Upheavals in Black Thought

Abstract

Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called “the position of the unthought.” This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to “include” blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the additive approach through which, for instance, black and brown stripes were recently added to the redesigned rainbow flag (Campbell 2019: 82–87). Even in inclusionary or additive gestures, race often serves either as an analogy to sexuality or as a past historical social struggle (aka. “the civil rights movement”) upon which the LGBT movement now builds (Johnson and Henderson 2005: 4–5). As recently as 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005: 220) could remark how the archive of queer theory remained predominantly white, Western, and canonical, despite the emergence of queer of color scholarship. In the past two decades, an emergent field of Black queer and trans studies has continued to address this blind spot, but its recurrence in queer studies as a field must by now be attributed to something deeper than ignorance.1This recurrence, I have argued elsewhere, suggests that Black and Queer may not operate as “equally actualized signifiers” but instead depend upon a process of occulting of the Black. In order for “queer” to become visible, following Lacan's account of metaphor, “black” must be occulted, or hidden, in the chain of signifiers (Nyong'o 2008: 98–99). Three recent books help us think through this complex interplay of blackness and queerness and offer new avenues of possible redress. They each do so with distinct methodological approaches and disciplinary commitments, and they arrive at different conclusions. Even their sense of audience differs, making the task of reviewing them together less a summing up of a particular academic field than an articulation of tensions roiling underneath the disciplines and interdisciplines. Our present conjuncture—in which Black trans* and queer lives are politically central to the practice of Black revolution in previously unimaginable ways—justifies the usefulness of thinking these texts together. And while only one author under view, Amber Jamilla Musser, addresses her text extensively to the development of queer theory “proper,” all three books hold great significance for the improper and heterodox itineraries for queerness that are found in Black and/or Black feminist histories and futurities.Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a landmark work of the historical imagination that centers the unruly and anarchic lives of Black girls and women at the turn of the twentieth century. This is a period sometimes known as “the Nadir” in Black history (1877–1923)—a time when the backlash against emancipation and reconstruction led to Jim Crow laws, virulent white supremacy, and lynching. It is a period that students often learn through the stories of charismatic Black male leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and his rival Booker T. Washington. Black women leaders such as anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who spearheaded the African American women's club movement, also figure prominently. Wayward Lives acknowledges these leading figures (Du Bois in particular), but comes at the period from a different angle. Here Hartman, a scholar known for her scouring critiques of acts of archival recovery, turns to a technique she terms the “close narration” (xiii) of the lives of ordinary girls and women who migrated to Philadelphia and New York City from the South. Reading both with and against the archival grain, close narration highlights the continuity between the violence done to her subjects and the historical records through which she must access them.In order to produce a text that can center their desire to live life on their terms rather than as either respectable race women or obedient drudges, Hartman refuses the conventions of standard historiography. As such, the book defies easy summary, and the most I can hope to do in this review is encourage you to read it in its entirety. Close narration enables Hartman to re-narrate history in ways that decenter the most famous and recognizable figures in order to ask new questions about those who remain present but anonymous in the historical record and to notice those whose unrealized ambitions did not make their errancy any less real. And she also poses crucial questions about history itself, at times turning to a kind of ficto-criticism to do so. For instance, she fabulates the well-known story of Gladys Bentley, the legendary bulldagger blues singer, as “Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux” (the legendary early Black film director). She remaps the sexual geography of the city from the vantage point of the lesbian chorine Mabel Hampton, who aspires to become a concert singer but ends up offering her services on the infamous “Bronx Slave Market” of Black female domestic day laborers. And in the final section of the book, the chorus itself becomes a space of Black queer feminist narrative possibility, as their movements in concert on stage, in cabarets, and in close historical narration constantly test the limits of an anti-Black world. By rearranging and defamiliarizing the historical record, Wayward Lives is itself a beautiful experiment in freeing us up from our dependence on linear temporalities of progress, completion, and/or recovery.While a momentous work of cultural history, Wayward Lives also resonates in our moment because of the way it brings together blackness and queerness at the site of a revolution in ordinary life. By deemphasizing the narratives of social reformers, soapbox radicals, and official ideologies, Hartman reimagines the history of anarchism and queer refusal as a quotidian practice spontaneously adopted by these Black girls and women who simply willed their lives to be otherwise. In a short, credo-like chapter, Hartman (227–28) defines this waywardness: Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis of the dispossessed. . . . To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. . . . It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.In passages like this, Wayward Lives speaks directly to our own moment, as the best history always does. In offering up a history of the present, it redefines concepts like mutual aid, fugitivity, opacity, and queer wildness in Black feminist terms.2Another text that centers Black feminist genealogies in queer theory is Musser's Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (full disclosure: I am a coeditor of the series in which this book was published). Like Hartman, Musser is deeply invested in the wayward and insurrectionary potential of feminine desire. But where Wayward Lives adopts a close narration (or counternarration) of archives meant to police, expose, and regulate Black women's bodies, Sensual Excess employs feminist and psychoanalytic theory to launch a series of provocative readings of contemporary art. At the center of Musser's concern is a reappraisal of the body/flesh distinction in the work of Hortense Spillers and of Spillers's (2003) influential theories of the pornotroping of Black women's bodies. Whereas some readers have taken Spillers as arguing for absence or lack as constitutive of Black sexuality (emphasizing her account of slavery acting to ungender the Black body), Musser argues instead for a reading of the pornotrope as leading to sensual “excess.” Musser deploys the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance in order to interrupt the popular belief that pleasure derived from this excess fulfills or satisfies the subject, rather than dividing it from itself. At the same time as the excess that is jouissance undoes theories of blackness as lack, brownness for Musser serves a means of “expanding the parameters” of the pornotrope “beyond blackness” (7). Here she joins other queer of color critics in arguing for the value of Black feminist theory for reading Asian, Latinx, and other racialized peoples’ lives, moving “away from theorizing blackness as the space of negation by positioning it in relation to multiple forms of brownness” (8).3 Subsequent readings of Black and women of color artists expand upon the multiple dimensions of queer femininity that are manifested through the particular ways blackness and brownness expose histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide.Musser's (7) detailed readings demonstrate the manner in which Black and brown queer feminine jouissance creates “inhabitations of the pornotrope” theorized by Spillers. The first two chapters directly engage inhabitations of the pornotrope through extended readings of yonic imagery in the work of Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas. Musser's work here offers a heterotopic rereading of the feminine body, showing how labial feminist artwork often castigated as essentialist (or trans-exclusionary) is in fact engaged in a process of corporeal reterritorialization. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to performances of listening and witnessing in the work of Cheryl Dunye, Xandra Ibarra, and Carrie Mae Weems, while 5 and 6 veer toward considerations of automaticity and aggression, respectively, in the work of Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan. With impressive sweep, Musser in each case combines close description of the aesthetic maneuvers of these artists with rigorous revisions of the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance by way of a feminist account of these artists’ work. She concludes the book with a riposte to both the Lacanian neglect of the mother's desire and queer femininity's relative silence around the figure of the maternal.Even as Sensual Excess seeks to expand the parameters of the pornotrope without abandoning its grounding in Black feminist theory, the book also intervenes in the calcifying debates over “pleasure” versus “criticality” in readings of racialized sexuality. Those critics who argue against accepting lack as the condition of blackness are often accused in return of uncritically celebrating pleasure. (And to be sure, there are some who do indeed see Black pleasure as reparative or healing in a direct way, but this is not the case with any of the authors under present review.) Pushing this debate beyond the pleasure principle affords Musser new opportunities for rendering the affect and aesthetic of what she calls the brown feminine. It also affords a timely opportunity to reconsider Audre Lorde's writings on the erotic, of which Musser is among our most able contemporary critics. A return to Lorde is warranted, Musser persuasively argues, less to recuperate pleasure in sensuality and more to redress the overly self-conscious break with prior women of color feminisms that the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s effected. Reclaiming a Black socialist lesbian feminism discarded as too essentialist during the heyday of poststructuralism, Sensual Excess invites us to think with the surface and textures that queer feminism continue to afford aesthetic and erotic experimentation.In a telling coda, Musser (172–73) even revives the contested figure of the mother, arguing that a queered motherhood has been central to her book all along: “To think the mother as a place, not a void, works toward a framework of generativity, fleshiness, and sensuality. Black and brown mothers have haunted the pages of this book, sometimes appearing and sometimes absent, but always hovering. . . . This is not about producing the maternal as homeland, but about reaching toward the black and brown maternal as horizon.” The jouissance of the Black mother is so frequently rendered as monstrous in the anti-Black imagination that citing examples seems fruitless (although a return to Hartman's Wayward Lives might provide one useful inventory). And while the final book under review here swerves sharply away from the inclusionary gestures of queer of color critique instanced in Musser, it shares with her text a powerful conviction that the Black body (and flesh) is a continuous shock to thought.Calvin L. Warren's Ontological Terror brings together the historiographical and theoretical concerns of the above two books with its focus on the ontology of antiblackness. On an initial approach, Warren could be counted among those critics for whom blackness must be theorized through negation and lack. In his work, the very word being, in relation to Black people, can appear only under erasure, as being. The very notion of freedom, for Black people, can only appear under the double negation “is not.” As with other critics working in an Afropessimist frame, Warren argues both that anti-Black racism is a permanent feature of modernity and that appeals to Black humanity, suffering, and/or hope only intensify this bleak condition.4 Rather than pessimism per se, Warren's book foregrounds nihilism, a term rich with philosophical controversy. Ontological Terror can be read both as a defense of Black nihilism in the face of gratuitous violence and as a carefully wrought argument about how anti-Black violence works. Its combination of theoretical rigor and interrogation of legal, political, scientific, and visual archives place it squarely in conversation with contemporary debates in Africana philosophy. Of the multiple threads Warren pulls together, I will focus here on his treatment of Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics (at the risk of some simplification), because it provides a useful entry point into some of the central claims of the text.For Warren, the free Black “is not” because “being” is a crucial attribute of humanness, and it is precisely the humanness of the Black that is refused by modalities of power in the modern world (both under slavery and during its afterlives). Heidegger conceives human being (dasein) as a world-building and tool-bearing animal. But because the human builds his, her, or their world by reducing the slave to a tool, Warren argues, no act of mutual human recognition can be forthcoming between the human and the slave. Instead, the human must reduce the slave to a worldless thing: a tool. The free Black, the “slave without a master,” is nothing to the white man (Berlin 1974). Warren accepts that Black people exist and inhabit the world (13) but denies that this existence adds up to the sort of being that grounds “metaphysical schemes of political hope, freedom, and humanity” (172). Rather than inveigh against this logic as a calumny against Black humanity, Warren aims to destitute it through a Heideggerian Destruktion. In a section titled “Chief Justice Roger Taney: Ontometaphysician” (76–87), for instance, Warren destructs the language of the notorious Dred Scott decision, not in order to retrieve the human rights that Taney's decision travesties but in order to argue “the absurdity that any right could ever change the formulation of black existence as nonexistence” (85). Following Taney, the freed or emancipated Black is not a proto-citizen ready to join human society but, as a now-broken tool, becomes newly visible in its brokenness as an insoluble problem for civil society.In a chapter titled “Catachrestic Fantasies,” Warren delivers one of the most elegant destructions of anti-Black nineteenth-century visual culture in the recent critical literature. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon, David Marriott, and others, he argues for the significance of the free Black body as a site of fantasy projection in which Black being is characterized by white supremacy as a site of continuous malapropism and category collapse. This chapter is a contribution to debates on troping (and stereotyping) insofar as it focuses on the contrastive mechanism of catachresis: the misapplication of a word to describe something that would otherwise go unnamed. Where stereotype discourse presumes the repetition of a familiar trope, catachrestic fantasy intimates the disturbance of the anti-Black imaginary from within. Free blackness is this unnamed thing: it is not troped or stereotyped, it is the site of perpetual and structural misrecognition.I am summarizing all too quickly, but the nihilistic, existentialist, and at times even mystical gist of Ontological Terror should already be apparent, as should its departure from the more Hegelian account of the master-slave dialectic preferred by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy (1993) and Susan Buck-Morss (2000). Rather than a struggle to the death and consequent bid for mutual recognition, for Warren there is only “ontological terror”—a title that we must take in a double sense to indicate both the terror Black people felt at the gratuitous violence we faced before and after emancipation and, crucially, the ontological terror the anti-Black imagination experiences in encountering Black being as an inexplicable nothingness that somehow is. Here, I believe, is a crucial contribution of this book to the Afropessimist polemic: its positioning of the anti-Black human as terrified. Warren (9; emphasis added) writes: A mentor once asked me a terrifying question: why are blacks hated all over the world? Stunned, I remained silent, but the question remained with me. . . . We can call this hatred antiblackness: an accretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated. Put differently, antiblackness is anti-nothing. What is hated about blacks is this nothing, the ontological terror, they must embody for the metaphysical world.The rhetorical doubling of terror in this passage, as something experienced by Black people and, at the same time, something caused by our existence, returns me both to waywardness as “errant path” and to “feminine jouissance” as that which splits, rather than consolidates, the subject of “pleasure.” In making this observation, I am not papering over the distinctions and even disagreements among these critical positions. Instead, I am aiming to complicate the either/or thinking that has increasingly come to characterize Black critical theory, particularly in its encounter with queerness (an either/or binarism that, to be absolutely frank, can so often take a gendered dynamic).On one hand, sexuality and libidinal economy are decisive to post-Fanonian Black critical thought. Warren (149), for instance, draws on Fanon when he develops a reading of the Black (or Negro) “as the phallus of the Lacanian phallus for the human”; that is, as “a nonsensical sign buried deeply within a global unconscious.” Visual fantasies of Black bodies, considered in these terms, will be necessarily catachrestic: violent, violating, and anomalous. On the other hand, such a turn (or return) to phallocentrism, even a phallocentrism ostensibly placed under the erasure of dark occulting, is what then supplies Warren with an argument against critics such as Musser and Darieck Scott (2010), who he maintains locate Black agency in the masochistic pleasures afforded by such a libidinal economy. In a passage that equates such masochism with pleasure, Warren (198; emphasis added) argues: “I, however, do not find agency within masochism—pleasure is no more a strategy against antiblackness than voting or metaphysical romance. Pleasure reaches its limit when the body is literally destroyed, and pleasure in destruction just produces a dead black body. Antiblackness is not moved by black death or deterred through black pleasure.”Aside from noting the perhaps unwilled appearance of jouissance in this passage (pleasure reaching its limit), aside from noting also the appearance of his own critical method (pleasure in destruction aka Destruktion), I also want to signal the difference feminism makes to the assumptive logic of reading libidinal economy as phallocentric. What Musser describes in Sensual Excess (37) as the “challenge of thinking economies of racial violation in conjunction with those of gendered vulnerability” is not a plea to “deter” theories of antiblackness through recourse to sexual pleasure. Nor is it accurate, again, to equate accounts of feminine jouissance with retrievals of agency (more nearly, they serve as the very sort of double and triple negation that Warren elsewhere favors). Musser (39) points out that psychoanalytic feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray have labored intensively to disrupt “this logic of choice and agency.” Feminine jouissance, as Musser posits it (38), is not a recourse to uncritical pleasure, but a means of asking why “the problem of the animated, black consumable body is not framed as being applicable to the problem of phallocentrism.” At least on my reading, this is a question that Ontological Terror also proposes to pursue.The implications of this review essay, it will have been noticed, bear relevance to the larger stakes of queer theory as it continues to wrestle with the antirelational thesis, and to Black studies in its ongoing engagement with Afropessimism. The parallel that some see between Afropessimism and the antirelational thesis is not one that Afropessimists would necessarily accept, since queerness (insofar as it pertains to the domains of gender and sexuality identity or subjectivity) could be construed as a human matter, and when it comes to the matter of blackness, it is still a case of “no humans involved” (Wynter 1994). Without pretending to settle these important and ongoing debates, two points might be briefly hazarded in conclusion. First, notwithstanding their asymptotic theoretical arcs, there may still be a value in lingering in the negativity of both the Afropessimist and the antirelational standpoints, precisely in order to bring to the surface all the ruses through which oppositional and “wayward” life is continuously seduced back under the purview of neoliberalism. And second—as I would hope this review has made a point of stressing all along—it would amount to an act of negligence to erase or sideline Black feminist debates over gender, sexuality, liberalism, terror, citizenship, and the human, insofar as they inform both Afropessimism and queer theory.Whether we are reckoning with the psychoanalytic “death drive” or a more sociological “social death,” in recent years critical negativity has assuredly served as a needed jolt out of complacency wherever it still lingered. At the same time, it remains the case that the faith in exposure such “strong theory” holds, to borrow the durable insights of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003: 133), does not always do justice to the very communities of struggle they speak to. This is less a matter, I think, of clinging to hope, pleasure, or agency as rhetorical postures, and still less a matter of suturing the gaps in the symbolic order of antiblackness. It is more a question of recognizing the archive of Black queer feminist refusals as mattering (or, to follow Zakiyyah Iman Jackson [2020: 39], as mater-ing) to the destruction of the human order of metaphysical representation.In her Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde extends an invitation into such mat(t)ers of Black lesbian feminist refusal when she writes: “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?” (quoted in Smith 2020). While overcoming the terror of death is impossible, as Warren suggests, taking critical pleasure in the thought of a “we” made possible by collective refusal ought not be. As Hartman suggests at the end of Wayward Lives, “The Chorus Opens the Way” (345).I would be the last to deny that there is a difference in theoretical idiom and perhaps even political commitment apparent across our current debates over negativity and refusal. But there may not necessarily be two static camps: one camp devoted to nihilistic criticality and the other hopefully attached to sensuality and affect. Even if it would make it easier for many of us if there were.