Frank B. Wilderson III is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the American Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

RED, WHITE & BLACK

Cinema and the Structure of U.S. AntagonismsBy Frank B. Wilderson III

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4692-0

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..ixIntroduction: Unspeakable Ethics……………………………………………1one The Ruse of Analogy……………………………………………………35two The Narcissistic Slave…………………………………………………54three Fishing for Antwone………………………………………………….95four Cinematic Unrest: Bush Mama and the Black Liberation Army…………………117five Absurd Mobility………………………………………………………149six The Ethics of Sovereignty………………………………………………162seven Excess Lack…………………………………………………………189eight The Pleasures of Parity………………………………………………200nine “Savage” Negrophobia………………………………………………….221ten A Crisis in the Commons………………………………………………..247eleven Half-White Healing………………………………………………….285twelve Make Me Feel Good…………………………………………………..317Epilogue…………………………………………………………………337Notes……………………………………………………………………343References……………………………………………………………….365Index……………………………………………………………………375

Chapter One

The Ruse of Analogy

THIRTY TO FORTY years before the current milieu of multiculturalism, immigrants rights activism, White women’s liberation, and sweatshop struggles, Frantz Fanon found himself writing in a post-World War II era fixated on the Jewish Holocaust as the affective destination that made legible the ensemble of questions animating the political common sense of oppression. The Holocaust provided a “natural” metaphor through which ontologists in Fanon’s time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, worked out a grammar through which one can ask the question, What does it mean to suffer? The Jewish Holocaust as “natural” metaphor continues to anchor many of today’s metacommentaries. Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on the Muselmann, for example, allow him to claim Auschwitz as “something so unprecedented that one tries to make it comprehensible by bringing it back to categories that are both extreme and absolutely familiar: life and death, dignity and indignity. Among these categories, the rue cipher of Auschwitz-the Muselmann, the ‘core of the camp,’ he whom ‘no one wants to see,’ and who is inscribed in every testimony as lacuna-wavers without finding a definite position.” Agamben is not wrong so much as he is late. Auschwitz is not “so unprecedented” to one whose frame of reference is the Middle Passage, followed by Native American genocide. In this way, Auschwitz would rank third or fourth in a normative, as opposed to “unprecedented,” pattern. Agamben goes on to sketch out the ensemble of questions that Churchill and Spillers have asked, but he does so by deploying the Jewish Muselmann as the template of such questions, instead of the Red “Savage” or the Black Slave: “In one case, [the Muselmann] appears as the nonliving, as the being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as he whose death cannot be called death, but only the production of a corpse-as the inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area. In both cases, what is called into question is the very humanity of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his privileged tie to what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death and life. The Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman.” In the historiography of intellectual thought, Agamben’s widely cited template of the Muselmann is an elaboration of Sartre’s work. As philosophers, they work both to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense which positions the German/Jewish relation as the sine qua non of a structural antagonism, thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological-and not just social-significance to the Jewish Holocaust.

Fanon has no truck with all of this. He dismisses the presumed antagonism between Germans and Jews by calling the Holocaust “little family quarrels,” recasting with this single stroke the German/Jewish encounter as a conflict rather than an antagonism. Fanon returns the Jew to his or her rightful position-a position within civil society animated by an ensemble of Human discontents. The Muselmann, then, can be seen as a provisional moment within existential Whiteness, when Jews were subjected to Blackness and Redness-and the explanatory power of the Muselmann can find its way back to sociology, history, or political science, where it more rightfully belongs.

This is one of several moments in Black Skin, White Masks when Fanon splits the hair between social oppression and structural suffering, making it possible to theorize the impossibility of a Black ontology (thus allowing us to meditate on how the Black suffers) without being chained to the philosophical and rhetorical demands of analogy, demands which the evidentiary register of social oppression (i.e., how many Jews died in the ovens, how many Blacks were lost in the Middle Passage) normally imposes on such meditations. The ruse of analogy erroneously locates Blacks in the world-a place where they have not been since the dawning of Blackness. This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy is not only a mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness’s grammar of suffering (accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also a provision for civil society, promising an enabling modality for Human ethical dilemmas. It is a mystification and an erasure because, whereas Masters may share the same fantasies as Slaves, and Slaves can speak as though they have the same interests as Masters, their grammars of suffering are irreconcilable.

In dragging his interlocutors kicking and screaming through “Fact of Blackness,” or what Ronald Judy has translated more pointedly as “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon is not attempting to play “oppression Olympics” and thus draw conclusions that Blacks are at the top of every empirical hierarchy of social discrimination, though that case has also been made. Having established that, yes, the Jew is oppressed (and, yes, the Black is oppressed), Fanon refuses to let the lived experience of oppression dictate the terms of his meditations on suffering. “The Jew,” he writes, “belongs to the race of those [who] since the beginning of time have never known cannibalism. What an idea, to eat one’s father! Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger…. in my case everything takes on a new guise. I am the slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.”

Two tensions are at work here. One operates under the labor of ethical dilemmas-“simple enough one has only not to be a nigger.” This, I submit, is the essence of being for the White and non-Black position: ontology scaled down to a global common denominator. The other tension is found in the impossibility of ethical dilemmas for the Black: “I am,” Fanon writes, “a slave not of an idea others have of me but of my own appearance.” Being can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness. The visual field, “my own appearance,” is the cut, the mechanism that elaborates the division between the nonniggerness and slavery, the difference between the living and the dead.

Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present through some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks cannot reach this plane. Spillers, Fanon, and Hartman maintain that the violence that continually repositions the Black as a void of historical movement is without analog in the suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive. The violence that turns the African into a thing is without analog because it does not simply oppress the Black through tactile and empirical technologies of oppression, like the “little family quarrels” which for Fanon the Jewish Holocaust exemplifies. Rather, the gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, “wiped out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on which they are based.” Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them.

This violence which turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say fungible) for any subject. As such, “the black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” or, more precisely, in the eyes of Humanity.

How is it that the Black appears to partner with the senior and junior partners of civil society (Whites and colored immigrants, respectively), when in point of fact the Black is not in the world? The answer lies in the ruse of analogy. By acting as if the Black is present, coherent, and above all human, Black film theorists are “allowed” to meditate on cinema only after “consenting” to a structural adjustment. Such an adjustment, required for the “privilege” of participating in the political economy of academe, is not unlike the structural adjustment debtor nations must adhere to for the privilege of securing a loan: signing on the dotted line means feigning ontological capacity regardless of the fact that Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form. It means theorizing Blackness as “borrowed institutionality.”

Ronald Judy’s book (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular and his essay “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity” critique the Black intelligentsia for building aesthetic canons out of slave narratives and hardcore rap on the belief that Blacks can “write [themselves] into being.” Judy acknowledges that in such projects one finds genuine and rigorous attention to the issue that concerns Blacks as a social formation, namely, resistance. But he is less than sanguine about the power of resistance which so many Black scholars impute to the slave narrative in particular and, by extension, to the “canon” of Black literature, Black music, and Black film:

In writing the death of the African body, Equiano[‘s eighteenth-century slave narrative] gains voice and emerges from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity. It should not be forgotten that the abject muteness of the body is not to not exist, to be without effect. The abject body is the very stuff, the material, of experiential effect. Writing the death of the African body is an enforced abstraction. It is an interdiction of the African, a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without agency, without thought. The muted African body is overwritten by the Negro, and the Negro that emerges in the ink flow of Equiano’s pen is that which has overwritten itself and so becomes the representation of the very body it sits on.

Judy is an Afro-pessimist, not an Afrocentrist. For him the Negro is a symbol that cannot “enable the representation of meaning [because] it has no referent.” Such is the gratuitousness of the violence that made the Negro. But it is precisely to this illusive symbolic resistance (an aspiration to “productive subjectivity”), as opposed to the Negro’s “abject muteness,” and certainly not to the Slave’s gratuitous violence, that many Black scholars in general, and Black film theorists in particular, aspire when interpreting their cultural objects.

My claim regarding Black film theory, modeled on Judy’s claim concerning Black studies more broadly, is that it tries to chart a project of resistance with an ensemble of questions that fortify and extend the interlocutory life of what might be called a Black film canon. But herein lies the rub, in the form of a structural adjustment imposed on Black film scholars themselves. “Resistance through canon formation,” Judy writes, must be “legitimated on the grounds of conservation, the conservation of authenticity’s integrity.” A tenet that threads through Judy’s work is that throughout modernity and postmodernity (or postindustrial society, as Judy’s echoing of Antonio Negri prefers) “Black authenticity” is an oxymoron, a notion as absurd as “rebellious property,” for it requires the kind of ontological integrity which the Slave cannot claim. The structural adjustment imposed on Black academics is, however, vital to the well-being of civil society. It provides the political economy of academia with a stable “collegial” atmosphere in which the selection of topics, the distribution of concerns, esprit de corps, emphasis, and the bounding of debate within acceptable limits appear to be “shared” by all because all admit to sharing them. But Judy suggests that the mere presence of the Black and his or her project, albeit adjusted structurally, threatens the fabric of this “stable” economy by threatening its structure of exchange: “Not only are the conjunctive operations of discourses of knowledge and power that so define the way in which academic fields get authenticated implicated in the academic instituting of Afro-American studies, but so is the instability entailed in the nature of academic work. That instability is discernable even in the university’s function as conservator.”

This academy-wide instability, predicated on the mere presence of the Black and his or her object, has three crisis-prone elements which Blackness, should it ever become unadjusted, could unleash. First, African American studies cannot delimit “a unique object field” (i.e., a set of literary texts, or a Black film canon) which threatens the nature of academic work, for Black studies itself is indexical of the fact that “the object field-that is, the texts-has no ontological status, but issues from specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics.” Second, these “specific historical discursive practices and aesthetics,” heterogeneous as they might be at the level of content, are homogeneous to the extent that their genealogies cannot recognize and incorporate the figure of the Slave. As a result, “interjecting the slave narrative into the privileged site of literary expression achieves, in effect, a (dis)formation of the field of American literary history” and, by extension, the field of Black film studies. “The slave narrative as a process by which a textual economy is constituted-as a topography through which the African American achieves an emancipatory subversion of the propriety of slavery-jeopardizes the genealogy of Reason.” Once Reason’s very genealogy is jeopardized then its content, for example, the idea of “dominium,” has no ground to stand on. We will see, below, how and why “dominion” is recognized as a constituent element of the Indian’s subjectivity and how this recognition enables partial incorporation.

A third point, however, proves just as unsettling, if not more so, than a crisis in the genealogy of Reason. For if Slave narratives as an object field have “no ontological status,” such that the field’s insertion into the field of literary history can disform not just the field of literary studies but the field of knowledge itself (the paradigm of exchange within the political economy of academia), and (dis)form the hegemony of Reason’s genealogy, then what does this tell us about the ontological status of narrating Slave themselves? This question awaits both the Black filmmaker and the Black film theorist. It is menacing and unbearable. The intensity of its ethicality is so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to be embraced, it can be seized by a significant number of Black artists and theorists only at those moments when a critical mass of Slaves have embraced this terror in the streets.

Normally, in moments such as the present (with no such mass movement in the streets), the “effect of delineating a peculiar African American historiography” seems menacing and unbearable to the lone Black scholar; and so the Black scholar labors-unwittingly, Judy implies-to adjust the structure of his or her own “nonrecuperable negativity” in order to tell “a story of an emerging subjectivity’s triumphant struggle to discover its identity” and thereby ascend “from the abject muteness of objectivity into productive subjectivity.” The dread under which such aspirations to Human capacity labor (a labor of disavowal) is catalyzed by the knowledge, however unconscious, that civil society is held together by a structural prohibition against recognizing and incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and so appears to be very much alive. Civil society cannot embrace what Saidiya Hartman calls “the abject status of the will-less object.” Explicating the rhetorical and philosophical impossibility of such an embrace, Judy writes:

The assumption of the Negro’s transcendent worth as a human presupposes the Negro’s being comprehensible in Western modernity’s terms. Put somewhat more crudely, but nonetheless to the point, the humanization in writing achieved in the slave narrative require[s] the conversion of the incomprehensible African into the comprehensible Negro. The historical mode of conversion was the linguistic representation of slavery: the slave narrative [or Black film and Black film theory]. By providing heuristic evidence of the Negro’s humanity the slave narrative begins to write the history of Negro culture in terms of the history of an extra-African self-reflective consciousness.

(Continues…)

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