National Fantasies about the Self

Abstract

National Fantasies about the Self Rebecca Wanzo (bio) In my last exchange with Lauren Berlant, they asked me if I had read Patrisse Cullors's memoir written with asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist (2017). It was one of those out-of-the-blue messages you might get from Lauren about a book, art exhibit, film, television show, or in recent years, comedy routine, that you might find intellectually generative. And Lauren, queen of the "hated archive," negotiator of the pleasures and irritations of high, middle, and low, always saw that texts engendered something for someone. 1 We often did not agree on what that was, but the conflict was part of the pleasure, and much of the use. It took me some time to see a way to diverge from Berlant's ideas, as their ideas on sentimentality and citizenship were the scaffolding upon which I began to build an understanding of how so many fictions about the US, particularly fictions about the self, were constructed. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture are meditations on how white subjects integrate discourses of victimization into citizenship narratives, and how the phantasmagoric constructs of ideal intimacies shape possibilities for everyone else. Over two decades after its publication, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City has a breathtaking explicatory force when examining conservative discourses of subjection. Berlant describes the "rage at the stereotyped peoples who have appeared to change the political rules of social membership," and a "desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal, an order of what was felt to be a general everyday intimacy that was sometimes called 'the American way of life'" (2). Patrisse Cullors and Black Lives Matter are changing the rules. But their stories of suffering are often discarded because they challenge lies about the American Dream. Cullors learned early on that Black children are outside of what Berlant called "infantile citizenship models"—representations of the nation's innocence and futurity in which young white bodies become signs of the nation's future goodness. In contrast, Black children "become the thing that's no longer cherished," and a "thing to be discarded" (Cullors and bandele 25). If Tamir Rice was "out of time" at twelve, it was because he was born out of sync with his space, one riddled with cultural ghosts depicting white male violence as innocence and Black existence as inevitable villainy ( Cullors and bandele 28). Berlant's origins as a nineteenth-century literary scholar informed their observations of how subjected people of color were often the peripheral shadows to [End Page 5] contemporary frustrations with the absence of the promised "good life." Over the decades, Berlant's work on citizenship, sentimentality, and victimization shifted to discussions of precarity, perhaps reflecting how discourses of suffering remain central in mainstream politics but the troubled project of sympathy for subjected others does not. Donald Trump did not even vaguely gesture toward George W. Bush's facile "compassionate conservatism," but he did depict himself as a long-suffering victim. Slavery has remained a point of reference, but it and the Holocaust have become omnipresent referents for depicting white victimization. Berlant's work teaches us that there are always suffering citizens at the center of America, but in the twenty-first century, some people have skipped over recognizing the oppression of others, instead simply beginning with the narcissism always possible with the sentimental mode. But if Berlant's career began with interrogating the ways that "nations produce fantasy," they consistently focused over time on what it means when fantasies cannot be maintained (Anatomy 1). Even some of us who do not expect to be vulnerable to cruel optimism are. As Cullors explains, after the election of Donald Trump, she became angry "at her own naiveté" for not realizing "how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are" (246). Berlant's final book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, works through people living with failure and what often seems like the impossibility of living with others, and attempts to imagine some other way to understand...