1 Morrison, “Site of Memory,” 77.
2 Arlene Keizer coins the much-used taxonomical term “contemporary narratives of slavery” in her 2004 monograph, Black Subjects. I find this term particularly useful (as opposed to variously named sub-categories of the contemporary narrative of slavery) because it is deliberately capacious, accommodating “a wide variety of works,” including “the historical novel of slavery . . . , works set in the present which explicitly connect African American/Afro-Caribbean life in the present with U.S./Caribbean slavery . . . , and hybrid works in which scenes from the past are juxtaposed with scenes from the present” (Black Subjects, 2).
3 By most accounts, African American fiction’s renewed interest in the slave past begins with Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), a novel based on an oral history of the author’s grandmother and published as the Civil Rights Movement was giving way to more militant strains of black nationalism. Combining revisionist historiography with the imaginative un-encumbrance of fiction, Jubilee anticipated, and perhaps even catalyzed, what Deborah E. McDowell calls “a post-sixties phenomenon” of “novels about slavery [appearing] at an unstoppable rate” (“Negotiating between Tenses,” 144).
4 Best, “On Failing,” 453.
5 In this vein, Keith Byerman writes that black historical fiction is “potentially therapeutic in that it insists on revealing the fullness of the past” (Remembering the Past, 9); Arlene Keizer opines that “these texts [contemporary narratives of slavery] seem to be saying that we need to imagine [enslaved] ancestors as psychically free if we are to imagine ourselves as psychically free” (Black Subjects, 17); Angelyn Mitchell offers that the “objective” of a subset of contemporary narratives of slavery is to “engender a liberatory effect on the reader” (Freedom to Remember, 6); Ashraf H. A. Rushdy asserts that a prominent subset of black historical novels “make[s] the point that the past influences a present that can be modified and made better only by returning to and understanding [the] past, [specifically,] that personal and national family secret of slavery” (Remembering Generations, 7); and Lisa Woolfork contends that a proliferating set of “books, films, exhibitions [and] reenactments . . . use the contemporary body as an invitation for the reader, viewer, or patron to locate themselves in the past; readers, viewers, and visitors are prompted to ask themselves, ‘What would I do?’ in the context of American slavery” (Embodying American Slavery, 1). To be sure, one may adopt the hermeneutic of therapeutic reading as a critical premise without making it one’s sole or primary object of study. In identifying this common feature that pervades much recent scholarship on black historical fiction, my aim is not to reduce that scholarship to a singular, shared “meaning” but to gesture toward the critical reach of the hermeneutic of therapeutic reading, which informs a capacious and multi-faceted body of research.
6 Variations on this figure appear in novels such as Toni Cade Bambara’s Salt Eaters, David Bradley’s Chaneysville Incident, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata, as well as in a number of acclaimed films, including Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa.
7 Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow, 245.
8 Throughout this book, I invoke the figure of the “contemporary reader” to describe an abstracted consumer of post–Civil Rights black fiction. One approach to thinking through such a figure might emphasize literary history and the sociology of reading, giving attention to data on who reads and how, as well as political and generational differences among post–Civil Rights writers and critics. Such a project, however, is beyond the scope of the present work. My primary interest attaches, instead, to the implied reader—the projected addressee of literary discourse. Rather than speaking for the tastes or desires of a particular demography, this imaginary figure consolidates a sense of how particular texts and genres imagine their readers and curate the reading experience. This “contemporary reader” is historically specific insofar as post–Civil Rights authors necessarily speak to an audience positioned at a significant distance from the slave past. Yet, as an index of narrative construction, this reader cannot be accountable to the particularities of experience, perspective, and idiosyncrasy that mark actual readers and their textual encounters.
9 Perry, Stigmata, 24, 17.
10 Ibid., 7, 47.
11 Ibid., 88.
12 Perry, “Confronting the Specters of the Past,” 637.
13 Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 37n. Warner’s catalog of hermeneutical norms is meant to expose the tacit bias through which scholarly practices of “critical reading” work to de-legitimize texts and reading strategies that operate outside of its hegemony. In this respect, Warner could easily be describing the critical marginalization of so many earlier forms of African American literature—most notably, the slave narrative and the protest novel, with their purposeful, sentimental appeals and their urgent calls to action. Since black print culture has, from its inception, been charged with particular modes of representation—activist, pedagogical, documentary—it is not a stretch to say that African American literature’s availability to Warner’s enumerated interpretive conventions has been powerfully and persistently interrupted. On the long history of how African American literature has been framed for consumption and evaluation, see Gates, Figures in Black.
14 Mitchell, The Freedom to Remember, 6; Byerman, Remembering the Past, 9.
15 Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 137.
16 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6.
17 Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 16.
18 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises, xv.
19 As Shoshana Felman puts it, psychoanalytic literary theory replaces the question “What does the story mean?” with the question “‘How does the story mean?’ How does the meaning of the story, whatever it may be, rhetorically take place through permanent displacement, textually take shape and take effect: take flight” (“Turning the Screw,” 119).
20 As an inquiry into how psychic forms travel in and through black historical fiction, the infrastructure of this book takes a cue from Caroline Levine’s unorthodox re-imagining of formalist analysis. Levine invokes a broad definition of form as any recognizable “ordering principle” to demonstrate how forms travel in and through ostensibly disparate cultural territories such as literature, politics, popular culture, and so forth. Mobile and adaptable, forms are available to repurposing but indivisible from their constitutive properties. To repeat one of Levine’s examples, the form of the whole may alternatively describe a unified text, a “nation-state,” or a “seminar room”—three indisputably non-identical entities—but in each iteration, the whole retains certain unaltered capacities—the capacities to contain, enclose, exclude, bring together. A formalist analysis after Levine begins with a curious eye toward what forms can do—an index of potentiality that she terms “affordances.” Thinking about form in terms of affordances invites an orientation toward meaning that is dynamic, non-reductive, trans-disciplinary, and open to surprise but also finite and generalizable (Forms, 3, 48, 6).
In a similar way, I would like to think of psychoanalysis as a collection of psychic forms whose meaning concentrates, not in diagnostic power, but in the capacities of those forms to express and conceal attachments, desires, and other interior processes. What are the affordances of the psychic forms that prominently and repeatedly appear in post–Civil Rights African American literature—trauma, masochism, and depression? Posing the question in this way allows me to shift the interpretive endeavor from taxonomy to exploration. To continue with my example, instead of asking, Are contemporary narratives of slavery masochistic? I set out to understand what masochism can do for contemporary African American literature. What kinds of narratives about power and desire does the form of masochism enable, and what kinds of narratives does it foreclose? Why might this be an appealing form (or not) for conceptualizing the longue durée of black disenfranchisement and political longing?
21 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, 24.
22 Spillers, “All the Things,” 379.
23 Madhu Dubey offers a particularly astute analysis of this phenomenon, keyed to its implications for contemporary black literary and cultural studies. See Signs and Cities.
24 Brand, Map to the Door, 50.
25 Spillers, “All the Things,” 381.
26 Friedman, Joyce, 25.
27 “Freud also breaks down the autonomy of the dream-text by reading dreams in relation to other dreams, decoding a series of dreams as a composite text. ‘A whole series of dreams,’ he writes, ‘continuing over a period of weeks or months, is often based upon common ground and must accordingly be interpreted in connection with one another’” (ibid., 25).
28 The voluminous critical literature on contemporary narratives of slavery includes illuminating research on many of these recurring tropes. To scratch the surface, see Byerman, Remembering the Past; Keizer, Black Subjects; Rody, The Daughter’s Return; Rushdy, Remembering Generations; Tillet, Sites of Slavery; and Woolfork, Embodying American Slavery. Through their selective and sustained emphases, these studies and others implicitly corroborate the foundational claim that I am moving to establish: that contemporary black fiction may be read for and through thematic and figural resonances among texts, to illuminate an archive that comprises something like a “composite text.”
29 Lee, Sarah Phillips, 14.
30 In a closely related argument, Michael Awkward offers an expansive consideration of the novella’s split allegiances to black literary and cultural traditions, on the one hand, and to the radical abandonment of these traditions, on the other. He highlights in particular the “notable disparities between the narrator-protagonist’s myopic observations about race and Lee’s informed allusions to black-authored texts” (Philadelphia Freedoms, 126).
31 Brown, Edgework, 100. Here, Brown is speaking about the decline of feminism in late modernity.
32 McBride, Song Yet Sung, 286–287.
33 Manning Marable offers one representative iteration of this cultural narrative when he outlines an inter-generationally continuous trajectory of “yearning for freedom” that takes root on “America’s plantations and slave society” and persists as a unifying, collective racial self-story through the late 1960s. Again resonating with McBride’s novel, Marable identifies Martin Luther King, Jr., as the final prophet of a “cultural tradition of salvation and liberation” (Beyond Black and White, 18–19).
34 McBride, Song Yet Sung, 254.
35 Ibid.
36 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, 34.
37 Ibid., 24.
38 Best, “On Failing,” 459, 455.
39 Kenan, Visitation of Spirits, 188.
1 Warren, What Was, 1.
2 Nielsen, “Wasness” (Neilsen’s italics).
3 Warren, What Was, 82.
4 Best, “On Failing,” 454.
5 Morrison, Beloved, 248. The space gap appears in the original, near the beginning of a nine-page break from conventional prose. Further citations to this work are given in the text.
6 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 167. To be clear, Leys makes only a fleeting reference to African American literature, and she is not directly engaged in the disciplinarily specific conversation that I address in this chapter. The immediate focus of her book is the evolution of shame theory in relation to post-Holocaust Jewish studies. I reference her in passing because, despite this substantive difference, her notion of “radical expropriation” (167) crystallizes a central concern she shares with critics like Warren: that contemporary uses of trauma theory calcify victimization as a social identity and falsely position “those of us who were never there” at the center of historical meaning (180).
7 Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 137.
8 Douglas Jones, “Fruit of Abolition,” 43.
9 I borrow this economical phrase (somewhat out of context) from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who proposes that both historiography and virtue depend upon the possibility of imagining human life as a unity. See MacIntyre,“The Virtues.”
10 “The event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.” See Caruth, “Introduction,” 4.
11 Luckhurst, Trauma Question, 88, 89.
12 For an excellent study of this literary trope, see Rody, Daughter’s Return.
13 Morrison, Beloved, xviii.
14 Caruth, “Introduction,” 4 (Caruth’s italics).
15 Snitow, review of Beloved, 26n.
16 Felman, “Betrayal of the Witness,” 167.
17 Christian, “Fixing Methodologies,” 6–7.
18 On this tradition, see Gilman, Difference and Pathology.
19 Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity, xix.
20 Awkward, Philadelphia Freedoms, 6.
21 Some noteworthy exceptions to this pattern of exclusion are Eyerman, Cultural Trauma; Felman, Juridical Unconscious; Hirsch, “Maternity and Rememory.”
22 Marriott, Haunted Life, xxi.
23 Best, “On Failing,” 459.
24 Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 136. By contrast, Michaels regards modern socio-economic disparity as the dominant and reliable “real” of American life. As he writes in The Trouble with Diversity, identitarian racial discourse is “at best a distraction, and at worst an essentially reactionary position” in relation to the class-based justice projects that he deems the work of “equality” (16).
25 Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 136.
26 Morrison, Beloved, 44.
27 Hirsch, “Generation of Postmemory,” 107.
28 La Capra, History in Transit, 108.
29 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10 (my italics).
30 In the introduction to Renewing Black Intellectual History, Reed and Warren write, “Much black studies scholarship remains unreflectively moored to notions such as race leadership, unitary racial interest, as well as an intellectually and politically naïve rhetoric of racial authenticity on which those notions rest. Yet these notions—all of which emerged within the patterns of elite discourse that evolved between the second half of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth—have become increasingly problematic as frames for interpreting black American experience” (Renewing Black Intellectual History, viii).
31 Joan Dayan’s critique of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic epitomizes this argument: “Gilroy announces that it’s time to reconstruct ‘the primal history of modernity’ from the ‘slaves’ point of view,’” she writes. “But . . . . Where, oh where do we find the slaves’ point of view?” Still more pointedly, she concludes with the claim that, by “taking writing anchored in a specific time and place out of its roots and into abstraction, Gilroy turns poverty and racial stigma into an obscurantist, if rhythmic aesthetics of pain” (“Paul Gilroy’s Slaves,” 8, 13; Dayan’s italics).
32 Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” 72, 74.
33 Consider the crescendo of Reid-Pharr’s case for prohibitive reading, which simultaneously magnifies the allure of power and the mechanism of censorship that drive prohibitive reading. In this excerpt, Reid-Pharr casts himself in the third person as the hero of contemporary black intellectualism:
He refuses to privilege the rhetorics of return and nostalgia that so burden much contemporary criticism of Black American literature and culture. . . . He does not mourn fallen martyrs, nor does he tremble in the face of forgetfulness, alienation, isolation, peculiarity, funniness, or estrangement. . . . Instead he has suggested that the notion that the Black American must forever despise what he holds in his hands in favor of what is already lost is, in fact, part of the very defeatist nonsense that would not only disallow any true form of Black American intellectualism but that would also disqualify Black Americans as self-conscious agents of history. (Once You Go Black, 172)
34 In her fascinating study of anti-victim rhetoric, Alyson Cole argues that a key strategy of anti-victim discourse has been to discredit “therapeutic culture” as disinterested in the truth. Imitating the discourse through which her antagonists devalue victims’ claims, she writes, “Truthfulness is not a therapeutic concern. Any claim of injury or need is prima facie valid and merits compensation” (Cult of True Victimhood, 33).
35 Warren, What Was, 84.
36 I borrow this phrase from Wendy Brown’s chapter of the same name, “Wounded Attachments.”
37 Bradley, Chaneysville Incident, 197. Further citations to the work are given in text.
38 Caruth, “Introduction,” 5.
39 Morrison, Beloved, 44.
40 Elsewhere, Bradley elaborates on this desire for historiographical mastery. He writes: “[Most] of us have learned to accept the idea that we will never know everything, so long as we labor here below. But we also believe in Historians’ Heaven: a firmly fixed chamber far removed from the subjective uncertainties of this mortal coil, where there is a gallery of pictures of [the past] taken constantly from every angle, and motion pictures, and cross-sections. And we believe that if we have been good little historians, just before they do whatever it is they finally do with us, they’ll take us in there and show us what was really going on. It’s not that we want so much to know we were right. We know we’re not right (although it would be nice to see exactly how close we came). It’s just that we want to, really, truly, utterly, absolutely, completely, finally, know” (Chaneysville Incident, 264; Bradley’s italics).
41 La Capra, Writing History, 35.
42 Warren, What Was, 102.
43 Bradley, “Business of Writing,” 26.
44 Best, “On Failing,” 461.
45 Warren, What Was, 103, 105 (my italics).
46 Morrison, Jazz, 229. Further citations to the work are given in text.
47 Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud, 17.
48 Morrison, “Site of Memory,” 70, 69.
49 Ibid., 71.
50 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 5.
51 See ibid.
52 Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black, 172.
53 Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 137.
54 Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black, 33.
55 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 32.
56 Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
57 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 27, 26.
58 Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 20, 22.
59 Juxtaposing curt, narrative descriptions of so many micro-aggressions with poetic accounts of anti-black surveillance, brutality, and murder, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which culminates in a magnified detail from J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship,” is organized by just such a tension.
60 In fact, as Thadious Davis points out, A Visitation of Spirits’s temporal dexterity is even greater than it seems, for the novel is haunted by Kenan’s historiographical short story, “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” which elaborates a Chaneysville-like reclamation of the main family’s history in slavery and marronage. “‘Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,’” Davis writes, “began as a section of [Kenan’s] 1989 novel A Visitation of Spirits,” but it became uncontainable within the novel’s frame. In separating the story from the novel, the author was able to develop a multi-textual, palimpsestic take on historical desire (Davis, Southscapes, 315). The focus of the present chapter, however, will limit itself to A Visitation of Spirits. Further citations to the work are given in text.
61 Set awkwardly alongside each other, the play and the historical vision are ostensibly opposite renditions of a shared referent—the one is jovial, celebratory, and apologist, while the other is harrowing, sorrowful, and demanding. The play purports to look back on history, while the vision presents itself as history’s own summoning, unappeased voice. The play is endorsed by corporate money and local governmental organizations, while the vision is of a kind with oral counter-history. Wildly divergent in content and register, these clashing representations of slavery model the inconsistent and inaccessible contexts in which Horace apprehends a sense of his past and the resultant terms of his interpellation.
62 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 29.
1 Byerman, Remembering the Past, 10.
2 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the original theorist of this concept, which is now widely (if somewhat inconsistently) used. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. For Higginbotham’s recent response to misconceptions about respectability in contemporary political and activist discourses, see Higginbotham, “Wrestling with Respectability.”
3 For a sampling of this scholarship, see Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet; Holland, Erotic Life of Racism; Keizer, “Obsidian Mine”; Morris, Close Kin; Musser, Sensational Flesh; Jennifer Nash, Black Body; Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection; and Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.
4 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 148.
5 Cole argues that in contemporary American culture, the credibility afforded to victims “has less to do with the veracity of petitions or the facts of injury than with the sufferer’s personal qualities.” Each of the four qualities she describes—propriety, responsibility, individuality, and innocence—sits at odds with popular understandings of the masochistic posture:
Propriety: The True Victim is a noble victim. He endures his suffering with dignity, refraining from complaining or other public displays of weakness. Responsibility: The True Victim commands his fate; he does not exploit his injury to excuse his failures. He assumes victimhood reluctantly or, even better, rejects the status altogether. Individuality: Victimhood is an individual status even when a group is injured collectively. A True Victim is not a victim by affiliation or by engaging in “victim politics”; victimization must be immediate and concrete. Innocence: This is the most important virtue of True Victimhood. Anti-victimists apply the category of innocence in two distinct ways. First, with respect to his victimization, the victim’s innocence must be complete and incontrovertible. True victims have not contributed to their injury in any way. Second, the victim is morally upright; he must be pure. This totalizing conception of innocence encompasses every facet of the True Victim’s character. (Cult of True Victimhood, 5; Cole’s italics)
6 In her anthropological study of BDSM (bondage, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism) in California’s Bay Area, Margot Weiss describes an additional, pragmatic disincentive for African American engagement with masochistic desire or s/m practices. Weiss reveals that BDSM communities tend toward demographic homogeneity (white, upper middle class) and that black participation is often limited to “race play that mimics social power” in un-self-conscious ways. Although most practitioners envision their fantasies and performances as politically benign, Weiss observes that “scenes require enough of the real to work—black bodies or German commands and uniforms.” “Indeed, effective scenes find and push hot buttons, buttons that access the power that coheres with national imaginaries that structure citizenship, belonging, and subjectivity through affective relations.” In such a milieu, masochism requires African Americans to inhabit and claim a particular kind of victimhood: a victimhood of “choice” that is shielded from political critique by its appeal to the “private” domain of the sexual (Techniques of Pleasure, 199, 207, 214).
7 Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 25.
8 Delany, The Game of Time and Pain, 57, 34.
9 Keizer, “Obsidian Mine.”
10 Kara Walker, quoted in English, “New Context,” 87.
11 Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 25.
12 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, quoted in Lenzer, “On Masochism,” 277.
13 Lenzer, “On Masochism,” 280.
14 Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 189.
15 Brown, Politics out of History, 53, 59.
16 Ibid., 52, 55.
17 Octavia Butler, Kindred, 28. Further citations to this work are given in text.
18 Intermittently throughout the novel, contemporary repudiations of Dana and Kevin’s marriage are echoed in the historical tense. For example, when Dana first tells Rufus that Kevin is her husband, his spontaneous reaction is, “Niggers can’t marry white people!” Later, the taboo against interracial marriage is more explicitly tied to traditions of non-recognition for all African American romantic unions. “No slave marriage was legally binding,” Dana learns (ibid., 60, 133).
19 Baker, Blues, Ideology, 48. Baker elaborates: “What Douglass’s certificate of marriage . . . signifies is that the black man has repossessed himself in a manner that enables him to enter the kind of relationship disrupted, or foreclosed, by the economics of slavery” (ibid.).
20 Litwack writes, “If [legacies of freedom and opportunity] are the grounds for commemorating the anniversary of the Constitution, they reveal a perverse and limited reading of the American past. [To celebrate uncritically] is to read American history without the presence of black men and women, to define them out of American identity, to exclude a people who enjoyed neither liberty, impartial government, nor the equal protection of the law (“Trouble in Mind,” 317).
21 To be sure, Brown herself acknowledges this limitation and does not purport to “psychologize political life directly [or] to reflect on the ways that sexual life bears on political life, but rather to allegorize a historical-political problem through the story of desire and punishment that Freud constructs” (Politics out of History, 47). My critique should not be read as an allegation of Brown’s shortcomings but, rather, as an attempt to put pressure on what the idea of political masochism can do for contemporary black fiction’s explorations of the slave past.
22 Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 87.
23 Freeman, Time Binds, 142, 143.
24 Ibid., 138.
25 Ibid., 144.
26 Octavia Butler, “Persistence” (Butler’s italics).
27 Octavia Butler, “Interview” by Rowell, 51.
28 Octavia Butler, “Persistence.”
29 Octavia Butler, “Interview” by Snider, 214 (Butler’s italics).
30 Morrison, Beloved, xix.
31 Freeman, Time Binds, 95, 99, 101.
32 Ibid., 191n.
33 Butler underscores the idea of the excessive inarticulacy of historical pain in her extraordinary overuse of two impactful yet imprecise words: “pain” and “hurt.” In the course of the mid-length novel’s 264 pages, Butler deploys the word “pain” 62 times, and the word “hurt” a stunning 114 times. As I see it, her strained reliance on language that is at once necessary and inadequate gestures toward the affective excesses of contemporary African Americans’ legible and “appropriate” relationship to an abusive racial history. Furthermore, Butler’s deliberate and redundant verbal vagueness operates as an indictment of historiographical standards of distance and objectivity, gesturing toward a wealth of experience that cannot be apprehended on these terms.
34 Cvetkovich uses this language to describe the “safe space” of a feminist mosh pit, where sexual trauma is performatively re-enacted (Archive of Feelings, 87).
35 Freeman, Time Binds, 141, 139.
36 Mitchell, “Not Enough of the Past,” 52–53.
37 Gayl Jones, Corregidora, 184. Further citations to this work are given in text.
38 For an expansive discussion of the trope of the family secret in temporally split contemporary narratives of slavery (including Corregidora), see Rushdy, Remembering Generations.
39 Brown, Politics out of History, 53.
40 Sharpe makes a similar point when she writes, “Corregidora allows us to explore how the family’s demands on the subject to keep visible (but also keep repressed) horrific experiences of violence in slavery—in this case, the demands of the formerly enslaved on their descendants—become congruent with the law of the (slave) master” (Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 32).
41 Brown, Politics out of History, 56.
42 Rushdy, “Relate Sexual to Historical,” 277.
43 Freeman, Time Binds, 191n.
44 Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 83.
45 Freeman, Time Binds, 144.
46 Ibid., 141, 144.
47 In the vein of queer theorists like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, Freeman imagines the mystical power of s/m as wrapped up with “sado-masochism’s temporary destruction of the subject.” She diverges from Bersani and Edelman, however, in her refusal to regard this destruction as evidence of sex’s fundamental ahistoricity or apoliticism. For a more detailed description of how Freeman positions herself in relation to both Bersani’s critical tradition and “white lesbian-feminist” strains of queer theory, see Time Binds, 142–144.
48 Brown, Politics out of History, 55.
49 Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 81.
50 Gayl Jones, Corregidora, 185. Surely this contrast is at least in part a matter of genre. Dana’s access to the fantastical possibility of time travel allows her to confront a history that Ursa can only find spectrally, projected onto her similarly wounded, African American lover.
51 Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 129.
52 Ibid., 139.
53 Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 23.
54 Ibid., 9–12, 258–259.
55 Ibid., 49 (Scott’s italics).
56 In fact, Scott makes a point to disarticulate his preferred term, “abjection,” from the more broadly familiar concept of masochism, although he avows a family resemblance between these terms and includes within his book, sustained considerations of s/m fantasy, desire, and play. In the introduction to his book, Scott writes that “such familiar (if nevertheless endlessly fascinating and near limitless) terms [like] masochism and castration overlay, overlap, and even partly describe the relation between blackness and abjection, and the powers that inhere in that relation, [but they] do not fully encompass that relation and those powers, adequately name them, or exhaust them.” In my own engagement with Scott, I have treated his “abjection” and my “masochism” as comparable and even interchangeable terms, but I have taken care to do so only in ways that preserve the arc and content of his argument (ibid., 28–29; Scott’s italics).
57 Ibid., 270, 264.
58 Ibid., 265.
59 Ibid., 263, 265.
60 Lotman, Structure of the Artistic Text, 213, 212. Elsewhere, Madhu Dubey elegantly ties the non-ending of Corregidora in particular to the blues form when she writes:
In a narrative structured by the cut, it becomes irrelevant to ask the bildungsroman question of whether, at the end of the novel, Ursa succeeds in articulating a radically new identity that ruptures her ancestral heritage. The movement of her plot is, rather, an accumulation and variation on her foremothers’ stories. Any notion of the present as a new and decisive break from the past . . . is simply incongruent with the novel’s structure and temporal vision. The device of the cut achieves a sense of structural and temporal continuity, and allows a formal containment of the potentially discontinuous terms, past and present. This formal containment must be distinguished from the problem-solving impetus of classic linear plots; the blues structure of Corregidora . . . formally accommodates rather than erases the text’s thematic contradiction between past and present. (Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 83)
1 Lee, Sarah Phillips, 10–11. Further citations to this work are given in text.
2 The capacious language of “feelings” that I employ throughout the chapter—in addition to, and at times as a critique of, the particular language of psychoanalysis—is indebted to Cvetkovich’s recent writing on the topic. In Depression, Cvetkovich explains her effort to generate a critical vocabulary that “encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways (whether as distinct specific emotions or as a generic category often contrasted with reason).” She elaborates:
I also like to use feeling as a generic term that does some of the same work: naming the undifferentiated ‘stuff’ of feeling; spanning the distinctions between emotion and affect central to some theories; acknowledging the somatic or sensory nature of feelings as experiences that aren’t just cognitive concepts or constructions. I favor feeling in part because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences. It also has a vernacular quality that lends itself to exploring feelings as something we come to know though experience and popular usage and that indicates, perhaps only intuitively but nonetheless significantly, a conception of mind and body as integrated. (Depression, 4)
I follow the example of Cvetkovich’s tensile vocabulary of affect and feeling, although my own work preserves more of an inclination toward psychoanalysis than does hers.
3 Smith, “Foreword,” x.
4 Washington, “Young, Gifted and Black,” 3.
5 To date, two critical emphases have dominated discussion of Sarah Phillips: The first alternatively condemns or defends Sarah’s relationship to progressive racial politics, while the second elucidates the novel’s emplotment of unprecedented African American social and class mobility in post–Civil Rights America. For examples of the former, see Hogue, “The Limits of Modernity”; McCormick, “Is This Resistance?”; Smith, “Foreword”; and Washington, “Young, Gifted and Black.” For examples of the latter, see Awkward, Philadelphia Freedoms; and Murray, “The Time of Breach.”
6 McPherson, “Elbow Room,” 260–261. Further citations to this work are given in text.
7 “The loss of a love-object,” Freud writes, “is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself effective and come into the open” (“Mourning and Melancholia,” 250–251).
8 Ibid., 249. A subsequent phrasing of this defense is especially poetic. Freud writes, “So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction” (257).
9 Ibid., 249.
10 Ibid.
11 Nevertheless, Freud unwittingly enables future appropriations of his theory for thinking through the forms of social identity, for his theory of melancholia becomes the basis for his understanding of universal, non-pathological processes of subject formation. As Judith Butler explains, the very notions of interiority, and of the ego as a “psychic object,” require the technology of melancholia in order to come into being, as the fiction of the self is produced through serialized negotiations of loss (Psychic Life of Power, 168). See also Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis, 230.
12 Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 8.
13 Ibid., 10, 12.
14 Ibid., 20, 17.
15 Ibid., 4, 10.
16 Ibid., 17. Cheng’s analysis here refers to the character Claudia in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, though it is offered in the service of a generalizable argument.
17 Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 20.
18 The chronology I employ here is similar to that which the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall identifies and critiques as the “dominant narrative” of the “short civil rights movement.” By her account, this narrative
chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then comes the decline. After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and reaction against the excess of the late 1960s and 1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action, or an overweening of the welfare state. A so-called white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good or ill, depending on one’s ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of another story, the story that surrounds us now. Martin Luther King, Jr. is this narrative’s defining figure.
Hall goes on to make a very persuasive case for imagining instead a “‘long civil rights movement’ that took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s,” but this argument is, for the time being, beyond the scope of my study. I bracket the narrative of progressive continuity not because I believe it is untrue but because I am interested in the “dominant narrative” precisely as an index of how historical events and effects have been publicly registered and represented (Hall, “Long Civil Rights Movement,” 1234–1235).
19 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 216.
20 Giovanni, “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” 54.
21 Baraka, “Afrikan Revolution,” 244.
22 This passage reads in full: “For a moment be any black person, anywhere, and you will feel the waves of hopelessness that engulfed black men and women when Martin Luther King was murdered. All black people understood the tide of anarchy that followed his death. It is the transformation of this quantum of grief into aggression of which we now speak. As a sapling bent low stores energy for a violent back-swing, blacks bent double by oppression have stored energy which will be released in the form of rage—black rage, apocalyptic and final” (Grier and Cobbs, Black Rage, 210).
23 In this summative statement, I adapt language and a conceptual gesture from Wendy Brown’s description of modern liberalism, which she describes as an amalgam of “certain crucial collective stories . . . by which we live.” Brown’s study proceeds as an inquiry into what happens when “fundamental premises of an order begin to erode, or simply begin to be exposed as fundamental premises” (Politics out of History, 3).
24 The idea that the denouement of the modern Civil Rights Movement has been accompanied by feelings of collective loss is by now fairly common within African American literary and cultural criticism, although affective and analytical responses to this narrative of loss vary widely. For some examples, see Awkward, Philadelphia Freedoms; Baker, Betrayal; Dubey, “Speculative Fictions”; Gates, Colored People; Murray, “Time of Breach”; Reed and Warren, Renewing Black Intellectual History; Spillers, “All the Things”; and Warren, What Was.
25 The Reverend is explicitly associated with King in the chapter “Marching,” where he takes part in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. Elsewhere, Sarah notes that others recognize her father as “the civil-rights minister,” and that he subscribes to “a fixed optimism about the brotherhood of man” (Lee, Sarah Phillips, 55, 53).
26 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244–245.
27 Ibid., 245.
28 Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 172.
29 Ibid., 170, 183.
30 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
31 Awkward, Philadelphia Freedoms, 145.
32 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 256, 251.
33 This is the title of Murray’s essay on contemporary novels about the Civil Rights era, including Sarah Phillips (Murray, “Time of Breach”).
34 See, e.g., Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion; Steigerwald, Sixties and the End of Modern America.
35 Cvetkovich, Depression, 14.
36 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 16. In fact, Sedgwick’s bias is that the logic of psychoanalysis is secondary to that of affect theory. She credits the psychologist Silvan Tomkins for clarifying this priority when she writes, “Common sense holds . . . that the drive system [of Freudian psychoanalysis] is the primary motivator of human behavior, to which the affects are inevitably secondary. Tomkins shows the opposite to be true: that motivation itself, even the motivation to satisfy biological drives, is the business of the affect system” (20).
37 In Depression, Cvetkovich includes a caveat about her use of the term “affect” that neatly captures my own approach to this conceptual domain. She writes, “I tend to use affect in a generic sense, rather than in the more specific Deleuzian sense, as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways (whether as distinct specific emotions or as a generic category often contrasted with reason)” (4; Cvetkovich’s italics).
38 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 21. Cvetkovich does something of this kind when she draws on Cornel West’s formulation of “black sadness” to theorize a “political depression” grounded in ongoing traditions of anti-black racism. Rather than attending to processes and structures through which the injustices of the outside world become edifices of one’s inner life, Cvetkovich emphasizes the ways in which feelings such as cynicism, “crankiness,” and anti-sentimentality may be read as part of the texture of racism itself. She argues that a “rich vocabulary of affective life” is cultivated in the “strange but ordinary situations created by racism,” providing an “important vantage point” from which to view a diverse and suggestive range of “modes of political response” other than “activism on the streets” (Depression, 125).
39 Warren, So Black and Blue, 13. This theme recurs as a dominant concern within Reed and Warren’s Renewing Black Intellectual History and Warren’s What Was, as well.
40 In “Elbow Room,” McPherson indicates the editor’s comments to the author by using italics; I have eliminated the editor’s italics and have quoted conventionally by using quotation marks.
41 At the time of their meeting, the narrator describes Virginia as “a wounded bird fearful of landing with its wings still spread . . . in search of some soft, personal space to cushion the impact of her grounding” (McPherson, “Elbow Room,” 260).
42 Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 16.
43 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 679. Sara Ahmed offers a similar formulation when she describes racialized melancholia through the figure of “affect aliens”—discontent minority subjects who are “alienated through how [they] are affected by the world. . . . To be an affect alien is to experience alien affects—to be out of line with the public mood, not to feel the way others feel in response to an event” (Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 157).
44 In her brilliant exegesis of “Elbow Room,” Lubiano draws on Abdul JanMohammed’s critique of colonial literary traditions to show how McPherson’s fictional editor takes on the role of the civilizer, assuming as his duty the domestication of the narrator’s unwieldy content. What the editor presents as an ideologically neutral commitment to aesthetics—particularly, the conventions/norms of realism, linearity, and closure—Lubiano reveals as the disingenuous imposition of “a form that pretends to be disinterested” in order to cultivate the myth of its own, universal truth. Form, here, “is an analogue for the idea of Western civilization and its ideology of beauty and morality.” It is the instrument of a dominative will to paint the world through a singular story about “the privileged and the objects of their largess” (“Shuckin’ Off,” 168, 178).
45 The language of “hearing” and “feeling” the “frequencies” of racialized experience is borrowed from Muñoz’s “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” in which he conceptualizes racialized affect as “descriptive of the receptor we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt” (Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” 677).
46 Randall, Rebel Yell. Further citations to this work are given in text. Though beyond the scope of the present chapter, it is worth noting that Andrea Lee has written her own, curious twenty-first-century rejoinder to Sarah Phillips. Her short story “The Prior’s Room” re-stages much of the plot from the first chapter of Sarah Phillips (“In France”), but this time the part of the ingénue is played by a girl of Irish, Polish, and Filipino descent. In a familiar progression, Anna is an American teenager studying at Lausanne who begins a casual affair with an unlikeable French boy. The affair is built on mutual exoticization and youthful curiosity about sex, but where Sarah’s relationship culminates in an ugly, racist insult and a compulsion to return home, Anna is gifted a pair of expensive jeans at the end of her brief liaison. Indeed, the story ends in analepsis, as a forty-something Anna recalls this long-ago lover as a “generous and benevolent [gatekeeper] to the world that has become hers” (Lee, “Prior’s Room,” 241).
47 See, e.g., Murray, “Time of Breach”; Warren, What Was; Awkward, Philadelphia Freedoms; Edwards, Charisma; and Patterson, Exodus Politics.
48 Browning, “Alice Randall Courts Controversy.”
49 This quotation comes from a long section in Rebel Yell that Randall has italicized to distinguish it from the rest of the text. I have chosen to eliminate the italics and quote it conventionally using quotations marks.
50 Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 17.
51 Ibid.
52 Freud writes, “It is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244).
53 Adam Phillips, Beast in the Nursery, 123.
54 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, 24. I borrow this phrase from Phillips, who uses it to speak more specifically about dreams—a classic register of symptomatic “speech.”
55 Ibid., 68.
56 Ibid., 78–79.
57 Ibid., 75.
58 Sedgwick describes a similar movement of shame, whose precision is informative. Imagining an audience to the embarrassing acts of “an unwashed, half-insane man,” she writes: “I pictured the excruciation of everyone else in the room: each looking down, wishing to be anywhere else yet conscious of the inexorable fate of being exactly there, inside the individual skin of which each was burningly aware; at the same time, though, unable to stanch the hemorrhage of painful identification with the misbehaving man. That’s the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality” (Touching Feeling, 37).
59 Elsewhere in the scene, Randall writes, “You hate the fact that he has fucked and you haven’t. You hate the way he swaggers through a world of grown folks and strands you in a world of children” (Rebel Yell, 362).
60 Jones, Corregidora, 103, 102.
61 Warren, What Was, 9.
1 Mat Johnson, Pym, 159, 8.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Indeed, the entire novel may be read as an homage to Morrison, who devotes a chapter of her inquiry into “whiteness and the literary imagination” to an analysis of Poe’s Narrative. Therein, she declares, “No early American writer is more important to the concept of African Americanism than Poe,” and through her reading of Poe, she proposes to chart “a critical geography . . . to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World” (Playing, 32, 3). Chris Jaynes signals his indebtedness to Morrison on the very first page of the novel’s main text, when he discloses his course title, “Dancing with the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind,” and his subsequent voyage enacts something much like an intellectual adventure charted geographically (Mat Johnson, Pym, 7).
4 Mat Johnson, Pym, 23.
5 Ibid., 39.
6 Ibid., 108, 160.
7 Ibid., 35, 83, 29n, 39.
8 Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, xv. Johnson’s novel was originally published by Indiana University Press, where his editor was John Gallman. It was subsequently re-printed by Grove Press in 1984, and by Plume in 1995.
9 Charles Johnson, “Interview” by Little, 232.
10 Keizer, Black Subjects, 48.
11 To be sure, Oxherding Tale is neither the first nor the only literary comedy about slavery, and although the comedic strain represents a minority trend among contemporary narratives of slavery, it is prevalent enough to constitute a recognized sub-genre. For a fascinating study of this topic, see Carpio, Laughing.
12 Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, 118. Further citations to this work will be given in text.
13 I borrow this phrase from Stanley Crouch’s review of the novel, originally published in 1983 in the Village Voice (Crouch, “Charles Johnson: Free at Last!” 273).
14 Ottenberg, “Symbols and Ordeals.”
15 Mitchell, Freedom to Remember, 21.
16 Morrison, Beloved, xviii.
17 Byerman, Remembering the Past, 107.
18 Keizer, Black Subjects, 72.
19 Byerman, Remembering the Past, 10.
20 My cursory definition of allegory borrows from Angus Fletcher’s major study of the narrative mode. He writes, “In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’ When we predicate quality x of person Y, Y really is what our predication says he is (or we assume so); but allegory would turn Y into something other (allos) than what the open and direct statement tells the reader.” In a note, he elaborates, “Allegory from allos + agoreuein (other + speak openly, speak in the assembly or market). Agoreuein connotes public, open, declarative speech. This sense is inverted by the prefix allos. Thus allegory is often called ‘inversion’” (Fletcher, Allegory, 2, 2n.)
21 Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 253. Kelley’s discussion of contemporary allegory’s tensile use of pathos further illuminates Johnson’s narrative technique. She argues that contemporary allegory in particular is a double-voiced enterprise that works by yoking pathos to abstraction. In order to maintain credibility, she says, “allegory needs what ancient rhetoricians called pathos, the strong feeling that justifies exaggerated, even monstrous, figures” (9).
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Keizer, Black Subjects, 64.
24 See Hayward, “Something to Serve”; Keizer, Black Subjects; Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives; and Retman, “Nothing Was Lost.”
25 Hayward, “Something to Serve,” 697.
26 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3.
27 Hartman writes, at the outset of Scenes of Subjection, “Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned—slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the constitution of humanity in slave law, and the fashioning of the self-possessed individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle” (ibid., 4).
28 Rushdy, e.g., opines that Evelyn’s account of literary influence and her professional developments “reads like his [Johnson’s] own roman-a-clef” (Neo-slave Narratives, 181).
29 Charles Johnson, “I Call Myself an Artist,” 19.
30 Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, xiii.
31 Retman, “Nothing Was Lost,” 429.
32 Freud, Uncanny, 124.
33 Ibid., 143.
34 Freud writes, “The process of repression is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expenditure of force, and if this were to cease the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure” (“Repression,” 151).
35 Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination, 103; Byrd, Charles Johnson’s Novels, 94–95. For additional interpretations of the centrality of Buddhism and related Eastern philosophies in Oxherding Tale, see Gleason, “Liberation of Perception”; and William Nash, Charles Johnson’s Fiction.
36 Jonathan Little notes that
Reb’s aesthetics are taken from a central parable from the “Inner Chapters” of Chuang Tsu’s writing, a fourth-century B.C.E. Chinese Taoist. These influential chapters show Chuang Tsu “anticipating Zen Buddhism and laying the metaphysical foundation for a state of emptiness of ego transcendence.” In this exchange, Prince Wen Hui’s cook talks about his aesthetic techniques in carving an ox. Prince Wen Hui admires his cook’s skill and mastery of his art. The cook tells the prince that “when I first began to cut up oxen, I saw nothing but oxen. After three years of practicing, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. I now work with my spirit, not with my eyes. My senses stop functioning and my spirit takes over.” (Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination, 93)
37 Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives, 190; and Keizer, Black Subjects, 68. For additional feminist and anti-racist critiques of Andrew’s claims to moksha, see also Hayward, “Something to Serve”; and Hussen, “Manumission and Marriage?”
38 In a similar reading, William Gleason has aligned Oxherding Tale’s narrative project with Johnson’s well-documented calls for “a broadened literary outlook that embraces (to quote Clayton Riley) the ‘entire world—not just the fractured world of American racism and psychic disorder.’” With particular attention to Johnson’s assimilation of Zen philosophy, Gleason argues that “Oxherding Tale attempts what Buddhists call opening the ‘third eye,’ or what Johnson sees as the final aim of serious fiction: namely, the liberation of perception” (Gleason, “Liberation of Perception,” 705). For Johnson’s essayistic elaboration on this literary ideal, see Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight.”
39 Hayward, “Something to Serve,” 701, 697.
40 Keizer uses this phrase to describe Minty in Black Subjects, 64.
41 Retman, “Nothing Was Lost,” 432.
42 Storace, “Scripture of Utopia.”
43 Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, 31.
44 Morrison, Paradise, 306. Further citations to the work are given in text.
45 Hilfrich, “Anti-Exodus,” 330.
46 Lipsitz, Time Passages, 213.
47 Lipsitz’s re-imagining of Foucaultian “counter-memory” offers a fitting theoretical frame for Patricia’s notebooks. He writes:
Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story. Counter-memory looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. But unlike myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past. . . . Counter-memory focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience. (Ibid.)
48 Storace, “Scripture of Utopia.”
49 Menand, “War between Men and Women,” 79.
50 Dobbs, “Diasporic Designs,” 113.
51 Edwards, Charisma, 178.
52 Jessee, “Contrapuntal Historiography,” 105.
53 Hilfrich, “Anti-Exodus,” 330.
54 Storace, “Scripture of Utopia.”
55 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation, 23.
56 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 348–349.
57 Friedman, “Return of the Repressed in Women’s Narrative,” 142. I borrow this phrase from Friedman’s description of the Freudian hermeneutic for dream analysis. She writes, “Beginning in determinacy, his method ends in indeterminacy. Dreams have ‘authors,’ ‘intentions,’ and ‘meanings’ to be decoded, he affirms. But their ‘overdetermination’ necessitates an unending ‘overinterpretation,’ in infinite regress of interpretation that ultimately leads to the threshold of mystery” (Friedman’s italics).
1 Gates, Figures in Black, 14.
2 Alexander, Black Interior, 7.
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Morrison, “Site of Memory,” 71.
5 My phrasing here borrows from Kevin Quashie’s gorgeously realized monograph, in which he argues that “the inclination to understand black culture through a lens of resistance . . . practically thwarts other ways of reading.” Beyond resistance, Quashie advocates for the idiom of “quiet,” which he presents as “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears.” Quiet, he elaborates, should not be confused with apolitical, since “the interior could be understood as the source of human action—that anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and capacities of our inner life” (Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 4, 6, 8).
6 Best, “On Failing,” 454.
7 Cheng, “Psychoanalysis without Symptoms,” 92.
8 Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 4.