From its inception, African American formal writing has troubled conventions and norms of how to read. The slave narrative and, later, the protest novel, with their purposeful, often sentimental appeals and their urgent calls to action, plainly asked to be read for their literal truths, their moral and emotional claims, and their repudiation of (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s unforgettable phrase) “the Western fiction of the ‘text of blackness.’”1 This is not to say that early African American literature is without beauty or attention to form but, more pointedly, that in its utmost urgency it belonged to the province of political speech. Above all else, its representational aims were activist, pedagogical, and documentary; its premise was that the act of reading would inspirit social change.
The conditions for today’s black literary production do not demand literature’s political agency above all else, and yet, from the perspective of the present, it remains un-realistic to imagine an African American literature that wholly supersedes or divests from the political. For if the political is the public realm in which individuals and collectives negotiate the terms of their aggregated representation, then “blackness” itself, however problematically, is a constitutively political sign. As Elizabeth Alexander argues in her extraordinary book, Black Interiors, African American racial representation is always, “regardless of the artist’s intent,” staged “against a history of deformation and annihilation of the black body and [thus] challenged with resisting or redirecting the current (though ancient) vogue for a stereotypical black realism.”2
Of course, to say that a literature cannot shake its ties to the political is not to say that it must look or act according to a certain, fixed prescription. Nor is it to say that black writing is categorically or ideally instructive, transparent, or confined to “the face of the social self.”3 Indeed, Toni Morrison argues just the opposite when, in “The Site of Memory,” she posits that her unique capacity and duty as a black writer in late modernity is to restore an “unwritten interior life” to our historical conceptions of African American subjectivity. In other words, her response to the stubborn publicity of the Gatesian text (and counter-text) of blackness is to illumine what it obscures: the human complexity that is denied by racism, on the one hand, or excised in the name of political expediency, on the other.4
Morrison’s call to interiority may be interpreted as the mantra of the contemporary narrative of slavery more generally—that voluminous and proliferating archive of post–Civil Rights fiction which regards the traumatic past as its painful inheritance and the object of its reparative desire. Tacitly or explicitly, this genre presumes that if the “text of blackness” is an economic, political, and materialist formation (as surely it is), then it is also a historical discourse, a record of personal and collective psychic injury and resilience, and an axis of identification and desire. It depicts dramas of black interiority that exceed the frameworks of “resistance” or political action while nevertheless insisting on psychic life as a space of political potentiality.5 This tradition of writing represents one origin of the present study, which similarly aims to dispel the esoteric reputation too often associated with the investigation of the inner life.
Contemporary narratives of slavery are by no means the first or only books to foreground intricacies of black psychic life, but I am drawn to them as objects of study because of their collective longevity and impact, because of the poly-vocal force with which they identify a cathected site in the contemporary racial imaginary (i.e., the slave past), and because they have inspired such impassioned critical debate about how they should be read and what happens when we read them. Critics have wondered: When we read the fictionally restored interior lives of enslaved African Americans, does the act of reading assume the status or function of political agency? Is our reading directed by our desire to, or our belief that we can, “claim the lives and efforts of history’s defeated as ours either to redeem or to redress?”6 Alternatively, does the reading of contemporary narratives of slavery embolden us to confront past and present in a way that is false, dangerous, or maladaptive? One assertion of the present volume has been that the question of how contemporary narratives of slavery enshrine hermeneutical approaches to depictions of black interiority is a central question for black literary studies today.
Against the grain of the questions listed above, this volume uses a critically re-imagined, somewhat idiosyncratic iteration of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic to interrupt received habits of reading black fiction and to access a unique store of conceptual and linguistic resources for thinking about interior life. As a tool for reading African American literature, psychoanalysis’ shortcomings are various; some of them are enumerated in the preceding pages. What attracts me to psychoanalysis in spite of its flaws is its complication of specific modes of reading that residually attach to African American literature—modes of reading that encounter black textuality as (always, only) literal, performative, and heroically “resistant.” Psychoanalysis can help us to uncover veiled, disavowed, and inconsistent feelings and desires, as well as the ways in which “oppression . . . both [compromises and conditions] the very possibility of subjecthood.”7 Access to this kind of nuance and contradiction is, I believe, essential to the serious recognition of the human mind. It is also crucially important to the present study because the major archive under consideration is one that defies the transparent rationality of the political directive. Claiming the distant past as the psychic property of the present and investing, however ambivalently, in a moral logic of redemptive suffering, the contemporary narrative of slavery requires an interpretive rubric that is accountable to the indirect routes and complex mechanisms of psychic life.
By way of psychoanalysis, I have told a story about the forms of un-finished and un-acknowledged mourning—not just over the un-resolved trauma of the slave past but also over the political, civic, and psychic dismantling of the modern Civil Rights Movement—that inhabit and drive today’s black literary discourse. I have argued, more specifically, that the psychic logics of trauma, masochism, and depression can help us to decipher how the grief and desire imbuing the contemporary moment attain clarity (or find disguise) in narratives of historical return. The point is not to cure, or even to mobilize, but to invite a more supple and comprehensive reading of blackness, one that necessarily engages but also strains against “the politics of representation,” with its “determination to see blackness only through a social public lens.”8 The ability to read individuality and human complexity within blackness seems to me an irreducibly important pre-condition for politics—and a pre-condition that literature is uniquely equipped to address.
Far be it from me to prescribe or prohibit any reader’s experience of textual encounter, whether by insisting on the “appropriate” psychic impact of a text or by diminishing the reader’s experience of being moved and transformed by literature. On the contrary, my intention has been to release the contemporary narrative of slavery from such interpretive strangleholds. I separate the question of how representations of psychic life work in literary fiction (which is my primary interest) from the question of how literary fiction works on actual readers (which is not). Although I have gravitated toward psychoanalysis and made a case for its hermeneutical legitimacy, I do not mean to suggest that psychoanalysis is the only—or even the singular best—way to interpret black interiority. I hope that the titular “how to” will be read, not as a self-righteous command, but as a deliberative and inconclusive invocation of the question how? that animates my approach to contemporary literary depictions of black interiority. Taking inspiration from Andrew Hawkins and the magical Convent women in their respective moments of hermeneutical revelation, I have endeavored to approach reading as a practice of wonder that agnostically recuperates the density of inner life.