Mungo Park's Artificial Skin; Or, the Year the White Man Passed

Abstract

There is no recognition without self-forgetfulness. --Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Between Cultures (1) I want to begin with two endings, or perhaps tellingly, question of ends. That one of these texts could be said to traverse borders of historico-philosophical moment we call Enlightenment (1799, Africa), and other to occupy a space still suffering its legacy (1952, Antilles), begins to suggest something of broad historical stakes of argument that follows, although my concerns are finally much local, intimate, improvisational. Both of privileged passages I begin with suppose a stark dichotomy between blackness and whiteness, and thus could be said to summon limit case of Duttmann's claim that recognition necessarily involves some form of self-negation, for each passage tacitly asks: What, and how much, need one forget in order to acknowledge an other? How do we ensure that recognition--and, by extension, self-forgetting--is a shared venture, securing thus an end to blackness and whiteness both? (2) THOUGH BY A CIRCUITOUS ROUTE An extended meditation on psychopathology of colonial recognition, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks ends with a strategic oscillation between rhetoric and negation, between questions that text answers by asking (Do I have to be limited to justification of a facial conformation?) and assertions that insist resolutely on what cannot be asked (I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from other). (3) tactic is designed in part to counter debilitating logic of colonial subjectivity that Fanon diagnoses in body of his text, whereby phobic structures of coloniality arrest any promise of reciprocity at border of black skin: accordingly, often oracular style of Black Skin's conclusion strives to hold open alternative modes of thinking subject in and of history. Pleading that the tool never possess man, Fanon offers a now famous, and famously truncated, aphorism at text's end that eludes instrumentality of certain colonialist grammars: The is not. Any than white man (231). This instance of ungrammaticality turns on a generative break--an arrest somewhere between caesura and sentence, between dialectic of recognition and rhythms of being--and as such makes audible Fanon's constant imperative throughout Black Skin, White Masks to Listen. (4) Part of what resounds here is dangling promise of any more that must be heard otherwise, but one also hears what Homi Bhabha calls Fanon's writing to edge of things, a logic stalled somewhere between emergence and erasure and thus narrowly averting crushing objecthood of colonial interpellation (or, in Fanon's formative account, Mama, see Negro! I'm frightened!). (5) If earlier in Fanon's text black soul is the white man's artifact (14)--a projection woven ... out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories (111)--here, in stutter of enunciation is an unreclaimable version of negritude, one that resists facile categorization of what Fanon christens the epidermal schema (112). There is an intriguing correlative to Fanon's dislocating phrase a century and a half earlier, another moment of effacement that marks an end to narrative. When Scottish explorer Mungo Park emerges frail and beleaguered from African interiors at conclusion of his Travels in Interior Districts of Africa (1799), he is accompanied by his Negro benefactor, Karfa, and cluster of slaves that Karfa dutifully escorts to coastal ports. addition of African subject at end of Park's narrative is significant not simply because it complicates romantic image of intrepid and singular explorer, but because Karfa bears witness to narrator's reintegration into scene of colonial production. (6) After twenty-six chapters of Park's often meticulous proto-ethnographic account of Africa's indigenous cultures, Karfa's sense of wonder in presence of European improvements allows for a momentary reversal of narrative's general visual economy: observing improved state of our manufactures, and our manifest superiority in arts of civilized life, [Karfa] would sometimes appear pensive, and exclaim with an involuntary sigh, fato fing inta feng, 'black men are nothing. …