On Jubilee: The Performance of Black Leadership in the Afterlife of Slavery by Omar Benton Ricks A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in New Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Chair Professor Abigail De Kosnik Professor Darieck Scott Professor Frank B. Wilderson, III Spring 2014 1 Abstract On Jubilee: The Performance of Black Leadership in the Afterlife of Slavery by Omar Benton Ricks Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in New Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Chair Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being—especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black bodies to gratuitous and structural violence—work through subsequent Black performances of leadership. The philosophical breadth of the concept of "new media" and of the constituent elements of slavery as elaborated by Orlando Patterson invites close study of the ways that human beings can serve as new media. The impulse to create an all-new form of being known as the “Black” allowed a new human labor technology for western Europeans to mediate their libidinal desire and political demands. This dissertation engages the ways this technological paradigm extends into the present. i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee members, Brandi Wilkins Catanese (my generous and devoted dissertation chair), Abigail De Kosnik, Darieck Scott, and Frank B. Wilderson III, as well as Catherine Cole. You were always there to advise and support and you really got me through this challenging period called the last 5 years. Thank you also to Vernon Burton, Robert Cohen, Cliff Faulkner, Sandra Y. Govan, Daniel N. Hoffman, Dorothea Martin, Dianne Rothenberg, Ken Washington, and Frank B. Wilderson III, who helped me get here and believed in my abilities to formulate an academic project. Special thanks to Hortense J. Spillers, for introducing me to The Feminist Wire, and to Dean MacCannell and Fred Moten, for commenting on my work. Beyond thanks to Gregory Caldwell, my one-of-a-kind honorary committee member. You advised me to keep on living and to go always forward, never back. Conversations with Leslie Allums, Tarecq Amer, Sampada Aranke, James Battle, Clifford Benton, Deanna Blackwell, Rizvana Bradley, Nicholas Brady, Naomi Bragin, Ambrielle Caldwell, Jennifer Caldwell, Lamar Caldwell, Monica Casper, Cecilio Cooper, Tiffany Cox, Michael D’Arcy, Jerome Dent, Patrice Douglass, Ugo Edu, Zakiyyah Jackson, Paige Johnson, Corey Jones, Darol Kay, Kate Kokontis, Clarence Lang, Amanda Lashaw, Tamura Lomax, Minkah Makalani, Danae Martinez, Victoria Massie, Lisa McLeod, Kimberly McNair, Darnell Moore, John Murillo III, James Nelligan, Tamara K. Nopper, Yumi Pak, Linda Quiquivix, Raphaelle Rabanes, Ivan Ramos, Heather Rastovac, Takeo Rivera, Jared Sexton, Karin Shankar, Jewels Smith, Kevin Spencer, Selamawit Terrefe, Obiamaka Ude, John Wason, Jaye Austin Williams, Josh Williams, Connie Wun, and Hentyle Yapp, sitting at tables with me, breaking bread with me, and exchanging ideas made me a stronger intellectual. My family has seen me through a perilous journey to press the gifts they gave me to the limit, but especially my siblings, Vance, Nia, and Derrin, and my stepmother, Patricia Jones Ricks. You are all the beautiful minds and hearts I could have asked to be cultivated around. You have challenged and embraced me. Thank you, finally, to my mother, Carole Elizabeth Benton Ricks and my father, Alvin Antonio Ricks. I am sure you always knew I would find my way into the master’s house and steal one of his most precious tools. But I would trade back all of it, and more, for just one more day with each of you. ii Introduction If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders… Nearly all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two…. —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (Du Bois) 49) The slave was the ultimate human tool, as imprintable and as disposable as the master wished. And this is true, at least in theory, of all slaves, no matter how elevated. Paul Rycaut’s classic description of the Janissaries as men whom their master, the sultan, ‘can raise without Envy and destroy without Danger’ holds true for all slaves in all times. —Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Patterson) 7) We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being, in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. --Malcolm X (X and Breitman) 116) If we are not looking in the same direction, we won’t see it coming. And if we don’t love each other, we won’t care. Of Tied Hands Toward the beginning of the brief dance with “post-racialism” in U.S. political culture, a Black man was called on to make a speech about U.S. national unity. “There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America,” intoned then-U.S. senate candidate Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (Obama). “There's the United States of America.” Long before Barack Obama stepped to the podium to tell the “Black America” that formed him as a political subject that we don’t exist (at least when he’s speaking in front of white people), Black people had a critical interest in Black leadership as a unique mode of performance in itself, distinct from the performance of other forms of leadership. And so, Black people in the United States were broadly supportive of the speech because they were able to read it, with the above-quoted Du Boisian double consciousness, as “leader[ship] not of one race but of two.” Obama’s iii attempt to iterate a post-racial United States was simultaneously the performance of two modes of leadership: Black leadership and “post-racial” (that is, white) leadership. In the years since, the fate Barack Obama has endured has made it clear for those who didn’t know that he made this speech under a certain disavowal, if not, indeed, under a kind of desperation or even duress. As articulated among white people, “post- racial” America is and always was a fantasy to be post-Black—to be rid of Black people— one that many non-Black people in the United States still hold onto and that Barack Obama is still expected to labor under and advocate, even if he, like most Black people in the United States, cannot personally attest that it is possible without the type of acceleration of its orchestrated genocide that the United States does not presently appear to be ready to perform against its Black population. Nonetheless, white people who voted for him are now beginning to express a readiness for his administration to end so that they can stop having to see how racist they are. The post-racialism that once propelled him into office in part so that white people would see themselves as not racist now cannot stand him as a leader. On the other hand, of course, the Black desperation for a truly post-racial United States that never came to fruition was an articulation of something that is not merely a hope of many Black people but actually central to the structure of Black subjectivity, sociality, and political ethics: the drive toward the actualization of a non-racist social order. The fact that “Black America” is very much real, and the line being used to distinguish it from all the other Americas in the United States has rarely been brighter, is no longer up for dispute, if it even was in 2004, because the group, or better yet, the position that has consciously or unconsciously articulated this drive to abolish the racist social order remains. Even as Black people in the United States desperately want to make the world a less destructive place for us, and realize how powerless, ineffective, and even unwilling the Obama administration is to address the problem of racism in anything like a permanent way, our support for Barack Obama as president has wavered very little, likely because he is of “Black America” and Black people in the United States identify with what he has been put through. Defining leadership in relation to Black folks is difficult precisely because of this problematic of audience. Who is Black leadership for? It is caught up in a web of affective considerations, even as social scientists attempt to circumscribe it with rigorous definitions. We—and when I say “we,” I mean Black people— know it when we see it, and it’s there until it isn’t. In general, Black people must be the ones performing it. But simply being Black and occupying a position of leadership is not enough.