Trumping the House that Race Built: Deracinating 21st-Century American Politics

Abstract

With the shock election and subsequent inauguration in 2017 of its 45th president, Donald Trump, America appeared to go into mourning. Propagating discriminatory and divisive sentiment and instituting an exhaustive list of retrograde and repressive policies, Trump’s administration augured what political pundits viewed as national extinction. Yet, in eliding how African Americans in particular have historically lived, constantly and constitutionally, with the fear or threat of death, the apocalyptic populist discourse disseminated primarily by mainstream, white society has initiated within black communities a counter-discursive, restitutional cultural populism that risks similarly hierarchical and exclusionary, separatist iterations. Motivated by Judith Butler’s analysis in Precarious Lives of the exclusory mechanisms of national melancholia and influenced by (re)visionary contemporary black feminist theory and poetics, this essay first interrogates, in what are read to be variant but converging strains of populist discourse, who and what makes for a ‘grievable life’? Through a close reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the essay demonstrates how its inspired articulation of African American slave life proffers a necessary lament for a disremembered past and dead black subjectivity and culture that at the same time revives in the present and for the future a broader, more inclusive, alternative vision and ontological idiom. In this way, the novel creatively expresses (particular and universal potential for) what is lost in the current moment – responsive and responsible, transhuman modes of being (and becoming) in the world.