The Voice, The Body, and "Letting it all Fly": Neo-Slave Narratives and the Discursive Framing of Urban America

Abstract

The Voice, The Body, and "Letting it all Fly"Neo-Slave Narratives and the Discursive Framing of Urban America Leila Kamali (bio) This essay explores the role of voice and embodiment in the claim to citizenship made in contemporary narratives addressing conditions of state surveillance in urban America. I discuss Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father (1995), hip hop/spoken word piece "Return to Innocence Lost" (1999) by The Roots featuring Ursula Rucker, and Louis Theroux's television documentary Law and Disorder in Philadelphia (2008). I read these texts as contemporary variants upon the neo-slave narrative. Each of these texts makes acute commentary upon conditions of state surveillance and the policing of the black body in ways that bear comparison with the practice of narrative "framing" that historically formed the site of the slave narrative's production. Just as "(Neo)Slave narratives emerge from the combative discourse of the captive as well as the controlling discourse of the 'master' state," what I call "voice" emerges against the dominance of what Toni Morrison identifies as a "statist language" which is "censored and censoring [and] cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, [or] fill baffling silences" (James xxii; Morrison). Voice is defined here, in part, by way of Kamau Brathwaite's "nation language," as a black nationalist strategy and a liberatory poetics, where "sound explosions" may form part of a distinctive interplay between reported speech, silence, bodily contortion, and inarticulate sound (Brathwaite 13). Voice thus reflects some dysfunction in a surveillance society, as it works within the compromised relationship with speech and the body that is shaped by surveillance and its insidious entry into individual interiority. Speech, and even self-knowledge or interiority, I suggest in this essay, are made especially difficult for those who lack privilege in the context of the surveillance state, a parallel to the situation of the slave in the slave narrative. In the classic slave narrative form, the narrative account is usually "verified" by the white patron or publisher, so that "These formal attestations present . . . the black narrative voice to the imagined audience, [and] the patron will claim that the narrative voice, if not identical, is a credible approximation of the ex-slave's speaking voice" (Phillips 52). Citizenship exists then, in the context of the slave narrative, as a problem of articulation where "the clash of voices, between the well-intended prefatory or appended attestations of abolitionists about the author's integrity (or indeed his or her intelligence) and the voice of the slave subject, can be . . . clearly overheard" (Davis and Gates xii). Milette Shamir shows that the persona articulated by the slave narrative was constructed wholly according to the desires and definitions of an abolitionist publication framework and readership, and that the slave narrative's very legibility depended upon a virtual erasure of "individual interiority": [End Page 137] The slave narrative . . . exposed privatized stories and introduced embodied voices into the public sphere, but, in order to authorize and authenticate these stories and voices, it filled the space of individual interiority with performative, conventionalized narratives of socially-defined identity. The black private self constructed by the abolitionist narrative was wholly alienable, an object for public consumption, fully legible and ultimately safe. (Shamir 137) In this process, individual interiority as Shamir describes it becomes subject to a network of contradictory impulses: the "privatized" is at once "exposed," and the "embodied voice" is at once "authorized." The site of interiority, where the subaltern subject might speak her own feelings, is rampantly colonized by the abolitionist narrative process. In the texts discussed below, the possibility for the black individual to be represented as "legible" and "safe" exists more than ever in contemporary society as a sly means of policing the black body; the surveillance mechanisms of the state, experienced with a particular intensity in urban contexts, perform the same functions of invasion, dehumanization, and control of the individual's interiority as do the framing of the slave narrative. As individual interiority is shown in the chosen texts to be violated by a surveillance culture akin to the governing structure shaping the slave narrative, I identify in this essay a discursive territory that...