Last week’s issue of Time magazine identified me as the “Ebon Pied Piper.” In U.S. News and World Report, I was the “bellwether of ethnic hara-kiri.” History will add my name to the list of maniacal messiahs who sit in Hell’s homeroom answering the Devil’s roll call: Jim Jones, David Koresh, whoever led the charge of the Light Brigade, Charles Manson, General Westmoreland, and me. These pages are my memoirs, the battlefield remains of a frightened deserter in the eternal war for civility.
—Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
IN TIMES OF NATIONAL PERIL, ABOMUNISTS, AS
REALITY
AMERICANS, STAND READY TO DRINK
THEMSELVES
TO DEATH FOR THEIR COUNTRY.
—Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto”
If the war for civility is eternal, as the narrator of Beatty’s novel, Gunnar Kaufman, suggests, there is, of course, no historical constancy to the character of the battle, to the antagonists, the strategies, the measures of victory and defeat, which define it. This book is concerned, like Beatty’s novel, with a particular historical moment, in which the political subjects, institutions, and structures of feeling that have shaped the “war for civility” in modernity are giving way, ceding the ground to a “something else” that we struggle to discern, even as, or precisely because, it has so thoroughly overtaken contemporary political life. Gunnar ascends to the status of redeemer in the novel on the strength of his public assertions that the war is a lost cause; as Beatty (2000) acidly observes in his reflections on “Black Humor,” Langston Hughes’s deferred dreamers appear destined to return as Bob Kaufman’s “abomunists.” At the same time, as I will suggest, Gunnar’s death-bound leadership is by no means a concession to the reign of necropower, nor is intimacy with the prospect of death the same thing as a death wish.1 My interest lies in the relays the novel explores—relays between what Achille Mbembe calls “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence” and the political self-elaboration of the instrumentalized; between state surveillance and subaltern publicity; between domination and erotics; between terror and belonging (2003, 14).
Within the institutions and discourses of the bourgeois nation-state, sovereignty wears the mantel of an emancipatory power. This is not to dispute the obvious facts that “freedom” in this historical synthesis is abstract, rather than concrete (freedom from arbitrary authority, rather than freedom from material need), partial, rather than universal (there is always a difference, more or less pronounced, between the population of a sovereign nation and the corpus of its “free citizens”), and bound up in the operations of a disciplinary political culture (the citizen is made free through being formed a rational political actor). Rather, here as in the preceding chapters, my point is simply to linger on the novel appearance of modern sovereignty, as a power that proposes to liberate those on whom it bears. “The romance of sovereignty in this case,” writes Mbembe, “rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself)” (2003, 13, emphasis in original). The popular sovereign is imagined to author (and authorize) the creation of the governing bodies that will act in its name (self-institution) and at the same to time to accede to the rule of law that it has given to itself, through the mediation of its representatives (self-limitation).
To describe this form of sovereignty in this manner is, of course, already to imply that modern self-governance is a ruse—a brilliant ruse, no doubt—by which the power that imposes on us comes to appear as nothing but our own power to produce and define ourselves. Reason appears as the neutral instrument, and our education in its protocols and idioms becomes the condition of our self-realization, rather than the means to our conformity. But if this emancipatory sovereignty is a fiction and a lure, it has—unevenly, to be sure, yet for the better part of two centuries—provided a means for disqualified political actors to pressure and to undermine the exclusionary and the normative project that it forwards. Thus colonized peoples repudiate the authority of the occupiers by asserting their own status as national popular sovereigns, while within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, subaltern populations assert their claim to full participation in the rights and benefits of the sovereign power and its metonymic figure, the citizen. Historically speaking, we might say, the struggle against the bad faith of this characteristically modern sovereignty routinely reproduces the political ethos of self-governance as the legitimating ground of the struggle.
As Mbembe emphatically reminds us, however, this emancipatory sovereignty (let’s call it sovereignty I) is by no means the sole expression of sovereign power in modernity, nor even the only properly modern form of political rule. There is also the other practice of modern sovereignty (thus, sovereignty II) “whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Such figures are far from a prodigious piece of insanity . . . Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live” (2003, 14). Mbembe’s argument resonates with and draws on Paul Gilroy’s signal work, which similarly contests the “strongly normative reading,” as Mbembe puts it, of the self-governing rational subject. Gilroy situates (racial) terror as the other face of (an always racialized) reason, so that in his account of the decidedly modern dislocations of people, culture, and commodities that organize the Black Atlantic, the pursuit of autonomy appears historically bound to the slave ship, the auction block, the plantation, and the administration of terror materialized in these sites. In Gilroy’s account, the instrumentalization of human life—what we might call, following Hortense Spillers, the systematized unmaking of bodies and persons—is endemic to modernity, not the sign of its incompleteness; it is not the persistence of a residual irrationality, but the expression of capacities for domination and destruction fully internal to the subjects and institutions of political reason. Mbembe’s related point is that there exists a disjuncture between the multiple figures of sovereignty that appear in modernity, on the one hand, and the domain of political theory, on the other, which has “privileged normative theories of democracy” and in so doing stymied the development of a “reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject” for which neither reason nor autonomy are foundational (2003, 13, 14).
In his justly influential, although broadly sketched and sometimes elliptical essay by that title, Mbembe goes on to denominate as “necropolitics” the “subjugation of life to the power of death (2003, 39), a politics that correlates to a form of sovereignty “expressed predominantly as the right to kill” (2003, 16). While necropower shares with biopower the characteristic of managing the life of populations, rather than producing and regulating individuals, Mbembe proposes that necropower makes “the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective” (2003, 12).2 More specifically and complexly, as the sense of necropolitics emerges from Mbembe’s discussion of specific necropolitical situations (and especially occupied Palestine, which he posits as necropower’s “most accomplished” contemporary form), necropower arrays human populations as disposable in both, interrelated senses of that term: (1) positioned by forces with the capacity to track, dislocate, intern, and otherwise control, impel, or arrest their movements, and (2) expendable, rendered fully susceptible to the imposition of a slow and (or) violent death. (2003, 27). If biopower correlates to a form of sovereignty in which the monarch’s right to “take life or let live” cedes to the right to “make live and let die,” as Foucault suggests, we might say that necropower employs the apparatus of biopower (surveillance, risk assessment, securitization) to make die, or to make live at the very margins, in the shadow of death.
Part of Mbembe’s point is that necropower constitutes “the nomos of the space in which we still live” (my emphasis). Like Gilroy, he argues against the proponents of a fundamentally democratic modernity, who see in the many forms of organized terror and making die a horrifying aberration, a fall into incivility that is routinely read as a falling out of modern time, a retrogression into barbarism. Yet in the present historical moment, I take it that we might press the point a different way, and suggest that the necropolitical is not simply persistent (endemic to modernity), but ascendant within late modern political contexts, where the institutions and subjects of an emancipatory sovereignty appear visibly and pervasively in decline. If today the sites and arenas of necropower are proliferating, and necropower once established continues all too often to be durable and entrenched, we might speculate that the erosion of democratic modernity, and what it proffers historically by way of institutional and imaginative resources for opposing necropower, bears on the capacity of necropolitics to flourish. I will argue that The White Boy Shuffle dwells precisely on this historical transformation, in which the claim to autonomy (the right to self-govern) seems less and less viable as a strategy for addressing the instrumentalization of human life, or, to put it a slightly different way, in which the norms of democratic civility, however routinely invoked, offer little traction in confronting the subjugation of life to the power of death. This transformation appears, of course, in a particular kind of relief in the contemporary United States, which stands historically as an “advanced” democratic nation, one in which the emancipatory form of sovereignty has been both thoroughly institutionalized and politically normative. The White Boy Shuffle meditates on the necropolitics of the ghetto at a historical juncture where the assertion of civil rights—the struggle for “freedom”—carries little or no political efficacy and the historical work of democratic politics (the production of mass social movement) is replaced with the mass circulation of iconic identities.3 “Negro Demagogue,” Gunnar imagines the wording of a want ad in the Sunday classifieds, “must have ability to lead a divided, downtrodden, and alienated people to the Promised Land. Good communication skills required. Pay commensurate with ability. No experience necessary” (Beatty 1996, 1). The novel as I read it, then, presses a question that we have scarcely learned to ask: What might it mean to confront necropolitics without resting on the failing institutions of democratic modernity?
In the existing, relatively slight body of published criticism on the novel, The White Boy Shuffle is generally cited as an example of a post-soul sensibility in African American literature, marked by the critique of identity, at least insofar as it demands or forwards a claim to authenticity. Indeed, the novel opens with a prolonged, satiric assault on the investment in origins, via Gunnar’s passionate recitation of his debased ancestry—he traces his descent through seven generations” of “coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers” (1996, 5). There is no retrieving the figure of the race man from this array of willfully servile forefathers, as L. H. Stallings observes, much less the race woman, who goes missing entirely in the “autogamous, self-pollinating men’s club” of Kaufman genealogy (1996, 23). What Gunnar’s outrageous genealogy targets, and the novel more broadly engages, is the correlation of a properly black identity with resistance, which organizes the race man in his varied historical iterations, such that the struggle for sovereignty I serves as the authenticating sign of the African American political subject. Alexander Weheliye notes as much in a published roundtable discussion on the “Post-Soul Aesthetic,” where conversation perennially circulates back to Beatty.
What does blackness mean in the absence of an explicit form of resistance or struggle? A couple of students actually said, “Why isn’t there more struggling here? Why is everybody just making fun of the struggle?” Right? And it wasn’t only black students. You know, “That’s what you go to African American literature for, right? . . . And, I mean, that’s sort of the whole critique of White Boy Shuffle. That sort of narrative, you know, black people always having to fulfill that role. (2007, 793)4
Even as Weheliye’s astute remarks find ready affirmation from other roundtable participants, the criticism of the novel evinces a tendency (quite different from that of Weheliye’s students) to read for what the narrative supposedly suggests about the contours of a reconstituted and reauthenticated struggle. In Stallings’s account, for example, Gunnar eschews a “cool-posing” black masculinity that originates in hegemonic white culture in order to model an alternative, and by implication more genuinely oppositional, masculinity mediated by black women. Similarly reclaiming the prospects for African American political subjectivity through resistance, Mark Anthony Neal sees in Gunnar’s rejection of the self-serving black politician a call for organic leadership. “Given Gunnar’s notion that the term nigger is a metaphor for community and authenticity, his assertion that black leadership needs ‘niggers who are willing to die’ is tantamount to a call for subaltern leadership that will emerge from within” (1996, 149).
Mark Anthony Neal’s comment here touches on an aspect of the novel that has received no real sustained attention—namely, its representation of serial black suicide. For Neal, Gunnar’s critique of black leadership, “these telegenic niggers not willing to die” (1996, 200), stands as a call for the kind of leadership whose absence he remarks. Moreover, the circumstance that Gunnar’s ascendance to the status of messiah triggers a wave of black suicides is the proof that “real empowerment among the ghetto masses can never be achieved unless leadership emerges from within, as imported leadership, be it the traditional civil rights leadership or Gunnar himself, does little more than administer over the ‘already dead’” (2002, 149). But in the context of the novel as a whole, it seems not at all clear to me that Gunnar’s critique of “today’s housebroken niggers” should be read as a call to revive this form of sacrificial leadership. (For that matter, while “nigger” is surely a form of communal address, I would not agree that it figures in the novel some particularly authenticated form of community.) Gunnar’s comments on black leadership occur towards the end of the novel, in the context of a campus rally for divestment from apartheid South Africa, where Gunnar, called to address the demonstrators, takes as his prompt a plaque on a nearby statue of Martin Luther King, which reads, “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Querying the crowd about its willingness to die for black rule in South Africa, Gunnar responds to the rousing sounds of affirmation:
“You lying motherfuckers. I talked to Harriet Velakazi, the ANC lieutenant you heard speak earlier, and she’s willing to die for South Africa. She don’t give a fuck about King’s sexist language, she ready to kill her daddy and if need be her mama for South Africa. Now don’t get me wrong. I want them niggers to get theirs, but I am not ready to die for South Africa, and you ain’t either.”
The audience hushed, their Good Samaritan opportunism check-mated. There was nothing they could say. “I’m willing to die for South Africa, where do I sign?”
I rubbed my tired eyes, licked my lips, and leaned into the microphone. “So I asked myself, what am I willing to die for? The day when white people treat me with respect and see my life as equally valuable to theirs? No, I ain’t willing to die for that, because if they don’t know that by now, then they ain’t never going to know it. Matter of fact, I ain’t ready to die for anything, so I guess I’m just not fit to live. In other words, I’m just ready to die. I’m just ready to die.”
I realized I’d made a public suicide pact with myself and stole a glance toward [Gunnar’s childhood friend] Scoby and [his pregnant wife] Yoshiko. Scoby was nodding his head in agreement, while Yoshiko was pointing to her stomach and yelling “What the fuck are you talking about?” (1996, 200)
To be sure, Gunnar concludes the speech by calling for “some new leaders. Leaders who won’t apostasize like cowards. Some niggers who are ready to die,” to which the crowd takes up a chant of “You! You! You!” (1996 200). But Gunnar’s concluding call is at best ambiguous: Do African Americans need leaders like King, ready to die for something, or leaders like himself, simply ready to die? Neal’s reading assumes the former, and he argues that Gunnar’s spontaneous appointment to the position is therefore “ironic,” as he has specifically discredited himself. A quite different reading of the novel and of the contemporary political field opens when we assume, instead, that Gunnar is not sincerely advocating sacrifice—the loss or amputation of the part that secures the survival and the sovereignty of the whole—but rather the kind of forfeit, or unfitness, that he himself embodies.
What it means in The White Boy Shuffle to be “just ready to die”—and what imaginative or material ends this orientation might serve—is the provocative and vexing question around which, as I take it, the narrative orbits. As the citation from King implies, the willingness to “die for” is foundational to the value of life. Life in this view is a domain of disciplined living: self-curtailment (here, of course, in its most radical form, as embracing the prospect of self-annihilation) is the condition of self-realization (or to recall Mbembe’s terminology, self-limitation is the mark of the self-instituting subject). The valued life belongs to the sovereign subject, in other words, the one who courts the risk of death, accedes to it, but in the mode of mastery, by not succumbing to its terror.5 Being “just ready to die” signals a rather different kind of intimacy with death, an openness, perhaps, a disposition, that is not willful or calculated on the part of the ready subject, though it is also not, by any means, an acquiescence in or accommodation to the necropolitical devaluation of black life. It is rather, as Gunnar’s speech elliptically suggests and as I aim to explore in the following sections, a rejoinder to necropower that does not abide by the logic of modern self-institution—of producing oneself “fit to live.”
Death and the prospect of death are everywhere in Beatty’s ghetto. The novel opens with Gunnar and his family—mother Brenda and two sisters—living in Santa Monica, where he is the only “cool black guy at Mestizo Mulatto Mongrel Elementary,” the city’s “all white multi-cultural school” (1996, 28). But the children’s off-handed response to the idea of attending an all-black summer camp (“they’re different from us”) prompts the mother to relocate the family to “a West Los Angeles neighborhood the locals call Hillside,” an area “less a community than a quarry of stucco homes built directly in the foothills of the San Borrachos Mountains” (1996, 45). The neighborhood’s natural boundaries, Gunnar explains, are reimagined
in the late 1960s, after the bloody but little-know I’m-Tired-of-the-White-Man-Fuckin’-with-Us-and-Whatnot riots, [when] the city decided to pave over the neighboring mountainside, surrounding the community with a great concrete wall that spans its entire curved perimeter save for an arched gateway at the southwest entrance. At the summit of this cement precipice wealthy families live in an upper-middle-class hamlet known as Cheviot Heights. At the bottom of this great wall live hordes of impoverished American Mongols. Hardrock niggers, Latinos, and Asians, who because of the wall’s immenseness get only fifteen minutes of precious sunshine in summer and a burst of solstice sunlight in the winter. (1996, 45)
The relation of Hillside to the adjacent urban space exemplifies with textbook precision the spatial politics of sovereignty II, in which “occupied territories are divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells” (Mbembe 2003, 28) Gunnar’s arrival in Hillside coincides in a matter of hours with the arrival at his front door of an LAPD police cruiser and a pair of officers who announce their commitment to “‘preventative police enforcement’ . . . whereby we prefer to deter habitual criminals before they cause irreparable damage to the citizenry and/or its property,” a mandate that Gunnar swiftly translates as “you put people who haven’t done anything in the back seat of your squad car and beat the shit out of ’em so you don’t have to do any paperwork” (1996, 47). Effective internment and “preventative policing” are supplemented by drive-by and aerial surveillance. In the latter sections of the novel, after Gunnar’s return to Hillside from Boston University, his life unfolds under the continual scrutiny of an LAPD helicopter, whose first appearance is a prompt to quasi-nostalgic reminiscence:
I heard the sound of helicopter blades churning the hot air. Niggers must be fucking up, I thought, remembering the fun we used to have outwitting the police copters by crawling underneath parked cars until we reached safety. I turned onto Whitworth Avenue and suddenly found myself engulfed in a blinding waterfall of blue-white light. Instinctively, my hands shot above my head as I waited for the standard drill—“Face down on the ground, hands behind your head, ankles crossed. Move!” But no instructions were forthcoming. (1996, 211)
Hillside bears the imprint, then, of what Eyal Weizman, writing on occupied Palestine, calls “the politics of verticality,” which operates, in Mbembe’s gloss, “through schemes of over and underpasses, a separation of airspace from the ground” (2003, 28). The experience of subjection to this regime of control-from-above registers in the vertical axis along which Gunnar’s body moves: there is slow, foul, and body-cramping movement under cars, or else the constant risk of arrest—frozen in a posture of bodily extension, hands raised, awaiting the command that casts one, face down, onto the pavement.
Life in the walled-in space of the ghetto is marked by a surplus of movement that attains nothing, as Gunnar longs to convey to his mother, by way of response, or so it seems, to the move and the desire for the children’s enhanced sense of black identity that motivated it. Coming home early in the morning, he responds to her asking where he’s been:
“Shooting up the neighborhood, Ma. I’m becoming so black it’s a shame.” I wanted to explain to her that living out there was like being on some never-ending log-rolling contest. You never asked why the log was rolling or who was rolling the log. You just spread your arms and get moving, trying not to fall off. Spent all your time trying to anticipate how fast and in what direction the log would spin next. I wanted to take a seat next to my mother and use this lumberjack metaphor to express how tired I was. I wanted to chew my runny eggs and talk with my mouth full. Tell her how much I missed the calm equipoise of my old life but I had grown accustomed to running in place, knowing nothing mattered as long as I kept moving. I wanted to say these things to her, but my breath smelled like wet dog shit with a hint of sulfur. (1996, 102)
And what results from “running in place,” from “impoverished American Mongols” interned in a sunless quarry, preemptively targeted, and ruthlessly surveilled is the visceral presence of death.6 Gunnar is befriended by his neighbor, Psycho Loco, leader of a gang called the Gun Totin’ Hooligans—the name is something of a misdirect, as none of them bears firearms—and the first gang event to which he finds himself casually invited, the very one from which he is returning when moved to explain about log-rolling to his mother, is a memorial for the fallen GTH Pumpkin, killed by a rival gang. The scarcity of life prospects that sends ghetto dwellers into underground economies and endless turf wars not only decimates the population of young men, but as The White Boy Shuffle pointedly remarks, the figure of the gangsta becomes the sign under which value is extracted from the necropolitics of the ghetto—though not, of course, extracted by the inhabitants themselves.
There was a different vibrancy to 24th Street that day. The decibel level was the same, a grating Hollywood hullabaloo replaced normal Hillside barking dog and nigger cacophony. The newest rap phenoms, the Stoic Undertakers, were filming a video for their latest album, Closed Casket Eulogies in F Major. Earlier in the day I had wandered into the production tent to audition for a part as an extra. The casting director blew one expanding smoke ring in my direction and dismissed me with a curt “Too studious. Next! I told you I want menacing or despondent and you send me these bookworm junior high larvae”
Moribund Videoworks was on safari through the L.A. jungle. . . . Local strong-armed youth bore the director over the crowds in a canopied sedan chair, his seconds shouting out commands through a bullhorn. “Bwana wants to shoot this scene through an orange filter to make it seem like the sun’s been stabbed and the heavens are bleeding onto the streets.” “Special effects, can you make the flames shoot further out from the barrel of the Uzi? Mr. Edgar Barley Burrows wants the gun to spit death. More blood! You call this carnage! More blood” My street was a soundstage and its machinations of poverty and neglect were Congo cinema verité. (1996, 76)
The shoot goes on location as though to ensure the gritty realism of the genre, but the ghetto exists for the director and his crew only as the figure of death-dealing violence, “menace,” and despair, and the authenticity of the Stoic Undertakers is bitingly exposed as inner city hyper real. More to the point, perhaps, the episode of the video shoot stands as a salient reminder that the abandonment of the ghetto—the expulsion of its inhabitants from all but the most insecure arenas of the formal economy and so, too, from the disciplinary apparatus of capital—is no impediment to generating capital via the ghetto brand. The video shoot is thus the culture industry’s variant of what Ananya Roy (2010) calls “poverty capital,” which transforms dispossessed populations into sites of accumulation (in her analysis, through the use of microfinance).
In these moments and in myriad others, The White Boy Shuffle traces the contours and idioms of ordinary life in the precincts of necropower. Most poignantly, perhaps, we see the grade school lesson in kinship relations, so fundamental to pedagogies of identity, family, and nation, converge on the organized devaluation of black life in Ms. Murphy’s classroom, where Gunnar first recites his own family genealogy, the “groveling Kaufman male birthright,” but is also exposed to the “caricature American ancestries” of his peers:
I sat midway up the first row of seats in from the door, bored with the kids holding up their family trees and giving the same speech: “Ummmmmm, the boys are the circles and the girls have the triangle heads. This is me. My six sisters. My brother, he dead. My other brother, he dead, too. My mom. My dad. And here go my grandparents. My grandfather was in Vietnam and he crazy. Any questions?” (1996, 11)
In this context, to be “just ready to die,” in Gunnar’s phrase, risks appearing indistinguishable from the way in which the inhabitants of Hillside—and of the many other neighborhoods like it—are already positioned, as vulnerable at any moment to the imposition of death. Notably, neither Gunnar nor Scoby, his closest friend and one of the very first to embrace suicide in the wake of Gunnar’s speech, seems to offer any but a sliding account of this readiness—one that pivots on its difference from existing narratives of self-inflicted death. In a series of interviews with foreign TV stations following the divestment rally, Gunnar is pressed on the implications of suicide as political program:
“Bonjour, France. . . . There are reports of black people killing themselves indiscriminately across the United States. Don’t you have anything to say?”
“Yes, send me your death poems.”
“Hyuää huomenta, Finland. Mr Kaufman, isn’t suicide a way of saying that you’ve—that black people have given up? Surrendered unconditionally to the racial status quo?”
“That’s the Western idea of suicide—the sense of the defeated self. ‘Oh, the dysfunctional people just couldn’t adjust to our great system, so they killed themselves.’ Now when a patriotic American—a soldier, for example—jumps on a grenade to save his buddies, that’s the ultimate sacrifice. They drape a flag on your coffin, play taps, and your mama gets the Congressional Medal of Honor to put on the mantel-piece.”
“So you see yourself as a hero?”
“No. It is as Mishima once said: ‘Sometimes hara-kiri makes you win.’ I just want to win this one time.”
“Last laugh?”
“I don’t see anyone laughing.”
“This is Namasté, India. And when do you plan to commit suicide Mr. Kaufman?”
“When I’m good and goddamn ready.” (1996, 202)
The interviews proceed through a series of feints: to the narrative of defeat, Gunnar counterposes iconic sacrifice. But he refuses that account, in turn, invoking Mishima and an idea of suicide as refusal, rather than surrender. Yet it is not a refusal that sustains—there is no laughter for the suicide, nor by implication is suicide performative, a rallying point for the survivors. And so, not surprisingly, he insists, there is no public significance to when or even whether Gunnar will embrace his death.
In his final riposte to Namasté, India, Gunnar marks a difference between being “just ready to die” and “good and goddamn ready” to kill himself. Gunnar’s insistence that he will die only when he chooses suggests that the completion of his “public suicide pact” should not be read as the measure of his good faith—nor is his postponement of the act a sign of his own apostasy. Here again, Gunnar rejects the sacrificial narrative: his death, when it transpires, is not martyrdom and is not constitutive of his people’s “honor,” or their sovereignty. And indeed, the novel will end on a tellingly domestic note, with Gunnar lovingly washing his baby daughter “at home, in Suite 206 of the La Cienega Moter Lodge and Laundromat,” while rehearsing “the Kaufman history” (1996, 225–226). Thus we find Gunnar at novel’s end cast in a role more conventionally assigned to women—the mothers of the nation, the ones who receive the medals for their fallen sons, as it were, rather than the ones who earn them. In this context, I suggest, the point of being ready to die—the political import of this position—is not the embrace of death, but the declaration of unfitness to live, more exactly, the summoning of the unfit life as the new scene of African American political self-elaboration. From the vantage of modern emancipation struggles this is, of course, an impossible self-elaboration, predicated on the refusal of the political rationality—freedom through self-mastery—on which sovereignty I depends. Instead we might say, borrowing Paul Gilroy’s language, that being ready to die marks a “dynamic rapport with the presence of death and suffering,” which has throughout the history of the Black Atlantic, as Gilroy goes on to remark “generated modes of expression . . . absolutely antagonistic to the enlightenment assumptions with which they have had to compete for the attention of the black public” (1993, 198). Yet it is the attraction of unfitness as the prospect not (just) of dying but of living that explains why Gunnar’s speech inaugurates, not only a wave of suicides, to be sure, but also a massive influx of black and brown people to Hillside, ongoing community festivals, and new modes of subaltern publicity. Rallying the crowd around the proposition of his own unfitness, Gunnar proposes unfitness as a different way to rally, in both senses of the term: to come together as a group and to come back from defeat, to belong, and to survive.
It is by reimagining unfitness as a condition of possibility, rather than failure, that the novel dislodges suicide from the narrative of the depressed subject, a fundamentally solitary and dissociated figure. The wave of spontaneous, public, and improbable suicides that follow Gunnar’s ascension are profoundly manic—a sudden, compulsive, breaking-into-action that ensues from everyday incidents of racist condescension, outrageous in their very banality. Carlton Mathus, a beer maker in Oregon who is refused service in a local bar, consumes an entire keg continuously for five hours and expires; Merva Kilgore, a poet from Philadelphia who is asked by a high school principle to perform “one of those old Negro spirituals,” electrocutes herself by thrusting her hand in the water pitcher and biting through the microphone cord; and so forth (1996, 212–213). While the suicides are not exemplary or redemptive, they are fully social acts. Suicide in The White Boy Shuffle is neither the severing of the part that ensures the fitness of the whole (martyrdom), nor the falling away of the damaged psyche that can no longer sustain its relation to the social (alienation; depression), but an expression of belonging in an unfit community—a community in “dynamic rapport with death.” The counterintuitive sociality of suicide in the novel registers, as well, in Scoby’s parting letter. “Sitting on this ledge, my feet dangling in midair, two hundred feet off the ground,” he writes, “I find my thoughts going back to Tokubei, the soy sauce dealer, and the unbelievably codependent courtesan Ohatsu in Chikamatsu’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the doomed lovers under the fronds of a palm tree binding their wrists, preparing for noble deaths” (1996 206). In one sense, the reference to Chikamatsu’s lovers reverberates oddly, as Scoby, sitting on the roof of the law school building moments before jumping, is quite hauntingly alone; yet the contents of the letter, replete with his sense of attachment to Gunnar and to the pleasures and intimacies of their common social world, imply a world of codependents.
Scoby’s suicide precipitates Gunnar’s and Yoshiko’s return to LA and, shortly thereafter, the appearance of the hovering LAPD spotlight over Gunnar’s nighttime excursions. While the Hillside locals initially shy away from Gunnar, strolling in the illuminated circle with Yoshiko and Psycho Loco, onlookers are eventually drawn into the light, and their private ramblings transform into more public affairs. This is perhaps what inspires the decision for Yoshiko to make of her labor and delivery a community event in Reynier Park, with security provided by the Gun Totin’ Hooligans, refreshments by Mrs. Kim, the neighborhood’s Korean grocer, and midwifery by Gunnar’s mother. Naomi Katsu Kaufman’s public birthing develops organically, or so it seems, into a regular series of Friday night “outdoor open mikes, called the Black Bacchanalian MiseryFests,” using “the LAPD’s simple but effective stagelighting,” and a “jerry-rigged sound system using car stereos loud enough to drown out the noise from the helicopter” (1996, 219). As their name implies, these events fuse the funereal with the carnivalesque, crossing and recrossing the lines between ostensibly discrete cultural arenas to produce an event that is part county fair, part town hall meeting, and part (more or less experimental) arts scene:
The shows lasted all night, and the neighborhood players read poetry, held car shows, sang, danced, ad-libbed harangues about everything from why there are no Latino baseball umpires to the practicality of sustaining human life on Mars. Sometimes troupes of children simply counted to a hundred for hours at a time. (1996, 219)
Like Gunnar’s anti-apartheid address, the MiseryFests extend the checkmate on “Good Samaritan opportunism,” and related forms of feel-good self-fashioning that correspond—not incidentally—to various mass cultural narratives of black identity:
Every week there was at least one hour of Community Stigmas. Community Stigmas was a loosely run part of the MiseryFest where the neigborhood’s stigmatized groups got a chance to kvetch and defend their actions to the rest of the neighborhood. I’d call the registered voters to the stage to explain why they bothered, request that all welfare cheats step forward and share their fraudulent scams, ask the panhandlers to say what they really thought of their spare-change benefactors, offer fifty dollars to any Muslim who’d eat a fatty slab of bacon. (1996, 219–220)
But the summoning of these stigmatized groups does not serve a reparative political end, as Gunnar’s language suggests; after all, “kvetching” is proliferative and arguably competitive (the point is to rehearse a wrong or injury that trumps one’s interlocutor’s complaint), but it is notably interminable and unproductive. And there is nothing in Gunnar’s rather eclectic choice of targets to suggest a corrective or transformative aim, such as the cultivation of a more authentic or oppositional identity. The Community Stigmas are perhaps therapeutic—or at any rate, they cite freely from self-help and therapy discourse—even as recovery (or persistent abuse) seems somewhat beside the point. The confessional moment is mandatory, but there is no requirement that it function as conversion narrative, likely as not to be laced with dubious twelve-step wisdom:
The most poignant nights were the ones when the recovered addicts stepped into the light to soak up the warm applause and address the crowd. “I want to thank all my cool outs who stood by me, but mostly I want to thank self for not giving up on self.” . . . The bold users would swagger into the circle, smoking their pipes, needles dangling from their arms, playing up to the boos like villainous wrestlers. . . . No one could leave until he’d said something, anything from “I promise on my grandmama’s grave to stop” to “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll smoke till white people have feelings.” The drug dealers also got their say. Every third Friday we’d have Psycho’s Analysis, where Psycho Loco conducted these heartwrenching gangbanger tribunals. Some hoodlums would volunteer to bear their souls. They’d sit on wooden stools, speaking thoughtfully into microphones, unburdening themselves like war criminals, black gunny sacks stretched over the heads of the wanted ones to prevent the police from using an overhead skycam to identify them. (1996, 220)
It is, of course, easy enough to dismiss the novel’s MiseryFests as simply parodic of the various reclaimed and unregenerate identities that constitute the repertoire of mass-mediated African American cultural and political presence. On this reading, the MiseryFests are social movement upside down: therapy in lieu of politics, oration instead of organizing—and all under the auspices of the LAPD, who are thankful, or so one might imagine, for the ghetto community’s helpful self-assembly under the glare of the search light. Such a reading would rejoin Mark Anthony Neal’s insistence that Gunnar’s moribund leadership is intended as a failed model (and by implication a call for some other, properly political alternative). Yet although the MiseryFest’s “neighborhood players” traffic in parody—which different segments of the audience read cynically or sincerely, as they prefer—I take the MiseryFests themselves as something other than a travesty, even though they remain indescribable by reference to the categories that organize our prevailing sense of political work. The MiseryFests represent a massive political demobilization, an organized, willful refusal to produce an emancipatory political subjectivity that is also, at the same time, a politically salient massing. In this way, I would argue, the MiseryFests belong to the domain of what Partha Chatterjee calls political society. Civil society aligns with “the nation state founded on popular sovereignty and granting rights to citizens,” but in postcolonial democracies such as India, Chatterjee reminds us, the normative institutions of civil society dedicated to the social reproduction of the rational citizen-subject have only ever encompassed a relative minority of the total national population (2004, 37). Political society names that “different domain of politics” where governmental agencies “pursuing multiple policies of security and welfare” (2004, 37) encounter populations—those without access to the disciplinary pedagogies of civil society—and part of Chatterjee’s point is that political society presents with us with any number of “loose and transient mobilizations, building on communication structures that would not be ordinarily recognized as political (for instance religious assemblies or cultural festivals, or more curiously, even associations of cinema fans, as in some of the Southern Indian states)” (2004, 47). To be sure, Chatterjee’s concern is with the “pastoral” functions of the state, in Foucault’s sense, “governmental performance that emphasizes the welfare and protection of populations” (2004, 47), in short biopolitics rather than necropolitics, and his examples tend to focus on the interface of political society with electoral politics (the undisciplined actors of political society nevertheless have a vote). But I find in Beatty’s novel the provocative suggestion that in the zones of (historically advanced) democracies where necropower prevails, the operations of a “different political domain,” one not committed to emancipatory struggle—to civic self-making—might be a population’s best, or even its sole alternative.
In the end, the most telling feature of the MiseryFests as an organization of political society is the complex negotiation its creators transact with both the necropolitical state and a culture industry on perennial “safari” through the ghetto. The LAPD’s “stagelighting” reminds us how surveillance and communications technologies developed for the state now permeate societies in ways that also make them differentially available to those same populations they are used to manage. This is not to suggest that these technologies are thereby subverted from their primary command and control functions, but simply to note another dimension of the transformation Gayatri Spivak observes when she remarks that “today the subaltern must be rethought” as “s/he is no longer cut off from lines of access to the center” (2006, 326).7 At the same time, the circumstance that the spotlight is at once an instrument for the community’s self-mediation and for its “preventative” policing underscores the extent to which the politics of political society are not the politics of “freedom.” In this configuration, (the infrastructure of) the state is a relay in the Hillside population’s relationship to itself and to the larger world, and the MiseryFests are necessarily constructed in the persistent awareness of the state as spectator, one whose presence registers viscerally in the masked buzzing of the helicopter. Yet these Friday night assemblies are not primarily directed at the state (they are not a protest, a demand for recognition, incorporation or amelioration); rather, they are directed at the participants themselves. As news of the MiseryFests migrates beyond the boundaries of Hillside—as participation ceases to be a matter of geography—the culture industry appears as the second necessary relay in the elaboration of this different political subject, and the politics of political society come into focus as a struggle over publicity, rather than rights.
Soon the Bacchanalian MiseryFests became gala events; colored folks from all over Los Angeles crashed Hillside to take part in the spectacle. To ensure that the Friday nights didn’t turn into a trendy happening for whites bold enough to spelunk into the depths of the ghetto, Psycho Loco stationed armed guards at the gate to keep out the blue-eyed soulsters. Questioning anyone who looked to be of Caucasian descent, the sentries showed those of dubious ancestry a photograph of a radial-tire-colored black man, then asked, “What’s darker than this man’s face?” Anyone who didn’t answer “His butt” or “His nipples” didn’t get in.
The networks caught wind of the MiseryFest’s popularity and offered a bundle of money for the rights to broadcast weekly installments. We accepted the best offer and divvied it up among all the households in Hillside, and the television station agreed to the following conditions:
One part of the struggle is to preempt the transformation of the community event into the spectacle of community by closing the MiseryFests to the cultural tourists. The litmus test for entry brilliantly offends the sensibilities of the colorblind liberal (earlier sections of the novel, set in Santa Monica, satirize the elementary school lessons in unseeing racial difference) and also, crucially, establishes lived familiarity with black and brown skin as the criteria for admission: the point of the test question, I take it, is that it cannot be answered by reference to one’s cultural fluency in blackness as signifier. Another part of the political struggle is to avoid the integration of the MiseryFests into the broader market for African American “menace” and “despondency”; the organizers sell the right to broadcast, but retain control of all aspects of production.
By this point in the narrative, Gunnar’s fame as a poet rivals his political notoriety (upon arriving at Boston University, he discovers that some of his early efforts, scrawled on the walls of Hillside, have been photographed and collected in a coffee-table volume of “street poems” by an “unknown street poet named Gunnar Kaufman”), and one of the poems he delivers at the milestone MiseryFest commemorating the second anniversary of Scoby’s death quite explicitly identifies as the impediment to freedom politics America’s will to transmute black life into capital (1996, 178). Entitled “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Crib Death,” the final stanzas read:
Remorse lies
not in the consciousness
of a murderous parent
who rocks a child born into slavery
to divine sleep
sung by sharp blade
and suffocating love
applied with pillow and pressure
Remorse lies
in the slave owner’s anguished cries
upon discovering
his property permanently damaged;
a bloody hieroglyph carved into flesh
the smiling lips swollen and blue with asphyxiation
after he calculates his losses
forecasts the impact on this year’s crop
he will notice the textual eyes of murder/suicide
read “caveat emptor”
let the buyer beware (1996, 222)
The poem situates infanticide and suicide in a longer historical tradition of African American response to necropower, to a devaluation of black life that takes the perverse and spectacular form of rendering it market soluble—accounting its value in monetary terms, exclusively. Gunnar then launches into his “encore,” a “small sacrifice” to Scoby and “any niggers who cared,” which he opens with the claim that careful research of the Manhattan Project has revealed the creation of a third bomb, “Svelte Guy,” never deployed over Japan (1996, 222). Producing a knife and a handkerchief and arraying them on the podium, Gunnar proceeds to issue
a challenge to the United States government. “When I was a child, my dad—before he left us, the fuck—whenever I did something wrong, he used to say, ‘I brought you into the world and I’ll take you out.’ Well, Big Daddy, Uncle Sam, oh Great White Father, you brought me here, so I’m asking you to take me out. Finish the job. Pass the ultimate death penalty. Authorize the carrying out of directive 1609, ‘Kill All Niggers.’ Don’t let Svelte Guy lie dormant in the basement of the Smithsonian. Drop the bomb. Drop the bomb on me! Drop the bomb on Hillside!” (1996, 223)
And on that closing note, Gunnar hacks off the pinky of his right hand with one stroke. Gunnar’s poem as it aligns with this closing invocation of sovereign nationality in its nakedly patriarchal guise throws into stunning relief both the ruse of political modernity—autonomy must be conferred, freedom rests on subjection—but also the specifically familial register in which this ruse is emplotted. The poem and the “challenge” alike reflect on how the capacity for sovereignty is given or withheld under the sign of the Father, and in broaching this motif, to be sure, Gunnar takes a path well worn by a remarkable array of Euro- and African American intellectuals pondering the aberrations of “the black family” to a variety of political ends—not least perhaps, his curiously chosen namesake, Gunnar Myrdal. As the poem rehearses, to the slave owner, the slave is property—which bears interest in the form of its labor. The slave is father-lacking, then, because the white father is not kin and the slave father, however present in body, remains, in Hortense Spillers’s suggestive formulation, absent “from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the father’s name” (1996, 228). The slave parent, male or female, can confer only death: social death (the condition of the mother) or death itself.8 “Big Daddy,” on the other hand, wields the threat of death. Here, of course, we are squarely within the castration thematic, where deference to the father’s power is (for the son) the condition of claiming that power for himself. In demanding that “Big Daddy” make good on the threat, that he “finish the job,” Gunnar insists both that black people are still and already living in “subjugation to the power of death,” and, crucially, that acceding to the regime of the benevolent father—the one who strikes the bargain, who gives us title to ourselves as the reward for our subjection—is neither an adequate political aspiration nor an adequate response to necropower. Gunnar’s amputation of his smallest finger, then, reads as a mocking rehearsal and repudiation of the socializing power of castration. If he shares his given name with Myrdal, as many critics have remarked, his surname (on which no one remarks) suggests a rather different symbolic affiliation to the Afro-Caribbean/Jewish poet Bob Kaufman and the committed delirium of the “abomunist.”
Gunnar’s father, Rolf, is, depending on the point of view, too absent or too present in his life, which is father-lacking in one sense, father-excessive in another. A sketch artist for the LAPD whose mimetic devotion to white masculinity is only amplified by every episode of racist condescension and abuse he undergoes, Rolf fades in and out of view in Gunnar’s backstory, only to get the final word: his suicide and death poem end the narrative. Rolf’s relation to Gunnar is shaped on the one hand by Rolf’s aggressive upholding of “Big Daddy’s” authority and on the other hand by his own thoroughly abject relation to it. On weekend custody outings, Gunnar recalls, his father imparts a personal history of assimilationist yearning systematically employed by white peers and patrons to shame and exploit him, only to end “this confessional with the non sequitur wisdom that ended all our conversations: ‘Son, don’t ever mess with a white woman’” (1996, 23). Although Gunnar gamely shares the history of his groveling forefathers with his classmates, he always omits the final chapter, his father’s portion of the tale. Earlier generations seem remote, but “his history,” Gunnar tells the reader, “was my history. A reprobate ancestry that snuggled up to me and tucked me in at night. In the morning, it kissed me on the back of the neck, plopped its dick in my hands, and asked me to blow reveille” (1996, 21). This last figure is especially charged, as Gunnar’s recollection of Rolf’s servile relation to white masculinity is intercut with his memory of his father molesting him. In a long meditation on the resonance of color in his early life (a resonance all the more pronounced for his third grade teacher’s promotion of color-blind humanism), he ends the section on “black” this way:
Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend custody drunken binge, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old, seventy-five-pound bell clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall, the shoe tree. Black is a repressed memory of a sandpapery hand rubbing abrasive circles into the small of my back, my face and rising and falling in line with a heavy heaving chest. Black is the sound of metal hangers sliding away in fear, my shirt halfway off, hula-hooping around my neck. (1996, 36)
There is plenty one might remark about the way that Rolf’s ostensibly disciplinary aspirations (subjecting the son to patriarchal authority so that he may one day wield it; making the boy a man) devolve into a will (or, more aptly, perhaps, a compulsion) to un-make—to use Gunnar, to “take [him] out” of the world, by one means or another. Rolf cannot confer on Gunnar a sovereignty in which he himself does not participate—the sovereignty of the “free,” self-governing man—so he seizes, instead, the power to instrumentalize, and the twelve-year-old Gunnar becomes a thing, a human “bell clapper,” made inanimate by his fear. But I stress in particular what appears, perhaps, incidental: unlike the “reprobate ancestry” that asks Gunnar to “blow reveille,” Rolf wages an assault on the surfaces of Gunnar’s body, an assault via abrasive touch and the suffocating proximity of Gunnar’s face to his father’s flesh. If a disciplinary pedagogy enjoins us (in obviously gender-differentiated ways) to police our own psychic and corporeal boundaries against the prospect of rupture (invasion, penetration), necropower is an organized and distributed assault on those very boundaries. Tellingly, Rolf’s molestation of Gunnar takes the form of an enforced and abrasive proximity—a breaking down of the structure of the skin. I am suggesting that disciplinary power wields the threat of the breach to teach proper management of one’s openings/orifices; in contrast, necropower offers lessons in a more radical permeability: the receptivity of the body’s surfaces at every point.
The relays between Rolf, “Big Daddy,” the necropolitical state, and what we might call the training in masculine embodiment converge in one episode, in particular, after the acquittal of the officers in the Rodney King beating causes rioting to break out in Hillside. Helping Psycho Loco loot a safe from the manager’s office of the local Montgomery Ward, Gunnar sees his father step out of a police cruiser and stays behind in the parking lot to cover his friends’ retreat. “You are not a Kaufman,” an irate Rolf intones, “You can’t embarrass me with your poetry and your niggerish ways,” and he goes on to beat senseless the already prostrate Gunnar, felled earlier by a blow from Rolf’s partner:
Something hard smacked the side of my neck, sending my tongue rolling out of my mouth like a party favor. I could taste the salty ash on the pavement. Ash that had drifted in from fires set in anger around the city. I remembered learning in third grade that snakes “see” and “hear” with their sensitive tongues. I imagined my tongue almost bitten through, hearing the polyrhythms of my father’s nightstick on my body. Through my tongue, I saw my father transform into a master Senegalese drummer beating a surrender code on a hollow log on the banks of the muddy Gambia River. A flash of white—the night of my conception, my father twisting Mama’s arm behind her back and ordering her to “assume the position.” A flash of white—my father potty-training me by slapping me across the face and sticking my hand in my mushy excrement. Soon my body stopped bucking with every blow. There was only white—no memories, no vision, only the sound of voices. (1996, 138)
Gunnar’s visions in this passage devastate beyond reclaim the idea that the restoration of African American fatherhood to patriarchal privilege—as “a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the father’s name”—is a condition or a sign of black liberation. In this series of tableaux, Rolf appears precisely where that fiction would place him: at the center of the family’s psychic life, putting black matriarchs and rioting sons in their proper place. Only this is no victory, but rather a surrender: Rolf’s Afrocentric avatar alters nothing about the character of the role he assumes; the phallus is a nightstick, and in Gunnar’s iteration of the primal scene, parental sex becomes a kind of stop and frisk. Interestingly, as the father morphs into the cop, the mother elides with Gunnar and the other legions of prostate black men “assuming the position.” Most tellingly, the subjugation of the mother aligns in the next “flash” with Gunnar’s own lesson in bodily shame. Gunnar’s arrival into self-possession (controlling his sphincters and what crosses them) is secured, paradoxically, by a slap—another, or perhaps the first, in the long series of brutalizing surface contacts.
In The White Boy Shuffle, then, the black father who seeks to insert himself in the prevailing social fiction of paternity is not a salutary presence, but an extension of the necropolitical state.9 Rolf’s commitment to purge the “niggerish” from Gunnar—to produce him as a fit receptacle of sovereign power—turns repeatedly and dizzyingly into a traumatic reconfiguration of Gunnar’s body that by turns hypersensitizes and numbs its surfaces. Although Gunnar’s relation to his father, in particular, is largely missing from L. H. Stallings’s reading of the novel, her more general observation about the novel’s repudiation of the “race man” leads her to suggest that Gunnar as a kind of “anti-race man” extricates himself from the toxic model of “hegemonic masculinity” under his mother’s influence (2009, 100, 106). His parents’ divorce, Rolf’s molestation, and Gunnar’s “ambivalence” toward the “Kaufman lineage” all contribute to center his mother’s presence in the narrative, she argues. “By having Gunnar write his mother into the Kaufman legacy, so that his own son might one day know the importance of her subjectivity to his own, Beatty allows Gunnar and his descendants to say yes to the female within,” Stalling writes, referencing in this last phrase Hortense Spillers’s suggestion that the African American male in the aftermath of slavery has been differently “touched” by the mother. “With his mother’s break into the imagination,” Stallings concludes, “an androgynous lineage forms, and a revolutionary race leader is born” (2009, 107). But there is little to suggest that Gunnar, washing his daughter and rehearsing the Kaufman legacy in the novel’s closing paragraph, has inserted his mother into the ancestral narrative—at any rate, he tells us, he “begins with the end,” Rolf’s suicide the week before (2009, 226). Nor is Brenda an idealized figure—unlike Rolf, she is lovingly assassinated, but satirized nonetheless, and the notion that her decision to relocate to Hillside “rescue[s] Gunnar from blacklessness,” as Stallings puts it, rather downplays the complex reverberations of the family’s move into the carceral ghetto. Although Stallings is surely right to draw the line connecting the sexual politics of the novel with Spillers’s reflection on slavery’s “American grammar,” I would dispute the notion that this connection takes the form of championing Brenda as a redemptive figure. More to the point, I am inclined to read Spillers’s formulation—saying “‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within”—in ways that have less to do with the influence of maternal character and more with the articulations of embodiment, sexuality, and necropower. Here is the passage from Spillers that Stallings also cites; however, significantly, the italicized portion is omitted in Stallings’s essay:
Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males handed the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of “yes” to the “female” within. (2003, 228, my emphasis)
The omitted section is admittedly a cryptic phrase in an essay remarkable for its author’s use of figural language to discern the historical terrain of gender and New World slavery, whenever a more conventionally analytical vocabulary proves inadequate to her discernments. Spillers’s concern in the essay, broadly speaking, is to decipher the grammar of “American” identities at the historical juncture where the economics of slavery invade and interrupt the workings of patriarchalized gender: thus in a society where identity is a function of paternity, the determination of slave or free follows, perversely, from the condition of the mother. The black father undergoes a “peculiar[ly] American” denial, removed as he is from the “social fiction of the father’s name,” while the black mother in and in the wake of slavery assumes the deeply “illegitimate” capacity to impart, or transfer something of herself to her offspring. But here we arrive at the cryptic modifier: What is this “infant child?” Does “infant child” modify “community of males”—or does “infant child” modify the “female” they harbor, so that the infant is a trope, not for the community of sons, but for the thing learned, for this interiorized female quantity? Insofar as the infant has a feminine gender (“against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own”), we veer to the second reading, yielding the arresting image of a male community discovering inside itself a proto-female, “bearing life” in the impossible, shattering contexts of “pulverization and murder,” or necropower.
What the African American male is “handed the specific occasion to learn” is not the importance of his mother’s influence (the way in which her character shapes his)—which is obviously not to say that his mother’s influence is unimportant, but that it holds no unique importance for the African American man as contrasted to other men. Rather, what he is uniquely situated to learn (and to affirm) is embedded in the grammar of black motherhood, that is, in the historical position of black women in general. This interiorized female who might be affirmed (or not) is defined by the experience of “bearing life” under subjugation to the power of death. In another, closely related passage, Spillers reflects on the unstable meaning of the “condition” that the slave mother is said to impart. “But what is the ‘condition’ of the mother?” she writes. “Is it the ‘condition’ of enslavement the writer means, or does he mean the ‘mark’ and the ‘knowledge’ of the mother upon the child that here translates into the culturally forbidden and impure?” (2003, 227, my emphasis). We might rephrase the interrogative in the form of a speculative proposition: in being made to transmit to her child the condition of social death, the mother also, ambivalently, comes to transmit a knowledge of and orientation to what patriarchal culture proscribes, and this is the unique, the specific inheritance that accrues from black mothers to black sons. It is only by drawing the line between Spillers and the novel in this way, it seems to me, that one can make sense of what Stallings astutely remarks as a central dimension of Gunnar’s masculinity: his willing self-identification as “punked.”
Although tagged as the “cool, black guy” in his Santa Monica elementary school, Gunnar’s persona is clearly marked, from adolescence onward, by a general remove from what Stallings calls “cool-posing,” an explicitly masculine style of self-assured detachment designed, among other things, to compensate for black men’s structural positon of disempowerment relative to white men (1996, 28). A hyperbolic iteration of conventional masculinity, cool-posing aims to fortify the embodied subject, “to mask or resist any acts of penetration: physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually” (Stallings 2009, 108). Gunnar’s distance from this form of cool plays out hilariously in the episode with two neighborhood girls, named Fas’ Betty and Vamp a Nigger on the Regular Veronica, first introduced when they initiate a playground brawl with a newly transplanted Gunnar and his two sisters. The pair resurface farther on in the narrative, when they take an amorous interest in Gunnar, casting him as “Archie” to their “Betty” and “Veronica.” Challenging him to a game of “hide-and-go-get it,” which he is not permitted to decline—“I’m the only boy,” Gunnar protests to no avail; “That’s not fair, two against one”—they pursue him across the neighborhood, eventually cornering him in the laundry room of a nearby apartment complex, where he has been attempting to hide (1996, 80). Gunnar remains passive, explicitly “limp” and “flaccid” under the girls’ simultaneously tender and aggressive sexual attentions, his body a more or less compliant prop in Betty and Veronica’s competition to demonstrate their superior understanding of the uses to which a boy might be put. Maturity does not redress the situation, as Gunnar remains, though by no means indifferent to women, “intimidated into a state of catatonia” by their presence (1996, 123). Gunnar’s extreme timidity induces Psycho Loco to take matters into his own hands and pursue an arranged marriage for the now eighteen-year-old Gunnar, culminating in the appearance of his bride-to-be, Yoshiko, who arrives one afternoon by UPS. Despite this literalization of the trope of the mail-order bride, Yoshiko departs uproariously from the stereotype of the deferential Asian woman, in no small part because of her proficiency in the forms and idioms of black popular culture, whose global reach she embodies, as Mark Anthony Neal remarks (2002, 146). At the moment of the exchange of vows, for instance, Yoshiko surprises Gunnar with her command of English:
“Now Yoshiko’s turn.”
“Mom, she doesn’t speak English.”
“English?” Yoshiko stood up sharply, a little red-faced and wobbly from all the beer she’d drunk. “Me speak English.” To wild applause, Yoshiko pecked me on the lips, then climbed onto the tabletop, chugging her beer until she reached the summit. My bride, literally on a pedestal, was going to pledge her life to me. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face with a blowtorch.
Yoshiko cleared her throat and threw her hands in the air. “Brmmmphh boomp ba-bom bip. I’m the king of rock—there is none higher. Sucker MC’s must call me sire.” (1996, 169–171)
It is during this impromptu wedding celebration, that Gunnar, contemplating Yoshiko, suddenly recollects an earlier exchange about masculine sexuality with Psycho Loco:
Psycho Loco once told me that in prison when two men fall in love, they have to be careful not to relax and give in to the passion, because just when you let yourself go, your lover slips his finger into your anus and you’re punked for life. I squeezed my sphincter shut as Yoshiko lowered the empty plate from her face, wiped her mouth, and let out a healthy belch. (1996, 169)
The pertinence of this remembered conversation emerges later that evening, when Yoshiko and Gunnar are alone on the beach.
I fell asleep to Al Green singing on a belly full of cornbread and fruit punch . . . and Yoshiko’s finger tapping on my anus. “Anaru zene,” she whispered.
I dreamed I was a flying, fire-breathing foam stegosaurus starring in a schlocky Japanese film called Destroy All Negroes. I stomped high-rise projects into rubble, turned out concerts by whipping my armored tale across the stage, and chewed on slow black folks like licorice sticks. The world government sent a green-Afroed Godzilla to defeat me and we agreed to a death match in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The winner would be crowned Reptile of the Nuclear Epoch. I was beating Godzilla into the sea with a powerful stream of radioactive turtle piss when I awoke to find Yoshiko’s index finger worming its way toward my prostate. Punked for life. (1996, 173)
Gunnar’s cinematic dream, in which his fortified avatar is both mutant and flimsy (a schlocky foam prop), brilliantly ushers in his orientation to a receptive (hetero)sexuality—to the “anaru zene,” or anal play, with which Yoshiko readily seduces him.10 That Gunnar’s pleasure in being penetrated is decisive for their dynamic and is by no means rejected (nor even kept private) by Gunnar himself becomes clear in a subsequent episode, when Gunnar, in flight from the worshipful members of his Boston University poetry class, “white kids who were embarrassingly like myself but with whom I had nothing in common,” heads home to Yoshiko, disrobing along the way, while the class follows in devoted pursuit, collecting his wardrobe (1996, 179).
I continued down Commonwealth Avenue, naked save for sneakers and socks. My black, lower-middle-class penis fluttered stiffly in the wind like a weather vane, first to the left, then suddenly to the right. When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, “It’s okay, he’s a poet. Matter of fact, the best black . . . the best poet writing today.” The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy.
I . . . skipped up the stairs to my apartment and plopped face down on the couch, my head on Yoshiko’s lap. She rested her textbook on my cheek and with her left hand cleaved the crack of my ass like a hacksaw . . .
“Yoshiko, this is my creative writing class. Class, this is my wife, Yoshiko.” Shy hellos, whispers all around. (1996, 180)
The black penis is exposed—as the reference to Commonwealth Avenue reminds us, exposed in a historical center of North American political modernity, where Euro-American men declared their sovereignty, along with their right to property in human chattel. But this penis is decidedly not a phallus; its symbolic potential as icon of black hyper-masculinity is downgraded by its lower-middle-class specificity, not to mention its inability to hold the line, “flutter[ing]” as it does at the whim of the breeze. Nor do these merely ordinary genitals have pride of place in the organization of Gunnar’s sexuality. As Scoby comments, on entering the apartment shortly after the class withdraws and discovering Gunnar still in his prone position on the couch, “Damn, nigger, every time I come over, Yoshiko got her hand halfway up your ass” (1996, 181). If Gunnar’s initial response to Yoshiko (squeezing shut his sphincter) mimes the anxious cool of Psycho Loco’s men in love, his resistance holds only for a moment, and the narrative of Gunnar’s political ascendance, as it turns out, is also the narrative of his sexual “relaxation,” or being punked.11
In a landmark essay from the late 1980s, Leo Bersani takes up precisely the question that the convergence of these narratives broaches—the question about the articulations of sexual and political orientations. Writing amidst the emergency of the AIDS crisis, Bersani takes to task those who would align homosexuality with left politics in a kind of stable, causal chain.
I do mean that there has been a lot of confusion about the real or potential implications of homosexuality. Gay activists have tended to deduce those implications from the status of homosexuals as an oppressed minority rather than from what I think are . . . the more crucially operative continuities between political sympathies, on the one hand, and on the other, fantasies connected with sexual pleasure. . . . While it is indisputably true that sexuality is always being politicized, the ways in which having sex politicizes are highly problematical. (1987, 206)
Against the tendency to “pastoralize” (1987, 221) gay and lesbian sexualities by attributing to them a more ethically appealing, pluralist orientation to power—a tendency that often pivots on privileging the role of parody in the construction of gendered personality, as well as the more fluid, flexible forms of identification these sexualities sustain—against the tendency, in other words, to construct a moral taxonomy of sex that inverts the punitive criteria of heteronormative society, Bersani insists that it is “almost impossible not to associate mastery and subordination with the experience of our most intense pleasures” (1987, 216). Sex is not redeemable, he contends, or at any rate, rescuing sex from hierarchical relations is not the only point of departure for a progressive sexual politics. Instead, we might start by considering the persistent association of receptive sex with powerlessness and (by extension) annihilation or death, an association central, he suggests, to the ways in which HIV/AIDS is made to equal gay male sex is made to equal death. Discussing the persecution of a Florida family with three hemophiliac, HIV-positive children, Bersani speculates that what the community “may have seen [in looking at those children]—that is, unconsciously represented—[is] the infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (1987, 212). Crucially, in his analysis, this pleasure is suicidal because “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (1987, 212)—an insight with which he also credits the anti-pornography crusaders Catharine MacKinnon and Andrew Dworkin. (Hence, he remarks, the seemingly universal repudiation of passive anal sex, even in cultures which institutionalize and condone homosexual relations.) Unlike MacKinnon and Dworkin, however, for whom the implication of this proposition is that women should effectively abdicate being fucked, Bersani suggests that the receptive position should be valued for the very way in which it shatters (the prevailing social fiction of) the sovereign subject. “Phallocentrism . . . is not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has also obviously led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (1987, 217). Rather than seek to rewrite the equation of bodily receptivity with powerlessness, we should embrace receptivity for that very reason. “If the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death” (1987, 222).
From this perspective, Gunnar’s orientation to receptive anal pleasure aligns with his embrace of “unfitness,” with his readiness to die, understood not as an abdication of life, but a repudiation of “proud subjectivity.” To say “‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within,’” as Gunnar models this affirmation, it to refuse the devaluation of the humiliated self and to recognize that the loss of sovereignty does not cancel the power of bearing life, in both possible senses of that phrase of enduring (surviving) but also proliferating (bringing into the world). The “culturally forbidden and impure” knowledge that the mother transmits to the son is the knowledge of an alternate psychic and social world, a world in which agency (the capacity to live and to make life) is not predicated on (self-)mastery. This knowledge, as the novel suggests, may have a particular urgency and salience in the present historical moment, when the institutions of sovereignty I appear visibly in decline. Beyond “making fun of the struggle,” as Weheliye’s students suggest, The White Boy Shuffle is an exercise in imagining what is and remains just barely imaginable: a practice of political self-making that is not a contest for sovereignty.
“It’s been a lovely five hundred years, but it’s time to go,” Gunnar opens the epilogue. “We’re abandoning this sinking ship America. . . . Black America has relinquished its needs in a world where expectations are illusion, has refused to develop ideals and mores in a society that applies principles without principle” (1996, 225). If the novel concludes with giant targets painted on the roofs of Hillside’s dwellings, the ghetto is not the only thing marked for destruction: “America” as the avatar of political modernity, of a “free people,” is also going under. I have argued that The White Boy Shuffle is about sounding a retreat from the terrain of modern freedom politics—or more aptly perhaps, to recall Gunnar’s opening formulation, a desertion from the field. It is about dismissing the idea and the ideal of the inviolate subject, of autonomy as the condition of political self-elaboration, and disciplined self-elaboration as the condition of political autonomy. However counterintuitively, the novel is about the possibilities and limits, the pleasures and the risks, of doing what Psycho Loco’s “two men in love” refuse: “relaxing” into another kind of psychic and political embodiment. If my chapter has taken the form of an intricate and sustained close-reading, one that lingers necessarily on the micro-resonances of the novel’s phrasing, characterizations, and plot, it is because this other politics is so profoundly difficult to discern. This difficulty inheres in the impulse to give to the narrative a properly political significance—to discover in the novel a program of resistance to the deadly conditions that it describes. But more fundamentally, it inheres in the absence of an already constituted discourse of the non-sovereign subject as anything besides a ruined, violated remainder—a non-subject. So the unfit subject who does not struggle to redeem “the principle”—to demand the principled application of freedom—emerges partially, provisionally, and above all diffusely. There is no shorthand for this new political subject who remains impossible in theory.