1. See Ann Helms, “Judge Accuses CMS of ‘Academic Genocide,’” Charlotte Observer, May 24, 2005; Ann Helms, “Threat to Close Schools Lifted,” Charlotte Observer, August 19, 2006.
2. See Institute of Education Sciences, “Race/Ethnicity of College Faculty,” n.d., http://nces.ed.gov.
3. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv.
4. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 6.
5. Sara Ahmed argues that the diversity rhetoric that is so prevalent in some American and European universities is itself deeply implicated in the foreclosure of new modes of thought in which black subjectivity might be recognized as something other than marginal or supplementary. See Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
6. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, intro. David Levering Lewis (1935; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1998); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Santo Domingo Revolution (1938; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985; reprint, New York: Norton, 1999).
8. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–2.
9. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29.
10. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Radical Tradition (1983; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
11. María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
12. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 107–69. See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1994); and Jacob Pandian, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Toward an Authentic Anthropology (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1982).
13. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
14. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), 217.
15. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 12.
16. For a very interesting discussion of the transformation of Colombo/Colón into the U.S. national hero Columbus, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
17. For more on Cabrera, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
18. See Peter Pierson, The History of Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 18–19.
19. See Debra Blumenthal, “‘La Casa dels Negres’: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 225–46.
20. Jeremy Lawrance, “Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature,” in Earle and Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 7–93.
21. See Foucault, The Order of Things; and Robinson, Black Marxism.
1. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
2. For a very useful treatment of the racialist and white supremacist impulses compelling the Spanish-American War, see Nell Irvin Painter, “The White Man’s Burden,” in Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: Norton, 1987), 141–59.
3. Between 1898 and 1919 the U.S. military invaded not only Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, but also Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
4. See Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987).
5. The Plessy decision was part of a group of racialist decisions by the court designed to ratify the country’s developing status as an imperial power while guarding against the threat of racial mixture. I specifically have in mind the series of Supreme Court decisions regarding the political status of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as “foreign in a domestic sense.” There are a fair number of works that treat this matter in depth. Among the best is Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). See also Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
6. See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
7. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Tellingly, the work was published in the United Kingdom in 2000 as Between Camps.
8. “Negro Leaders Call Conference on Spain and Fascist Menace,” Daily Worker, December 30, 1938.
9. The Fifteenth International Brigade would ultimately number approximately forty thousand troops from fifty-two countries. See Peter N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 12.
10. James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Greensboro, NC: Open Hand, 1989), 115.
11. As with most chroniclers of the participation of American militants in the war on behalf of the Republican government in Spain, Peter N. Carroll refers to the collective body of persons who served as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. This name is technically incorrect as, in fact, the soldiers, ambulance drivers, doctors, nurses, and others mainly served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, which was part of the Fifteenth International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army. This brigade was made up of troops from countries around the world, particularly Europe. One of the reasons for continuing with the inaccurate title Abraham Lincoln Brigade is to bring together those individuals who served in the actual American battalion along with those individuals who served either with Spanish troops or with other, non-American forces. At the same time, the use of the term “brigade” obscures the fact that no more than three thousand Americans served in the Republican army.
12. “International Letter from Paul Robeson, Jr.,” Daily Worker, April 26, 1938.
13. “Spain, 1938: Guillen and Robeson Meet,” World Magazine, July 24, 1976.
14. Quoted in Jonathan Scott, Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 36.
15. Roughly, “the silly reign of the house of Borbón”: Borbón + nada (nothing).
16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Where I differ with Agamben, however, is not so much in his deployment of the idea that much within the practice of modern biopolitics is specifically designed to distinguish “bare life” from “qualified life”—or what I label here “human” from “Man”—but instead that he demonstrates so little interest in the multifarious methods utilized by humans identified as objects, automatons, and chattel to refuse this same sovereignty. Like most of his predecessors, Agamben speaks of the slave but not to him. He attempts a critique of the most vulgar aspects of so-called Western humanism without once noting that there are very many alternatives to even the most sacred of these presumably universal intellectual traditions.
17. Here I am referring primarily to the complex history of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, a location in the extreme north of Morocco that as late as 1955 held as many as one million persons, or perhaps a tenth of Morocco’s population. Today the remnants of the protectorate comprise primarily the poor “garrison cities” of Ceuta and Melilla. See Tony Hodges, Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1983); and John Mercer, Spanish Sahara (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976).
18. Salaria Kea Application to the Army Nurse Corp, Frances Patai Papers, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive (ALBA), Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (hereafter cited as Frances Patai Papers).
19. Negro Committee to Aid Spain and the Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, Salaria Kee: A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain (1938; reprint, San Francisco: Bay Area Post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1977). In reference to Kea’s last name, I will spell it Kea, which she preferred at the end of her life, rather than Kee, which appears in most of the documents that discuss her. For ready access to this pamphlet, see the website Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, http://irelandscw.com.
20. Howard Rushmore, “Fascists Won’t Win, Declares Negro Nurse,” Daily Worker, May 18, 1938.
21. Salaria Kea O’Reilly, “While Passing Through,” Frances Patai Papers.
22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1994), 297.
23. Bob August, “Salaria Kea and John O’Reilly: Volunteers Who Met and Wed in Spain, 1938,” Cleveland Magazine, 1975, available at Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, http://irelandscw.com.
24. Martin Balter to Frances Patai, December 7, 1990, Frances Patai Papers.
25. Frances Patai to Martin Balter, December 7, 1990, Frances Patai Papers.
26. For more on the history of African American women in the nursing profession, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
27. Most of these individuals were part of the Fuerzas Regulares Indígenas (Indigenous Regular Forces) recruited from the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco. For more, see Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain (New York: Penguin, 1982).
1. I am of course punning on Fanon’s notion of “the fact of blackness.” See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967).
2. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
4. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 164–65.
5. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
6. Quoted in Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 100.
7. Even Ángel del Río, Lorca’s friend and one of his most sensitive critics, believed that Lorca had been born in 1899. His biographical essay “Federico García Lorca, 1899–1936” was singularly important in securing Lorca’s status as one of the most significant poets and playwrights of the twentieth century. See Ángel del Río, “Federico García Lorca, 1899–1936,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 6, nos. 3–4 (July–October 1940): 193–260.
8. See Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1998); and Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
9. Federico García Lorca, “El niño Stanton” (“Little Stanton”), in Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Christopher Maurer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 688, 689.
10. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
11. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Spanish military, which had been so soundly defeated by the Americans. In response, King Alfonso XIII attempted to save face by redeploying troops to the Spanish protectorate in Morocco, where they engaged in an endless series of bloody “cleanup” operations against rebellious Berbers. Among the soldiers who were deployed to Morocco was a young officer known for both his cruelty and ultra-conservative politics who would later figure with great prominence in the lives of both García Lorca and the country as a whole, Francisco Franco. See Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life, 54, 387–88.
12. Federico García Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” in In Search of Duende, ed. Christopher Maurer (New York: New Directions, 1998), 64.
13. Bob Kaufman, “Like Father, Like Sun,” in The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956–1978 (New York: New Directions, 1981), 35.
14. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1947; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991).
15. Antonio Machado, “Españolito,” in Poesías Completas, with prologue by Manuel Alvar (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975), 229. Translation mine.
16. See Paul Julian Smith, “New York, New York: Lorca’s Double Vision,” Tesserae: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 6, no. 2 (December 2000): 169–80.
17. Jonathan Mayhew, Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 29–30.
18. See Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
19. A typical example of this tendency to create Lorca as a sort of primitive fetish can be found in Cyrus Cassells’s poem “Lament for Lorca”: “Federico, at seventeen, I became possessed / By your voice in Andalucía, in Nueva York. / I loved you then / As the chronicler of the gypsies, / As the visionary traveler / Who mourned for Harlem.” See Cyrus Cassels, “Lament for Lorca,” Callaloo 32 (Summer 1987): 380–84.
20. Federico García Lorca, “Scene of the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard” (“Escena del teniente coronel de la Guardia Civil”), in Collected Poems, 155, 157.
21. The reference here is to Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316.
22. Federico García Lorca, “Ballad of the Three Rivers” (“Baladilla de los tres ríos”), in Collected Poems, 97, 99.
23. Ángel Sahuquillo, Federico García Lorca and the Culture of Male Homosexuality, trans. Erica Frouman-Smith (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007).
24. Federico García Lorca, “Dialogue of Amargo” (“Diálogo del Amargo”), in Collected Poems, 161, 163, 165.
25. Federico García Lorca, “Song of Amargo’s Mother” (“Canción de la madre del Amargo”), in Collected Poems, 164, 165.
26. Federico García Lorca, “Ode to Walt Whitman” (“Oda a Walt Whitman”), in Collected Poems, 731, 733.
27. My understanding of primitivism owes much to the work of Hal Foster. See Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: New Press, 1998).
28. George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), 3.
29. See Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).
30. Federico García Lorca, “Streets and Dreams” (“Calles y sueños”), in Collected Poems, 661, 663.
31. The literature surrounding the practice of “New World African religions” is both diverse and rich. There are any number of works, moreover, that speak to the belief on the part of practitioners that they are not simply emulating the gods during possession, but instead that they actually become the gods. For examples of two classic works, see Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, intro. Henry Louis Gates (1938; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1990); and Katherine Dunham: Island Possessed (1969; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
32. Federico García Lorca, “El rey de Harlem” (“The King of Harlem”), in Collected Poems, 650–58.
33. Federico García Lorca, “Son de Negros en Cuba” (“Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms”), in Collected Poems, 742, 744.
1. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1991), 134.
2. Arnold Rampersad writes in his introduction to Hughes’s The Big Sea, “In a genre defined in its modern mode by confession, Hughes appears to give virtually nothing away of a personal nature.” See Arnold Rampersad, introduction to The Big Sea, by Langston Hughes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), xvii.
3. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), 331.
4. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel de Leon (1852; reprint, New York: New York Labor News Company, 1951), 14.
5. Langston Hughes, “Song of Spain,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage, 1994), 195–97.
6. Norris was convicted and then sentenced to death in 1933. His case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ordered a retrial. In 1937 he was tried again and reconvicted, again with a sentence of death. This was later commuted to life in prison. He eventually was paroled in 1946, whereupon he fled the state of Alabama. In 1976 his conviction was overturned. He died in 1989, “the last of the Scottsboro Boys.” See Clarence Norris, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys (New York: Putnam, 1979).
7. Langston Hughes, “August 19th . . . A Poem for Clarence Norris,” in Collected Poems, 204–6.
8. Langston Hughes, “Too Much of Race,” in Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti, ed. Edward J. Mullen (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 94.
9. Langston Hughes, “Broadcast on Ethiopia,” quoted in Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 322.
10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Wilcox (1963; reprint, New York: Grove, 2004), 135.
11. Langston Hughes, “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” in Collected Poems, 143–46.
12. Langston Hughes, “Cubes,” in Collected Poems, 175–76.
13. Seth Moglen, “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 1188–1205.
14. At an April 2010 reading of a shorter version of this essay at Addis Ababa University, one of my Ethiopian interlocutors pointed out to me that the word “disease” is composed of only five letters, the s and the e repeating themselves. I thank her now for her clever intervention.
15. See Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1; and Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1941–1967: I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
16. Nicolás Guillén, “Conversación con Langston Hughes,” in Mullen, Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World, 172–75. Translation mine.
17. See Vera Kutzinski, “Yo También Soy América: Langston Hughes Translated,” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 550–78. See also Vera M. Kutzinski, The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).
18. Langston Hughes to Noel Sullivan, in Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 2015), 172–73.
19. José Antonio Fernández de Castro, “Presentación de Langston Hughes,” in Mullen, Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World, 169–71. Translation mine. A very similar set of procedures was utilized in an appreciation of Hughes by the Spaniard Miguel Alejandro in a 1936 issue of the radical journal Nueva Cultura. Alejandro writes of Hughes,
Ha sido universitario, chofer, repartidor de flores, marinero de viejos y lentos pataches, y de navíos de alto bordo. Pensó una noche ascender a todos los balcones de Verona, y ha paseado las charcas venecianas, y se emborrachó de vinos y mujeres en nuestra Valencia.
Carl Van Vechten que le conoce muy bien, dice de él ¡Ojalá que este joven negro, se decida a confiar al papel, en sus mas mínimos detalles, las corridas de toros de México; la ebria alegría del Gran Duc; la delicada y exquisita gracia de las negritas de Burutu; la exótica languidez de las mujeres españolas de Valencia; los viles bárbaros al son de jazz, en Harlem, en el corazón de Nueva York.
(He has been a university student, driver, flower delivery boy, sailor of old and slow schooners, and of oceangoing ships. He thought one night to climb all the balconies of Verona, and has walked the Venetian ponds and gotten drunk off of wine and women in our Valencia.
Carl Van Vechten, who knows him very well, says of him, Hopefully this young black will decide to trust to paper, in their most minute details, the bullfights in Mexico, the drunken joy of the Gran Duc, the delicate and exquisite grace of the black girls of Burutu, the exotic languor of the Spanish women of Valencia, the wild dances to the sound of jazz in Harlem in the heart of New York.)
Miguel Alejandro, “Langston Hughes,” Nueva Cultura, no. 10 (January 1936): 9. Translation mine.
20. Langston Hughes, “Tomorrow’s Seed,” in Collected Poems, 431.
1. The deep connections between especially the most elite American universities and slavery is becoming ever more clear. Brown University, the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, Emory University, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, Yale University, and Columbia University, among many others, either held slaves directly, utilized slave labor in the building of their campuses, traded slaves as commodities, greatly supported the work of slavery apologists (and later apologists for colonization and segregation), or more likely some rich combination of all these things. For more on this matter, see Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
2. Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3–vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring–Autumn, 1984): 47.
3. In addition to the two autobiographies, information on Himes and Lesley Packard in Spain can be found in James Sallis, Chester Himes: A Life (New York: Walker, 2000); and Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre, The Several Lives of Chester Himes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
4. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years; The Autobiography of Chester Himes (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1971), 301.
5. Chester Himes, The End of a Primitive (1955; reprint, New York: Norton, 1990).
6. Jodi Melamed, “The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes’s End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism,” American Literature 80, no. 4 (December 2008): 769–97.
7. See Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
8. Chester Himes to Mrs. Roslyn Targ, July 29, 1975, Chester Himes Papers, box 22, folder 227, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Chester Himes Papers).
9. Chester Himes to Mrs. Roslyn Targ, July 17, 1976, Chester Himes Papers, box 22, folder 227.
10. The details that Himes offers about this affair in The Quality of Hurt are largely confirmed by the discussion of the relationship in Edward Margolies’s and Michel Fabre’s biography, The Several Lives of Chester Himes. They identify Alva as Willa Thompson Trierweiler, whom Himes met onboard a France-bound ship and who at the time of their meeting was seeking a divorce from her husband, a Luxembourg dentist with whom she had four children.
11. For more on Haywood, see Lawrence Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
12. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet; trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
13. Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane (1969; reprint, New York: Arcade, 1990), 20.
14. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Basic Franz Kafka, intro. Eric Heller (New York: Pocket Books, 1946), 245.
15. For more on Carl Hagenbeck and his shows, see Hilke Thode-Arora, “Hagenbecks’s European Tours: The Development of the Human Zoo,” in Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 65–173.
1. Richard Wright, Pagan Spain (1957; reprint, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 4.
2. For a very good discussion of Stein’s influence over other modernist intellectuals, see Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
3. In his March 3, 1957, review of Pagan Spain in the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, Roi Ottley wrote,
When a novelist of Richard Wright’s stature pauses in his fictional chores to turn journalist and report on a foreign nation’s social fabric, one always wonders whether he merely is indulging himself in a writing exercise.
I am an admirer of Wright’s novels, but do not think he has the talents of a skilled reporter, or indeed has he developed and [sic] subtle understanding necessary to accurately report the social and cultural nuances of the Spanish people.
Roy Ottley, “Review of Pagan Spain,” in Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 56.
4. Richard Wright, “An Outline Tracing the Treatment of Material on a Proposed Book on Spanish Life, Tentative Title, Lonesome Spain,” Richard Wright Papers, 1927–1978, box 53, folder 652, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Richard Wright Papers).
5. See Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 475.
6. Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, in Richard Wright, Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen!, intro. Cornel West (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008).
7. Granville Hicks, reviewing Pagan Spain in the New York Post, amplifies Myrdal’s thinking, telling us that for Wright, “Spain was not so much a landscape to be looked at as a problem to be solved.” Granville Hicks, review of Pagan Spain, New York Post, February 24, 1957. See also Saunders Redding, review of Pagan Spain, Afro Magazine, March 9, 1957.
8. Richard Wright, “Harlem Spanish Women Come Out of the Kitchen,” Daily Worker, September 20, 1937.
9. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; reprint, New York: Grove, 2005).
10. See William D. Phillips, “The Old World Background of Slavery in the Americas,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara Solow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 43–61.
11. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4.
12. My thinking here is heavily indebted to those feminist critics whose efforts to reevaluate sentimental fiction turned on the ways that the seemingly non-ideological nature of sentimental novels made them perfect vehicles for the articulation of various political ideologies. See, for example, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
13. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
14. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973; reprint, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 414.
15. Richard Wright, “Las Fallas: A Pagan Celebration, draft,” Richard Wright Papers, 1927–1978, box 5, folder 84.
16. See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29.
17. Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen R. Lane (1969; reprint, New York: Arcade, 1990).
18. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
19. My thinking here owes a great deal to Jasbir Puar. See Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
20. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
21. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
1. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 4.
2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1994), 16.
3. Lynn Nottage, Las Meninas, in Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays (New York: Theater Communications Group, 2004), 253.
4. See Neus Moyano Miranda, “Exhibiting People in Spain: Colonialism and Mass Culture,” in Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, and Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 353–68.