Abstract
In this article, I critically engage Stephen Best’s provocative text, None Like Us. The article agrees with Best’s general concerns regarding longings for a unified black community or a We before the collective crime of slavery. Yet I contend that melancholy, which Best associates with black studies’ desire to recover a lost object, can be read in a different direction, one that includes both attachment and wound, investment and dissolution. To think with and against Best, I examine Spike Lee’s School Daze in conversation with Freud, Benjamin, and Morrison.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
It announces itself in the assumption that in writing about the black past “we” discover “our” history; it is implied in the thesis that black identity is uniquely grounded in slavery and the Middle Passage; it registers in the suggestion that what makes black people black is their continued navigation of an “after-life of slavery,” recursions of slavery and Jim Crow for which no one appears able to find the exit . . . ” (Best 2018, p. 1)
While Best is sympathetic to “attempts to root blackness in the horror of slavery,” (Best 2018, p. 1) he worries that this reflexive move leaves black studies overburdened by history, tethered to a slave past that we assume is continuous with the present
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Thinking of an array of authors, such as Saidiya Hartman, Anne Cheng, and Ian Baucom, Best notices in this melancholy historicism a hidden desire to recover the past or what has been erased from history.
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