Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic by Mark Christian Thompson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic by Mark Christian Thompson Jeff Fort Thompson, Mark Christian. Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 172pp. $34.95 paperback. Was Kafka black? The question startles, even more so than other, more empirical questions that have arisen about the Czech writer (such as: Was Kafka gay?—this being the title of a German newspaper article from some years ago). Thompson’s central question is not that blunt, of course, but it leads us to such a notion, and Kafka’s Blues provides a no less startling and convincing answer: Yes. In a way—indeed in multiple ways—we can say that Kafka was black. Or rather, to put a finer point on this deliberately provocative statement, and to do better justice to the remarkable thinking and scholarship on display throughout this book, we can say something like this: Kafka’s writing and artistry are deeply and extensively traversed by an engaged meditation on racial blackness, a meditation which is far from incidental, along with a constitutive becoming black or “becoming Negro”—as Thompson titles his first chapter, using the word one finds, in English, in Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene. The argument may provoke some resistance. Do the few mentions in Kafka of African, Afro European, or African American people, culture, and history add up to a serious preoccupation? While Thompson’s analysis builds on these mentions, in fact more numerous than one might think, it goes far beyond an assemblage of explicit references; nor is it limited to any claims regarding Franz Kafka’s self-conscious intentions or subjective attitudes. The blackness in question is ultimately defined less in empirical or subjective terms— though these certainly remain operative—than as historical, discursive, and structural formations. One could perhaps even call them, in a preliminary and qualified manner, transcendental, in a mode of the transcendental that is qualified (precisely) by the body. It is to this depth, by the end, that Thompson’s readings appear to take us. But they begin in each case, as they must, with Kafka’s texts. Perhaps aware of the possible skepticism his thesis might meet, Thompson carefully lays out the broad outlines in the first sentences of the book, worth quoting here as a concise overview: This book shows that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial blackness and in several instances metaphorically portray bodily transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the ‘Negro’—a term he used in English. Kafka’s thinking of racial blackness is integral to his work in terms of thematic progression and aesthetic form. Indeed, this book demonstrates that the creation of a work of art is, for Kafka, impossible without passage through a contextual and corporeal state of being ‘Negro.’ Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music, to evolutionary recapitulation theory and ethnography, to biblical allusion. (3) Interpreting and expanding on Kafka’s use of the word “Negro,” the name that Karl Rossmann gives himself when signing up for the “Nature Theater of Oklahama” (sic), Thompson draws this word through Kafka’s text like a powerful magnet, pulling toward it an unforeseen and coherent constellation of material. The chapter titles are strikingly minimal, showing the structural centrality of this heavily charged word; I list them here along with the German title of the text each one focuses on (Thompson always gives Kafka’s titles in German): “Becoming Negro” (“Das Urteil”); “Being Negro” (Der Verschollene); “Beyond Negro” (Die Verwandlung); “Negro’s Machine” (“In [End Page 141] der Strafkolonie”); “Negro’s Manumission” (“Bericht für eine Akademie”); “Negro’s Martyrdom” (“Ein Hungerkünstler”). While one may find some associations more immediately persuasive than others, the book becomes progressively more convincing with each chapter, as it places each of these major narrative works within the contexts most relevant to its concerns, while also drawing on pertinent passages from the diaries and letters. These chapters move from the biblical reference to Noah’s nakedness and the...