FEMINIST AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNISM

Introduction

1. Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 87. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as RO.

2. Nella Larsen, Quicksand in “Quicksand” and “Passing,” ed. Deborah E. Mc-Dowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 82. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as Q.

3. See Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); and David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

4. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

5. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” trans. Joan Riviere, in Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books; 1959), 152–170; and Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

6. See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

7. Nella Larsen, Passing in “Quicksand” and “Passing,” ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 176. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as P.

8. bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), xiv.

9. Sarah Worth, “Feminist Aesthetics” in Berys Gaunt and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds., The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London, Routledge, 2001), 437.

10. Lisa Ryan Musgrave, ed., Feminist Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art: The Power of Critical Visions and Creative Engagement (New York: Springer, 2011).

11. Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface” in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1985), xiii.

12. For a discussion of Bourdieu’s critique of taste and the unacknowledged reliance of this critique on aesthetic categories, see Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 197–230. See also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 154.

13. According to Winfried Fluck’s astute assessment of the debates about aesthetics in cultural studies, without some reference to aesthetic specificity the significance of art is determined exclusively by external regimes of power. See “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” in Emory Elliot, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyme, eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 79–103.

14. Drucilla Cornell begins her discussion of ethical feminism with a fable, with a feminist aesthetic response to Joyce, and concludes with a discussion of feminine writing. See Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1–20, 165–190; Hilde Hein, “Refining Feminist Theory: Lessons from Aesthetics” in Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35–40; Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life; Marriott, Haunted Life.

“Death of art” is of course a Hegelian concept. For my detailed discussion of the political, rather than philosophical, death of art see chapter 2.

15. Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), xv. See also 79–107.

16. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The New Aestheticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 3.

17. Thomas Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

18. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 7.

19. In addition to the particular authors I discuss in this book, I want stress the key role of Bonnie Kime Scott’s two anthologies, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). See also Scott’s own Refiguring Modernism, vol. 1: Women of 1928 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) and Refiguring Modernism, vol. 2: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Another monumental, now classic work from the late eighties and the nineties is the three-volume study of the position of modern women writers by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1: The War of the Words. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: Sexchanges. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3 : Letters from the Front (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). For the important overview of the transformations in the field of modernist studies, see The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

20. See Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues” in Hein and Korsmeyer, Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, 119–138; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Marriott, Haunted Life. Working through Adorno’s aesthetics, Bell proposes an aesthetic of blackness as an experimental shattering of nonreflective master values, including cultural classification of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation (31). See Kevin Bell, Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

21. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Introduction: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Feminist Scholarship,” vii.

22. hooks, Art on My Mind, 9.

23. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19. This view is modified but not challenged in her The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

24. Felski, Doing Time, 175.

25. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 228. Subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically as AT.

26. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 39. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as NT.

27. Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 188–223. For a discussion of Adorno’s “paradoxical modernism,” see also Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetics Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 150–176.

28. Bernstein offers a philosophical account of “the perpetual lateness” of modernism in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–3.

29. Frederic Jameson, “Presentation IV” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 149.

30. See Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke, “Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 288–308. For feminist engagements with Adorno, see Maggie O’Neill, ed., Adorno: Culture and Feminism (London: Sage, 1999).

1. On Suffrage Militancy and Modernism

1. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 236.

2. See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Denise Reily, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), 80–81.

3. In addition to studies discussed later in this chapter, see also Rita Felski’s analysis of feminist discourses of evolution and revolution in The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 145–173.

4. For a discussion of the conflicts and alliances between the WSPU and socialist and labor women, see Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (New York: Routledge, 1992), 165–177.

5. In 1906 the conservative Daily Mail coined the term suffragette to refer to militant brand of suffrage movement.

6. Laura E. Nym Mayhall contests the exclusive association of militancy with the WSPU and points to militant tactics of other suffrage organizations. See “Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908–1909,” Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 340–371.

7. Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (London: Viking, 1997), 11.

8. For my discussion of suffragettes’ hunger strikes in the context of Agamben’s homo sacer, see “Bare Life on Strike: Notes of the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” South Atlantic Quarterly: The Agamben Effect 107 (2008): 89–105.

9. For a discussion of the destruction of the selected works of art—mostly nude paintings, such as the Velázquez’s Venus and portraits of famous men—altogether fourteen paintings—see Rowena Fowler, “Why Did Suffragettes Attack Works of Art?” Journal of Women’s History 2 (1991): 109–125.

10. For the connections between militant suffrage and the tradition of British political radicalism, see Mayhall, “Defining Militancy.”

11. The Women’s Freedom League (WFL) emerged in September 1907 out of a split from the WSPU. One of the main causes of this split was a dissension over the governance—conspiracy or democracy—that militant action required. The conflict over the labor movement was another dividing issue.

12. Teresa Billington-Greig, The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig, ed. Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald (London: Routledge, 1987), 148. Further references will be cited parenthetically as TBG.

13. Jane Marcus, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts (London: Routledge, 1987). Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as SP.

14. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 193.

15. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 28–29. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as OR.

16. As Reily points out, socially engaged British women encountered significant difficulties translating their activism into political emancipation. See “Am I That Name?” 80–81.

17. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, ed., Speeches and Trails of the Militant Suffragettes: The Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1918 (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 157.

18. Reily, “Am I That Name?” 94–95.

19. Anne Kenney, quoted in Mackenzie Midge, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary (New York: Knopf, 1975), 23–24.

20. Emmeline Pankhurst, quoted ibid., 32.

21. Agamben credits Arendt with a critique of the confusion of constituting power with sovereignty in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 42. Subsequent references to this text will be cited as HS. For my critique of Agamben’s inability to take gender and race into account, see “Bare Life on Strike,” 89–105.

22. For a discussion of these divisions, see Rowbotham, A Century of Women, 7–26; and Women in Movement, 165–177. See also notes 4, 5, and 10.

23. Rowbotham, A Century of Women, 16.

24. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and the Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 13.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. Ibid., 14–17.

27. Ibid., 199. According to Burton, Gandhi visited London in 1906 and admired suffragettes’ courage and willingness to serve time in prison. He also might have met some suffragettes. Ibid., 199–200.

28. Laura Mayhall, “The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canonical Texts in Britain, 1880–1914,” Gender and History 13 (2001): 481–497.

29. Jorgensen-Earp, Speeches and Trails, 128.

30. Lady Constance Lytton in Midge, Shoulder to Shoulder, 133.

31. Jorgensen-Earp, Speeches and Trails, 226–227.

32. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–19.

33. Walter Benjamin famously interprets constituting and constituted power as the law creating and the law preserving violence in his essay “Critique of Violence” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 277–300.

34. For further discussion of the relation between suffrage and British political radicalism, see Mayhall, “Defining Militancy.”

35. Although, as Arendt points out, the term permanent revolution was coined in the nineteenth century by Proudhon, women were excluded from being the agents of such revolution. See OR, 163.

36. See Kristeva, The Sense and Nonsense, 87.

37. Ibid., 106.

38. Glenda Norquay, “Introduction,” in Glenda Norquay, ed., Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 2–8.

39. Wendy Mulford, “Socialist-Feminist criticism: A Case Study, Women’s Suffrage and Literature, 1906–14” in Peter Widdowson, ed., Re-Reading English (London: Methuen, 1982), 179–192.

40. Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 151–237.

41. Jane Marcus, “Introduction: Re-reading the Pankhursts and women’s suffrage” in Suffrage and the Pankhursts, 9–17.

42. Marcus, “Introduction: Re-reading the Pankhursts,” 10.

43. For an excellent discussion of Adorno’s concept of autonomy, see Jay M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 188–196.

44. For my formulation of feminist democratic politics and ethics, see Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

45. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism” in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga Taxidou, eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 251.

46. As an example of this approach, see, in particular, Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

47. Alain Locke, “The New Negro” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 12.

2. Melancholia, Death of Art, and Women’s Writing

1. Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5, 23.

2. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), 99. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically as PM.

3. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8–9.

4. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 13.

5. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 150.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 10. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as A.

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bonsaquet (London: Penguin, 1993), 12. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as ILA.

8. Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel, trans. James McFarland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 2.

9. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 145. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as MER.

10. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Francis McDonagh, in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1977), 178. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically as C.

11. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 26. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as SSD.

12. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” in Sondra Kathryn Wilson, ed., The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P.’s “Crisis Magazine” (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 319. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as CNA.

13. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 179.

14. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 234. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as BS.

15. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” trans. Joan Riviere in Collected Papers, vol 4, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 152–170. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as MM.

16. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1960), 56. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as EI.

17. Sigmund Freud, Das Ich Und Das Es (Frankfurt: Fischer Tachenbuch, 1993), 290.

18. Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 54.

19. For transnational studies of modernism and modernity, see, for instance, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); or Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

20. Jay Bernstein interprets melancholia as the interplay between social ideals and spleen in his “Melancholy as Form: Towards an Archaeology of Modernism” in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The New Aestheticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 167–189. For an analysis of mourning in relation to black humor, see Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 158–161, 172–172.

21. Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke, “Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 288–308.

22. Virginia Wolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 208. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as TTL.

23. Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin” in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 59–76.

24. Alain Locke, “The New Negro” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 11–12.

25. Robert Hullot-Kentor, “The Philosophy of Dissonance” in Huhn and Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity, 317–318.

26. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 180. Adorno argues that modern reification is itself a mimesis of death. For an excellent discussion of the mimesis of death, see Jay Bernstein, “The Horror of Nonidentity: Cindy Sherman’s Tragic Modernism” in Peter Osborne, ed., From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 126–127.

27. Bernstein, “The Horror of Nonidentity,” 184.

3. Woolf’s Aesthetics of Potentiality

1. Susan Gubar, “Introduction” in Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 2005), xvii. Brenda R. Silver explores the function of Woolf as a cultural icon in relation to second-wave feminism in Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. For a discussion of the changing trends in feminist criticism of Woolf, see Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 130–136.

2. Hermione Lee, “Virginia Woolf’s Essays” in Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97.

3. Diane Filby Gillespie, “Political Aesthetics: Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson” in Jane Marcus, ed., Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 132.

4. Laura Marcus, “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 230.

5. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 8–18. Moi foregrounds the importance of textual experimentation for a revision of sexual norms.

6. Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 13. Black’s discussion of Woolf as a political writer is in opposition to critics like Sue Roe, who sees feminist implications in Woolf’s contestation of fictitious forms. Sue Roe, Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 171.

7. Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–10, 22, 207–208.

8. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Novels (Joyce)” in Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 644. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as MN.

9. Jane Marcus, “Introduction: Re-reading the Pankhursts and Women’s Suffrage” in Jane Marcus, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts (London: Routledge, 1987), 1–17.

10. At least since Kant the notion of genius has been associated with freedom of imagination and originality. For my discussion of Kant’s genius in relation to gender, see “Impossible Inventions: On Genius and Sexual Difference” in CR: The New Centennial Review 8 (2009): 139–159.

11. Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1992), 422. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as CF.

12. Marcus, “Introduction,” 1–17.

13. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (New York: Harvest, 1985), 17.

14. For the classic analysis of the trope of the “madwoman in the attic” in relation to female authorship, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

15. As Laura Marcus notes, anger and androgyny are frequently discussed topics in A Room of One’s Own. See her “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf,” 229–233. See also Jane Marcus, Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), 132.

16. For Nietzsche’s critique of resentment, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 73–74. In her “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf,” Marcus suggests a more general Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” in A Room of One’s Own. See page 229.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin, 1954), 139. For further discussion of this passage, see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 267. Subsequent references to this text will be cited as PCE.

18. Agamben, PCE, 267.

19. Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women” in The Death of Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 241.

20. Ibid., 241–242.

21. Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 232–233.

22. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Daily (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 69. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as TR.

23. As Woolf argues in “Professions for Women,” “this freedom is only a beginning” (242).

24. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1992), 384–389. Subsequent references to this work will be marked parenthetically as MBMB.

25. Arnold Bennett, “Is the Novel Decaying?” in Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, eds., Virginia Woolf: The Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1975), 113. Bennett himself implies that there is a “feud” between himself and Woolf in his 1929 negative and condescending review of A Room of One’s Own, entitled “Queen of the High-Brows.” See page 259 of this same volume.

26. Woolf’s letter to the New Statesman, quoted in Marcus, “Woolf’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf,” 213.

27. Houston A. Baker Jr. challenges Woolf’s “time line” of modernism and suggests that “a change in African-American nature occurred on or about September 18, 1895.” Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3–8.

28. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 60. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as O.

29. Gilles Deleuze is one of the few philosophers who has noted this ontological status of life as potentiality in Woolf’s work. See his A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1987), 232–309.

30. Woolf’s brief engagement in suffrage activism has produced conflicting interpretations. In his Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 210–240, Alex Zwerdling stresses Woolf’s “reluctant” participation in politics while Naomi Black in Virginia Woolf as Feminist (23–50) argues for its importance for the formation of Woolf’s feminism. See also Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 143–144, 169.

31. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” in The Gender of Modernism, 633. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as MF.

32. Kevin Bell, Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 107.

33. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 30–45; in contrast to fetishism, Spivak proposes the metaphor of the womb as a new linguistic/sexual allegory of artistic “production” (45).

34. At stake in fictional experiment is therefore a shift from what Agamben calls “decreation” to what he calls in passing “Palingenesis” (PCE, 271), which means another birth or rebirth.

35. Woolf, Women and Fiction, 170. Gubar, “Introduction,” in A Room of One’s Own, lv.

36. Minow-Pinkney follows the theory of Julia Kristeva’s poetic language in order to address the question of jouissance of this split subject of female poetic practice. See Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 16–23.

37. Briggs, Virginia Woolf, 231.

38. Sherron E. Knopp, in her “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” PMLA 103 (1988): 24–34, regards Orlando as “the first positive, and still unsurpassed, sapphic portrait in literature” (33). See also Jane Marcus, “Sapphistory: The Woolf and the Well” in Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 164–179; and Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer, eds., Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings (New York: New York University Press, 1997). For more critical assessments of Woolf’s “Sapphic” modernism, see Jaime Hovey, “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf’s Orlando,” PMLA 112 (1997): 393–404; as well as D. A. Boxwell ‘“(Dis)Orienting Spectacle: The Politics of Orlando’s Sapphic Camp,” Twentieth Century Literature 44 (1998): 306–322.

39. Elizabeth Meese, “When Virginia Looked at Vita, What Did She See; Or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman—What’s the Differ(e/a)nce?” Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 99–117, 112.

40. For Jane Marcus, who reads The Well of Loneliness as the subtext of A Room of One’s Own, allusion and secrecy manifest both female conspiracy and seduction. See “Sapphistory,” 164. For a critique of Woolf’s relation to The Well of Loneliness, see Hovey, “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark.’”

Introduction: Rethinking

1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 54.

2. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 328.

3. Ibid., 327.

4. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 54.

5. See, for instance, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 186–187; or Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 107–110.

6. For instance, Williams, in Marxism and Literature, argues that to understand form in material ways is to see it as active process, as “the activation” of the relations between subjects and things (187).

7. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 119.

8. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4.

9. Ibid., 11.

10. Ibid., 39.

11. For the contestation of the divide in feminist political theory between the symbolic politics of recognition and the materialist politics of redistribution, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist Condition” (New York: Routledge, 1997), 12.

4. Abstract Commodity Form and Bare Life

1. Agamben himself indirectly points to the link between commodity form and the destruction of bare life. However, that link is expressed in a stereotypical way through the commodified female bodies that, by bringing pleasure to male viewers, cover over the mangled corpses of the victims of violence. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 46–50.

2. By focusing on the violence of abstraction, Irigaray’s analysis goes beyond reification. For a discussion of reification, see, for instance, Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke, “Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” in Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 288–308.

3. For a fuller analysis of the debates on essentialism in Irigaray’s writing, see my An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 160–161, as well as my “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” in differences 16 (2005): 88–115. See also Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which is Not One” in Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, eds., Engaging with Irigaray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57–78; and Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Rout-ledge, 1995), 21–44.

4. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 179. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as TS.

5. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 126. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as CA.

6. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 31. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as ILTY.

7. As Derrida briefly points out, this abstraction and ideality of time is the condition of “any ideologization and any fetishization.” See Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 155.

8. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 23. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically as H.

9. Such unacknowledged metaphysics of production is, for instance, at work in Gayle Rubin’s classic essay, “The Traffic in Women.” The definition of the sex/gender system as an economic system of production, evident for instance in the claim that kinship is “‘production’ in the most general sense of the term,” never problematizes the autonomy of production as such. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in Laura Nicholson, ed., The Second Waive: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38.

10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.

11. We should remark here that Irigaray fails to note the objectification of masculinity as well and, in so doing, inadvertently repeats this disavowal.

12. See Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), 71–79.

13. Ibid., 72.

14. For further discussion of Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference, see my An Ethics of Dissensus, 151–182.

15. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 28–49 and 107–122.

16. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 273.

17. As Patricia Williams writes, “Blacks went from being owned by others to having everything around them owned by others. In a civilization that values private property above all else, this means a devaluation of person…. This limbo of disownedness keeps blacks beyond the pale of those who are entitled to receive the survival gifts of commerce, the life, liberty, and happiness whose fruits our culture locates in the marketplace. In this way blacks are analogically positioned exactly as they were during slavery or Jim Crow.” Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 71.

18. McDowell focuses on the impact of the ideology of primitivism and exoticism on the artistic production of the black women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. See her “Introduction” in Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” and “Passing,” ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), ix–xxv.

19. As Gilroy argues, the enslavement represents a “deeper experience of reification than anything that can be mapped through the concept of the fetishism of commodities.” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 124.

20. William Pietz, “The Problem of Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res 16 (1988): 87–88. For the cultural/economic history of fetishism, see also his “The Problem of Fetish, I,” Res 9 (1985): 5–17 and “The Problem of Fetish, II: The Origin of Fetish,” Res 13 (1987): 12–45.

21. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 95.

22. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 68. Subsequent references to this essay will be marked parenthetically as MBPM.

23. I would like to thank Henry Sussman, who has pointed out to me this parallel between Spillers’s discussion of black bodies and Hegel’s characterization of Africa.

24. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 99.

25. In The Politics, Aristotle makes a famous distinction between mere life and a good life in the context of the function of the polis: “while it comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life.” Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1252^b27.

26. Arendt follows the Aristotelian distinction between zoē and bios in a number of her texts, most notably in The Human Condition, where she characterizes the political life not only with speech and action but with the condition of human plurality: “this plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.

27. As Agamben puts it in his critique of Hobbes, in the state of nature, mere life “is not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios” but rather “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (HS, 109).

28. Andrew Benjamin, “Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben,” in Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 167.

29. Thomas Carl Wall, “Au Hasard,” ibid., 38–39.

30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 318–321.

31. Catherine Mills is one of the very few of Agamben’s interpreters to raise the question of sexuality and sexual embodiment. See her essay “Linguistic Survival and Ethicality: Biopolitics, Subjectivation, and Testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz” in Norris, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 215–218. For the most extensive discussion of sexuality and bare life in the context of slavery, see Alexander Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (2008): 65–81.

32. Ernesto Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy” in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 22. According to Laclau, the absence of the theory of resistance is intertwined with the lack of the theory of hegemony. For a different critique of the lack of attention to resistance in the context of the body and the contingency of political struggles, see Andreas Kalyvas, “The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp” in Norris, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 112–113.

33. I am grateful to my colleague, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, for discussing with me Aristotle’s notion of slavery.

34. Aristotle, The Politics, 1254b2–b16.

35. See Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” 65–81.

36. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51.

37. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” 66.

38. For a contestation of the divide in feminist political theory between the symbolic politics of recognition and the materialist politics of redistribution, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).

39. In his discussion of the survivors’ testimonies in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller Roazen (Brooklyn: Zone, 1995), Agamben defines such a link between the damaged life and the human as the aporetic task of witnessing to the inhuman. For my discussion of the ethical structure of the survivors’ testimony in Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, see my “Evil and Testimony: Ethics ‘After’ Postmodernism,” Hypatia 18 (2003): 197–204, especially pages 201–203.

5. Damaged Materialities in Political Struggles and Aesthetic Innovations

1. For the contestation of this divide, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist Condition” (New York: Routledge, 1997), 12.

2. Falguni A. Sheth, Toward the Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 16, 38–39.

3. Jane Marcus, “Introduction” to Jane Marcus, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts (New York: Routledge, 1987), 2.

4. For a discussion of “bio-sovereignty,” see Andreas Kalyvas, “The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp” in Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 108–109.

5. Kyra Marie Landzelius, “Hunger Strikes: The Dramaturgy of Starvation Politics” in Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, and Willy Weyns, eds., Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action, and Society, vol. 5: A World in Transition; Humankind, and Nature (Dordecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 83.

6. For a brief discussion of the history of the hunger strike, see Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973), 363–367.

7. Maud Ellmann argues that the Irish nationalists might have been inspired by suffrage, yet in order to conceal this debt, they appealed to the medieval practice of fasting in order to compel debtors to repay a debt. A more recent and politically pertinent example would be, for instance, the 1912 hunger strike of the Irish Suffragette Hannah Seehey Skeffington. See Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11–12.

8. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, 637.

9. Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary (New York: Knopf, 1975), 110.

10. See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104.

11. Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 135.

12. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, ed., Speeches and Trails of the Militant Suffragettes: The Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1918 (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 105.

13. Lady Constance Lytton, “Speech Delivered at the Queen’s Hall, January 31, 1910,” ibid., 108–109.

14. Ibid., 107.

15. By stressing the sexual dimension of slavery, Weheliye argues that “violent political domination activates a surplus in excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures such brutality.” Alexander Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (2008): 65–81, 67.

16. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 76–81. For the discussion of resistance and embodied political practice as different modes of “redressing the pained body,” see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 49–78.

17. Ibid., 51.

18. Patterson develops the relation between slavery and freedom in his Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1992), in which he traces the evolution of three ideas of freedom: personal, civic, and sovereign from antiquity to the Middle Ages, followed by the second volume, entitled Freedom in the Modern World, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

19. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 11.

20. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 16. Subsequent references to this text will be marked parenthetically as ITB.

21. Hortense Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 710–734, 725.

22. In particular, see Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, or the purging of the passions, in Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Classics, 1996), xxviii.

23. Hegel defines the sensuous aspect of art as between sensuous immediacy and “ideal thought” (ILA, 43).

24. Rancière defines the relation of aesthetics to the political in terms of the redistribution of sensible experience. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006).

25. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). For a discussion of the feminine invention of the new alphabet of the sensible, see Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 1–16.

26. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For a theory of the dialogical, antagonistic, and sensible literary language, see Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition” in Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 119–138.

27. For Grosz, the significance of art lies in the enhancement of the excessive forces of sexuality and sensations. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

28. For an illuminating account of the gendering of aesthetic concepts, see Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (New York: Rout-ledge, 2004).

29. For my discussion of essentialism, see Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” in differences 16 (2005): 88–115.

30. See Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 10–19, 156, and 180. This view is modified but not fundamentally challenged in her subsequent works, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

31. See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 327.

32. See Irigaray’s reading of Plato in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially pages 339–345, and her interpretation of Aristotle in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 34–55. For Butler’s interpretation of Irigaray, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 36–55.

33. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 113.

34. Ibid., 115.

35. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 104. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as AI.

36. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 421.

37. Adorno describes enigma as the constitutive feature of modernism: “Enigmaticalness peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer it requires—like that of the sphinx—were always the same” (AT, 127).

38. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 75.

39. For further interpretation of wonder, see my An Ethics of Dissensus: Post-modernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 161–163.

40. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 91. It is precisely to contest this severing of Egypt from the rest of Africa that black scholars have often reappropriated Egypt as a symbol of Afrocentricity and black countermodernity. On this point, see MolefiKete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Trenton: African World Press, 1989). For a critical discussion of Afrocentricity, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 188–196.

41. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 94.

42. Ibid., 92.

6. The Enigma of Nella Larsen

1. For an overview of Larsen’s reception, see Carla Kaplan’s “Introduction: Nella Larsen’s Erotics of Race” in Nella Larsen, Passing, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Norton, 2007), ix–xxix. This edition also includes a representative selection of secondary criticism on Larsen.

2. Linking negativity to otherness and textual absence, Pamela Caughie remarks that in Larsen’s texts “are the many things that are not said, narrated, or verbalized” (780). Pamela L. Caughie, “Not Entirely Strange, … Not Entirely Friendly”: Passing and Pedagogy,” College English 54 (1992): 775–793.

3. Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation,” Black American Literature Forum 14, no. 4 (1980): 142–146.

4. Similarly, Cheryl A. Wall considers the conventions of passing and the “tragic mulatto” to be a narrative “mask.” Cheryl A. Wall, “Passing for What: Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels,” Black American Literature Forum 20 (1986): 97–111. See especially page 110.

5. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.

6. Ibid., 13. In turn, Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that what “has been most repressed” in the tradition of Afro-American literary criticism is the “language of the black text.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xix.

7. Wall, “Passing for What,” 107. For instance, Davis sees Larsen’s abrupt endings as more successful in her early stories than in her novels. Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 176. For an alternative discussion of untimeliness and death, see Kate Baldwin, “Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Theory@Buffalo 4 (1988): 50–90. See also Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166–175.

8. Davis, Nella Larsen, 245.

9. As Claude McKay writes to Walter White, “every work of art is in reality personal propaganda,” quoted ibid., 240. For a discussion of this debate, see ibid., 240–247.

10. Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 254–267, 267.

11. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 168–169.

12. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 49.

13. Ibid., 49.

14. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 173–174.

15. Kaplan, “Introduction,” ix.

16. Ibid., xxi–xxv.

17. Thadious Davis, “Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic,” in Larsen, Passing, 384.

18. Walter White was an artist, civil rights leader, and a member and executive secretary of the NAACP. His novel Flight also explores the problematic of passing and return to the black community.

19. For an informative discussion of the historical and cultural background of Larsen’s letter to Opportunity and Larsen’s own aesthetics, see Davis, Nella Larsen, 200–207.

20. Nella Larsen, “Letter to Charles S. Johnson,” reprinted in Larsen, Passing, 158–160, 159. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically as LCJ.

21. For discussions of transatlantic modernism, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

22. Davis, Nella Larsen, 173, 178.

23. Larsen, “The Wrong Man” in An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, ed. Charles R. Larson (New York: Anchor, 1992), 6. Subsequent references to this text will be marked parenthetically as WM.

24. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51. See also Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Diacritics 17 (1987): 65–81; and Alexander G. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” Journal of Visual Culture 7 (2008): 65–81.

25. Weheliye, “Pornotropes,” 66.

26. According to Moten, counterfactual sensual speech, interrupted by the scream of violated flesh, animates the radicalism of black artistic performance. See Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

27. For David Marriott, “haunted life” is a symptom of a failed mourning for the trauma of racial slavery. See his Haunted Life: Visual Culture in Black Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), xx–xxiii.

28. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 56.

29. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 64.

30. David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1.

31. Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.

32. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 176.

33. Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 82.

34. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 79.

35. For an excellent discussion of the imaginary father in Quicksand, see Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 129–147.

36. Du Bois famously begins The Souls of Black Folk with the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1995), 43.

37. Locke, The New Negro, xxv.

38. For a discussion of fetishism and queer desire in Larsen’s novel, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Rout-ledge, 1993), 167–185.

39. Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 101.

40. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 125. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically as JTRU.

41. In “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Ralph Ellison discusses the political and racist aspects of jokes in America, especially the transformation of “grotesque” racist stereotypes into black jokes about these stereotypes, which not only contest the racist images behind the mask of the joke but also express the sheer pleasure of joking itself. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Shadow and Act (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1994), 45–59.

42. Ibid., 54. I am grateful to Professor Devonya N. Havis for this reference to Ellison and for her careful reading of this chapter.

43. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 294–308.

44. Referring to Hortense Spillers’s notion of the pornotropic, Weheliye stresses the sexual dimension of slavery. The main question he raises is how the history of “violent political domination activate[s] a surplus and excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures such brutality” (“Pornotropes,” 67). As he points out, the surplus of pleasure “moves in excess of the sovereign subject’s jouissance; pleasure … and violence … deviate from and toward each other, setting into motion the historical happening of the slave thing” (72).

45. For an excellent discussion of “the choice of death” as an act of freedom not limited to the Hegelian master, see Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 63.