Brathwaite’s concept of “nation language” reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s project in Borderlands/La Frontera: both are an attempt to forge new consciousness (the “mestiza consciousness” in Anzaldúa) and new aesthetics (Brathwaite’s “tidalectics”) that grapple with the history of colonization and the narratives white supremacy by encompassing and embracing the linguistic and political ingenuity made possible in opposition to those forces/conditions. Thus they are both borne out of very specific physical locations and histories – at sites of cultural confrontations and violence – while functioning very much “out” of or between place and time; Brathwaite is especially “deterritorialized” in his digital work.

For Anzaldúa, this means living not at the border, but in the borderlands – in a not-either and not-neither that nevertheless serves as a space that has room for both; for Brathwaite, it means working towards a “Creole way of seeing things” which relies on both hyper-local and hyper-global influences. The concept of nation language, writes Infante, is therefore not only “historically constituted but mutually constitutive, for if the vernacular localizes the cosmopolitan as part of its own self-constitution , unwittingly relocalizing what the cosmopolitan borrowed from it in the first place” (Infante 152).

Thus both Anzaldúa and Brathwaite are seeking to find ways articulate the tensions inherent in creating modes of expression truly either “outside of” or “in” one language, one place, vernacular, one tradition – or, for that matter, truly outside or inside the location of the body itself.  Moreover, that ambiguity – the both-and-but-not-either-neither – suggests the need to and ways of radical re-thinking.

The English of the Caribbean is, writes Brathwaite:

…in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions…not English, even though the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree. And this brings us back to the question …can English be a revolutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions. I think, however, that language does really have a role to play here— certainly in the Caribbean. But it is an English which is not the standard, imported, educated English, but that of the submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility, which has always been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean people… It may be English: but often it is an English that is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time (Braithwaite 311).

Likewise, says Anzaldúa, the mestiza – who speaks indigenous, Anglo, Mexican, and hybrid languages – develops “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity.” 

She also shifts between modes of perception: from “analytical reasoning, that tends to use rationality to move towards a single goal (a Western mode)”  to “divergent thinking, characterized by a movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective” (Anzaldúa 101). Like Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” then, which “primarily aims at countering the teleological or progressive linearity of Western culture” – the work of mestiza consciousness is to undermine and break down the dialectic itself, while still seeking the “wholeness and reintegration” (Infante 154) central to Brathwaite’s project:

That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is seperate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or seperate pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That element is a new consciousness – a mestiza consciousness – and…its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm (Anzaldúa 102).

“Citizen,” as we discussed in class, evokes ideas of the public: the language of the state, of the law, of rights, of equality. We might think of the concept of the public/private divide, for example, which undergirds those laws, and shapes the ways we talk about what it means to BE a “citizen,” or else the word might conjure up old lessons about the “body politic” – a group of private individuals, distinct from one another and nevertheless “one” by nature of their membership in the group, by their responsibility to one another and the (re) “public” itself.

Citizen complicates these meanings – these connections between words and between people – and examines how to, or whether we can, manage to function between them: between public/private, between the personal and the political, between “you” and “I.”

In an interview before the publication of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (which Rankine mentions in her own conversation with Berlant, as well as in the Guernica piece), Berlant talks about her own interest in these negotiations:

Mediation shapes experience and imaginaries. For me, the focus on mediation links the aesthetic and the normatively social. The investment in certain forms for providing the continuity of life goes some way to explaining the stickiness of some kinds of injustice, inequality, and energy-siphoning that structure so much of the reproduction of life.

That “stickiness” is so apparent in Citizen; it features a number of “sticky situations,” and, moreover, later, demands that we remain “stuck” in the “situation” videos – that we sit with, sit in, scenes of our own and other’s discomfort: having to sit at the table with the white men who you overheard making a racist remark, choosing to sit next to the black man on public transportation when you are told you shouldn’t. This proximity is intimate, though it involves the “public” self, and Rankine likewise points to the ways the self seen by the world – the self within the racially-marked body – intrudes into intimate spaces: in relations with friends, therapists, even with one’s self.

Rankine talks about these intimate, “unbearable” encounters (as Berlant puts it) in the Guernica interview:

I mean, I sometimes don’t move through them. My tendency is to want to say to the person, “Do you understand why I feel this way?” I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn’t go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can’t let it go. For good or bad.

The images in Citizen do the same: they interrupt the intimate space of reading, and this “break” functions as an opportunity for greater understanding. The artwork doesn’t resolve the text (they don’t say exactly what Rankine does) but carry the conversation beyond words; they undermine the “private” narrative momentum of the book itself in order to bring in other voices – to engage with the “public” in moments of reflection and solitude.

In a way, then, the images demand that we remain “stuck” with them, like Rankine remains in the “unbearable encounters” she and Berlant discuss – stuck at an impasse, because of being “stuck” together, and of having no option but to do so: “Intimacy is important in my work because I don’t understand existence without intimacy. All of us are dependant on other people – and in ways we don’t know.”  

The impossibility of becoming unbound to each other – of being free from the public, from our public selves, of being “unaddressable”¹ – demands that we learn not only to manage our discomfort but investigate it. “I see awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the world at the heart of what also binds people to the social,” Berlant writes. How do we negotiate between, and how do we remain attached to, “worlds and situations (and…ways of thriving within them) that are also quite toxic?”

It’s not a question that has an easy answer, or perhaps an answer at all – there is no “point” beyond the question itself, or point “beyond” the unease of our attachments: it’s the unease that clarifies. (“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by answers.”)² As Rankine says in the Guernica interview:

…Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It’s not arguing a point. It’s creating an environment. Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, “What’s your point?” With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want.

You can remain, in other words, stuck.

¹ Rankine quotes Judith Butler: “Our very being exposes us to the address of another… we suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness…is carried by our addressability” (p 49).

²  Rankine quotes Baldwin (p 115).

Hey y’all! Thought this might be of interest – the excerpts themselves, as well as the overview of its (non)publication history, which touches on a lot of themes familiar to this class: dialect and transcription, the writing economy, lost archives (ala Braithwaite) and “lost” histories, etc.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Lost Interview With One of America’s Last Living Slaves

Excerpt from Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston. In 1931, she sought to publish an important piece of American history – the story of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America.

Keizer, Alrene R. “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory.” PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 5, Special Topic: Comparative Racialization (Oct 2008). Modern Language Association.

I’m not sure if this is a direction I’m going to fully explore, but I am interested in the idea of the cultural “post-memory” of trauma, which comes from Marianne Hirsch in her writing on the Holocaust; here Keizer explores how that “post-memory” occurs in the context of blackness, and via the iconography of slavery in black visual and literary art– the“icon” being something Walker in particular plays with in her work and is always at play when it comes to the monument.

Bibler, Michael P. “The Flood Last Time: ‘Muck’ and the Uses of History in Kara Walker’s “Rumination” on Katrina.” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After (August 2010). Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies.

More on Walker: her 2006 Met show featured work in response to Katrina, and resulted in a “visual essay” called After the Deluge. There’s a ton here: Katrina as a sort of Biblical flood, caused by and exposing the sins of racism; razing and rebuilding as opportunity; how Walker’s “artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present…shows how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse ‘after the deluge’ of Katrina.”

(That show included Walker’s selections from the Met’s permanent collection, too –placing the cultural products of the past into a “current exhibition.” The possibility of re-contextualization is something that often comes up in the discussion of and controversy behind public monuments, and I’m also reminded of the Mel Chin collage in Citizen, here, as well.)

Not sure how to properly cite this, but there’s this (now pretty famous) speech by Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, on the city’s decision to remove its Confederate statues, and on the need for Americans to confront our racist past given that, well, the past ain’t even past.

Hoelscher, Steven. “Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2003).Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers.

This is an overview of how, following Reconstruction, white supremacy was re-established both geographically and ideologically, and there’s a lot of great overview of theories on the relationship between public environments and public memory and how they are constructed.

Leib, Jonathan I. “Separate times, shared spaces: Arthur Ashe, Monument Avenue and the politics of Richmond, Virginia’s symbolic landscape.” Leib, Jonathan I. Volume: 9 issue: 3. July 2001.

Going to need to find full access to this, but this is about Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA, which features statues commemorating the Confederacy and where, in the 1990s, proposals were made to erect some counter-memorials featuring prominent African-Americans. This led to a “debate over Richmond’s symbolic landscape centred on issues of race relations, identity and power in Richmond at the end of the twentieth century.”

Levinson, Sanford. “Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies.” Duke University Press, 1998.

Levinson writes about how nations and communities around the world use public monuments to shape visions of the future, particularly at sites of conflict.  They offer the opportunity, he writes, to consider the “political lessons” of the past – but is also quick to note how it is always those in power with the means to determine what those lessons are, and what the monument will be. He quotes Nietzsche on the idea of the “monumental” past, which provides continuity, which reminds me that I intend to revisit the Foucault from the beginning of the semester, too.

Jorgeson-Earp, Cheryl R. and Lanzilotti, Lori A. “Public memory and private grief: The construction of shrines at the sites of public tragedy.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 84, Issue 2 (1998)

Speaking of continuity: this discusses the impromptu memorials made by communities without the resources/materials/power to create an official “monument” and how they create a “meta-narrative” of the rituals of public mourning. The authors suggest that these shrines provide a sense of history – as on, they “make sense” of grief by placing it in the pubic narrative of history. I’m thinking of this in the context of the memorials being made to black men and women shot by the police – the memorials for Eric Garner, Saheed Vassell, Michael Brown.

Berlant, Lauren and Rankine, Claudia. “Claudia Rankine.” BOMB, No. 129 (Fall 2014), pp. 44-49. New Art Publications.

The cover image of Citizen is of the black hoodie, itself a kind of new “icon” of blackness (per above.) Here’s a conversation between Rankine and Lauren Berlant about Citizen. There’s a lot here that’s relevant, I think: they talk about maneuvering between public and private experience, spectatorship, etc. They bring up Kara Walker in this context and also white ignorance – of the privilege to live in space or time with a sense of ownership, without a sense of history or at least without discomfort towards that history. Thinking about the role the physical environment takes in this, and how to resist it: whether in the train scene in Citizen, or the sort of physical discomfort of reading Citizen itself, of “being in” the environment of the book: the starkness of the white pages, the way it is organized to “interrupt” itself, especially with images. I’m especially interested in what both Rankine and Berlant say about the function of the photo of a “Jim Crow” Rd.

Johnson, Joan Marie.“‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument.” Journal of Women’s History, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2005.

Again, I’m going to have to work on getting access to this article, but the abstract was just too fascinating/rich not to include considering my interest in Walker and her use of stereotype with the monument at the Domino Factory:

“In the early twentieth century, the institutionalization of disfranchisement and segregation and the surging popularity of the Lost Cause, a movement to honor the Confederacy, led African Americans who recognized the power of public image to attempt to take control over their public representations. This article examines the ways in which African American clubwomen rejected the message of African American contentment in slavery and continued inferiority implicit in a proposed monument to honor the Black Mammy in Washington DC, and, through the purchase and restoration of the former home of Frederick Douglass, negotiated an alternative public identity for African Americans that focused on African American history, heroism, and respectability. African American women wanted to turn attention away from their service in white homes to their lives in their own homes as wives, homemakers, and mothers.”

Campbell, Andy. “‘We’re Going To See Blood On Them Next’: Beverly Buchanan’s Georgia Ruins and Black Negativity.” Rhizomes, Issue 29, 2016. (permalink)

I’m looking into Buchanan’s work as a land artist – a movement we associate with the “monumental” but also primarily with the work of white male artists. I’d like to take a look at her work Ruins and Rituals, Marsh Ruins, and Unity Stones, discussed here, as an interesting example of an artist working within and in opposition to temporal and geographic location. (Her “shacks” are interesting, too, in terms of them being the opposite of monumental – i.e. unplanned, not made to last; again thinking of “Po’ Sandy.”) I’m particularly interested in Marsh Ruins: how they relate to the “muck” of history (see above) but also because they are in direct response to/conversation with a Confederate poem. More on Buchanan here and here; looks like I just missed a big exhibit on her at the Brooklyn Museum.

(Also, quickly: I’m reminded of the work Solange Knowles is doing now, which seems influenced by land artists – her use of empty space and color reminds me of James Turrell – but also places the black body (and black voices) center to, distinct from, or harmonious with, landscapes or structures.)

Here’s the piece I referenced today in class about the economics of freelance writing. Super interesting to think about this in terms of “Discourse Networks 2000” and how the breakdown of traditional publishing does and does not open up opportunities for writers. (There’s a narrative, I think, that the internet has “democratized” the media – how does this complicate that?)

And here’s the bit about Hearst and fascism. The idea of Mussolini writing for Cosmo is… something.

“Hearst was enamored with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini, first hiring him in 1928 to write about the fascist perspective on gender relations, which is exactly what you might think: “Man is in full possession of woman’s liberties, and measures them to her as a merchant does a piece of cloth,” etc. Mussolini faced backlash at the time, but Hearst still contracted him in 1931 for a monthly column in Cosmopolitan for $1 a word. That’s $15.66 per word today.

In the same year, Hearst also hired Adolf Hitler to write about current affairs from a Nazi perspective, though for much lower pay than Il Duce. According to Hearst biographer David Nasaw, the problem wasn’t his ideas, it was Hitler; he was an undependable writer who promised exclusives he failed to deliver.”

I wanted to pick up on Julia’s post about transcendence and the body, and about the idea of escape. Bigger is trying to escape – to take “flight” – but remains tethered to his location – not only to his neighborhood, but more fundamentally to his body, and thus to his blackness.

From Shawn Copeland: the body is no “mere object…with which we are confronted: always the body is with us, inseparable from us, is us.”¹ To have a body “marked” as black, then, is to be black; for Bigger, being black excludes him from being anything other than what he believes – and has been told – blackness to be. In Native Son, to be so bound to the body is to be burdened by it, and limited by it; it is to be inescapably “in” a place, and so without access to what we called in class the “meta-place of theory.” Hemmed in by the constraints of blackness, Bigger can neither transcend his circumstance nor reach “transcendence.”

Bigger experiences things primarily through physical sensations: his pulse raises, he sweats, his nerves feel on edge, he is hot or tense or turned on. But these drives, though experienced via the body, are not dictated by the body, by his body – they are responses to the world outside of it. Bigger’s actions are primarily re-actions, then; reactions, most often, to the proximity of whiteness and, in contrast, to his blackness. His physical desires are not wholly his own, and he is, over and over again, “made” to feel/to act. When he is squeezed between Jan and Mary in the car, for example, he feels “flushed with anger”: “He knew that they would not have cared if he made himself more comfortable, but his moving would have called attention to himself and his black body. And he did not want that. These people made him feel things he did not want to feel” (68).

Wright often uses the phrase “blot out” in describing Bigger’s fantasies; in the same scene, Bigger “suddenly wanted to seize some heavy object in his hand and grip it with all the strength of his body and in some strange way rise up and stand in naked space above the speeding car and with one final blow blot it out – with himself and them in it” (70). In “blotting out,” Bigger can access that “naked space”– the vantage point of the airplane, of the the space above. He does so via a kind of violent un-scription: he is able to “blot out” whiteness by blotting himself out, too.

Mary’s murder does, in some ways, allow Bigger to escape; it’s an act that condemns him, he knows, but it also makes him feel powerful, invincible, all-knowing – transcendent. His interest in Loeb and Leopold is interesting in this context: Bigger convinces himself that his ability to get away with murder proves him an kind of ubermensch. (This power also inspires in him a brief desire for action, a glimmer of ambition for authority: “looking at the black people on the sidewalks, he felt that one way to end fear and shame was to make all those people act together, rule them, tell them what to do, and make them do it.”) Still, he despairs: “But he felt that such would never happen to him and his black people, and he hated them and wanted to wave his hand and blot them out” (115).

This sort or erasure – of himself, of blackness, of whiteness – is achieved, for Bigger, in, on, and via the bodies of women, through his use of them sexually and through their destruction. Bigger smothers Mary and kills Bessie by beating her face in; he silences Mary, obliterates Bessie’s individuality, and eliminates the burdens their bodies represent. He “loses himself” in Mary – “he thought only of her body” – and in Bessie, too, in both their consensual encounter and her rape.

Coupled with her blackness, Bessie’s female body becomes for Bigger a kind of blank slate, a resource from which (and on which) he can draw: like the bodies of the “naked black men and women whirling in wild dances” (33) in Trader Horn, Bessie’s body is a location – a sea, a field – that provides Bigger the kind of non-space (if not the “meta-space”) into which he can “escape”:

“He felt two soft palms holding his face tenderly and the thought and image of the whole blind world which had made him feel ashamed and afraid fell away as he felt her fallow field beneath him stretching out under a cloudy sky waiting for rain, and he slept in her body, rising and sinking with the ebb and flow of her blood, being willingly dragged into a warm night sea to rose renewed to the surface* to face a world he hated and wanted to blog out of existence, clinging close to a fountain whose warm waters washed and cleansed his senses, cooled them, made them strong and keen again to see and smell and touch and taste and hear, cleared them to end the tiredness and to reforge in him a new sense of time and space.” (135)

Bessie’s body allows Bigger to re-orient himself in time/space and to re-enter and experience his body not in reaction the whiteness but in blackness. That he does so in violation of Bessie’s agency – at the cost, even, of her life – is a tragedy; perhaps there was an opportunity for Bigger to escape not out of but into his own body – through the power of the erotic, as Audre Lorde calls it, instead of through the power of violence.

The erotic, Lorde writes, has the potential to suggest what kinds of desires we authentically feel and to what kinds of people we want to be; it is a “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” she writes. “It an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”²  What might Bigger desire outside his relation to whiteness?* Who might he be without “being” black? And where might Bessie be, who might she be, had Bigger’s access to the “naked space” not been bound to the negation of her body – to its “blotting out”?

*the religious implications are interesting here, when it comes to the idea of transcendence through the body (ie. baptism, in the body of Christ) – see Reverend Hammond in “Fate.”

*I’m thinking about Bigger’s rejection of the narrative of racial uplift, the promise of school, etc. – the only other “vision” of blackness he’s offered, which is successful only in its approximation of whiteness. Wright’s own biography is interesting, here – his inability to escape blackness even after the success of Native Son and his move to Paris where “one could feel one’s soul.”

¹Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010. p 7.

²Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” from The Audre Lorde Compendium. London, UK: Pandora, 1996. p 107.

Full disclosure: I’m still working through what, exactly, the argument of my final project actually is. But I was struck by Claudia Rankine’s Citizen – and in it, by the reproduction of Mel Chin’s work “Black Angel,” in which the artist has taken images out of the encyclopedia and re-configured them into what appears to be a representation of a new kind of monument. This got me thinking; what, after all, is more inscriptive than a monument? How can, should, or might monuments be reimagined, reconstructed, or maintained? Though the monument is intended to stand against time – to actually be timeless, to seem inevitable, to a certain extent – they also always seem to evoke images of their own destruction – of ruin, of rubble; of change. Built (usually) to honor exceptional individuals, they nevertheless often have a kind of municipal mundanity; they can transform the public landscape, stand against it, or fade into it. As such, they are a reminder of the “constructed-ness” of our shared material and ideological environments and but also how easily, simultaneously, those conditions are naturalized.

I’m inspired by Rankine’s broad use of cultural moments, objects, voices, interactions etc. in drawing out the themes of her work, too, and I’d like to (if possible) approach my project using multimedia “texts” that are likewise, in some ways, far-ranging. There’s a lot of flexibility in terms of what a monument “is,” and so there’s a lot to touch on:

I am thinking about the recent controversies/demonstrations over Confederate statues, of course, and the new portraits of the Obamas in the National Gallery. I’m thinking about “Ozymandias” and “The Wasteland” and the canon as a monument, about the Gates reading and about the Black Arts movement.

There’s also the fact that, in the United States, many of our grandest monuments were built by slaves: I’m from Arlington, Virginia, where Robert E. Lee’s home still stands; like Jefferson’s Monticello, also in VA, and most of the monuments in DC, they utilize a neoclassical style that is intended to connect us to antiquity – to “our” (whose?) past – but were constructed by enslaved people from whom the connections to familial/cultural history were robbed. (What about “Po’ Sandy” in this context?)

Chin’s “The Specter of Urban Decay Rises from the Rubble,” from the same series as his piece in Citizen, reminds me of these graphs, which expose the segregation and discriminatory housing policy in neighborhoods with streets named after MLK (which function as a kind of monument, a physical manifestation of honor and remembrance). Then there’s the impromptu monument being made here now, on Utica Avenue, to honor Saheed Vassell, a man shot by police in my neighborhood, the quickly-gentrifying Crown Heights.

And I’m thinking a lot, a LOT,  about Kara Walker’s A Subtlety – its temporality vs its scale, the dignity of it, how (white) audiences responded to it and interacted with it, and how bodies, like monuments, can be (are rendered?) both strong and vulnerable under the weight of history, both hyper- and in- visible under the white gaze (see, again, Rankine, and the interplay between the mundane/everyday and the historical).

Some scholarly sources (obviously, a jumping-off point):

Ater, Renée. “Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments.” American Art, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 20-23. The University of Chicago Press.

Berlant, Lauren and Rankine, Claudia. “Claudia Rankine.” BOMB, No. 129 (Fall 2014), pp. 44-49. New Art Publications.

Daugherty, Ellen. “Negotiating the Veil: Tuskegee’s Booker T. Washington Monument.” American Art, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Fall 2010), pp. 52-77. The University of Chicago Press.

Kardux, Johanna C. “Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery Memorials in the United States and the Netherlands.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 2011), pp. 87-106. UC Santa Barbara.

Marcoci, Roxana. “Counter-Monuments and Memory.” MoMA, Vol. 3, No. 9 (Dec., 2000), pp. 2-5. The Museum of Modern Art.

Playing Conjure Tales “through” Chesnutt meant that my particular window seemed pretty narrow at times: I was nervous about the idea of speaking “for” him (or even “as” him), and so felt bound to my source materials – his own journals, letters, etc. – to an extent that might not have been the case had I played a character within the novel itself. As someone who is uncomfortable writing fiction in general, though – and play-acting, which is what it sometimes feels like – being able to rely on those texts also mitigated some of the anxiety I felt “performing” my role.

In another sense, playing Chesnutt meant that I could choose to open a number of windows: the historical Chesnutt was not only a writer, but an attorney, a teacher, a businessman, an activist – and all of these “roles” (as evidenced by the Sussman reading, in particular) influenced and were influenced by his writing. This meant that I could come at the game from a number of angles; even working as “the author” strictly within the text itself presented a lot of possibilities and raised a lot of questions: should I – could I? – stay faithful to Chesnutt as a historical figure, or as a narrator? Should I – could I? – speak to, or as, my characters? Should I create new ones? Could I involve new influences, new ideas?

Being anchored in Chesnutt’s own works/words was a good way in for me, but were I to play the game again I’d be interested in exploring more of these questions – I feel like it would have been a more generative creatively not only for me but could have added to/aided the game. (As the “author,” I felt weirdly responsible for the “plot” of the game and for the intratextual characters. There’s something there, though, about the lack of control a writer/artist has over his own creations – interesting especially in our discussions of minstrelsy in The Conjure Tales, and thinking about how the illustrations in Puck magazine – see Wonham’s “Playing Races” – changed the reading of some of Chesnutt’s other, earlier published work.)

I had some difficulty keeping up with the pace of the game (she says, posting two days late); I wished I had more time to research prior to the start of the game, or else could play for longer with more flexibility in terms on when the moves were due – which is basically how I dealt with that particular challenge, honestly: by excusing myself from the due dates. (I didn’t say it was a GOOD coping strategy!) I missed out on a lot of the interactive elements of the game due to this, which I really regret; I can see, now that we’ve got going, that that’s a lot of the fun of it.

Most of my criticisms/suggestions in terms of the interface we covered in our in-class wrap-up last week – though I’d mention, again, that I would have liked a more direct or more intuitive way to interact with my fellow players. The experience felt a bit isolating, especially at first; it was hard to know where to begin, and the initial moves felt a little like a shot in the dark. I think part of it is that in Ivanhoe you just have to “find your own way” – not only in terms of the role but also in that it’s hard to anticipate how other players are going to approach the game; this sense was exacerbated, I think, because it seemed like there was a lot of jumping between pages without a way to refer back to the game. When responding to a move, for example, you’d have to open your response in a new window if you wanted to look back at what you were replying to. I’m not sure, moreover, now that I’m thinking about it, that I would have chosen a chronological display of the moves – I don’t know if that’s a limitation on wordpress? – but I might have preferred them organized differently, more visually threaded in some way.

I had a few initial thoughts about the kinds of searches that might be fruitful, but once I started using the tools my ideas shifted – mostly because of confusion, even after playing around for a bit, over how best to use them. I’ve had a hard time figuring out what kinds of queries come up with visible results, not to mention notable ones; it’s been hard to figure out, too, whether the results look unremarkable because the search just wasn’t productive or because of a failure on my end to craft the search properly.

So, on to the queries: I thought it might be interesting to search for terms of ownership – my, mine, own, etc. – both in terms of the use over time – would those terms increase after the end of slavery? – and in what contexts they might appear. What do enslaved people “own” vs. free people “own”? And: how does an individual sense of self and agency come into play? i.e. – the usage of the word as in one’s “own” will, mind, etc., vs the use of “own” as something, someone, you physically have “possession” over?

I searched the main corpus; “my” was excluded from searchability, I think, as too common to be usefully tracked, but instances of “mine” stayed pretty steady. I searched “own” by itself and in conjunction with “self”; “self” stayed steady, while the use of “own” declined slightly. “Ownership” stayed rather the same (as distinct from “own” because it refers to the state of or claim to owning), as did “property.” “Possess” declined slightly, as did “possession.” I also searched “buy” and “bought” to no real result and then searched “sold” alongside “bought,” in all tenses. Pretty spikey, no overwhelming trends.

I will say that the the context tool was more useful: it seemed like there were very few instances, in general, of material ownership; instead, most had to do with things that people possess immaterially or of/“within” the body rather than outside of the “self” – terms like spirit, color, heart, etc. – not a lot of objects. I hoped that the “correlation” tool would turn up some interesting things but no results loaded.

Speaking of the body: I was also curious about whether or not there might be a difference between the corpus of women’s narratives and the general narrative in terms of the instances terms having to do with the physical body. What might that tell us about the distinctive ways men and women experienced slavery? I searched for terms like “body,” “blood,” “heart,” “skin,” etc. I thought that these terms might be used more figuratively in the general corpus and perhaps to refer more literally in the women’s corpus, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to compare them/ to do that.

Here I also ran into something that made me think about the idea of “distant reading” as counter to/rendering the idea of the “canon” outdated or irrelevant, or that a tool like Voyant might just be able to side-step all that, or at least make it more accessible. Because: in order to search effectively, you have to understand the ways in which the use and meaning of language develops over time. Words like “blood,” “heart,” etc., function differently (to us, euphemistically) within the context of Victorian sentimentality: though I was interested in bodies, searching for the word “bodies” didn’t turn up very much at all. I’d have to already be familiar with the literary conventions of the era to utilize these tools to any productive ends.

Finally, quickly: I also thought about searching for spikes in certain words around the dates of different legal gains – how does the ability to “shape” the nation via enfranchisement, for example, effect the way a person might “shape” his or her own narrative? How does the language of “citizenship” change or mutate? (I’m thinking, of course, of the “Colored Man’s Constitution” in Hager.) I was disappointed that I couldn’t search before vs. after a certain date; I’m sure there might have been a way – either technically, or through some creative combinations of terms or something – but I missed it.

I read the David W. Blight op-ed in the Times today and, funnily, I’d already been planning on engaging with what I found to be a kind of anti-neoliberalism – or rather, (more appropriately) some ambivalence about/critique of the eminence of the individual in the liberal tradition – in Douglass’ Narrative. We’ve talked about Douglass’ coming into a sense of self — the centrality of reading and writing to that process – and Douglass certainly uses the language of individualism to advocate for his own humanity and his own potential. The tragedy of slavery is not only that it fails the individual, however, or that it it excludes the enslaved person from that status altogether, but that it also represents a failure of – and an exclusion from – community, compassion, care: Douglass recognizes the real cruelty – and real malice – of being “let alone.”

Take, for example, how Douglass recounts the treatment of his grandmother after the death of the man that enslaved her (forgive the enormous block quote!) :

She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny.  And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old…her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!

What is framed as a “privilege” by the slave owners and is otherwise conceived of, in the liberal tradition, as a “right” – the right to autonomy, to self-sufficiency – is here made a mockery of: in the context of the slave system, it is revealed to be not only insufficient, but cruel; not freedom, but a death sentence. (I’m thinking of Douglass’ evocation, later on, of Patrick Henry’s famous utterance: “give me liberty or give me death!”) Notably, it is this experience, “more than another,” which for Douglass “served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery”: having witnessed and recounted many active forms of violence – beatings, rape, murder – it is nevertheless this act of not-doing that angers Douglass the most. (And inspires, I think, some of his most heart-rending –wrenching?– writing).

Likewise, Douglass remembers “Henny” – an enslaved girl who is known to be “helpless” and is resented and targeted by their master for that very fact. Recently-converted, Douglass’ “benevolent master, to use his own words, ‘set her adrift to take care of herself.’” Here, the absence of care³ exposes hypocrisy in the practice of liberal Christianity: “The outspread wing of American christianity, apparently broad enough to give shelter to a perishing world, refuses to cover us.” (My Bondage)

This is all to point out the ways in which Douglass was, as Blight writes, “both a radical thinker and a proponent of classic 19th-century political liberalism.” There’s much to think about, for the purposes of our class, Douglass’ familiarity with, mastery of, and belief in, this particular European tradition – how, and on what authority, this allowed him to be such “ferocious critic” of a country founded on those principles.¹ There’s lots to be said, moreover, about the ways in which the facts of Douglass’ life – his status as a “self-made man,” in both an ontological and material sense – track with the values of that tradition. But it seems particularly gross to me that conservative leaders would co-opt that narrative – an act that ironically un-”makes” Douglass as “self-made” man – in order to cast him “a radical for individualism, never concerned with “the interests of the collective” – when the Narrative* itself very obviously reflects such concerns. Douglass writes not only to liberate himself but to liberate others; he writes in relation to others – in opposition as an Other – but also in solidarity. This is true in the literal sense, within the text – as when he writes protections for his and his friends’ escape – but also motivation for writing the text itself: it is the means by which he might prove himself, and thus, his race.

This dual purpose – to hold himself as both exceptional/distinct and as representative of/ one of a kind– is evident.² But: he identifies himself strongly with his “fellow-slaves,” and at times the distinction between the individual and the group becomes unclear. “We were linked and interlinked with each other,” he writes:

We never undertook to do anything, of any importance, without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were one; and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our condition as slaves.

They attempt to escape together; in their capture, “our greatest concern was about separation.” Why, if Douglass is acting only in his own self-interest, should be the case?

I wonder, here, about the value and role of collective action – of the ways in which the mutual interests of individuals and of groups are made more possible through organizing, and through identification – through “rational sympathy,” to paraphrase a paraphrase of Wollstonecraft. “Their object in separating us was to hinder concert”; as I mentioned in the notes, this is the object, too, of the prohibition of reading and writing: not only might “a slave become a man” through writing himself  – i.e. develop “consciousness,” but, given the potential of reading and writing to connect individuals through space and time, to spread and weaponize it: to develop race consciousness, as well.

And, if we are to extrapolate from Douglass’ biography as well as his autobiography  –Douglass’ “fans” on the right certainly “take the liberty” (yuk yuk) – what to make of Douglass’ decision, despite great financial risk – and at the cost, moreover, of some of his closest personal/professional relationships – to start, of all things, a newspaper? Why is print so important? What can and does it do that lecturing cannot? What purpose does it serve? Who does it reach? Who is it for? And what does the concept ownership mean in this context?

…

¹ From My Bondage:

The fundamental principles of the republic, to which the humblest white man, whether born here or elsewhere, may appeal with confidence, in the hope of awakening a favorable response, are held to be inapplicable to us. The glorious doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities, human and divine.”

² Having escaped, eventually, on his own, Douglass is simultaneously grateful for and burdened by his “exceptionalism”; again, liberty and loneliness are linked under the conditions of white supremacy: “…the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren.”

³ I want to be clear, here, that I’m not suggesting that Henny was in any way “better off” being enslaved or that I’m advancing even a sliver of a Calhoun-ish “positive good” kinda trash – only that Douglass seems to recognize the malevolence of carelessness (pretty well illustrated these days).

*Noting here the ways in which autobiography collapses subject and author – the narrative of his life vs. The Narrative of the Life; the narrative as the object of his creation vs as his real and lived experience; himself as the author of the story, and himself in the story – the distance and overlap between them, as in Sartre’s “Why Write?”: how is this related to/ interact with DuBois’ “double consciousness”? And how is Satre’s “revealing” related (or not) to Foucault’s “geneology”?