Representations of Whiteness in American Visual Culture from the Perspective of African American Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory
Name: Jenna Stivey 12160830 Course: Master Thesis Comparative Literature Supervisor: Daan Wesselman
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 1
Introduction 2
Chapter One: Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and Lynching Photography 10
Chapter Two: Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives, “Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel 25
Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”, “Grotesque Realism” and the Horror Film 40
Conclusion 60
Works Cited 65
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this thesis to my friends and family, who have supported me throughout the process. Also, to all of the teachers and students I have encountered at the University of Amsterdam this past year whose intelligence and passion have inspired me endlessly. I especially want to thank my supervisor, Daan, who has shown me patience and understanding and helped me to push myself and grow academically.
1 Introduction
This thesis is first and foremost led by the cultural objects I have selected. In them, I have observed a contemporary zeitgeist dedicated to representing whiteness, specifically in the
American context and born, I believe, from the increased racial tension in the United States.
Alejandro de la Fuente’s introduction to the 2017 special edition of Transitions responded to
Trump’s presidency, stating that ‘whiteness is the common denominator behind Trump’s support’ (3). Whether conservatively championed through overt racism within the increased presence of alt-right groups in America, or accepted and overlooked by those fortunate enough to be unaffected by policies that threaten the lives of women, people of colour and the
LQBTQ+ community, whiteness was ‘[t]he unifying and most consistent commonality among Trump voters’ (3). Though it may be an oversimplification to attribute whiteness as the fundamental basis of the motivations and causes of the current political climate in the
United States, Fuente’s inclusion of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the 900
“separate incidents of bias and violence against immigrants, Latinos, African Americans, women, LGBT people, Muslims, and Jews” following the first 10 days of Trump’s election
(3) points to a relationality stronger than correlation. This focus on whiteness, however, which calls into question its violence, privilege and pervasive invisibility has gained momentum in visual culture and my analysis of a collection of lynching photographs, a graphic novel and a film look at how representations of whiteness are mediated through different visual forms in a way that reverses, subverts, appropriates and unravels the historically traumatic and contemporarily perpetuated oppressive white gaze from the perspective of African American cultural trauma and collective memory.
Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (translation, 1967) draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan (1949 original, 1977 English translation by Sheridan) to express how the gaze relates to race and produces the racialized looking practices of white
2 domination and black subjugation. Lacan locates the “mirror stage” as an event in early childhood development whereby the image reflected in the mirror confirms and settles a sense of wholeness in the subject. According to Fanon, because blackness is visually different to whiteness, colonized black subjects are fixed by white subjects as “the Other” in a way that objectifies and dehumanizes the black body, fulfils the desire for wholeness in the notion of white identity and fragments the black subject’s conception of self. He states: “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating” (42). W. E. B Du Bois in the seminal text on African
American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, also thinks through this concept in his notion of “double consciousness”. The dominating white gaze, he argues, produces a meditated sense of self for African Americans as the process of “othering” under white domination conditions a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (8). That is, the external, racist conceptions of blackness in the United States under the “white supremacist gaze” (hooks, “Glory”, 50) puts into contention a unified sense of self for African Americans which leads to a negating fragmentation.
Michel Foucault conceptualizes the gaze as a function of knowledge and power whereby bodies are produced and regulated by systems of surveillance within the dominant structures of society (Discipline and Punish, 1977). bell hooks brings into conversation the psychoanalytical notion of the gaze with Foucault’s discursive understanding of its function and applies it to cultural representations of race in the United States. She thus locates the gaze and the control of images as fundamental in the formation, consolidation and maintenance of white supremacy and racial domination in the United States since slavery. And, because of this exercise of white dominance through the gaze and its realisation through representation, she argues that: [a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness” (345). In her book,
3 Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks outlines that her “thinking about representations of whiteness in the black imagination has been stimulated by classroom discussions about the way in which the absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group "the Other” (“Representing Whiteness”, 338, emphasis added). Here, what hooks addresses is the unacknowledged position of privilege that whiteness occupies and argues it is this lack of critical engagement with its hegemonic status that allows white supremacist structures to operate and exercise dominance. Crucially, she states that the absence of this critical attention means that white people are either resistant, or find it difficult, to comprehend the terrorizing representations of whiteness in the collective imagination of African Americans which “makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures…” (341). To represent whiteness in a way that attends to this collective African American perspective of terror thus works to recognize constructions of whiteness and white supremacy as they pertain to the longstanding infliction of African American cultural trauma. And, to produce, analyse and reframe images of whiteness in this way is to “…disrupt the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness”
(341), uncover repressed memories of its role in African American subjugation and cultural trauma, and interrupt contemporary structures of white supremacy which perpetuate the oppression of African American people.
hooks also emphasis the role of memory as important to unveiling and conceptualizing notions of whiteness as it equates to a “terrorizing imposition” in the cultural imagination of African Americans. She argues that “…we are always in the process of both remembering the past even as we create new ways to imagine and make the future” (5). I therefore draw on the field of “memory studies” particularly as it pertains to theorizations of collective and cultural trauma. This field of study finds its initial roots in thinking through the horrors of the holocaust as the aberrations it caused led to much ethically-based theoretical
4 discussions on how to represent such horrors which arguably defy the parameters of representation (Adorno: 1982; 1997, Lyotard: 1990). Though it emerged from this event,
Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory” suggests that these theories on trauma and memory can be applied to instances of collective and cultural trauma outside of the Shoah as he states that the era of decolonization shares a connection with the development of a public memory of the holocaust (7). Rothberg’s model pivots around
Richard Terdiman’s claim that “memory is the past made present” (quoted in Rothberg, 3).
Rothberg establishes that:
The notion of a "making present" has two important corollaries: first, that memory is
a contemporary phenomenon, something that, while concerned with the past, happens
in the present; and second, that memory is a form of work, working through, labor, or
action. (3-4)
The performative aspect of memory which he outlines emphasizes the “constructed side of our relation to the past” (4) as recollections are mediated through representations. This relates to concept of cultural trauma developed by Jeffrey Alexander who locates the attribution of collective trauma as a “socio-cultural process” which requires certain criteria to be fulfilled, such as determining the perpetrators and the nature of the pain, in order to productively deal with event(s) that induce “acute discomfort [in] the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (10). Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” also identifies the social production of memory based on the evidence that second and third generations belonging to a certain culture remember and identify with collective trauma even when they (historically speaking) have no direct experience of the event(s) (15-16). Ron Eyerman associates this with the cultural trauma of African Americans specifically and locates slavery as a “primal scene” (a term borrowed from psychoanalysis) by which African Americans collectively identify because its impact is felt through the reverberations of this trauma and continues to
5 define their “common fate”, especially seeing as the oppression of black people in the U.S in re-embedded in society’s contemporary white supremacist structures.
Given that memory and trauma are socio-culturally produced, I therefore situate my analysis of whiteness in the interactions between perspective, form and representation to see how its construction and position of privilege is interrogated through the lens of African
American collective memory and cultural trauma. The way trauma and memory is mediated through representations of whiteness in the objects I have selected contend with the ways that white supremacy continues to affect African Americans and thus provides the opportunity to critically address and interrupt the systems within which white supremacy operates. Rothberg draws on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the screen to explain how representations can mediate memory in a way that offers spectators/viewers the opportunity to suture themselves into the traumatic memories of other collective/cultural groups by projecting individual histories/memories/identities in a potentially productive way through empathy. Alison
Landsberg uses the term “prosthetic memory” to analyze how the representation of memories that one has no direct experience of can be adopted and incorporated into our own concepts of trauma and history from differently situated perspectives. She notes that this vision, which is rooted in empathetic potential, is perhaps utopian, but I would insist that the objects I analyze do navigate viewers through alternative narratives of whiteness which set up a dialectic between white supremacy in the past and present and trace the structural oppression of African Americans implicit in the continuation of white privilege. From this perspective, white spectators/viewers in particular can develop critical ways of recognizing and regarding their positions of privilege and thus revise and contest the systems which uphold this position.
It is worth mentioning that trauma and victimization does not speak to the totality of
6 black experience in America, by any means. However, as hooks states, it is because whiteness still carries with it the constant threat of terrorization to African Americans that it is crucial to engage in readings of whiteness from the perspective of African American collective trauma. Representing and interrogating whiteness through this lens is thus not a palliative response to the historical and ongoing trauma embedded within African American collective experience but a productive act which interrupts structures of white supremacy in a potentially transformative way.
In the first chapter, “Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and Lynching
Photography” I will be look at how James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) creates a frame from which to look critically at the role of the oppressive white gaze in consolidations of white supremacy and its traumatic affect on black subjects. It represents and (re)members the part played by spectatorship in substantiating notions of white supremacy by focussing on the circulation of the photographs. The collection interrogates the role these viewing practices played in forming a collective identity in white
(usually Southern) communities and draws attention to how spectatorship thus provides another form of trauma. I rely on theories which outline the relation between looking practices (including spectatorship and photography), representation and trauma from critics such as Marianne Hirsch (1999), Susan Sontag (2003) and Barbie Zelizer (1998). I also draw on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies” (2004) to look at how the circulation and exchange of the photographs, which is made explicit in Allen’s archival framing, worked to shape and consolidate notions of white supremacy by accumulating the affective value of hate through the repeated act of spectating violence against the black body. I have made the conscious decision to not include any of the photographs in this paper precisely to avoid this act of violent spectatorship. I do, however, think that analysing Allen’s collection is an important task seeing as the racialized looking practices it presents are still in many ways
7 implicit in the ways race is ‘looked at’ in the present.
In Chapter Two, “Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives, “Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel”, I analyse representations of whiteness in Mat Johnson and Warren
Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery (2010, reprinted as a new edition in 2018). I look at how the generic tropes of the African American literary tradition of the passing narrative, which plays on the visibility and invisibility of race, are expressed through the graphic novel form. I draw Jeffrey Alexander (2004) and Ron Eyerman’s (2001) understanding of cultural trauma as a sociocultural process which is mediated through representation and use the notion of collective memory as a performative act of generational transference, led by the theories of
Marianne Hirsch (1999), Ellen Fine (2001), Eva Hoffman (2004) and Victoria Aarons and
Alan Berger (2017). I look at the way citizenship and national identity is expressed as a process of Othering and negation in a uniquely visual way in the graphic novel form from the perspective of African Americans. I follow Lauren Berlant (1997) and Michael Warner’s
(1992) theoretical understanding of citizenship as it pertains to forming norms and delineating bodies based on race in the public sphere, and also reference Sara Ahmed (2004) to highlight how Incognegro expresses this as a traumatising experience for African
Americans who are not given the full status of citizenship. Drawing on Sinéad Moynihan
(2015) alongside cartoon theorist Scott McCloud (1994) I see how the superhero narrative in subverted in Incognegro through alternative visual and discursive framing and also apply the notion of “prosthetic memory” (Alison Landsberg, 2004) to show how this reframing forms new public narratives and memories of whiteness that extend the African American representation of whiteness as terrorizing (hooks, “Representing Whiteness”, 341) beyond the locale of the collective to a wider viewing/reading audience born from an empathetic potential.
8 In “Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”, “Grotesque
Realism” and the Horror Film” I analyse the representation of whiteness in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017). Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “grotesque realism” (1941 original, 1993 translation by Iswolsky) alongside Michael Rothberg’s (2009) multidirectional model of memory, I look at how satire is used to critique and unravel whiteness from the perspective of African American cultural trauma. The film expresses the experience of terrorization at the hands of white supremacy within the framework of horror and uses grotesque absurdity to communicate the way micro-aggressions, fetishization and cultural appropriation forms African American experiences of trauma and a warranted suspicion of whiteness. I follow Harry M. Benshoff (1999) and Noël Carroll (2000) to look at how the film intersects the generic conventions of horror and humour through the lens of African
American collective memory and draw on Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” (1981) to analyse the way this constellation creates new memories and perspectives out of itself and puts the past and present forms of African American oppression into conversation. Peele’s film satirically casts white, middle-class liberals as ‘body-snatching’ monsters against the quotidian backdrop of suburban American to communicate the way that white people operate under a guise of seemingly good intentions. In doing this, Get Out points to the everyday and accumulative occurrences of trauma induced by the unacknowledged privilege position of whiteness and, through unsettling comedy, situates the viewer in the African American perspective of white people, white spaces and white supremacist structures as always potentially threatening. The film makes the viewer ‘do the work’ of memory recall and thus exercises the multidirectional model of memory to re-embed new narratives of whiteness that are both productive and potentially transformative.
9 Chapter One: Framing Whiteness: Spectatorship, “Postmemory” and Lynching Photography
Stef Craps in his seminal text, Postcolonial Witnessing, addresses the theoretical difficulties in understanding racism within the field of trauma studies. He states that, ‘[u]nlike structural trauma, racism is historically specific; yet, unlike historical trauma, it is not related to a particular event, with a before and an after’ (32). The formation of African American identity in the United States had to contend with the historically specific collective trauma of slavery. Until the addition of the 13th and 14th amendments to the constitution, black people in America were legally objectified as property and their humanity was contested. However, though the addition of the 13th and 14th amendments abolished slavery and legally recognised black people in America as human with (a conditional) right to vote, the cultural legacy of slavery continued to oppress African Americans as racism was deeply embedded in
American culture, not only limited to the cultural imagination (a hatred of African Americans by white Americans) but also exercised through institutional means. Inequality and oppression continued to define the lives of African Americans via the Plessy vs Ferguson
(1896) ruling1 which formed the notion of “separate but equal” during the reconstruction era and in this period, white people in (mainly) the Southern states carried out the abhorrent act of lynching on African Americans, almost exclusively without persecution. As bell hooks observes, this cultural and institutional racism still forms the conditions of African Americans in the present and results in the representation of whiteness as “terrorizing in the cultural
1 The Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) ruling has never been directly overruled but the Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) ruling was the first to legally overturn conditions of segregation. For a close reading of the case, see: Lofgren, Charles A. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
10 imagination of African Americans” (“Representations of Whiteness”, 341). And, what the current Black Lives Matter movement in the United States tells us is that this institutional violence against African Americans at the hands of law enforcement and the justice systems is not a historically specific form of oppression but, rather, is still very much prevalent in the structures of American society2.
I take James Allen’s disturbing collection of lynching photographs, Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) as my object of analysis in this chapter and look at the ways in which the archive that presents contemporary audiences with the violent acts of lynching precisely to remember how constructions of white supremacy were formed and consolidated by violent acts against African Americans which continue to perpetuate their cultural trauma and collective memory. Allen’s archive frames the photographs in such a way as to show how they circulated and exchanged amongst white communities to form an identity out of this violent spectatorship through the inclusion of material evidence such as stamps and etched messages. The violence against African
Americans that is depicted in the photographs is remembered by African Americans via a collective conceptions of whiteness as terrorizing and trauma inducing. However, this violence is largely repressed and disassociated from notions of whiteness by white people themselves (hooks, “Representations of Whiteness, 342). Thus, the collection addresses the historical and structural trauma of racial domination over black Americans and locates the
“white supremacist gaze” (hooks, “Glory”, 50) as its source by framing the spectatorship of violence against black bodies as a crucial factor in forming white supremacy.
2 Christopher Lebron gives an account of the Black Lives Matter movement in great detail, analysing both its historical roots and contemporary concerns. Lebron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea. Oxford University Press, 2017. Print.
11 Originally curated for an exhibition and later published as a book Without Sanctuary attests to the traumatic history of violence against African Americans exercised through the dehumanization of blackness under the white gaze and consolidated by technological looking practices (photography). According to Lacan, the subject cannot exist without the Other and thus the gaze is an objectifying strategy to define the self. Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White
Masks, draws on the lacanian theory of the gaze to explain that the lived experience of black subjecthood exists in negation to whiteness (90). Photography functions as an extension of the gaze, or, as Susan Sontag argues, can be its ‘predatory weapon’ (14). In lynching photography, the viewer (photographer) captures the traumatic event of violence enacted upon the black body both as an indexical reality and as a symbolic objectification and violation (Sontag, 14). The photograph turns the single event into a spectacle and becomes a rhetorical example of white supremacy through consumption amongst a wider audience. In line with Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, they function as an object shaped by an accumulation of shared hatred toward the black Other through their circulation. In gathering these traumatic photographs and photo postcards in a contemporary collection,
Without Sanctuary risks reproducing the trauma induced by the white gaze by increasing spectatorship. However, as a project of rhetorical reframing, the collection does provoke a reflection on what it means to look at these photographs, particularly as a white person, and comments on the dialectical relationship they share with racialized looking practices in the present.
Theorists W.E. B Du Bois (1903) and bell hooks (1992) accounted for the violent
Othering of the white gaze in the consolidation of white supremacy and the trauma this inflicted on black subjectivity. hooks explicitly states, in relation to the oppressive white gaze that negates black subjectivity, that “[a]ll black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness”
12 (345). This not only speaks to the enduring resistance black people in America have had to develop in order to reclaim the right to look and negotiate the racialized looking practices that have historically formed and terrorized their lived experience, but also points to a distinct lack of recognition on behalf of white people to contend with their gaze as able to inflict this kind of terror and negation. Richard Dyer’s seminal contribution to the field of whiteness studies during the 1990’s states that, ‘[a]t the level of representation…whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race’ (9). Thus, to confront the image of whiteness as a white person does not produce a reflection of the ways white identity was constructed through racial domination in America, even though this knowledge of oppressive domination is pervasive in the collective memory of African Americans. Dyer suggests, then, that
‘[w]hiteness needs to be made strange’ (12) in order to counter its hegemonic position and interrupt the oppression its supremacy induces. Without Sanctuary, because it frames the formation and consolidation of whiteness in the act of looking at racially motivated violence, uproots it from a position of normality in a way that makes white spectators in the present contend with the violent history embedded in the oppressive white gaze and the strangeness that this produces, and I can speak personally here, forces white people to critically reform ways of looking to avoid the perpetuation of trauma against black subjects.
Allen’s Without Sanctuary becomes an imperative example of the disturbing and affectual visualisation of the white gaze as it both shows white spectators in the photographs’ historical moment and implicates contemporary white audiences in these viewing practices.
In many of the photographs, the gaze of the white viewer in the present is returned by the civil or smiling faces of the white lynch mob. Critics Jessy J. Ohl and Jennifer E. Potter argue that, “[r]ather than framing racial brutality as the product of fanatical small groups and radicalized individuals, Without Sanctuary significantly differs from post-racial discourses by characterizing lynching as collective, deliberate, and controlled” (187). The collection makes
13 apparent the role of the white gaze in forming notions of collective white identity based on the supremacy over black inferiority. Capturing the event on camera makes a spectacle of the traumatic and violent event and the commercialisation achieved through circulation becomes a crucial part of producing a certain knowledge of white superiority by reproducing and consolidating power dynamics which repeatedly objectify the murdered black body.
In photographs 24, 26 and 27 featureless white faces gather around a lynched black man/men in the centre. They peer into the camera (some with clear effort as they strain their necks at the back of the crowd), not only with an apparent lack of fear that they will be recognised but also implying a desire to be seen at the event, and to share the fact of their presence with a wider audience. The desire for recognition demonstrates the “deliberate, collective and controlled” participation amongst the lynch mob present but also confirms a value judgement which places the spectator as acting for a common cause. Photograph 28 is a framed copy of 27, highlighting the circulation of these photographs amongst a wider population than just those present for the event, whilst the addition of an inscription which flags the position of a friend/family member in the crow and uses a violent racial slur to refer to the black body, confirms the practice of sharing postcards which capture the event as a form of collective memory and identity rooted in the act of looking at the violated black body. Allen’s collection thus highlights that the photographs are not only an exercise of the white gaze on a par with the spectators present at the event who witness the lynching, but are also used to produce and confirm white identity through a broad circulation of the violent
Othering of blackness. Because of photography’s role in producing, confirming and circulating these racist looking practices, contemporary white audiences do, on one level, participate in the spectatorship that helped form white supremacy and terrorize black subjects.
14 In 21 photograph, the perspective of the camera places the contemporary viewer just above the crowd in attendance of the lynching. The position allows for a scopic view of the spectators but also a ‘privileged’ position in terms of capturing the traumatic event of the lynched black body. It is difficult for the contemporary viewer not to become implicated in the spectacle as the gaze of the camera is heavily embedded in the oppressive white gaze that seeks to capture proof of blackness as subhuman and whiteness as superior through the indexical reality of the violated body. As Marianne Hirsch suggests, “[w]hen we confront perpetrator images, we cannot look independently of the look of the perpetrator” (25). In this particular photograph, the black body is not immediately noticeable in the scopic field of the image. It is difficult not to search for the object of the gaze and thus participate in the violent act of looking at the traumatic image of the murdered black body. As Jessy J. Ohl and
Jennifer E. Potter argue, because Without Sanctuary rhetorically implicates the viewer as a lynching participant through its social orientation, audience members are drawn to evaluate their own passive involvement in human oppression” (197). The historical distance enables the contemporary white viewer to proclaim innocence, however the voyeuristic association with the photographer’s lens implicates them in the act of objectification. However, the photographs/ photo postcards in Allen’s collection do not remain fixed in their original context and thus provide an opportunity to engage critically with the implications of racialized looking practices precisely because the collection’s framing situates the viewer through a different perspective. This framing, which provides a detour and separation from the original way the photographs were circulated and viewed, allows the contemporary audiences to see the ways in which the racially dominating white gaze can be mobilised in the present as they participate in spectatorship but then interrupts this gaze as the collection draws attention to the original white supremacist, racist viewers of the photographs rather than replicating the traumatic act of gazing at the murdered black body. This shift in
15 perspective attends to the way that African Americans view whiteness as terrorizing and therefore offers contemporary white viewers an explicitly horrific example of how this view is formed and the indebtedness of the white gaze to these trauma inflicting practices.
The addition of etchings, messages and annotations along with photographer stamps and occasionally advertisements on many of the photographs in the collection highlight the broad spectatorship they achieved. Contemporary white viewers are able to witness the symbolic value attached to the photo postcards as souvenirs and items of exchange. This extra layer of looking materialized through additions to the photographs testifies to their role in forming a collective white identity through the annihilation of the black Other and thus offers an opportunity to reflect on the role of spectatorship in trauma, rather than just becoming implicated in the violent monocular gaze of the camera. On the back of photograph
16, there is a message that includes a racial slur in relation to barbecuing, whilst on 22 a message reads, “This is the barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son Joe”. The references to “barbecue” and “cooking” are shocking to encounter as the euphemism draws a connection between the violent practice of lynching with a communal or family event. Photographs 7 and 51 actually include white, well-dressed young children (both boys and girls), demonstrating how the construction of white supremacy relied on these violent acts against black people to be looked at as a form of socialisation and knowledge production, interpolating children into this racial rhetoric as a form of collective identity in the Southern States. The sender/recipient of photo postcard 22 appears to be a parent/child relationship and the sender’s desire to make his presence at a ‘barbecue’ known to his parents establishes that shared family values or important memories to be shared are in this instance predicated on confirming racial superiority and this is carried out through the visual documentation and circulation of lynching photographs.
16 To expand on the how the circulation and exchange of the lynching photographs formed and consolidated white supremacist identity, I want to draw on Sarah Ahmed’s seminal text, “Affective Economies”, in which she argues that emotions accumulate and assign value to signs, symbols and objects, similar to the ways in which the economy functions in the accumulation of capital through circulation and exchange (120-21). She states that it is ‘…the accumulation of affective value [that] shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds’ (121). Adhering to Ahmed’s convincing theory, the lynching photographs and postcards become signs of white supremacy and the hatred of African American ‘Others’ through their circulation. That is, they “…increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more they circulate, the more affective they become, and the more they appear to “contain” affect” (121). Thus the act itself which is captured in the image represents the indexical reality of violence that occurred. But, the reframing which the archive undergoes also represents the wider circulation of these lynching photographs amongst white people as an integral part of forming a collective identity of white supremacy based on a hatred and violence directed at black subjects. The collection represents white supremacist identity as the materialization of an affective economy of hate. It shows how the consolidation of the individual and collective white self is produced by the accumulation and exchange of spectating violence against the black body. Such reframing therefore calls attention to the role of spectatorship as a second form of trauma-inducing-violence. By bringing this role of spectatorship into the contextual frame of the archive it turns the focus away from the indexical acts of trauma, so as not to repeat the violence of looking, and places it on the circulation of these images. In this way, Without Sanctuary shows how these photographs depicting acts of racial hatred and the violent othering of black subjects shaped a collective identity of white supremacy. As evidence of horrific acts of violence, these photographs-as-objects do in themselves carry affective value for contemporary viewers
17 because they depict actual moments of suffering or mutilated black bodies in a period where racially motivated acts of violence were frequent occurrences in a vigilante movement under a prominent and hegemonic racist ideology. However, the collection shows that the circulation of photographs-as-objects for white viewers and consumers, in their historical moment of exchange, accumulated value by reproducing collective investments in notions of white superiority. The framing of the collection thus foregrounds white supremacy as a narrative embedded in the repetition of viewing acts of violence against the black body.
Without Sanctuary, through its archival framing, draws focus to this act of violent spectatorship in order to make it visible. What the collection is thus able to represent is how white supremacy is a construction explicitly built on and implicated in the cultural trauma of
African Americans.
The circulation and exchange of the photographs therefore accumulated spectatorship and formed narratives of white superiority and the racial domination of African Americans.
However, these narratives rooted in and produced through racialized looking practices are not static, precisely because looking practices are made up of various mediations. Marianne
Hirsch argues that, “[t]he gaze is mediated by the screen, contested and interrupted by the look” (24). She follows the Lacanian concept of the gaze as it pertains to a (in this case harmful) objectification motivated by the desire to fulfil a lack, which, as Fanon theorizes in relation to the oppressive white gaze, forms a terrorizing negation of black subjectivity as whiteness is confirmed through the terrorizing objectification of black bodies. The look relates to the ability of vision/the eye to take in a wide scopic field and, by the screen, she means the ideological and rhetorical filters produced by ‘cultural conventions and codes that make the seen visible’ (24). Because Without Sanctuary reframes lynching photographs in a way that does not subscribe to the oppressive white gaze and, by extension, the ideological screen that consolidated racist narratives embedded in gaze in the original production and
18 spectatorship of the images, contemporary white viewers are encouraged to look differently.
Hirsh focusses on the trauma experienced by, in particular, the second generation of holocaust survivors. She coins the term “postmemory” to conceptualise the way that memories can be socially produced and that traumatic events need not be directly experienced (though trauma is often defined as not fully experienced) in order for one to remember and consider them part of their collective/individual identity (15-16). Wendy
Wolters, in her discussion on Without Sanctuary, states that:
Postmemory can be used to explain, for instance, the ways in which African
Americans who have no direct experience of lynching or knowledge of lynching in
their family nonetheless "remember" lynching with skepticism of the legal system and
fear of violence by whites. (403)
Indeed, Without Sanctuary develops a new mediating screen from the perspective of African
American “postmeory” by representing and reframing the lynching photographs, which raises productive questions. Contemporary audiences become spectators in order to (re)member the violence enacted through looking. That is, they too become members of the audience who spectate this traumatic violence but in doing so are made to remember and acknowledge the ways that spectatorship reproduced and informed racist ideologies of white supremacy.
Addressing these racialized looking practices and the narratives they build through the screen is important precisely because the traces of this legacy informs African American postmemory, which manifests in representations of whiteness as terrorizing. Moreover, because the screen has the ability to attend to and shift the racist narratives which have historically constituted the ways white people have looked at black people, projects such as
Without Sanctuary, which reframe images that previously represented white supremacy, hold the potential for white people to remember and attend to this problematic formation of racist looking practices and develop new ways of seeing.
19 It is necessary to point out that images in Without Sanctuary have provoked criticism regarding the (re)presentation of such painful and violent acts against the black body. Wendy
Wolters sees that, ‘[i]ndeed, in order to participate in the historical narrative that Without
Sanctuary seeks to create, one must accept that the documentary meaning of the photographs is not static; photographs that were evidence for the lynch mob now serve as evidence of the lynch mob’ (208, emphasis in the original). She states that the framing of the collection no longer supports the consolidation of white supremacy that their original context sought but goes on to note how, “…the "new" evidence that the photographs provide of the lynch mob does not necessarily alter the original social relations embedded in their creation” (408).
Wolters’ concern over the potential reoccurrence of trauma implicated in presenting the lynching photographs holds considerable weight. However, as Amy Louise Wood argues, there are historical instances to show that “once [the photographs] were removed from their localities, through lines of commercial distribution or political activism, these meanings became quite unstable, allowing antilynching activists to imprint, quite successfully, entirely different meanings upon them” (377). Though this argument for the potential shifts in the photograph’s knowledge production through iterations outside of their original context appears to contradict what I am attempting to argue, what I want to stress is that this reframing has been dedicated to reclaiming and fighting for black subjectivity via visual representations of the indexical reality of the traumatic event. Leigh Raiford points out that the process of African American subjects re-appropriating the archive of lynching photography in the Jim Crow era, Civil Rights Movement and contemporary art and criticism has become “a constitutive element of black visuality’ and forms what he calls ‘black critical memory” (118). Whilst black critics such as Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Due Bois and bell hooks, as well as journalists working for NAACP funded journals dedicated to black subjectivity
20 such as Fire!! (1926) and The Crisis (1910 – present)3, have experienced, theorized and refigured the burden of the white gaze in order to recuperate their subjectivity, white
Americans, on the other hand have undergone no such critical practice to address the role of their visual practices in this trauma. What Without Sanctuary does is represent white supremacy, which often remains insidiously invisible, by framing it as a collective process formed and constituted by inflicting violence on the black body.
With regards to the issues and implications of representing trauma, which have been discussed by François Lyotard, Theodor Adorno and Cathy Caruth, amongst others, I want to focus on the importance of framing in reproducing images with such affective value. Barbara
Zelizer, discussing the representation of traumatic images from the holocaust, argues that,
…while the reduction of the archive of images and their endless repetition might seem
problematic in the abstract, the postmemorial generation--in displacing and
recontextualizing these well-known images in their artistic work--has been able to
make repetition not an instrument of fixity or paralysis or simple retraumatization (as
it often is for survivors of trauma), but a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a
traumatic past (Remembering, 9).
By looking again, through a reframed and critically-engaged archival lens, contemporary audiences can contend with the ways their looking practices may be historically indebted to racist narratives and how this may continue to perpetrate African American cultural trauma.
Indeed, Ahmed argues (in relation to objects invested with affective value) that emotions can travel backwards “through “sticky” associations between signs, figures, and objects”
3 W. E. B. Du Bois was the founder of The Crisis and edited the journal from 1910 – 34. For more information on The Crisis, see: Protest and Propaganda: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History. Eds. Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. Print.
21 precisely because “repression always leaves its trace in the present—hence “what sticks” is also bound up with the “absent presence” of historicity” (127). That is, not looking at these images both represses the indexical reality of their existence and the way their circulation formed narratives which constructed and consolidated white supremacy against the dehumanization of blackness. Though African Americans in the present may not have the direct experience of lynching, they have more than likely experienced (directly or indirectly) police brutality, stop and frisk policies and the overwhelming number of incarcerated African
Americans. What becomes apparent, then, is that the repression of the traumatic history of lynching and spectatorship does not remove it from memory, but rather leaves traces of these racist ideological narratives largely intact to be mobilized in the present.
As Ahmed argues, “fear opens up past histories that stick to the present […] and allow the white body to be constructed as apart from the black body” (126). Thus, what I have just discussed not only relates to an individual task which calls upon white subjects to reflect on their way of seeing, guided by the framing of Without Sanctuary. But also, in returning to the photographs, I want to focus on the presence of authority figures and civic values which are prevalent in them to see how the oppressive white gaze and the racist ideology in the consolidating screen is deeply embedded in organisational and institutional structures of American society. Some photographs show lynching taking place in green park- like areas, but many depict more public events where the murder is carried out in a space which is important to the community. For example, postcard 50 features the body of
Augustus Goodman hanging from a tree which, the collection points out, “served as a community bulletin board”. The lynched black body hangs amongst the posters, leaflets, and other pieces of public knowledge made accessible and so regarded as important to the (white) community. Whilst photograph 61 shows the image of an un-named black body hanging in a courthouse yard and 76 depicts the corpse of Leonard Wood on the town’s public-speaking
22 platform. These images show that the lynching of black bodies was considered amongst white spectators as a form of justice as the organised event was selected to take place in a public location associated with the organising body of civic matters. In this way, a contemporary white viewer of the collection is confronted with the way in which the practice of looking at and dehumanizing black subjects visually constituted community values and served the binding of white, Southern American identity and that this was bolstered by and realised through societal structures. In the present, the encounter with historically specific trauma inflicted by the white mob may provoke a contemporary white audience, on an individual level, to deny any involvement. However, by making the specifically civic sharing of these lynching images apparent in the frame, there is an opportunity to critically contend with the implication of the violent and oppressive gaze as it informs not just individual racial narratives which dehumanize blackness but how these narratives are upheld by and operate through institutional structures associated with politics and legislation. Having no direct memory of lynching, or not explicitly subscribing to racist ideologies, in the present does not prevent or resist one from falling back on the historical narratives of white supremacy particularly seeing as there are examples of how the violence against the black body in
America is still enacted via institutional structures, as the Black Lives Matter movement makes explicit. In this way, the task of reforming racialized looking practices requires not just an individual reflection from white people of the ways their look is embedded in a history of violence against African Americans, but also, in a larger sense, a structural reorganisation of the racial narratives which inform political and legal institutions.
So, by representing and (re)membering the narratives of white supremacy produced through spectatorship, Without Sanctuary asks contemporary viewers to take on the uncomfortable task of confronting these problematic looking relations in order to see how they manifest in the present and develop the critical faculties to understand and unravel these
23 practices by forming new narrative “screens” and seeing anew. The horrific depictions of violence in Without Sanctuary risk re-traumatizing both the victims in the image and contemporary African American viewers who share a collective “postmemory” of the terrorizing history of lynching in the United States. However, as I have argued, through the collection’s reframing and focalization it draws attention to how constructions of white supremacy were realized through the circulation of these lynching photographs. Seeing as white supremacy and white privilege are still in existence in the United States and lynching informs the cultural memory of African Americans, it seems that there is crucial work to be done with regards to acknowledging the role played by violent racialized looking practices and examining the traces of this legacy as it informs and is informed by legally and politically institutionalized structures of looking in the present. Indeed, Zelizer argues that historical cultural trauma (that is, traumatic events that occurred in the past and as such are not experienced directly by the present generation of that collective) forms “aberrations or ruptures in the cultural continuum [that] demand retelling'" (Remembering, 10). Without
Sanctuary engages in a ‘retelling’ of the traumatic history of lynching in the U.S by reframing the lynching photographs in a way that interrogates the role of spectatorship by the white mob, the extension of this gaze via the camera to the contemporary white viewer, and the way their circulation informed and consolidated structures of white supremacy. By representing, (re)membering and reframing the photographs, the collection invites a potential disruption to the narratives of white supremacy in the present as it forms a discourse around the racialized looking practices through the lens of African American cultural trauma. In this way, it reveals how racist structures are produced through looking and spectatorship and addresses the need to develop white critical viewing practices both on an institutional and individual level precisely because they remain implicitly embedded within American society.
24 Chapter Two: Drawing Whiteness: Passing Narratives,
“Prosthetic Memory” and the Graphic Novel
Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Icognegro: A Graphic Mystery (2010) traces the story of
Zane Pinchback, a light-skinned African-American journalist, living in Harlem, who passes for white in the southern states to report on lynching cases. During the Jim Crow era, black and white bodies were separated in the public sphere under the Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) ruling and thus the black body was discursively framed as ontologically Other within legislation predicated on epistemologies of visual difference by the myopic projections of the hegemonic white gaze which made up the ruling class. Incognegro follows a tradition within
African American literature termed ‘passing narratives’, written largely in the period of segregation and exploring the experiences of subjects legally defined as black who pass as white in order to access the economic and social privileges afforded to white citizens.
Republished as a new edition in 2018, the addition of an afterward from Johnson observes the pertinence of Incognegro within the United States’ current political climate. He states that the
2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia contradicted his belief that ‘…the age of organized, public, avowed mainstream white nationalism was over’ (135). Johnson’s declaration of hope that the text has the potential to ‘…serve as an entry point into a larger historical exploration’ (135) of race relations in America is where I take my lead in the analysis of Incognegro. Precisely because white supremacy still exists in the United States, and white nationalism seems to be gaining momentum, I want to see how Incognegro’s graphic medium makes use of abstraction, framing and closure to represent whiteness through the lens of African American cultural trauma and memory provide an opportunity to disrupt these structures by challenging hegemonic narratives and forming new ones.
In the preface to Incognegro, Johnson states that Walter White, a journalist and prominent member of the NAACP who passed as white and reported on lynching in the
25 Southern states was a source of inspiration for the text precisely because of the influence his story had on him as a young adult, which enabled him to perceive his light-skinned African
American identity as a potential ‘asset instead of a burden’ as he struggled with his ethnic appearance in the ‘height of the Black Power era’ (4). Because of this, I see the text as an example of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”. The forward that shares Johnson’s personal affiliation with Walter White’s story and the 2018 afterword that references the current racial tension in America bookend the graphic novel and demonstrate how the text’s
“…connection to its object or source [the traumatic event(s)] is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation’ (Surviving Images, 9).
Indeed, Johnson remembers the events in Walter White’s life by projecting his own experiences of race on to his biography, whilst he reflects on the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally through the meditation of fictional events in Incognegro. Page 76 depicts an angry white lynch-mob who confront Carl, Zane’s light-skin best friend who is mistaken for him by the
Klansman hunting down “Incognegro”. The mob is armed with pitchforks, guns, baseball bats and a noose and expressions of hateful rage are drawn onto their faces. Though the creation of this image preceded the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, there is an alarming similarity between the details drawn in the fictional image of the lynch-mob and the photographs from the contemporary “Unite the Right” event, including grimacing expressions and the violent wielding of torches. As such, the text not only creates a graphic passing narrative to remember the Jim Crow era of white supremacy, but implicit in the forward/afterward framing of the text is how its representation of whiteness expresses memories of historically specific African American collective/cultural trauma (from the immediate or more distant past) to demonstrate how it continues to reverberate through generations after the fact precisely because whiteness still assumes the position of privilege in
American society.
26 To expand on the term cultural/collective trauma that I apply to my understanding of
Icognegro, I follow the concept as it is outlined by Alexander and Eyerman. Alexander makes the claim that the attribution of trauma on a cultural or collective level occurs when,
“acute discomfort [enters into] the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (10).
This then needs to be represented through a “sociocultural process” which involves determining the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim and the attribution of responsibility (10-15). Eyerman adopts this framework for thinking through cultural trauma and applies it to the African American experience of slavery. He states:
…[S]lavery is traumatic for those who share a common fate, not necessarily a
common experience. Cultural trauma articulates a membership group as it identifies
an event or an experience, a primal scene, that solidifies individual/collective identity.
This event, now identified with the formation of the group, must be recollected by
later generations who have had no experience of the “original” event, yet continue to
be identified by it and to identify themselves through it. (14-15)
On page 18, the panels depict Zane altering his appearance to pass for white so that he can go undercover in Mississippi and save his dark-skin twin-brother Alonzo who has been falsely imprisoned for of the murder of a white woman and awaits a hanging. This pass is performed via a “mirror scene”, which Sinead Moynihan points out is a trope of the passing narrative
(48) and relates to Franz Fanon’s Lacanian-based understanding of the subject defining
“mirror stage” which, for black subjects, is a negation under the culturally traumatic oppressive white gaze which produces a fragmentation of the psyche. Reflected back at Zane during this “mirror scene” is, along with his own reflection, an opaque, grainy image of a black woman being clutched and overpowered by a white man (see Fig 1). This interrupts and negates Zane’s mirror-image (Panel 2, 18) and functions as a “primal scene” from which
Zane identifies both individually (through seeing this image as part of his own reflection) and
27 collectively as an “American Negro” (18). Moreover, the diegesis, narrated from Zane’s first person perspective, explicitly outlines that his racially ambiguous appearance which is reflected back at him is ‘…the product of the Southern tradition nobody likes to talk about.
Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy’ (Panel 2, 18), and this repressed history is captured by the interrupting image. So, Incognegro’s graphic novel form is able to represent this identity- negating “mirror scene” trope and the psychological fragmentation it produces in a specifically visual way by compressing and thus relating generational depictions of trauma to illustrate how the legacy of slavery is perpetuated and continues to inform African American identity. The overlay of the traumatic “primal scene” which Zane euphemistically names “the
Southern tradition” materializes the transference of cultural trauma from one generation to the next and the disruption of Zane’s reflection in the image expresses that white supremacy continues to inform collective trauma and a fractured sense of African American identity.
Fig 1. Johnson, Mat and Pleece, Warren. Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery. Wisconsin: Dark Horse Books, 10th Anniversary Edition, 2018. P. 18. Print. (Reproduced with permission of the publishing company)
28 In the “mirror scene”, Zane abstracts any signs that may act as visual markers of his black racial identity by straightening his curly hair with a Madam C.J Walker product4 and donning a suit. Incognegro uses only black, white and grey in its illustrations and so particularly within these panels that depict Zane’s ‘transformation’ to pass for white, the images represent an almost imperceptible change in his appearance to undermine the notion that whiteness is a secure ontological category that can be optically confirmed. Instead, then, the ‘passing’ panels focus on what bell hooks terms the “terrorizing image of whiteness in the
African American cultural imagination” (342). The fact that Zane identifies his ability to pass with “…the Southern tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy’ (Panel
2, 18), highlights that he sees himself as a mediation of a traumatic legacy historically predicated on the rape and sexual exploitation of black women by white slave owners, seeing as miscegenation laws criminalized interracial sex and marriage but did not legally recognize black women as human and thus not ‘rape-able’ subjects before the addition of the 13th
Amendment to the constitution (Kumar Katyal, 794). As outlined in the Introduction, W. E.
B. Du Bois observed that black subject formation in the United States produced a sense of
“double consciousness” in African American subjects as their status as American citizens was formed through the culturally traumatic experience of slavery which legally, politically and institutionally contested not only their national identity but their humanity even after the introduction of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. The image of sexual
4 Madam C.J Walker was a successful, African American business woman who made her money by selling cosmetic products for skin-lightening and hair straightening. Advertisements for her products were often featured in the critical, literary journals funded by the NAACP such as The Crisis Magazine and Fire, demonstrating the deeply embedded hegemonic concept of whiteness as the attainment of superiority in the U.S. See Bundles for more information on her life: Bundles, A. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker. New York, NY: Scribner, 2001. Print.
29 exploitation that interrupts Zane’s reflection expresses the African American experience of
“double consciousness” and locates these traumatic ruptures in the terrorizing effects of white supremacist structures. Again, Icognegro’s lack of shading which depicts Zane’s pass as imperceptible emphasizes that the construction of whiteness in the United States, as it pertains to a guaranteed status of citizenship, is not only an identity formed by visual codes
(white vs. black) but, rather, was formed and consolidated by violent acts against black people which were legally, politically and institutionally embedded to uphold the notion of white supremacy.
This representation of the constructed norm of U.S citizenship as white and as terrorizing to African Americans is also depicted in Icognegro through the opaquely impressed image of United States flag which ruptures the cohesion of Zane’s mirror image.
As Sara Ahmed points out: ‘The flag as a sign that has historically signified territorial conquest as well as love for the nation (patriotism) has effects in terms of the display of
“withness” (whereby one is “with others” and “against other others”)’ (130). She argues that the flag is therefore an object which is reiterated in an effort to shape the collective or national body of citizens as unified based on a separation from the Other. Indeed, Icognegro’s graphic form produces a counter narrative to this “withness” as the flag separates Zane from his own reflection in another materialized image of “double consciousness”; the flag is a negating screen rather than a symbol of a coherent self who identifies with the notion collective national identity. On the page that follows, Zane (passing as white) enters into the public sphere and narrates his perceptions of whiteness. He states: ‘They don’t think they have accents. They don’t think they eat ethnic foods. Their music is classical”; “They think they’re just normal. That they are the universal, and that everyone else is a deviation from form” (Panel 3, 19). Lauren Berlant argues that the public sphere forms subjects via citizenship as it shapes a collective body under a common identity through legal and political
30 institutions within a geopolitical space (37). However, Michael Warner notes that, (focusing on sexuality and citizenship in the United Sates), “The bourgeois public sphere has been structured from the outset by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle class, the normal’5 (383). Under the Plessy vs.
Ferguson ruling, black bodies were literally prohibited from areas of the public sphere and were thus legally and politically marked by inscriptions of Otherness that negated their existence in the United States and, as Zane observes, defined African Americans as a
“…deviation from form” (Panel 3, 19). By overlaying Zane’s mirror image with the U.S flag,
Incognegro points out that, as an abstract representation of the collective national body of citizens, it encompasses the historical trauma of African Americans precisely because their blackness prohibited them from being regarded as national citizens part of this collective.
Ingonegro thus represents the image of the flag to focus on the process of Othering that its
“withness” symbolizes. By reproducing the “star spangled banner” as a negating screen,
Incognegro brings to the fore the relationship between notions of collective national identity/citizenship and its historical construction and confirmation of white supremacy. And, to address the U.S flag from an African American perspective of cultural trauma and identity fragmentation is to interrupt the hegemonic conceptions of its symbolic unity.
White supremacy operates insidiously and efficiently because it remains unmarked and invisible according to the abstract logic which constructs the U.S citizen. Because it is the source of perpetuating African American cultural trauma, this adds another dimension to the challenge of representation. Critic Cathy Caruth, discussing the individual, event-based
5 Warner’s discussion of citizenship is rooted in the theory of framing and passing from philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas: Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991. p. 175-177. Print.
31 model, states that trauma is the haunting return of the ‘unassimilated’ event that cannot be known (3-4). Similarly, Ron Eyerman argues that
National or cultural trauma (the difference is minimal at the theoretical level) is also
rooted in an event or series of events, but not necessarily in their direct experience.
Such experience is usually mediated, through newspapers, radio, or television, for
example, which involves a spatial as well as a temporal distance between the event
and its experience. (3)
In both cases, (though I am focusing more on a sociocultural approach to trauma in line with collective attribution of trauma theorized by Eyerman) post facto representations and mediations based on the absent presence of memory or historicity are needed to assimilate experiences of trauma and resolve a “crisis of meaning and identity” (Alexander, 10) on the individual and collective level. As a journalist, Zane is what Eyerman calls an ‘intellectual’ in that he mediates information between the cultural and political spheres of activity to make certain claims for and to others (4). He therefore assumes a role in the sociocultural ‘trauma process’ which attempts to assimilate African American trauma by representing the collective experience of fear and violence under white supremacy to a wider audience. Once again, to draw on Johnson’s forward/afterward framing of the graphic novel it is evident that, for
Johnson (as well as many other Americans) Walter White (who is the inspiration for Zane’s character) was an intellectual figure who played a historical role in the African American
‘trauma process’ but also continues to be an influence in the present. Ellen Fine states that members of a group can “continue to ‘remember’ an event not lived through. Haunted by history, they feel obliged to accept the burden of collective memory that has been passed to them and to assume the task of sustaining it” (126). Thus, Johnson’s affiliation with White’s story on a personal level and with regards to the part he played in raising awareness of the
32 violence of white supremacy, demonstrates this ‘passing on’ of memories which is realized through Incognegro.
In reference to the graphic novel form, in particular, Andreas Huyssen argues that the
“cross-cutting of past and present” achieved through the comic form, “points in a variety of ways to how [the] past holds the present captive…” (71). Thus, not only do the overlaying images in the “mirror scene” attend to the unique ability of the graphic form to materialize the generational overlap which pertains to the experience of African American collective memory and cultural trauma, but the forward/afterward explicitly situates the reader in multiple historical frames (the antebellum South, the Jim Crow era of segregation, the black power movement, the contemporary racial tensions in America). The multiple generations which are referenced in the framing of the text and in its diegesis provides a temporal guide for the reader which is akin to the experience of African American collective memory and cultural trauma, as it is understood by Alexander, Eyerman, Fine and Hirsch. In the text, Zane states that his bi-racial identity is a “…walking reminder” of the traumatic history of slavery and is thus caught in the perpetual present-ness of the past. I would argue that Incognegro as a whole, and not just the figure of Zane is thus “an example of an internalized past, of the way in which atrocity literally reverberates through the minds and lives of subsequent generations” (Eva Hoffman, 103). Incognegro therefore functions as part of the ongoing
‘trauma process’ that Alexander and Eyerman outline. The text’s 2018 republication, which
Johnson states is a reaction to the evidence that “…white racial resentment has reentered the
American discourse as an overt, unapologetic force” and therefore “…the era of racial terrorism covered in Incognegro is suddenly relevant again”, consolidates the point I am trying to make. That is, the text engages in the working through of ruptures to the collective identity of African Americans as they are perpetuated and re-embedded within contemporary
American society.
33 Incognegro also reworks the cultural and collective memories associated with the comic form itself. Sinéad Moynihan notes that the appropriation and subversion of images which evoke the figure of the Superhero, a character whose origins are indebted to both the comic form and “…problematic notions of white racial superiority”6, interrupts the myth that the form introduced. Drawing on Megha Anwer, she states that, “…in a knowing nod to this history, Pleece visually frames the head Klansman in Incognegro, in terms explicitly reminiscent of the superhero” (49). On page 106, the Klansman’s stance (hands on hips, legs slightly wider than hip-width apart) and cloak form an image reminiscent of depictions of comic-book superheroes. Incognegro, in referencing the mythologies of white supremacy embedded in the history of its own form, foregrounds and interrupts these notions as the graphic novel alternatively takes its perspective through the lens of African American cultural memory and trauma. Scott McCloud notes that, “[b]y de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favour of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts” (41). Thus, by visually framing the Klansman in a superhero-like way, Incognegro tackles the concept of whiteness-as-superior by subverting the figure of the hero in the form of the leader of a white supremacist terror organisation, responsible for the deaths of multiple innocent African Americans. In this way, as Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger state collective memory is a dynamic act with the potential to interrupt and develop narratives as it is, “…transferred, undertaken, and performed” (46).
6 Sinead Moynihan goes into detail about the white supremacist origin of the superhero in American comics. She draws on Adnan Morshed’s exploration of the superhero as related to “social darwinism… and Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch” (82). For more information, see: Morshed, Adnan “The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63.1 (2004): 81-93. Moynihan, Sinéad. "“Watch me go invisible”: Representing Racial Passing in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro." South Central Review, vol. 32 no. 3, 2015, pp. 49. Project MUSE. Web.
34 This visual and discursive reframing of the superhero in the graphic novel form also demonstrates how, as Patrycja Włodek argues, “demythologization in collective forms of memory can be influenced by politics, media, current historical narratives, etc” (80). Włodek takes her theoretical stance on the transferrable and transformative power of memory alongside Alison Landberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory”. Landsberg outlines this term as “…a new form of public cultural memory […] that emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum” (2). “Prosthetic memory”, as Landsberg sees it, is best initiated through the sensuous experience of cinema, however, as an intergenerational and multi-temporal expression of African American collective memory and cultural trauma, I would suggest that the experience of reading/viewing Incognegro is one that forms new memories and encourages a new understanding of African American collective trauma. Zane’s undercover title, “Incognegro”, serves a superhero-like alias but, as he states:
I don’t wear a mask like Zorro or a cape like The Shadow. But I don a disguise
nonetheless. My camouflage is provided by my genes; the product of the Southern
tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy. (Page 18, Panels 1-2,
see fig 1).
Zane’s ‘superpower’ is his ability to “go invisible” (19), and by this he means to appear white and thus go undetected as a black person in the public sphere which prohibits his body under the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling. Again, this depiction counters the comic form’s traditional mythology of the superhero new mythology from the perspective of African America collective memory which uproots the concept of whiteness as superior and, rather, represents white supremacy as a terrorizing and villainous. Lansberg argues that, “[i]n contrast to collective memories, which tend to be geographically specific and which serve to reinforce
35 and naturalise a group’s identity, prosthetic memories are not the property of a single group.
Rather, they open up the possibility for collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected political alliances” (149). Though Włodek observes that taking on the culturally traumatic memories of African Americans carries with it a potentially problematic risk of appropriation, she agrees that the potential of such transference, when dealt with in an empathetic manner, has transformative power (88). Just like Zane’s declaration of
“assimilation as revolution”, Incognegro’s situated perspective in African American collective memory and cultural trauma reimagines mythologies and subverts the associations of forms with white supremacy in order to assimilate new narratives into readers/viewers memories which attest to rather than repress the oppression of black people in the U.S As Johnson states in the afterward, Incognegro can “…serve as an entry point into a larger historical exploration” (135) of race relations in America as it interjects hegemonic narratives of whiteness and produces empathetic understandings of the way white supremacy affects African American experience.
Critic Sandra Oh, commenting on the relationship between race and the graphic novel medium, states that, “both racial identity and the graphic novel depend on hegemonically determined narratives, or closure, and the reiteration of these narratives” (114). Incognegro plays on this shared formative strategy precisely to interrupt the hegemonic narratives of racial difference based on visual codes. Inserted into the unframed double-page image which concludes the graphic novel is a zoomed-in panel which focusses on a photograph of the
Klansman on the cover of the newspaper that identifies him as “Incognegro”. Being framed as an African American carries with it the legal implication of having to negotiate the body in public space as the privileged white sphere seeks to render his body unseen (and, as the graphic narrative illustrates throughout, this task is often undertaken by the white mob through the use of violence). The Klansman’s narrative fate becomes clear when he is
36 surrounded by an angry mob of white people in Fayetteville, Missouri because his identity is iterated within the framing regime that defines him as African American and thus determines his persecution. In this way, the final double-page spread highlights that racism and racial categorization is based on strategies of representation which have the powerful ability to form, transmit and mediate certain narratives and knowledges. bell hooks theorises how the affect of representations has been felt by African Americans through the negating and deleterious experiences of racial degradation under white domination but that white people, in general, do not regard or understand how representations in the black imagination, which are responses to this racial domination, depict whiteness as terrorizing (342).
By concluding its narrative with “a case of mistaken identity” (134–35), Incognegro not only highlights the power of representation but exemplifies it from a white racist perspective and from the perspective of African American collective memory and cultural trauma. The two images of the Klansman on the final pages offer iterations of his identity juxtaposed in close proximity. One image framed in a newspaper declares that he race-spy
“Incognegro”, which provokes the white mob to surround him in a menacing way and expresses the terrorizing experience of being defined as black and thus Other in the U.S.
Whilst the other image of the Klansman, where he denies this claim, relays the unacknowledged experience of being represented that white supremacy ensures. Thus, these images highlight that visual representation and framing is able to situate bodies within racial narratives and, by extension within public space. Framing whiteness in such a way thus addresses the importance of representing whiteness as it communicates the often suppressed
African American experience of whiteness as always potentially terrorizing (hooks, 341).
Retracing its structural invisibility gives whiteness a frame to be analyzed and the reiteration of the Klansman’s image gives the opportunity for white supremacy (seeing as the figure of the Klansman epitomizes this) to be drawn out from a system of closure through exposure.
37 The comic form offers up a way in which the interdependence between discursive and visual representation can reiterate and shift the conceptual frames of race just as they were implemented in its construction and there is the potential embedded within this to encounter the African American perspective of whiteness as terrorizing as thus attend to and remove the ways that whiteness structurally induces the oppression of black people in America.
Precisely because white supremacy still exists in the United States, and, as Johnson observes, white nationalism seems to be gaining momentum, Incognegro’s dedication to an interrogation of whiteness through the perspective of African American cultural trauma and collective memory provides an opportunity to disrupt these structures by challenging hegemonic narratives and forming new ones. Thinking with the concepts of memory and trauma as collective experiences which are realised through a sociocultural process of attribution and generational transference (Alexander, Eyerman, Hirsch, Fine, Berger and
Aarons), and seeing how new narratives and memories can be formed indirectly and
“prosthetically” (Lansberg, Włodek), Incognegro provides viewers/readers with the opportunity interrupt hegemonic conceptions of whiteness and see it anew both historically and in the present. Recent release films such as Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018) and
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) speak to this current moment of African American collective remembrance through the adoption of the passing narrative and what is unique about Incognegro’s reworking of the trope is the way in which it is able to materialize the multi-temporal experience of traumatic memory recall on the page by representing concept rather than abiding by a dedication to realism. Incognegro forms mythologies which counter the hegemonic representations of whiteness that are embedded, even if repressed, in the cultural memory of the graphic form exposes both the constructions of white supremacy and the realities of its deleterious affects on African American cultural identity both at a collective and individual level. As such Johnson and Pleece’s Incognegro provides a space in
38 which to critically comprehend the racism embedded within hegemonic structures of white supremacy both in terms of a historical and contemporary understanding and therefore invites the potential for their dismantling.
39 Chapter Three: Satirizing Whiteness: “Multidirectional Memory”, “Grotesque Realism” and the Horror Film
In response to questions regarding the genre of his 2017 film, Jordan Peele tweeted, “Get Out is a documentary” (twitter.com). This statement encompasses the satirical tone of Peele’s debut film and, far from being a straightforwardly incongruous joke, speaks to the dialectical content in the film which expresses African American experiences of white people and white supremacy within the framework of horror. The plot of the film sees protagonist, Chris
Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), going to visit the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose
Armitage (Allison Williams). During the visit, he is hypnotized by Rose’s mother, Missy
(Catherine Keener) and his consciousness is suppressed in ‘the sunken place’. After an accumulation of micro-aggressions experienced through encounters with the family and the other white members of the terrifying “Coagula Project”, it is eventually revealed that Chris has been trapped by Rose and his body will be supplanted by a white art-dealer in a procedure developed by the Armitage’s which harvests black bodies for the use of white people. The fictional and horrific “Coagula Project” is a satirical take on the way in which black bodies and psyches become silenced and repressed as they are formed within a functioning system of white hegemony and appropriation that defines, fetishizes and subjugates them. Whilst, at the same time, the monstrous depiction of the uncanny white people and white spaces express what bell hooks theorizes as the terrorizing representation of whiteness in the collective imagination of black people in the United States. My analysis of the film will follow Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “grotesque realism” which is an aesthetic mode that uses “degenerative satire” to reverse and thus unpick hegemonic structures of society, particularly relating to how they define subjects through the body. In conversation with this theory, I will use Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory” which argues that memory slides between temporalities as it is an act which makes the past present
40 (4). Like the deconstructing formal reversals in Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism”, he states that the performance of memory can embed new narratives and meanings of the past that “…can play a role in coming to terms with and mapping undesirable forms off implication in historical traumas’ (41, Implicated Subject). In bringing together these theories, alongside hooks’s more personal account of the collective conception of whiteness in the African
American cultural imagination, I interpret Peele’s Get Out as a satirical horror that expresses an absurd but dialectically rooted African American perspective that unpicks whiteness to embed new memories and conceptions of the way white supremacy affects black people in the United States.
To justify my rejection of Peele’s comment as an incongruous joke and argue against the film being a formal practice of incongruity, it is worth elaborating on this theory of humor and how it often relates to the generic conventions of horror. Noël Carroll explicitly links these two forms and states that:
On the incongruity theory of humor, one explanation of the affinity of horror and
humor might be that these two states, despite their differences, share an overlapping
necessary condition insofar as an appropriate object of both states involves the
transgression of a category, a concept, a norm, or a commonplace expectation. (154)
Elm, Kabalek, Kohne observe this use of incongruity and state that: ‘…the ‘horror’ in horror movies [may] derive from ‘normal’ milieus, like the familiar nuclear family of white, US-
American suburbs, unalarming, per se, at first glance from the outside’ (14). In the case of
Get Out, the humor in the film actually derives from the incongruity of the horror. The film opens with a young black man strolling through such a setting whilst on the phone. He confesses a sense of shiftiness in a comic tone and compares the ‘creepy ass suburb’ to a
‘hedge maze’ (a foreshadowing horror reference to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). A white sports car cruises into the shot and pulls up to the pavement as “Run Rabbit Run” (Flanagan
41 and Allen, 1939) begins to play. The absurd song overlaying this scene invites both laughter and terror as the tune of the childlike nursery rhyme contrastingly expresses the experience of being hunted and communicates the man’s fear that he is unsafe and unwelcome in this supposedly idyllic setting. The music ends abruptly in a jump-scare in which the man is captured by a dark figure and dragged off into the car and the opening credits begin to roll.
Thus, from the outset, expectations of the white, American liberal residing in a pleasant house in the suburbs are thwarted in Get Out as this seemingly harmless quotidian image is imagined and introduced to the viewer through the perspective of the black man’s discomfort and then confirmed as the monstrous source of threat and terror through the jump-scare kidnapping.
This takes on another dimension, though, as the representation of whiteness is not as straightforward as simply reversing audience expectations. In fact, bell hooks argues that whiteness has existed in the cultural imagination of African Americans as a form of terror in response to their historical dehumanization at the hands of white supremacy in the United
States. She states that representations of whiteness as terrorizing are:
…not formed in reaction to stereotypes but emerges as a response to the traumatic
pain and anguish that remains a consequence of white racist domination, a psychic
state that informs and shapes the way black folks "see" whiteness. Stereotypes black
folks maintain about white folks, are not the only representations of whiteness in the
black imagination. They emerge primarily as responses to white stereotypes of
blackness. (341)
Implicit in the black man’s expressions of feeling ‘creeped-out’ and unsafe is that he is aware of being in a space (the white suburbs) where he is unwelcome: where he does not belong.
So, though casting the figure of the monster in the form of whiteness (both in terms of white subjects as well as representations of white spaces) is a transgressive representation that
42 disrupts expectation and imbibes laughter, it also speaks to the material reality of African
American lived experience as they collectively approach whiteness with a warranted suspicion rooted in a traumatic history and re-embedded in the contemporary structures of society. This representation of whiteness, then, is one which uses Rothberg’s multidirectional model of memory. He uses the term to describe the collective and performative acts of making the past present and states that, “such processes of reconstruction always involve temporal and spatial displacements and thus new layerings and constellations of time and place” (43). Performing the terror of whiteness thus actively remembers, bears witness to and collapses the historical legacy of black subjugation and the ways in which these oppressions emerge in the present. And, because the film satirically frames this perception of whiteness within the generic conventions of horror, it makes “hostility, reconfigured by comedy, accessible to a subject inclined to repress it” (Aloys Fleischmann, 72) and, for white viewers, opens up rather than closes off a dialectical view of how racism continues to function within the collective imagination of African Americans through the structures of American society.
The way the tension and horror is structured in Peele’s Get Out is itself an exercise in memory recall. That is, when the viewer, vicariously through the eyes of protagonist Chris, becomes aware of the Armitage’s harvesting project they are prompted to retrace the accumulation of tension-building absurdities from a new perspective based on this revelation.
Up until the point of discovery that the Armitage’s are usurping the bodies of black people, the points of tension are intertwined with a comic tone, albeit an unsettling one. In the car, on the way to visit his white girlfriend’s parents, Chris receives a phone call from his best friend and TSA employee Rod (Lil Rel Howery). Rod treats the visit with a comically exasperated suspicion and advises his friend: “Don’t go to a white girl’s parents’ house!”. The tour that occurs the first time Chris meets Rose’s parents, is accompanied by comments such as, “it’s such a privilege to experience another person’s culture”, “bring it in, we’re huggers” and “I
43 would have voted Obama in for a third term, if I could!”. Whilst the encounters with the bizarre, Stepford-Wife-like maid, Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and the obsessive night-time running of gardener, Walter (Marcus Henderson), (both of whom are black), teeter at the intersection of comical absurdity and anxiety-inducing abnormality. When it is revealed that
Georgina and Walter are, in fact, the hosts of the Armitage grandparents who have embodied them and supressed their state of consciousness, the viewer revisits the memory of the uncanny behaviours they displayed earlier in the film from this newly situated position of knowledge. For example, Georgina’s cloying tone, her moments of ‘glazing-over’ and her oddly conservative attire becomes evidence of the Grandmother’s inhabitance in the young black woman’s body, whilst the comically absurd and outdated white vernacular used by
Walter to describe Rose as ‘one of a kind; top of the line; a real doggone gal’, is answered according to a newly formed awareness. Further, the explanation for Walter’s (or, rather, the
Grandfather’s) running can be traced back to the first scene in the Armitage’s home. Chris is told that the Grandfather lost out to African American athlete, Jesse Owens, in the qualifying round for the 1936 Berlin Olympics – which Dean (Rose’s father – played by Bradley
Whitford) ironically references as the event which disproved Hitler’s theory on the supremacy of the Aryan race, though Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) nearly exposes the project when he fetishizes Chris’s apparent physical prowess during dinner, excitedly noting his potential to “…be a real beast”. Moments that were previously met with a chuckle, a strained smile or an eye-roll of recognition from Chris (and by extension, the viewer) become instances of horror when revisited. This speaks to how the generic conventions of the horror film are able to not only capture the way in which the accumulative experience of micro-aggressions invokes a sense of terror and trauma that is rooted in the events of the past but, in a more productive and progressive sense, also demonstrates how new narratives and perspectives can alter views of the past and have the potential to shape
44 views in the future.
So, whiteness in the film is thus the object which intersects humor and horror but not only due to the absurd incongruity between white, liberal quotidian and monstrous body snatchers.
David Eldridge, discussing American Psycho, states that ‘…ultimately the satirical horror of both texts [film and novel] lies in the possibility that it might be real’ (23), and the case is the same in Get Out. White stereotypes are used in the film in line with bell hooks’ argument that they are responses to the apprehensions or manifestations of terror they imbibe in African
Americans based. She states that white people “…do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness” (341). Get Out demystifies this fantasy through satirical representations of whiteness to attest to the accumulative experience of micro-aggressions which unsettle and exhaust Chris. The technology developed by the Armitages allows white subjects to literally inhabit black bodies whilst usurping their state of consciousness. The project to embody blackness is born from a twisted combination of pragmatic survival (living on in another body when one’s own no longer functions) and fetishistic desire. At the garden party, a friend of the Armitages’ gazes lustfully at Chris and comments on his sexual virility; a retired golfer joyfully proclaims that he “knows Tiger [Woods]!” and a gentleman declares that “the pendulum is swinging back, black is in fashion!”. The man who wins the bidding war for
Chris’s body (depicted as a silent game of bingo – which provides its own comedic commentary on the past-times of white people) is a blind art-dealer whom Chris meets beforehand. He specifically desires him for his eyes, as Chris is a skilled photographer, and appreciates his work for being “brutal and melancholic”. So, not only does this auction provide the premise of the horrific threat which terrorizes Chris, and, by extension, the viewer, but the particular interest from the art-dealer speaks to an ongoing history of white
45 appropriation and fetishization of African American art and aesthetics, whose cultural traditions7 are, in part, influenced by the collective experience of trauma. In a highly choreographed scene which sees Chris disappear upstairs, feeling increasingly isolated and distressed by the objectifying comments directed at him, the party attendees fall completely silent and direct their gaze to follow him. This shot in particular highlights the clearly exaggerated representation of whiteness that satirizes rather than mirrors reality, however, what it expresses is the very real and oppressive trauma induced by white people’s current fetishistic desire to consume blackness; predicated on racist perceptions which equate blackness with primitive hypersexuality, superior physical strength and the aestheticization of collective trauma. Thus, even before Chris discovers the harvesting project, horror is derived from the satirical representation of fetishization which forms perceptions of whiteness as
“terrorizing imposition[s]” in the collective psyches of African Americans.
Noel Carroll argues that the figure of the monster in horror films are “contortions performed upon the known” (166). Implicit in this argument is a reliance on memory and of the everyday quotidian. In Get Out, though, there is an additional contortion as it subverts the traditional face of monstrosity and locates it in the form of white, liberal Americans. With this in mind, it befits that the Armitage’s harvesting project and the tactics they use to lure their victims are reminiscent of vampiric tropes. They use their beautiful daughter, Rose, to attract their victims (the evidence of which is provided by the photographs that Chris finds in
Rose’s bedroom) whilst Missy hypnotizes them into an unconscious state which she calls
7 Such an in-depth study of the history and specificities of the cultural appropriation of blackness and African American culture in the United States is beyond the scope of this paper as I want to focus on its relation to horror, satire and memory, but for a greater overview and insight, see: Young, James O. “Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 63, no. 2, 2005, pp. 135–146. JSTOR, Thompson, Sheneese. “Exploitation, Cultural Appropriation, and Degradation”. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2015. Onlinelibrary.wiley.com. Web.
46 “the sunken place”. Most importantly, as stated above, their harvesting project is motivated by the desire to sustain and prolong life predicated on the fetishization of blackness. Harry M.
Benshoff, in his analysis of Blaxploitation era horror films, notes that the vampire often functions “as a metaphor for capitalism and cultural imperialism, dramatizing in horror movie iconography how some human beings live off the blood, sweat, and toil of others…” (38).
Though the ‘horror movie iconography’ of the vampire is not explicit in the imagery of the film but is, rather, adopted in the form of vampiric ‘tactics’, it situates whiteness in the realm of a monstrosity predicated on an existence defined by the deleterious affects on and consumption of others. Indeed, bell hooks argues that the “[c]ommodification of blackness has created a social context where appropriation by non-black people of the black image knows no boundaries” (Black Looks, 7). Whilst both she and Paul Gilroy also agree that the postmodern era has created a (neo)liberal attitude whereby white Americans consume commodified ‘blackness’ in “…an attempt to make an act of consumption appear to be an act of acknowledgement” (hooks, Black Looks, 13) and “…racial types are reinscribed in the service of commercial reach rather than abolished in the name of human freedom” (Gilroy,
147). Again, this adopts a framework of multidirectional memory as it reworks horror’s longstanding mythic tropes of the vampire and represents them in the form of white
American (neo)liberals. More than this though, such a transgressive reversal of white representation is an example of the Bakhtinian understanding of satire and the grotesque.
Peter Arnds, discussing mythical representations of the Third Reich, suggests that this form of satire acts as a “translation from the real to the mythical in order to offer ways of coming to terms with trauma” (25). The satiric and grotesque displacement and replacement of vampiric tropes on to whiteness forms a relationality between the two which is able to develop and express an ambivalence, suspicion and eventual terror towards whiteness in the film’s diegesis and also cathartically ‘translates’, rather than represses, the historical and
47 ongoing cultural trauma of structurally implemented African American economic exploitation and oppression at the hands of white supremacy.
To expand on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque and apply it to Get Out, I want to focus on how it relates to memory, satire and the body. The grotesque is a literary mode which focusses on the exaggerated, porous and penetrative body and is realised, according to
Bakhtin through carnival practices such as mask wearing8. As such, Gillespie sees satirical appropriations which perform racial stereotypes such as black-face minstrelsy as an example of the “racial grotesque” and states that this re-appropriation “is never simply the anachronistic revival of a dead phenomenon but is also a creative practice attendant to the continued impact of racialization and white supremacy” (22). Get Out, however, utilizes and performs stereotypes of whiteness as a response to stereotypes of blackness which, from an
African American perspective, provide the conditions for a terrorized lived experience, as outlined above by bell hooks. At the garden party, the out-of-place Chris seeks validation and solace from Logan King (LaKeith Stanfield), the only other black person attending the party.
Chris, relieved to have spotted him, confesses to Logan: “Good to see an old brother around here” to which a confused-looking Logan replies: “Hi. Yes, of course it is”. Logan is then called away by a gathering of white people and reciprocates Chris’s fist-bump by grabbing it with his hand, expecting a hand-shake. The camera shows a close up of Chris’s perplexed face and then follows his gaze to Logan who holds up his arms and spins around for the white people who clap, “oo” and “aah”. The white vernacular, formal (if not awkward) manner and southern-style of attire of Logan King, (who the viewer discovers is the black man who was
8 Bakhtin writes, "carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the pre vailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibititions” (10) Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World [1941]. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Print.
48 kidnapped in the film’s opening scene during a phone call between Rod and Chris), sees the unsettling and absurd performance of whiteness through the black body. In the moment where Chris attempts to secretly photograph Logan to show Rod, he causes him to break out from his hypnotic state in “the sunken place” which results in a change of voice, a glazed look in his eyes and blood trickling from his nostril (see Fig 2). In a state of immediate alarm, mistaken by Chris for hostility, Logan yells at him to “Get out! Get out, man! Get out!’. The comical representation of a black man behaving in a distinctly white manner is, in an instant, turned into a representation of a terrorized black subject who is then dragged off by white people, re-hypnotized and supressed. Importantly, warping the black body in this performative way resists the retraumatization of representing degrading black stereotypes.
More than this, though, it uses the “racial grotesque” to communicate the penetration of the black body by white people in a horrific way through the critical lens of the terrorized
African American collective experience at the hands of structures of white supremacy which fetishize and appropriate the black body.
Fig 2. Still from Get Out. Dir, Jordan Peele. Monkey Paw Productions. 2017. 55.10 mins. Film
It is the secretions and shifts of Logon’s orifices that communicate a transformation from a performance of whiteness to a conscious and terrorized black subjectivity and, as such, the
49 grotesque is used to express a comic satire of whiteness which quickly slides into a representation of the vulnerable black body. A black body performing whiteness is thus more than a jarringly incongruous image which transgresses the viewer’s expectations based on stereotypes. It is an example of “racial grotesque” in that the ontological overlapping which is achieved by representing two separate identities (both on the level of the individual subject and the collective notion of racial identity) in one body, it highlights through satire the lived experience of African Americans. As Franz Fanon put it in Black Skin, White Masks, the space of “shared inhabitance” between the world and the body of the black subject requires an act of reconfiguration rather than orientation and this produces a sense of negation (41).
He states: “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating” (42). This is expressed in the film not only in relation to the black bodies that host white subjects. The accumulation of micro- aggressions that Chris experiences also highlights the experience of African Americans having to negate their bodies and behaviours in white space, and the draining effect this has on subjectivity. On the way to the Armitages’ home, Chris and Rose hit a dear and call the police to deal with the situation. The policeman treats Chris with hostility (a foreshadowing of the film’s final scene, which I will discuss shortly) and asks to see his ID despite the fact he was not driving the vehicle. Rose vehemently defends Chris, but he reacts by shrugging of the situation. At the party, following numerous fetishizing objectifications, Chris confides in
Georgina: “All I know is that sometimes, if there’s too many white people, I get nervous.
Y’know?”. She shakes her head, wearing a large, strained smile and repeats the word “no” but tears secrete from her eyes in juxtaposition to her statement. Finally, she states: “that’s not my experience at all. The Armitage’s treat us like family”. From the perspective of the project’s revelation near the end of the film, this provides the viewer with a moment of
50 retrospective absurd laughter as it becomes known that Georgina is actually inhabited by the
Armitage’s grandmother and so is literally part of the family.
However, though scene functions retroactively/retrospectively as a confirmation of the
“Coagula Project”, its diegetic occurrence also expresses the terrorizing effects of micro- aggressions on Chris and shows how this is part of an African American collective experience. He expects that Georgina will understand his nervousness and stress as she too
(so he thinks) is a black person in an overwhelmingly white space. When Chris’s attempt to confide in and relate to Georgina is rejected, the moment is presented in an odd and unsettling way (her contorted and contrasting facial expressions) to point out that this is an unusual and out-of-place remark. As bell hooks points out:
Collectively, black people remain rather silent about representations of whiteness in the
black imagination. As in the old days of racial segregation where black folks learned to
"wear the mask," many of us pretend to be comfortable in the face of whiteness only to
turn our backs and give expression to intense levels of discomfort. Especially talked
about is the representation of whiteness as terrorizing. (Black Looks, 341)
In contrast to Georgina’s denial of experiences of terror at the hands of frequent micro- aggressions from white people, Chris’s phone-call to Rod that follows confirms this African
American experience which represents whiteness in the collective imagination as
“terrorizing”. Chris tells Rod that “it’s like all of them missed the movement”, referring to a lack of racial awareness from the white people at the party and also from the few black people he has encountered. Rod concludes that it must be because “they are all hypnotized!” in a lingered-over moment which reaches the height of retrospective irony. Bakhtin argues that form is “dialogizing”: it creates out of itself and develops “new aspects of meaning” from the past, “Thanks to the intentional potential embedded in them” (“Discourse” 421).
The “racial grotesque” that is realised through the film’s generic conventions of horror works
51 in this dialogizing way within the parameters of the diegesis. The revelation of the
Armitage’s harvesting project retrospectively and retroactively explains the absurd behaviour of the white and black people at the party and so the previous stereotypical representations of whiteness as subtle, accumulating and yet still terrorizing are embedded with an intentional satirical irony which is only fully realised from the situated knowledge that occurs when the project is unveiled. Furthermore, what can be gleaned from Fanon’s argument, and what hooks points out, is that these racial stereotypes have historically informed the conditions of
African American collective experience and so not only does the “racial grotesque” work within the diegesis of Get Out, but also re-embeds the formal conditions of African American lived experience in the contemporary moment. As such, the film’s satirical use of stereotypes, as Gillespie states, is a “creative practice attendant to the continued impact of racialization and white supremacy” (22).
This also speaks to the relation between Rothberg’s multidirectional model of memory and Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” and its intentional dialogism. Lindsey Freeman notes that,
“[r]eading Rothberg reading Freud we understand the displacement of memory as displacement as well as a re-placement of memory, disembedding as well as reembedding: memory re-emerges in seemingly unrelated geographical locations, historical periods, and material objects” (2). In a scene at the beginning of the film, Chris and the Armitage’s are served ice-tea by Georgina out on the veranda. The representation of this image is reminiscent of the Southern plantation scene9 as depicted in films such as Birth of a Nation
(1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939) which present Southern white hospitality against the
9 Daniel Stein unpacks this image of the plantation scene in literary fiction and film at length, arguing that is “…became the emblem of the South as mythical space in American culture” (21). Stein, Daniel. “From ‘Uncle Remus’ to ‘Song of the South’: Adapting American Plantation Fictions.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, 2015, pp. 20–35. JSTOR,
52 backdrop of African American slavery. Chris expresses visible discomfort at being served by
Georgina whilst Georgina ‘glitches-out’ in a moment which sees her eyes become distant as she distractedly over-fills his glass. This momentary lapse in the scene provides an instance to reflect on its out-of-place absurdity. It is also the moment in which Missy clinks her spoon against the glass to initiate the process of hypnotizing Chris and this tactic is repeated when she first supresses him into “the sunken place”. As she questions Chris about his mother’s tragic death, the camera cuts back and forth between the two of them whilst the grating sound of the tea-spoon against Missy’s china tea-cup is audibly emphasised. Get Out thus thwarts the American cultural imagination which relates tea-drinking to white Southern hospitality and places it within the narrative as a means of suppression and eventual ‘body snatching’.
Re-embedding and re-placing this image, which is associated with white Southern hospitality, within the framework of horror points out the hypocrisy of these connotations and remembers how the image is situated within the historical context of African American slavery. This contemporary, ironic re-imagining represents whiteness not as civil, hospitable and welcoming but, through its dialogic reference to the antebellum past, reverses this stereotype to represent the terrorizing image of whiteness from the perspective of African American collective memory and cultural trauma. This grotesque performative reversal therefore manifests an altered memory of whiteness by creating new layers of meaning from the same form and demonstrates how memory functions in a multidirectional way which can account for histories which have been neglected and repressed.
It is important to emphasise that “grotesque realism” is a distinctly comedic form and one which derives comedy from the uncomfortable memory of immediate or more distant pasts.
This concept emerges most clearly in the film through the figure of best-friend Rod. His humorous yet unsettling commentary on white people throughout Get Out provides comedic relief but, ironically, his absurd predictions come very close to being ‘on the nose’. Frances
53 Barasch discusses Holocaust literature in relation to the comic form of Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism”. He states that:
The conflict, objectified in the grotesque moment, is correlative to the reader's own
ambivalence and, no doubt, discomfort with its effect. Invariably, the grotesque structure
also implies a failure of conventional systems to provide rational solutions for human
interaction. In the darkest, most absurd moment, the grotesque conceit is stretched out of
proportion to its own logical conclusion by portents of self-destruction… (6)
Though Rod is not a grotesque object/figure in himself, his narration of whiteness encompasses the “ludicrous statements about the irrational nature of man” and his perceptions always refer to uncomfortable, terrorizing and grotesque stereotypes. During the phone-call in which Chris seeks validation for the odd behaviour of white people, he tells
Rod that he has been hypnotized by Missy. Rod’s advice to him is to “get out!” because
“white people love making people sex slaves and shit” and he proceeds to give examples of the behaviour of white people by erroneously referencing the horrific actions of white serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and tells Chris he is “some Eyes Wide Shut situation” (referencing
Kubrick’s 1999 film - relating back to the opening scene). The short-cut conclusion Rod comes to, based on his knowledge of white people, has a distinctly comic effect. However, what is unsettling about his white-people-reference is the evocation of an infamous serial killer, a horror film and, retrospectively, the fact that the Armitage’s do have a horrific plan in-store for Chris. Implicit in Rod’s perspective on the behaviour of white people is a failure in American society to provide systems where African American subjects and white subjects conceive of and relate to one another. Furthermore, the film does not deny Rod’s terrorizing image of whiteness but, rather, satirically directs the viewer to a perspective on the destructive affects of white supremacy and locates it in the memorably unsettling intersection of terror and laughter. Johanna Öttl, again, discussing holocaust literature, states that the
54 grotesque “…breaks the sacred aura that has been created around artistic representations of the Shoah. These aesthetics do not play down the dimension of the Shoah but stress its absurdity” (87). Within the generic conventions of horror and through the mode of
“grotesque realism”, the film expresses and represents the terror and trauma that exists in the actual lived experience of African Americans. As Öttl argues, the aesthetics do not trivialize the experience by fictionalising it in this way, but, rather, communicates the experience of whiteness in the black imagination based on a long-standing and perpetuated history of oppression and appropriation.
Rod’s character is also akin to the stock figure of the black friend in horror films who provides comedic relief. However, the representation of this stock character is reversed in Get
Out10, as is the archetypal cathartic end and both of these reversals are dependent on
Bakhtin’s mode of “grotesque realism” and Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory”. Rather than aligning with the trope of the black friend as one of the first to die, Rod ends up saving the day in a final scene that satirically expresses African American attitudes towards the police. A bizarre video tape reveals to Chris that his body will be used to harbour the blind art-dealer as part of the Armitage’s absurd “Coagula Project”. The tape functions not only as a crucial part of the film’s horror but is also a satirical take which pushes to extremity the representation of members-only, country-club-like organisations stereotypically associated with whiteness. This sets the humorous/terrifying tone for the final scene as the viewer is inundated with a constellation made up of absolute terror in the present diegetic moment as
Chris is hunted by Rose and flashbacks to Georgina, Walter and Logan direct the viewer to a
10 For an extensive account of this horror trope, see: Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Horror Noir: A History of Black Horror. Dir, Xavier Burgin. Stage 3 Productions. 2019. Film.
55 comprehension of their odd behaviour based on Chris’s newly situated knowledge. This facilitates a travelling back and forth in temporality which encourages a multidirectional mode of viewing and this is mode is applied dialectally to contemporary ‘real world’ events in the final scene. Chris manages to pin-down the gun-wielding Rose but exercises a moment of restraint by not killing her. However, as he leans over her: bloodied, bruised and with a crazed look of terror in his eyes, a siren becomes audible and then red and blue flashing lights appear within the shot. This functions to bring the film back from the horrific absurdity and into the ‘real world’. But, far from the arrival of the police signifying justice and safety for
Chris, his alarm is sustained if not accelerated by their presence. He gets to his feet in the middle of the road and holds up his bloody hands with Rose sprawled out in front of him. His eyes express both dread and defeat in reaction to their arrival and through this, the viewer understands that Chris’s ability to explain himself out of the situation will be impossible. The film therefore adopts Rothberg’s model of multidirectional memory as it relies on and applies an understanding of the events of the immediate past which show that black people in the
United States have been persecuted and even murdered by the police under far less incriminating circumstances11. The reversed representation of Rod as the hero and the police as an extension of the terrorizing horror therefore reworks dominant cultural memories through “grotesque realism” to communicate the contemporary African American lived experiences of terror and struggle at the hands of the police.
Particularly within this final scene, the film’s satire can be located in the
“degenerative model”, described by Weisenburger as the infliction of violence on cultural forms, including collective groups and institutions, that overtly and/or covertly engage in terrorism (1-5). The representation of what is believed to be the police that is captured in
11 This is explicitly expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement. See: blacklivesmatter.com
56 Chris’s expression of dread is therefore a satirical attack on an institution which seeks to protect society, but for African Americans, often induces far more ambivalent if not terrorized states of emotion based on a continued history of violence and neglect. Jessie
LaFrance Dunbar draws on Weisenberger (who is influenced by Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism”) to state that, “African American comedy lends itself to the degenerative model of satire inasmuch as it depicts a real world of objects based on dominant codes of conduct.
Thus, the "representing" satirical discourse destroys the "represented" racist language
(Bakhtin 363)” (80-81). The shot that comes after Chris’s expression of terror follows his gaze to the door of the vehicle as it opens to reveal the word “airport”. The viewer is awash with relief as Rod gets out of the TSA vehicle and stares at Chris in complete disbelief. The subversive representation relays new memories of the police to the viewer from an African
American perspective to present a collectively induced feeling of anxiety and terror at the hands of an institution that historically and continuously enacts violence on their community and thus achieves the goal of “degenerative satire” to “subvert codified knowledge”
(Christian Schmidt, 152). The use of this degenerative model of satire in Get Out’s final scene is therefore used productively to bear witness to the terrorizing stereotype of the police in the collective imagination of African Americans and communicate this experience of institutional racism. The potential of this reworking is located in an ability to undermine hegemonic representations of whiteness and white supremacist institutions that erase the terrorized experience of African Americans. Get Out expresses an African American perspective at the distinctly memorable intersection of horror and humour and opens up an opportunity for the viewer to remember, re-embed and transform their own perspective from this newly situated position.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out engages in a project of “multidirectional memory” through the aesthetic mode of “grotesque realism” and, specifically, the “racial grotesque”. The film
57 uses the generic form of horror to communicate the experience of terror induced by whiteness in the collective imagination of African Americans. Because this terror is built on a dialectal relationship between historically situated trauma and the re-embedded forms of this trauma in contemporary structures of white supremacy, the film’s representation of tension-building micro-aggressions, appropriation and fetishization, and scenes which subvert stereotypes of
“whiteness-as-goodness” (hooks, 341) all work to re-map memories and perceptions of whiteness. bell hooks states that in order to conceive of the experience of whiteness-as- terrorizing:
…[O]ne must face a palimpsest of written histories that erase and deny, that reinvent
the past to make the present vision of racial harmony and pluralism more plausible.
To bear the burden of memory one must willingly journey to places long uninhabited,
searching the debris of history for traces of the unforgettable, all knowledge of which
has been suppressed. (342)
The performance of African American multidirectional memory in Get Out takes up this task, and with: the viewer, to communicate a perspective of whiteness that resists, re-imagines and reverses dominant concepts under white supremacy. The film does not gaslight or downplay the terrorizing experience of micro-aggressions, as Jessie LaFrance Dunbar argues is often the case as ‘…we privilege the intentions and feelings of certain aggressors—those who do not intend to be racist—over the perceptions and feelings of injured parties’ (83). Rather, the film testifies to and represents the culmination of deleterious racist micro-aggressions on
Chris’s psyche with the revelation of the Armitage’s insidious “Coagula Project”. Thus, Get
Out uses “degenerative satire” to reflect on the ways that white subjects and white spaces inflict a state of terror on African Americans and depicts the repressed terror embedded in everyday life by representing hegemonic images of whiteness in a reimagined monstrous form (Isabel Cristina Pinedo, 107). That is, from the black perspective, casting whiteness in
58 the form of the monster and particularly one whose aim, the viewer discovers, is to profit from the bodies of African Americans whilst rendering them in an unconscious and silent state, forms a “palimpsest” that overlays the to the not-so-distant traumatic cultural history of slavery and also encapsulates the contemporary perpetuation of trauma that occurs throughout society’s white supremacist structures. Get Out places the viewer in a newly situated position of knowledge through “grotesque” reversals that enable the comprehension of Peele’s provocative statement. In many ways, “Get Out is a documentary”.
59 Conclusion
In many ways, my three objects of analysis in this paper are responses to Richard Dyer’s provocation to “…make whiteness strange”. James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching
Photography in America, Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery; and Jordan Peele’s Get Out all take a different approach to representing whiteness according to their forms but the questions they invite and the answers they produce exist in congruity: they all encourage a recognition of the ways, as bell hooks points out, whiteness terrorizes
African Americans (“Representing Whiteness”, 342). The aesthetics and form of each of the objects visually represent whiteness from the perspective of African American collective memory and cultural trauma and specifically address the role that racialized looking practices have played/continue to play in forming these experiences of terror that are transmitted and re-embedded from one generation to the next. In reading the objects according to Michael
Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory”, Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” and
Alison Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory”, I have shown how these visual representations of whiteness attest to an ongoing legacy of African American terrorization at the hands of whiteness but also how these visual representations that engage in a dialectical relationship between the past and present form productive and transformative ways of shifting perspectives and acknowledging the terrorizing aspect of whiteness. Indeed, I have followed
Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman’s line of argument which suggests that cultural trauma
(and the collective memory it produces) is a “sociocultural process”. As such, Without
Sanctuary, Incognegro and Get Out all engage in the process of attending to the ruptures within African American identity (Alexander, 10) by locating the “white supremacist gaze”
(hooks, “Glory”, 50) and its extension into representation and images as a source of ongoing cultural trauma. Because this “sociocultural process” is one that “performs memory”
(Rothberg), it enables African American trauma to be worked through and, by identifying the
60 source of this trauma, encourages a shift in the racialized looking practices embedded in white supremacy.
Moreover, all of the objects address the necessity of a shift in racialized looking practices both on an individual and institutional level. Without Sanctuary, in particular, makes the contemporary viewer a spectator of violence against the black body. The controversial collection raises questions regarding the retraumatization of African Americans as white people who look at these images in the present replicate the racially dominating white supremacist gaze which was produced and consolidated through the repeated act of sharing, circulating and exchanging these images. Indeed, it was an ethically difficult decision to include the object but the statistics of a website mapping police brutality in the
United States pointed out the necessity to address the horrific lynching images and the institutional embedding of white supremacy they informed seeing as law enforcement and legal structures perpetuate these violent acts against African Americans in the present.
Mappingpoliceviolence.org found that in 2017, U.S police killed 1,147 people and “[b]lack people were 25% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population”; black people are
3 X more likely to be killed by police than white people; 69% of the black people that were killed were non-violent/unarmed; and 99% of the 2015 cases did not result “in any officer(s) involved being convicted of a crime”. Especially seeing as 69% of the black people killed by the police were unarmed and non-violent, it becomes apparent that specifically racialized viewing practices impact the police violence against black people in America and that the racial narratives embedded in white supremacy is institutionally bolstered by a lack of recognition and a perpetuation within the legal system. Without Sanctuary’s dedication to addressing and reframing these viewing practices predicated on and accelerated by the racial domination of white subjects over black subjects is therefore crucial precisely because this
“white supremacist gaze” inhabits the very institutions designed to protect U.S citizens.
61 The final scene in Get Out which uses degenerative satire to point out the suspicion and lack of trust in U.S law enforcement also attends to the institutionalised white gaze which deems blackness as guilty/Other/sub-human. Peele’s horror film, or as he would have it: documentary, encompasses the terrorized experience of being black in America through the formal elements of Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism”. The engagement with shifting temporalities aligns with Rothberg’s “multidirectional model of memory” to achieve a subversion and de-normalisation of narratives pertaining to whiteness-as-goodness.
Representing whiteness in the form of monstrosity thus attends to the collective memory of
African Americans both historically and in the present and the intersecting crux of horror and humour imprints itself on the viewer to form new memories and narratives of whiteness from the perspective of African Americans, many of whom experience the lingering potential of terror that whiteness poses to their subjectivity, as hooks points out.
Similarly, Incognegro adopts symbols and narratives of American national identity and applies them in the graphic form to contest notions of equal citizenship between black and white subjects. The projected, opaque images in Zane’s “mirror scene” depict how white supremacy constitutes American national identity as the memory of sexual exploitation during the antebellum period of African American slavery and the U.S rupture his mirror image reflection. The re-drawing of the graphic novel’s superhero figure onto the Klansman also points to the embedded representations of white supremacy within the form itself and, in a wider sense, comments on the way white domination is an insidiously constitutive part of images in popular culture which reinforce narratives of white supremacy. By subverting these narrative in the graphic form, Incognegro provides images which impress upon the mind of the viewer/reader and interrupt the white supremacist narratives that are both repressed and perpetuated in American culture. As such, and as Mat Johnson’s framing of the graphic novel suggests, this holds the potential create a new public memory of the way whiteness is
62 privileged in the U.S via Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” in order to disrupt and rewrite racial narratives of white supremacy that are alarmingly on the rise in
America.
By undertaking the task to represent whiteness, the three objects analysed in this thesis participate in performing African American collective memory to interrupt the perpetuation of white supremacist constructions in the present. They make the form of whiteness visible, as it pertains to terror in the cultural imagination of African Americans, through focalizing techniques such as framing, satirizing and drawing to produce new memories of whiteness through visualisation. By using techniques of visualisation to represent whiteness, the objects operate within the very terms that produced and consolidated racial domination, white supremacy and the dehumanization of blackness. As such by addressing the individual and institutional power of the gaze, representation and images and tracing the history of this influence through African American collective memory, they disrupt, reframe and reimagine the processes that inflicted their trauma at the hands of white people. Memories exist at both an individual and collective level and involve the performative acts of sensuous experiences. Visual images, are able to mediated and even form these memories and, therefore, representations have the power to transform knowledges
(Landsberg, Hirsch, Fine, Aaron and Berger). Because white people have not been faced with negating images based primarily on their race, Without Sanctuary, Incognegro and Get Out all provide these crucial instances of visual disruption which enable white people to contend with the construction of white supremacy both historically and in the contemporary and this creates the opportunity to reflect on and reform memories regarding the dominating construction of whiteness and the ways this was practiced by exercising a dehumanizing gaze against African Americans. I have made clear the necessity to tackle and transform these racialized looking practices which function on an individual, cultural and institutional level,
63 given the ongoing and, at the moment, increasing terrorization of African Americans. The dedication to visually mediating whiteness can thus play an important role in forming new, critically engaged ways for white people to contend with their own image and attend to developing ways of looking that resist the perpetuation of oppression against African
Americans.
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