In July of 2013, following the announcement of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the 2012 killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the Twitter hashtag and movement #blacklivesmatter was born (“All”). From July 2013 to July 2014 tweets marked with the hashtag point out historical and contemporary instances of violence against unarmed black men and women, including Oscar Grant III and Renisha McBride, as well as the unequal treatment of black and white citizens who claim lawful use of deadly force under state stand-your-ground laws.1 When video of Eric Garner repeating “I can’t breathe” while restrained by New York City police officers prior to his death became public on July 17, 2014, and after news broke that Darren Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old white police officer, fatally shot Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black man, in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, #blacklivesmatter gained new audiences. Activists began to chant the phrase at protests against state-sanctioned violence, and social media users increased their usage of the hashtag in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Vine postings regarding police brutality, white privilege, and racial profiling.
As the name suggests, #blacklivesmatter speaks against the devaluing of black lives in white supremacist societies. However, members of other racial, ethnic, and national groups have rallied in support of the movement. In December of 2014, approximately seventy-five clergy members of various races and ethnicities joined individuals from the Black and Latino Caucus for a “die in” protest at New York City Hall. Following a similar protest the week before, Rabbi Jill Jacobs commented, “Rabbis and all Jews need to stand up and say that every single person is a creation in the divine image—that black lives matter” (Blumberg). Syracuse University students chanted “From Syracuse to Ferguson, black lives matter!” during a December 2014 multiracial march to protest the grand jury decision not to indict Wilson for Brown’s death (O’Brien). The group Black Lives Matter Minnesota helped organize a protest involving individuals of multiple ethnicities that shut down part of the Mall of America during the 2014 holiday season (“Chanting”). In Ireland, England, France, and India, among other places, thousands of citizens from a variety of racial and ethnic groups have vocalized or otherwise displayed the slogans “black lives matter,” “hands up, don’t shoot,” and “I can’t breathe” as part of in-person and online protests to support Brown’s and Garner’s families and communities (Sharkey; Randhawa).2 The ubiquity of #blacklivesmatter is also reflected in its selection of “word of the year for 2014” by the American Dialect Society, the first occurrence of a Twitter hashtag as winner (Schuessler), and its position (as Black Lives Matter rather than the hashtag) on the shortlist for Time’s 2015 Person of the Year (Altman). More recently, #blacklivesmatter leaders took the social media campaign to the White House, meeting with President Obama about civil rights (Cobb). Whether online, in print, or in person, #blacklivesmatter brings individuals from multiple social, cultural, and national groups together in solidarity to assert that black lives matter to black Americans as well as to members of other races from around the globe.
The solidarity conveyed by various racial, ethnic, and religious groups involved in the #blacklivesmatter movement corresponds with the tenets of posthumanism, including the bringing together of disparate entities and, specifically, disparate subjects. Moments of contact between individuals from distinct racial, religious, or gender groups, for example, allow for the formation of posthuman communities through which people may work together against larger oppressive forces. The possibility of solidarity within posthuman communities reveals that intercultural understanding develops not from technological links specifically but our reliance on human and other connections, including during those moments in history often seemingly defined by separation.
Set during a particularly divisive time in American history—the antebellum period—Sherley Anne Williams’s neo–slave narrative Dessa Rose (1986) demonstrates posthuman solidarity through the congruence of discourses and peoples set at odds by white supremacist and patriarchal forces. Williams’s first novel tells the story of a young, pregnant, enslaved woman named Dessa Rose who evades a death sentence for her role in an uprising by joining other escaped slaves at a white woman’s North Carolina farm. The physical, psychological, and rhetorical border crossings that occur within the novel, particularly as related to the intersection of black and white identities, incorporate the other as part of the self and, accordingly, diminish the power of white supremacy and patriarchy while preserving racial and gender differences. As such, the novel demonstrates the shift from power structures based in hierarchy to those founded in solidarity, the latter imbued with the potential to break down oppressive systems.
Posthuman theorists understand the subject as neither “discrete and sovereign” nor binary but as liminal, linked to multiple others along manifold lines of connection (Halberstam and Livingston 14). Rosi Braidotti states that the posthuman subject, like “figurations such as the feminist/the womanist/the queer/the cyborg/the diasporic,” develops from the “processes of becoming” (164). “These processes,” Braidotti argues, “assume that subject formation takes place in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past—in the spaces that flow and connect the binaries” (164). Braidotti develops her theory of posthuman becoming from Deleuze and Guattari, who position becoming as a process that occurs within “assemblages,” or the interconnection of distinct entities, “including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 90). Furthermore, John Phillips and Jasbir K. Puar explain that Deleuze and Guattari’s term assemblage derives from the French word agencement, “a term that means design, layout, organization, arrangement, and relations—the focus being not on content but on relations, relations of patterns” (Puar 57). The ongoing, relational process of becoming explains posthuman subjectivity as always already in flux, constituted by and constituting connected entities throughout space and time.
The continual development of the posthuman subject allows for new conceptions of individual identity—which must be seen as linked and liminal—as well as social and cultural identity categories. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s and Braidotti’s discussions of becoming, Lauren J. Lacey argues that becoming shapes conceptions of race and gender. While Lacey focuses on the genre of fantastic fiction, her application of becoming to constructions of subjectivity and temporality within these texts establishes alternative modes of power for posthuman subjects: “The ethics of becoming […] engenders awareness of potential and possibilities for alternative ways of acting/reacting to dominant and/or normative power structures. But such an ethics is only possible if subjectivity is understood as nomadic, both in time and in space” (71). Nomadic subjectivity, a term coined by Braidotti, emphasizes the multiplicity of the individual and “anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity, to the multiple and external others that are constitutive of that entity which, out of laziness and habit, we call the ‘self’” (100). The nomadic or liminal nature of posthuman subjectivity requires that identity categories based on stable binaries be rethought.
While posthuman constructions of identity might seem irrelevant to real-life power systems with historical and cultural significance, such as the regime of white supremacy discussed above, posthuman subjectivities and communities can develop out of these binary-based systems, given that contemporary issues of difference and commonality originate in experiences of oppression. Judith Halberstam, Ira Livingston, and Alexander G. Weheliye likewise articulate the posthuman personality in terms of lived experiences of domination. In their introduction to Posthuman Bodies, Halberstam and Livingston position as posthuman those individuals who embrace as well as those who reject patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative systems, stating, “The posthuman marks a solidarity between disenchanted liberal subjects and those who were always-already disenchanted, those who seek to betray identities that legitimize or delegitimize them at too high a cost. No one comes naturally to this conjecture; rather it must be continually forged within and among people and discourses” (9). By extending the idea of becoming—the continual and networked development of the subject—from posthuman individual identities to posthuman communal relationships, Halberstam and Livingston associate oppression, or at least “disenchantment,” with all subjects in the posthuman society.
Weheliye further develops the concepts of community and solidarity Halberstam and Livingston introduce by investigating relationships among the disenfranchised in terms of racialization, “a conglomerate of socio-political relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Habeas 3), a system of categorization that, as Deleuze and Guattari assert, “operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face” (Deleuze and Guattari 178). Weheliye, expanding an idea of community that can be traced back to Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg, allows that solidarity can occur between oppressed racial and ethnic groups if, for example, we consider their positions in hierarchical systems “in relational terms rather than through the passages of comparison, deviance, exception, or particularity” (Habeas 13). He goes on to argue, “While we should most definitely bring into focus the relays betwixt and between the genocide of indigenous populations in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, Asian American indentured servitude, and Latino immigration among many factors, we cannot do so in the grammar of comparison, since this will merely reaffirm Man’s existent hierarchies rather than design novel assemblages of relation” (Weheliye, Habeas 13). Although he warns that subjects situated in relation risk reproducing hierarchical systems, Weheliye joins Halberstam and Livingston in suggesting the empowering potential of subjects joined in communities, a theory of solidarity articulated more fully and for the first time here (Habeas 46–47).
The theory of posthuman solidarity rests on the premise that posthuman societies—like individual posthuman subjects—develop out of and maintain a commitment to both difference and connection. Many theorists explore the posthuman subject as connected to and constituted by others, but what happens when we consider communities made up of multiple posthuman subjects, which, given the posthuman subject’s interconnectivity to surrounding elements, seems a necessary precondition of posthumanity rather than a theoretical possibility? Rather than erasing difference, the posthuman subject and society speak to a solidarity that thrives on differences being put in conversation with one another. Posthuman solidarity develops when subjects within or across societies embrace individuality and work together to overcome systems that seek to hierarchize differences.
Although a theorist committed to humanism, Weheliye raises the question of posthuman communities in his scholarship on solidarity. Weheliye considers racial, ethnic, and religious groups who suffer in solidarity, but rather than understanding solidarity as a means of traditionally fighting oppression, he argues that bringing these groups together may “offer pathways to distinctive understandings of suffering that serve as the speculative blueprint for new forms of humanity, which are defined above all by over-determined conjurings of freedom” (Habeas 14). Weheliye moves away from contemporary understandings of freedom, including “recognition based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal state,” but he acknowledges that new types of freedom have “not (yet) [been] described,” even in his book (Habeas 14–15).
Posthuman solidarity may signal pathways for both traditional and new freedoms for the oppressed. Weheliye’s proposal that various racial, ethnic, and religious groups be considered together in terms of their shared experiences of suffering extends backward to the antebellum period in America. In bringing together those oppressed by white supremacist and patriarchal forces, Williams’s Dessa Rose expresses posthuman solidarity. Although, as Tim A. Ryan, Ann Trapasso, Donna Haisty Winchell, and Joycelyn K. Moody argue, the relationships between black and white subjects in the neo–slave narrative contain “romanticized elements” (Ryan 160), evidence of posthuman solidarity in Williams’s fictionalized history points to contemporary strategies for dismantling oppressive hierarchies.
The novel Dessa Rose allows for the possibility that relationships rooted in difference—relationships among people of different races and genders, for example—can be understood according to solidarity rather than hierarchy. Considering the relationships in the novel, particularly the connection shared by Dessa Rose, a black woman, and Ruth “Rufel” Sutton, a white woman, in terms of posthuman theory reveals how Williams’s characters’ solidarity weakens the systems of white supremacy and patriarchy. This new theory of posthuman solidarity indicates that even within hierarchical systems, relational theories of the subject and community indicate a path by which hierarchies can be destroyed.
Posthuman solidarity presents itself in Williams’s novel through the depiction of liminal black and white identities. The primary women characters in Dessa Rose, Dessa and Rufel, intersect in a way that emphasizes their bonds and, importantly, those forces they unite against. Readers first see evidence of the links between Dessa and Rufel and the liminality of black and white identities when Dessa arrives on the North Carolina farm, disoriented from her journey out of imprisonment and slavery and the recent birth of her son. She wakes briefly to see Rufel breastfeeding her daughter, Clara, whom Dessa identifies as “a year old, maybe, or more, with plump white arms and legs, wisps of light-colored hair on its smooth white head” (Dessa 88). As Dessa fades in and out of sleep, the scene in front of her changes. She “open[s] her eyes” to discover the “white woman, the shoulder still bare, the curly black head and brown face of a new baby nestled at her breast” (Dessa 88). The new baby, Dessa’s son, Mony, takes sustenance from Rufel before suckling at his mother’s breast, which links not only the white and black children—who, from Dessa’s disoriented point of view, swap places seamlessly—but also the white and black women who feed them. While Dessa abhors the thought of Rufel feeding her son, she reluctantly admits the necessity of Rufel’s breast milk when her own supply decreases. With Rufel acting as wet nurse to Mony and, later, Dessa serving as caretaker to Clara, the women overlap in their mothering by working together to meet their babies’ physical and emotional needs.
In Dessa Rose, mothers transcend racial hierarchies and personal differences to care for their children, a community-focused action that ties into posthuman becoming and solidarity. The process of becoming indicative to posthuman subjectivity indicates that posthuman communities emerge from the intersection of subjects from different racial, ethnic, religious, or other backgrounds, and solidarity occurs when the subjects work toward similar goals. Halberstam and Livingston explain that while the human subject “functions to domesticate and hierarchize difference within the human (whether according to race, class, gender) and to absolutize difference between the human and the nonhuman”—“the human” functioning as a category from which, Weheliye clarifies, the black subject has been banned (Habeas 3, 8)—the posthuman subject thrives on the bringing together of differences (Halberstam and Livingston 10). The liminal posthuman subject does not erase differences, Halberstam and Livingston state, but lives between and among them, a relational configuration that allows for the possibility of not only posthuman subjects but also posthuman societies.
The relational quality of posthuman subjectivity necessitates the location of the individual into posthuman societies, yet the empowering potential of posthuman communities depends on the organization of the subjects within. Deleuze and Guattari argue that multiplicity—what we can understand as a building block of the posthuman subject and society—has no origin point from which it develops nor unity toward which it strives; rather, organizing forces are external, since “[m]ultiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities” (9). Because contemporary and historical posthuman communities exist not in a vacuum but, rather, in hierarchically organized societies, the empowering potential of posthuman communities must be considered in terms of those societies that shape them and which, as connected entities, they shape as well. In his understanding of assemblages, Weheliye likewise focuses on the influence of hierarchies, noting that the networked multiplicities “ought not be cognized as unavoidably positive or liberating, particularly when set against putatively rigid structures such as race and colonialism, since assemblages transport potential territorializations as often if not more frequently than lines of flight” (Habeas 47). Although “[a]ssemblages are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on,” posthuman conjunctions can reproduce oppressive hierarchical regimes, especially when made within said power structures (Weheliye, Habeas 46–47).
Accordingly, a solidarity-focused view of the posthuman community requires the rejection of the hierarchical systems that categorize and rank individuals. Contemporary conceptions of difference situate gender identities, for example, “in a binary machine that privileges heterosexual family formations” and erase other, more complex understandings of the gendered or sexed subject (Braidotti 99). In an effort to disentangle the subject from hierarchical systems, Braidotti champions the preservation of differences and the intersectionality of oppositional elements. Braidotti argues that posthuman theorists must “reassert the concept of difference as both central and non-essentialistic,” given that the subject forms out of the “irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of” (100). If the posthuman subject exists in a liminal space and time between and among differences, the concept of difference can be viewed through the lens of commonality rather than hierarchy. Considering difference within not only the posthuman subject but also the posthuman community in terms of commonality and solidarity allows those subjects oppressed by hierarchy—arguably, all subjects, even those in positions of power—to reconfigure their relationships with one another.
In Williams’s novel, posthuman solidarity emerges out of the conjunction of the unique histories and experiences that Dessa and Rufel bring to their relationship. By sharing the role of mother yet maintaining their personal and cultural identities, Dessa and Rufel form a posthuman community. Moody argues that Williams’s Dessa Rose, like Morrison’s Beloved, depicts “self-esteem” growing “out of the affirmation of the self by others” (646). A posthumanist view of the novel further reveals that a community achieves empowerment through, in part, the maintenance of difference. Williams’s frequent references to whiteness and blackness preserve the women’s differences and allow readers to consider the characters in terms of liminality and solidarity rather than merely similarity. In the same scenes where she interchanges Dessa and Rufel in the role of mother, Williams positions their bodies as dissimilar. For Dessa, Rufel’s pale skin contrasts with her dark surroundings: “a white woman white stared at her from the shadows of some room” (Dessa 82). Conversely, Rufel notes Dessa’s darkness, viewing her as “a sooty blur against the whiteness of the pillow” (Dessa 97) and “a vivid chocolate and jet against the whiteness of the sheets” (Dessa 139). Both Dessa and Rufel perform the mother function, yet each woman sees the other as different from herself and distinct from her environment.
As Dessa Rose demonstrates, connections define the posthuman subject, but if sociopolitical forces organize those connected entities hierarchically, a posthuman community will reproduce oppressive power structures. In Williams’s novel, the juxtaposition of character and environment, although expressed by each woman, carries different weight in white and black communities. Rufel positions Mony’s “utter brownness” as “a striking contrast with the pallor of [her children’s] skins” (Dessa 128), an observation about the unique color values of the children’s skin tones that reflects the unequal social values ascribed to the children’s membership in white supremacist society. Dessa likewise comments on the dissimilarities of black and white bodies, but she directly acknowledges the political implications of racial difference. Thinking about Nathan’s black body in Rufel’s bed, Dessa states, “Nathan sprawled in whiteness, white sheets, white pillows, white bosom. All he did was make them look whiter. He wasn’t nothing but a mark on them. That’s what we was in white folks’ eyes, nothing but marks to be used, wiped out. […] I couldn’t trust all we had to something could swallow us like so many drops” (Dessa 171–72). Dessa comments on the physical characteristics of black and white skin and also the sociopolitical implications of the different skin tones. The idea of Rufel’s white bed and body “swallowing” Nathan’s blackness reflects Dessa’s knowledge that the ruling white power controls and consumes black bodies.
However, even in the discussion of skin color, the novel demonstrates the dual possibility of the breakdown of hierarchies and the preservation of difference. Dessa asserts, “She [Rufel] did know the difference between black and white; I give her that. She wasn’t that foolish. But where white peoples look at black and see something ugly, something hateful, she saw color” (Dessa 170). Rufel’s recognition of color divorced from a ranking of value indicates a potential solidarity between blacks and whites in the novel. Although Dessa dismisses Rufel’s role as an ally in her next breath, her differentiation of Rufel from other white people serves as evidence that Rufel rejects some white supremacist principles. Dessa’s comments show that Rufel maintains an awareness of difference yet breaks down the hierarchical organization of whites and blacks.
The historical posthuman community depicted on Rufel’s plantation, called Sutton’s Glen or simply the Glen—a community characterized by the conjunction of disparate entities—shows that Williams’s Dessa Rose condemns sociopolitical systems that organize multiplicities into hierarchies. Specifically, the novel critiques systems of racialization that mark black Americans as “nonhuman” as well as those hierarchies that position white and black women as “not-quite-human” and “nonhuman,” respectively (Weheliye, Habeas 3). Although the black Dessa and the white Rufel rarely get along, they fight together against the white supremacist and patriarchal forces that constrain their lives. Once Dessa and Rufel begin to understand their experiences of oppression reflexively, they break down hierarchies in their relationship and society.
Thinking about the links between distinct forms of oppression allows differences to be considered in terms of solidarity rather than hierarchy. Although Weheliye focuses specifically on racial, ethnic, and religious groups and excludes gender groupings, he asserts that disenfranchised subjects and the individual “acts of aggression” they commit against ruling powers can be understood to operate according to a theory of solidarity: “Part of this project is to think the question of politically motivated acts of aggression in relational terms rather than through the passages of comparison, deviance, exception, or particularity, since they fail to adequately describe how specific instances of the relations that compose political violence realize articulations of an ontological totality: the constitutive potentiality of a totality structured in dominance composed of the particular processes of bringing-into-relation” (Habeas 13). Weheliye considers victims of sociopolitical violence in a new system of association based on solidarity, since traditional hierarchical systems serve to substantiate dominant powers that “as a general rule, only grant a certain number of exceptions access to the spheres of full humanity, sentience, citizenship, and so on” typically afforded to the ruling class (Habeas 13–14). Like Braidotti’s posthuman nomadic figurations, Weheliye’s “processes of bringing-into-relation” allow for an understanding of communities as composed of distinct but interconnected subjects, an idea of multiplicity linked to posthuman subjectivity and solidarity.
The solidarity that exists within Williams’s Dessa Rose reveals that the posthuman subject’s and community’s rejection of damaging hierarchies has historical foundations as well as future applications. The novel as a whole, with its antebellum setting, reflects the historical underpinnings of posthuman solidarity. Additionally, the discussion of personal pasts—particularly the characters’ childhoods—within the novel indicates that solidarity develops out of individual as well as national histories. Rufel and Dessa associate their role in childcare and their own positions as daughters with their relationship to “mammy,” a figure who links the two women and signals their positioning along a posthuman liminal continuum. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes that the signifier mammy is one “both women feel entitled to use to describe their relationships to an earlier presence and a preceding generation” (Neo-Slave 154). When breastfeeding Mony, Rufel “imagine[s] herself saying to Mammy,” the black mother figure who raised her from the age of thirteen, “‘Well, I couldn’t have them bringing a bleeding colored gal in where Timmy and Clara [Rufel’s children] were having breakfast,’ wheedling a little, making light” (Dessa 95). Rufel’s impulse to justify her choice to mother a black child to the black woman who mothered her indicates that despite her ingrained racism, Rufel is capable of relating to others through bonds of affinity rather than hierarchy.
Dessa similarly evinces black and white solidarity through her recollections of her birthmother or “mammy” (spelled using a lower-case m), named Rose, during times when she is mothering or being mothered by others—including the white Rufel. Dessa first introduces readers to her mammy when convalescing in Rufel’s bed. While Dessa initially believes she dreams of a white woman with hair “the color of fire” while lying in the slave quarters with mammy, she comes to recognize “the Quarters had been a dream” and Rufel, rather than mammy, is her reality (Dessa 86). As Rufel takes the place of mammy in Dessa’s waking life—helping to care for Mony and swindle money that buys Dessa and her son passage to the West—the women forge a connection based on interdependence, or a posthuman solidarity in difference.
Dessa and Rufel do not merely share remembrances of their mammies: both women confuse the two mothers, eliding them into a single mother figure and, accordingly, positioning themselves as adoptive or figurative sisters. Although Rushdy asserts that “Williams takes pains to stress that neither Dessa nor Rufel is confused; each realizes that the other is talking about a different person” (“Reading” 375), Williams links the two mammies together in order to emphasize the developing bond between Dessa and Rufel. As a sleepy Dessa listens to Rufel drone on about her mammy while feeding Mony, Dessa wonders how she never knew about Rufel: “No white woman like this had ever figured in mammy’s conversations, Dessa thought drowsily. And this would have been something to talk about: dinner and gowns—not just plain dresses” (Dessa 117). Rufel continues talking about Mammy dressing her until Dessa interrupts, asserting, “Wasn’t’ no ‘mammy’ to it. […] Mammy ain’t made you nothing!” (Dessa 118). The two women fight about Mammy/mammy until they realize that each had a relationship with a different mother. However, the confusion and comingling of Mammy/mammy—and, accordingly, Dessa and Rufel—persists throughout the novel. After she confesses to herself that “[o]f course” she and Dessa “were talking about two different people,” Rufel wonders if Dessa could be the daughter of her mammy, named Dorcas, and she asks Harker about the women’s connection (Dessa 121, 129–33). Rufel receives confirmation that Dorcas and Dessa are unrelated, yet she inquires several more times about their relationship (Dessa 137). Even once the women admit to each other the existence of two distinct mammies, Rufel and Dessa continue to overlap through their shared link to their individual mothers. Rufel tells Dessa, “Your mammy birthed you, and mines, mines just helped to raise me. But she loved me, […] she loved me, just like yours loved you” (Dessa 154). While Dorcas’s status as slave calls into question the validity of Rufel’s assertion, Rufel’s belief that Dorcas loved her “just like” Dessa’s mother loved her own daughter shows that despite the racial hierarchy that separates Rufel and Dessa, a daughterly solidarity bonds the women.3 Dessa and Rufel come together in relational rather than hierarchical terms by sharing their love for their mothers.
In addition to sharing a personal relationship, Rufel and Dessa, along with the escaped men and women at Sutton’s Glen, develop solidarity through their response to the patriarchal and white supremacist social structures that constrain their lives. Rufel, Dessa, and the others work together to defraud slave buyers and earn money for their passage out of North Carolina. Rufel hopes the move will free her from her husband’s rule—a threat that looms even in his absence—as well as the socioeconomic-related prejudice of her neighbors, while Dessa and her friends anticipate that traveling west will secure their freedom. When Dessa expresses anxiety about Rufel’s involvement in the plan, Harker assures Dessa “this deal benefit her [Rufel] same as it do us” and that “she do got some stake in doing right by us” (Dessa 182). Rufel’s “stake” may relate to her sexual relationship with Nathan—Harker tells Dessa, “Maybe she wouldn’t do it just for the money” (Dessa 188)—but readers come to understand that her stake also emerges out of her empathetic association with Dessa, Harker, Nathan, and the other runaway slaves.
The novel supports the notion that shared experiences not only bond the black and white inhabitants of Sutton’s Glen but also break down conventional racial hierarchies on the farm. The Glen’s remote location—geographically, as the house sits away from neighboring properties, and socially, as Rufel’s poverty makes her an unwelcome associate to nearby whites—reflects Rufel’s subordinate position in the North Carolina social hierarchy. Moreover, on Rufel’s farm, black men and women possess knowledge, skills, and numbers that invalidate Rufel’s authority. In the absence of Rufel’s husband, the black workers at the Glen, namely Mammy and Harker, become leaders in the home and on the farm. Williams writes, “Rufel had been uneasy as the suggestions [for what to plant and when] diverged more and more from Bertie’s practices, but Mammy, citing as justification the experience of the new darky, Harker, who had wandered into the Glen sometime during the winter, had easily quieted Rufel’s hesitant questioning. She was baffled by the larger questions of crop management that were implicit in these changes and found it easier in this, as in so much else, to rely on Mammy’s judgment” (Dessa 112). The escaped slaves at the Glen serve not as advisors to Rufel, ceding to her rule, but instead as authorities, making decisions about what happens and when. The black men and women share their talents with the white Rufel, who shares her land with them. As Nathan tells Dessa, the people at Sutton’s Glen develop a relationship built on mutual benefit and trust: “We been trusting her all along, just like she been trusting us” (Dessa 189). Those living on the plantation deconstruct traditional hierarchies, and the Glen functions as a liminal space, a place where those suffering racial, gender, or class oppression come together and create a new system of relation.
While top-down power structures crumble at the Glen, moments of contact between disparate subjects in the novel do not necessarily destroy hierarchies; instead, new hierarchical systems may develop. Weheliye’s theory of assemblages corroborates this possibility: “While thinking through the political and institutional dimensions of how certain forms of violence and suffering are monumentalized and others are relegated to the margins of history remains significant, their direct comparison tends to lead to hierarchization and foreclose further discussion” (Habeas 13). In other words, rather than the destruction of hierarchies, assemblages of disparate parts may reproduce old or produce new hierarchies. In his analysis of Dessa Rose, Rushdy argues that the Glen reproduces old systems of relation, stating that although Rufel does not own the escaped slaves at the Glen, “she maintains remarkable control over their narratives” (Neo-Slave 153). However, once Rufel makes links between her relationship with Dorcas and Dessa’s relationship with Rose—that is, as she develops as a posthuman subject who develops through manifold lines of connection—her “desire for controlling the black Others in her life becomes somewhat less urgent” (Rushdy, Neo-Slave 158). Rufel’s realization reveals that new systems of relation can form within hierarchical power structures, though ladders of power threaten to resurface.
In addition to shaping the larger social structure at the Glen, Dessa and Rufel’s weakening of the hierarchies that threaten their personal relationship allows them to fight together against oppressive social and political forces. Moody argues that Dessa’s “reclaiming of herself in her fugitive slave status depends on a supportive community,” including the men she escaped the coffle with and the black and white women at Sutton’s Glen, “most especially Ruth” (644). Although the two women engage in rhetorical battles throughout the novel, they rely on each other to survive when traveling through the South to con slave traders. Michele Wallace asserts that through her depiction of Dessa and Rufel’s “friendship,” Williams gives her readers a view “into the world that black and white women shared in the antebellum South,” a world where exists—at least in the fiction writer’s imagination—the potential of “collective struggle that ultimately transcends the stumbling-blocks of race and class” (145). During their tour of the South, the two women gain consciousness of their “collective struggle” during their encounter with the sexually aggressive Mr. Oscar. Dessa helps Rufel escape from Mr. Oscar during an intended nighttime sexual assault, and the two women bond over their shared vulnerability: “The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me,” Dessa thinks. “I hadn’t knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us” (Dessa 201). She continues, “I never will forget the fear that come on me when Miz Lady called me on Mr. Oscar, that knowing that she was as helpless in this as I was, that our only protection was ourselfs and each others” (Dessa 202). Dessa’s preservation of “us” and “them” language to distinguish her struggles from Rufel’s maintains the integrity of distinct black and white experiences of gender oppression, yet her statements of comparison—“the same ravishment as me,” “same as they could with us,” “she was as helpless in this as I was”—unite the two women in solidarity. Moreover, Dessa’s assertion that she and Rufel must work together, that their only recourse against sexual violence comes from “ourselfs and each other,” reveals that the two women, to use Weheliye’s words, “design novel assemblages of relation” by which they express the destructive power of “Man’s existent hierarchies,” including patriarchy (Habeas 13). Despite the different goals and hardships of Dessa and Rufel, their shared experiences of subjugation allow them to join together against tyrannical sociopolitical forces.
Williams further demonstrates solidarity between black and white characters in the novel by rhetorically linking statements of care between Dessa and Rufel with statements of care among those of a single race. After working with Rufel to defeat Mr. Oscar, Dessa realizes that her negative opinion of Rufel shifts: “You can’t do something like this with someone and not develop some closeness, some trust” (Dessa 206). Dessa’s thoughts of “some closeness, some trust” echo the sentiments Nathan articulates when explaining to Rufel the bond shared by the runaway slaves: “us three—we did it [escaped] and we made it. It’s gots to be some special feeling after that” (Dessa 149). Dessa expresses a similar connection with those who escaped the coffle, asserting, “Nathan and Cully, and Harker, too, had risked something for me and I felt bound to them—and them to me—as tight as blood-kin” (Dessa 174–75). Although she initially states that Rufel “wasn’t no part of that knot; the only way she could get in was to loosen it” (Dessa 175), the experience the women share the night of Mr. Oscar’s aggressions allows Dessa to see them as “partnered” and perhaps even “friends” (Dessa 219). Dessa and Rufel, like Dessa and the formerly enslaved men, shift from a relation based in hierarchy—whether race or gender oriented—to a bond situated in solidarity.
Williams’s novel shows that although the weakening of the racial hierarchy in Dessa and Rufel’s relationship affects how the women see each other and how they view race relations outside of their community at Sutton’s Glen, larger race and gender hierarchies remain intact. As Weheliye states in his assessment of Stuart Hall’s conception of articulation, which “emphasizes relational connectivity,” assemblages must be considered in terms of historical power structures, including hierarchical social relations, which may “territorialize” assemblages and reproduce dominant social structures: “Articulated assemblages such as racialization materialize as sets of complex relations of articulations that constitute an open articulating principle—territorializing and deterritorializing, interested and asubjective—structured in political, economic, social, racial, and heteropatriarchal dominance” (Habeas 48–49). In Williams’s novel the assemblage of black and white subjects within a white supremacist and patriarchal society simultaneously maintains and deconstructs existent hierarchies. In Dessa’s recollection of their relationship, Rufel projects her empathetic bond with the escaped slaves outward, expressing that “if white folks knew slaves as she knew [Dessa and the others], wouldn’t be no slavery. She thought that was what’d ruined her husband—seeing how much money you could make if you owned other peoples. This is why she felt slavery was wrong, because peoples was no more to you than a pair of hands, stock, sometimes not even a name” (Dessa 211). Rufel’s understanding of the Glen’s inhabitants as people rather than property, combined with her earnest belief that other whites would likewise share her view “[i]f they just knew” (Dessa 212), shows that she imagines race-based differences in terms of solidarity rather than hierarchy. However, Rufel’s position of racial privilege prevents her from recognizing, as Dessa and her friends do, that action must accompany belief in order for hierarchies to be destroyed. Dessa states, “I couldn’t understand how she could watch white folks buying up our peoples right and left and say this. As far as white folks not knowing how bad slavery was—they was the ones made it, was the ones kept it. Master could’ve freed me anytime and I wouldn’t’ve never said him nay” (Dessa 212). Dessa notes that while Rufel’s interactions with her changed the white woman’s view of slavery, most whites do not form empathetic bonds with their slaves, or if they do, they fail to act empathetically, and white supremacy continues to reign.
Indeed, the moments of solidarity between Dessa and Rufel do not erase the larger social hierarchy that exists due to their racial difference. Following the encounter with Mr. Oscar, both Rufel and Dessa arm themselves with hatpins for use against lascivious men. However, Rufel possesses a bigger and more readily available weapon than what she gives to Dessa (Dessa 202–03). The fact, first, that Dessa keeps a hatpin on her person only because Rufel buys Dessa the weapon and, second, that Rufel holds a larger hatpin, one visible to the public and more easily within reach, reveals Rufel’s position of power over Dessa and, perhaps, Rufel’s belief that the threat of sexual violence against her takes precedence over the sexual violence faced by Dessa. Biman Basu argues that the “possibility of Rufel’s regression into the law of the father”—the patriarchal power structure of slavery and white supremacy—“constantly threatens to disrupt” the solidarity-based system of relation developed among the travelers (105). The mutually beneficial, empathetic association between Dessa and Rufel cannot, as Basu asserts, “be entirely abstracted and severed from the political economy and from the larger social-political-economic complex,” and Rufel’s performance threatens to reproduce the power structure she purports to reject (106). In order for solidarity to replace hierarchy, Basu argues, “power relations […] will have to be rigorously negotiated. And the practice of living will have to be formulated in terms of competent practice” (111). For differences to be organized nonhierarchically in posthuman communities, empathetic intent must be matched with empathetic action.
The shifting nature of the solidarity between Dessa and Rufel—at times their relationship breaks down local hierarchies, while at other points the novel’s assemblages of black and white subjects reinforce white supremacy and patriarchy—reflects the fluidity of posthuman bonds: the continual development of the subject along networks of relation means that identity and community always already exist in a state of transition. While the novel does not demonstrate the destruction of hegemonic structures—and, of course, it could not, given that it takes place during the historical period of slavery, a time followed by centuries of ongoing oppression against people of color as well as (and including) women—Weheliye argues that thinking about assemblages in terms of total freedom limits their potential: “Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/ or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?” (Habeas 2). Moving beyond white humanist conceptions of resistance and agency, Weheliye poses the question of “what different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” (Habeas 8). If we read Williams’s novel not according to resistance and agency, then, but in terms of Weheliye’s suggested new modes of the human—alternatively conceived as the posthuman—then the potential of fluid networks of relations becomes clearer.
When read according to posthumanism, Williams’s novel depicts bonds based in solidarity as well as hierarchy, a proposition that positions power systems, like the individuals who construct them, as temporal and fluid constructions. The ease with which Rufel, Dessa, and the others at Sutton’s Glen assume positions in the existing power hierarchy in order to swindle money from white slave traders shows that the components of the system are constructed and changeable. Rufel, in the guise of a slave owner, sells Harker, Ned, Castor, and Flora, who masquerade as her slaves. Nathan drives the wagon, and Dessa, in the role of nursemaid, minds Rufel’s daughter (Dessa 193–94). The light-skinned, mixed-race Cully stays behind at the farm in the character of Rufel’s white brother from Charleston (Dessa 59, 194–95). Each of these performances—owner, slave, driver, nursemaid, and brother—reflects an accepted social position of the individual who plays it: Rufel was a slave owner; Harker, Ned, Castor, Flora, and Nathan were slaves; Dessa, like her mammy and Rufel’s mammy, provides care and comfort for children; and Cully serves as surrogate brother to the orphans on Rufel’s farm. Whether the characters formerly or currently identify with the roles they occupy, their ability to shift in and out of their parts in the scheme reveals the performative and, therefore, fluid aspects of race and gender, as well as their related hierarchies. As Judith Butler argues, the “shifting and contextual phenomenon” of gender exists as “a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations” (14). Gender, like race and other assemblages, must be understood as provisional in that it operates according to the temporally specific context into which individuals produce and reproduce it.
Williams’s novel demonstrates that even the role of slave, where a failed (or successful) performance can result in death, never becomes natural for those who occupy it. Moreover, Dessa and her cohort understand that race itself is a construction. While playing lady’s maid to Rufel, Dessa fails to respond when Mr. Oscar calls her out of her name and commands her with the identifier “Nigger.” Looking back on this event, Dessa reminds herself, “I was slave; I was ‘nigger’; I couldn’t forget that for the rest of the journey” (Dessa 198). Dessa pairs the rejected name Nigger with the metonym slave, suggesting that neither term describes her accurately. Despite spending most of her life in servitude and capitulating to Rufel’s racial authority several times while at the farm, Dessa views the role of slave, the position at the bottom of the antebellum social hierarchy, as a performance. As Morrison reminds us, racism exists as a “construct” (Interview), and despite the fact that black and, to a lesser extent, white lives depend upon successful performances of racial identities, Williams’s novel never fails to remind readers of the temporality of race- and gender-based hierarchies.
Understanding hierarchies as located in specific places and times does not make the lived experiences of those subjects positioned hierarchically any less oppressive. However, the fluid nature of power relations allows for the imagining of differences organized according to solidarity rather than hierarchy. William’s Dessa Rose ends in a place of liminality, where subjects from different backgrounds and racial groups overlap and intersect yet remain distinct entities. Dessa and Rufel, “by the sheer competence of their performance” of slave and mistress roles (Basu 110), enable Dessa to escape from Adam Nehemiah, a white writer working on a book about slave uprisings who desires to see Dessa punished for fleeing prison and evading her death sentence. While Nehemiah equates Dessa and Rufel because of their shared gender—“You-all in this together,” he tells them, “womanhood. […] All alike. Sluts” (Dessa 232)—the novel allows the women to act in solidarity while maintaining their subjective integrity. In the novel’s final spoken conversation, the words of Rufel and Dessa intersect, yet two distinct lines of commentary run through the paragraph: “‘Ruth,’ ‘Dessa,’ we said together; and ‘Who was that white man—?’ ‘That was the white man—’ and stopped. We couldn’t hug each other, not on the streets, not in Arcopolis, not even after dark; we both had sense enough to know that. The town could even bar us from laughing; but that night we walked the boardwalk together and we didn’t hide our grins” (Dessa 233). Dessa’s statements overlap with Rufel’s, but readers have no difficulty knowing who voices each line. The words mark Dessa and Rufel’s defeat of the man who symbolizes white supremacy and patriarchy in the novel, and the utterances speak to the power of solidarity over hierarchy. As previously stated, the women do not erase racial or gender hierarchies—the novel ends with Dessa telling her descendants of her physical separation from Rufel—yet the book depicts the progress made, both in Dessa and Ruth’s personal relationship and the larger social structure of black and white relations.
In Dessa Rose, subjective liminality and temporal liminality meet as Williams creates a contemporary novel based on two antebellum histories: one of a pregnant, enslaved woman who helped lead a coffle uprising in Kentucky in 1829, and the other of a white woman who housed runaway slaves in North Carolina in 1830. “How sad,” Williams thought, upon discovering the two incidents, “that these two women never met” (Author’s Note 5).4 As Williams weaves the histories together, she also connects the subjectivities of the women, allowing the fictionalized Kentucky woman to shape the fictionalized North Carolina woman, and vice versa. Williams’s Dessa and Rufel come together in the spaces between their distinct racial, cultural, and historical selves, and the novel demonstrates posthuman solidarity by linking those oppressed by white supremacist and patriarchal forces. While hierarchies do not disappear from Williams’s novel, the bonds between disparate subjects reflect that connectivity, whether organized in hierarchy or solidarity, characterizes posthuman communities. The bonds forged across lines of race and gender in Dessa Rose speak to the origins of posthuman solidarity and the possibility that social relations can change. Other neo–slave narratives—including those found in songs and on the screen—similarly reveal that new expressions of subjectivity and community develop when the boundaries of self and other and past, present, and future blur.