality to a delivery style often mistrusted now as inauthentic in many dramatic contexts but increasingly ubiquitous beyond them, and by making her identity reveal an exercise in George’s missing the obvious (invoking but also mocking the detective-like readerly energy that can sometimes attend a passing plot), Jacobs-Jenkins ultimately indicates that his own interest lies elsewhere: Not in racialized identities that can be untangled, explained away, or confessed, but in those whose “bodymind”-edness and historical embeddedness mean they cannot be. To this end, contrast Zoe’s earnest confession of her racial identity with more sardonic tones deployed by the Jacobs-Jenkins stand-in BJJ himself in the very first line of the play: “Hi, everyone. I’m a ‘black playwright.’ Beat. I have no idea what that means” (). Clearly, this statement in no way 

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indicates BJJ’s – or Jacobs-Jenkins’s – lack of interest in the issue. As Harvey Young notes, quoting Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon’s definition of their term “post-black,” Jacobs-Jenkins himself may resist the restrictive label of “Black artist,” but his “work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” In An Octoroon, that redefinition involves BJJ admitting his own opacity to himself. Coming from the play’s primary narrator, this statement is the first of many that cues audiences to the necessity of accepting a certain lack of clarity regarding both the denotations and connotations of Blackness – while simultaneously confronting a character they are asked to recognize as Black. And while the first scene of the play features extended reference to a classic confessional context, the therapeutic relationship, Jacobs-Jenkins redefines that scenario, too, starting with the fact that the character of BJJ plays both himself and his white therapist. (This dual role anticipates his second, later doubling in whiteface as hero George and villain M’Closky, who eventually battle each other in a one-man fist fight.) The therapist’s instincts are portrayed as clueless at best, and suspect at worst, as when she continues to press the possibility that BJJ’s real problem might be that he is “angry at white people” (). “Um, no,” replies BJJ, in a parody of the infamous white reference to colorblindness: “Like most of my best friends are white.” Shortly thereafter, BJJ reveals that his therapist is (or may be) a fiction. “Just kidding,” BJJ tells the audience. “I don’t have a therapist. I can’t afford one. You people are my therapy” (). Tina Post captures the critical distinction here: Viewers are not “not his therapists but, rather, his therapy” – they are “cast as the prodding process rather than the agent of healing.” In many cases, attending to confessional forms, even those with unreliable narrators, gives audiences the opportunity to flatteringly cast themselves as perfect confidantes. By contrast, Jacobs-Jenkins emphasizes the importance not of one extra-attuned person but of relational practice itself: That challenging, collaborative work intended to result in greater attentiveness even outside the relationship in question. In calling the audience his therapy he redirects at least a portion of our attention during the play to our fellow audience members. If we are the work, in other words, then what are we doing? Continuing to show where opacity might more ethically lie if not in the mystery of The Octoroon’s passing heroine, Jacobs-Jenkins invites audiences to consider the extent to which their potential relief at affirming racial identity may in fact promote obstacles to Black survival. This invitation is made most obvious in the scene in which Zoe and enslaved residents of the estate stand at auction, and it is enhanced by attention he has suggested audience members give to one another. In the auction scene, both Zoe’s 

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Staging Racial Passing

white appearance and her Blackness become overdetermined: In the historical narrative and reality Jacobs-Jenkins cites, her pale looks accentuate the “wrongness” of her presence on the auction block, while her Blackness justifies her sale. Jacobs-Jenkins offers the following stage directions: “Time has passed and we are now at the auction. There is either one or ninety-nine people playing various bidders. Or maybe there’s some clever way to force the audience into doing this” (). These directions require artists and audiences to engage in a complicated reckoning. Some productions, for instance, have taken the last sentence as a challenge, placing bidding paddles on the seats of audience members. Carrie Preston and Post note that at Company One’s production in Boston in , a new in-person pre-show announcement asked audience members to express their approval and disapproval throughout the play, including at the auction. Post has also written that in an earlier New York production, where no such invitation was overtly made, certain audiences included members who leaped into the auction scene of their own accord, shouting out numerical values for the people being sold. In other words, theatergoers who fixated on the characters’ hypervisible Blackness found ample evidence to sanction their own embodied engagement with slavery’s “affective scripts.” Jacobs-Jenkins’s take on the auction block scene suggests how thoroughly the historical representation of mulatto/a and/or passing body was shaped by the threat of what Shawn Michelle Smith calls “the terrifying exposure to a threatening gaze that preceded and begot violence upon the slave body”; and, as well, the extent to which present-day audiences are primed to participate in that exposure and violence when given permission to associate it with an historical context. In the next scene, the playwright puts his audience to a different test by offering a devastating angle on the threat of this exposure to the Black body in a more contemporary setting. When it is discovered that M’Closky killed an enslaved child while stealing a letter that could have saved the plantation from sale, the overseer is captured by an angry mob. A few lines into this scene, however, the character playing M’Closky interrupts the action to return to his metatheatrical framing role as BJJ. BJJ explains that nineteenth-century melodramas typically included a “sensation scene”: A meticulously plotted sequence which introduced a moral lesson through the systematic manipulation of the audience’s shocked affective response. Whereas the sensation scene in Boucicault’s play relied on the reveal of a photograph whose capture had been an earlier plot point, BJJ has a problem in that photographic technology no longer impresses in the twenty-first century the way it did in the nineteenth. How, then, to shock his own audience? The solution comes without warning – the projection of a photograph, yes, but not the one discussed in the melodrama. 

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Instead, the image projected against the upstage wall is a photograph of a twentieth-century lynching, its victims life-size, or larger, in scale. JacobsJenkins leaves the selection of the image open to individual productions, noting in the stage directions only that the Assistant character “projects a lynching photograph” (). The original Soho Rep production and its transfer to Theater for a New Audience, both directed by Sarah Benson, selected for this scene the iconic photograph of lynching victims Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, murdered in Marion, Indiana on August , . In my own experience in the audience at Soho Rep, the introduction of the lynching photograph – and the extended duration of its projection – utterly shifted the theatrical moment, explicitly demanding one of two things: That I stare at the lynching victims or acknowledge that I could not. If An Octoroon aggressively decenters its title character, Zoe, this is the image the play centers instead. Taken and sold as a souvenir from the scene of the crime it depicted, the Shipp and Smith photograph depicts the two men hanging lifeless above a large white crowd. Spectators smile, mill about, acknowledge one another, and point with their fingers and gazes toward the bodies of the lynching victims. In highlighting the crime’s white perpetrators, the photograph suddenly expands the play’s company of actors. As Post writes of the photograph chosen for the Company One production, which also featured a crowd, “The white men once missing [from BJJ’s original adaptation] now populate the stage. Frozen in tableau, a range of expressions on their faces, they draw every eye that wants to avoid looking at the lynched black body.” Importantly, the lynching photograph may be less predictable in its affective impact on contemporary audiences than the nineteenth-century sensation scenes for which those historical audiences were well-trained and well-primed: Preston and Post both describe the difficulty, even dangerousness, of assuming modern theatergoers will respond to its brutality in similar ways. When the action resumes, M’Closky is brutally beaten and carted off to be lynched. The downfall of the evil white overseer is potentially a gratifying moment in the schema of the melodrama, except for the fact that, in JacobsJenkins’s casting, it is a Black actor with a rope around his neck. “SOMEBODY! HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP!” screams M’Closky, an echo of BJJ’s own cries in a nightmare described in the first scene of the play (). Writes Jacobs-Jenkins in the stage directions, “It seems incredibly real.” If audience members take note of the clear contrast yet paradoxical similarity between the real-life, offstage violence done to Black bodies in the lynching photograph and the fictional beating received onstage by a Black actor in whiteface, they may experience some approximation of the “overwhelm” for 

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Staging Racial Passing

which the scene was striving (). As the Assistant puts it in the scene’s final line: “The whole point of this thing was to make you feel something” (). Just what that something is, however, Jacobs-Jenkins does not say. Casting the Passing Plot As the end of the preceding section suggests, casting serves a crucial role in a play that brings a history of racial exposure to the fore while also emphasizing the obfuscating layers accruing within racial portrayals. For An Octoroon’s attention to racial passing within the staged narrative is not the only way Jacobs-Jenkins seeks to ask, in Michele Elam’s terms, “What do discourses about passing culturally enable, disable, facilitate, accommodate?” (). Another way he addresses this question is through the script’s highly irreverent approach to cross-racial casting, which requires audience members to interlace their understanding of characters’ racial identities with the “passing” of actors whose identities may not align with the people they play. Leverett observes that while Boucicault’s own play was “unprecedented” in its specificity about the racial makeup of its characters, including not only the titular octoroon but also a “quadroon” and a “yellow,” it relied on its own era’s conventions of theatrical passing in that all the characters were played by white actors. (Jacobs-Jenkins’s play invokes those historical expectations when in the metatheatrical framing when the character modeled after Boucicault describes a white actor as “a more convincing negro / than the ones who came to audition . . . [–].” An Octoroon remixes the material reality of theatrical production in the nineteenth century by prescribing in the casting list that all the “the white guy parts” retained from The Octoroon should be played by actors of color. In the published playscript accompanying the play’s  production at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, England, the character list reads as follows: BJJ, played by an actual playwright, an African-American actor, or a black actor GEORGE, played by the same actor playing BJJ M’CLOSKY, played by the same actor playing BJJ PLAYWRIGHT, played by a white actor, or an actor who can pass as white WAHNOTEE, played by the same actor playing PLAYWRIGHT LAFOUCHE, played by the same actor playing PLAYWRIGHT ASSISTANT, played by a Native American actor, a mixed-race actor, a South Asian actor, or an actor who can pass as Native American 

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PETE, played by the same actor playing ASSISTANT PAUL, played by the same actor playing ASSISTANT ZOE, played by an octoroon actress, a white actress, a quadroon actress, a biracial actress, a multiracial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon DORA, played by a white actress, or an actress who can pass as white MINNIE, played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or an actress of color DIDO, played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or actress of color GRACE, played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or actress of color B’RER RABBIT, played by the actual playwright, or another artist involved in the production RATTS, probably played by the same actor playing B’RER RABBIT The suggested cast size for this play is eight or nine actors. Actors’ ethnicities listed in order of preference. (emphasis mine) In flamboyant contrast to contemporary theater’s frequent insistence on indexical casting, these notes dictate that actors may share or pass as the characters’ racial identities. What to make of such iconoclastic instructions? Since audiences are rarely privy to the language of the printed script, these directions do more than indicate a certain attitude that future productions might take toward the play’s charged material: They set in motion a series of production possibilities that would each raise different questions about Black and other racialized embodiment. In other words, they suggest that Jacobs-Jenkins is less wedded to any particular meaning for the relationship between actor and role than he is in raising questions about that racialized relationship. If Zoe were cast with a white actor, for instance, it is likely that many audience members would spend significant energy attempting to confirm the actor’s less-than-obvious Blackness. If BJJ were cast with an actual playwright who did not also happen to be African American or Black, An Octoroon’s commentary on the burden of Blackness to teach whiteness about itself – emphasized through BJJ’s elaborate application of whiteface makeup; his complaint about the white actors who refused to participate in the first version of the play; and the play’s winking acknowledgment of the relief audiences might feel to be insulated from possibly “real” white racism, given that its most racist characters are played by actors of color – could be seriously undercut, in which case the production might reasonably be expected to make this point in other ways. 

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Staging Racial Passing

The cast list also stresses the extent to which Jacobs-Jenkins’s passing drama is willing to point its racial signifiers in potentially competing directions. For instance, the Black characters Pete (an older enslaved man) and Paul (an enslaved child) are both to be played by a “Native American actor . . . mixed-race actor . . . South Asian actor, or . . . actor who can pass as Native American.” The playwright’s request that Pete and Paul be played by a non-Black actor of color brings to mind the ways in which non-Black groups of color are regularly enlisted to confirm the abjection of Black embodiment. Pete and Paul speak in a dialect that calls up associations with stereotypical representations of Black speech from cultural and literary history – even as those associations are challenged by the talk of enslaved women Minnie, Dido, and Grace, all played by women of color, whose language draws on certain patterns of contemporary Black speech. Redface performance also makes a disturbing, if less lucid, appearance in the play, with the Boucicault character donning a Native American war bonnet to get into monosyllabic, grunting character as the Native American man Wahnotee. In sum, by stirring up the already fraught relationship between actor and role, these casting notes reveal the enduring and compelling nature of narratives regarding so-called racial essence at the same time as they insist on the opacity of the racialized body. “I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with,” read the stage directions prior to Minnie and Dido’s first entrance: “I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you” (). A final instance of passing in An Octoroon returns the play’s focus on opacity to an interpersonal level – and to a personal level, as well. In the play’s last scene, Zoe turns up on Dido’s doorstep in the middle of the night, distraught at having overheard George say that he would rather see her dead than with M’Closky. Calling Dido “Mammy,” confusing her with another enslaved woman who nursed her as a child, Zoe seeks a potion that will allow her to end her own life. Dido reluctantly gives Zoe the potion, but as she later explains to Minnie, she is extremely distressed by the encounter. In the exchange that follows, arguably the most emotionally grounded of the play by contemporary stylistic standards, Dido struggles to explain the root of her unhappiness to Minnie: “And you know she kept calling me Mammy! And I was like, ‘Bitch, what? We are basically the same age!’” (). Dido returns to the subject a few lines later: “I’m sorry, Minnie. I just don’t like when people be treating me like I’m some old woman. I am not a mammy! I’m not!” (). Dido’s unhappiness at her unintentional passing reminds us that while contemporary passing narratives are usually characterized by some degree of agency on the part of the passing figure, the possibility of being misrecognized remains deeply destabilizing. 

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Minnie cannot understand Dido’s distress, but tries to comfort her friend by reminding Dido that she will never be able to wholly control others’ impressions of her – and moreover, that Zoe is not the most interesting story: “If Zoe’s lightskinned ass wanna call you old and go poison herself over some white man,” says Minnie, “then you need to let her do that and move on . . . I know we slaves and evurthang but you are not your job. You gotta take time out of your day to live life for you” (). Minnie’s words are an expression of her own life philosophy, which provides many of the play’s moments of humor. Yet Dido finds it difficult to follow her friend’s advice, given the conditions of enslavement: “I just don’t know what I could be doing better,” she says, weeping; “I don’t like feeling the way I do. This life – I didn’t ask for it.” With these words more than any others, Jacobs-Jenkins’s neo-passing narrative – a passing subgenre defined by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young as one whose concerns extend beyond Black– white racial passing – emphasizes what may never be truly knowable between people and within oneself, particularly under racist systems. Conclusion “Theater is a different way of receiving information,” Jacobs-Jenkins has said; “Though playwriting is a literary medium, theatrical language is supposed to initiate a different chain of reactions because it has to end in a person doing something” – such as passing – “in front of us.” He goes on: Theater is about the body. It’s about what you hear and see. It’s about how comfortable you feel in your seat, and how long you’re sitting in that seat. I’m always teaching my students to be sensitive to themselves as embodied receivers of sensory information.

Jacobs-Jenkins’s play offers a sterling example of the ways in which drama can implicate audiences in the real-time work of racialization – a communal process that is not only narrative and aesthetic but also physical and affective. For these reasons of form, An Octoroon may thus be especially suited to helping audiences to connect with the embodied stakes of approaching passing literature in other genres, and moreover to approaching the issue of racialization more broadly. As Michele Elam writes, “although ‘passers’ are usually characterized as exceptional, a demographic anomaly . . . passing is at the dead center of, rather than peripheral to, questions of racial identity.” Put another way, An Octoroon shows how embodied attunement to questions of passing, whether in literature or in life, are key to more ethical involvement in the racializing act. 

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Staging Racial Passing

An Octoroon’s title is a nominative phrase that settles Zoe’s racial identity once and for all. Whereas Boucicault’s work was called The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins’s play transforms “The” to “An” – in other words, “just one of many,” though whether that means one of many racially mixed individuals, one of many possible versions of Boucicault’s play, or one version of Jacobs-Jenkins’s own is unclear. Staging the passing plot in dramatic form raises crucial questions about our expectations for the embodiment of Blackness: As Post puts it, “where does cardinal blackness live and how much do we value it”? At the same time, it invites us to (re) consider the value placed on aesthetics of transparency and representational accuracy in certain currently popular forms: The dizzying pile-up of crossracial casting, and the interplay of that casting with striking moments of exposure of and violence done to Black bodies on stage, suggests instead the ethical importance of admitting a fundamental opacity within the process of racialization. Finally, while linking the impenetrability of passing figures to their ambiguous racialization has at times been an act of exoticization, An Octoroon turns that equation inside out, showing through the heartbreak of individuals like Dido, alienated from the self-knowledge she craves by the structures of slavery, that opacity is what makes his characters most fully human.



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 LISA MENDELMAN AND OCTAVIO R. GONZÁLEZ

Passing Bodies

“Racial passing is an exile, sometimes chosen, sometimes not,” Allyson Hobbs asserts in her history of the phenomenon in late eighteenth- through mid-twentieth-century America, A Chosen Exile (). Focused on the experience of African Americans who passed as white, Hobbs describes the challenges of recovering the history “of a phenomenon that, by definition, was intended to be clandestine and hidden, to leave no trace.” As such, Hobbs writes, “writing about passing” has been seen as “fit for novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics,” whose creative works “bring a blurred history into sharp focus.” Hobbs’s optical metaphor plays with the optics of the passing body, a form whose mobility, encoded in the idea of “passing” itself, suggests the slipperiness of supposedly fixed racial categories. By calibrating a specific racialized habitus for the social gaze, a passing body capitalizes on the visual and performative ambiguities of racial categorization. Hobbs’s study of this cultural phenomenon reminds us of the lived experiences that give fictionalized accounts of passing their gravity. And yet, as she points out, fiction can lend gravity to history as well. Among other things, fiction can provide visceral encounters with a necessarily secretive corporeal phenomenon like passing, inviting the reader or viewer to enter the psychology of race as well as rethink its sociology. Fiction – of any time period, but perhaps especially fiction that revisits and rewrites an earlier moment – can also remind us that matters of our fractured racialized past are very much still with us. Rebecca Hall’s  film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (), is one such text, as the film indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. Our chapter explores Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing, we propose, licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s “passion project” is born of this dualism: Her 

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Passing Bodies

neo-passing narrative of s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it. First, a word about the “neo-” in neo-passing: Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young define neo-passing narratives historically, as arising in the wake of newer racial formations after Jim Crow, including the so-called postracial Obama era. But neo-passing stories also “remobilize” the tropes of classical passing by “interrogat[ing] race through other categories of distinction, challenging static conceptions of class, sexual desire, gender identity, and racial authenticity all at once.” This rubric elucidates the relationship between Hall’s film and Larsen’s novel: Hall resurfaces and amplifies Larsen’s intersectional concerns. That is, Hall brings Larsen’s latent content to the surface, particularly playing up the gendered queerness of her characters’ racialized selves. A quick plot summary: In both iterations, Passing tells the Jazz Age story of two childhood friends, both with phenotypically similar fair skin, whose lives unfold on opposite sides of the Jim Crow color line. Following family upheaval, Clare Kendry (played in the movie by Ruth Negga) decides to pass as white; Irene Redfield (played by Tessa Thompson) marries a Black doctor, moves to Harlem, and becomes a well-manicured icon of the bourgeois New Negro woman. When the two later run into each other, their renewed friendship unsettles their carefully curated lives. Our discussion of Passing’s intersectional bodies unfolds in five sections. First, we assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality. Then, we consider cinematography and, specifically, Hall’s use of mirrors, perspective, and other optical motifs to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses. Our third section discusses the homoerotics of passing in Larsen’s and Hall’s works. The fourth section extends this characteroriented discussion as it contemplates the implications of Hall’s casting choices in her, Thompson’s, and Negga’s shared passion project. The fifth and final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century. On Character Hall personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality, turning a meditation on the “tragic mulatto” trope, the iconic New Negro woman, and other 

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                        .  ´   

conventions of the Jim Crow color line into a domestic melodrama. These choices reflect an intentional decontextualizing of the novel in order to speak to contemporary audiences, but the cost of Hall’s remobilization is a loss of history, an erasure of cultural genealogy. Instead, we get Clare and Irene, archetypes of themselves. The women appear as deracinated individuals, rather than representatives of larger sociopolitical phenomena, such as the New Negro woman that they might be seen to embody. Even their multigenerational families are largely erased. For instance, Clare’s father is never mentioned in the film, whereas his symbolic function shapes the novel, as Lisa has argued elsewhere (more on that later). The novel begins with Irene reading a letter from Clare – a moment that triggers a series of reflections on her childhood friend. But the film opens with matronly white women shopping in a toy store and with a slur about a Black doll (Figure .). These choices displace Irene from her own experience and interpellate the viewer as white. Hall’s opening also removes Larsen’s finely-wrought narrative bookends of father’s and daughter’s senseless deaths. Part of what Irene remembers in the novel is Clare’s downwardly-mobile biracial father, Bob Kendry, whose white father seduced and abandoned a Black woman, and Clare’s mother, who is long dead. When Bob dies in a “silly saloon-fight,” young Clare moves in with his racist white sisters and becomes the help (Larsen, : ). Hall deletes this genealogy, making Clare a free radical. This change exemplifies the film’s erasure of Clare’s and Irene’s family connections,

Figure . Beginning of Passing film



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Passing Bodies

which flattens Larsen’s commentary on race. Hall dissolves the embodied ironies these characters negotiate by removing them from their social worlds – not just from family but also from history and their intersecting double binds for Black subjects. Without the backstory, Clare’s desire to return to Harlem seems enthusiastic at best, fetishistic at worst. Passing’s Racial Optometry In a  essay, Martha Cutter proposes that US neo-passing fictional narratives frequently feature “a reclamation of blackness,” “but also an acknowledgement of race (blackness, whiteness, and mixed-race identity) as constructed behind [what Danzy Senna calls] the ‘dirty glass’ of human perception, of the human gaze that sees and categorizes people according to perceived skin color and other racialized characteristics.” Analyzing Senna’s  novel, Caucasia, Cutter seizes on racial recognition through visual tropes, such as the “‘dirty glass’ of the human gaze.” This optical idiom seemingly riffs on W. E. B. Du Bois’s canonical metaphor for double consciousness, “the Veil.” The textual history of US racialization, then, is partly defined by the idea that racial definition is available to the human gaze, transferable into visual codes of perception – what one might call the optometry of race. These optics hinge on individual physicality, from skin pigmentation to characteristics of hair and physiognomy, despite the instability of these embodied rubrics. Yet, as Cutter underscores, the racial gaze is intersubjective, a relay between observer and observed, independent of conscious identification or social protocol. Hall’s adaptation draws on this framework: Racial perception as a visual language defines the film, appropriately enough, for cinema is a visual medium. This highly psychological novel must necessarily be translated into visual codes for cinematic storytelling. Hall’s adaptation relies on the motif of reflective visual surfaces, especially mirrors, to portray racial passing and racial perception, as well as other aspects of modern identity, through visual mediation. Through the use of mirrors, doubled reflections, tricks of perspective, and other optical motifs, Hall cinematically evokes Larsen’s psychological portrait and reproduces the novel’s commentary on the unreliability of racial coding as visual unreliability; of things “not being what they seem,” in the words of Irene Redfield herself during an iconic gala scene we discuss later. In both iterations, Passing mobilizes two models of racialization: One, labile and performative; the other, material and embodied. Hall’s reliance on optical metaphors to adapt the novel to visual storytelling structures the 

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                        .  ´   

diegesis at the most fundamental level: The choice to film in sepia-toned black and white and to frame the story world in a retro : aspect ratio, which lends an uncanny realism to the film’s s periodization. Such technical affordances make the film feel like the novel in its diegetic textures evoking a Jazz Age lifeworld as understood through cinematic codes that denote the s on screen. The choice to “periodize” the look of the film also distances this story of two New Negro women passing as white, for convenience or survival, from matters of the present – at least for those audience members who would prefer such a safe distance. In addition, Hall frequently uses the camera’s gaze to insinuate Irene’s subjective point of view. In perhaps the best example of this dynamic, Hall’s cinematography reveals an intimate encounter between Clare and Brian to be Irene’s distorted projection. In the first image, we see Brian’s and Clare’s reflections in the mirror, implicitly tracking Irene’s point of view as she descends the stairs (Figure .). The shot distorts this tête-à-tête in two directions: First, the subjective foreshortening insinuates an illicit intimacy, a sexualized tension, between Brian and Clare; second, the mirror that frames this moment amplifies this perceptual quality. The next shot shows the

Figure . Irene’s distorted gaze in Passing



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Passing Bodies

Figure . The objective gaze in Passing

reality of the situation, with Clare and Brian standing a meter apart, as Irene finally joins them in the room (Figure .). Here, then, Hall illustrates Irene’s “unseeing eyes” by letting the camera gaze adopt Irene’s distorted visual perception, her suspicious outlook, which transforms the fabric of reality itself. But Hall’s source material is about the unreliability of this language, the uncertainty and inscrutability of racial perception. Passing, in Larsen’s handling, involves a hermeneutics of suspicion. As we mentioned, the novel begins with Irene’s reading a letter, trying to decipher the “almost illegible scrawl” of Clare’s handwriting (Larsen, : ). In another scene, a character assumes that Clare is white, but then quickly asks Irene if he is right (Larsen, : ). Irene laughs and puts the matter right back onto him: “What do you think? Is she?” (Larsen, : ). The need for confirmation of racial identification from someone who knows the subject more intimately (rather than merely visually) exemplifies the contextual logic of identity that governs the discourse of the novel. Seeing is not believing. Indeed, seeing is frequently deceiving, even self-deceiving. 

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                        .  ´   

Such scenes of textual decipherment show how relying solely on visual information leads one astray. The visual signifiers of race are malleable and inscrutable, as malleable and inscrutable as the contents of another’s mind, heart, or any other interior form of embodiment. Larsen also dramatizes this intersubjective confusion through narrative focalization: Irene is an overtly fallible center of consciousness. From the character’s “unseeing eyes” to her increasingly anxious perception of motives, desires, and allegiances, Larsen’s novel reminds the reader to mistrust Irene precisely because her vision of others is so clearly shaped by her own suspicions, repressed desires, and minimally conscious projection (Larsen, : ). Queer Passing In the novel, Clare and Irene’s erotic triangle with Irene’s husband Brian tells a homoerotic story beyond the discourse of racial passing. Irene and Clare’s attachment is subtextually erotic, even if on the surface their friendship is vexed by envy, jealousy, mutual resentment, and moral judgment. As Deborah McDowell establishes, Larsen was constrained by “peculiar problems about [realistically representing] black female sexuality” in the era of the New Negro Renaissance: “How to write about black female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic? How to give a black female character the right to healthy sexual expression and pleasure without offending the proprieties established by spokespersons of the black middle class?” These questions formed a double bind for women writers like Larsen, whose protagonists explore and test the limits of rigid sexual and racial boundaries sustained by bourgeois Black decorum. Or, as McDowell writes, “We might say that Larsen wanted to tell the story of the black woman with sexual desires, but was constrained by a competing desire to establish black women as respectable in black middle-class terms. The latter desire,” she concludes, “committed her to exploring black female sexuality obliquely.” Hence, the narrative exploration of Clare and Irene’s homoerotic frisson is subtextual, necessitating queer reading between the lines. As with much queer writing at the time, same-sex desire is artfully coded as friendly sociability in order to evade the censor of public respectability. The sexual undertone of Clare’s desire to return to Harlem and to Irene are synonymous. Clare’s initial overwrought letter to Irene begins to tell the queer tale. And, indeed, Larsen stages Irene’s reading of the letter as itself an act of decipherment, of decoding, the presence of queer desire within the articulation of a respectable desire, to rejoin the Black community Clare had forsaken. Clare’s desire for Irene, in other words, is hidden in plain sight: 

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Passing Bodies [Irene] ran through the letter, puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them. “. . . For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before . . .. It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases . . .” Sheets upon thin sheets of it. And ending finally with, “and it’s your fault, ‘Rene dear. At least partly. For I wouldn’t now, perhaps, have this terrible, this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that time in Chicago . . .” Brilliant red patches flamed in Irene Redfield’s warm olive cheeks. (Larsen, : )

Clare’s performative blaming of Irene is almost comically overt, flirtatious, and “a shade too provocative,” as Irene thinks of Clare’s attitude towards a waiter at the hotel where they reunited “that time in Chicago,” two years prior to this letter (Larsen, : ). The hyperbole is operatically sensuous: “[A]n ache, a pain that never ceases;” “this terrible, this wild desire;” “longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before.” Such romantic declarations seem only glancingly related to the sentimental surface of the “tragic mulatta’s” desire to return to the Black community. Clare’s excessive yet “carelessly formed” words, her repetitious and florid style, have the romantic valences of an adulterous love affair, more than the sober seriousness of ethical regret and moral shame at her race betrayal. The film redoubles Larsen’s Sapphic subtext. It oozes conflicted homoeroticism, as when Irene watches Clare dancing with Brian and declares one can be drawn to something (or someone!) that seems “repugnant.” A moment later, Irene reaches for Clare’s arm; they clasp tight; Brian returns; Irene pulls away (Figures . and .). Whereas the novel’s queerness operates at a subterranean level, as McDowell points out, with fire imagery and coded but dissimulated homoerotic tension between Irene and

Figure . Homoeroticism on screen in Passing ()



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                        .  ´   

Figure . Homoeroticism on screen in Passing ()

Clare, Hall’s film visualizes this tension for the spectator, as this moment indicates. By literalizing and focusing on such moments, the film adaptation bares the eroticism contained by Larsen’s prose and domestic decorum – not to mention the decorum of Irene’s hyper-controlled, even self-repressed, point of view. Cinematic representation objectifies the coded desires and motivations hinted at in the text, translating these into a visual language of bodies and their physical interactions. Even when the novel physically connects Clare and Irene – as when Clare “dropped a kiss on her dark curls” – Irene’s “sudden onrush” of emotion can be easily overlooked as friendship rather than eroticism, even if her “affectionate feeling” is tinged with “inexplicable” “awe” (Larsen, : –). As McDowell argues, Larsen’s constraints as a Black woman novelist entailed a very careful containment of sexual representation, whether hetero or queer, given the toxic Scylla and Charybdis of hyper-sexualization of Black women in US society. The cultural–political efforts to combat these stereotypes by New Negro woman writers like Larsen follow the cultural expectations of the Harlem Renaissance and its poetics of uplift. It is easy to overlook just how different Hall’s context is in this regard, when representations of queer Black sexuality remain charged but have become far more mainstream, as queer visibility writ large has become far more mainstream. On Casting Hall’s casting of Thompson and Negga has its own critical cultural– political angle. In collaborating with two actors who embody Black femininity but are not necessarily “light enough to pass as white,” Hall 

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Passing Bodies

accomplishes at least two things. First, Hall leverages the symbolic, social, and cultural power of two well-known actors: Negga is distinguished as an Oscar-nominated actor for ’s Loving, while Thompson is a bona fide celebrity, a star in the Marvel cinematic universe. Casting Negga and Thompson helped ensure the film’s production, according to the L.A. Times interview. Banking on these stars’ marketability – and Netflix’s enormous bankroll – Hall’s film benefits from more mass-market visibility than a typical “indie” made by a first-time writer-director (even as Hall is herself a celebrity actor of film and stage). Hall’s personal backstory – she comes from a multiracial family with a history of passing – also resonated with Negga and Thompson, who are bicultural and biracial. Indeed, the story behind the production is that both actors dropped other roles in order to make the film. Second, Hall’s casting of Negga and Thompson leverages the controversy surrounding the success (or lack thereof ) of “passing” performances. Casting actors who may not be phenotypically able to pass as “white” while shooting the film in black and white troubles the hegemony of the racial gaze. Avoiding color in order to neutralize colorism, Hall’s film challenges the optics of race that define racist constructs of US Blackness. We usually think of colorism as intraracial discrimination (oppositions of light-skin and dark-skin). But we deploy the term somewhat differently, to refer more broadly to expectations of skin pigmentation as they correspond to US racialized identity. Thus, Hall’s seemingly strategic choice to cast Negga and Thompson, whose skin color does not necessarily correspond to racist expectations of “white” phenotype. By casting renowned Black actresses of color, Hall ironizes Larsen’s plot of two women “light enough to pass as white,” creating a metacinematic commentary on spectators’ own racial expectations and assumptions about what “Black” or “white” plausibly look like. Such binaristic, and indeed racist, assumptions are the very ones Larsen and Hall aim to problematize. Hall and her cinematographer further use black and white film to blur the Black–white binary. Instead, the film exists on the spectrum between black and white. Hall’s elegant, period-specific black and white palette mitigates as it anticipates the racial colorism inherent in the casting critique. To expect all-but-white actresses to play these roles obeys the visual logic of racial segregation and its sorry cinematic history. Canonical films like Show Boat (), Imitation of Life (), and West Side Story () cast white or non-Black actresses (Ava Gardner, Susan Kohner, and Natalie 

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                        .  ´   

Wood, respectively) to play “biracial” or “ethnic” characters. Hall resists this racist legacy, consistent with the novel’s theme: That Blackness and whiteness are not “pure” constructs, but curated performances that have little basis in social or biological or psychological fact. Those who criticized the film for its casting choices were thereby missing the point. Their criticism recapitulates the obsession with visible racial purity – and erotic fantasies of its admixture – that saturates stories of passing and neo-passing. The casting choice therefore holds another mirror up to the audience: If one dismisses Thompson and Negga as “too Black” to play “all-but-white,” one’s racial prism sees only the color line. But Passing is about the swirl, atmospheric grays rich with shadow or oversaturated with light. The debates over the casting underscore how neo-passing stories, such as Hall’s adaptation, cover the same ground as Larsen’s Jazz Age classic, even as the context has shifted under our feet. Living beyond Jim Crow, we still occupy a de facto segregated world – where people are visually located on a hierarchy based on racialized appearances and treated accordingly. As Godfrey and Young claim, with regard to the famous Rhinelander case of , “the language of deception has been used not to differentiate between real and unreal identity performances but, rather, to reinforce the boundaries of whichever identity category the individual’s performance was calling into question.” Interrogating Negga’s and Thompson’s ability to pass polices and reifies whiteness and Blackness as separate and unequal categories of identity , thereby denying their performativity, lability, and transferability. Hall’s trompe l’oeil is a mirror to our own insidious optical division of the color line, a binary racial construct that lives on, and on. On Two Endings Hall’s choices also complicate the upshots one might derive from Passing’s famously ambiguous ending, in which Clare falls – perhaps jumps, perhaps is pushed – to her death, while Irene stands by, or perhaps precipitates the fall. The fatal scene occurs during a Harlem cocktail party for the New Negro elite, when Clare’s husband bursts in. In one moment, Clare stands next to Irene by an open casement window; in the next instant, she falls to her death – and that is all we know. The novel’s filtering through Irene’s perspective facilitates the ambiguity of



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Passing Bodies

whodunnit. We never know the truth of Irene’s perceptions. Anticipating Clare’s defenestration, Larsen’s narrator ambiguously reports that, “What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly” (Larsen, : ). Larsen’s signal to the reader is incontrovertible, if deeply ambiguous: As readers, we will never know whether Irene pushed Clare out the window; because, conveniently, Irene would never “allow . . . herself” to know, either. Indeed, the impossibility of knowing the truth of perception – and hence of race, which is a matter of perception but importantly not only that – might be Larsen’s crucial point. In the film, there’s a rapid cut-away shot, a close up of Irene’s arm protectively holding (pushing?) Clare around the waist, then the empty window. So, Hall preserves the ambiguity of who (or what) causes Clare’s fall. But at the same time, Clare’s husband’s “sound not quite human” is silenced to oddly dispassionate anger – or to some other quiet emotion (Larsen, : ). More importantly, the Roaring Twenties’ racial caste system gets off the hook. The film reduces Clare’s death to a triangular whodunnit: Irene? Bellew? In Larsen’s novel, Clare’s (down) fall is symbolic punishment for transgressing the color line. Her “death by misadventure” is not a question of individual accountability or choice: Society at large kills Clare (Larsen, : ). In the novel and perhaps also the film, Irene’s inner life – her logic, her desires, her anxieties – impels the plot trajectory that makes the end inevitable. But Larsen makes it clear that Irene’s cloistered inner life does not belong to her as an individual so much as to the cultural types she lives in relation to, especially the New Negro woman. The conclusion is wrought by the impossibility of resolving the conflicts baked into this cultural model of Black femininity. The New Negro woman’s scripted desires are riven with paradox: Chastely maternal, ambitiously self-sacrificing, and aggressively self-regulated – want all the right things, but not too much. Which is to say: Want to be Black, but embrace a US identity defined by white middleclass values. Hall preserves a more general sense of the ways in which white models of selfhood script Irene’s and Clare’s and US life, and she deserves a lot of credit for her visually stunning, thoroughly watchable interpretation of these characters’ interdependent narratives. Yet we cannot help but feel that her characterization reflects a broader contemporary erasure of the reasons why passing was and is a compelling decision for individuals seeking better opportunities. In the novel, every character is a foil for another – not just



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                        .  ´   

Irene/Clare, but also Irene/Brian, Brian/Clare, Clare’s biracial father/Clare’s white husband, etc. Larsen’s point, as Lisa has also argued before, is that these ironic distinctions matter a great deal: They are the difference between life and death for us all, not just Clare and Irene. For all of this family resemblance, people get differently punished for living out the conflicts of their desires.



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 

Quare Bodies

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 ALEXANDRIA SMITH

Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society – Black or gay – I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted, to look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice.” To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

In the more than thirty years after her death, Audre Lorde’s impact on literature and culture has grown wide and deep. Her poetry, essays, interviews, and memoirs are read and studied throughout the world, her voice emanates from the documentaries made about her life and work, and her name is attached to institutions such as the Audre Lorde Visiting Professor Of Queer Studies at Spelman College and the Audre Lorde Project. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is part autobiography, part family history, and fully comprised of poetic prose. This narrative gives readers a sense of the lived experiences – beginning with her parents’ migration to New York from Grenada in , through Lorde’s birth in  and ending in  when she is twenty-six years old – which subtend the core of her ideas, language, and politics in print. Zami is a touchstone for Black, queer, feminist, lesbian, and women writers across time periods and identity positions. First published in , Zami arrives toward the end of Lorde’s life, yet in the midst of an active publishing period. In  she published The Cancer Journals, a memoir documenting her negotiation of the realities of breast cancer, a mastectomy, and an ongoing healing process.  sees the arrival of her extremely influential Sister Outsider: Collected Essays and Speeches, a collection of essays, journal entries, speeches, conference presentations, and interviews spanning from  to . Zami announces its genre as biomythography, a term that Lorde discusses in a  interview 

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  

with Claudia Tate as “a biomythography, which is really fiction. It has the elements of biography and history of myth. In other words, it’s fiction built from many sources. This is one way of expanding our vision . . . You might call Zami a novel. I don’t like to call it that.” Through innovating a new genre term and specifying it in this way, Lorde distances this book from strict adherence to the conventions of (auto)biography and the novel, while simultaneously emphasizing the fictive, the constructed, the fabulated nature of all writing, including the story she has written about her own life. As a genre descriptor, biomythography functions as a statement of the text’s intention, an assertion of its investment in poetics, aesthetics, and the narration of lived experience. Zami’s “expansive vision” marks an intentional expansion beyond the singular focus of one person’s life to account for the communities in which that person – Lorde herself – is shaped and contributes to. The selfreflective form of biomythography facilitates Lorde’s stated commitment to prioritize her lived experience and embodiment, rendering it in a communally-oriented voice and reflecting the insights she has gained through being in relation with others. The concepts contained within biomythography, as well as the term itself, have come to influence ensuing generations of feminist and queer studies scholars. This chapter examines Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as a worthwhile case study in the larger context of portrayals of queer bodies, particularly Black queer women’s bodies, in US literature. While Zami is, of course, only one text within a network of overlapping traditions of Black feminist, lesbian, and women’s writing, it has representative value owing to Audre Lorde’s titanic position within the canons of these traditions, its analyses of the gendered and racial specificity of Audre Lorde’s embodied experiences, and its narrative theorization of the feminist concepts found elsewhere in Lorde’s body of writing. In what follows I argue that Audre Lorde’s writing locates her embodied experience as a center from which feeling and the narrative accounting for that feeling emanates. I argue that Lorde’s writing illustrates her sense of her body as integral for feeling and therefore knowing, and that the interrelation of feeling and knowing is a key theme across her body of work. Beyond its relevance in her own writing, Lorde’s approach to treating the body as central to feeling and knowing illuminates a pattern in contemporary Black queer writing. In this chapter I will give background on Lorde as a writer, situate Zami within her other texts, and describe some of the key moments in the book that illustrate Zami’s approach to embodiment particularly clearly. In recognition of the subjective intermingling that accompanies autobiographical and self-reflective writing I use Audre and Lorde somewhat interchangeably, with ‘Lorde’ most often referring to her role as author and ‘Audre’ in reference to the subject within the text. 

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Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

Zami is an exemplar of a Black lesbian and Black feminist literary practice that conveys a dialogic relationship between embodied experience and writing: Living informs writing, and vice versa. Within Lorde’s corpus of work, the link between embodiment and writing is enabled through her concept of the erotic as a site of corporeal and spiritual power. This concept is articulated and defined in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,” first read as a conference presentation in , published in independent press pamphlets, and included in the collection of essays Sister Outsider. This brief and powerful essay offers multiple articulations of how Lorde defines the erotic, including as “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love in its deepest meanings.” Within Lorde’s work, these ideas are not restricted to the ways they find expression in “Uses of the Erotic.” In contrast, Lorde’s essays, poetry, and biomythographic work Zami are similarly infused with attention to expressing emotional and embodied depth of feeling. Lorde’s multi-genre exploration of the erotic gives flesh to Barbara Christian’s argument in “The Race for Theory” that literature and other forms of creative, artistic production have long been primary sites for Black theorizing. Christian’s essay, published in  – five years after Zami – was responsive to a cultural and academic moment dominated by what she understood to be familiar white supremacist tropes of non-white intellectual inadequacy, masquerading as a newly articulated academic privileging of Eurocentric philosophical abstraction in lieu of literary criticism taking authors of color and their literature seriously. While Lorde herself was not preoccupied with directly responding to the same antagonizing voices Christian engaged, Lorde’s intermingling of theorizing and poetics was a career-long praxis which has both subtly and overtly informed the generations of Black feminist and queer artists and scholars whose work is indebted to hers. In this vein, I read Zami as not only narrating Audre Lorde’s lived experiences, but as theorizing and analyzing the lived effects of difference within the practice of community, and as advocating for the political and psychological necessity of spaces which allow multiply marginalized subjects full acceptance. Just as the ideas raised in “Uses of the Erotic” permeate Zami and Lorde’s other writings, her essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” articulates Lorde’s sense of the urgent need for women, feminists, and lesbians to courageously account for one another’s differences as supporting, not impeding, the construction of meaningful community. She writes in this essay, 

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   I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition.

This analysis of inhabiting multiple marginalized identities and the embodied consequences of being asked or expected to self-alienate from these identities presents a form of theorizing rooted in lived experience. This  speech turned essay is by no means Lorde’s first expression of these concepts, yet their articulation at this time is positioned within a broader conversation on the roles of difference, identity, and community happening contemporaneously in Black women’s and Black feminist writing. Between  and the early s, a wealth of essays, articles, and books were published by Black women about Black women’s structural particularities. To consider just a few of these contributions here, we might think of Frances Beale’s  essay titled “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Statement published in , and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s pair of essays introducing the concept of intersectionality in  and . In Sister Outsider and Zami, Lorde writes herself into a community of Black women, lesbians, and queer writers treating the dilemma of having to expect that parts of oneself will not be legible within the spaces one seeks, and challenging one’s audience to imagine and act otherwise than these structured exclusions. Critical to Lorde’s writerly orientation is a sense of a plural or collective self, meaning that Lorde always understands her individual particularity as necessarily in relation with the others that she sees herself in community with – women, lesbians, Black people, and peoples of the Third World more broadly. Zami’s coming-of-age arc is not only a movement toward adulthood, but equally toward felt senses of belonging that do not demand the sacrifice of crucial parts of the self. The conversations and experiences described in Zami grapple with Lorde’s formative encounters with many of the identity category labels she later comes to adopt and reiterate in her writing: Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, socialist, feminist. Lorde illustrates these identity-terms as umbrellas under which individuals organize themselves in pursuit of relation and belonging, and she is attentive to the ways that these and other terms seek to produce and articulate legibility, both within and beyond one’s desired communities. Throughout Zami, Lorde’s investment in communal identification and definition is necessarily responsive to how identities such as Black, woman, and lesbian are shaped 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

by the dominant white supremacist, misogynist, and homophobic society, as well as invested in naming and enacting the ways said identities exceeded these framings. Zami’s movement traces the places Audre goes, the decisions she makes, the language she employs to situate herself in communities where all of her can be seen and held, and where she can receive as much as she contributes. Zami powerfully illustrates the spatial and geographic, linguistic, and interpersonal dimensions of the search for space to be received in one’s wholeness. In one example, Lorde shares her experience of being “part of the ‘freaky’ bunch of lesbians who weren’t into role-playing,” which is how she terms the decisive and somewhat rigid identification with the oppositional categories of butch and femme that dominated the community of New York gay girl/lesbian bars she moved within at the time. This lack of clearly adopted role contributes, like Lorde’s Blackness, to her feeling of being illegible and less desirable within a gay community segregated along many lines. The epigraph of this chapter reflects Lorde’s negotiations of legibility’s relationship to belonging. Her acceptance of her difference even and especially within the “sub-communities” of fellow societal outsiders allows her to free herself from futile efforts to bend into unbefitting shapes in pursuit of acceptance. The redirection of this precious energy to the efforts of “stay[ing] alive” and “stay[ing] human” produces growth and reveals a strength that we might recognize as rooted in the erotic. Critically, Zami accounts for the ways Lorde’s investment in the identity of woman also encompassed recognition of the ways others challenged that identity. The queerness of Audre’s relationship to womanhood is felt in the silences surrounding her internal landscape of love and desire when in community with women in the “straight” world, and equally so when the realities of her Blackness emerge among her gay sisters. This knowledge is felt even when it remains unarticulated, such as when an older Ukrainian woman offers Muriel a skirt as a seemlier option than the dungarees routinely worn by Audre and Muriel in their neighborhood. “I knew there was nothing I could do, including skirts and being straight, that would make me acceptable,” whether in the (dis)approving eyes of these European elders or in the desirability hierarchy of the gay bars. Zami records a range of the circumstances in which a young Audre is interpellated as Black, always alongside and in conversation with her other identifying factors. The consistency of this interpellation provides a ground on which Lorde grows to name and seek to understand how her multiple identities function together simultaneously, and how she herself forms more than the sum of their parts. Consistent with Lorde’s approach to narrative and (auto)biographical theorizing, much of Zami’s accounting for the 

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  

valences of Blackness within her network of intersecting identities occurs through narrations of bodily encounters with anti-Blackness. Lorde describes instances of being taunted by children at school and adults on the street in New York City, being denied entry to an ice cream parlor in Washington, D.C., and her mother’s various efforts to shield her children from these normalized indignities. Even from these early experiences, Audre learns that Blackness neither appears nor is experienced uniformly. Lorde’s writing anticipates and meaningfully responds to the ways that Blackness has sometimes been conflated with or reduced to African American experience, both colloquially and in cultural production. She literally anchors the text in her parents’ national and regional heritage, describing their migration from Grenada to New York City in the s in the narrative’s first pages. While Lorde’s parents neither subscribe to nor articulate belonging with African Americans in racialized terms, they recognize and are responsive to the ways that they as “foreign,” West Indian Black people living in a segregated Harlem were subjected to the material forces of white supremacy. Readers are able to see and hear the Afro-centric elements of Lorde’s literary voice as it has developed over the course of her career, such as the articulation of her Caribbean heritage as an extended form of Black African heritage – an articulation rooted in her mother’s saying that “island women make good wives; whatever happens, they’ve seen worse,” and enhanced with Lorde’s own analysis of the “softer edge of African sharpness upon” the Grenadian and Barbadian women she witnessed as an adult. While anti-Blackness is a formidable antagonizing force in Lorde’s experience of the world, moments of communal belonging and identification, both within and beyond the parameters of Black social spaces, also populate Zami’s racial landscape. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty Audre spends a transformative period of time in Mexico. I read this trip as a definitive experience in Zami’s explorations of identity, race, community, belonging, and writing as a tool for negotiating these phenomena. The book positions Audre’s expression of desire to go to Mexico within a context of an undesirable interpersonal and political climate in the United States: She is critical of the fear produced by the anti-communist red scare in the United States – in full swing in  – and she is fleeing both her family in the wake of her father’s death and the end of a relationship with a dispassionate young white woman named Bea. What Audre leaves behind in the United States – familial and romantic disconnection, a political context of pervasive fear – set up the contrasts found in the erotically engaging embodied and expressive experiences she encounters in Mexico. Lorde finds identification, while also acknowledging difference, in “the brown faces” that filled the streets of Mexico City as she explores on her first 

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Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

days there. She writes, “seeing my own color reflected on the streets in such great numbers was an affirmation for me that was brand-new and very exciting. I had never felt visible before, nor even known I lacked it.” Lorde’s adjacency, up to this point, to Black and specifically African American community facilitates the kind of negotiation of racial/color identification she describes here. This adjacency is due in part to Lorde’s multiple outsider status: In addition to her parents’ previously-mentioned cultural difference from African Americans, her queerness sends her in search of more accepting spaces that often find her beyond the boundaries of Black New York. During these early days in Mexico City, Audre recounts a racialization in the terms of the color politics of her own light to medium brownness, a perspective that informs who she sees as similar to herself and who seems to see her as similar to their selves. Based on these encounters, Lorde interprets Mexico as possessing a cultural context capable of receiving her in a way that she finds needful – which is not to speak, necessarily, of its broader racial context which may not receive other Black people in the same way. The practicalities of language – the need for people to speak with in English – draws Lorde into a community with a group of white American expatriates living in Cuernavaca, forty-five miles south of Mexico City. During this time she meets a middle-aged white woman named Eudora, a known if somewhat tepidly received member of this white American community. Eudora is a journalist, a scholar of the region’s history and cultures, and a fellow lesbian with whom Lorde has a transformative relationship. Intimacy with Eudora prefaces greater clarity and intentionality regarding Lorde’s use of language to describe her queerness. She writes, “Eudora was the first woman I’d met who spoke about herself as a lesbian rather than as ‘gay,’ which was a word she hated. Eudora said it was a north American east-coat term that didn’t mean anything to her, and what’s more most of the lesbians she had known were anything but gay.” For much of Zami Lorde describes her community as one of “gay girls,” which is reflective of the language used at the time by those she was in community with. In the writings which follow the period described in Zami she not only uses but elaborates and advocates on behalf of lesbian as an identity position. This is not to suggest that the change in language is productive of a changed identity in and of itself, but rather that Mexico serves as a setting for Audre’s departure from her norms and a more expansive set of ways of seeing herself and being seen. And critically, Audre is aware of the processes of seeing and being seen. The undoing which Mexico provides her of her lifelong felt sense of invisibility is found in “the streets, in the buses in the markets, in the plaza, in the particular attention within Eudora’s eyes.” 

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  

Overall, Audre’s time in Mexico represents growth in her erotic capacities at the level of attunement to sensation, quality of connection with other people, and understanding of art as a means of erotic expression. Lorde’s intersecting identities mean that there is no “likely” place from which she would find love and belonging, hence her warm embrace of Eudora and other lovers across the differences of age, race, and class. Lorde’s experiences of receiving genuine connection from seemingly unlikely places underlie her long-standing commitment to venerate difference as a fact of life, as a benefit for connection, and as something that can and must be taken seriously in relationships between people. She writes in “Uses of the Erotic,” “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” If “Uses of the Erotic” explicitly proposes that erotic connection is a vehicle for the building of connection through and across difference, Zami’s narration of Audre’s relationship with Eudora and with other white lesbians provides lived examples of these erotic connections. Mexico’s natural beauty is the background for Lorde’s newly gained awareness of the world and her movements within it. Zami narrates many of the moments of this time period in language rich with imagistic details reflecting the richness of her experience. In one illustrative example Lorde writes of her time in Cuernavaca, One morning I came down the hill toward the square at dawn to catch my ride to the District. The birds suddenly cut loose all around me in the unbelievable sweet warm air. I had never heard anything so beautiful and unexpected before. I felt shaken by the waves of song. For the first time in my life, I had an insight into what poetry could be. I could use words to recreate that feeling, rather than to create a dream, which was what so much of my writing had been before.

Here, Lorde uses her descriptions of the environment and her surroundings to communicate emotional presence and engagement. The sense of presence and engagement described here stand in direct contrast to the kinds of disconnection Lorde felt before leaving the United States, such as the asymmetrical sexual desire and chemistry with Bea. Physically, Lorde’s increased presence manifests in outgrowing the habit of walking with her eyes down, adopted when she was a small child with severe vision issues, learning instead to hold her head up when walking. This shift literally creates the increased capacity to visually take in as much of her new environment as possible. The relationship of this increased presence to the tools of poetry and writing is expressed with the use of the world “could,” representing a 

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Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

future-oriented sense of desire and possibility. This moment simultaneously inaugurates a new phase in Lorde’s consciousness as a writer and reflects a new stage in Audre’s relationship to her own feelings. Zami’s narration up to this point has illustrated that she has always felt things deeply, and through this moment in Mexico she begins to articulate feeling – an attuned, engaged, and present feeling – as the source for her writing. Lorde’s increased attunement to her surroundings is embodied, as she often narrates embodied sensations and her engagement with them in relation to other people and phenomena in her environment. She describes while walking in the park one morning, “I felt myself unfolding like some large flower, as if the statue of the kneeling girl had come alive, raising her head to look full-faced into the sun. As I stepped out into the early morning flow of the avenida I felt the light and beauty of the park shining out of me, and the woman lighting her coals in a brazier on the corner smiled back at it in my face.” Audre feels herself aligned with her surroundings, specifically with the qualities of light and beauty that suffuse the park. These phenomena are embodied within her, she inhabits them, and she experiences another person noticing and responding to the light she has imbibed. Like Audre’s new sense of poetic possibility, her relationship to spoken language is similarly embodied. On speaking her affirmative desire to Eudora before they make love for the first time she writes, “as I spoke the words, I felt them touch and give life to a new reality within me, some half-known self come of age, moving out to meet her.” This expression of language is an embodied speech act, in that the words Audre’s mouth and mind enact a new state of being and have their own tactile quality. These words Audre speaks lend lifegiving – erotic, in her truest definition – movement and reality to a sense of self Audre has not yet been able to witness or know. Two significant romantic relationships occur toward the end of Zami’s narrative arc, one with a white woman named Muriel and the other with a Black woman named Afrekete, nicknamed Kitty. For the final part of this chapter, I turn to examine how these relationships illustrate Lorde’s construction of emotions as embodied as well as their portrayals of the role of interpersonal intimacy as healing. Most discussions of Zami dedicate at least some attention to the whirlwind romance with Afrekete which concludes Lorde’s narrative. This preoccupation is warranted, given the satisfying narrative completion of their initial meeting while each is otherwise romantically attached, their reunion in the wake of Lorde’s major breakup with Muriel, and the achingly lush and fertile language Lorde uses to recount their relationship. In order to fully appreciate Afrekete’s significance to Zami and to Audre Lorde as author and subject, we must consider the contrast presented by Lorde’s relationship to Muriel, particularly the difference in 

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  

Audre’s capacity to emotionally engage and respond to each woman. I will demonstrate how these differing emotional capacities and their shifting terrains are narrated in embodied terms. About six months after her return to New York from Mexico, Audre and Muriel meet through a mutual friend and begin a relationship. Lorde describes their intimacy as encompassing a range of overlapping affinities: Both wrote and talked about poetry, both lost close friends in their youth, and both – though very differently – grappled with challenges to their mental and emotional health arising from the compounded precarities of being young, poor, necessarily closeted lesbians. Lorde writes, “slowly but surely, Muriel became more and more like a vulnerable piece of myself. I could cherish and protect this piece because it was outside of me. Hedging my emotional bets, inside safe and undisturbed.” Zami’s narration of Audre’s relationship with Muriel emphasizes their evolving forms of codependence. Audre’s attempts to externalize her own vulnerabilities through maternal care for Muriel are exacerbated through the saga of Muriel’s long-term unemployment, her alcoholism, her untreated schizophrenia, the couple’s experiments with consensual nonmonogamy as well as with deceptive infidelity, and their shared unwillingness to account for the fact of Audre’s Blackness. All of these complicating factors occurred in the midst of the beauty their relationship also held, as Lorde relished in the new experience of decisively living with a woman lover, “[thinking] of [their] life as a mutual exploration, a progress through the strength of [their] loving.” After discovering Jill, an old school friend, and Muriel having sex in their living room while Audre had been sleeping in the next room, Lorde characterizes the final days of her relationship with Muriel with the themes of distance, separation, and injury. Significantly, these themes are relayed through the imagery and embodied sensations of forms of covering, veiling, and being poisoned from within. Traveling from the East Village to the Bronx for work the morning after the discovered infidelity, Lorde recounts that “the street and the sky and the people I passed were all covered with a veil of rage fastened to an iron ring that was anchored with a steel bolt through the middle of my chest.” In symbolic contrast to the adoption of Muriel’s vulnerability as an externalized extension of her own, Audre responds to the sense of betrayal of this event by constructing protective barriers between herself and the people and natural and built environments which surround her. She is attentive, as at other times in Zami, to the ambient presence of the seasons even as she dissociates from the moment. “In the dampness of this overcast Monday morning, the brightness of the new green was startling.” Pain ultimately pierces this veil of numbing rage, after Audre accidentally pours boiling 

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Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

water from a tea kettle onto her hand at work and the sensation of searing pain “erupt[s] into the space left empty by the draining away of the poison.” Paying close attention to the narrative construction and expression of Lorde’s embodied barriers to intimacy in her response to deep betrayal lends greater significance to the softening and re-sensitizing that unfolds through Audre’s relationship with Afrekete. Nearly a full year passes between the summer of Audre and Muriel’s breakup and the spring when Audre reencounters Afrekete. Lorde describes their re-acquaintance in embodied terms, as she describes her connection to and separation from Muriel, even as these relational dynamics vary greatly and even contrast. Dancing figures as a metaphorical connection with Muriel and a literal one with Afrekete. Lorde describes herself and Muriel as “unknowing partners in an intimate and complicated minuet.” After multiple seasons of mourning, it is in the spring of a new year when she recounts, “dancing with [Afrekete] this time, I felt who I was and where my body was going, and that feeling was more important to me than any lead or follow.” Lorde’s renewed familiarity with herself as a person is coterminous with a new sense of her body’s positioning and movement, both individually and in relation with Afrekete. Through dancing, we are also able to see the distinction I am drawing between Lorde’s experience of the sensations of cloaking or covering as a response to rage, and emergence or re-sensitivity as a form of healing through and from the rage. Lorde writes, for the last few months since Muriel had moved out, my skin had felt cold and hard and essential, like thin frozen leather that was keeping the shape expected. That night on the dance floor of the Page Three as Kitty and I touched our bodies together in dancing, I could feel my carapace soften slowly and then finally melt, until I felt myself covered in a warm, almost forgotten, slip of anticipation, that ebbed and flowed at each contact of our moving bodies.

Lorde’s receptivity to giving and receiving Afrekete’s touch begins to perform the work of reuniting herself with her own body’s capacities for sensation. Throughout Zami’s narrative movement, Lorde has illustrated shifting levels of engagement with her body’s incredible sensitivity, and the pain of her protracted breakup with Muriel produces a felt and imagined distance from that sensitivity. Intimacy with Afrekete begins the process of thawing. Lorde describes her capacities for sensitivity returning as an emergence from within her, in contrast to a veil of rage or other disconnected surface surrounding her. In the immediate wake of rage Lorde cloaks as a protective measure, while the consequence of her healing is felt in her body’s receptivity to touch and sensation. 

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  

Lorde closes Zami with symbolic and metaphorical attention to skin, the human body’s largest organ, which functions as a permeable barrier to the world around us and the surface through which we experience tactile contact. Lorde remarks on the deep and rapid intimacy she shared with Afrekete as, “we had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange,” in the wake of which, “[Afrekete’s] print remains upon [Lorde’s] life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo.” Afrekete’s print is evidence of Lorde’s nascent acceptivity, her capacity to be imprinted on at their time of their coupling. Lorde would not have been able to receive Afrekete’s print without the necessary softening her skin underwent, literally and symbolically. In the epilogue Lorde affirms that “every woman I have ever loved has left her print on me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me.” With Afrekete, Lorde narrates a younger version of herself in possession of a renewed and expansive capacity for knowing through feeling, a willingness to hazard the risks of intimacy, and the nearness of a fellow Black woman whose presence enriches these possibilities. Audre and Afrekete know, and know to articulate, the need to be both “soft and tough,” as Black people, Black women, and Black women who love other women. If upon Lorde’s return from Mexico she felt her Blackness as a “fact [that] was irrevocable: armor, mantle, and wall,” lovemaking with Afrekete finds that Blackness as less wall and more conduit for “the silver hard sweetness of the full moon, reflected in the shiny mirrors of [their] sweatslippery dark bodies, sacred as the ocean at high tide.” From beginning to end, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name models how Black queer literature can account for the body as a record of experience and as a site through which some of our most powerful theorizing can emerge. Audre relationship with Afrekete and its position at the close of Zami is symbolically and narratively significant, given its implications for the themes of identity, community, and belonging that ground Zami as well as Lorde’s larger collection of work. Lorde’s narrative descriptions of her relationships with Eudora, Muriel, and Afrekete emphasize the ways that her body bears the evidence of her physical, emotional, and conceptual connections with these women. Audre’s relationship with Eudora unfolded during a period of time in which Lorde learned to use poetic language to harness a newly articulable erotic depth of attention to embodied sensation. The emergence of Audre and Eudora’s sexual relationship from an otherwise erotic friendship, in combination with Eudora’s intentional deployment of “lesbian” as both term and way of being, gave a young Audre access to the lived and linguistic insights we see elaborated later in “Uses of the Erotic,” as well as 

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Body of Knowledge Audre Lorde’s Zami

the framework of difference-in-community that Lorde dedicates her life and praxis to. Through growing alongside and ultimately detaching from Muriel, Audre experiences the limits of a lesbian and women’s community that will not meaningfully account for race as a factor of important difference, a limitation which coincides with the kinds of disconnection from honesty and integrity which carry devastating interpersonal – and corporeally felt – consequences. Lorde’s body of writing puts forth what we see to be true from other Black queer literature – that the narration of emotions as embodied phenomena asserts the realness of these experiences for the subject who lives them as well as for the reading audience who encounters the narrative subject. For a Black queer author and subject like Audre Lorde, the narrative assertion of this realness in such tangible terms serves as an invitation for the readers to meaningfully engage the queer subjectivity being illustrated in the text regardless of, or specifically in contrast to, the potential impediments to Black queer subjects’ legibility as human. The narration of thoughts and emotions as they are anchored in corporeal form is an ontological assertion of Black queer existence.



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 AHMAD GREENE-HAYES

The Black Body, Violence, and Religion

In his now classic  text entitled, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind, Black social ethicist and theologian Riggins Earl posited that “white divines of the plantation South used their literary skills to prove that slaves’ souls must be valued at the expense of their bodies.” He continued, “The soul-body dichotomy is foundational to the theological and ethical problem because it inevitably affected the way slaves saw themselves in relationship to both God and their plantation masters.” This dichotomy produced a social and religious grammar which read African people as either “soulless bodies” or “bodiless souls” (Earl, : –). Earl’s assessment of the archives of slavery and their relation to the colonial project of Christianization are instructive for contending with the interconnected relationship between “the Black Body” and “Religion” – two categories fraught with multiple, and often, conflicting meanings. Overwhelmingly, the dichotomy that Earl names overdetermines how scholars of African American religions attend to the question of Black bodily experiences in relation to religion, especially as Christian theological hegemony has historically and historiographically been the field’s guiding theoretical compass for attending to the archives of slavery and its afterlives. In this vein, historian Wallace Best observed in , “Scholars of African American religion, in particular, have been lax in taking seriously the relationship between black religion and bodily experience” (Best, : ). This chapter thinks alongside Best’s observation by asking the following questions: In the face of gratuitous anti-Black violence inflicted upon Black people’s bodies, what exactly does it mean to “take seriously” the relationship between Black religion and bodily experience? How have scholars done this critical work, and where does the field need to go regarding this imperative line of inquiry? This chapter responds to these questions by moving beyond the Black church paradigm so central to Earl’s assessment, and instead considers how scholars have ruminated on, revered, and contended with the Black body and its fungibility as it relates to Black religions in 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Black Body, Violence, and Religion

America in the wake of slavery. Matters of the body and of embodiment, like prayer and divine utterances, are the backbone of all Black religions, and to fully comprehend Black religious belief and practice, we must reckon with “the Black Body” – as a vessel or conduit for spiritual power, as an ideology, as a site of/for white racial violence and dismemberment, and as currency in slavery and its afterlives. Now, a quick word on terminology. “The Black Body” is a charged locution, bearing a lot of weight. Indeed, the Black Body holds the score, even as it is Black people who experience psychic and bodily pain. “Black Body” and “Black people” are related, cousins even, but they are certainly not synonymous. Here, I think with Black critical theorists who posit that Black sentient beings exist in fungible bodies, but lack “personhood” in Western modernity, such that (Blackened) non-humans experience violation upon (their) bodies in slavery and in slavery’s afterlives given the incessant and quotidian reality of anti-Blackness. Relatedly, “Religion” as a category is unruly, defying easy definition or careless oversimplification. I think with religious studies scholars Aaron W. Hughes and Russell T. McCutcheon, who have recently contended that “religion is nothing more (or less) than an imagined category that people use (often quite effectively, of course) when talking about, and thereby making sense of, their situations in the world” (Hughes and McCutcheon, : ). For the purposes of this chapter, then, “Religion” specifically refers to the spiritual, ritual, sacred, material and immaterial world-making, institution-building, and worship practices of people of African descent. Thus, to think about “The Black Body and Religion” necessitates an analysis of how Black religions emerge, though not solely in relation to, overarching systems of domination which incessantly violate “pained bodies” and “pained flesh” (Hartman, : –). In this chapter, I theoretically trace the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. Historian Judith Weisenfeld has historicized how religious practitioners of African descent theorized their own subjectivity from the space of “theologically constituted ideas of skin color” and from the vantage of “the religio-racial body,” or the racialized body de-raced and imbued with religious meaning (S. Johnson, ; Weisenfeld, : –, ). The body and its maintenance through food, clothing, and other methods, however, is not the only space in which to think through racialization and racemaking as religious processes (Weisenfeld, : –). As critical theorist Hortense Spillers reminds us, “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that 

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    - 

zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” She continues, “These undecipherable markings,” from the ship, the hold, and the plantation, “on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” (Spillers, : ). In this chapter, I think alongside both Weisenfeld (“the religio-racial body”) and Spillers (“hieroglyphics of the flesh”) to consider the flesh, and by extension the Black body, as a site of inquiry in the study of Black religions in the Americas (see also Beliso-De Jesús, : –). These hieroglyphics – or a sort of Blackened religious grammar – are pivotal to the Black study of Black religion, especially as practitioners engage the anti-Black world using a host of spiritual practices that exceed white, Western comprehension. In this vein, we must consider R. A. Judy’s provocative question in Sentient Flesh, “How does the flesh, formally expressed as the enslaved captive body, become Negro?” (Judy, : ). This chapter narrates how archives of Black religious history depict the flesh as the canvas upon which white race makers place and play out their eroticized, pornotropic fantasies concerning the religions of the enslaved and their descendants, even as the captive body is the space in which race-making is mass produced and marked in modernity. Moreover, this chapter investigates how Black people engage in and cultivate “hieroglyphics of the flesh” to subvert and challenge these systems of domination and their religious grammars, as the body functions as a portal for the divine and for deities to dwell among the people. In this way, this chapter does not romanticize these hieroglyphics, but in the last section I gesture toward a brief examination of how some Black theological deciphering has the potential to recapitulate master class hermeneutics. Black Bodies, Captivity, and Religion Since the late nineteenth century, slavery and its afterlives have been central concerns to scholars of Africana religions, especially as anthropologists and social scientists of the period sought out inventive ways to uncover, prove, or disprove the validity of African retentions (see Raboteau, : –; Savage, : –; Stewart and Hucks, ). Some scholars took a different turn, asking questions about the relationship between Black religion and domination. In his meditation on the import of prayer, for example, historian of religions Charles H. Long reflected, “To whom does one pray from the bowels of the slave ship? To the gods of Africa? To the gods of the masters of the slave vessels? To the gods of an unknown and foreign land of enslavement? To whom does one pray?” (Long, : ). 

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The Black Body, Violence, and Religion

While Long’s focus here was prayer and its centrality to almost all religious formations, he was also implicitly concerned with the Black body and what could be emoted or expressed from the enclosed space of bodily confinement, or “from the bowels of the slave ship.” Indeed, Long’s concerns served as counter to the longstanding white, Western ethos central to the Euro–American “study” of religion, which emerged as a colonial project and further crystalized during the era of Jim Crow. For example, nearly one hundred years before the emancipation of the enslaved and three hundred years before Long would step foot in the academy, Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant stated in his  book, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous” (Kant, Frierson, and Guyer, : –). Feeling, the affective, or that which is felt, if not embodied, by the senses was rendered incompatible with the enslaved or “the slave” and their descendants. Those who were brutalized and bore chattel against their will were force-fed the idea that feeling was abstraction: A Black myth, a white truth. Kant continued by delineating the racialized and religio–cultural differences between “these two human kinds,” more specifically, the enslaved and the enslaver, the colonizer and the colonized, the propertied and the propertized: “The religion of fetishes which is widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry,” he noted, “which sinks so deeply into the ridiculous as ever seems to be possible for human nature” (Kant, Frierson, and Guyer: –). The demonization of the African necessitated the demoralization of Africana religions, the erasure of the African’s culture, and the dismemberment of the African body and soul. Once Africana religious traditions were illegalized and illegitimated under the anti-Black, white Christian plantation economy, slaveholders theologized white supremacist philosophies of the human, such that Africans were rendered subhuman, monstrous, barbaric, non-beings devoid of feeling and personhood; slaves who beget slaves. Afropessimist Frank Wilderson describes this as “a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture,” and if anyone knows the power of ghosts, it is most certainly Black people, whose ancestors saw the unspeakable, jumped ship, stealed away, survived albeit traumatized, and kept the lines of communication open with those who crossed over (Wilderson, : –; see also Hurston, : –; ManigaultBryant, ; Otero, ). Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson would later riff on this idea, singing, “You know my soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” Looking back to look forward – or what the Akan tribe in Ghana is said to have called “Sankofa” – is a central feature of Black religious phenomena 

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experienced through, on, and in Black people’s bodies, as practitioners believe that the ancestors, spirits, deities, and divine presences blur time – moving from an African past to a Black present and prophetic future. This is brilliantly captured in Julie Dash’s  film, Daughters of the Dust, in which the family matriarch Nana Peazant stitches together a conjure bag that includes the hair of her mother, an enslaved woman, along with a lock of own hair to give to her children and their children as they prepare to take off North in , during the early years of what would become the Great Migration. Each generation is stitched together, literally, through Black religious practices of ancestral veneration. In this way, scholars of Black religions in the Americas remind us that, for many practitioners of African diasporic religions, the Orishas and the ancestors are “sensed and felt on the body” (Beliso-De Jesús, ). Even in captivity and under the gaze of white racial violence, Black people feel the Spirit and/or the spirits. Scholars of Africana religions throughout the diaspora – employing historical, ethnographic, and performance studies methods – have focused on these embodiments as it relates to Black religious ritual, aesthetics, and expressions, as evidenced by the many accounts published in the recently released Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas (), edited by scholars Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili. The editors note, perhaps further contextualizing Best’s earlier observation, “While scholars of African and African diasporic religions have focused for many years on the role of the body, they have rarely been in conversation with each other. Furthermore, their conversations about religious embodiment were limited by a focus on particular religions (i.e. Santeria, Islam) or by geography (African religions, Caribbean religions, African American religions)” (Covington-Ward and Jouili, : ). Harkening back to Riggins Earl’s assertions at this chapter’s opening, much of the disjuncture on this subject has had to do with African American religious studies’ emphasis on church histories and Christian theology, which all-too-often involve theologies and practices which call for denying the flesh and disembodiment even as shouting, speaking in tongues, and breath are central features of Black Christian religious performance, especially in charismatic contexts. In contrast, scholars of African diasporic religions engage religious contexts where Black bodies are celebrated through a religious sensuality that centers on food, alcohol, ritual dance, pleasure, and spirit possession. Scholars who have studied the relationship among African American Christian practice and African diasporic religions often comment on visual semblances, while highlighting much of African American Christianity’s imperative to disregard African heritage and body-soul holism, with notable exceptions including but certainly not limited to Christian hoodoo practitioners, the African 

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Methodist Episcopal Church or the Yoruba Baptists (Hucks, : –; Reed, : –; Dickerson, ). Despite this point, it is nonetheless important to consider the effects of Kant’s thesis and its application upon the enslaved and their descendants. In her examination of the violent Christianizing imperatives of enslavers, historian Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh has described their enactments of brutalization upon enslaved people’s bodies as “dismemberment.” The story does not end there, however, as enslaved Africans engaged in what she terms “re/membrance,” or “the ways that bondpeople’s religious productions were simultaneously acts of memory that drew on West and West Central African cosmological and ritual heritages and acts of remembrance – reconfigured and innovated practices aimed at mitigating the effects of dismemberment” (Wells-Oghoghomeh, : ). Such examples included the use of abortifacients to prevent the birth of slave children, infanticide, ritual poisonings of enslavers and rapists, and shouting and ceremonial dance, to name just a few. Drawing on this religious heritage, Black religious actors have constructed, performed, and enacted their own notions of religiously inflected “race-making” and performances in the wake of modernity. In groups such as Father Divine’s Peace Mission, the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, and other related groups, “people of African descent in the United States have often contested racial categories, worked to reshape racial meaning by challenging racial hierarchy, or sought to dismantle race altogether, seeking other bases for collective identity still rooted in shared African descent” (Weisenfeld, : ). Across the United States in the twentieth century, many people of African descent participated in “religio-racial movements,” in which they, “in rejecting Negro racial identity [also] did not repudiate blackness or dark skin but, rather, endowed it with meaning derived from histories other than those of enslavement and oppression” (Weisenfeld: ). In this way, religious practitioners confronted “white people’s agency in race making” even as race-making was a recurring “maintenance event” used to enforce and uphold white supremacy and racial dominance (Weisenfeld: –). Through these theological interventions, we come to know the complex social terrain of Jim Crow America and the simultaneous making and unmaking of racial caste by religious practitioners – both policed people of African descent “calling old gods by a new name” as ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston observed, and the police, who so often held up the bloodstained banner of Jesus Christ with both a gun and a lynch mob’s rope (Hurston, : ). Recall the words of one white supremacist ethnographer Dr. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, a former major in the Medical Department of the United 

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States Army, who wrote in , “The sensuality of the negro in the United States goes hand in hand with his religious superstitions. The utter sexual abandonment among them is for this reason so commonly seen at their famous camp-meetings . . . And, as to their voodoo practices in the South and elsewhere, they simply reek in their history with every unnatural crime in the calendar of bestial sensuality” (Shufeldt, : ). Considering Shufeldt’s characterization of the co-constitutive nature of Black religion (“superstitions” and “voodoo practices”) and Black sexuality (or what he terms “bestial sensuality” and “passion” in other places), it is also significant that Shufeldt distinguishes between “the negro of Africa” and “the flesh” in his demonization of Black religions, sexualities, and cultural expressions. Indeed, the flesh is the canvas upon which Black people articulated nonnormative sexualities notwithstanding master class hypersexualization of the slave and of the Negro. Through these religiously inflected racializing processes, the slave became Negro, even as religio–racial bodies remained captive, surveilled, and policed during Jim Crow segregation and amidst white racial–sexual terrorism. Moreover, religious practitioners of African descent used their religio–racial bodies to decipher hieroglyphics of the flesh imbued with religious, racial, and sexual meaning, in which they endeavored to upend and deconstruct white racial fantasies imposed on their bodies and personhood. Black people have done this precisely because “Blackness is not imperviousness to a politics of sex-gender but a site of its profound intensification” (Jackson, : ). In other words, one cannot understand “the Black body” without contending with how Blackness was constructed through sexualized, gendered, and eroticized violence by white race-makers in slavery and throughout Jim Crow modernity. To fully understand the religio–racial body, then, we must return to the flesh and its (hyper)sexualization, especially given the contradictory, yet concomitant, demonization of Black flesh by the white American Christian planter and his descendants. On this point, looking to archives of dismemberment shows us again and again that lynching was not only human sacrifice to the god of white supremacy, but it was also a form of erotic play for white Americans (Mathews, : –; Cone, ). White Christians and their allies consumed Black flesh and still hungered, in which “eating functions as a metalanguage for genital pleasure and sexual desire [and] eating is often a site of erotic pleasure itself” (Tompkins, : ). For white race-makers, Black flesh was a site of pleasure and ritualistic communion, whether through rape, torture, mutilation, or the commodification of Black body parts. Slaveholders were “the eaters” and enslaved people were “the eaten.” In so doing, slavery and Jim Crow were contingent upon the eating of Black flesh. Black investigative journalist and anti-rape activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett 

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observed, “The nineteenth-century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd” (Wells-Barnett, ). In their distribution, white racemakers situated the flesh of the captive religio–racial body as the centrum of erotic racialization, and by sorting through records – press, police, anthropological, social scientific, church, and governmental – left by these white race makers, we see the means by which Black religious practitioners navigated the ever-present threat of death and dying. Given the centrality of sexualized and brutalized flesh to the regulation of the religio–racial body, Black religious practitioners simultaneously chose and were forced to reckon with the flesh and its implications for racial, religious, and sexual identity. For Black Pentecostals, the carnal desires of the flesh were denied for the purposes of sanctification and holiness, for faith healers and sex workers, the flesh was pleasured and provided pleasure, for other Black Atlantic religious practitioners, (animal) flesh was often used for ritual sacrifice, or flesh – both alive and dead – was adorned through a variety of sartorial choices. Indeed, Black flesh constituted a robust religio– racial world, and its eroticization was due largely to anti-African sentiment and white racial anxieties about Vodou (or “voodoo”) and the legacies of slave rebellions like that of Nat Turner and of the Haitian Revolution. For instance, recall the words of the Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James from his  book, The Black Jacobins, “Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves travelled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk; and now, since the revolution, to hear the political news and make their plans” (James, : ). As I have argued elsewhere, Black Atlantic religions have long been discredited by colonial powers, and white Christian supremacists marked these “discredited knowledges” as “conspiracy,” “primitive,” or “fanaticism,” evidenced by the enduring, racialized, and racist category of “the voodoo cult” in the Black Atlantic world. Many Black religious actors, both past and present, contend with this legacy and the captive and policed religio–racial bodies who traversed it through a highly interpretative “hieroglyphics of the flesh.” In other words, the flesh was imbricated with religious, racial, and sexual meaning, and Black people often deified their own flesh, making themselves gods in the flesh, walking, and living among the people. Bearing in mind the relationship among domination, brutality, and religious performance, scholars of Africana religions have thought deeply about how Black people engage the body and theologies of embodiment in their religious practices. From spirit possession to faith healing to holy dances to scripted performances to chanted sermons to the spirituals and the blues, the body is not solely a site for white erotic racial fantasy and violence, but it is 

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also a conduit for Black religious experience, transcendence, and communion with the Divine – deities, spirits, and gods. On March ,  – amidst her time as a staff member of the Works Progress Administration’s archival and documentation efforts – Zora Neale Hurston worshiped with and studied the “ritualistic expression from the lips of the communicants of the Seventh Day Church of God” in Beaufort, South Carolina. She wrote, “Its keynote is rhythm. In this church they have two guitars, three symbols, two tambourines, one pair of rattle goers, and two washboards. Every song is rhythmic as are their prayers and their sermons.” Focusing in on the sonic resonances of the Sanctified church, otherwise called “Holy Rollers” or Pentecostals, Hurston continued, “The unanimous prayer is one in which every member of the church prays at the same time but prays his own prayer aloud, which consists of exotic sentences, liquefied by intermittent chanting so that the words are partly submerged in the flowing rising and falling chant.” Initially intrigued by the church’s ritualistic similarities with Africanderived spiritual traditions and cosmologies – or what scholars have termed “African retentions” – Hurston then described “the form of prayer” – with its Africana soteriological orientation – “like the limbs of a tree, glimpsed now and then through the smothered leaves. It is a thing of wondrous beauty, drenched in harmony and rhythm” (Hurston, ). In other iterations of her fieldwork in the Black South and the Caribbean, Hurston took note of conversions and visions, or moments in which the spirit world engaged with practitioners’ bodies while asleep and awake, and shouting, writing in the s, “There can be little doubt that shouting is a survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalized. The implication is the same, however, it is a sign of special favor from the spirit that it chooses to drive out the individual consciousness temporarily and use the body for its expression” (Hurston, : ). Black people’s bodies have historically been a site for religious expression, and as Hurston long observed, these expressions made manifest the African ancestor in modernity. Contemporary Implications While it is certainly true that the spirits ride, mount, descend upon, speak through, possess Black people’s bodies, it is also true that white supremacist, misogynistic, and cisheteropatriarchal theologies and cultural ideologies have long shaped and complicated Black people’s relationships to their own bodies, causing not only what Wells-Oghoghomeh has referred to as dismemberment in slavery, but also disembodiment in contemporary religious contexts (Johnson, : –). In this regard, several scholars, 

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many of whom have training in theology and ethics, have taken up these concerns as central components of their research agendas in Black Religious Studies, in order to find ways to lead Black religious practitioners – primarily within Black, Christian, and cisheteronormative contexts – to reclaim, love, and “loose” their Black bodies from theological oppression. In the canon of African American literature, James Baldwin’s  novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, is perhaps the most prescient example of this conundrum, as a queered Christ is in fraught communion with a queer Baldwin. The novel appears to be a semi-autobiographical fiction, though Baldwin never admitted such. In Part III: The Threshing Floor, the church infringes on the queer imaginings of a Black church boy whose reality is not hypermasculine, Black male preacherly, or “holy” in the context of Black Pentecostalism. Some good things dwell in John’s (the protagonist) Black queer flesh, despite how the church deemed his body a vestibule of sin. He has masturbatory thoughts and is curious about nonnormative sexuality, even while in the sanctuary of “the Temple of the Fire Baptized.” And yet, John’s stepfather – his own flesh and blood, so to speak – states, “I’m going to beat sin out of him. I’m going to beat it out” (Baldwin, : ). Baldwin writes, “All the darkness rocked and wailed as his father’s feet came closer; feet whose tread resounded like God’s read in the garden of Eden, searching the covered Adam and Eve. Then his father stood just above him, looking down. Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son” (ibid.). John’s inner wrestling with queerness – a “darkness” that “rocked and wailed” – incited violence and illumed a power imbalance whereby Gabriel, this God-like figure (or overseer) imbued with authority from his faithful congregants, “stood above” John, the young queer church boy, while judgingly “looking down” upon him. The irony of this juxtaposition is evident in the fact that the novel begins with Baldwin elucidating the significance of the Sanctified church in the Grimes family during the early twentieth century, and with Baldwin’s thick descriptions of how faith functioned centrally in every other aspect of their family. While they sing the songs of holy men and women, read the holy scriptures, and pray fervently, Baldwin compellingly demonstrates, however, that contention and violence are also at the crux of social relations in this Christian household. Roy argues with Elizabeth about Gabriel’s lifestyle and John questions Elizabeth about Gabriel’s character: “Mama, is Daddy a good man?” and we learn that Gabriel devotes more time to his religious practices than he does to his family, as Sarah, his daughter notes, “He sure is praying all the time” (Baldwin, : ). Gabriel is also said to be an abusive husband and father – both physically and verbally. He abstains from 

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speaking with his children and wife, but instead, speaks at them, and his only interaction with Roy for example, is through beatings. In many ways, Baldwin’s depiction of Gabriel speaks to how Black male preachers are never quite placed under public scrutiny in the same ways Black women or LGBTQ individuals are, reifying the contradictions inherent to the plantation church wherein the slave body was a site of commodification and surveillance by the master class. In this regard, it is fitting to conclude this chapter by turning to contemporary, controversial matters of Black religion and the body, matters that extend from the plantation church’s troubled beginnings. On Saturday, November , , for instance, Andrew Caldwell came to the altar at the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) convocation in St. Louis, Missouri, exclaiming, “I Ain’t Gay No More.” Before Caldwell uttered those words, Bishop Brandon Porter asked, “What did you come down here for?” to which Caldwell responded, “To get delivered . . . more.” Porter continued, “Do you believe that the Lord tonight has set you free?” “Yes,” replied Caldwell. “Turn around and tell those people. Tell ‘em,” said Porter. Caldwell turned around and said, “I’m not gay no more. I am delivert. I don’t like mens no more. I said I like women. Women, women, women. (Begins to speak in unknown tongues) I said women. I’m not gay. I will not date a man. I will not carry a purse. I will not put on makeup. I will, I will love women (starts dancing).” Porter takes the microphone and proclaims, “Y’all praise God with him. Either you gonna believe this stuff, or you need to stop preaching it! If you can’t praise God with him, you’re an unbeliever!” The entire congregation then joins, runs to the altar, and collectively praises God for Caldwell’s “deliverance” from what many evangelicals describe as “the spirit of homosexuality” (for video, please see PimpPreacher.com, ; Jones, ; –). Immediately following the service, video footage of Caldwell’s deliverance went viral across social media platforms. Everything from songs to memes to Vine videos to Facebook statuses and tweets either praised Caldwell for “getting delivered” or criticized COGIC for perpetuating homophobia under the auspices of love and prayer. Other viewers questioned whether Caldwell had truly been “delivered,” and raised larger questions about the psychic trauma that Caldwell had experienced prior to and during the service. Some went as far as to ask why COGIC was in convocation in St. Louis without acknowledging the cries of Black youth in the #BlackLivesMatter movement who had been protesting the shooting deaths of both Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri (August ) and Vonderitt Myers in South St. Louis, Missouri (October ). In response to some of these criticisms, Bishop Charles Blake, COGIC Presiding Bishop and senior pastor at West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, apologized for homophobic 

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statements spewed by COGIC clergy, while simultaneously standing behind what he termed “biblical teachings.” A closer look at his statement, however, suggests that the apology was less of a confession of homophobia or wrongdoing, and more of a public relations stunt. We believe that we should reflect the love and compassion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in all that we do. And we do not in any way compromise our biblical position against same-sex unions are in favor of biblical teachings on matters of sexual conduct, but at the same time we expect that our clergy and laity will be civil and considerate as they speak to men and women regarding issues related to our Christian faith. We love all people regardless of their faith or their moral standard. And when we fail to express ourselves with love and humility we contradict the witness we strive to have to the world. The Church of God in Christ wholly condemns acts of violence against and the subjugation of any person to verbal and physical harassment on the basis of their sexual orientation or sexual stance. (NewsOne Staff, )

Echoes of “love the sinner, hate the sin” are evident in Blake’s comments. But how does one demonize a part of someone’s identity by labeling it “sin,” and then say that one “hates” that sin (read “identity”), all while claiming to “love the sinner” (read “person with the demonized identity”)? Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas writes, “When Black church people approach human sexuality as a vessel of sin and evil – as they perceive it to be only about genitals and sexual activity – they betray their enslaved religious heritage in that they have adopted the dominant Western European and Euro-American tradition of spiritualistic dualism and pietism” (Douglas, : ). Queer womanist theologian Pamela Lightsey takes it a step further in Our Lives Matter, “The majority of homophobic attacks against LGBTQ persons from the Christian Church are concerned with what we do with our genitals in the privacy of our bedrooms with our partners. That is, the church is concerned with our sex, which it misnames as an ‘erotic deviant nature’” (Lightsey, : ). On the altar, Caldwell’s queered body was rendered bare under the microscopic and myopic lens of heteronormative theology, in which male clergy function as plantation overseers wielding spiritual violence as divinely sanctioned action. In the church, perceived queer sex(uality) and perceived queer gender performance necessitate intervention from those who self-identify as “straight.” Indeed, Caldwell’s femininity, including but not limited to his flamboyant attire, disrupts what is considered appropriate for cisgender, straight-presenting (male) clergy and parishioners in the church. Though, of course, scholars of religion must consider how Black churches consistently queer what binary concepts of masculinity and femininity look like. COGIC 

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dress, attire, and presentation are flamboyant across the gender spectrum. There are few images of Black hypermasculinity in the church, especially when considering clerical dress or the big, colorful rings and suits that Bishops wear, or even the colors flaunted on Easter Sunday. Certainly, queerness or queering is a part of the Black church tradition, but when it shows up as a manifestation of one’s expressed sexual desire and/or sexual pleasure politic, the (Black) church quickly takes issue, demonizes the individuals who have “gone too far,” and attempts to regulate the person whose queerness exceeds the bounds of what is considered “normal,” rendering their queer bodies damnable at the foot of the altar as auction block (Johnson, : –; Retzloff, : –; Johnson, a; Johnson, b; Snorton, : –; Best, ; –). Indeed, Porter stated that Caldwell could only be a “real,” God-fearing man if he is fully delivered from homosexuality. The male clergy attended to Caldwell’s soul, vis-à-vis the laying on of hands, prayer, and dancing near Caldwell, but his queered Black body, his psyche, and his spirit were left untouched, and perhaps damaged, by the oily hands of those same COGIC clergy. Scholars interested in ritual within Black Pentecostal contexts have wrestled with whether “deliverance,” or the process of exorcizing someone from “evil” and “sin” aids the Black queer individual being “assisted” or if these practices further the systemic brutalization of an already marginalized group. The nuance here shifts the power dynamic from Caldwell as inherently flawed and raises ethical questions about the role of the institutionalized Black church in exacerbating white supremacist heteropatriarchy – even in the “sanctuary.” If “sanctuaries” are not havens for all Black people – say, in the spirit of the slave hush harbor – then they are nothing short of master class churches in drag propagating anti-Black religious performances, counter to slave hieroglyphics, that ultimately recapitulate the master class body– soul dismemberment named at this chapter’s start.



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 ANNA LAQUAWN HINTON

Black Cripistemologies

African Americans have had a contentious relationship with medical doctors – and for good reason. Historically, white doctors in the US have provided subpar medical care, performed unauthorized medical procedures, and have conducted nonconsensual experiments upon Black people. During the antebellum period, doctors regularly used enslaved Black people to test their medical procedures and treatments before offering them to their white plantation-class patients. For example, John Brown recalls how Dr. Thomas Hamilton subjected him to a variety of painful experiments, exposing him to high heat to find a cure for sun stroke and cutting away layers of his flesh to investigate how deep his Black coloring went. One of the most notorious examples of medical abuse is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, when white scientists offered treatment for “bad blood” but allowed hundreds of Black men with syphilis to remain infected for over forty years in order to study the progression of the disease. When the details of the study were leaked and then revealed in , the skepticism that many Black people had about the medical community was confirmed. While medical history erases, minimizes, and/or revises the pivotal role Black people played as non-consenting test subjects, Black literature – as a replication of and extension of Black oral cultures of knowledge dissemination – has recorded these abuses. Black bodies have played an essential and often objectionable role in the medicinal humanities. While there has been much recent scholarly attention to implicit bias in health professionals’ attitudes toward Black patients, there remains stark and, to be quite honest, grave disparities in Black people’s encounters with medicine – whether it involves disparity of care, insensitivity to levels of pain, or increased health and economic precarity during the recent (and currently ongoing) COVID- pandemic. Though these issues are often discussed as new ethical concerns in medicinal practice, Black literature has documented the long history of racist medical indifference and violence. From Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Kwoya Fagin Maples poetry collection Mend (), Black American 

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  

literature has borne witness to how medical advancement has and continues to be made over and through Black bodies, yet Black people are erased from this history and fail to reap the social, financial, and embodied benefits of the technological progress enabled by their abused and sacrificed flesh. American literature features examples of characters whose bodies, through experimentation or exhibition, force us to confront the ethics of medical practice. Indeed, the confrontation with the textual Black body takes what is accessible in the historic archive – the documented gratuitous violence against Black folk – to craft a counter-history of Black life. African American literature confronts the archived Black body – in medical texts, memoir, history books – as “a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history” with critical, creative fabulations of Black aliveness that attempts to “[retrieve] what remains dormant – the purchase or claim of their lives on the present – without committing further violence in my own act of narration.” Writers like Chesnutt and Maples engage in a spiritual poetics of what Kevin Quashie would call Black aliveness, a critical hermeneutic oriented toward “imagin[ing] a Black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of Black death.” This spiritual poetics of Black aliveness – often expressed through a Black characters’ internal dialogue or conversation and confrontation with another – works to make palpable the thoughts and words, both spoken and withheld, sighs and side-eyes that no one thought, or outright refused, to document. This literature not only imagines the silenced, erased, and falsified experience of the Black human victims of racist medical history, but it also envisions the harmful thoughts, actions, and motives undergirding celebrated achievements that history has redacted from the record. These counter-histories refuse the local and national accounts and omissions that together work to gaslight those who continue to flounder in the wake of slavery. Black writing pans out from the hyper-focused moments of recollected medical history to show the broad systems of oppression and domination in which medical science emerges. Thus, we see recurring scenes and themes, such as encounters with medical practitioners and police personnel collaborating in anti-Black violence, often using the paradoxical imagery of all white or bright healing spaces as scenes of brutality. At times these spaces, particularly in the South, are surrounded by natural beauty and abundance. In Black women’s writing, there is also thematic emphasis on stories of reproductive violence. In these narratives, women’s bodies are likened to sweet, ripe fruit available for slicing and/or consuming. These ripe bodies turn rotten with ticks, pains, sickness, and inexplicable disease when 

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Black Cripistemologies

characters cannot or do not give witness to the harm exacted against them. Women’s injured bodies bear the material markings of medical violence even as it metaphorizes the process of resisting historical and ongoing silencing. Indeed, the body in Black literature considers how Black folks’ embodied pasts come to bear on our present culture of anti-Black medicalized violence. For instance, Kwoya Fagin Maples’s Mend weaves together excerpts from J. Marion Sims’s autobiography with poetry and prose meant to capture the voice of Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy, the enslaved objects of his gynecological experiments that Sims names in his autobiography. Mend contrasts Sims’s scientific observations about the objects of his studies with the thoughts, hopes, observations, fears, and pain of the three. For instance, take the following two passages from Mend – one an excerpt from Sims’s autobiography and the other a prose-poem “The Doctor Asks if I Want to Go Home the Way I Came.” In the first passage, Sims writes: She willingly consented. I got a table about three foot long, and put a coverlet upon it, and mounted her on the table, on her knees, with her head resting on the palms of her hands. I placed the two students, one on each side of the pelvis, and they laid hold of the nates, and pulled them open. Before I could get the bent spoon handle into the vagina, the air rushed in with a puffing noise, dilating the vagina to its fullest extent. (Maples, : –)

Here, Sims claims that Betsey “willingly consented” to being spread open. Gazed upon. Penetrated by spoons. Sims makes this assertion although he is not required to acquire her consent and despite details he shares in the next sentence that belie this claim. Students have to hold her down. Moreover, the language Sims uses to describe the preparation for the procedure is nearly pornographic: He mounts her on her knees and opens her vagina as far as it will go. Maples removes Sims’s words from the context and safety of larger medical antebellum discourse to force readers to encounter his barbarity laid bare. Maples annotates and corrects Sims’s perfidy with counter-history, fabulations meant to find, hold, and preserve Betsey’s dignity and personhood. In “The Doctor Asks if I Want to Go Home the Way I Came,” Betsey, as excavated – or perhaps resurrected – by Maples reflects: The first day is the worst. He rolls his sleeves up slow, cuffs white and crisp as gardenias. He says to lift my skirts up higher – roll them up around your waist, he says. He drapes a white sheet over the table . . . His cold hand makes my spine shiver and he tells me you’re gonna have to learn to keep still. My behind is high up in the air. Naked as the day I was born, like when that overseer turned my skirts up over my head to give me lashes. I just sit up there on that table and cry. Next thing you know, I’m sittin’ there snifflin’ and in walks a pack of white men. I jerk up, clawing at the sheet on the table and pulling down 

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   my skirts. The doctor’s eyes meet mine, and then he points from my hem to my waist, tells me this is purely scientific. A few men place their handkerchiefs over their noses. Excuse the odor, gentlemen, he says. Seems like tears were coming up out of a well. One man holds my shins while the doctor puts his tool in. Another stretches me apart. I sure cried that first time, I tell you. (–)

Maples’s passage is told from the first person point of view that contrasts the horror of the scene with the imagery of whiteness as untouched yet hostile – the crisp white cuffs and white sheet – and hints of the beauty of the natural surroundings – gardenias (the poem right before this, which represents Betsey’s arrival to Sims’s home, focuses on the beauty of the natural surroundings). Maples contrasts Betsey’s experience with Sims to the gratuitous violence of whippings on the plantation from which Sims borrows her. The students, “a pack of white men,” are nearly indistinguishable from the packs of white men commissioned to hunt runaways. Maples positions these forms of violence as extensions of one another. Maples fragments Sims’s discourse to tell a story about Betsey, one that does more than simply repeat the violence of Betsey’s violation. It confronts, corrects, and counters Sims’s record with Betsey’s thoughts, her memories, her cries, her shivers, her sniffles, and her jerks. For many, the broken Black body in literature is often symbolic of African Americans’ disenfranchised and marginal position in the American body politic. The beaten, maimed, seared, and serrated flesh of novels such as Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, or Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred are manifestations of the harm racism exacts on Black people, which scholars often explicate through theories of trauma and the grotesque. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the grotesque is appealing because of its focus on the fleshly materiality of the body as historicized and politicized. Moreover, as Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman explains as she formulates a theory of Black grotesquerie, “as an expressive practice, black grotesquerie infuses the materiality of the black body with the textuality of the art object.” In the (Black) grotesque, Abdur-Rahman situates the Black body as both matter and metaphor. The (Black) grotesque speaks to forms of both the physical body and textual body. The grotesque is a political artform as it parodies normative structures of power, “disarranging and reforming the official order of things.” Despite the grotesque’s privileging of the fleshy, leaky materiality of the body and its commentary on power-relations, the grotesque’s theorizing of bodies still fails to fully situate said bodies as concrete historicized and politicized substances. Emily Russell provides a compelling critique of the grotesque, writing: It is most common, among scholars of the grotesque, to show how the grotesque body reflects a social body gone awry, but less common to find critics 

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Black Cripistemologies who wonder what this role as national symbol means for the grotesque citizen. Even at their most politically invested, studies of the grotesque offer largely static accounts of the disabled figures that populate grotesquerie.

Alternatively, more and more scholars are turning toward trauma studies to approach the injured bodymind in African American literature. After the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a classified mental illness in the wake of the Vietnam War, trauma theory was initially concentrated in Holocaust studies. However, trauma studies’ focus on historic catastrophe proved fruitful for examining the ongoing impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery on the communities of Black people in the US and throughout the diaspora. African American literary scholars not only find trauma studies as appropriate to consider Black literature’s representations of communal and individual violence but also as a mechanism for which to account for Black aesthetic practices in the contemporary period. Aida Levy-Hussen, for instance, coins the term traumatic time to account for “non-linear,” “dis-unified” formal elements of contemporary African American writing. Trauma studies as literary theory, however, remains divorced from psychotherapeutic conversations about individual experiences with trauma. On the one hand, this distinction necessarily leaves diagnostic and therapeutic practice to those who specialize in psychological medicine, which also provides the opportunity for literary scholars to avoid pathologizing the Black bodymind. On the other hand, much like theories of the grotesque, trauma studies fail to account for the lived, material experiences of those with traumatized bodyminds. In this chapter, I approach the bodymind in African American literature through a Black disability studies frame that challenges readers to view the injured, maimed, mad bodymind as both metaphoric of the harm caused by racialized violence but also representative of the lived experiences of Black folks with altered or non-normative bodyminds. Merging theories and methods in both Black studies and critical disability studies, yet creatively reaching beyond them both, scholars of Black disability studies such as the late Christopher M. Bell, Therí A. Pickens, Nirmala Erevelles, Michelle Jarman, Dennis Tyler, and Sami Schalk ask readers to consider the relationship between bodyminds and medicine as shifting relations of power where ableism, or preference for the able body and mind that informs flat portrayals of disabled people as well as policies and practices that exclude and target disabled people for erasure, colludes with racism to determine which bodyminds are expendable and can be made vulnerable to debility, or the targeted creation of injury, the violent process of becoming disabled, and which are not. It considers both the disabled and the able body as inherently unstable 

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  

products (or processes) of both biological, political, and social forces. At the same time, a Black disability studies methodology understands disability as natural bodily diversity and reveals how disability can be a political and cultural identity, what others like Alison Kafer refer to as “crip” identity, that offers community and shapes worldviews those who are able-bodied may not access – cripistemologies. Like theories of the grotesque and trauma, Black disability studies methods of reading uncover the relationship between the body and aesthetics, bodily form and art form, and locates an embodied radical aesthetic in contemporary Black writing. In what follows, I will discuss how Toni Morrison’s Home provides a poignant counter-story of Black people’s historic experiences with racialized medicine. Drawing on crip theoretical and methodological modes of interpreting the relationship between bodies and society, I contend that Home presents the injured and debilitated bodymind as evidence of the medical system’s interpolation of state and culturally sanctioned racist violence against Black people. Black communal spaces, however, provide counternarratives to dominant discourses about medicine and the Black body, narratives that are crucial to Black crip survival. Black community in Home is a valuable and necessary repository of cripistemologies that enables characters harmed by the white medical system to heal. Toni Morrison’s  novel, Home, is a reverse migration narrative that follows Frank Money, a shell-shocked Black Korean War veteran, who travels from the Pacific Northwest to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to the fictional town of Lotus, Alabama to rescue his younger sister, Ycindra “Cee” Money from life-threatening danger. Initially unbeknownst to Frank, Cee marries the first city-slick visitor to Lotus who then brings her to Atlanta and abandons her after assuming control over Cee’s step-grandmother’s car. Ashamed to go home and so forced to provide for herself financially, Cee follows up on a job lead that lands her as an object of medical experimentation on the surgical table of general health practitioner, medical inventor, and eugenics researcher, Dr. Beauregard “Beau” Scott. Frank rescues Cee, whose injuries have her on the brink of death, and brings her back to their hometown of Lotus for healing through the “mean love” freely given by the female collective ancestor figure of “the women.” The care and sustenance home provides for Frank and Cee and enables them to begin the process of acknowledging and working through their personal, familial, and historical trauma. Morrison subverts medical history by centering and privileging Black patients rather than white doctors, “implicating biomedicine in racist debilitating and deathly violence against Black bodies.” In so doing, Morrison exposes medical science and treatment, typically understood as objective and apolitical, as politicized along the axis 

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Black Cripistemologies

of gender, race, class, and dis/ability, and positions home as a healing practice. Counter Reading in Home In Home Morrison provides a counter reading of traditional medical histories that exalts white doctors for ushering medical advancement through the abuse of Black (female) bodies used to forward biomedical treatment and technology. As Patrick S. Allen observes, Morrison published Home at a moment of renewed interest in medical racism among African Americans. Medical histories such as Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid and Rebecca Skloot’s  biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks made important interventions in medical historical discourse by exposing how biomedical advancement has relied on vulnerable Black bodies. While Washington’s examination of the long history of scientific experimentation on Black bodies in the US documented the mistreatment and harm Black American victims experienced within the medical system, Skloot’s medical biography of Henrietta Lacks, as Moya Bailey and Whitney Peoples so poignantly critique, provides very little information about Lacks. Skloot neglects to examine how the intersections of gender, race, and class brought Lacks into the Johns Hopkins hospital room where her cells would be harvested, and she minimizes the injustice of the Lacks’s family not reaping the benefits of the biomedical technology Lacks’s cells enabled. As Henrietta Lacks’s daughter, Deborah, reflects: But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and I had to talk pills. But I don’t got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.

Deborah’s rage, dejection, and sorrow is palpable – both in the thrust of her words and in her bodymind. The anguish of her familial trauma makes her ill enough to need treatment. Skloot allows Deborah’s harrowing voice to interject periodically but asserts her so-called objective position as the predominant and final word, ultimately refusing to see Lacks’s and her descendants’ treatment by the biomedical industry as unethical. Skloot fails to seriously engage with Deborah’s and the Lacks family’s low economic status and related lack of health while others have greatly profited – both 

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monetarily and with good health. Skloot instead focuses on the development of the HeLa cell line Lacks’s sick and then deceased body supplied. Skloot’s celebration of medical scientific advancement at the erasure and dismissal of Black pain and injury participates in a long history of celebrating so-called pioneers of medical advancement who have built their careers through the exploitation of Black bodies, such as J. Marion Sims, those responsible for the Tuskegee Experiment, and those who developed (and continue to profit from) the HeLa cells. As Bailey and Peoples contend, “the humanity of Black people in American medicine has often come second to the biological and scientific value of their bodies – when recognized at all.” Morrison’s Home assumes Black aliveness, Black being, Black humanity. Like Washington, Morrison uses her novel to trouble the celebration of those who harm Black people by documenting the history of medical abuses in the US. Most notably, Morrison takes up the sordid history of gynecological advancement by revising and temporally extending and projecting into the relative present the horrors Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey experienced at the hands of J. Marion Sims. While predominant medical history has celebrated Sims as the father of modern gynecology, preserving his legacy in the halls of medical schools around the nation, Morrison’s novel condemns and shifts the focus to the Black bodies typically dismissed by dominant historical accounts. In Home, Dr. Beau, like Sims, is celebrated as an accomplished doctor within the white community. By focalizing the novel through Black characters, however, a different portrait of Dr. Beau emerges. For instance, through the limited omniscient narrator, readers learn through Sarah, another Black woman who performs domestic labor in the Scott house, that Dr. Beau’s services include providing abortions and his homemade concoctions to the wealthy. Sarah also tells Cee the Scott family secret: Dr. Beau has two daughters living in an asylum because they have cephalitis, or swelling of the brain. While Cee is initially awestruck by Dr. Beau, Sarah challenges Dr. Beau’s well-crafted and pristine public image. She disrupts the eugenics narrative that white people are morally and physically superior and reveals that this myth is perpetuated through closed-circuit networks of private healthcare providers that enable them to suppress facets of their practices and lives they devalue. In other words, the wealthy white are not physically or socially fitter than others; they are merely able to escape state and socially sanctioned surveillance and control. Throughout Home, Morrison’s characters challenge the uncritical assumption that hospitals and doctors are objective, disinterested providers of healing and care. For one, Morrison recasts scientific objectivity as deathly indifference: Dr. Beau remains impartial about his work because he views his test subject, Cee, as disposable and easily replaceable. This is not 

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Black Cripistemologies

only Dr. Beau’s attitude in his private practice but it also characterizes most of the medical spaces in the novel. For instance, Reverend John Locke, a good Samaritan who provides Frank with shelter, food, clothing, money, and contacts on his journey south, informs Frank that the local hospital Frank recently escaped is known to regularly sell bodies to the medical school. Like Dr. Beau, the medical students rely on a steady stream of poor, Black bodies for their education and career. Whereas it may be easy to dismiss Dr. Beau as an outlier, a Doctor Frankenstein representative of only himself (Morrison, : ), Morrison’s novel implicates the entire medical system as a system dependent on supposedly expendable Black bodies. As Rev. Locke explains to Frank, “doctors need to work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich” (). Biomedical science perversely values sick and disabled bodies for their use in developing normalizing technologies. The demand for expendable and exploitable bodies demonstrates how racism complicates our understanding of ableism as preference for the able body. Black disabled bodies are valued for their use in developing curative technologies to produce white able bodies. During the antebellum period, for instance, it was not uncommon for doctors to purchase, rent, or borrow enslaved Black people with disabilities to experiment upon. Rather than lack value because of their disabilities, the disabled enslaved could still produce profit for their white enslavers and were invaluable to the medical doctors who wanted to use them for experimentation. Bettina Judd’s poem “The Opening” from patient. is a particularly compelling poetic witnessing of this. In “The Opening,” J. Marion Sims’s enslaved patient Anarcha reflects on the procedures violently wrought on hers, Betsey’s, and Lucy’s bodies because of their vesicovaginal fistula. Anarcha laments that she and the others were “Something to master” and “something to enslave” because they were “so perfectly broken” and therefore “so eagerly hunted” (Judd, : ). Though the urine and feces seeping from their injured pelvic floor made them unfit for work and unpleasant for many to be around, J. Marion Sims sought Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy because their disability made them invaluable to the work he wanted to do to improve the lives of plantation-class white men and women. More contemporarily, the indomitable cancer cells rapidly obliterating Henrietta Lacks’s body proved invaluable to the doctors who studied them and people worldwide who benefit from the medical technoscientific advances spawned from them. The medical system not only relies on the dead bodies of the poor but also the live bodies of the disabled to advance the wellness and rehabilitation of the wealthy and white. However, those who are Black and/or poor, as Deborah Lacks testifies, do not reap, as often, the benefits of the medical science their body enables. 

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  

Indeed, when the poor Black characters receive medical attention in Home, they are more likely met with violence or incarceration than with care. In fact, Home opens with Frank incarcerated and plotting his escape from a psychiatric ward. The scene makes it clear that rather than providing care to Frank, who was presumably in psychic distress when he was arrested two days prior, the staff and the ward are there to contain him. Staff check Frank to see if he needs “another immobilizing shot” to make him like another patient who is “sunk in a morphine sleep” (Morrison, : ). Like most psychiatric wards, staff have stripped Frank of possessions that they deem may be used for self-harm, such as his shoes, and all the doors and windows on the floor are locked. Only attendants may come and go. While Frank is able to draw on skills he used to survive his tour in Korea to dupe the nurses, find a weakness in the ward’s security, and slip away into the unfamiliar city, for most of the other residents of this town, the hospital is simply an alternative to the local jail to contain Black and poor people who are criminalized and pathologized for offenses related to homelessness and unor underemployment such as “vagrancy” or “loitering” (). As Allison C. Carey, Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and the other contributors to Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada contend, many social service settings, such as mental institutions, share the same purpose as carceral spaces – they work to mark populations as deviant and therefore in need of control and confinement. As Rev. Locke also recognizes and explains to Frank, “They must have thought you was dangerous. If you was just sick they’d never let you in” (). Importantly, it is rumored that these same people who are criminalized and then contained in the hospital are the same people who do not leave the hospital – until their corpses are sold to the medical school. The racist criminalization of poor, Black peoples’ existence provides society with the bodies they need to advance science. In Morrison’s Home, Black people view the hospital with the same suspicion and contempt with which they scrutinize the police. Both are violent institutions within the Black community. African American literature implicates the healthcare and law enforcement systems not only in the deathly violence that shapes Black life but also in debilitating violence. There has been much needed attention to the statesanctioned murder of Black people – from Trayvon Martin to Breonna Taylor to Elijah McClain, not to mention the distressing certainty that name after name and body after body will join the list before and after this book goes to print. Also important, but less discussed, are the people who survive these encounters with murderous white supremacist violence with their spirits, minds, and bodies altered and how non-normative bodyminds make one more susceptible to state violence. Stated otherwise, not only does 

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Black Cripistemologies

having a disability make one more vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence – nearly fifty percent of people killed by police are disabled – but encounters with white supremacist violence does not always kill. Many people survive with a disability. Morrison’s Home bears witness to disabling encounters with police and medical violence as well. Home opens with a young Frank and Cee witnessing the aftermath of an extra-legal but nevertheless culturally sanctioned murder of a Black man. This event is so traumatizing, both children repress the memory well into adulthood when they are finally able to lay the bones and memory of the murdered man to rest. While this is the most lethal encounter with racial violence captured in Morrison’s novel (the racial dynamics of the Korean war aside), other encounters with state-sanctioned violence are presented as equally consequential (–, –). While on his journey south, Frank stops in Chicago where a hospitable Black bartender, Billy, offers Frank a bed for the night. At Billy’s home, Frank meets Billy’s son Thomas and notices that Thomas’s right arm “[sags] at his side.” Once alone with Billy, Frank asks Billy how Thomas’s arm came to be that way. While Frank’s question fails to consider the possibility that Billy may have been born with this difference in his limb functioning, it also presents the opportunity for Morrison to bear witness through Billy’s testimony to the nuances of police violence. In a story prescient of what would be twelveyear-old Tamir Rice’s fate in , Billy shares with Frank that when Thomas was eight, he was shot by a “drive-by cop” because he had “a cap pistol.” Frank finds it hard to believe that a cop would shoot a child – in the US North no less. Billy, as Rev. Locke does before him, explains to Frank the mechanisms of racism: “Cops shoot anything they want” (). While scholars of the book point out how Billy’s astute insight speaks to issues of deathly police violence, they overlook or fail to identify an important detail: Thomas does not die. The cop’s violence fails to kill Thomas; it disables him. In so doing, the cop radically shifts Thomas’s orientation of his body to himself and the world around him – he is a precocious child, wise beyond his years – which is profound in an ableist, inaccessible world. Nevertheless, unlike Tamir Rice, Thomas survives to continue to grow under the direction, affection, and care from his mother, father, and community. Thomas, enveloped in the loving care of his family and community, is a poignant example of Black (crip) aliveness. In Home, more characters are debilitated by white supremacist police and medical violence than they are murdered outright. Thomas is paralyzed in his right arm; Frank has frequent bouts of mental distress marked by depression, paranoia, flashbacks, and hallucinations; and Cee can never birth children. These same characters, when ensconced and uplifted in a caring community, develop to be, what 

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Morrison describes elsewhere, both ship and safe harbor. They come to embody homeplace. Toni Morrison uses the nautical metaphor of “the ship” and “the safe harbor” to theorize Black women’s relationship to educational and career advancement and family and motherhood. For Morrison, historically, Black women have had the ability (and responsibility) to perform mother and care work as well as labor outside of the home. Black women had to be “comrades” with Black men in the fields, with a baby on her back, and maintain a home. Morrison uses this history to remind Black women that they do not have to choose between personal goals and ambition or nurturing positions such as motherhood. Black women as ship and safe harbor are “complete human beings.” Access to what bell hooks has called homeplace is crucial to preserving the fullness of one’s humanity. Like Morrison, hooks reminds us that historically Black women have managed to work grueling hours as domestic caretakers in white households yet maintain enough energy to care for and nurture their own loved ones. According to hooks, these women created a space where, “Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination . . . one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist” and Black people “could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.” The care work Morrison and hooks describes is political. The homeplace Black women create allow them to reject, resist, and heal from the psychic and spiritual injuries exacted by racism. In Morrison’s Home, women who teach Cee and Frank to be both ship and safe harbor, who provide homeplace for the two, do so through Black cripistemologies. Cripistemology, coined by Lisa Duggan but fleshed out in conversations among crip scholars at the periphery of formalized academic spaces, questions “what we think we know about disability, and how we know around and through it.” Whereas knowledge about disability, within our current neoliberal moment, is largely produced by market forces targeting the debility dollar, or the money spent on impairments, cripistemologies are the ways of knowing about and through disability that cannot be coopted by the market or state. Although the term cripistemology has been largely developed by and among white disability studies scholars, cripistemology is a concept that in part draws, according to Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, from Black southern folk culture. Johnson and McRuer open their introductory article for a special issue on cripistemologies with “Southernisms” quoted from Randall Kenan’s  novel A Visitation of Spirits. The quoted Southernisms, such as “it’s always something,” capture the crip knowledge that “it does not always get better” and “the 

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Black Cripistemologies

backwoods” of academic theory origins of the concept. While Black folk Southernisms offer witty phrases and serve as an apt metaphor for the nonhegemonic spaces from which cripistemologies has been theorized, as suggested in Johnson and McRuer’s essay, they are, in and of themselves, snatches of Black cripistemological knowledge production. They are a sample of Black folks’ embodied theory not easily (or desired to be) coopted into mainstream produced and disseminated disability knowledge. Morrison’s celebration of Black folk wisdom, of Black women’s unique ways of understanding the world, locates Black women’s folk knowledge as an actual site of cripistemologies necessary for Black survival. Under the sage direction of his father, Thomas appears to have learned invaluable lessons about survival, power, and empowerment that improve his odds of achieving his goal – to be “a man.” (). These are lessons that Frank and Cee learn over the novel. As a veteran of the Korean War, Frank is disillusioned not only by the lack of care for veterans but also by the failure of racial unity and dignified manhood enlistment in the army and engaging in battle was supposed to bestow. The Korean war was celebrated by advocates for racial equality for integrating the US army which appeared to portend changed race-relations in the US. Rather than ending his service with a feeling of integration into the American patriarchal fabric, Frank appears to feel more displaced and despondent than hopeful. Not only had enlistment failed to confer the status and privilege of dominant masculinity, it also ensnared him into US imperial violence that shattered his sense of self as caregiver and protector (of Cee). Frank thought the army would provide him an escape from what he believed was the “worst place in the world” (). Lotus, for Frank, represented a non-future, stagnation. Frank dismissed the Lotus people as willfully ignorant and unambitious. They were placated by relative safety. What Frank comes to understand over the course of the novel is the value of this safety he had taken for granted and the people’s knowledge about white supremacist power structures. Similarly, Cee views Lotus as a place to escape boredom and ignorance. Cee fails to appreciate the lessons about survival her neighbors attempt to provide. As a teenager, she resents the Lotus community’s watchful eye; yet their knowingness is precisely what she, and even Frank, need for Black crip survival. Both Frank and Cee eventually turn to Black communities for care and guidance. Specifically, Frank must re-evaluate and revise his relationship with masculinity and power. Frank must come to understand that neither age nor location can protect Black (and brown) people from white supremacist state violence. Moreover, while this violence lethally wreaks havoc among Black people, it quite often fails to (immediately) kill but instead debilitates Black people and/or, at times, enacts a process of slow death. 

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Over the course of his journey back south, Frank encounters mentors and ancestor figures that each offer not only material resources to aid him on his sojourn, but also knowledge about the mechanisms of power that counter the dominant American narratives about manhood. Rev. John Locke teaches and guides Frank to make connections between multiple locations of state violence, such as the medical industrial complex, not just the police. In fact, it is Rev. Locke who explains to Frank how the military also perpetuates this racialized violence, despite racial integration: “An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better” (). While Frank continues to internalize his homelessness and PTSD, Rev. Locke, as the first stop on his journey, plants the seed for the subversive readings of military experience as the measuring tape of masculinity. Billy and Thomas also provide Frank much needed wisdom and guidance. Billy challenges Frank’s understanding of police violence and Thomas forces Frank to reconsider his relationship with violent masculinity. Arguably, these lessons settle in only when Frank returns to the place he hates most – Lotus. When Frank rescues Cee, he takes her back home to Lotus. Once in Lotus, both Cee and Frank receive an education on survival that, until that point, they had fled. The women of Lotus give Cee and Frank “mean love.” The women create and enforce a woman-only enclave for Cee as she heals. Once her acute wounds are treated, Cee’s healing begins. Ycindra must learn what, to the women, seems like common sense. For instance, the women do not ask Cee to testify, but she does anyway. And, “Once they knew she had been working for a doctor, the eye rolling and tooth sucking was enough to make clear their scorn” (). Despite Cee’s attempt to rationalize, explain, or even commend the doctor, “nothing made them change their minds about the medical industry.” The women of Lotus not only provide Cee a counter reading of the mainstream medical industry, but they also challenge her internalized anti-Blackness and uncritical trust and adoration of whiteness that leaves her vulnerable to predation: “Men know a slop jar when they see one;” “You ain’t a mule to be pulling some evil doctor’s wagon;” “Misery don’t call ahead. That’s why you have to stay awake – otherwise it just walks on in your door;” and, “But nothing. You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know” (). They let Cee know she is not an object to perfect whiteness as the doctor would use her, or an object of scorn as her step grandmother treated her. They stressed epistemological diligence and an inherent, unshakable knowledge of self-worth. These women embody and share cripistemologies as tools for survival. In its most basic sense, cripistemologies refer to the (embodied) knowledge one has about, “around and through” disability. Cripistemologies 

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Black Cripistemologies

recognize that the able-bodiedness of the larger population depends on the debilitation of another; the ability in one area of one’s body or life depends on the disabling of another. These are the lessons the women – women with disfigured, blind eyes, women disabled by polio, mothers of murdered children, women for whom poverty is par for course in their hard-bitten lives – impart to Cee. They teach Cee to be reflective and honest about the mechanisms of power in the world and how that bears on her life. Yet they also challenge Cee to take ownership of the life she has and self-define it to the extent she can. In Home, Black, southern women’s cripistemologies help Cee to become ship and safe harbor. In Home, Lotus is homeplace but homeplace is also a crip orientation with the self. Frank, too, must learn from his elders to be ship and safe harbor. The instruction Frank comes by on his journey to Lotus solidifies as he bears witness to Cee’s newfound ability to witness, accept, and survive the truths of society and her life. This act of witnessing compels Frank to sit, locate, and evaluate the tattered pieces of himself in need of mending. In so doing, he comes to the truth of a pivotal moment of his time in Korea – the murder of a Korean little girl seemingly accustomed to survival sex work. Initially, Frank projected this murder onto an imagined soldier; Frank’s quiver of sexual desire for the child exposed a masculinity so corrupt and foreign to him that he altered his memory, but, by the end of the novel, equipped with his hard-wrought revised understanding of violence, nationalism, race, and masculinity, Frank accepts and admits that he is the one who murdered the starved, hungry “wee little girl.” Frank comes to understand that the pay-in to nationalist masculinities is an irreconcilable debt. Becoming ship and safe harbor for Frank involves finding a third option, a third space to occupy that is neither the capitulation into chauvinist sexual economies nor the violent externalization and exorcism of a selfhood loathsome to him. The cripistemologies modeled by the women of Lotus and then Cee paves a way. Once Frank both testifies and witnesses his own brokenness as a complicit pawn in American imperialist violence, he is then able to witness the truth of another casualty to American racist ideology. Frank (re) members that as a child he and Cee witnessed the shoddy disposal of a man’s body. Frank learns that a white mob forced the man and his son to fight to the death, but that the man offered his life in exchange for his son’s. Once again in Lotus and inspired by how the people there are both ship and safe harbor, despite their recognition of the bitter consequences of racial apartheid in their lives, Frank comes to realize how he has protected and shielded himself from his truth – the truth of his actions, the truth of the state of the US where horses can “look like men” as a Black man dies like a dog. He and Cee retrieve the man’s bones and lay him to rest. They take him home. 

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For Morrison, returning home is a feat, not a failure. Although home in this novel is complex and fraught for those impacted by histories of racism – Frank and Cee are displaced from home as Black Americans coming of age in the s, they are displaced from the larger cultural fabric through legally codified discrimination and disenfranchisement, their family is violently driven out of their Bandera County Texas home, and, within their (step) grandmother’s house in Lotus, they are unloved, neglected, and abused – coming home is nevertheless a healing process at both the plot and structure levels in this book. Like Cee and Frank, the composition, the structure of Home comes full circle. The syuzhet, the story, for Cee and Frank, begins in Lotus and ends there. The fabula, the narrative of Home opens with the murdered body of the man and ends with the murdered body of this man. In both instances, however, there is a return with a difference. The man’s bones have been laid, with honor and care, to rest and his humanity has been acknowledged and emphatically documented on his grave marker – “Here Stands a Man” (). Both Frank and Cee, initially too ridden with shame to go home, return to Lotus broken, but not beaten (). Whole. Their wholeness, symbolized at the end of the novel by the sweet bay tree, is “Hurt right down the middle” yet also “strong,” “beautiful,” and “alive and well” (). This vision of wholeness counters ableist visions of recovery and rehabilitation as restoration to a previous mode of functioning and unimpaired, unmarked embodiment – a return to a pristine state. This common understanding of recovery reduces wholeness to a cure and falsely positions cures as completely erasing the evidence of illness, disease, injury, and disability. It evades, as Eunjung Kim coins, curative violence, or that bodies rarely rehabilitate completely and that the journey toward a cure often generates different sets of disabilities or leaves one in “a space in between disability and nondisability.” The curative time of this violence always defers crip survival in the present for possible able-bodied futures. Morrison’s vision of wholeness, however, recognizes the wholeness of healed, yet non-cured bodyminds. It demands one live life mindfully in the present, particularly because Black crip survival in the wake of slavery and racial apartheid is a constant reminder that the future is not promised. Morrison anchors home as homeplace, as both ship and safe harbor, a space in which to behold and be held.



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 JULIAN KEVON GLOVER

Black Erotic Bodies

Introduction I would like to begin this chapter by inviting readers to accompany me “down to the valley where the girls get naked” – that is, Chucalissa, Mississippi where the hit Starz show P-Valley is set. Originally written as a stage play (by Katori Hall), the adapted television series features an array of Southern Black strippers, rappers, politicians, and entrepreneurs all vying for the power to mold their beloved town toward their own interests by whatever means necessary. There is much to be said about the beauty and kinesthetic prowess that characters, such as Mississippi and Roulette, exude whether on or off the poles of The Pynk; the bravery and resilience that characters like Mercedes demonstrate when they encounter devastating personal and professional hindrances; and business acumen that characters like Hailey Colton (Autumn Night) leverage to outwit the savvy white Southern elite whose interests dominate Chuchalissa’s political landscape. However, I invoke P-Valley for another reason entirely – namely, its capacious depiction of gender transgression and celebration of Black erotic bodies. When considering gender transgression, P-Valley approaches the topic by depicting a wide array of gender embodiments, which is significant given its predominantly Black cast. From Lil Murda’s struggle to reconcile his hypermasculine image as a rapper in light of his secret queer romances, to Andre Watkins’s careful curation of his image as a family man and business savvy lawyer, P-Valley highlights a range of Black masculinity. On this topic, I must also mention Uncle Clifford, the longtime owner of The Pynk, known for her unique approach to aesthetics, which blurs the lines between masculine and feminine and mannerisms both verbal and nonverbal. Uncle Clifford’s character, in particular, demonstrates what is possible when embodiments of Black gender refuse to conform to heteronormative binary standards that reduce gender to dichotomous categories. Moreover, Uncle 

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Clifford’s gender embodiment is just one factor which makes her complex, and the show does not overemphasize her aesthetics, nor erotic appeal, at the exclusion of revealing the various other ways her life is just as complicated as the rest of the cast. I begin this chapter by drawing on P-Valley because it offers a generative depiction of the capaciousness and appeal of Black erotic bodies yet also relies on narrative scripts that prioritize visual interpretations of the body as central to understanding the erotic, excluding the erotic’s psychic, spiritual, and emotional manifestations. P-Valley showcases Black erotic bodies on and off the stage at The Pynk as various members of the cast leverage their erotic capital for their own purposes – whether to open their own dance school, get out of Chucalissa, and/or provide for their families. The dancers’ various embodiments underscore the interplay between the erotic and pleasure in generative ways. However, by no means do I suggest that the erotic begets only pleasure – erotic embodiments have the capacity to elicit just as much danger as they do pleasure. For example, consider how Mississippi’s erotic appeal rendered her susceptible to sexual assault by someone she trusted or how Whisper’s purported inability to sexually gratify a partner who aggressively pursued her nearly caused her to be choked to death. Yet, Black bodies maintain a particular relationship with the erotic and pleasure due to the historical and ongoing treatment of Black bodies under modernity. Indeed, history teaches Black people that safety is little more than an illusion and in light of such a lesson, the pursuit of pleasure derived from the erotic is a choice rife with its psychic, physical, emotional and spiritual benefits, and shortcomings. This chapter contends that Black erotic bodies congeal through a peculiar blend of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances enable Black bodies to conjure fugitive practices of erotic freedom such as multiplicity by which I refer to the recognition and simultaneous embodiment of multiple selves – all understood to be complex, capacious and sometimes contradictory in their manifestations – without attempting to minimize or eliminate the specific selves perceived to be undesirable. In writing, I aim to reveal how connections between gender fungibility and dispossession create a context in which Black people harness erotic power to pursue pleasure and intimacy in a world which relentlessly seeks to foreclose access to such experiences on personal and interpersonal levels. The erotic, in my estimation, specifically attends to the psychic, spiritual, and emotional registers – routinely among the most neglected – of a person’s existence and how they influence practices, beliefs, and behaviors. To truly engage the erotic and maximize its offerings requires understanding of its processual nature; that is, its capacity to promote fervent and continual personal 

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Black Erotic Bodies

transformation throughout one’s life. Such personal growth enhances one’s ability to recognize and honor the erotic in others without perceiving it to be threatening. My theorization of the erotic extends that of Audre Lorde’s to delineate how Black erotic bodies leverage gender fugitivity to conjure a generative relationship to multiplicity – the primary freedom practice examined in this chapter – through which Black bodies exercise erotic freedom and mitigate the material and discursive violence that said bodies experience. The final section of this chapter discusses how erotic freedom manifests as the pursuit of pleasure for oneself and the sharing of joy among those within one’s community. This section also draws on the character Ada from writer Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater in addition to a short essay about Emezi’s gender transition surgeries to underscore how erotic freedom and multiplicity effectively unlock boundless potential to engage in self and communal redefinition. Fungible and Dispossessed: The Creation of Black Erotic Bodies In order to understand the significance and contributions of Black erotic bodies, one must interrogate the context from which such an embodiment emerges . Literary scholars, such as Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, trace the social and historical interpolation of Black bodies in the modern era and highlight how said bodies come into being, namely through their dispossession and fungibility. In her seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Spillers argues that Black bodies – specifically “ungendered female flesh,” the raw material upon which modernity is built – cannot reliably lay claim to coherent gender embodiments such as male or female due to the legacy of chattel slavery. That is to say, the labor demands – both productive and reproductive – placed on Black bodies in captivity created the conditions through which said bodies lacked the “symbolic integrity” required to establish and maintain coherent gender embodiments. The sheer breadth and depth of labor demands placed upon the enslaved outweighed the utility of the gendered divisions of labor (i.e. women performing domestic labor and raising children while men worked at companies and established businesses), which became increasingly common among whites during this time. At the same time that gender began to dictate the types of labor a white person performed, the lack of “symbolic integrity” which impacted the realities of Black bodies within the context of slavery meant that gender became fungible. Here, fungibility refers to what Shoniqua Roach calls the “material and discursive elasticity” of Black gender – the inheritance with which Black bodies living in the afterlife of slavery must contend. 

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Fungibility certainly has its drawbacks as it fails to provide Black people with a reliable strategy through which said communities can seek redress for grievances and protect ourselves and each other from the onslaught of violence in all of its forms. Consider, for example, the description of Mary Ann Waters, a nineteenth-century Black “cross-dressing” sex worker, in a pick-up notice issued by the warden of Baltimore city jail which simultaneously acknowledges Waters’s fungible gender (noting that she works “as a woman”) and misgenders her. C. Riley Snorton rightly asserts that the example highlights how even fungible gender fails to “exceed or provide refuge from slavery’s hegemony over the material and semiotic arrangement of black flesh.” At the same time, the elastic quality of fungibility also creates an opportunity for Black people to define ourselves beyond the heteronormative gender binary, affirm and recognize others who do the same, while also cultivating space to explore multiplicity as a form of erotic freedom and a rejection of being reduced to sentient beings whose primary purpose is to perform labor within white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal regimes of power. Expounding on the legacy of chattel slavery in the lives of Black people, Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking text, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, investigates the development of American legal jurisprudence immediately following emancipation and during the Reconstruction period to examine the material and discursive tactics used to extend the subhuman treatment of Black people, thus creating what she calls “the afterlife of slavery.” Hartman interrogates conceptions of empathy, subjectivity, universalism, and the limits of emancipation as she traces the discursive evolution of the law’s approach to and treatment of Black bodies. Hartman concludes that it is precisely the law’s selective (at best) recognition of Black people’s humanity that continually shapes Black life in the afterlife of slavery. Put differently, the law creates the conditions through which Black humanity remains subjugated and therefore perpetuates the gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and general dishonor that Black bodies experience. Moreover, this discursive truth tethers blackness to subhuman categorization which manifests in the social, economic, cultural, and political realities of Black people with few options for redress of grievances let alone justice. Said subhumanity, enforced both discursively and materially, amounts to the dispossession of which I speak when considering the existence of Black erotic bodies. Taken together, gender fungibility and dispossession are the constitutive elements crucial to understanding Black erotic bodies. These elements also provide a sense of the high stakes with which Black erotic bodies contend in a world that simultaneously relies on and disavows these bodies. While the 

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Black Erotic Bodies

pernicious influence of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy make it unlikely that Black erotic bodies alone will overthrow the prevailing regime, Black erotic embodiments combat hegemonic power in rather opaque and, dare I say, fugitive ways. By this, I mean that Black erotic bodies find power and potential in the fungibility of Black gender such that the lack of legibility becomes a tool through which a single Black body inhabits multiple embodiments which shift according to the context. Further, such a capacious relationship to gender enables Black erotic bodies to harness creative ways to circumvent discursive and material dispossession and acquire the tangible and human (love, respect, affirmation, kinship, intimacy, etc.) resources necessary to thrive. So, while the legacies of Western imperial power discursively and materially relegate Black bodies to a fugitive position, such a status enables Black bodies to manipulate this sordid inheritance toward the pursuit of erotic freedom. On Erotic Freedom and Power To understand the importance and contributions of Black erotic bodies, we must first understand “the erotic” itself. Among the numerous conceptions of “the erotic,” Black feminist Audre Lorde’s seminal speech turned essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” offers a prolific vision of the purpose, power, and potential of mobilizing the erotic in one’s daily life. Lorde contends that sex routinely overdetermines notions of the erotic such that its purpose is misconstrued, and transformative potential drastically reduced. Such a contention offers an important correction to prevalent understandings of the erotic from which this chapter departs in favor of interrogating the erotic beyond sex. This is not to suggest that the erotic has no relationship to sex; rather, sex is but one small aspect of erotic power. It is imperative to disentangle the erotic from sex for, as Hartman reminds us, notions of analogous terms such as seduction, affinity, and intimacy comprise a significant portion of the law’s discursive and material power which delimits and constricts Black life. That is to say, Black erotic power which emphasizes sexual seduction as its primary tool will undoubtedly fail to facilitate personal and interpersonal transformation. Momentarily returning to P-Valley, the relationship between Big Teak (Season ) and Lil Murda underscores this point as Lil Murda’s attempts to console Big Teak, recently released from prison, by reigniting their sexual relationship failed to assuage or rehabilitate Teak’s emotional, mental, and spiritual anguish as the character ultimately died by suicide. According to Lorde, the transformative potential of the erotic lies firmly within its ability to prompt fervent self-reflection and development through 

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which individuals learn to live meaningful lives beyond the mere pursuit of exogenous definitions of success inextricably linked to “hard work” and “productivity” within a capitalist world. Here, the erotic functions as a spiritual, mental, and physical tool that enables Black bodies to access personhood beyond tethering our existence to labor within a capitalist society. Moreover, the erotic facilitates the acquisition of the numerous human and material resources and experiences of which Black people have been robbed in the afterlife of slavery. To surrender to the power of the erotic, as Lorde notes, is no easy feat. It is one that must become a perpetual commitment in a world that inundates Black people with purportedly worthwhile pursuits which, in reality, cost much more than they are worth. Learning how to harness erotic power is a restorative process through which Black people commune with ourselves, tending to our own needs, desires, and creativity and in so doing, redefine the meaning and the terms of “success” for our own benefit. The processual nature of erotic power makes personal transformation – that which the global capitalist and white supremacist society in which we find ourselves seem impossible – more possible as it disrupts hegemonic power, thus rendering the societally enforced boundaries less of an imposition. My delineation of erotic power, in conversation with Lorde, maintains an orientation toward process rather than product as is the tradition in capitalist societies. It is through an unwavering and consistent commitment to the process of becoming that Black people experience and practice erotic freedom. Erotic freedom and power maintain a reciprocal relationship as the cultivation of erotic power strengthens experiences of erotic freedom and vice versa. Gender fugitivity offers one of the clearest examples of how erotic freedom manifests in practice for once a person accepts the capaciousness (read fungibility) of Black gender, it becomes a tool of continual self-redefinition. In this case, redefinition imbues Black erotic bodies with the power to determine their own gender without simultaneously burdening one’s embodiment with the demand for it to be stable and, therefore, “real.” Erotic freedom accepts that safety, for Black bodies writ large, is an illusion and refuses to prioritize popular strategies, like “realness,” as the primary method to refract myriad forms of violence. Self-redefinition as evidence of erotic power conjures an unruly approach to gender fugitivity through which multiplicity emerges as an alternative tactic to combating the constant assault on Black life. The benefits of erotic freedom and power do not stop at the individual level; rather, the zenith of their powers manifest through the cultivation of relationships between individuals. In fact, Lorde’s own theorization considers the erotic’s capacity to be shared with other people as one of its most 

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Black Erotic Bodies

important contributions. The processual nature of erotic power endows it with the ability to help its practitioners unlearn harmful beliefs which limit one’s creative and spiritual potential as well as their emotional awareness. As few processes are completed overnight, becoming attuned to erotic power requires nurturing one’s intuition; that is, relearning how to recognize and adhere to intuition, undergirding by erotic power, as a guide rather than be suspicious of it, as Lorde reminds us, “we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge.” This is no easy task as even those who are aware of their intuition regularly find it challenging to put said knowledge into practice for fear of discomfort. Yet, growth and transformation are seldom comfortable which means that harnessing erotic power requires that we face and wrestle with complexities that make us uncomfortable, the contradictions that embarrass us, and the capaciousness that exhausts us. Forged through nurturing rather than discipline, these lessons – a kind of remembering or coming back to oneself – conjure apt tools through which Black practitioners of erotic power might best nurture other Black people who seek similar kinds of self-knowledge. Thus, when combined, the power to share deep experiences of grief, glory, despair, and hope not only heals everyone involved, but also transforms the very foundation upon which interpersonal relationships among Black people are built. For there is a type of unfathomable joy that arises when the erotic bolsters the manner in which Black people conduct life. That is not to say everyone will have the same experience of the erotic; rather, it becomes a strategy, tactic, and tool that changes how intracommunal differences are understood in ways that make it less threatening for a multiplicity of, sometimes contradictory, truths to coexist.

Multiplicity, the Erotic and the Pursuit of Pleasure The combined capacity of erotic power and freedom present a tremendous opportunity to transform the personal and interpersonal lives of Black people. Indeed, their combined power brings Black erotic bodies into being and the practice of multiplicity constitutes evidence of their influence. Multiplicity rejects hegemonic logics of identity, which demand that individuals simplify their identities to include one or two central markers determined by their race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, and religion. Instead, multiplicity acknowledges that the lives of human beings are too complex to be discreetly categorized; too capacious to be remotely stable; and too rife with contradictions which cannot be neatly resolved. The aforementioned truths remain especially applicable for Black bodies who 

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continually find ingenious ways to inhabit a world in which we are not meant to survive. The benefits of multiplicity are numerous as this manifestation of erotic freedom allows its practitioners to accept their own idiosyncratic contradictions and complexities rather than ignore or hide them. By refusing to disavow contradiction and complexity, Black people eradicate feelings of shame which undergird the impulse to hide aspects of oneself deemed too risky or embarrassing to be acknowledged. Welcoming contradictions strengthens an individual’s immunity to ad hominem attacks (designed to expose and embarrass someone) because asserting one’s own contradictions makes it nearly impossible for others to weaponize said contradictions. Further, embracing contradiction and complexity disrupts the societally encouraged pursuit of “perfection,” eliminating any aspect of a person’s desires or characteristics that do not conform or support an image of purported perfection. Accepting contradiction and complexity on an individual level significantly enhances a person’s capacity to embrace the contradictions and complexities of other people rather than judge or expose them for perceived trespasses, reshaping how individuals within a community understand and treat each other. In these ways, Black bodies harness erotic power and freedom to practice multiplicity and utterly transform the possibilities of Black life. Multiplicity, forged through erotic power and freedom, facilitates redefining the pursuit of pleasure and its stakes among Black erotic bodies. One tangible example emerges through considerations of Black gender, its fungibility, and acceptance of how one’s own contradictions and complexities manifest. Take, for example, author Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel Freshwater in which readers meet Ada – a Nigerian woman born with numerous divine beings, called ogbanje, who reside inside of her. The novel chronicles Ada’s journey to self-acceptance as her semi-divine existence in a world of humans presents her with a barrage of issues from childhood to adulthood. From an early age, Ada exhibits signs associated with mental illnesses including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and a proclivity toward self-harm. Her relocation from Nigeria to the United States further exacerbates these nascent conditions as Ada attempts to self-soothe by forging new relationships such as dating a young man, Soren, who repeatedly drugs and sexually assaults Ada throughout their relationship. Ada’s sexual assault creates an opportunity for one the ogbanje, Ashugara, to emerge and take over Ada’s consciousness, prompting her to enact a pattern of reckless sexual behavior. Ada’s sexually negligent behavior, at the hands of Ashugara, persists for a while, eventually precipitating 

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the demise of Ada’s relationship with Ewan – a person with whom Ada shares a mutual bond of true love. Ashugara’s dominance in Ada’s life ends when the ogbanje causes her to attempt suicide and fails at which point the other ogbanje begin to influence her mind and actions. Ada, with the support of the ogbanje, begins a gender transition during which she has a double mastectomy and initiates sexual relationships with women. Ada’s transition positions them between masculinity and femininity which, in turn, enhances their strength and facilitates Ada’s self-recognition as part-human and partdivine. Following Ada’s transition, they meet Leshi – a spirit whom the ogbanje deem a prince – who recognizes and affirms Ada’s self-knowledge and Ada eventually returns to Nigeria in search of their roots. The novel ends as Ada encounters and develops a relationship with Ala, a deity who turns out to be Ada’s mother, and ultimately takes control of the multiplicity of ogbanje who reside inside of Ada. Ada’s story in Freshwater illustrates the interplay between the character’s multiplicity – a capacious measure of their complexities and contradictions – and their gender embodiment such that Ada was unable to reconcile said multiplicity until they accepted the desire to embody both masculinity and femininity. That is to say, Ada’s refusal to choose between embodying a masculine or feminine comportment illustrates their commitment to accepting their own complexities and contradictions in a way that strengthens their ability to live life on their own terms – no matter the cost. Ada’s eventual embrace of masculinity and femininity provides compelling evidence of the benefits associated with multiplicity and the fungibility of Black gender as they enable Black people to engage in self-definition in the midst of a world determined to tell us who we can and cannot be and limit the possibilities and experiences that we have in life. In this way, Black erotic bodies redefine the pursuit of pleasure from merely chasing normative definitions of “success” toward a kind of self-acceptance that does not depend on the affirmation of the outside world. Further, forging relationships with other Black people who acknowledge erotic power strengthens the pursuit of pleasure and heightens the stakes as doing so stands to bring about new modes of relation betwixt and between Black erotic bodies. Another publication by Akwaeke Emezi, entitled “Transition: My surgeries were a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature,” illustrates generative mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of erotic power. In the article, Emezi chronicles their journey navigating the medical industry as a Black nonbinary trans person seeking to have a series of surgeries which medical professionals found to be confusing at best and unnecessary at worst. Emezi vividly describes the recovery 

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process following a hysterectomy before offering an explanation as to why they sought the procedure in the first place: To prevent an ogbanje from reproducing. Emezi explains that according to Igbo (Nigerian) spiritual traditions, an ogbanje is a malevolent spirit which seeks to disrupt and destroy the human cycle of reincarnation by inserting themselves into and tormenting human hosts. Citing disdain for their reproductive capacity from an early age, Emezi reflects on how removing the uterus altogether offers an efficient way to ensure that they will not be haunted by an ogbanje and in so doing, reveals how being attuned to the spiritual realm bolsters erotic power. However, Emezi does not write off ogbanje as wholly sinister; rather, Emezi asserts that their gender transition surgeries enhance their ability to acknowledge overlapping realities in which they simultaneously exist as ogbanje and human. That is to say, Emezi’s fervent commitment to harnessing erotic power influenced their decision to seek surgery so as to bring their physical body in closer alignment with their spiritual insight. Thus, their surgeries created “a bridge across realities” – a method enabling their “spirit [to customize] its vessel to reflect its nature.” Reflecting on the emotional and mental impacts of their medical transition, Emezi recalls an experience with a doctor whom they sought to perform a breast reduction only for the surgeon to express his incredulity during Emezi’s consultation saying, “Male to female, female to male, fine. But this in-between thing?” Instead of lashing out at the doctor, Emezi forced themselves to grin and bear such an indignity because they remained committed to executing their vision and knew doing so required the approval of a therapist and a physician. Said doctor took another opportunity to express his annoyance with Emezi when, during their post-operative appointment, the physician complained that, despite performing surgeries for numerous transgender patients in the past, he had never spent as much time speaking with a client during consultation as he had with Emezi. The author’s reflections illustrate how dominant conceptions of trans embodiment remain intricately tied to the medical industry in a way that reproduces, therefore further naturalizing, the purported gender binary. Not only does Emezi’s example reveal how the medical industry reinforces reductive understandings of trans embodiment, it also provides a glimpse into the emotional toll that such ideologies have on trans and nonbinary people. Emezi admits that, following their breast reduction, there were days when they did not feel trans enough. However, their complex truth suggests that while surgeries and dysphoria are not prerequisites for being trans, the keloid scars from their reduction offer a “grounding reflection” of their own certainty. Emezi writes, “I wasn’t sure then what I was transitioning my body to, but I was 

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clear that the gender I’d been raised as was inaccurate.” While this passage reveals Emezi’s uncertainty about the trajectory of their gender transition, it does not suggest that the author’s transition lacks coherence; rather, it represents an openness to constant redefinition such that Emezi and Emezi alone might be emotionally, mentally, and spiritually satisfied. Emezi’s erotic power emanates from the combined strength of harnessing their complex truths – the disavowal of a linear gender transition (from female to male) and the insistence that trans means embodying any gender that is different from the one assigned at birth – alongside their dedication to embodying contradictions as both a spirit (ogbanje) and human whose gender embodiment refuses bifurcation. Emezi’s example demonstrates the processual nature of erotic power by honoring and following their own intuition regardless of the opinions of other people – even those who maintain legal and medical administrative power (such as therapists and physicians) in society. Indeed, Emezi themselves recognizes how difficult it is to prevent other people from unduly influencing one’s own decisions as they acknowledge their struggles with convincing doctors to remove an uninjured organ and with friends and family, especially their mother, who view Emezi’s surgeries as bodily mutilation. However, Emezi ends the essay by delineating the transformation in their thinking about mutilation: “By now, I’ve come to think of mutilation as a shift from wrongness to alignment, and of scars as a form of adornment that celebrates this shift.” Taken together, Emezi’s essay highlights their spiritual, mental, and emotional transformation throughout a process which so heavily emphasizes physical transformation in ways that illuminate the true power and potential of the erotic. Conclusion This chapter posits that Black erotic bodies congeal through a peculiar blend of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession and that these inheritances enable Black bodies to conjure fugitive practices of erotic freedom such as multiplicity. Ada’s story, alongside that of the novel’s own author Akwaeke Emezi, offer examples of what lies on the other side of erotic power and freedom should Black people release attachments to normative conceptions of gender and willingly surrender to the fungibility of Black gender. That is to say, the fungibility of Black gender presents an opportunity – not a threat – to the creation of new possibilities for Black life. Popular notions of legibility and safety undergird hegemonic gender regimes and allegedly provide adherents with various forms of protection. However, centuries of evidence suggest that said protections seldom apply to Black 

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bodies as these bodies remain subject to gratuitous violence and terror in ways that render us all to be fugitives. So, while dispossession remains a critical part of our inheritance, it does not overdetermine what is possible. Tapping into erotic power and freedom offer another path through which Black erotic bodies can join with one another and conjure new possibilities for Black life beyond those this world has yet to witness.

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NOTES

CELESTIAL BODIES: AN INTRODUCTION  Giorgio Agamben used the term Bare Life to refer to the conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, ).  Misogynoir is Moya Bailey’s term for the discrimination Black women experience as a conjunction of anti-Black racism and sexism, especially in the public sphere and digital realm. See Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York: New York University Press, ).  See Nazeera Wright on Black Girlhood studies in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, ).  Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, ), .  Cox, Shapeshifters, .  Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. . (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), preface.  Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. , no. , (Summer ): –, .  Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.  C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press ), .  Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Nicole Fleetwood. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, New York: ), .  Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, ), .  Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Introduction” to On the Visceral. GLQ, vol. , no. , : –, . DOI ./ –. 

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        –   Amber Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, ), .  Ibid., .  See Nikia Roberts on what she calls “unlawful black mother” and the “criminal line” in her work on abolition theology. Chau Mellon talk at Pomona College.  Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides, .  Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, .  THEORIZING BLACK BODIES  Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, vol. , no. , : –, .  See Jennifer Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem”; C. Riley Snorton, “Anatomically Speaking”; Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination. and Cedrick Robinson, Racial Capitalism.  Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford University Press) , .  I borrow “political ontology” from Wilderson, Afropessimism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ). I also borrow the notion of breaks and fissures from Moten and Snorton.  Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid.  Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar, vol. , no. , : –, .  Ashley Byock, “Dark Matters Race and the Antebellum Logic of Decorporation,” symplokē, vol. , no. –, : –, .  Ibid.  See Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  For an article-length delineation of this argument, see Plasencia, “Staging Enfleshment.”  Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ), . While I borrow “racial calculus” from Hartman, I also mean for it to echo McKittrick’s “mathematics of the unliving.”  Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. , : –, .  For more on Walker’s typography see Dinius, The Textual Effects of David Walker’s Appeal: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).  Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers & Writers in the North – (New York: Oxford University Press, ).  Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).  See John Ernest, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Brigitte Fielder, Relative 

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

         



      

Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Polity Books, ). See J. Cameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account; Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions; LaRose TT. Parris, Being Apart; Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage; Pinto, Infamous Bodies; Lloyd Pratt, The Strangers Book; and Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), . Ibid., . Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), . Koritha Mitchell, From Slave Cabins to the White House (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), . Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyrrany, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Ibid., . Mills, The Racial Contract, . Lloyd describes a Black natural law tradition that contests Western theories. His only pre-civil war examination of this tradition, however, is Frederick Douglass. Both examples I offer here predate Douglass. See Black Natural Law. In using Phillis Wheatley’s married name, Peters, I follow the practice introduced by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers in The Age of Phillis. It is worth noting that four years later, when John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston come together to write the Declaration of Independence, they cite “the pursuit of happiness” as one of God’s given rights, and claim that governments are instituted to secure such rights. By insisting on African happiness Wheatley Peters is also suggesting that happiness was secured by African governments. This reading of “fancy’d” is informed by June Jordan’s reading of Wheatley Peters’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Jordan understands the line “once I redemption neither sought nor knew” to be saying “Once I existed beyond and without these terms under consideration. Once I existed on other than your terms” (). See Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in American or Something Like a Sonnet for Phyllis Wheatley.” Shelby Johnson, “Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Niobean Soundscapes,” in EighteenthCentury Environmental Humanities (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, ), . Ibid. Samuel E. Morison, “The Commerce of Boston,” American Antiquarian Society, : . Ibid. Tiffany L. King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), x. Ibid., . Scholarship on sentimentality is extensive, but key studies include Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments; Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint; Shirley Samuels, ed. The Culture of Sentiment; Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief; and Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling. 

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             –   Hershini BhanaYoung, Haunting Capital (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, ), .  Hartman, Scenes of Subjection,   Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling, .  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Hendler, Public Sentiments, .  Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, , .  Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling, .  P. Gabrielle Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ).  Frances Smith Foster, Written by herself: Literary Production by African American Women, – (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), .  See Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In The Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).  Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, , –.  Ibid., .  Juliette Singh, Unthinking Mastery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Ibid.,   Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling, .  Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Douglass describes this in My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by John David Smith (New York: Penguin Books), .  Thomas E. Miller, “A Plea against the Disfranchisement of the Negro,” in P. S. Foner and R. J. Branham (eds.), Life Every Voice: African American Oratory – (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, ).  Christina Sharpe, In The Wake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” .  C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), , .  Ibid., .  Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Snorton, Black on Both Sides, , .  Lewis R. Gordon, “Disciplinary Decadence,” African Development, vol. , no. , : –, .  THE BLACK BODY AND THE MEDICAL ARCHIVE  Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor, ), .  Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .  David S. Jones, Jeremy A. Greene, Jacalyn Duffin, John H. Warner, “Making the Case for History in Medical Education,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. , no. , : –, .  Ibid., . 

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   –  Washington, Medical Apartheid, .  Ann Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, ), .  See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York City: Vintage, ).  Sarah Berry, “‘[No] Doctor but My Master’: Health Reform and Antislavery Rhetoric in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” The Journal of Medical Humanities, vol. , : –, .  Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in W. Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, ), –.  Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .  Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York City: Oxford University Press, ), .  See, for instance, Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: the Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Farah J. Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in R. G. O’Meally, B. Hayes Edwards, and F. J. Griffin (eds.), Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –; and Emily Lordi, Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ).  Griffin, “When Malindy Sings,” .  For an excellent analysis of how Dr. J. Marion Sims and the broader field of American Gynecology exploited and experimented on the bodies of Black women in particular, see Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ). For a great study of medical violences against Black women’s bodies that range from forced reproduction during slavery to sterilization, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, ).  Like many other doctors in this period, William Wells Brown was not formally trained at a medical school to be a physician.

 LABORING BODIES  Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .  Harriet E. Wilson, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Reginald H. Pitts, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin Books, ), .  Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), xv.  Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts (New York: Penguin Books, ), xxxii. 

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             –   P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Recovered Autobiographies and the Marketplace: Our Nig’s Generic Genealogies and Harriet Wilson’s Entrepreneurial Enterprise,” in J. Boggis, E. A. Raimon, and B. A. White (eds.), Harriet Wilson’s New England: Race, Writing, and Region Revisiting New England: The New Regionalism (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, ), .  Nazeera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), .  Crystal Lynn Webster, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, ), .  Jennifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America Disability Histories (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), .  Samantha Dawn Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Puar, The Right to Maim, xiv.  Ibid., xv.  Barclay, The Mark of Slavery, .  Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined, .  Puar, The Right to Maim, x.  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. , , .  Ibid., .  Puar, The Right to Maim, xiv.  Diana Martha Louis, “Pro-Slavery Psychiatry and Psychological Costs of Black Women’s Enslavement in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (),” Literature and Medicine vol. , no. , , –.  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Victoria Parente, Lauren Hale, and Tia Palermo, “Association between Breast Cancer and Allostatic Load by Race: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey –: Biomarkers of Breast Cancer,” Psycho-Oncology, vol. , no. , , .  Mark T. Berg, Ronald L. Simons, Ashley Barr, Steven R. H. Beach, Robert A. Philibert, “Childhood/Adolescent Stressors and Allostatic Load in Adulthood: Support for a Calibration Model,” Social Science & Medicine, vol. , , –, .  Ibid., .  Louis, “Pro-Slavery Psychiatry,” .  Of the  documents Jean Fagan Yellin discovered pertaining to the Jacobs family, only some  items appear in the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. The other  likely contain other reports of Jacobs’s illnesses in her personal correspondence. For example, Yellin contextualizes the July ,  letter from Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post with William Cooper Nell’s report of Harriet Jacobs’s ill health in a September ,  letter to Amy Post. On October , 

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   –

     

 Nell reports an improvement in Jacobs’s health. Neither of these letters is included in the volume. Harriet Wilson, “Introduction,” in Our Nig, xxxiii. Harriet Wilson, “Appendix,” in Our Nig. Foreman, “Recovered Autobiographies,” . Ibid., . Wilson et al., “Introduction,” xlvi. Puar, The Right to Maim, .  ANIMALIA AMERICANA

 BET Networks, Ruff Ryders Chronicles. August , . Online video clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRorPmKxkM&t=s.  For more on the weather and atmosphere see, Christina Shape, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Paul Mohai, Byoung-Suk Kweon, Sangyun Lee, and Kerry Ard. “Air pollution around schools is linked to poorer student health and academic performance.” Health Affairs, vol. , no. , : –.  Robert D. Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright. “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: Why Race Still Matters after all of These Years.” Environmental Law, vol. , no. , : .  Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, ).  On the vestibularity of blackness and cultural vestibularity, see Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (United States: Lulu.com), . .  See Nikki Giovanni, Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (New York: Harper Collins, ).  See also Christina Sharpe, “Beauty is a Method,” e-flux journal, no. , .  Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha: A Novel (New York: Harper Collins, ), .  Ibid..  Ezely, Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. May , . Online video clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAhJZyo_d.

 BLACK ECOLOGICAL INSURGENCIES  Trial of Nan and Harry, , Essex County (VA) Records, –, undated. Local government records collection, Essex County Court Records. The Library of Virginia. I am indebted to K Anderson and Miracle Freckleton for their effort in the initial transcription of these documents for an exercise in my course on Archival Methods at Arizona State University during the Fall of  Semester. Their own beautiful writing through these records and our discussion of the distinctions between historicism, fiction, and critical fabulation in 

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             – 

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  

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conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Haley, and others inspired my narration of these records. Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology (New York: Polity Books, ), ; Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso), . Jennifer Morgan, “Reproductive Rights, Slavery, and ‘Dobbs v. Jackson,’” Black Perspectives, August , . https://www.aaihs.org/reproductive-rights-slaveryand-dobbs-v-jackson/ For an analysis of the role of property’s development in territorial dispossession and enslavement see K-Sue Park, “The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field,” The Yale Law Journal, vol. , no. , : –. For an astute analysis of the antebellum and postbellum toxicity of cotton production, see Brian Williams, Jayson Maurice Porter, “Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons,” Environmental Humanities, vol. , no. , : –. doi: https://doi.org/./– Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. , no. , : –. Essex County (Va.) Free Negro and Slave Records, –, Library of Virginia The disruption of African ontologies of the body encompassing cosmological and ecological orders through the processes of the slave trade and the attendant enfleshment of Black bodies through commodification underwrote the rise in the West of the somatic body and attendant subjectivity through the formation of the dominant anatomical configuration of the body. See Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). Sowande Mustakeem, “‘She Must Go Overboard & Shall Go Overboard’: Diseased Bodies and the Spectacle of Murder at Sea,” Atlantic Studies, vol. , no. , : –.; Mustakeem, “‘I Never Have Such A Sickly Ship Before’: Diet, Disease, and Mortality in th-Century Atlantic Slaving Voyages,” Journal of African American History, vol. , : –. Also see Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Harlem Moon Broadway Books, ). Also see Sylvia Wynter’s generative typology of the genre of the human’s transformation in the postenlightenment West and Katherine McKittrick’s engagements with its construction and reconfiguration. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. , no. , : –. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, ), . Here I also think with work on Black women’s enfleshment and the juridical ordering of slavery through Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the New World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery:



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   –

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  

  

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Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books,  []), . Delores S. Williams, “Sin, Nature, and Black Women’s Bodies,” in Carol J. Adams (ed.), Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, ), –. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, ). In another context I engage critically with the boundary of the “believable” in relation to captivity and archives of Black women’s violent confinement. See J. T. Roane, “Spitting Back at Law and Order: Donnetta Hill’s Rage in an Era of Vengeance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. , no. , : –. https://doi.org/./. Here I borrow from the insights provided by Saidiya Hartman. As Hartman writes: “My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history.” See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: a Journal of Criticism, vol. , no. , : . https://doi.org/./---. Oyer and Terminer trial of Nan and Harry, Essex County (Va.) Records, –, undated. Local government records collection, Essex County Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia . On a genealogy of Black feminist rage into which we might read this early colonial case, see Roane, “Spitting Back at Law and Order,” –. Yannick Marshall, “An Appeal – Bring the Maroon to the Foreground in Black Intellectual History,” Black Perspectives (blog), June , , https://www .aaihs.org/an-appeal-bring-the-maroon-to-the-foreground-in-black-intellectualhistory/. Kathryn Benjamin Golden, “‘Armed in the Great Swamp’: Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp,” The Journal of African American history, vol. , no. , : –. J. T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls, vol. , no. , : –; Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (New York: NYU Press, ). Minnie Fulkes, interviewed by Susie Byrd, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. . (Washington, DC: Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration, ). For a visualization of the transformation associated with plantation and market expansion, see the maps generated by the Creating Digital Souths Resource University of Richmond. Minnie Fulkes, interviewed by Susie Byrd, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. . (Washington, DC: Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration, ). Octavia V. Alberts Rogers, The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-like, as They Appeared in Their Old Plantation and City Slave Life; Together with Pen-pictures of the Peculiar Institution, with 

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             – 

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   



Sights and Insights into Their new Relations as Freedmen, Freemen, and Citizens (New York: Hunt & Eaton, ); For an important reading of Albert’s work and its importance, see Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, ), –. Tony C. Perry, “In Bondage when Cold Was King: The Frigid Terrain of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland,” Slaver & Abolition, vol. , no. , : –, doi:./X... Rogers, The House of Bondage. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See K-Sue Park, “The history wars and property law.” Carlyn Ferrari, Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer’s Ecopoetics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ). Ernest Ingersoll, “The Oyster Industry,” Bureau of Fisheries, US Census Office : . Ernest Ingersoll, The Oyster Industry, Bureau of Fisheries, US Census Office : . In this schedule Fauntleroy’s name is marked as “Larence;” however the other details match information from the census for Lawrence Fauntleroy. Agriculture Schedule, Selected Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, –, OS Page , Line . Enumeration Date June , . Oyster Platt Records Microfilm, Library of Virginia. J. T. Roane, “Black Ecologies, subaquatic life, and the Jim Crow enclosure of the Tidewater,” Journal of Rural Studies, vol. , : –. https://doi.org/ ./j.jrurstud.... Here I have placed towns in quotations in order to qualify this designation as a complex one given Danielle Purifoy and Louise Seamster’s important analysis about the relationship of “creative extraction” between white towns and Black towns, which are often marked as anomalous and exceptional in their lack of functionality or financial and geographic stability. See Danielle Purifoy & Louise Seamster, “Creative Extraction: Black Towns in White Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. , no. , : –. https://doi.org/ ./. W. B. Weaver, The Gloucester Letter, vol. no. , January . I am grateful to Bessida Cauthorne White for sharing with me these important sources. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge,  []), . Ibid. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. “Southern types - catching his breakfast,” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March , . https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ddd-f-ade-eaa The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Black-fishing,” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March , . https://digitalcollections .nypl.org/items/de-fbbb-ad-e-eaa.



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   –  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. “Near the bridge two negro women are fishing.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March , . https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ ddd-ee-ad-e-eaa  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Overestimated intelligence. “Talk ‘bout cats not hevin’ ‘telegence! Dey knows I hab fish in dis yeah baskit’s well’s I do myse’f. G’long off, you scound’els, an’ wait fur de bones.”” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. –. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ e-cad-eef-e-ea  THE BLACK BODY IN NATURE  Jonathan Edwards, “Birder from Infamous Central Park Run-in to Host Birdwatching Show.” The Washington Post, . https://www .washingtonpost.com/nation////christian-cooper-birding-show/  Nic Brown, “Force of Nature: How Dr. Drew Lanham is Changing Birding,” Garden and Gun, . https://gardenandgun.com/feature/drew-lanhambirding/  Stefanie K. Dunning, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, ), .  Dianne D. Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, ), .  Camille T. Dungy, “Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry,” in C. T. Dungy (ed.), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press. ), xxi.  Ibid., –.  Anissa Janine Wardi. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ).  Analena Hope Hassberg, “Introduction,” in Natalie Baszile (ed.), We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy (New York: Amistad, ), .  Dunning, Black to Nature, .  Hassberg, “Introduction,” .  Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, ), .  Dunning, Black to Nature, .  Smith, African American Environmental Thought, .  Dungy, “Introduction,” xxi.  Ibid., xxii.  Hassberg, “Introduction,” .  Ibid. .  Ibid. .  Natalie Baszile, “Foreword,” in Natalie Baszile (ed.), We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy (New York: Amistad, ), . 

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          –   William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: WW Norton and Company, ), .  Heather I. Sullivan, “The Ecology of Colors: Goeth’s Materialist Optics and Ecological Posthumanism,” in Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .  Dennis McKenna, “Foreword,” in Ryan, John C., et al. (eds.), The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (Sante Fe: Synergertic Press, ), xi.  Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  McKenna, “Foreword,” xi.  Harrison, Gardens: An Essay, x.  hooks, bell, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, ), .  Ibid. .  Jim Robbins, “Ecopsychology: How Immersion in Nature Benefits Your Health,” Yale Environment , . https://e.yale.edu/features/ecopsychology-howimmersion-in-nature-benefits-your-health

 SYNESTHETIC EMBODIMENT  Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), .  Mary Helen Washington, “‘Taming All That Anger down’: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘Maud Martha,’” The Massachusetts Review, vol. , no. , . –.  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (New York: Doubleday, ), .  Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (St. Paul: Gray Wolf Press, ), .  David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), .  Washington, “Taming all that anger down,” .  Ibid., .  Hortense Spillers, “‘An Order of Constancy’: Notes on Brooks and the Feminine,” The Centennial Review, vol. , no. , : –, .  Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs, vol. , no. , : –, .  Tina Campt, Listening to Images. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Spillers, “An order of constancy,” .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  Hortense Spillers. “All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” Boundary , vol. , no. , : . 

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   –  DANCING BODIES  André Lepecki, “Introduction: Presence and Body in Dance and Performance Theory,” in A. Lepecki (ed.), Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), –, .  Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  Shane Vogel theorizes the “dancerly text” in a discussion of Geoffrey Holder’s Black Gods, Green Islands in Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.  Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, .  James Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), , .  The Sugar Cane Club was a cellar club “on the disreputable edge of Harlem,” with an overcrowded dance floor where “the most popular form of dancing was blues dancing, . . . the most sensual form of couples’ dances.” Peter Hulme, “Taking the Blues Away: The Second Edition of The New Negro,” MELUS, vol. , no. , : .  Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, .  Cheryl A. Wall, The Harlem Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .  Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture From its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), .  J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” Survey Graphic, vol. , no. , : .  Maria Balshaw, Looking for Harlem: Urban Aesthetics in African American Literature (London: Pluto, ), .  See, for example, Brooks E. Hefner’s argument that Fisher’s “vernacular modernism” in The Walls of Jericho challenges “the dominant narrative forms of uplift that characterized the early Harlem Renaissance.” Hefner, The Word on the Streets: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), .  Balshaw, Looking for Harlem, .  andré m. carrington, “Salon Cultures and Spaces of Cultural Edification,” in C. Sherrard-Johnson (ed.), A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, ), –, .  Vogel, Stolen Time, .  Daniel Matlin, “Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto Discourse,” in A. Fearnley and D. Matlin (eds.), Race Capital?: Harlem as Setting and Symbol (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –, .  Winston James, “Harlem’s Difference,” in A. Fearnley and D. Matlin (eds.), Race Capital? (New York: Columbia University Press), –, –.  Ibid., .  Stephen Robertson (). Basketball in s Harlem. Digital Harlem Blog, https://drstephenrobertson.com/digitalharlemblog/maps/basketball-ins-harlem/ 

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            –   Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), .  Vogel, Stolen Time, , .  Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry, vol. , no. , : –, , .  Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, – (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), , –.  Ibid., .  Lepecki, “Introduction,” .  Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, .  Daphne Lamothe, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), .  Vogel, “The Sensuous Harlem Renaissance: Sexuality and Queer Culture,” in C. Sherrard-Johnson (ed), A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Hobken, NJ: Wiley Publishing), –, .  Dorothea Löbbermann, “Richard Bruce Nugent and the Queer Memory of Harlem,” in A. Fearnley and D. Matlin (eds.), Race Capital? (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –, . Suzanne W. Churchill, “‘The Whole Ensemble’: Gwendolyn Bennett, Josephine Baker, and Interartistic Exchange in Black American Modernism,” Humanities, vol. , no. , . https://doi.org/./h  Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –.  CELEBRITY BODIES  Lyle Ashton Harris, () The Good Life. https://www.lyleashtonharris.com/ series/the-good-life-/  Celeste Benier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ).  Gwendolyn Shaw and E.K. Shubert, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, ).  Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, – (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Erica Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repetoire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraitur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). 

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   –  Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), .  Amber Musser, Sensual Excess (New York: New York University Press, ), .  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, ).  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, ).  Rachel Douglas, Making the Black Jacobins: CLR James and the Drama of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Shana L. Redmond, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Michelle Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Cedric Tolliver, Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ).  Madhu Dubey, “The ‘True Lie’ of the Nation: Fanon and Feminism,” Differences, vol. , no. , : –.  Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Shane Vogel, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Ibid., .  Stephens, Skin Acts.  Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity.

 EMBODIED BLACK ALIVENESS  Kevin E. Quashie, Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Badia Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, ), .  Christina Radish, “‘Lovecraft Country’: Misha Green, Jonathan Majors, and Jurnee Smollett on How the HBO Series Reclaims Horror,” Collider, August , ,  Grant Fared, What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Langston League, “Langston League” [home page], March , , http:// langstonleague.com/.  Ahad-Legardy, Afro-Nostalgia, .  Nettrice R. Gaskins, “Afrofuturism on Web .: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space,” in R. Anderson and C.E. Jones (eds.), Afrofuturism .: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lanham: Lexington Books, ), . 

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            –   Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. , no. , : , accessed March , , https:// doi.org/./ncr...  Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, vol. , no. , : , accessed March , , https:// doi.org/./.  Ibid., .  Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Radish, “Lovecraft Country.”  Ian Failes, “Behind those insane skin shedding scenes in ‘Lovecraft Country’,” befores & afters, March , , https://beforesandafters.com//// behind-those-insane-skin-shedding-scenes-in-lovecraft-country/.  Ibid.  Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, –.  Ashon T. Crawley, “Stayed | Freedom | Hallelujah,” in T. L. King, J. Navarro, and A. Smith (eds.), Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and AntiBlackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Ibid., .  Misha Green and Shannon Houston, Lovecraft Country, Episode #: “I am.”, Production Draft – Blue Revision, August , , Home Box Office, Inc.  Rasheedah Phillips, “Dismantling the Master(‘s) Clock[work Universe], Pt. ,” in D. Matti and R. Phillips (eds.), Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas (Philadelphia: The Afrofuturist Affair, ), .  Camae Ayewa, “Sights and Sounds of the Passage,” in D. Matti and R. Phillips (eds.), Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas (Philadelphia: The Afrofuturist Affair, ), .  Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, ), .  Phillips, “Dismantling the Master(‘s),” –.  Camae Ayewa, “Time Pockets: The Building of Communal Nostalgia,” in R. Phillips (comp.), Space-Time Collapse II: Community Futurisms (Philadelphia: The Afrofuturist Affair, ), .  Green and Houston, “I am.” Production Draft, .  Tatiana King, DJ BenHaMeen, and Porshéa Patterson-Hurst, “I Am – The Safe Negro Podcast Show (LoveCraft Country Review S E),” September , , in For All Nerds Show, podcast, MP audio, ::, https://soundcloud .com/fanbros/i-am-the-safe-negro-podcast-show-lovecraft-country-review-se.  Casey Brown, “C’est vs. Il est: When and How to Use Them in French,” Clozemaster (blog), December , , https://www.clozemaster.com/blog/ cest-vs-il-est-in-french/.  Lovecraft Country, season , episode , “I Am.”, directed by Charlotte Sieling, aired September , , https://www.hbo.com/lovecraft-country/season-/-iam.  Green and Houston, “I am.” Production Draft, .  King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-Hurst, “Safe Negro Podcast Show”  Lovecraft Country, “I Am.” 

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   –        

Phillips, “Dismantling the Master(‘s),” . Eshun, “Further Considerations,” . King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-Hurst, “Safe Negro Podcast Show.” Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, ), . Quashie, Black Aliveness, –. Langston League, Lovecraft Country: An Unofficial Syllabus, Episode : “I am.”, last modified September , , https://drive.google.com/file/d/ mTFoElCfGbEtnOCRegujoOVaHVof/view, . Langston League, . Ibid.

 STAGING RACIAL PASSING  See Werner Sollors on historical literary passings in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.  In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Redwood: Stanford University Press, ), Michele Elam describes passing narratives of this period to “variously feature passing as a strategy of survival, as a means to economic gain, or, as James Weldon Johnson’s narrator sees it at the outset of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (, ), the wicked realization of a ‘savage and diabolical desire’ to play a ‘practical joke on white society’” ().  Ibid., .  For a sampling of scholarship on this dyad, see Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Differences, vol. , no. /, : –; and C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), among many others. In Black literature the paradigmatic example is, of course, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (); in Black drama, see, for example, the work of writers from Ed Bullins (This Theme Is Blackness, ) to Suzan-Lori Parks (The America Play, ) to Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, ).  Martha J. Cutter, “Why Passing Is (Still) Not Passé after More Than  Years: Sources from the Past and Present,” in M. Godfrey and V.A. Young (eds.), NeoPassing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), –.  Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, Translated by Betsy Wing. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ).  Contemporary critics addressing the intersection of Blackness and opacity include Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, – (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (New York: New York University Press, ); John Brooks, The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in 

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            – 

    

 

 

 



Black Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect,” Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. , no. , : –; and many more. Cutter, “Why passing is (still) not passé,” . Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Nella Larsen, Passing, Penguin Classics, , . Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, . Suzan-Lori Parks, Essays on the Plays and Other Works (Jefferson: Macfarland, ), . A fellow volume in the Cambridge Companion series, The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (), offers provocative and wideranging reflections on theatrical form in the hands of Black artists. Readers of the present book may be especially interested in essays by Soyica Diggs Colbert on “Drama in the Harlem Renaissance”; by Adrienne Macki Braconi on “African American Women Dramatists, –”; and by Aimee Zygmonski on “Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement.” Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Lori Harrison-Kahan, “Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna,” in Julie Carey Nerad (ed.), Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, – (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, ), –, . Harvey Young, Theatre & Race (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Harry Elam, African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Zora Neale Hurston was one of the earliest theorists of the relationship between Blackness and drama. In her words, “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama [. . .] No little moment passes unadorned.” Decades before sociologist Erving Goffman proposed his theory of “the presentation of self in everyday life,” Hurston described the specific ways in which Black men and women signaled to one another: “These little plays by strolling players are acted out daily in a dozen streets in a thousand cities, and no one ever mistakes the meaning,” Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in A. Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. Ju Yon Kim, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (New York: New York University Press, ), . Elam, African-American Performance, . To this end, as Daphne A. Brooks has argued, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black performers “rehearsed methods to transform the notion of ontological dislocation into resistant performance”; through such “Afro-alienation acts,” she writes, “the condition of alterity converts into cultural expressiveness and a specific strategy of cultural performance,” (Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, – (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –). Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry, vol. , : –, .



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   –  Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (), featuring one Black character and one white (we do not know which is which), is a relatively rare example of a literary work that invites readers to interrogate the “truth” of its characters’ racial identity. (Morrison’s point, of course, is to spotlight our readerly investment in racialization; the story is constructed so as to make definitive judgment impossible.) Yet the difference between engaging in a process of guessing at the racial identity of imagined characters whom we encounter in the privacy of our own reading experience versus those we encounter in live performance is substantial. In the latter, the audience’s judgment concerns a real person (the actor) with whom they are breathing the very same air; the stakes are thus, in many senses, significantly higher – and more embodied – for all involved.  Young, Theatre & Race, .  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Jacobs-Jenkins is a MacArthur Honoree,” Juilliard Journal, October . http://journal.juilliard.edu/journal//jacobsjenkins_ macarthur. Neighbors involves a family of Black minstrel actors – played by Black actors in Blackface – who move in next door to a bourgeois interracial family; Appropriate features a group of white adult siblings who discover that their recently deceased father has been hoarding a trove of lynching photographs. While no Black characters take the stage in that play, the highly theatrical specter of lynched Black bodies haunts its every scene, shaping the hopes, dreams, and betrayals of the play’s white characters.  Boucicault also made lasting impacts on theatrical culture, on which point Jacobs-Jenkins gives his own Boucicault character a bombastic line of dialogue claiming credit for everything from the invention of the matinee to that of drama copyright. As a matter of historical record, Boucicault was a plaintiff in a number of cases that led to the development of modern copyright law; of interest to the present discussion about Jacobs-Jenkins’s twenty-first century riff on the subject of melodramas and passing is the fact that Boucicault himself was also a noted plagiarist. On Boucicault and copyright, see Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, – (Cambridge University Press, ).  James Leverett, “An Octoroon: The Octoroon.” An Octoroon On Stage Press, , .  Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . While not all mulatto/a figures were also passing figures, Sherrard-Johnson observes that by the twentieth century, the two were closely linked: Insofar as “the passing performance tests visual and behavioral assumptions about race,” she writes, “[it] is inextricably tied to the mulatta’s function as an icon of visual modernity” ().  Citing Hazel V .Carby, author of groundbreaking feminist scholarship on mulatta figures, Sherrard-Johnson writes that the mulatta figure became solidified in the early twentieth-century imagination as a “‘literary displacement of the actual increasing separation of the races’ who acts as an imaginary bridge between black and white spaces, in spite of Jim Crow laws” (Sherrard-Johnson, , citing Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press, ), ). A representative handful of works featuring mulatto/a figures from this period include Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (); Pauline 

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            – 





 

 



 

Hopkins’s Of the Blood (); James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (); Larsen’s Quicksand () and Passing (); Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (); Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (); and Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto (). Eve Allegra Raimon, “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), . Kim Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). Manganelli also limns Boucicault’s literary dialogue with fellow Irish writers like Captain Mayne Reid, whose important play The Quadroon; Or, a Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana () also featured a non-southern hero who comes to the rescue of a racially mixed southern woman. Ibid., . For a detailed discussion of An Octoroon’s alignment with and departures from Boucicault’s original, see Rosa Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama.” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, vol. , no. , . Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (London: Nick Hern Books, ). Thelma Golden, Freestyle, exhibition catalogue. Studio Museum in Harlem, ,  (quoted in Young, Theatre & Race, ). A very incomplete list of contemporary Black playwrights innovating within dramatic form to interrogate conceptions of Blackness and processes of racialization include Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Aleshea Harris, Jeremy O. Harris, James Ijames, Michael R. Jackson, Antoinette Nwandu, Robert O’Hara, Mfonsio Udofia, and Jocelyn Bioh. I am grateful to Tina Post for conversation on the role of therapy in JacobsJenkins’s play, and hope that future scholarship on An Octoroon will take up its entanglement with psychoanalysis in greater depth. For an important assessment of the productivity of psychoanalytic methods for Black literary studies, particularly regarding subjects of historical trauma, see Aida Levy-Hussen’s How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (NYU, ). Writes Levy-Hussen in apt terms for discussion of the present play, “Fictional accounts of the past function, not as a psychic portal into the past, but as an encrypted map of contemporary fantasies that circulate through the idiom of historical grief” (). Post, Deadpan, . In these aspects Boucicault’s and Jacobs-Jenkins’s scenes chime very closely with a key scene in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter (). As Sherrard-Johnson notes, “Brown includes this early scene on the auction block, encoded with antislavery rhetoric, to evoke sympathy from free white women for the plight of enslaved black women; yet in so doing he creates a racialized discourse in which whiteness becomes violable through its collapse into blackness. The potential violence of this scene threatens any notion of racial stability and establishes a gold standard to which the majority of subsequent mulatta characters subscribe” ().



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   –  Writes Carrie Preston of this production, “Hissing and cheering were the warm up for a show that would ask the audience to participate in more intense ways, including bidding at a slave auction.” “Hissing, Bidding, and Lynching: Participation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins An Octoroon and the Melodramatics of American Racism,” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. , no. , : . Tina Post, “‘Is That What We Wanted?’: Staging Slavery’s Affective Scripts,” Modern Drama, vol. , no. , : –, .  Post, . Theatrical performance requires intense embodied experience from actors as well, a particularly complex demand in the context of material so personally and historically charged. Says the veteran actor Amber Gray of playing Zoe, “When I’m standing there on that block looking around at my fellow performers and I hear, ‘Is there any other bid for the octoroon?’ I start to hyperventilate a little bit. I feel my body cramping. I really have some crazy physical reaction to it. It’s never happened to me before” (Alexis Soloski, “Returning to an Impossible Role,” New York Times, April , , https:// www.nytimes.com////theater/amber-gray-on-an-octoroon-at-soho-rep .html).  Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), .  Schneider, “Anyway, the whole point of this” .  Post, “Is That What We Wanted?,”.  Leverett, “An Octoroon,” .  Marc Tracy writes that in the twenty-first century theater, “an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting” in both classic drama and new work (“Who Can Play the King? Questions of Representation Fuel Casting Debates.” New York Times. July , . https://www.nytimes.com////theater/richard-iii-casting-debates .html). See, among many other scholarly and popular treatments of this subject, Clare Syler and Daniel Banks, Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Edition (Routledge ).  This casting list draws from the  script published in the UK by Nick Hern Books. This would seem to be an evolution from the casting list in an earlier edition, the  US-based Dramatists Play Service, Inc., which noted that BJJ could be played by “an African-American actor or a black actor” but did not include the possibility of “playwright.”  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on the Politics of Theater.” September , . https://yalereview.org/article/theater-and-its-politics.  Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ).  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on the Politics of Theater,” Yale Review. September , . https://yalereview.org/article/theater-and-itspolitics.  Elam, African-American Performance, .  Post, “Is That What We Wanted?,” . 

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            –   PASSING BODIES  Alyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), .  Ibid., .  Ibid., .  The film is described as such in Jen Yamato () “Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga share passion for ‘Passing.’” L.A. Times. https://www.latimes.com/enter tainment-arts/movies/story/--/passing-sundance-negga-thompson-hall.  Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, “Introduction: The Neo-Passing Narrative,” in M. Godfrey and V. A. Young (eds.), Neo-Passing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow (Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, ), .  Ibid., .  Lisa Mendelman, “Character Defects: The Racialized Addict and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Modernism/Modernity vol. , no. , (): –.  Martha J. Cutter, “Why Passing is (Still) Not Passé after More than  Years: Sources from the Past and Present,” in M. Godfrey and V. A. Young (eds.), NeoPassing: Performing Identity After Jim Crow (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, ), .  Ibid., .  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, ).  Rebecca Hall, Passing (screenplay), , .  Deborah E. McDowell, “Black Female Sexuality in Passing” (), in C. Kaplan (ed.), Passing (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, ), .  Ibid., .  Ibid.  As D’Emilio and Freedman note, “[S]everal kinds of same-sex relationships, some of them sexual, flourished in the nineteenth century. The unique social worlds inhabited by middle-class men and women encouraged intimate relationships, especially between women who were socialized . . . to value the separate female sphere. For both women and men,” they conclude, “a cult of friendship fostered romantic feelings and may have sheltered sexual practices.” John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Friedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .  Rebecca Hall, Passing (screenplay), , .  As a comparison, Isaac Julien’s film Looking For Langston () famously battled the Hughes estate for its implication of Langston Hughes as a queer Black forebear. By , Hall’s exploration of Passing’s queer subtext finds a more mainstream audience.  Yamato, .  See, for instance, Hall’s interview with Terry Gross () “‘Passing’ Filmmaker Rebecca Hall shares the personal story behind her movie.” https://www.npr.org/ ////passing-rebecca-hall-film. Hall’s mother, the opera singer Maria Ewing, passed as white, but the family’s Black genealogy was purposely kept secret, until Hall investigated it through the PBS show Finding Your Roots. Hall discovered that her maternal great grandfather, John Williams, was Black, and “was born enslaved in Virginia”; after Abolition he went to 

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   –

 

 

Washington, where he became an activist and ended up “toasting Frederick Douglass at an event at the White House for the uplift of the race.” See Hall’s interview with Gross. For evidence of the controversy surrounding the casting of Thompson and Negga, see, for instance, Jared Alexander () “Black Twitter Debates Passing Passability as ‘Passing’ Trailer Premieres.” Yahoo News. Alexander’s article notes, “The trailer immediately found its way on Black Twitter, with many people chiming in with their takes on the film, and whether or not they believe Negga would actually be able to pass in the s or today.” One such Twitterer writes: “Aint nothing ‘white passing’ about that woman . Cut the shit Netflix ”; another says, “Netflix has lost their mf minds. Do they know what passing means??” (qtd. in Alexander). Looking at IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt/reviews? sort=userRating&dir=asc&ratingFilter=) or Rotten Tomatoes (https://www .rottentomatoes.com/m/passing_/reviews?type=verified_audience) shows a similar public fixation on the non-“passability” of the actors. But amidst the controversy, another Black Twitterer demurs, arguing that “these conversations about the white passing netflix movie are annoying. y’all have no problem when biracial people play fully black people so let them play fully white people” (qtd. in Alexander). Godfrey and Young, : , . Lisa Mendelman, “Character Defects: The Racialized Addict and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Modernism/Modernity vol. , no. , : –.  BODY OF KNOWLEDGE: AUDRE LORDE’S ZAMI

 “The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color center for community organizing, focusing on the New York City Area,” taken from their website: https://alp.org/about.  Lorde, “Audre Lorde,” in C. Tate (ed.), Black Women Writers at Work (Chicago: Haymarket Books, ), .  Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, ), .  Indeed, the title phrase “sister outsider” gestures to the experience of being simultaneously within and outside of a group of belonging.  Lorde, Sister Outsider, –.  For these and a fuller list of essays on this topic see the following chapters of Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press. ), edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall: “Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in the Angry Decades” and “Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism.” For a brilliant accounting of how these Black feminist articulations of difference informed and differed from Black gay and Black queer articulations, see “The Anthological Generation,” in Jafari Allen’s (ed.), There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, ).  Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, ), .  Ibid, .  The Jamaican–American lesbian writer Michelle Cliff, who was a colleague and close friend of Lorde, negotiates similar dynamics in her essays and 

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            – 

 



             

     

autobiographically-informed novels, in which light skinned Creole Jamaicans move to New York City in the mid-twentieth century and make decisions about how to navigate US racial and class dynamics. Lorde, Zami, . Ibid, . This sentiment may seem surprising, given Lorde’s upbringing in Harlem. In the chapter following the description of her time in Mexico Lorde explicitly reflects on the identity dynamics that shape her experiences of community, and her experiences of the geography of community belonging within New York City. The insights she shares on her return can be attributed, at least in part, to what she learns during her time in Mexico. This is additionally interesting in the context of – and in contrast to – the ways that narratives of mestizaje as nation-building in Mexico are seen to negate and/or undermine Blackness. It is possible that Lorde was minimally aware of these dynamics, as a traveler leaving the United States for the first time, and as a young person. It is worth noting that Lorde writes america and americans in the lower-case, though she capitalizes other countries such as Cuba and Mexico. Lorde, Zami, . See “Black Nations Queer Nations?” in Allen’s Disco Ball for an exploration of the cultural politics of Black people’s historical and current use of gay, lesbian, queer, and related terms. Lorde, Zami, . Lorde, Sister Outsider, . Lorde, Zami, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid. Ibid., . The scars produced by the burning begin to reduce through Lorde’s use of cocoa butter, at her mother’s suggestion, therefore softening both the physical scars and metaphorically softening the hardened outer shell Lorde protectively generates (). This has additional significance because of the embittered relationship Audre has had with her mother, along with her continued receptivity to aspects of her mother’s guidance and ways of seeing the world. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid. Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., , .  THE BLACK BODY, VIOLENCE, AND RELIGION

 Dianne M. Stewart and Tracey E. Hucks, “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field,” Journal of Africana Religions, vol. , no. , . 

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   –  See, for example, Hortense Spillers, ; Saidiya Hartman, ; Saidiya Hartman & Frank Wilderson, ; Wilderson, ; Calvin Warren, ; Zakiyyah I. Jackson, .  See also, Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ).  Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).  See Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, ).  Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, ).  Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (New York: Orbis Books, ).  Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture (New York: New York University, )  See Sanders, ; Butler, ; Pérez, ; Harris, ; Casselberry, ; Hartman, ; Greene-Hayes, .  Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).  Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Wayward Negro Religions in the Twentieth-Century Slum,” The Journal of African American History vol. , no. , .  Clarence E. Hardy, “‘No Mystery God’: Black Religions of the Flesh in Pre-War Urban America,” Church History, vol. , no. , : –.  See, for instance, Douglas, ; Pinn & Hopkins, ; Copeland, ; Lomax, .  Clarence Hardy, James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ).  Go Tell It On The Mountain’s main characters are John Grimes, a fourteen-yearold boy in the process of developing his moral compass and religious beliefs, especially as it relates to his gender/sexual identity; Gabriel, a self-proclaimed man of God, deacon and lay-preacher, and John’s stepfather, who rejects John for his suspicions about John’s suspected homosexuality; Elizabeth, John’s mother and Gabriel’s wife, who takes a backseat throughout much of the novel but secretly despises her husband’s actions; Roy, Gabriel and Elizabeth’s son, who is depicted as rebellious and in opposition to his father’s antics; Florence, Gabriel’s sister, the bearer of all of Gabriel’s dirty secrets, who challenges his hypocritical ways and is a voice of reason in the church and in the home; and lastly, Elisha, a young, saved, church leader, who in many ways functions as John’s spiritual guide, older brother, and in some instances, his romantic crush. In addition to these main characters, there are a number of minor characters that are significant to the novel’s composition, namely, the characters from some of the major characters’ pasts (i.e. Richard, Deborah, etc.), the “praying church mothers,” and the congregation of the Temple of the Fire Baptized. 

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            –   Though there was a “Ferguson Prayer Vigil,” activists were upset with the lack of physical mobilization from the church to the streets by clergy and churchgoing people.  Janet Jakobson and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, ).  Melissa Hackman, Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).

 BLACK CRIPISTEMOLOGIES  Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, vol. , no. , : .  Kevin Everod Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being. Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Here, I am alluding to Christina Sharpe’s conversation about Black redaction and annotation as wake work. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.  Farah Jasmine Griffin provides an excellent analysis of this juxtaposition in “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  Sami Schalk provides important interventions in disability studies with her theorizing of how Black women speculative fiction writers represent disability as material and metaphor in Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “Black Grotesquerie,” American Literary History, accessed November , , https://doi.org/./alh/ajx.  Ibid., .  Emily Russell, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), .  Aida Levy-Hussen, How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, ), .  Throughout, I adopt Sami Schalk’s version of the neologism bodymind, which is meant to reject the body and mind as binaries to instead consider how they operate together, one affecting the other and vice versa. Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), xiv.  Crip, an abbreviated version of cripple, is a reclamation of a denigrated form of embodiment and identity. As a theoretical perspective, it challenges critical disability studies to re-evaluate their understanding of disability identity as static and stable, privileging of medical diagnosis, and exercising of respectability politics by demonstrating disabled people’s ability to be independent and productive, to name a few. For more on crip identity and crip theory, see Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, ); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Caitlin Wood (ed.), Criptiques (Minneapolis: May Day/Graywolf Press, ). 

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   –  In her essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison contends that in Black literature “There is always an elder there. And these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.” Mari Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers (–): A Critical Evaluation, st ed. (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, ), .  Joycelyn Moody (ed.), A History of African American Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .  Ibid., .  Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown Publishers, ), . original emphasis.  Moody, A History, .  Here, I am inspired and compelled by Kevin Quashie’s reading of the aesthetics of Black being in Black poetry and essay – “And yet we might suppose that every black text rests on a quiet premise of black humanity – that the text and its aesthetics assume being.” Kevin Everod Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .  Mrs. Scott even reassures Cee that her husband – Dr. Beau – is “no Dr. Frankenstein” as she explains that he is a doctor and scientist (). In so doing, Morrison highlights that Dr. Beau is, indeed, a Dr. Frankenstein, only Dr. Frankenstein is not an anomaly, a monster of the imagination. He is very much representative, nearly mundanely so.  Liat Ben-Moshe and Allison C. Carey (eds.), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), x.  Mob violence forced Cee and Frank’s family to leave their Texas land and home to migrate to Lotus, evidencing Jasmine Farrah Griffin and Isabelle Wilkerson’s contention that white violence leads to displacement.  Andrea O’Reilly, Maternal Theory: Essential Readings (Bradford: Demeter Press, ), .  Merri Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. , no. , : , https://doi.org/./jlcds ...  Merri Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. , no. , : –, https://doi.org/./ jlcds... A Visitation of Spirits is a novel itself filled with southern Black cripistemologies.  For more on Black solidiers in the Korean War, specifically the promise of improved race relations, see David P. Cline, Twice Forgotten: African Americans and the Korean War, an Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Jeremy P. Maxwell, Brotherhood in Combat: How African Americans Found Equality in Korea and Vietnam (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ).  Puar, The Right to Maim. Here, I am drawing on Jasbir Puar’s theorizing of biopolitics, necropolitics, and disability.  Morrison theorizes ancestor figures in African American writing as ever-present elders or wise “timeless people” who are “benevolent, instructive, and 

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            – 

   

protective.” Mari Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers (–): A Critical Evaluation st ed. (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, ), . Merri Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. , no. , : , https://doi.org/./jlcds... Ibid., . Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Alison Kafer coins curative time to articulate how disabled people are positioned as out of time as they wait for the future possibility of a cure. Only once cured are disabled people reinserted into time as emblems of onward progress to better futures, futures emancipated from disability due to medical technological advancement. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .  BLACK EROTIC BODIES

 Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).  Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. , no. , : –.  Ibid.,   Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).  Shoniqua Roach, “Black Sex in the Quiet,” Differences, vol. , : –.  C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).  Ibid.,   Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  Frank B. Wilderson III, “Black and the Master/Slave Relation” in Afropessimism: An Introduction (): –. (Minneapolis: racked & dispatched Press).  Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.  Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, : –.  Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” Feminist Studies, vol. , no. , : –.  Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, : –. .  Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” The Black Unicorn, : –.  Akwaeke Emezi, “Transition: My surgeries were a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature,” New York Magazine, January , . https://www.thecut.com///writer-and-artist-akwaeke-emezi-gender-transitionand-ogbanje.html  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid. 

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INDEX

abuse, ,  Black body as repository for,  disability and,  labor as, – medical, , , – physical,  sexual, , ,  aesthetics,  biomythography and,  Black,  of Black being, n Black political, ,  Black political subjectivity and,  Black portraiture and,  body and,  literary, ,  literature and, – medicine and, – of modern arenas,  of P-Valley, – of transparency,  transparent,  Afrofuturism, , , –, ,  Black feminist,  Woolfork and,  Afro-nostalgia, , – Afropessimism,  Ahad-Legardy, Badia, ,  Aldridge, Ira,  The Black Doctor, –, ,  ancestry, ,  animal bodies,  animal rights activism, ,  animality, , , , , 

animals, , –, ,  flesh of,  plants and,  See also dogs Baartman, Saartje, – Bailey, Moya, –, n Baker, Josephine, , – Baldwin, James The Fire Next Time,  Go Tell It on the Mountain, – “Sonny0 s Blues,”  Bambara, Toni Cade,  Barclay, Jennifer, – BenHaMeen, DJ, ,  Bennett, Joshua,  Bernier, Celeste, ,  Best, Wallace, ,  biology, ,  bioterrain, , – birding, –,  while Black,  Black aliveness, –, –, , –, ,  Black arts, ,  movement,  Black being, , , ,  the vestibular and,  Black death, , , ,  Black embodiment, , –, –,  abjection of,  Black erotic bodies, –,  Black feminist thought, ,  Black folk wisdom, ,  Black history, , , ,  Black humanity, , , ,  Black inner life, ,  Black interiority, , 



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Black life, , , , , – counter-history of,  law and, – multiplicity and,  natural world and,  possibilities of, , – precarity of,  underrepresented histories of,  value of,  violence and, ,  white engagement with,  Black literary tradition, –, ,  post-bellum/pre-Harlem era of,  Black literature, , , n, n Black medical exploitation and,  Black medical violence and, ,  medical abuse and,  medicine and,  representations of violence and,  Black Lives Matter, , ,  Black portraiture, ,  Black Quantum Futurism (BQF), –, – Black studies, , –, –,  canon,  Lovecraft Country and, – speculative turn in,  Black subject, , , ,  Afro-nostalgia and,  Black memory-making and,  embodied,  medicine and,  Black thought, ,  Black women, , , , –, , , – bodies of, n confinement of, n controlling images and,  disabled lives of,  discrimination and, n dissimulating techniques and,  enfleshment of, n enslaved, n hypersexualization of,  in Larsen’s work,  in Lovecraft Country,  medical experimentation on,  medical violence and, – public scrutiny and,  reform theory and,  speculative fiction writers, n voices of,  writing by, 

Black writing, , , –, ,  blackface,  Blackness, –, , , , , , –, – animality and, ,  in An Octoroon (Jacobs-Jenkins), –,  anti-Blackness, , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  in The Black Doctor (Aldridge),  class privilege and,  drama and, n embodiment of,  enfleshment of,  fungibility of,  Haiti and,  Lorde’s, ,  material lack and,  mestizaje and, n opacity and, n public displays of,  as queer,  racial,  racialization and, n racialized, ,  reclamation of,  reterritorialization of,  as a site of woundedness,  subhumanity and,  theater and, – ungendering of,  US,  vestibularity of,  vestibule and,  whiteness and, , n writing and,  in Zami (Lorde), ,  bodymind, , , , , , –, , n non-normative,  Boucicault, Dion, , n, n The Octoroon, , –, , , n Bouroissa, Mohamed,  Brooks, Charlotte, – Brooks, Daphne, , n, n Brooks, Gwendolyn,  Maud Martha, –, –, –, – Brown, William Wells, , –n Clotel: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, –, , n The Escape, –

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Butler, Octavia,  Kindred,  Xenogenesis Trilogy,  Caldwell, Andrew, – Campt, Tina, –, n capacity, , , , ,  bodily,  for dreaming,  imaginative, – reproductive, , –,  capital, ,  accumulation, ,  erotic,  racial, ,  slavery and, – capitalism, , ,  green,  racial, –, –, ,  captivity, , , , , –, n African American women’s histories of,  Black bodies in,  Jacobs’s, ,  narrative,  under white supremacy,  Wilson’s,  Carman, Adam, –,  Oration, – celebrity Black, ,  Black feminine and feminized,  Black masculine, ,  body, , , , – culture,  Louverture’s, –, , – charisma, , –,  Charon, Rita, – Chesnutt, Charles, , –,  The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales,  The House Behind the Cedars, n The Marrow of Tradition, ,  Child, Lydia Maria, , ,  childhood, –, , , ,  Black, – Wilson’s, ,  Christian, Barbara, ,  Christianity African American,  white,  Church of God in Christ (COGIC), –

citizenship, ,  Black,  masculine,  Civil War (US), , , – class, , , , , , , –,  difference,  dynamics, n hierarchies, ,  master, , , ,  privilege,  Collins, Patricia Hill, ,  colonialism, –, – French,  Haitian Revolution and,  medical violence and, –,  medicine and,  settler, ,  visceral logics of,  colorism, , , , , , , –,  commodity Black expressiveness as,  fungibility of,  Cooper, Christian, , ,  corporeality Black female,  of gardens,  transnational,  cotton, , n fields,  COVID- pandemic, ,  Cox, Renee, – Crawley, Ashon, – cripistemologies, , , – Black, , n Cutter, Martha J., –,  dance, , –, – ritual, – debilitation, –, ,  decolonial movements, ,  Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, ,  disability, –, , , , , , n.cripistemology and, ,  debility and,  emancipation from, n enslavement and,  Home (Morrison) and,  identity, n indenture and, – knowledge, – labor and, –, – Puar on, n



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

disability (cont.) Wilson and,  See also Jacobs, Harriet:disability and disability studies, , , n Black, , – cripistemology and,  critical, n enslavement and,  disembodiment, ,  disenfranchisement, , ,  dismemberment, , , , ,  archives of,  dispossession, , –,  Black kin,  of Indigenous territory,  territorial, n dogs, , ,  double consciousness, ,  Douglass, Frederick, , , , , , n, n My Bondage and My Freedom, n Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, , – drama, , , , , n of the audience, ,  Black, n Blackness and, n copyright, n of history, , , , – racialization and,  reception of,  Du Bois, W. E. B., , , , ,  The Health and Physique of the American Negro,  “Of the Passing of the First-Born,”  Dungy, Camille, –,  Dunning, Stefanie, – Earl, Riggins, ,  ecologies,  Black, , ,  of white supremacy,  ecology, , ,  Black,  Black epistemologies of,  insurgent,  Edwards, Erica, – Elam, Michele, , ,  Ellison, Ralph. See The Invisible Man emancipation, –, , , ,  embodiment, , , , , , , , , –,  Black erotic, 

Black experiences of,  Black masculine celebrity,  of Blackness,  Black politial life and,  celebrity,  crip, n enfleshment and,  erotic,  gender, –, ,  Lorde and, – masculine,  racial, , – racialized, –, ,  religious, ,  theologies of,  trans,  unmarked,  See also Black embodiment Emezi, Akwaeke,  Freshwater, , – enfleshment, – of Black bodies, n of Blackness,  Black women’s, n in Lovecraft Country, , – enslavement, , , , , –,  in A Mercy (Morrison),  avian conservation and,  Butler on,  cellular,  conditions of, ,  disability and, , – Douglass and,  expansion of,  fungibility of Black bodies and,  Lockean natural rights and,  mental trauma and,  property and, n Wheatley and, – Equiano, Olaudah,  The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, – erotic, the, , , , –, –,  See also Lorde, Audre Fanon, Franz, , – femininity, , ,  Black, , ,  Ferdinand, Malcolm, –



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Fisher, Rudolph,  “High Yaller,” , , – “Miss Cynthie,” – vernacular modernism of, n The Fisher King (Marshall), – Fleetwood, Nicole, , , n flesh, –, –, , , –, , , – Black, , , , –,  Black queer,  brown,  hieroglyphics of, , , – refusal of,  women’s bodies as,  Floyd, George, ,  Foreman, P. Gabrielle, ,  freedom, , , , , ,  affective experience of,  Afrofuturism and,  Black, , , –, ,  Black bodies’ fungibility and,  Black writers on,  circumscribed,  co-cultivation of,  dance and,  dreams, , , ,  erotic, –,  legal, ,  of physical mobility,  sexual, – Wheatley on, – fugitivity, ,  gender, ,  Fulkes, Minnie,  fungibility, , ,  Black, , , , – of Black gender, –, –,  of the commodity,  gender, ,  Gaines, Ernest, –,  gardens, , ,  Garner, Eric, – Garrison, William Lloyd, ,  Gay, Ross, – gender, , , , , , , , , –, –,  barriers,  binary, ,  Black, , , , , –,  differentiation,  embodiment, –,  fugitivity, , 

fungibility, –, –,  gender-affirming surgery,  identity, , n queer performance of,  transgression, ,  transition, , – girlhood,  Black, –, – Jacobs’s, –, – in Love (Morrison),  in Maud Martha (Brooks),  traumas,  Wilson’s,  Glissant, Édouard, ,  Monsieur Toussaint, , – Godfrey, Mollie, , ,  Green, Misha, –,  Griffin, Farah Jasmine, , n, n Griggs, Sutton,  Imperium in Imperio, – grotesque, the, – Haiti, ,  as first Black state, – Louverture and, ,  revolutionary national body of,  US occupation of, ,  See also Haitian Revolution; Hughes, Langston: The Emperor of Haiti Haitian Revolution, , , , , –,  Hall, Rebecca, –n, See also Passing (Hall) Hamilton, Thomas, ,  Harlem Renaissance, ,  early, n Global,  poetics of uplift and,  Harper, Frances E.W.,  Iola Leroy,  Harris, Lyle Ashton, –, , ,  Hartman, Saidiya, , , , –, , –, n, n, n racial calculus, n heroism, , ,  Black, ,  heteropatriarchy, ,  Hinton, Anna, – historical consciousness,  Black,  Hobbs, Allyson,  homosexuality, , , n hooks, bell, –, 



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Hopkins, Pauline E.,  Of One Blood,  horror,  speculative,  Houston, Shannon, – Hughes, Langston, –, –, n Hurston, Zora Neale, , , , n The Emperor of Haiti,  Mulatto, n “Poor Little Black Fellow,” , – hypervisibility, , , , – identity, , , , , , –, , n American,  Black,  Caribbean,  categories of, ,  collective,  contextual logic of,  crip,  demonized,  dynamics, n gender, , n lesbian,  logics of,  mixed-race,  modern, ,  narratives of,  passing and, – positions,  psychic,  racial, , , –, –, ,  racialized, ,  sexual, , n US,  in Zami (Lorde),  illness, , –,  chronic,  in Our Nig (Wilson),  Jacobs and, – mental, ,  profit and,  psychological,  stories of,  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot), – imperialism,  indenture, , ,  Wilson’s, 

inferiority, ,  Black, , , ,  Black intellectual,  Ingersoll, Ernest,  intimacy, –, , , , , –,  earth and,  erotic power and,  illicit,  land and,  law and,  nonhuman life and,  water and,  invisibility, , , –,  social,  Invisible Man (Ellison), , , , , n Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, ,  Jacobs, Harriet, , , –, – Black women’s voices and,  disability and, –, – early Black critical theory and,  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, –, , , – narratives of disability and,  white doctors and, ,  Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden,  An Octoroon, , –, , n James, CLR, – The Black Jacobins,  jazz, , ,  dance,  free,  Jefferson, Thomas, , , n Jim Crow, , , –, , , , , – color line, – consolidation of,  Cotton Club and,  in Emperor Jones (O’Neill),  laws, n medical politics of,  passing literature and,  practices,  religion and,  reterritorialization of,  social architecture of,  Johnson, James Weldon, , , , n, n Jordan, June, , n Judd, Bettina, , 

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Kafer, Alison, , n Kant, Immanuel, , ,  Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,  King, Tatiana, ,  knowledge production,  Black,  Black cripistemological,  sensation and,  Western sites of,  labor, , , , , –,  abuse and, – agricultural,  Black, , ,  Black women’s,  children’s,  disability and, –, –,  domestic, ,  enslaved,  extraction,  forced,  intellectual,  law,  maximum extraction of,  medical, ,  racial hierarchies and,  sexual,  slave,  theft of,  unfree,  violence and,  Lacks, Henrietta, – Lanham, Drew, – Larsen, Nella Passing, , –, –, n Lawrence, Jacob, –,  Levy-Hussen, Aida, , n literacy,  requirement,  literary, the, –, –,  Loguen, J.W., , , – The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life, – Long, Charles H., – Lorde, Audre, , , , n “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,”  Blackness of,  The Cancer Journals,  Cliff and, n on the erotic, –, , , – on self-care, 

Sister Outsider: Collected Essays and Speeches, , – “The Uses of the Erotic,” ,  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, – Louis, Diana, , – Louverture, Toussaint, , – embodiment of, ,  Lovecraft Country, , –, ,  Black aliveness and, , ,  enfleshment in, , – lynching, , , , – photographs, –, n portraits,  Maples, Kwoya Fagin,  Mend, , – Marcus, Sharon, ,  maroon, , ,  martyrdom, ,  masculinity, , –,  Black, –, ,  McDowell, Deborah, – McKittrick, Katherine, n mathematics of the unliving, , n medical experimentation,  Black, , – on Black women,  in Home (Morrison),  racist,  medical exploitation, – medicine, –, , ,  biomedicine,  Black body and,  Black literary imagination and,  Black people’s encounters with,  Black people’s experiences with,  Black women and,  narrative, –,  psychological,  race and, –, , –, – racial hierarchies of,  slavery and, –, –,  medicine shows,  proprietors of,  memory, , ,  acts of,  Black medical,  in Home (Morrison),  of medical abuses,  work,  Middle Passage, , 

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Milan, Wardell, , – minstrelsy, , , ,  misogynoir,  modernity, , ,  Black bodies and,  Black life in,  Black political,  colonial, , – dance and, – flesh and, ,  global,  Jim Crow,  race making and,  race making in,  racial order of,  visual, n Western, ,  moral inversion, – Morrison, Toni, , , , n A Mercy,  Home, , , –, n Jazz,  Kindred,  Love, – Paradise,  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,  “Recitatif,”  Moten, Fred, , , n Musser, Amber, –,  narrative,  competence, – eugenics,  focalization,  grand,  Lorde’s approach to,  lynching,  medicine, –,  neo-passing, , , ,  passing, ,  reverse migration,  strategies, ,  techniques,  natural rights,  Lockean,  theories, – western transgression of,  natural world, , , –,  nature writing,  African American, –, , ,  Black,  Negga, Ruth, , –, n

North (US), , , , ,  urban, – Occom, Samson, ,  ontology,  of the garden,  political,  social,  transgressive,  overcrowding, –, , ,  passing, , –, , –, –, , n in An Octoroon (Jacobs-Jenkins), –, , –, n body, ,  figure, , –, , , , n fungibility of Black bodies and,  genre,  Hall and,  in “High Yaller” (Fisher), ,  literature, –,  narratives, –, , , – plot, , , ,  Passing (Hall), , – Peoples, Whitney, – performance, , ,  aesthetics of Black,  commodification of Black,  live, n passing, n queer gender,  religious, ,  theatrical, n personhood, , , , , ,  Black, , ,  bodily,  Enlightenment,  US constitutional,  phenotype, ,  Pickens, Therí Alyce, ,  plants, , – Plasencia, Sam, –, n pleasure, , , , , , , , –, – Black,  Black body at,  bodily,  of bodily studies,  of dance, –,  “High Yaller” (Fisher) and,  living world as site of, 

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Lovecraft Country and,  of nostalgia,  of physical mobility,  pursuit of, – sexual,  synthetic,  poetry, , ,  African American,  Bennett’s,  Black, n Brown and,  Gay’s, ,  in Mend (Maples),  Lorde’s, ,  Spence and,  pornotroping, , , – Post, Amy Kirby, , , – Jacobs’s correspondence with,  Post, Tina, –n, ,  Preston, Carrie, – property, ,  Love (Morrison) and,  signifying,  slavery and, –, , –n, –,  Puar, Jasbir K., –, n on debilitation,  on debility,  P-Valley, –,  Quashie, Kevin, –, , , , , , n queer bodies, ,  queerness,  Black church and,  Blackness and,  gendered,  in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin),  Lorde’s,  of Passing (Larsen),  in Zami (Lorde),  quiet, ,  Black,  Ra, Sun, , ,  race, –, ,  colonial modernity and,  dance and,  disability and,  drama and,  early Black thinkers on,  in Home (Morrison), 

Lacks and,  Larsen on, ,  Maud Martha (Brooks) and, ,  medicine and, –, , –, –,  multiplicity and,  nature and,  optics of,  optometry of,  passing performance and, n performance and,  pseuo-scientific theories of,  psychology of,  race-making, –, – relations, , ,  visibility of, – visual register and,  visual signifiers of,  wilderness and,  the You and,  in Zami (Lorde), ,  race-making,  racialization, , , –, , , –, , n Blackness and, n of the city,  erotic,  in Passing (Hall),  passing narratives and,  sensorial dimensions of,  theatrical performance and,  of timbre,  US,  in Zami (Lorde),  racism, , , , –,  ableism and, ,  in An Octoroon (Jacobs-Jenkins),  anti-black, n biological,  controlling images and,  environmental,  everyday,  Harlem Renaissance and,  institutionalized, ,  in Lovecraft Country, , – in Maud Martha (Brooks), ,  medical, ,  nature and, – northern,  routinized,  scientific,  the wild and,  Rappahannock River, , 

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Reconstruction,  Radical,  Reiss, Winold, , –,  religion, , , , ,  Black, , , ,  Black body and, – fetishes and,  resistance, , , , ,  Black, , ,  Roane, J. T., , , n Robeson, Paul, –, – Safe Negro Podcast Show, , – Schalk, Sami, , , , , n See also bodymind science, , , , , See also medicine biomedical,  of birds,  medical, , ,  segregation, –, , –, ,  Jim Crow,  racial, ,  Senna, Danzy,  Caucasia, ,  New People,  sentimentality, , –n, – logics of, – sexism, , , , , n Shange, Ntozake For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, , – Sharpe, Christina, , , n, n Shaw, Gwendolyn, ,  Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene, , n silence, , , ,  historical,  Sims, J. Marion, ,  autobiography of, – in Home (Morrison), – medical experiments of,  slave narrative, , , , ,  slave ship doctors,  writings of, – slave trade, –, ,  processes of, n slavery, , ,  abolition of, ,  affective scripts of, ,  afterlives of, –, , 

in An Octoroon (Jacobs-Jenkins),  anti-Black medical violence and, , , n archives of, ,  Black crip survival and,  Black flesh and,  Black literacy and,  Black women and, , , n, n brutality of,  colonial,  colonial regime of,  construction of Blackness and,  debilitation and,  disability and,  dismemberment in,  Dred Scott v. Sanford and,  freedom in,  gender and, , – landscape and, ,  literature of,  Louverture and,  medical exploitation and,  medicine and, –, –, – mid-eighteenth-century,  mulatta and,  nature and,  The Octoroon (Boucicault) and,  perversities of,  political,  reproductive,  strip mining and,  trauma of,  Snorton, C. Riley, , , , , n South (US),  Black,  Black diasporic archives in,  changeing fates of the enslaved in,  expansion of slavery and,  gendered economy of,  healing spaces and,  migration from,  racism and,  rural, – upper,  voodoo practices in,  white divines of,  Spillers, Hortense, –, , , , , –, –,  on Maud Martha (Brooks), –, – Stephens, Michelle, –, 

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

stewardship alternative ecological, ,  white moral,  Stewart, Maria, ,  stillness, , , See also synesthetic stillness storytelling, , ,  Black medical, –, ,  Jacobs’s strategies of,  non-linear,  racial,  Stowe, Harriet Beecher, ,  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, , – subject formation, ,  synesthetic stillness, , –, , –,  Taney, Roger, –,  terror, , ,  anti-Black,  Black bodies and,  Black embodied,  of Black medical experimentation,  of enslavement,  of execution,  the outdoors and,  racial, , ,  racialized,  of the rural American South,  of sexual abuse,  state-sanctioned,  white,  testimony, , , ,  theology, , ,  abolition, n Christian, ,  heteronormative,  thingification, ,  Thompson, Tessa, , –, n Thurman, Wallace, –, ,  Toomer, Jean,  Cane, – trauma, ,  Black past and,  bodily,  familial,  ineffability of,  mental, – psychic,  racial, , ,  of sexual violence,  of slavery,  studies,  theory of, 

Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, ,  tyranny, – Vernon, Olympia,  Eden,  Vick, Michael,  violence, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , n African American poetry and, – in the agrarian South,  anti-Black, , , –, , , , , , , –, , ,  Black bodies and, ,  Black literature’s representation of,  of Brooks’s master,  in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Chesnutt),  construction of Blackness and,  curative,  discursive,  extralegal,  in Home (Morrison),  labor and, – in Lovecraft Country,  material,  medical, –, –, –, , , , ,  nutritional,  pest animals and,  physical, , ,  police, , ,  possibility and,  potential, n power and,  queerness and,  racial, , , , , , ,  racist, , –,  reproductive,  in sensationalist fiction,  sexual, , –, ,  upon the slave body,  slow,  spiritual,  state, , – US imperial,  US imperialist,  vernacular,  white, , , n white supremacist, – whiteness and,  Virginia, –, , n Black families in,  Brooks and, –

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Virginia (cont.) Civil War in,  slavery in, –,  vocality Black,  Black women’s,  Vogel, Shane, , , , ,  vulnerability, , , , –,  Baartman and,  Louverture’s, , ,  Walker, David, , n Wardi, Anissa, ,  Washington, George, ,  Washington, Harriet A., – Medical Apartheid, , – Washington, Mary Helen, , ,  Weheliye, Alexander, , , –,  Weisenfeld, Judith, – Wells-Oghoghomeh, Alexis, , 

Wheatley Peters, Phillis, –,  White, Evelyn, – White, Walter,  The Fire in the Flint,  Whitehead, Colson,  The Intuitionist,  The Underground Railroad,  whiteness, , –, , –, , , , , , n Wilderson, Frank, , n Williams, Peter, –, – Wilson, Harriet, , , –, – disability and, , , ,  Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, , –, – Woolfork, Lisa, ,  Wright, Nazera, , n Wynter, Sylvia, , , n Young, Harvey, –,  Young, Vershawn Ashanti, , , 

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009204200.023 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Companions To . . . A UT HO R S Edward Albee edited by Stephen J. Bottoms

Joseph Conrad edited by J. H. Stape

Margaret Atwood edited by Coral Ann Howells (second edition)

H. D. edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay

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Don DeLillo edited by John N. Duvall

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Daniel Defoe edited by John Richetti

John Donne edited by Achsah Guibbory Dostoevskii edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow Theodore Dreiser edited by Leonard Cassuto and Claire Virginia Eby John Dryden edited by Steven N. Zwicker W. E. B. Du Bois edited by Shamoon Zamir George Eliot edited by George Levine and Nancy Henry (second edition) T. S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody Ralph Ellison edited by Ross Posnock

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