Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction’s Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction

Abstract

“Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Anti-Race Fiction” explores through the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt a post-Reconstruction racial order’s more dispersed, yet more virulent attritional biopolitics of “slow violence” and argues that turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American writers turned to a speculative realism as a narrative strategy to give shape to the differential vulnerabilities, risks, and devaluations of black life within early modern racial capitalism. To trace out this unstoried history of slow violence, the essay first looks at W.E.B. Du Bois’s study of “Negro Health” in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and then turns for a more detailed narrative analysis to his ignored first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) to argue that Du Bois in his fictionalized account of his earlier economic study of the tenant farmers in Lowndes County, Alabama, re-imagines a repressed story of negro health by showing how a necropolitics of contamination cooperated with a neo-slavery of debt and foreclosure. After recovering Du Bois’s speculative realism, the essay then examines how the fiction of Charles Chesnutt worked both to circulate and overturn liberal anti-race fiction’s representational strategies. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a text haunted by a never quite fully named slow violence that is finally closed off in the novel’s healing image of racial sympathy through a colorblind vulnerability to disease and death. In contrast, Chesnutt in his earlier conjure tales (1899) speculates beyond this liberal protest narrative by turning to the time of conjuring, which in its accelerated injury, overlap of temporalities, and blurring of human and nonhuman agency invokes the unrepresented story of the New South racial capitalism’s slow violence.