Laughter’s Fury: The Double Bind of Black Laughter
A dissertation submitted by
Diego A. Millan
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in English
TUFTS UNIVERSITY
August 2016
©2016, Diego A. Millan
Advisor: Christina Sharpe ii
Abstract
Laughter’s Fury: The Double Bind of Black Laughter
Laughter’s Fury advances two major claims: that western philosophical and cultural traditions marginalize Blackness within theories of laughter, and that laughter’s sonic disruptiveness contributes to the intellectual development of a
Black radical consciousness. Reading theories of laughter alongside Black literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this project bridges the two historically separate strands of scholarship – Black Studies and Humor Studies.
The disproportionate way in which humor scholars fasten laughter to affects such as joy overinvests laughter with a sense of goodness; consequently, this idea of laughter as an act of affirmation occludes how laughter operates in modes of protest and rebellion. Most theories of comedy uphold an Aristotelian premise that laughter is “essentially human,” which extends laughter’s status as good to the safeguarding of Western definitions of the human. Yet as scholars such as
Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya Hartman have illustrated, the emergence of Western civilization and liberal humanism depended on the violent, repeated repudiation of blackness and of Black subjectivity. I ground my project in the perspective granted by this foundation in critical theory and cultural analysis to examine laughter’s role in securing the boundaries of the human and examine the double bind of Black laughter within the US cultural imaginary – the impasse that appears when laughter is associated with life and positivity by a culture that equates Blackness with negativity and death. iii
I examine the ways that laughter circulates within a Black cultural imaginary in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Calling upon these varied sources, each chapter traces a different avenue for considering laughter’s role in Black literature: undoing western epistemology (chapter one), crafting a literary voice (chapter two), and revising historical narrative (chapter three). In particular, I examine Black laughter as an expression of Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial praxis developed across his four published texts; the significance of voice in antebellum Black American literature, especially James McCune Smith’s pseudonymous writings and Frank J.
Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends; and the redefining of Black laugher within
Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and its revision of the 1898
Wilmington Riot. iv
Acknowledgements
I often joke that I got to where I am by an unfathomable stroke of dumb luck. The truth is the incredible kindness, support, and love of a vast network of family, friends, and colleagues has supported me in ways I could not imagine; I offer the following words by way of thanks. As a young scholar, I have benefitted from the direction, patience, and compassion of my committee, whose guidance saw me through the completion of this project. Christina Sharpe served as the director for this project and has been looking out for me longer than I can remember. Her gentle and at times very necessary corrections during both seminar and the dissertation process have not only taught me to be a more careful scholar and writer but also a more compassionate teacher. Her passion for the work will always be an inspiration. Greg Thomas joined the Tufts English Department at the outset of this project and signed on to work together sometime during our first meeting. I thank him for the enthusiasm he has always shown this work. His thoughtful reading of my materials and his generosity has led my thinking down new and productive avenues. Joseph Litvak’s impeccable sense of humor is matched only by his warmth and kindness. His encouragement to write with style has resulted in some of my favorite passages in this project. Sandy Alexandre graciously joined this committee as its fourth reader, and I am immensely grateful for her insights and collegiality. Finally, I thank Modhumita Roy, the unofficial fifth member of my committee, for her kindness and willingness to share snacks. The English Department office staff – Wendy, Chantal, and Douglas – has an inexhaustible amount of patience and wisdom. Thanks for letting me use up a considerable bit of both. I recently described graduate school as a profoundly isolating endeavor. For their camaraderie and solidarity, I offer my sincerest thanks to the following friends and colleagues: Ugonna Onyekwu, James Harris, Chris Knight, Sam Kamin, Donald Theodate, Vivek Freitas, James Mulder, Sara Hasselbach, Jess Pfeffer, Bryn Gravitt, Luke Mueller, Chris Payson, Emma Schneider, Margaret Love. Making friends since moving to Baton Rouge hasn’t always been easy, so I would like to thank John Miles for his encouragement and perpetual willingness to grab some lunch. My childhood friends deserve special mention: Andres Sanchez, Santiago Carvallo, Erin Cody, and Josh Milowe. You have known me longer than most people in this world yet still consider me a friend; I’m baffled. The research for this project and other work has been funded by grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, The Social Science Research Council’s Mellon Mays Graduate Initiative, and the Tufts Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In particular, I thank the SSRC’s Cally Waite for her advice. I have also been the recipient of a Posse Leadership Scholarship and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Both of these awards helped prepare me in many ways for my graduate career, and I remain immensely thankful to each program. v
My family and I came to the United States when I was just under three years old. My parents sought better medical care for my brother Felipe, who was diagnosed with severe autism. As I approach the age my parents were when they first came to this country, I still cannot imagine the struggle it must have been leaving their home and moving to a an entirely new place with four young children, not knowing the dominant language, and having no option but to make it work. And they did it before the Internet. For teaching me the value of a strong work ethic, I thank my parents, Ramiro and Luz-Maria. My oldest brother, Ramiro, once told me he was proud to see the man I had grown into. I am proud to see the father he has grown into. My sister Macarena may be the only family member to read my dissertation. With that in mind, I say you’ve always been my favorite. And though he will never read these words, I will show Felipe my thanks with a hug and a kiss the next time I see him. My sister’s fiancé, Geoffrey, is one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I’ve met. He also gives the best hugs. Finally, I thank my nephews, Aiden and Ethan, for keeping me grounded and for teaching me to play Minecraft. Emily King, my partner and best friend, deserves my deepest gratitude – Emily, who is good to me, who keeps learning the games as fast as I can change them – I marvel daily at the miracle that is your decision to love me. In your dissertation’s acknowledgements, you wrote that you looked forward to supporting me as I began the dissertation process not knowing how shamelessly I would take you up on it. Your keen eye and scrupulous attention to my writing saved me from myself on more than one occasion; that being said, any errors that persist are solely a result of my inability to heed your sound advice.
vi
Table of Contents
Introduction “Laughing loudly and contemptuously: 1 Toward a Theory of Black Laughter
Chapter One Wit’s End: Frantz Fanon and the Psychodynamics of Black Laughter 23
Chapter Two “Voice might discover him”: The Subject of Voice 62 In James McCune Smith’s Pseudonymous Writings and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends
Chapter Three Laughing Black in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition 111
Coda Laughter. Community. Protest. 151
Endnotes 156
Bibliography 166 1
Introduction
“Laughing loudly and contemptuously”:
Toward a Theory of Black Laughter
During a 1994 field trip to the Grand Lake Theater on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, students from Oakland’s Castlemont High were removed from a theater for laughing during a screening of Schindler’s List. Their removal was done in response to complaints from older, white moviegoers who said the laughter at the film about the Holocaust disrupted their ability to enjoy the film. The story received ample news coverage, ballooning quickly into a national debate about propriety, laughter, and cultural sensitivity. The ease with which news outlets scrutinized Castlemont’s mostly Black and Latino students generated all manner of racist arguments about the difficulties of “urban” education that blame “boisterous youths” for their lack of achievement. Critiques citing their laughter as evidence of an empathic lack amounted to telling these students to subordinate their ways of watching film, their affective responses – in effect the right to inhabit their bodies – to idealized notions of shared, universal suffering and to bourgeois middle-class definitions of who and what deserves sympathy. What remained curiously unasked by most, however, was why these students laughed in the first place and why their laughter registered as so offensive to some. 2
I offer this anecdote as a way to introduce my dissertation’s examination of Black laughter. Indeed, the incident illustrates how enduring legacies of racism structure cultural understandings and practices of laughter and inspires the following questions: How does the reaction of the white movie patrons relate to longer histories of white anxieties concerning Black laughter? In what ways does the disproportionate reaction to this laughter signal a cultural relationship to Black laughter that exceeds the particulars of the situation? In what ways do the upset patrons’ responses discipline the students, and what precisely is it that they felt must be disciplined? What is the relationship between white claims on enjoyment and the subordination of
Black laughter? How might this relationship compel the disciplining of Black laughter – both as a social phenomenon and academic object of inquiry?
Finally, how might attending to the psychosocial parameters of Black laughter provide new ways of examining regimes of race and violence, identity formation, and minority politics?
In pursuing answers to these questions, Laughter’s Fury: The Double Bind of Black Laughter advances two major claims: that Western philosophical and cultural traditions have marginalized Blackness within theories of laughter, and that laughter’s sonic disruptiveness contributed to the intellectual development of a Black radical consciousness. Reading theories of laughter alongside Black literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this project bridges the two historically separate strands of scholarship – Black Studies and Humor Studies.
For example, the disproportionate way in which humor scholars fasten laughter to 3 affects such as joy overinvests laughter with a sense of goodness; consequently, the idea of laughter as an act of affirmation occludes how laughter operates in modes of protest and rebellion.
The “double bind” of my dissertation’s title emerges from an impasse that occurs when we hold “Black” and “laughter” together. Most theories of comedy and laughter produce explanatory models indebted to the Aristotelian premise that laughter is “essentially human.” In so doing, these theories simultaneously maintain the goodness of laughter and safeguard Western definitions of the human. Yet, as scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and others have illustrated, the emergence of Western civilization and liberal humanism depended on the violent, repeated repudiation of Blackness and of Black subjectivity, observable in both the centuries-long enslavement of Black Africans and in the ongoing structural disenfranchisement of diasporic Blacks and marginalized peoples. The result is a culture founded upon the radical exclusion of Blackness. I ground my project in the perspective granted by this foundation in critical theory and cultural analysis to examine laughter’s role in securing the boundaries of the human and examine the double bind of Black laughter within the US cultural imaginary – the impasse that appears when laughter is associated with life and positivity by a culture that equates Blackness with negativity and death.
In what follows, I dilate the Castlemont story to highlight facets of Black laughter covered in subsequent chapters (questions of spectatorship, identity formation, and the policing of affect). I then situate Laughter’s Fury within a theoretical framework and highlight the ways in which Black laughter might 4 provide new insights into conversations concerning possibilities for Black social life against a world predicated on Black suffering. Finally, I conclude this introduction with an overview of my project.
II. AN OPPOSITIONAL LAUGH
In looking the Castlemont incident further, we must consider issues of perspective and spectatorship. How did media representations, for instance, shape perspectives over the issue? Headlines suggesting the students laughed
“at the Holocaust” and “at the thought of murder” repeatedly positioned the predominately non-white Castlemont students as aggressors in the situation.
The stigmatization of Oakland itself, as socio-economically worse off than adjacent more affluent areas of California, contributed further to negative portrayals of the incident in the media. When we consider histories of equating Blackness with childishness, even the students’ status as students in relation to the adults in the situation added to the ease with which student perspectives were marginalized. In addition to irritated theater patrons and marginally sympathetic theater management, the “adults” whose perspectives were given credence included vocal editorialists; school administrators; and even Stephen Spielberg, who when he visited Castlemont, spoke about the episode paternalistically: “Castlemont High School has received a very bad rap for what happened," Spielberg said during his assembly, "I bore and bear no ill will. I was thrown out of 'Ben Hur' when I was a kid, for talking. I chalk it up to one of the privileges of youth” (qtd. in Koury). Absent from the 5 acknowledged list of “adults,” of course, were the many parents who protested
Spielberg’s visit along with their children.
Alongside these more racial and sociocultural mechanisms that structure the scene, audible perceptions contributed further to the racialization of laughter. News reports referred interchangeably to the laughter in this incident as “nervous,”i “giggling”ii and “snickering”iii – words that run a spectrum capable of describing laughter as childish, innocent, and harmless to derisive, indecorous, and ill-intentioned.iv These contradicting descriptions indicate, following Saidiya Hartman’s work, the ways in which Blackness operates as a fungible site of accumulation. Black laughter thus functions as a cipher out of which conflicting meanings can be decoded to satisfy the social and political needs of a white middle class.
In his recent article on this incident, “Does Anyone Have the Right to
Say, ‘I Don’t Care’?: Resistance and Reverence at Schindler’s List,” film studies scholar Dennis Hanlon examines what the Castlemont story has to say about media representation, the construction of reverence, and differing viewing practices. Hanlon argues that mass media’s disregard for Black spectatorship resulted in skewed interpretations and less than empathetic reporting. Citing the work of bell hooks, Mantha Diawara, and Jacqueline
Stewart on the distanced manner Black audiences develop for consuming mass media’s often demeaning representations of Black people, Hanlon suggests that within the “integrated setting” of the theater, the Black spectator’s awareness of his or her physical presence “might persist.” As such, 6 he writes, “the talking and laughter among the students may have been a way of forging a collective identity in opposition more to the audience, which they saw as hostile, than to the film itself”(61).v Hanlon acknowledges the potential affiliation made possible by collective laughter, yet he immediately hedges his bets; words such as “might” and “may have been” reframe the discussion in ways that necessarily reproduce an uncertainty of how to interpret Black laughter and fails to acknowledge how that uncertainty might be mobilized as part of a collectivized identity.
Hanlon’s considerations of collective identity formation in this instance must be placed in conversation with the social dynamics of the movie theater as public space. The way one experiences the physical space of the movie theater, for instance, generates a surprising amount of ambiguity.
Though privately owned, moviegoers generally experience a movie theater as a public space not unlike an amusement park or music festival. One’s admission ticket facilitates a transaction whereby the patron can imagine partial ownership of the space. The complaints and cheers that followed the students’ expulsion, as well as a general tenor in the media criticizing the students’ laughter indicates how some individuals exercise that ownership more effectively than others. Neither fully public nor fully private, this in- between aspect of the movie theater results in social mores meant to mitigate tensions that might arise. Theater owner Allen Michaan appeals to this model of “proper” social expectation when he says, “This is nothing more than a debate over proper behavior at a theater” (qtd. in Spolar C1). Yet there is an 7 inherent dismissal expressed by his use of the phrase “nothing more.”
Through this dismissal, Michaan frames anything else, which includes any interpretations made that regard broader social and cultural dynamics played out in response to the laughter, as something more or therefore excessive to the “real” substance of the issue. The “debate” over proper behavior at a theater, thus, emerges as a debate over who gets to dictate what constitutes
(im)proper behavior.
In his rationale, Michaan positions improper behavior as anything that runs counter to anticipated responses to the film. The students’ laughter interrupted the fantasy that the film’s pathos could adequately memorialize the
Holocaust. When the students laugh at how unrealistic the depiction of a woman’s fall appears after she gets hit by an SS solider, their laughter breaks a fantasmatic bridge tethering a sympathetic audiences’ presumed ownership over the aesthetic object of the film and any assumed dominance over the public space of its consumption. The laughter deflates the coercive pathos of the film and reveals it to be flimsy in a way that taunts these other patrons with the impossibility of maintaining a sentimental connection. It is the threat that Black laughter poses to these viewing practices that contributed to the demonization of this laughter from improper to something more.
To better get a sense of how this demonization of laughter operates, it helps to locate it within the broader context of a mid 1990s US cultural preoccupation with criminalizing Black youth. Alleged perpetrators of violent crimes, these so-called “superpredators” haunted America’s cultural 8 imaginary during the early to mid 1990s. The term was first popularized by then Princeton Professor John J. Dilulio in an article for the November 27,
1995 edition of The Weekly Standard, “The Coming of the Superpredators.”
Throughout the article, Dilulio establishes an implicit correlation between
Blackness and criminality: “And make no mistake. While the trouble will be greatest in Black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland” (23).
The threat of crime “spilling over” into more affluent areas reproduces the image of the Black criminal as a parasitic contagion who will not stop until he has infected the “heartland,” echoing the rhetoric of conservative propaganda put forward by Reagan’s demonization of welfare fraud during his 1976 campaign. The popularity of both Dilulio’s article and Reagan’s statements benefit from a desire to scapegoat social ills through the fantasy of a parasitic other. In this, the criminalized Black youth functions as a ready repository for social discontent. In The Condemnation of Little B, Elaine Brown examines the ways in which the image of the Black boy as criminal and social predator led to what she argues was the disgraceful sentencing of thirteen-year old
Michael “Little B” Lewis to life in prison. In her exploration of factors leading up to the case, Brown locates many social realities that condemned Lewis long before his arrest for murder. One of these realities was the way in which media representations created a disproportionate and distorted image of Black male youth criminality. Brown writes, “The promulgation of the stereotype of 9 the Black boy as a social evil is at once a product of the press and a reflection of deeper social realities” (37).
Opinions peddled about the Castlemont students in editorials and articles by Jacobs, Rich, and others focusing on (the myth of) increased inner- city violence demonstrate how readily the media, was prepared to filter the public’s understanding of these youths’ laughter through the image of a dangerous, gun-toting Black youth. News reports and opinion pieces about the
Castlemont incident channel these narratives equating Black youth with violence and map them onto the students’ laughter in ways that render the laughter itself an act of aggression. When sources refer to the murdered woman in Schindler’s List as “an intelligent, gentle Jewish woman” (Mowatt) and “a cultured woman” (Jacobs) – as if her intellect or culture heightened to the travesty of her murder – they invite readers to recommit their sympathy to the fictionalized victim and to witness a tacit complicity between Nazi violence and Black laughter as similarly destructive and undeniably antisocial.
In short, not only was the US finding its Black youths contemptible for firing their guns but also, as the Castlemont story illustrates, for shooting off their mouths. And if the connection between teens laughing in a movie theater and teenage gunfire seems a stretch, consider Joanne Jacobs’s editorial about the Castlemont story in which their laughter becomes a springboard to discuss her fears of an increasing desensitization to violence: “It's not just screen violence that's deadening our natural, salutary horror. More than likely, some of the kids in the movie theater have witnessed a shooting, or dropped to the 10 floor when they heard guns fired outside their homes and schools” (“The
Kids”). Jacobs, of course, cannot see her logical inconsistency. How could these children be increasingly desensitized to violence yet still know to drop to the floor when an actual threat is right outside? Consider, too, Frank Rich’s article, “Schindler’s Dissed,” in which the writer deploys all manner of inflammatory conceits in his portrayal of the situation:
Yet this battle in the larger war for the future of American
teenagers like Shalon Paige and Mirabel Corral [two
Castlemont students] continues. On one side are committed
adults, black and Jewish alike, who pull together to quell a
potential disaster like the one in Oakland. On the other are
demagogues who will try to fill the heads of the desensitized
inner-city young with paranoid fantasies.
Clearly a product of his own paranoid fantasy, the potential disaster to which
Rich alludes is a situation in which dissatisfaction may take the form an increased public demonstration, protest, or even riot. Rich preemptively discredits any opposing positions concerning the incident’s deeper historical context as “paranoid fantasies” designed to “fill” the supposedly empty heads of Black “inner-city” youths with ideas he deems unreasonable and, by extension, worthy of contempt.
We can see the consequences of such discrediting plays out three months after the incident when director Steven Spielberg visits Oakland accompanied by then California governor Pete Wilson. During the assembly, 11 student body president Kandi Stewart confronts Wilson: “I see your visit as a failing governor's publicity stunt that enables him to portray himself as a caring politician embracing the poor and smothering them with empty promises coincidentally close to election time” (qtd. in Koury 1A).
Scandalized by her bold assertion, the governor’s response, “I guess I won’t count on your vote,” mocks the measured, incisive criticism of the young student (qtd. in Koury 1A). Moreover, Wilson not only disparages Stewart’s question, he also belittles her position as a political subject when implies that her vote – the democratic exercising of her voice – along with the votes of those sympathetic to her viewpoint holds as little value to him as the laugher of her peers held in the court of public opinion.
This discrediting of Black laughter and speech stems from a broader sense that Blackness remains disavowed, demonized, disliked, discomforting, disconcerting, disruptive, interruptive, fierce, forceful, unrepentant, and scandalous within a US sociocultural (un)consciousness. In drawing a line from laughing during a movie to protesting a school assembly, I mean to show how the invalidation of Black laughter can extend to the invalidation of Black speech and Black protest. And although we do not always consider these all in the same breath, it is time that we start.
III. “BLACK LAUGHTER”
In his article “The Trouble with Black Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black
Quiet,” Kevin Quashie considers the kinds of expressiveness always already mapped onto Blackness. Quashie presents this relationship between Blackness 12 and an assumed expressiveness as a limitation that results in an overreliance on expressive modes to bear the burden of Black resistance and, as a result, Black identity. Assumed to be “necessarily public,” the hoped for modes of resistance that Black expressiveness is made to bear erase the possibility of an interior Black expressiveness; Quashie locates these moments in what he refers to as “black quiet,” or “the expressiveness of the interior” in which “a person’s quiet represents the broad scope of her inner life” (333-4).
At first glance, Black laughter conforms to Quashie’s concerns about the limitation of Black public expressivity and resistance. After all, the unruliness of laughter has much more to do with noise than with quietude, and making noise is often deemed a way of garnering attention. But as an external expression of supposedly internal reactions, Black laughter pivots on a divide between public and private, the internal/external divide of the body. Laughter erupts, and something from within escapes and disrupts the external stability of the body.
According to Anca Parvulescu, this pivot point is best illustrated by the mouth:
“In laughter, the mouth opens, it’s “inside” touching the “outside,” as if it wanted to speak or “communicate,” and yet what is communicated is only the very opening of the mouth, its gaping…The mouth—inside, outside, and threshold— bears witness to the fact that the inside of the body is always also outside” (9). As a sound emanating from the mouth, laughter erupts from a void, at the threshold between a knowable presence and unknowable absence; as such, the opening of a mouth and its laughter comprises a generative space. So, while Quashie insists on imagining a Black interiority to which we never have access, Black laughter 13 constitutes a mode of expression issuing from that inaccessible interior that nevertheless maintains some of its recalcitrant inaccessibility.
This inaccessibility makes providing any firm definition of Black laughter rather disingenuous. Rather, “Black laughter” remains contingent, and its meaning is constituted by a perpetually negotiated relationship between Blackness and laughter. To better understand what I mean, I now consider each term separately.
According to Frantz Fanon, Blackness signals “an impurity, a flaw that outlaws any ontological explanation” (Black Skin, White Masks 82). As outlaw and outlier,
Blackness exceeds the boundaries of signification and reveals ontology as inadequate for explaining the subjective experience of Black people. Through this explanation, Fanon argues that being, for the Black man or woman, is not simply ontogenic – “not only must the black man be black” – but sociogenic – “he must be black in relation to the white man” (82-3). In other words, Blackness is constitutive of a relational phenomenon between the contacts of two independent, antagonistic positions.vi Fanon theorizes Blackness through its surplus relationship to ontology as excluded excess. Working backward, we might conclude that Blackness occupies a de-ontological position, which enables the ontology of the white position to coalesce as it recognizes the bounds of its own existence.
Liberal humanism functions along similar lines. Consider the ways
European Enlightenment advocates of the rights of man and of humanism ignore the exploitative practices and primitive accumulation of the slave trade and the global imperialism it enabled, as Susan Buck-Morss argues in “Hegel 14 and Haiti”: “The paradox between the discourse of freedom and the practice of slavery marked the ascendancy of a succession of Western nations within the Early Modern global economy” (822-3). Delving further into shifting permutations of this paradox, Syliva Wynter contends, “the humanist concept of Natural Causality” sanctioned “a by/nature determined difference of reason, in which the African mode of cultural reason was seen as a non-reason”
(“After Humanism” 35). Relegating African cultural reason to “non-reason,” or primitive, amounted to “rationalizing him/her as an inferior mode of being in need of rational human baptism,” effectively justifying New World enslavement of Africans as noble and as right (35). The humanist narrative of progress is always one of a European/occidental progress toward civilization.
The invention of Man, then, precedes and instantiates the philosophical complement to “progress” as the perpetual process of defining (Hu)Man legally, culturally, racially, (pseudo)scientifically, etc. – the discursive endgame to which all other liberal humanist discourses are made to aspire.
Along the way these inalienable rights of man became synonymous with life, and those beyond the purview of the law remained in a state of living death.
Indeed, the “Man” of Enlightenment, rights-based discourse remains endowed with the exclusive access to be thought of as human, while the Black position occupies what Frank Wilderson along with Saidiya Hartman call “the position of the unthought.”vii And it is this unthinking that facilitates the production of “Man.” In short, it is not simply that the Fanon’s Black (man) must be in relation to the white (man) – emerging solely as a sociogenic being 15
– but that the position of the Black is always a being for the white position, what Hortense Spillers elsewhere calls a “being for the captor” (67). In her being for, according to Spillers, “the captive body reduces to a thing” – to
“flesh” at the “zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment” (67). From this null space, Spillers tells us, the captive body
“becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality” (67). The captive body functions as the screen for the untold projections, desires, sensations, and violence of the captor.viii It is this boundless accrual of symbolic meaning and value, this “fungibility” and “accumulation,” that remains in the service of shoring up the bounds of normativity/the human
(Hartman 21).
Laughter, too, has been made to secure the boundaries of the human.
Most famously, Aristotle writes, “of all living creatures only man is endowed with laughter,” producing an often-repeated argument that laughter is essentially human.ix This line of thinking consequently excludes the laughter of bodies for whom access into the boundaries of the human remains foreclosed.x For example, when a group of youths laughs at Schindler’s List, the initial impression is not of an indomitable spirit, or of spirited youth, but rather of a decidedly uncouth, indecent, expendable (someone probably said inhuman) behavior. Thus, when we consider that laughter is made the provenance of the human and Blackness imagined the unthought-of, anti- human null space, the term “Black laughter” necessarily stresses the double 16 bind that emerges when Black laughter occupies the simultaneous locus of
(in)humanity.
As Black laughter troubles these established notions of (social) life and
(social) death, an analysis of it necessarily contributes to recent debates within
Black studies between so-called afro-pessimists and their presumed opposites:
Black optimists. The discourse of afro-pessimism concerns itself with the possibilities of living for those excluded from the bounds of social life, or, put another way, afro-pessimism attempts “to speak of about a type of living on that survives after a type of death” (Sexton 23/para. 21). Afro-pessimists working primarily within Black studies theorize Blackness as a paradigmatic position of negativity in the West. Black optimism, on the other hand, emphasizes the transformative politics made possible by Blackness, that
Blackness can, and has, changed aspects of the (anti-Black) world. What the framing of a debate between these discourses misses, however, is that the radical negativity theorized within afro-pessimism perpetually, and necessarily, seeks the destruction of a social paradigm built upon anti-
Blackness, which is to say it is a mode of critical engagement that sees radical change as an effect of the work rather than as its goal. Jared Sexton’s “The
Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism” reconciles (mis)conceptions that presume an antagonistic relationship between the two modes of thought. Near the end of his essay he poses this reconciliation as a question: “Does (the theorization of) social death negate
(the theorization of) social life, and is social life the negation (in theory) of 17 that negation (in theory)?” (para. 31). Are there, in other words, expressions of
Black social life that refuse the discursive boundaries established by the
(theoretical) equating of Blackness with social death?
IV. OVERVIEW
In putting the laughter in Black literature and culture alongside the limitations and blind spots produced by theories of laughter, Laughter’s Fury pursues answers to Sexton’s provocative question(s). For instance, laughter’s constitutive elusiveness makes it an appealing model for clandestine communications, especially when one considers the extent to which Black expression continues to fall under intense scrutiny. To construct an analytical model supple enough to account for this elusiveness, my methodology examines the ways in which laughter circulates within a Black cultural imaginary in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Calling upon these varied sources, each chapter traces a different avenue for considering laughter’s role in Black literature (disrupting epistemology, forming a voice, telling alternative history).
In chapter one, “Wit’s End: Frantz Fanon and the Psychodynamics of
Black Laughter,” I consider laughter’s prominence within the pivotal confrontation in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks. Using this moment as inspiration, I read for other instances of laughter in Fanon’s works, such as his description of FLN member Djamila Bouhired’s laughter in Toward the African
Revolution, and argue that laughter is integral to Fanon’s anticolonial project. The 18 idea of laughter as a disruptive force animates pivotal moments in Fanon’s writing, which he uses both to navigate antagonisms between Blackness/Africa and whiteness/Europe and to undercut elisions between Europe and western rationalism. I first demonstrate how canonical theories of laughter, in particular the rise of the superiority and incongruity theories, buttress the interests of British imperialism. I further suggest that these theories perpetuate anti-black premises that contribute to a Western cultural image of Black laughter as degraded and uncivilized. I then turn my attention more fully to Fanon and consider the ways his writings respond to these premises and reimagine laughter as part of an anticolonial perspective.
Chapter two, “‘Voice might discover him’: James McCune Smith’s
Pseudonymous Writings and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” argues that writers and performers during the 1850s contemplated the subject of racial Blackness through the interplay of speech and text. Using Jennifer Stoever-
Ackerman’s concept of the “sonic color-line,” I examine expressive modes that troubled the ways sound, listening, and race produce social relations along the color line. In James McCune Smith’s writings produced during his time as
Douglass’s New York correspondent Communipaw, the excesses of voice provide an avenue through which to praise Black artistry. This stance, I show, also informs Smith’s Heads of the Colored People, a series of ten written sketches also published under pseudonym in Douglass’s paper. Both Smith and the second text
I read, Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, participate in an antebellum turn to fictionalized voice that offers writers “greater narrational 19 possibilities” (Peterson 562-3). Instances that engage questions of voice and embodiment show the ways in which The Garies directly addresses the biological calculus of race. In staging the destabilization of voice, the novel rhetorically undermines pseudoscientific logics that would concretize race as a wholly knowable object.
My third chapter, “Laughing Black in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of
Tradition,” begins by considering the ways in which Black laughter circulates in the performative tropes of blackface minstrelsy and the plantation tradition of fin de siècle American regional literature. To highlight the ways in which these tropes established white viewing and interpretative practices, I read parts of
Francis “Fanny” Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation
1838-1839. I then turn to Charles Chesnutt’s writings and his efforts to revise historical narratives, which I argue hinge on his ability to reposition the place of
Black laughter in literature. Rewriting the story of Black laughter holds significant political and literary import for Chesnutt. He accomplishes this shift most fully through The Marrow of Tradition (1901), in which the elusiveness of
Black laughter correlates to an increase in white anxiety and emerges as a viable mode for social exchange and for historical revision.
Finally, a coda considers Swedish Minster of Culture Lena Adelsohn
Liljeroth’s controversial participation during a 2014 live art installation in which she cut into a cake made up to resemble a caricatured African woman’s torso. Not only did images of the incident capture Liljeroth’s participation, they also show a surprising amount of enjoyment on both her part and that of the all white 20 spectators. This enjoyment and Liljeroth’s subsequent behavior when she becomes the subject of increased media pressure lays bare an aspect of the dissertation that remains mostly implicit in my chapters’ readings: the Black suffering required by expressions white enjoyment.
Conclusion
While this may be the first study to approach Black laughter in exactly this way, it benefits from the efforts of many scholars who have thought through the significance of laughter and humor in Black literature and culture. As Glenda
Carpio notes, some of the earliest works on Black humor appeared during the
1960s and 1970s, such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s The Book of
Negro Folklore (1965); Hughes’s The Book of Negro Humor (1966); Philip
Sterling’s Laughing on the Outside (1965); Alan Dunde’s Mother Wit from the
Laughing Barrel (1973); and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black
Consciousness (1970) (Carpio 20).
A more recent contribution to scholarly engagements with Black laughter,
Carpio’s Laughing Fit to Kill argues that rhetorical strategies present in second half of the twentieth-century and early twenty-first century Black comedy, writing, and art can be traced to the ironic presentation found in the social commentary of nineteenth-century writers such as William Wells Brown and
Charles W. Chesnutt. Carpio details strategies such as “grotesque” and farcical representations of stereotypes and their lasting relevance within Black cultural expression. Her emphasis on the ways “black writers and artists have utilized heterogeneous forms of humor across two centuries,” however, collapses 21 potentially productive distinctions that might be made between “humor” and the sound of the “laughter fit to kill” that inspires her study (8).
Mike Chasar considers more closely the sonic movement of Black laughter in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. The prevalence of Black laughter in this poetry coincides, Chasar notes, with the modernization of sound technologies. He argues, “the noise of a combative rather than humorous, comedic, or funny Black laugh could go where the physical Black body in many cases could not and thus could uniquely challenge white control of public space while also mapping or territorializing that space as a field for further political action” (58). But when Chasar distinguishes and separates this “combative” laugh from other adjectives typically associated with laughter – “humorous, comedic, or funny” – he also limits the possibility of understanding this combative laughter itself as humorous, comedic, and funny. In other words, while the latter modifiers convey the pleasure readily assumed by ideas of laughter, the grammar of
Chasar’s formulation eschews the possibility that there could be something humorous, comedic, funny, or even pleasurable about a combative, Black laughter. This reluctance to imagine the pleasure within a combative laughter is unsurprising. For many academics in branches of the social sciences, laughter signals little more than amusement and pleasure experienced at a safe distance.xi
Finally, as I sketch out the parameters of this dissertation, it seems wise to note what this dissertation is not. It is not my intention to propose a definitive archive of Black laughter, or even to provide an exhaustive list of the ways in which Black laughter signals different, “authentic” facets of Black literature and 22 culture.xii The distinction I aim to make here is one between Black laughter as cultural practice and Black laughter as paradigmatic product of an antagonism between Black and white. To clarify what I mean, Sylvia Wynter’s distinction between map and territory is helpful. Alex Weheliye describes that distinction as the following: “Blackness…is not primarily about cataloging the existence of racial groups (map) but addresses a spectrum of power along which all racial groups are unequally positioned (territory)” (“Engendering” 182). With that in mind, much of my aim in this project is to reposition the conversation about Black laughter away from mapping of Black laughter through exhaustive taxonomies to an analysis of the underlying structures of laughter that produce the societal conditions in which Black laughter provokes all manner of sanctioned, disciplinary functions.
23
Chapter One
Wit’s End: Frantz Fanon and the Psychodynamics of Black Laughter
What is fitting is always based on some reason of propriety, as improper deeds lack of propriety or in other words, the ridiculous is based on some failure of reason. –Anonymous Letter on Tartuffexiii
The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at this moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory. –Frantz Fanon
“I'm going to fight you, nigger." I remember the tension. I laughed and told him, "Sure, I'll fight, but you've got too many clothes on." He had on a big Army overcoat. He took that off, and I kept laughing and said he still had on too many. I was able to keep that cracker stripping off clothes until he stood there drunk with nothing on from his pants up, and the whole car was laughing at him, and some other soldiers got him out of the way. I went on. I never would forget that – that I couldn't have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind. –Malcolm X
I can honestly say that nobody ever thought I was totally incorporable! [Laughter] I’m happy, I do agree with them: I would not incorporate myself either, if I were in their shoes! –Sylvia Wynter
I. INTRODUCTION
Sara Ahmed begins her chapter “The Affective Politics of Fear” with the following epigraph, which she takes from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks, to discuss how racialization occurs along an axis of fear-induced object relations:
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me
as I passed by. I made a tight smile. 24
“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.
“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no
secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened!
Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind
to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. (84)
Ahmed focuses on how fear structures the political mappings of the scene, recognizing the ocularcentric constructions of race and sociocultural difference in
“the surface that surfaces through the encounter” between a subject and that which he or she fears (Ahmed 63).xiv The affective politics of fear produce and sustain the fearing subject’s sense of self via a complex set of object relations.
These relations highlight the ways new connections between signs generate the object of fear and how “the movement between signs allows others to be attributed with emotional value, as ‘being fearsome’” (67). Understanding how fear informs politics, Ahmed continues, helps explain early twenty-first-century connections between Arab and terrorist as the production of what is fearful today.
Curiously, the epigraph ends with Fanon’s reference to laughter, yet
Ahmed makes no reference to laughter throughout her chapter. While the repetition of “frightened” certainly justifies her attention to fear’s affective politics, we might just as easily notice Fanon’s increasingly “tight smile” and the repetition of “amuse.” The exclusion of laughter from her discussion is further surprising, as Fanon later proves the ability to laugh through an infamous retort to the white woman on the train, after which he claims, “Now one would be able to 25 laugh” (BSWM 86). Privileging the ways in which the affective politics of fear shape space and define bodies, Ahmed eschews the ways in which conceptions of laughter contribute to Fanon’s resolution of the conflict. In other words, while fright and fear certainly animate the scene, there is more to be said concerning
Fanon’s use of laughter. What does it mean that Fanon frames this oft-cited encounter through laughter? Laughter clearly accomplishes something for Fanon at this moment, and this chapter pursues what that something is.
Taking up the question of laughter in Fanon, this chapter participates in what Jean Khalfa calls a “renewed flow of critical studies on Fanon” (527).
The success of this enlivened return of Fanon studies has been due in part to the diversity of scholarship that has emerged, as scholars working from a variety of disciplines and continents turn to Fanon’s work for inspiration. For instance, work such as Ahmed’s on fear and John. E. Dabinski’s on shame engages with how Fanon intersects with discussions of affect. Psychology professor T. Owens Moore makes use of Fanon to explore the benefits of what he calls a “single-minded consciousness” as an antidote for the limitations of an imposed double-consciousness (761-2).xv Fanon has also been influential in terms of art making practices and how these practices intersect with scholarly criticism. The essays and conversations in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz
Fanon and Visual Representation highlight productive insights gained when artists and critics come together. According to editor Alan Read, the collected essays in the book constitute an “after-effect” of a joint art program and conference organized by London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts between 26
May and July 1995 (Read 8).xvi Fanon scholar Lewis Gordon organizes what he calls “several stages” of academic engagement with Fanon as moving
“from that of ideological critique to postcolonial anxiety to engagement with his thought” (“Hellish Zone” 5 emphasis in original). In giving a preference to
Fanon’s “thought,” both teleologically as the end toward which Fanon studies has moved “from…to” and stylistically with the use of italics, Gordon emphasizes his belief that “a great black thinker should be engaged as one would any other great thinker” (5). In the context of his statement, “any other” most clearly stands in for a tradition of “great” white male thinkers.
Given Fanon’s continued influence over scholars working on questions of Blackness and political life, this chapter grounds a discussion of Black laughter within the diversions of Fanon’s work and delineates a Fanonian theory of laughter that might participate within and beyond ongoing scholarship on Fanon. Considering the variety and scope of this Fanon scholarship, my goal is neither, necessarily, to discredit this previous work nor to substitute laughter as a keystone through which to reimagine the entirety of
Fanon studies. Instead, I read the ways in which theories of laughter construct a sense of the world that Fanon writes within and against. Put differently, we can glean insights about Fanon’s thoughts on laughter by reading momentary references to it across his career. These fragments, when read in concert, provide a stable enough foundation from which to discern a portable theory of
Black laughter. 27
To consider how Fanon can provide the foundations for a theorization of Black laughter, this chapter builds upon the premises established in my introduction concerning Western civilization’s foundational repudiation and
(re)production of Blackness. I demonstrate first an unconscious anti-blackness animating canonical theories of laughter to establish a broader conceptual landscape against which to interpret Fanon’s use of laughter. As a way to reinterpret the laughter from chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks I attend to the role laughter plays in the development of Fanon’s thinking throughout his published work. Because, as Kara Keeling notes, “The Fact of Blackness” is often “considered in isolation from the rest of [Fanon’s] anticolonialist project” scholars miss an opportunity to consider how the chapter functions
“as an interested delineation of the set of constraints and limitations that colonization places on epistemological and ontological projects more generally” (29). In other words, opportunities for differently nuanced interpretations of Fanon escape those unwilling to measure their readings of
“The Fact of Blackness” against the rest of Fanon’s work.xvii With this broadened approach to reading Fanon in mind, I focus on dynamics of laughter and listening in scenes of disrupted communication and violence across all of Fanon’s works, noting the ways in which laughter often accompanies Fanon’s discussion of conflict. In doing so, I demonstrate how an understanding of Black laughter can offer insights into an affective politics of Blackness as they animate this specific moment from “The Fact of
Blackness.” This is not, however, to privilege the chapter over the rest but 28 rather to emphasize the ways in which the laughter of “The Fact of
Blackness,” at least in translation, is both an example of Fanon’s earlier work and the product of his later works’ influence.
The colloquialism wit’s end helps ground and organize this analysis.
What does it mean to be at wit’s end? Wit, by itself, represents humorous acuity, a jocular insight associated with intelligence and keenness. The intelligence, or smartness, associated with wit proves helpful in social interactions. Engaging in a battle of wits, for instance, means entering an exchange that calls attention to the incisive way a sharp wit also smarts, and in the end it is usually the sharpest wit that outstrips the rest. Given an older, early modern understanding of wit as a synonym for phallus, colloquialisms that involve taking or seeing one’s point – and the broader mode of intellectual exchange to which they gesture – remain steeped in what Derrida calls phallogocentric constructions of meaning, or the privileging of the psychoanalytic phallus in the process of making meaning. Further, the preposition at (wit’s end) implies a location and destination at which one arrives in the sense that to say you are at your wit’s end implies having vetted all possible solutions. Together, we are left with the understanding that wit’s end describes an experience of exhausted frustration, especially in relation to the production of meaning.
This frustrated sense of wit’s end describes accurately the position in which Fanon finds himself during “The Fact of Blackness.” Through his dialectical approach Fanon engages and discards one supposedly valid theory 29 after another, experiencing wit’s end as he encounters a limit between reason and unreason. Lewis Gordon has argued that Black Skin, White Masks showcases Fanon’s “metacritical reflection on reason” (“Hellish Zone” 7).xviii
Part of that reflection, I argue, requires Fanon’s elaboration on the position of unreason, or nonsense. The breakdown of reason at wit’s end is reminiscent of
Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing,” a space from which one views the fraying of so- called rational discourse, and encourages me to consider the ways Black laughter addresses to the relationship between Reason and the unreasonable
(BSWM 2). And as laughter often marks such a limit, this relationship can be further examined through Fanon’s representation and thoughts concerning expressed moments of laughter.
II. BLACK LAUGHTER IN THEORY
To better understand Fanon’s engagement with laughter first requires a detour through more traditional theories of laughter. As I discuss more fully in my introduction, most theories of comedy and laughter build upon the Aristotelian premise that laughter is “essentially human” and produce schemas or opinions that safeguard the stability of the category “human.” Consequently, this approach ignores an impasse that occurs when laughter is made the evidence of a subject’s presumed inhumanity and sub-human status. We know, for instance, that images of laughing “darkeys” have helped extend imperialistic reaches,xix that performing blackface minstrelsy exteriorized and soothed nineteenth-century working class white anxieties regarding the precariousness of their claims to whitenessxx, and that slave dealers forced playfulness and 30 laughter out of enslaved bodies at the cofflexxi, yet most theories of laughter consistently ignore these examples and the relevance historical context in pursuit universal explanations for laughter. Noting these erasures from considerations of laughter is not to suggest, however, that simply including them would remedy the situation; rather I want to suggest that the exceptions made by theories of laughter give rise to a paradigmatic structure of laughter that exempts Black laughter altogether unless it can be made to serve the needs of the Social. The following section considers the way two prominent theories of laughter – superiority and incongruity – contribute to a racializing assemblage along ethno-class lines that both buttresses imperial interests and enshrines Western bourgeois definitions of Man.
Superiority
The superiority theory states that laughter signals a laughing subject’s feeling of superiority over an object, situation, or person. Most critics agree that the superiority theory can be traced back to ancient Greece; Plato says that
Socrates acknowledged laughter at self-ignorance in another or in oneself, and
Aristotle associated comedy with the imitation of “lower types” in chapter two of Poetics. A more recognizable version of the superiority theory in the way that it persists today takes shape during the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries. In 1650, Thomas Hobbes famously associated laughter with a
“sudden glory” that precipitates feelings of self-importance attained “by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly” (65).
Describing the consequences of social hierarchies, the superiority theory 31 upholds the status quo by facilitating an egotistical perspective of the world.
In what follows, I consider why the superiority theory’s rising popularity at the time coincides with the expanding interests of the British Empire.
Drawing a correlation between superiority, empire, and the rise of transatlantic slavery helps explain why the theory takes hold during the early
1700s. Joseph Addison’s writings as Mr. Spectator, for example, show a connection between the superiority theory of laughter and the production of an unconscious anti-black feeling of superiority. Mr. Spectator’s justifies for his thoughts on laughter through racially biased ideologies in a manner that reveals the troubling logic underpinning many theories of laughter. In The
Spectator No. 47, Mr. Spectator praises Hobbes, paraphrasing the political philosopher’s thoughts: “every one (sic) diverts himself with some person or other that is below him in point of understanding, and triumphs in the superiority of his genius” (Addison 82). The example he uses to prove this
“triumph” is the Dutch “Gaper,” which refers to carved heads with gaping mouths that adorn buildings on the streets of the Netherlands. Mr. Spectator describes this gargoyle-like embellishment as “the head of an idiot dressed in a cap and bells…gaping in a most immoderate manner” (82).
In omitting the sign’s broader historical context, however, Mr.
Spectator elides the corroboration between anti-black racism and superiority as a theory of laughter. Associated with pharmacies and pharmaceuticals, the carved heads vary in terms of phenotypic and cultural markers, yet they most often resemble a turbaned African Moor. One apocryphal account suggests 32 that these heads in particular are a reference to doctor’s assistants whose first role would be to “draw a crowd to their master’s tent by making faces and other antics, and then to entertain in order to allow the medicine man and customers more privacy” (Blakely 56).xxii By suggesting how laughing at the
Gapers proves beneficial to the Dutch, Mr. Spectator calls upon these pharmaceutical, racial, and therapeutic contexts (without naming them) to buttress his own definitions of laughter.
The benefit, he implies, stems from constant and consistent reminders of Dutch superiority expressed in their laughter, which the Gaper facilitates via its decontextualized ubiquity. Consider the Gapers’ seemingly innocuous appearance on the streets of the Netherlands. Adorning various buildings, these gaping mouths would have been rather common, passing from noticeable sign to quotidian marker. Allison Blakely notes, “The use of a human head with mouth agape and tongue sticking out has never been fully explained…For some reason it became especially popular in the northern
Netherlands” (54 emphasis added). One reason for the superiority that springs from passing by the Gapers might be that it normalized a sense of superiority over nonwhite bodies toward which the Gapers make reference without requiring concerted thinking. Indeed, the success of laughter’s superiority lies in generating uninterrogated pleasure removed from any suffering such pleasure might necessitate. This architecturally inspired feeling of superiority would make things such as Dutch enslavement and exploitation of Africans springing from northern ports such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam more 33 palatable. A correlation between superiority and slavery remains absent in Mr.
Spectator’s analysis of laughter, and is only unspoken in his passing appreciation for Dutch “industry and application” (82).
The (un)conscious and racially inflected undertones that accompany
Mr. Spectator’s attempts to rationalize laughter also appear in No 35, in which he pursues a distinction between true humor and nonsense. He begins with two fictional genealogies describing the separate lineages of “Humour” and
“False Humour” (Addison 65). The personification of each humor facilitates the association of each lineage with certain groups of people. Those of the false group, he tells us, would “willingly pass” for the supposed original, but fortunately, descendants of False Humour can be identified by their “loud and excessive laughter” (65).xxiii The logic follows, then, that any threat a passing subject poses to the stability of the social order can be defused by attending to his or her “excessive laughter,” as such excessive displays could only pertain to unmannerly, unrefined, and undistinguished members of socially lower classes. Further, the essay establishes a relationship between subjective position (laugher) and qualities of laughter, shifting the attention away from an internal sense of humor to external manifestations of it. These qualities reinforce class distinctions. Mr. Spectator writes that False Humor “being entirely void of reason…pursues no point, either of morality or instruction, but is ludicrous only for the sake of being so” (65). A tautology takes shape in his writing, then, that reinforces associations between perceptions of social inferiority, raucous laughter, and being unreasonable. The correlative, of 34 course, is that there is a socially beneficial, “good” laughter worth safeguarding. Thus, the pointlessness that Mr. Spectator describes stands in opposition to an ordered image of society, which his rationalization of laughter works so hard to uphold.
Emphasizing his distaste for this indecorous laughter, Mr. Spectator’s description reduces to all manner of dehumanizing, race-tinged epithets. Mr.
Spectator writes, “False Humour differs from the True, as a monkey does from a man” (65). Presented as simile, Mr. Spectator establishes an analogy in which False Humour is like a monkey as True Humour is like a man, aligning animal and primitive with that which is not man.xxiv As this false humor becomes non-human, so, too, do the techniques for eliciting laughter; Mr.
Spectator says, “apish tricks…buffooneries,” and a penchant for “mimicry” characterizes false humor. He calls upon Western cultural correlation between
Blackness, apishness, and primitivism to produce a classist and racist social commentary. xxv Mr. Spectator’s logic benefits and contributes to a cultural perspective that presumes an affinity between Blackness and boisterousness in a way that reinforces a paradigmatic structure that delimits the meaning of
Black laughter. We must shift our attention to the assumed superiority over such boisterousness and how it contributes both to the continual positioning of
Black laughter as excessive and to views that perceive excessiveness as threatening to the stability of a status quo.
The management of laughter, then, screens the engineering of a social model built on the repudiation of Black laughter. Mr. Spectator’s false 35 humorist soon occupies the position of the unwitting anarchist as the need to stabilize the Social engenders unease over potential social uprising. The unrepentant joker seeks to make light of all moments rather than taking care not to “bite the hand that feeds him” (241). Mr. Spectator criticizes those who do not exercise proper restraint over their wit, who ridicule both friend and foe, and who supposedly have no sense of social propriety. In establishing a hierarchy that privileges “the hand that feeds,” Mr. Spectator warns those from lower social statuses to exercise not only caution but also deference when making jokes. This warning positions the humorist, whether false or not, within an inescapable logic. It rationalizes servility, maintaining that those in power remain immune to criticism from those for whom they provide, and justifies regulatory/disciplinary functions to curb potential insurrections that might result from allowing discourteous joking to go on unchecked.xxvi
Thus, within societies structured hierarchically along axes that include race, gender and class, some laughter remains constitutively more suspect and subject to increased surveillance than others. The caution emerges as less concerned with distinguishing among humorists than with staving off the possibility of sincere criticism through a process that correlates naming the false humorists to other instances of Mr. Spectator’s overt racialization. When read in the context of Mr. Spectator’s more explicitly racial discourse, the essay generates a ready-made extension of its warning to nonwhites.xxvii Thus,
Mr. Spectator outlines parameters in which Black laughter’s negation upholds a vertical, hierarchical social order. In other words, legacies that frame Black 36 laughter as loud and excessive derive in many ways from these supposedly rational attempts to explain and justify the pleasurable superiority felt while laughing. Laughter emerges as pleasurable and unmitigated when it aligns with the interests of the dominant order. Consequently, this relationship disproportionately recognizes Black laughter as not only loud and excessive but also as unreasonable and seditious.
Incongruity
Related to the superiority theory, the incongruity theory says that laughter stems from the perception of an incongruous relationship between a ridiculous situation, or object, and its presumed typical, expected, and normative condition. English literary critic and essayist William Hazlitt introduces his
Lectures on the Comic Writers, Etc. of Great Britain (1819) with an exposition on incongruity. Offering a succinct recapitulation of incongruity as the juxtaposition between the ludicrous and the serious, Hazlitt makes important distinction from previous versions of the theory. Importantly,
Hazlitt saw in seriousness the variability that prior theories only recognized within the laughable. He describes the serious as “habitual stress which the mind lays upon the expectation of a given order of events, following one another with a certain regularity and weight of interest attached to them” (7).
The serious, according to Hazlitt, rationalizes one’s relationship to objects through the “expectation” of “regularity” that produces a sense of the object’s permanence reproduced by a “habitual stress” exerted by the mind. In contrast to this precarious rigidity, the ludicrous “is the unexpected loosening or 37 relaxing [of] this stress below its usual pitch of intensity” (7).xxviii Incongruity, in Hazlitt’s model, operates dialectically along a relationship between tension and release in that “unexpected” interruptions release the tension of habitually formed thoughts.
Rather unsurprisingly, Hazlitt’s comments on incongruity call upon everyday examples in ways that encourage racist, xenophobic inclinations. In addition to writing that we “laugh at the dress of foreigners, and they at ours,”
Hazlitt positions laughter as a marker of maturity: “It is hard to hinder children from laughing at a stammerer (sic), at a negro, at a drunken man, or even at a madman” (267 emphasis added). When Hazlitt declares that laughter is done “at” something the preposition “at” establishes an objective relationship between subjective laugher and laughable object while the repetition “we laugh” emphasizes the laugher’s agency over his or her laughter. In short, one’s mastery over laughter secures the stability of the subject through his or her mastery over that which might interrupt the habitual, logical progression of thought. Maturity comes, Hazlitt suggests, when we no longer need parents to hinder us from laughing and can muster enough self-restraint and reason to govern ourselves.
Although the incongruity theory has shifted greatly over the centuries in terms, its underlying practice of juxtaposition has remained constant.
During the French Renaissance, for instance, we might recognize the incongruous between a Rabelaisian grotesque, what in Latin was referred to as turpitude – ugliness or baseness – and the “the closed, smooth, and 38 impenetrable surface” of the classical body Mikhail Bakhtìn theorizes as its antithesis (Bakhtìn 317-8). In the twentieth century, Henri Bergson’s juxtaposition between the “mechanical” and the “living” can be thought of as an extension of the incongruity theory (Bergson 37), and Freud’s suggestion that wit is a “double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once” only works when these master’s interests remain in disagreement, which is to say incongruous (190).
Taken together, superiority and incongruity re-inscribe a narrative of progress. Trapped within their own (theo)logics of progress, most theories of laughter built upon incongruity privilege stasis and stability, toward which incongruity must resolve, as indisputably good. For Bergson, it means laughter functions as a “social corrective” that aims to humiliate and “make a painful impression on the person against whom it [laughter] is directed…for the liberties taken with [society]” (197). Laughter as social corrective disciplines those who step out of line via a safeguarded return to reason and the Social.
Though the return occurs at the level of the psyche for Freud, it nevertheless operates under a similar logic. Laughter, he argues in his book on jokes, ushers a return to the ego’s psychic equilibrium. In Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, Freud says that jokes hinder our ability to separate form from thought to the extent that the form a joke takes becomes inseparable from the mental faculties used in its construction, resulting in “a total impression of enjoyment” (161). In other words, the impression created by the joke is at first 39 indiscernible, resulting in what could be called an epistemic crisis or an encounter with unreason. To compensate, a preference for thought overtakes form and “we are no longer inclined to find anything wrong [with what] has given us enjoyment and [thus] spoil the source of a pleasure” (162). Thinking through the relationship between pleasure and the comic, Freud argues that the ego mediates its relationship to enjoyment by overanalyzing a joke, eschewing any perceived uneasiness produced by a joke’s uncertain origins. Thus, sense-making cognitive activity sublimates joke-induced uncertainty, ensuring the subject’s safe return to the habitual stresses of psychic equilibrium. Laughter, for Freud, is the psychic excess of this phenomenon escaping the body. In their own ways, Bergson and
Freud propose returns to a totalized self under the assumption that this self remains an indistinguishable member of the Social to which it returns. Presuming a system capable of resolving back to reasonable stability, theories of laughter propagate their good faith belief in the universal applicability of rational explanations for the irrational or, looked at another way, that everyone’s irrational can be incorporated in the same way.
III. FRANTZ FANON BEING DERELICT
The previous section interrogates the ways Western theories of laughter contribute to, and benefit from, a worldview founded upon anti-blackness. Each theory and explanation of laughter explored so far has relied on the assimilationist logic predicated on a divergent entity’s eventual reconstitution within the social body.
Yet, if we agree with Frank Wilderson’s reading of Fanon that the Black position is “a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere,” then we can 40 interrogate why Black laughter is not granted the type of resolution put forward by traditional theories of laughter (Red 9). In other words, if Blackness is that which cannot be recuperated but that nonetheless enables the system to work, then
Blackness only ever coalesces as perpetual incongruity from the vantage point of
Western epistemology. The racialized subject recognizes his or her position in relation this order of knowledge; the resulting awareness of one’s status as incongruous/anomalous to the stabile image of society generates what Fanon calls the “two frames of reference within which [the black man] has had to place himself” (83).xxix The relationship between Fanon here and Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness – the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” – is apparent and well-documented (11).xxx The question I pursue, instead, is how do we understand laughter when it exposes the incongruous tenets of a so-called rational world. How, in a sense, do we interpret
Sylvia Wynter’s thinking in relation to her transcribed “[Laughter]” in the fourth epigraph to this chapter? To answer this question, I now turn to Frantz Fanon and his work on the psychic life of Black subjects and colonialism.
Evidence of Fanon’s growing attention to laughter appear as early as
Black Skin, White Masks and increase through The Wretched of the Earth, yet critics have neither fully explored the importance of laughter within Fanon nor asked how Fanon might trouble theories of laughter. One reason for this gap is an overinvestment in seeing laughter as antithetical to seriousness. Consequently, a static opposition between serious and laughable renders laughter unthinkable 41 within the context of Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist and his image as a theorist of anti-colonialism and revolutionary. The academy, it seems, is less invested in
Fanon’s sense of humor.xxxi Rather than preserve this split between seriousness and levity, Black laughter neither reduces to joviality nor introduces a reprieve from the seriousness of decolonization; in fact, laughter bursts within the pages of
Fanon, its elusiveness more reminiscent of the asymmetry of guerilla tactics than an experience of ludicrous.
Essential to Fanon’s conception of Black laughter is its status as antithetical to the various instantiations of colonial violence. Fanon’s description of FLN member Djamila Bouhired in Toward the African Revolution illustrates how certain modes of laughter remain incomprehensible to agents of the State.
Bouhired was tried in July 1957 and sentenced to death for her participation in a café bombing that resulted in eleven dead. Reports state that she laughed at hearing her fate. Fanon eludes to this laughter in his reference to her sentencing:
"Djamila Bouhired's laughter on hearing the announcement of her death sentence is neither sterile bravado nor unconsciousness-let there be no misunderstanding as to this. That smile is rather the quiet manifestation of an inner certainty that has remained unshakable” (TAR 73).xxxii When Fanon writes, “let there be no misunderstanding,” he implies that Bouhired’s laughter courts misinterpretation.
To identify with her laughter would mean identifying with her position, which in this case would mean identifying with the supposed criminality of her anti- colonial activities; it thus becomes easier to ascribe alternate interpretations to her laughter than to accept her unmistakable belief in the rightness of her action. 42
Read in this way, Bouhired’s laughter might be understood best as a parallel to her legal council Jacques Vergès’s now famous dèfense de rupture or
“rupture defense,” which attempts to disrupt court proceeding by challenging the logic upon which the case is being tried in the first place. Instead of claiming
Bouhired’s innocence, Vergès acknowledges her actions and places them within the context of resistance to France’s violent presence in Algeria, challenging the
State to consider its ability to remain objective and still pursue a legitimate case against Bouhired despite France’s history of colonial violence. The result precipitates an impasse between the court’s fidelity and Bouhired’s fidelity to their respective stances on the same action. Vergès, perhaps fond of summing up the logic of this strategy, would recount the story of Bouhired’s laugh and the judge’s response “Don’t laugh miss, this is serious!” (qtd. in Lambert) Note the gendered dynamic of the judge’s reprimand and its attempt to position Bouhired as “miss” when in all other instances she is terrorist. Laughing in the face of the sentencing, Bouhired embodies the essence of Vergès’ defense and regards the status of the court as nonsense. As Lèopold Lambert rightly observes, her
“laughter is the most dramatic evidence of the impossibility of a dialogue between the accuser and the accused.”
Laughter, as a free floating vocalization, manifests a site at which meaning breaks down that epistemic registers attempt to reconcile. Rather than tell us precisely what Bouhired’s laughter means, however, Fanon imagines the contours of her laughter for his audience by naming what Bouhired’s laughter is not
(neither bravado nor unconscious). Laughter as “bravado,” or audacity, 43 emphasizes an attempt to project hyper self-awareness as defense. In this light, laughter appears as a front masking insecurities or as a lack of substance, neither of which, in Fanon’s estimation, describes Bouhired. “Unconsciousness” on the other hand implies that her laughter reveals some general imbecility or misunderstanding of her situation in a way that erases her conscious decision to take part in it. Fanon’s stark dismissal of these two interpretations speaks to his tacit insistence that Black laughter signals something else without surrendering a name for what that something else is. He also elides an obvious distinction between “Bouhired’s laughter” and “smile” to suggest that her smile is as much an expression of her fidelity to her cause as her laughter. This indefiniteness offers strategic benefits in Fanon’s conception of an anti-colonial, Black laughter.xxxiii
If laughter, as defined by traditional theories, indicates momentary disruptions into a system predicated on Reason from which the subject regains composure, Black laughter delimits the extent of Reason’s ability to resolve its internal inconsistency. Black laughter gives voice to the relationship between
Reason and Unreason as a perpetual frustration to Reason’s requisite mono- logical, universalizing stability. Fanon imagines a Black laughter that both remains unaccountable and animates his call for anti-colonial praxis.
We find evidence of conceptual similarities between Fanon’s proposed methodology and Black laughter early in his work. In the opening pages of
Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “It is good form to introduce a work in psychology with a statement of its methodological point of view. I shall be 44 derelict. I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves” (5). Parodying the style of other supposedly similar works in psychology with his first sentence, Fanon interrupts the pomposity in that mode of address full stop with the second sentence – “I shall be derelict.” This curious word, dropped innocently into his methods paragraph, holds many meanings. As an adjective, derelict refers to a deplorable or dilapidated condition; it also refers to something (or in Fanon’s case someone) forsaken by an owner. As a noun, derelict refers to a person without a home, job, or property. In other words, derelict refers to an individual removed from multiple stabilizing pillars of civil society such as domestic life, labor for another, and property ownership. The perpetual movement implied by this placeless condition symbolizes something about his intellectual project.xxxiv In choosing to be derelict, Fanon opts for a discursive register and mode of being that chooses to remain in motion and refuses to occupy any preordained space.
Laughter as embodied motion proves instrumental to the development both of derelict as a discursive mode and of Fanon’s thinking with regard to anti-colonial action. Corporeal responses such as laughter figure prominently in how Fanon conceives of decolonization. Consider how the immediacy of both laughter and decolonization follow visceral, muscular, and bodily responses such as “stiffening” and experiences of “muscular lockjaw” in The
Wretched of the Earth (43). Laughter, given its visible effects on the body and conceptual effects on the mind, fits readily into Fanon’s representational 45 schema, offering a way to discuss the dynamics between colonizers and colonized. A transition from more physical to more psychological considerations of laughter appears in Fanon’s description of the desire for decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth: “the impulse to take the settler’s place implies a tonicity of muscles” (53). Besides muscular tone and strength,
“tonicity” also refers to stress patterns in speech. As a term, tonicity bridges the body and speech to an anti-colonial impulse. Wretched demonstrates how tone takes the form of laughter and engages not only one’s muscles and speech but also one’s cognitive patterns and consciousness.
Because of the insidious ways colonialism claims land and its people, physical displacement or aggression alone cannot remove the persistent stronghold of colonial presence. Wretched engages the potential dangers of a neocolonial state and the consequences of a comprador elite who could act as the functionaries of former colonial powers. Fanon writes that in order to render these intermediaries effective neocolonialist states require an “adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie”(49). Colonial education plays a significant role in preserving regimes of Western epistemology.xxxv
The mind, because of these established “forms of thought,” requires its own decolonization. This means bridging the relationship between the muscular physical and the cognitive psychic by developing a psychic tonicity that could match the muscular. Laughter provides a useful mechanism through which to explore this bridge, and Wretched could be said to mark the moment when 46
Fanon’s theorization of laughter grows more explicit in its engagement of the body and its consciousness.xxxvi
Fanon’s pivot from body to mind uses the language of tension and release to describe the psychic processes, mental symptoms, and physical responses in his categorizing of colonized patient’s mental disorders. As a trained psychiatrist conversant in psychoanalysis much of Fanon’s thinking in Wretched stems from his work with subjects who were living and fighting through the Algerian
Revolution. He outlines the results of this work in his chapter “Colonial War and
Mental Disorders.” In it, Fanon lists such physical symptoms as “stomach ulcers,”
“menstruation trouble,” accelerated heart rate, and “generalized contraction with muscular stiffness” among the “psychiatric symptoms” experienced by the native
(291-2). In the way that Fanon organizes his list, we can recognize that physical symptoms remain necessarily connected to the experience of oppression at the psychic level. Writing of a patient, Fanon notes, “the patient does not seem able to
‘release his nervous tension.’ He is constantly tense, waiting between life and death. Thus one of these patients said to us; ‘You see, I'm already stiff like a dead man’” (292-3). Fanon puts “release his nervous tension” in scare quotes to call attention to psychoanalytic ideas of discharging psychic energies and perhaps to the ways in which psychoanalysis falters in a colonial context.
Fanon repurposes his training as a psychiatrist in a moment of dream interpretation as a way to stage a patient’s desire for decolonization. Working at the psychic level, Fanon describes a colonized subject’s dreams; these dreams help the subject, and Fanon, transition from the psychic dimensions of 47 colonialism to an imminent struggle for decolonization and liberation. A correlation between muscular tension and attendant feelings of stuck-ness results in native dreams about “muscular prowess” characterized by “action and aggression” (52). Ventriloquizing a native patient, Fanon writes, “I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me” (52 emphasis added). That laughter appears alongside more active actions underscores its physicality. The “burst” of laughter is further reminiscent of artillery fire during clashes in the colonies and helps establish the dreamer’s desire for freedom.
More than symbolize a colonized subject’s desire for power, the burst of laughter here pivots between possible everyday physical actions and superhuman achievement, facilitating a transition that renders the seemingly impossible act of revolution as something always already achieved. The grammar, in translation, anchors this turn; the use of “or” over “and” emphasizes an unconscious correlation between laughing, spanning a river with one stride, and outrunning a
“flood of motorcars” that makes each action synonymous with the others. Also, the verb tense shifts from gerunds in the first independent clause to declarative in the second in a way that enacts a rhetorical “burst” of its own. The final tense shift to the present perfect – “I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me” – further connotes the indeterminacy of an unspecified time, as if to suggest the work of decolonization remains ongoing and indefinite. 48
Though Fanon interprets the laughter in dreams through a Freudian lens of tension and release, he necessarily differs from Freud in terms of what that release entails. You will remember Freud argues that laughter operates as an individual release that ushers the subject’s return to a state of equilibrium (Reason) from a temporary encounter with an epistemic crisis (Unreason). Fanon’s laughter, on the other hand, signals one’s identification with the epistemic crisis, which is to say an identification with the way in which Blackness remains irreconcilable to the
Social. We find evidence of this identification as early as Black Skin, White
Masks: “Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason” (93).
Fanon’s stages this identification with unreason as an eruption of Black laughter in “The Fact of Blackness.” References to “laughter” and “amusement” appear alongside images of smiles and tightness throughout the scene. Recounting how a child’s exclamation – “Look, a Negro!” – produces a crisis of subjectivity,
Fanon writes, “I made a tight smile… ‘Look! A Negro!’ the circle [of my mouth] was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement” (84). Evidence of physical tension, we now know from his later work, anticipates an eruption of laughter. Fanon’s jaw locks, as “the circle” of his mouth grows “tighter.” At last,
Fanon admits, “I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible” (84).
This prohibition on laughter can be read as an inability to produce sound outside of a racialized matrix of meaning.xxxvii Fanon’s inability to laugh has to do with his recognition of the “legends, stories, history, and 49 above all historicity” circumscribing his subjective position for him, particularly in the ways Black laughter has been tethered to constructed myths of Black primitivism and inferiority (84). These myths that “[have] woven
[him] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” include “tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial-defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’” (84-5). The repetition of “above all” emphasizes the importance of this last element in this longer list. Perhaps in recognition of this double emphasis, Gordon changes the last bit of
Markmann’s translation back to Fanon’s original “Y a bon banania” in his analyses (Peau Noire 110). According to Gordon, the bit of dialect in quotation does not adequately invoke Fanon’s reference to a popular breakfast cereal, Banania. The caricatured Senegalese soldier depicted to sell the product, Bonhomme Banania, and his “so-called ‘African French’” slogan debuted in 1917; over time the advertisement came to “[resemble] a smiling monkey wearing a fez” (“Through the Zone” 17). Gordon defends his translation revision with an awkward joke: “The Markmann translation ended this passage with “Sho’ good eatin’” to signify a breakfast cereal” (17). Not exactly. During a time without Google, the racism and caricature suggested by
“Y a bon banania” would have appeared out of context and much harder for many of Markmann’s readers to apprehend. The translation does not “signify a breakfast cereal” as much as it draws attention to a history of using dialect in caricatured depictions of Blackness. This use of dialect stands in for the very issues of consumption that Fanon puts forward with his reference to Banania 50 in a way that would register with an English-speaking, American audience.
Both highlight the commercialization of Black amusement to promote the consumption of products whose manufacture is based upon the consumption of Black bodies vis-à-vis Black labor. The Black smiling or laughing face replaces those bodies of working Black people in a circuit of production.
As the only quoted element in Fanon’s list, it draws further attention to the ways in which Black speech is made to participate in white supremacist mappings of Blackness. The representation of affected dialect speech (in both
English and French) stands in for a broad assortment of white dominant representations of Blackness, most notably the production of rural dialect speech for minstrel performances. Through this extended riff on caricature, consumption and dialect we can reconsider Fanon’s inability to laugh as his acknowledgement that any vocalization could function as an extension of these racist mappings that invariably justify a Black subject’s supposed inferiority.
Fanon often attends to the ways in which sound and listening abut ocularcentric constructions of meaning. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon’s description of an exchange between a colonial doctor and a “native” patient during an examination highlights both visual and audible elements concerning their interaction. When confronted by the linguistic, cultural, social, political, and economic impasse created by the “colonial situation,” the doctor turns to the colonized body for diagnostic purposes (126). The “contracted” muscles of the patient mirror his or her verbal reticence during the examination; the 51 colonized body yields nothing, having become “equally rigid” (126). The doctor’s inability to gather diagnostic evidence serves as an introduction to a scene about the importance of listening. Fanon writes, “One must, of course, lend an ear to the observations made by the European doctors .... But one must also hear those of the patients themselves when they left the hospital” (127). If we listen to the doctor as Fanon instructs, we immediately notice his use of technical jargon such as “protopathic” – which refers to the nerve stimuli of the skin that are only capable of broad, coarse discrimination. The jargon itself obscures the racialization generated by his diagnosis of the patient. The patient’s pithy comment, on the other hand, uses no jargon and exposes the doctor’s pompous verbosity by comparison: “They asked me what was wrong with me, as if I were the doctor; they think they’re smart and they aren’t even able to tell where I feel pain” (127). The technician as colonizer imposes the singularity of an ocularcentric analysis onto the colonized body. The doctor’s verbose, jargon-filled language symbolizes Western modes of knowledge production and the ways in which those modes construe, produce, and pathologize race. Both Fanon’s descriptions of Bouhired’s laughter and his attention to the patient’s comments require that his audience restructure their auditory understanding and reorient their spatial relationship to colonialism away from the sanitized rooms of the clinic and the state court. After all, to hear the words of the patient one must step outside of the hospital, exit the symbolic site of sterile knowledge and reimagine their perspective on the situation. Thus, Fanon’s criticism of an ocularcentric West succeeds by 52
restructuring his audiences’ relationship to the auditory dynamics configuring
the scene.
Fanon’s retort to the woman on the train in “The Fact of Blackness”
requires a similar shift in auditory perception. In the following exchange,
Fanon finally speaks up and addresses the white woman directly:
— Regarde, il est beau, ce nègre... “Look how handsome that Negro is! . . .” — Le beau nègre vous emmerde, madame! “Kiss the handsome Negro’s ass, madame!” La honte lui orna le visage. Enfin j’étais Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free libéré de ma rumination. Du même coup, je from my rumination. At the same time I réalisais deux choses : j’identifiais mes accomplished two things: I identified my enemies ennemis et je créais du scandale. Comblé. On and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would allait pouvoir s’amuser. (112) be able to laugh. (Markmann 86 emphasis added)
Critics return to this influential moment often, yet little attention has been paid to
Fanon’s use of laughter. Lewis Gordon places this moment of laughter on a longer
trajectory leading towards tears and a kind of therapeutic catharsis, yet in order to
do so he first elides a distinction between laughter and humor and subordinates
both to “the therapeutic dimensions of the chapter” in which “laughter enabled
[Fanon] to cope with this situation, to move on” ( “Through the Zone” 19). It is
curious that Gordon so quickly steps away from laughter to “the role of humor in
oppressed communities” and the catharsis of weeping. For a person who places a
premium on Fanon’s thoughts, laughter for Gordon functions as little more than a
coping mechanism en route to greater insights. Yet what insights could emerge
concerning Black laughter if we dilate this moment instead?
Fanon tells us he has accomplished two things through his response: he
identifies his enemies and he “[makes] a scene” (j’identifiais mes ennemis et je 53 créais du scandale ).xxxviii Yet, the confident assurance “Now one would be able to laugh” that follows these two actions appears as proof positive in a manner suggesting that his two accomplishments are inseparable from claiming his laughter. But how is he so certain? There is very little about the scene that immediately suggests the more traditional mechanisms of comedy and very little to identify as a laughable. There is no apparent “proof” of laughter’s possibility if we limit definitions of laughter to traditional definitions. If we reevaluate our conceptions of laughter to understand that his scandalous expression makes whiteness an object of derision, the response itself can be thought of as a mode of laughter. In other words, Fanon can assert the ability to laugh because his response – one that both identifies enemies and makes a scene – has invoked the same derision of whiteness precipitated by Black laughter, a scandalous affect.
As a type of speech act that exerts its vocal force from an unspecified void, Fanon’s retort evokes the contours of Black laughter. When Fanon says, “Le beau nègre vous emmerde, madame” he in fact speaks the “subversive laughter”
Wynter attributes to “all the rouges/fools/clowns that ever brought the priestly forms of ‘high seriousness’ down to earth” (“After Humanism” 55). The down to earth moment here is the result of Fanon denouncing ontology as a scandal, though this gets somewhat lost among available translations. Markmann’s translation substitutes a euphemistic “kiss [my] ass” for the French “vous emmerde” while Richard Philcox translates the sentiment more literally: “The handsome Negro says, ‘Fuck you,’ madame.” (Philcox 94) Yet, what this more literal translation achieves in terms of an accurate translation for vous emmerde it 54 loses in nuance. There are no quotation marks around the phrase in French to justify Philcox’s decision to use them. Instead, the absence of these quotation marks emphasizes the way in which scandalous expression as Fanon conceives it is not so much what one says but what one does – which we will see is a crucial distinction. Steve Pile stresses the merde (shit) of emmerde when he offers the following suggestion: “The handsome Negro is covering you with shit, madame!”
(276). Though missing the useful pith and, thus, humor of the original, Pile recognizes that something about Fanon’s retort sullies the white woman. In saying
“vous emmerde” – or “fucks you” – Fanon gestures toward a more literal fuck, as in the negrophobic eroticism he explores more fully in other chapters. Thus, a more literal translation would be “The handsome Negro fucks you, madame!”
This would also encapsulate what Fanon has been saying all along: that Blackness fucks with ontology as the stain fucking up a broken system.
Black laughter affords Fanon a mode of articulation that is not beholding to the ocularcentric, sensorial constructions of knowledge production; the perception of laughter (visually on the body, aurally through one’s hearing, or even tactilely as felt vibrations) does not account for all cognitive and subjective dynamics made possible by the disruptive structure introduced by laughter. In this way, Fanon not only narrates his awareness of a constitutive rift between western Being and Blackness but also positions
Black laughter as a mode of radical praxis. Black laughter remains at that point where meaning collapses, perpetually frustrating attempts to schematize it into a knowable object. The indefinite, unknowable shape of Black laughter 55 disavows any type of definitive reformulation and reconstruction of its derelict movement. This is the insight that Fanon brings forward through his designation of Black laughter here and throughout his work.
The use of “scandale” in the original French supports this reading of Black laughter as the paradigmatic disruption of dogmatic orders of knowledge.
Remember that after addressing the white woman, Fanon tells us, “je créais du scandale.” Broadly, scandal refers to any disgrace or humiliation suffered when news of one’s disreputable actions are made public and derives from the more religious connotation of scandal. Referring to the discrediting of a religion resulting from the (mis)conduct of an acolyte person made public, scandal amounts to a crisis within a belief system that damages the logic under which that system operates. In this case, Fanon conveys that something in what he said has scandalized the white woman. The text also supports viewing this scandal as indefinite and unending, as the preposition “du” denotes an indeterminate amount of scandal generated in the process. “Du” also implies that Fanon creates from scandal, which is to say he disrupts what constitutes the scandalous object to include not only the white woman and her repressed sexual desires, but also the scandal of western epistemology itself. Thus, we can recognize Black laughter’s indefiniteness in the original French as a scandal without end, as the text opens a space to interpret at least two, or duex scandals.
As for how to translate “s’amuser,” Markmann’s use of “laughter” might be best understood in the context of Fanon’s later work. When we consider that Black Skin, White Masks was the last of Fanon’s works 56 translated into English, it becomes easier to imagine the breadth of Fanon’s work influencing Markmann’s translation.xxxix While we can never know precisely the reason for Markmann’s decision to use “laughter,” it nonetheless spurs us to reinterpret Fanon’s work alongside laughter. For scholars working in English, the possibility of this type of analysis grows increasingly limited.
Richard Philcox’s so-called updated 2008 translation renders “On allait pouvoir s’amuser” as “we could now have fun,” obfuscating laughter from the established record – and from some of its most-cited pages (Philcox 94). The
Black laughter pursued by this chapter points to more than the pleasure and lightness implied by “fun.” But rather than pursuing the fantasy of one specific meaning for s’amuser, what emerges from the interaction of their translations? How does the presence or absence of “laughter” in each English translation affect how we interpret Fanon?
Who, we might ask, is the subject of “On allait pouvoir s’amuser”?
Markmann’s use of “one” affords us the possibility of imagining distinct positions between Fanon, the woman and their respective laughter; Philcox’s use of “we,” on the other hand, collapses those positions and distorts an ability to identify one’s enemies. In short, the social “we” to which Black laughter can be reconciled is not a “we” that includes the woman’s structural position as Fanon delimits it. Yielding to decades of academic shifts and concessions that resulted in an atmosphere of increasingly academic, neoliberal celebrations of subjectivity, Philcox’s translation dampens the ire and anticolonialist thinking within which Fanon’s work circulated.xl As with 57
Bouhired’s laughter, Fanon’s laughter refuses to recognize an authority whose interests are antithetical to his being.
Broadening the analysis from the level of the word to that of the sentence amplifies this understanding of “s’amuser” by showing the ways in which it furthers Fanon’s thoughts concerning consciousness and subjectivity.
In his article on Hegel, Fanon, and the question of mutual recognition, Charles
Villet reminds us, “For Fanon, action is integral to the formation of self- consciousness” (47). Fanon refers to this mode of self-formation as becoming
“actional,” which Gordon interprets as “a call to transform people from self- implosion, of being without impact on the social world to the point of expressing their humanity solely through self-inscription” (BSWM 173;
“Hellish Zone” 6).xli If critics agree that action matters significantly in Fanon, and that this moment in Fanon’s oeuvre signals a major shift for both the chapter and for Fanon, then it makes sense to consider how the modal shifts of each translation affect the sense of the verb “amuser.” Both the phrase “would be able” and the word “could” refer to one’s ability and the potential for future action, but Markmann’s use of “would” privileges how one chooses to pursue an action while Philcox’s use of “could” assents to a sense that external permissions sanction one’s possibility of acting. The former captures the sense of acting for oneself as a way of embodying one’s self. The reflexive sense of the French “On…s’amuser” reflects how French, as with other Latin-based languages, expresses the reflexive through the verb rather than through a reflexive pronoun. As a reflexive verb, “s’amuser” furthers the importance of 58 laughter within Fanon’s discussion of being for oneself. Whereas Fanon repeatedly expresses his amusement at the child, eventually he stakes a claim on the importance of a self whose amusement (for himself) is inseparable from a sense of being.
IV. CONCLUSION
While the internal struggle had in dreams might be the psychic ground upon which some individual battles are waged, Fanon is clear throughout much of his work that anticolonial struggle and decolonization only ever works as collective action. Pseudo-releases of internal aggressions only benefit the individual, obscuring the ongoing oppressions of colonialism.xlii When Fanon writes,
“collective autodestruction (sic) in a very concrete form is one of the ways in which the native’s muscular tension is set free,” he problematizes collective infighting as an impediment to decolonization (54). As an alternative to these expressions of aggression Fanon lauds the “African institution” of “communal self-criticism,” which settles quarrels between members of the same group or community (48). This collective act, which he writes is always done “with a note of humor,” expresses more effectively the desires of the masses (48). This humor generates an atmosphere in which “everybody is relaxed” such that no tension has a chance to take hold (48). As such, this “communal self-criticism” operates as a mode of exchange along the contours of laughter, producing a mode of sociality capable of sustaining a community. 59
The eroticism in this laughter-based social exchange rejects the paradigmatic phallogocentrism of wit described briefly at this chapter’s outset. A communal form of laughter fits Fanon’s model for “native’s relaxation,” which he says, “takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity [sic] and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away” (57). Within this muscular orgy we might find implicit and explicit sexual connotations to consider communal laughter as eroticism and “the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself” (57). This exorcism that seeks to cleanse the community of colonialism’s violent influences is simultaneously an eroticism that centers the pleasure of the effort. This affirmation of a social
(re)ordering differs from the vertical, hierarchical, theological order that necessitates Black laughter’s negation within in the structural logic of the superiority and incongruity theories. There is no true humor or ideal state toward or around which one can orient existence. Instead, the communal laughter lauded in Wretched privileges a horizontal, decentralized, non-teleological mode of social exchange. The result is a de-sexualized eroticism with neither tops nor bottoms but in which sidesplitting is still allowed.
Much in the way Fanon’s work has had a far-reaching influence on academic discussions concerning Blackness, his thoughts on laughter should also be treated as a portable concept. Broader critical engagements with the structural, philosophical, and cultural positioning of Black laughter such as this chapter presents have the potential to yield innovative interpretive lenses. Indeed, we can understand Black laughter as an extension of Black studies’s ongoing intellectual 60 and political project of accounting for the West’s paradigmatic exclusion of
Blackness. Working within the subfields of Black cultural, literary, and performance studies, scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and
Hortense Spillers have considered how conceptions of the human, the civilized, the Law, and the pleasurable are predicated on the structural logic of anti-
Blackness. Describing the theoretical and political imperative of Black studies,
Alex Weheliye writes, “In sum, Black studies illuminates the essential role that racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood, works toward the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human” (Habeas Viscus 4).xliii Defined broadly as a pervasive correlation between Blackness and death, regimes of anti-
Blackness render all things associated with Blackness expendable, dangerous, and anathema to the life-oriented aims of so-called civil society. One consequence of this is the perpetual production of “a world in which everything Black has been negatively marked; and everything white has been positively marked” (Wynter
“Inter/Views” 5). At the limits of Western epistemology, Black laughter incites the perpetual crisis of this ordering and represents for us, as it does for Fanon, as a model for the types of critical engagement asked of us as scholars working in
Black Studies.
The work made possible by this perspective has the potential to guide us toward new ways of understanding text. For example, studying how Black laughter brings together elements of the physical, the sonic, and the cognitive can answer Daphne Brooks’ call to “theorize other forms of phonography…in 61 which…embodied sonic performances directly engage with and complicate written texts” (623). An exploration of the complexities informing the politics of
Black laughter necessarily takes into account the continued policing and disavowal of Black people’s scandalous expression, especially when that expression announces an unrepentant repudiation of the so-called rational stability, and safety, of whiteness. The following chapter constitutes the next step of this exploration by tracing how a concern over the capacity for Black speech
(and laughter) extend back from the cultural and political interests of the mid- twentieth century to nineteenth-century Black American writings.
62
Chapter Two
“Voice might discover him”: The Subject of Voice in James McCune Smith’s Pseudonymous Writings and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends
It is said that more persons would have attended, had they known that the S.R. Ward, advertised to speak, was a black man. Supposing me to be nothing but a white man, they did not take pains to attend. –Samuel Ringgold Ward, Impartial Citizen April 24, 1850
Within the past ten years, a great impetus has given to the anti-slavery movement in America by coloured men who have escaped from slavery. Coming as they did from the very house of bondage, and being able to speak from sad experience, they could speak as none others could. –William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe
I. INTRODUCTION
Although there is no way of knowing what Samuel Ringgold Ward said during his speech on April 16, 1850 in Lowell, Ma, one can assume the subject of his discourse given escalating tensions over Senator James Mason’s proposed
Fugitive Slave Law. Ward, a runaway slave turned noted abolitionist speaker, probably made disparaging remarks concerning the “compromises” of Northern politicians, suggesting such decisions could lead to the passing of what he saw as a “monstrous proposition” – an approach he took just weeks earlier speaking at an anti-Webster rally at Faneuil Hall.xliv We have no way of knowing whether or not more people would have attended; by Ward’s own admission, “several other attractions were on hand” to distract the citizens of Lowell (“Letter”). Even as we cannot know how publicizing his race would have affected audience turnout, we can ask why Ward felt compelled to share the comment – which he wrote “from a tavern” in Nashua, NH the day following his speech – with the readers of his 63 newspaper The Impartial Citizen. Did Ward want to emphasize and mock the differing ways that Northern white abolitionist sympathizers responded to the growing popularly of Black abolitionist orators and thus underscore a curious fascination with Black speaking in particular? In his comment on the remark, might we also recognize impressions of Ward’s dissatisfaction with the event?xlv
Criticizing this predominately white Northern audience, Ward implies that the same excess contributing to the heightened entertainment value sought from
Black oration coincides with the production of racial difference; in Ward’s evaluation of the situation he would be “nothing but a white man” were it not for this excess. Indeed, during the antebellum period certain Black orators garnered larger crowds than their white abolitionist counterparts and received increased attention through their affiliations with the American Anti-Slavery Society, giving credence to Ward’s triangulation of commodification, consumption, and
Blackness.xlvi Boston Garrisonian John Collins, for instance, referred to the
“itching ears” of the public “to hear a coloured man speak, and particularly a slave" (qtd. in Pease 31 n.7). This fascination with the speech of formerly enslaved persons supports William Wells Brown’s assertion in my second epigraph that these orators “could speak as none others could” (157).
The popularity and influence of Black voices during the 1850s extends well beyond the anti-slavery speaking circuit. The growing celebrity of vocal performers, such as dramatic reader Mary Elizabeth Webb and vocalist Elizabeth
Greenfield, alongside the creative endeavors of physician James McCune Smith
(as “Communipaw”) among other pseudonymous correspondents for Frederick 64
Douglass’ Paper mark the 1850s not so much a point of origin for African
American literature, but rather as a generative moment in its history. From
Greenfield’s impressive vocal range and Mary Webb’s capacity for voicing multiple characters interchangeably to Smith’s use of a fictional print persona, these figures each conceive spoken and written voice as inherently malleable. And it is this malleability that permits a greater flexibility in terms of artistic representation. Their examples contribute to a growing belief that engaging fiction could influence intellectual debates over abolition.xlvii This “novel” treatment of voice sets the 1850s apart from prior decades of Black writing and oration.
A full discussion of the historical, philosophical, ideological, cultural, and political aspects of laughter should include a significant consideration of voice – in relation to its physiology and to our cultural affiliation of voice and agency.
Both laughter and voice are produced by air passing over the stretching and vibrating of vocal cords, and both result in reverberations emanating from the mouth and throat that are then either codified as language or as extra-linguistic sound. Although the increased presence of fictional voices in print greatly affects the tenor of political debates during the 1850s, scholars have yet fully to account for how this change affects representations of physical, embodied voice within the fictional writing itself. Prompted by burgeoning inquiries at the intersection of race and sound,xlviii this chapter examines how the treatment of material voice helps two writers – James McCune Smith and Frank J. Webb – meditate on the relationship between Blackness, voice, and text. James McCune Smith’s 65 pseudonymous writings for Frederick Douglass’s Paper, for example, facilitates his development of a literary, fictional style through the manipulation of voice.
Taking on a pseudonymous persona, I argue, allots Smith the space to explore more vocal and fictional modes of representation. I then build upon Smith’s understanding of voice and examine the narrative and representational strategies in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel, The Garies and Their Friends (1857). The Garies,
I will show, makes sense of sonic disruptions and subjective formations as functions of voice and vocalization. Using Stoever-Ackerman’s sonic colour-line as an organizing principle, I will argue it is through the fluidity of voice that The
Garies carves out an alternative mode of criticism. Rather than directly address the biological, empirical calculus of race, the novel rhetorically undermines the pseudoscientific logic that would see race hypostatized as a stable object.
II. SOUND STUDIES
I ground this chapter in recent scholarly work that engages the significance of sound in nineteenth-century Black literature and culture. The turn to more sound- based dimensions of literary analysis is often understood as a reaction to ocularcentric modes of interpretation and knowledge production.xlix In her reading of Douglass’s Narrative, for instance, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman demonstrates how “listening…was enmeshed in the process of subjection usually ascribed to the visual realm” (21). Similarly, Samuel Ward’s comments with which I begin this chapter gesture toward an awareness of sight within the intersections of sound, listening, and race as they relate to the production of social formations – people would come to listen and to see a Black man speak. Sound-based modes of 66 interpretation complicate and exceed visual elements, amplifying a text’s sonic dimensions as integral to its overall potential for meaning making.
Beyond visual and aural dimensions, discriminatory practices also regulate sounds themselves. Jaques Atalli’s classic text on the political mapping of sound through the organization of music, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, attends to social structures that augment and sustain their power through the perpetual ordering of sound. This ordering, he argues, includes the management of noise: “[The organization of sound] is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms. Therefore, any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form” (6). If we follow Attali’s logic, the designation “noise” functions as the placeholder for what cannot be assimilated into the social body, or power center. Along a similar vein, Stoever-Ackerman calls our attention to
“the dominant association [between] nonverbal sound [and] the presumed irrationality of racial others” as it manifests within white supremacist cultures
(20). The management of noise by naming it irrational, then, overlaps with the ordering of bodies along race, gender, and class-based lines. So when subjects do speak out against such power structures, labels such as “pushy” and “loud- mouthed” do the added work of recoding comprehensible criticism as an unintelligent, incommensurable position. In his reinterpretation of Marx, Fred
Moten reminds us that a future-oriented value system rests on the impossibility of an object’s capacity to speak: “Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but the object’s speech, the 67 commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the final refutation of whatever the commodity will have said” (10 emphasis added). The sounds one produces (noisy or otherwise) emerge as already enmeshed within matrices of subject and identity formation, as what passes for audible within society is not always coincident with what registers as audible to the ear. Thus, entanglements between viewing and listening contribute to a proliferation of processes that maintain and strengthen white hegemony.
Seeking modes through which to disentangle these processes, critics such as Alex Weheliye, Fred Moten, and Julian Henriques examine how phonography
– or the inscription of sound – has contributed significantly to the development of
Black literary and cultural expression. Henriques’s articulation of a multivalent
“sound system” to investigate the world of Jamaican dancehall music, for instance, demonstrates how sound and bodies come together at “corporeal … phonographic … [and] sociocultural” frequencies, inviting a critical engagement with the relationship between sound production and orders of knowledge (xxxiii).
Weheliye’s Phonographies charts conceptual connections between sound technologies and Black cultural production that enabled Black performers to rethink questions of being and becoming, which he argues contributed to the emergence of a “sonic Afro-modernity” during the twentieth century, (5). Despite his own focus on the significance of sound recording technologies within a slightly later history of the relationship between Blackness and the West,
Weheliye rights acknowledges that “orality is always already techne-logical” (19). 68
Orality is already technologically capable of engendering similar explorations of selfhood through the ordering and reordering of speech.
If understanding and deploying this separation of voice from a bodily/enunciatory origin serves as a starting point for the formation of a modern
Black subject, we repeatedly find evidence of such a split during the antebellum period. James McCune Smith’s use of pseudonym, for instance, uses the split between the physician abolitionist and the persona he constructs. So even as
Weheliye’s focus on technology seems a far cry from the mid-nineteenth-century newspapers and from the content of The Garies, the surprising amount of sound- based textual representation throughout both should be read as its own technological innovation. In other words, Weheliye’s thoughts concerning the shaping and reshaping of Black identity along the technology-enabled recording of music during the twentieth-century find an antecedent in the mid-nineteenth- century manipulation of text. Reading for such manipulations can expand our understanding of literary innovations made within a newly forming body of
African American fiction. Through moments that reveal the internal/external divide between the body and outside world, the following section considers the ways speech circulates as inherently malleable and, thus, frustratingly variable.
This malleability positions voice as more technologic than intrinsic, which we will see proves frustrating for the observational practices that would seek to pinpoint Black voice as an imminently discernible aspect of the Black body.
The tenor of political realities facing America’s Black population in 1857 was one in which voice mattered significantly. While citizenship in a democracy 69 is thought of as having a vocal presence with which to affect one’s government, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case effectively stripped US Black subjects of a viable political voice. The decision denied citizenship to all “persons who are the descendants of Africans who were imported into this country”
(“Transcript”). In concert with the Fugitive Slave Act’s de jure protection of slave catching within northern “free” states and newly emerging territories, these laws effectively denied or reversed Blacks’ access to basic rights. The ruling legally and figuratively changed the meaning of the ground upon which Black folks stood. When we consider that having a voice to air grievances within legal proceedings is referred to as having “standing,” the decision left them without legal standing, state, or status. This prevented future legal petitions by the enslaved for freedom through the courts and safeguarded the expansion of slavery into western territories. Thus, an unstated effect of this de-territorializing gesture was one in which no space remained safe, producing a kind of “de-stated” Black life.
As the justification for its decision, the Supreme Court imagined a series of allegedly negative consequences to granting Scott’s petition. These included
“the right to enter every other State…to go where they [Blacks] pleased…[and] the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak” (emphasis added). Syntactically associating the right to move between states with the full liberty of speech, the court’s need to regulate
Black speech extends to both “public and…private” spheres, emphasizing the extent to which Black speech can register as dangerous within and to a white 70 imaginary; the mere possibility that Black people in private might discuss, not necessarily execute, seditious acts could not be brooked. This anxiety regarding the physical and metaphoric mobility of Blacks at the time resulted in a swift, definitive response to Scott’s petition. Casting Black speech beyond the limits of citizenship effectively coded the expanding national voice as white in ways that continue to manifest within the lived experiences of America’s Black citizens.l
The emerging fictionalized voices of Black Americans during this time should be understood as a reaction to this expansion. In her article on capitalism and the early African American novel, Carla L. Peterson argues how creative deployments of fictional voice opened up “greater narrational possibilities” for
Black writers than the commodification of autobiographical voice occurring through stump-tour oration and written testimony (562-3). We can see how the treatment of physical, embodied voice in fiction reflects this change. Indeed, as an external manifestation of one’s interior, this fictionalization of voice obfuscates its point of origin and provides a new space for political debates performed within the pages of Black American print; fictionalization, in other words, amplifies voice’s inherent indeterminacy, “allow[ing] for a dramatizing of arguments in striking ways” (Bruce 289).
Fictional representations of voice at the time call attention to the ways race, sound, and listening all reinforce, maintain, and police structures of racialization. This is the relationship Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman theorizes through what she calls, “the sonic colour-line.” As I will later show, the presence and circulation of Black speech in The Garies precipitates all manner of public 71 disturbance, shaking up social relations along the sonic colour-line long enough for the novel to scrutinize their underlying premises. First, however, I turn to the pseudonymous writings of James McCune Smith and consider his own strategic deployments of voice.
III. COMMUNIPAW’S VOICE
During the 1850s, several correspondents for Frederick Douglass’ Paper wrote under pseudonyms in their published letters to the paper. The collective deployment of pseudonyms reflects a dynamic relationship between voice’s malleability and identity at this moment in Black print. Figures writing under names such as “Cosmopolite” (Philip Bell), “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), and
“Communipaw” (James McCune Smith) debate economic, cultural, and social issues pertinent to the readership of Douglass’ paper. The “open secret” of their identities made using pseudonyms in this instance less about anonymity and more about how each chosen name “established its creator’s particular perspective on race” (Peterson Black Gotham 218). The use of pseudonym, in other words, coalesces pointed characteristics and distills one’s political position. The act of writing under pseudonyms in American public print itself was nothing new, of course. Indeed, the early American practice of assuming classically-derived Greek and Roman pseudonyms in print both enshrines a particular intellectual superiority to debates about the nation and casts a “meta-explanation of American society in terms of antiquity” (Shalev 153). This neoclassical connection to ancient Greece and Rome through the New Republic era served to buttress claims of America’s exceptional status. Grounded in Eurocentric myths concerning the 72 origins of “civilization,” America could imagine itself as the logical extension and improvement of such classical traditions.
One way to read the use of pseudonyms on the part of Douglass’s correspondents, then, would be to suggest that they signal a stake in the changing
American landscape as tacit acceptance of the American forefathers’ centering of
Greece and Rome. The pseudonyms of William J. Wilson and James McCune
Smith, however, trouble this particular history of civilization; calling himself
“Ethiop,” for instance, Wilson promoted an Ethiopianist stance that indicated the prominence of ancient African history and civilization predating European invasion, flouting what Cheikh Anta Diop would call the “convenient invention” of civilization’s Greco-Roman origin. Both names, in fact, stretch and complicate territorial histories and origins. Smith’s inspiration for the name “Communipaw” most likely derives from Washington Irving’s History of New York in which
Irving discusses the first Dutch settlement at the Native village Communipaw.
The choice of pseudonym thus reminds readers that the colonization of the
Americas, and the history of Black people in the area, extends further than just
England’s involvement. Because the Dutch at Communipaw supposedly settled peacefully and worked to establish a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community, Carla
Peterson explains that the name allows Smith to “give himself a new ancestry…[through] a composite of different races and ethnicities” (Black
Gotham 220) Communipaw’s name, then, captures more of a disruption to static identity categories in line with Smith’s disregard for racial purity than any allegiance to America’s mythical origin story.li 73
Writing as Communipaw, Smith conceives of both spoken and written voices that achieve similar disruptions of categories through a constitutive surplus. One method Communipaw uses to illustrate this surplus is the pun. Puns capitalize on the multiple meanings of a word, disrupting the direct delivery of a message through the slipperiness introduced an excess in meaning. In a letter dated Oct. 8, 1851, Communipaw argues in favor of manifesting a Black voice through the newspaper, listing what this “organ” could do for its Black readership.
After delineating a careful budget for increasing the circulation of Douglass’ paper from weekly to semiweekly distribution, Communipaw offers the following justification:
We need an organ through which to strike, and around which to
rally. It must be an organ of our own: and we must become its
body guard if we would hold safely our wives and little ones in
the homes which God has ordained for them. We need an
organ, not only to battle against our foes, but also, to cheer
each other on in the struggle. The hour has come when to be
quiet any longer, is to be criminally recreant. (Smith Oct. 8
1851)lii
As if meant to contrast the organized, mathematic graph of the budget, the multiple meanings of “organ” constitute excess meanings that can be mapped onto the letter’s theorization of voice. Referring to a periodical with a decidedly political inclination, Communipaw presents this organ as an extension of the people whose interests it represents. Organ, of course, also 74 puns on a body’s internal organs, without which the body would perish. The need for an organ here takes on multiple meanings, as the need for a newspaper coincides with the need for a voice and for a bodily presence. More sound-based meanings of organ are also at play and convey the significance of organ as voice. Organ, when referring to the musical organ and the vocal cords or voice, emphasizes the sonorousness of the organ as a complement to its physicality, in which “the human organs of speech” coincide with “the human voice” and “the mouthpiece” for a given political cause (“organ n.1”).
One further definition, in which “organ” operates as a verb, clarifies my point:
“to provide with a bodily organ or organs; to make into living tissue” (“organ v.”). In other words, Smith’s use of “organ” provides a body for and gives voice to a growing free and enslaved Black community such that a physical presence and speech mutually reinforce and amplify one another.
Note, too, how the letter privileges the masculine as the public embodiment of the “organ,” upholding hetero-patriarchal conceptions of the home and fashioning man as its heroic protector. In line with the thematic conventions of the time, Communipaw invokes threats to domesticity – a call to “hold safely our wives and little ones in the homes which God has ordained for them” – in order to then justify safeguarding it. Finally, then, Smith’s letter also puns on the “organ” as phallus, the possession of which could guarantee the reproduction of a stable Black (hetero-male) subject.
Even as Communipaw establishes the need for a stable organ, he troubles any singular stability such a presence could provide through the 75 excess produced in the many intersecting meanings of the word. The flexibility is fundamental to Communipaw’s conception of Black voice. This is a voice that can both “strike” and “cheer,” serving as both weapon and rallying cry. He continues, “Cravens are we, if our organ do not put on another barrel and fire two rounds to their one - all the while looking forward to the early day when we shall have a six shooter - that is, a daily.” In contrast to the “criminally recreant” act of remaining “quiet,” Communipaw locates success in the recoil of gunfire. Thus, the possession of this “organ” means nothing unless it “strikes,” which is to say unless it makes some noise, and that noise means nothing unless it galvanizes a social movement. Aligning the number of issues in a week with a number of bullets extends his metaphor; the surprise and disruption a gun precipitates would not be as violent were it not for loud crack of a bullet’s firing. In short, Communipaw describes a sonic dimension to voice that exists beyond the newspaper’s life, a voice whose phenomenology exceeds any singular material instantiation including the newspaper itself. In this, Communipaw’s deployment of voice resembles what
Fred Moten calls, “the incorporation or recording of a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music and speech” (Moten 6).
Communipaw’s interest regarding voice and surplus of the organ extends to descriptions of singing and writing, associating voice’s excessiveness with the artistic contributions of Black singers and writers, namely Elizabeth Greenfield and Alexandre Dumas. Known by her stage name, “The Black Swan,” Greenfield entertained segregated and mixed race audiences with her remarkable singing 76 talents during the 1850s.liii Billed as hitting a remarkably broad spectrum of clear notes, Greenfield toured major cities in the United States as well as one known tour in London.liv Inspired by her exceptional talent, Communipaw works out his ideas regarding Blackness and Black performance in white dominated spaces; in framing vocal excess as that which indicates artistic skill, he deploys Greenfield’s superb singing organ to taunt notable white critics of his time. In a letter dated
March 9, 1855, Communipaw criticizes the “atmosphere of prejudice” that perpetually subordinates Black expression to European values and criteria by calling attention to a lack of any appreciable criticism on Greenfield:
We have no adequate criticism of Miss Greenfield, even in the
liberal Tribune. Mr. Fry who grew frantic over Jenny Lind, is
dumb in relation to the Black Swan. I do not attribute his
silence to prejudice: Art must precede criticism: and a new
revelation of Art must be comprehended before it is chronicled
in fitting terms. Mr. Fry must grow up in the comprehension of
Miss Greenfield and then he may criticize. (Smith, March 9,
1855)
Communipaw presents Greenfield’s talents as lying beyond the lexical and epistemic capacities of current criticism. The lack of “adequate” criticism implies that critics consistently overlook or underappreciate Greenfield’s talents; Communipaw also emphasizes that the critics themselves remain inadequate. The use of “dumb” stresses a connection between voice and knowledge that Communipaw observes in Greenfield’s ability to render others 77 unable to speak. He does not aggressively belittle the Tribune’s music critic
William H. Fry, yet in suggesting that Fry “grow up” before he “may criticize,” Communipaw publically taunts one of the biggest music critics of the decade for his silence on the matter. Further, Communipaw again associates Black voice and martial resonances as he recounts that Wendell
Phillips could only “‘bless the pistol,’” of Greenfield’s voice he was so impressed by it.
Indeed, Communipaw makes much of the intersection between voice, excess, and comprehension. As a complement to Greenfield’s voice, he discusses the literature of Alexander Dumas. In a way similar to his appreciation of
Greenfield’s talent, Communipaw centers his thoughts on the excesses that
Dumas’ writing delimits. We find Dumas represents “not merely a first class original genius, but…a genius of new proportions” (March 9, 1855). These proportions grow larger than life and border on the mythic as Dumas possesses an
“unheard of fecundity of imagination” that flows from his mind like an
“inexhaustible river.” Words such as “unheard” cast Dumas’s writing in terms related to speech and sound, while “inexhaustible” establishes that there always remains something more to be said, which is to say Communipaw imagines voice vis-à-vis a supplemental logic grounded in its very excess. Thus, the intersection at which singing and writing meet acknowledges the constitutive excesses underlying both; Communipaw’s shifting focus between sung and written voice establishes their confluence rather than their difference, and he thus shows how 78 critical modes of interpretation prove inadequate for addressing either
Greenfield’s or Dumas’s talents.
Recognizing these inadequacies as the consequence of European criticism,
Communipaw insists there is something lacking within Eurocentric perspectives.
He addresses the problem through another pun: “The cruels [sic] of European criticism are too small for the accurate measurement of…proportions” (March 9,
1855). While the first impression is this is another example of Communipaw’s investment in proportion-based praise, his peculiar use of the word “cruels” names and undercuts the logic upon which European criticism operates.
According to the OED, “crewel” or “crule,” often used in plural, refers to the intertwining of two thin, worsted yarn threads: “These yarns, being produced in different colours and used in combination in the making of one article” (“crewel n.1”). The image of twining strands implies a binary between two separate entities that might be understood as oppositional even as they contribute to “one article”; imagining the twining of two separate strands, European criticism in
Communipaw’s evaluation perpetuates a fantasy regarding the potential disentanglement of the two.lv The problem lies with presupposing a discernible racial difference between Black and white instead of interrogating their imbrication, which Communipaw recognizes as an a priori consequence of a
Eurocentric imperative. Punning on crewels, then, Communipaw binds the cruelty of European criticism to Eurocentric constructions of Blackness. This image of
“cruels” further supports Communipaw’s overall agenda: to distress the fabric of racial discourse by challenging its premises. 79
As a way of distressing the textual fabric of his own writing, Smith blurs generic distinctions between non-fictional analysis and fictional description, resulting in a writerly voice that approximates both. Communipaw eschews any attempt to ensnare Greenfield within available interpretive modes. When he writes, “I cannot analyze, I can only describe the swan,” Communipaw avoids the pitfalls of analysis and outlines a potential alternative. Description displaces analysis, and Communipaw opts for outlining the structural elements limiting
Greenfield’s exposure. This approach, in turn, amounts to letting her experience, and the experience of hearing her sing, speak for itself.
Smith produces a similar effect by exploring the capabilities of his writerly voice in relation to the intersection of race and voice through Heads of the Colored People, a series of ten written sketches published in Frederick
Douglass’ Paper from 1852-1854.lvi A bit of a departure from the concert halls and middle-class interests found in his other writings for Douglass’s newspaper, the sketches typically involve Communipaw engaging with or describing New
York City’s working class and impoverished Black population. As an alternative to the more pervasive images of Black life privileging middle-class sentiments and activities, Smith felt that his sketches could serve to inspire members from this group who for the first time would see their lives reflected in print.lvii
Along with this attention to class concerns raised by Heads, John Stauffer highlights Smith’s “experimental style,” which he argues differs from more sentimental approaches popularized by novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (187).
Sketches such as “The Boot-Black” and the “The Whitewasher,” for instance, 80 present “the close links between manual labor and intellectual work,” as
Communipaw’s use of printing inks and tones as metaphors further associates intellectual work with types of activist writing and labor (Stauffer 195). While the journalistic sketches present non-fictional bodies moving through a realistic world, their style and form are more recognizably fictionalized than his other letters; offset dialogue, descriptive setting, and Communipaw’s flâneur-like movement within the sketches suggest a literary sensibility attuned to other nineteenth century representations of urban space.
Voice, as we have seen elsewhere, remains integral to Communipaw’s work. Much like his writing on Dumas and Greenfield, the first sketch in the series, “The Black News-Vendor,” privileges voice as a potential site for representing the limits of understanding with one key difference. Whereas Dumas and Greenfield embodied individuals at the pinnacle of their respective fields
(more in line with idealized bourgeois definitions of success), the newsvendor’s nameless status more closely aligns him and his labor with members of New York
City’s working class Blacks.lviii Smith acknowledges the collectivity of this striving when he reflects on the importance of the vendor’s story near the end of the sketch: “There is hope in [this story] for all who, like him, are battling against slavery and caste” (194). Smith speaks on two registers here. Communipaw exposes the violence of everyday life in the North by drawing attention to the ways in which some Black people in big Northern cities such as New York remain positioned within exploitative labor structures. The battle against “caste” also signals a battle against cast, or a ready-made bourgeois mold for Black 81 subjectivity and propriety. In presenting these sketches, then, Smith insists on the presence of Black people from lower class statuses and places the undeniable fact of their lives into greater circulation.
Despite this greater public awareness, “The Black News-Vendor” obscures the voice of the vendor in order to demonstrate a perspective made manifest, paradoxically, via its absence. Attending to the sounds of the sketch help clarifies this point. The “silent” Black newsvendor contrasts the bustle of a
New York Street on “[a]ny Sunday morning in West Broadway” and the vociferous “nomad criers in the literary world” (191). The vendor’s silence and static position in relation to the deafening sounds of both fictional (literary) and non-fictional (metropolitan) worlds represents a silent/silenced person produced via his negative relationship to the positive “nomad criers.” In contrast to the
“criminally recreant” act of remaining quiet expressed in his 1851 letter on the need for an “organ,” here the vendor “like his class, the colored people, noiselessly does his mission and leaves it to others to find out who and what he is”; silence now signals a powerful resource in a larger battle (191 emphasis mine). The “who and what” of the vendor’s statement signals the subject/object split of what has manifested as an enduring need to interpret Black life as either subjective striving toward a “who” or as exploitation of a “what.” The “and” in the statement complicates this distinction in a way that emphasizes the vendor’s irreducibility to either position. That the vendor “leaves it to others” to resolve this tension – call them the critics – suggests his indifference to such an understanding predicated on separation and binaries. The vendor’s indeterminate 82 status renders him, within the logic of the sketch at least, coincident with
Communipaw broader conception of voice as indeterminate.
If we consider the always already fictionalized status of the pseudonym, this indeterminate status applies to Communipaw as well. In the sketches, this status helps generate the successful disrupting of fantasmatic boundaries separating what is “real” from what is fictional. Communipaw frames his sketch as a vignette in the form of a letter to Douglass and then requires that we understand this frame as a frame by calling attention to the moments when he breaks through it. Smith makes himself a character by taking on his pseudonym, but within the sketch Communipaw makes a character of his character, producing a representation of his pseudonym in print through a dialogue with the vendor. The dramatic form that the dialogue takes breaks up the prose of the sketch. Moreover, the address to Douglass at the sketch’s end steps back out of the narrative to an extra-diegetic level of discourse that is nevertheless still trapped within a web of fiction held taught by the use of a pseudonym able to move between frames. The movement between so called fictional and non-fictional worlds functions, at least on one level, as the movement between alternate realities or alternate perspectives, accomplished at a switch point where the excess of voice(s) inhabit multiple registers at once. Thus, Communipaw’s ironic stance coincides with his own conception of voice and underscores how representation affects social and political power. Such moments of strategic vocalization, as one finds in “The
Black News-Vendor,” highlight Communipaw’s focused attention to the 83 movement of voices and bodies in public spaces. This suggests a way of reinterpreting how representation affects Smith’s larger project writing as
Communipaw. The consistent use of pseudonym throughout his writing for
Douglass renders untenable a firm distinction between “real” and “fiction,” which simultaneously justifies and animates the project in Heads of the
Colored People of incorporating dispossessed voices into a Black body politic through fictional writing.
IV. THE GARIES AND THEIR FRIENDS
As if in concert with Smith’s creative deployment of voice in print, Frank J.
Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends explores representations of Black voices in literature. Both Smith’s writing and Webb’s novel recognize an inherent relationship between voice and surplus. This excess, for Smith, signals a way to celebrate the individual accomplishments of Black artists and to acknowledge the unheard voices of a working class. Whereas “The Black News-Vendor” implies that Black writers could explore the fictionalization of Black people for something akin to social commentary, The Garies cautions against an overly reductive celebration of voice and political agency. If 1850s the legislation discussed above racialized the national voice as white, then a question facing us is how does Webb’s representation of voice address the political realities of a time in which Black voice signified something other than citizen? Consider how the social relations concretized by the Dred Scott decision not only whitewashed the national voice but also positioned Black voice as its constitutive surplus.
Identifying this surplus, The Garies recognizes the position Black voice occupies 84 within America’s social structure. The novel depicts this relationship between voice and subjectivity appears in several ways, including (1) the potential backfire of speech in the performance of one’s identity, (2) the ways in which certain foundations of racial whiteness rely upon erasing any distinction between the indeterminacy of voice and the stability of the body, and (3) how that relationship plays out with regard to material text. The novel’s deconstruction of whiteness results from successfully reintroducing this excess in a way that problematizes phonocentric assumptions tethering voice and subject.
The little biographical information we have about Frank Webb’s life ties the publication of The Garies to voice in relevant ways. For example, Webb’s first wife, Mary E. Webb, is recognized widely for her strengths in elocution.
Known by her stage name, “The Black Siddons,” Mary toured broadly and was the better known of the pair after her debut in 1855.lix Her earnings from speaking engagements, in fact, enabled Frank to focus on finishing his novel after his own business ventures failed in the early 1850s. Moreover, Mary’s tour of England in
1856 put Frank in contact with publisher G. Routledge, with whom he negotiated terms for the 1857 publication of The Garies and Their Friends.lx Mary showcased her vocal skill through readings of Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s The Christian Slave, a dramatic reworking of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin prepared “expressly” for her by Stowe. As Tavia Nyong’o argues, the plurality of voices Mary Webb could execute while performing these pieces highlighted her elocutionary genius and facilitated an implicit challenge to
American racist ethnic stereotypes. By bending gender expression and expertly 85 traversing various racial speech patterns in the roles least “like” her subject position as “Black” and “woman,” Mary Webb’s “strategic infidelity” to these categories during her performances disrupted static categories of identity
(Nyong’o “Hiawatha” 90-1). These publically staged instances of vocal passing underscore identity’s performativity, and anticipate similar disruptions appearing in novels and short stories of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Indeed, the strengths of Mary’s vocal performances find ready analogues with the conceptual mapping of voice found in The Garies and Their Friends. The novel is, in many ways, a loud text that repeatedly calls attention to acts of vocalization. Besides representations of national and regional dialects, the novel marks diction in a variety of interesting ways; for instance, the uses of exclamation points, capitalized words, and italics modify characters’ speech and generate a textuality that is at once visible and audible. In so doing, the novel deploys similar rhetorical and “typographically radical” strategies as those used by abolitionists such as David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison (Dinius 55). In her discussion of Walker’s Appeal, Marcy J. Dinius notes, “readers can virtually hear his rising voice and anger in his text’s italics, capitalized words, and multiple exclamation points” (56). The tonal variety achieved by such typographic markings in The Garies recreates audibly varied tones similar to those that would have been heard during Mary Webb’s performances. Thus, the novel’s treatment of text parallels Mary Webb’s disruptions of body.
Even as the typography of The Garies stretches and increases the capacity of written text’s ability to convey spoken language, however, the necessary 86 inclusion of these indications also suggests the inverse – that written text proves an inadequate vessel for speech. The opening of the novel prepares its audience to read for this opposition between body and voice through images of containers and their overflowing contents. The novel commences in Savannah, Georgia with the description of “a table covered with all those delicacies that, in the household of a rich Southern planter, are regarded as almost necessaries of life” (1). Samuel Otter notes the opening’s preoccupation with voyeurism and how viewing the
“temptingly displayed” treats feeds into a description of Emily Garie in a way that positions both “flesh and fruit” as aesthetic objects to be consumed (Otter 232).
And while I am inclined to agree with this assessment, Otter hermetically seals his analysis of the scene within the logic of the home in ways that downplay how the text evokes excess that reaches beyond the home through this overabundance of sweets. Alongside a domestic tableau made up of perceptible “outlines” and
“interiors,” the novel’s plantation opening also emphasizes how such domestic finery relies upon exterior labor as its antecedent (Otter 232).
After all, where would the Garies have procured the sugar sprinkled
“plentifully” on their “peeping” strawberries than from the sugar cane fields of the
Caribbean, or more broadly, from a global imperial framework built upon the labor of enslaved Blacks (1)? Excessive sweetness in this tantalizing display hauntingly gestures to spaces outside of the immediate home.lxi By the mid- nineteenth-century, sugar refining had advanced to the point at which less raw material was lost to things such as caramelization during the boiling process:
“Immense improvements in grinding capacity, cane varieties, pest-control and 87 cultivation methods, increasing use of machinery, and revolutionary changes in transportation eventuated in vast new agro-industrial complexes” (Mintz 69).
These radical changes within industrial models affected greatly both the production and consumption of sugar. The abundant spread of the Garies’ table spills over with surpluses generated by technological innovations and Black life reduced to labor. Referring to the treats as “almost necessaries,” the opening reaches beyond the home to the trade routes that would have brought the sugar into Georgia and to the culinary preparations that could transform the violence of economic exploitation into decadent desserts, all while the facade of domesticity hides these atrocities and gilds over death.
It is no surprise, then, that the saccharine treats in the Savannah home of
Clarence and Emily Garie remain marked by a stillborn death that no amount of sugar could sweeten. The “almost drowned” Geechee limes “contained” in a glass as well as the “preserved” peaches suggest a dash of perpetual deathliness at the heart of this sweetness (1). These representations of deathly excess disrupt fantasies of safely housing meaning, bodies, and even race within stable categories. Consider for a moment how this excess parallels the structure of the family, as we soon find out that the lady of the house is both wife and legal property of her husband, Clarence. The opening thus positions seeing, desiring, and consuming the Black (female) body for sustenance within a broader matrix of pleasure and exploitation – of which the home is only one node.
Despite the opening’s complicated relationship to the home, however, interpretations of Webb’s novel privilege domesticity as the site par excellence 88 for the ongoing mapping of Black subjectivity. The allure of this tendency rests with an inclination to safeguard a sustainable Black subjectivity free from the contamination of white mediation and is understood as a response to the violent destruction of filial bonds through capture and slavery. Robert Reid-Pharr observes that “(black) bodies both constitute and are constituted by domesticity,” yet he also cautions against overly “simple symbiosis between body and house”
(65). There is a requisite amount of “ambiguity” and “indeterminacy” that goes into the constant reformation of the home (65). It is this ambiguity that leads to what he calls the “irregular process” of domesticity, which (re)produces “irregular bodies” that constantly challenge the harmony of the homes from which they have emerged. In order to manage these potential instabilities, “Cleaning becomes, as a consequence, a primary technology in the production of self and other” (65-6).
With this attention to cleanliness in mind, Reid-Pharr introduces Webb’s novel as the model for a Black novelistic recuperation of domesticity with little room for dissent:
Thus, the impetus within…The Garies and Their Friends, is
always to clean, to produce clear boundaries between the black and
the white, the slave and the free, the northern and the southern.
Moreover, the very fact of Webb’s obsession with cleaning brings
us back to my argument that proper black bodies can only be
produced within proper black households, households that must be
cleaned literally and figuratively of the unsettling stench of white
intrusion. (11) 89
This understandable, if not overstated, privileging of domesticity within early
Black American novels has held considerable sway over interpretive approaches to The Garies. Extending Reid-Pharr’s analysis, Anna Mae Duane writes, “the black women who populate the novel” remain “inextricably bound” to the
(re)production of a secure Black subjectivity (202).lxii Maria G. Fabi suggests that the “familial standpoint of [Webb’s] novel,” in contrast to the whiteness one encounters in the public sphere, “provides a background against which his African
American characters stand out in their full individuality” (29). Securing the home in The Garies, then, correlates to the protection and reproduction of a particular form of Black subjectivity grounded in a filial, future-oriented, racially decontaminated domestic space. This almost exclusive attention to subjectivity in the terms of Black domesticity, however, has produced an implicit scholarly wariness of the novel’s public spaces. In other words, scholars reading The Garies tend to stay indoors as if responding to the novel’s representation of the public sphere as dangerous.lxiii
In contrast to the stability of the home, the novel marks public spaces with a sense of precariousness, which is evidenced when Black characters move outside of their homes. Mrs. Garie, after remaining indoors for much of the narrated action, freezes to death when the threat of mob violence forces her outside in an attempted escape.lxiv Trying to warn the Garies of this threat, Mr.
Ellis runs into another mob and loses the command of his hands when one of the rioters takes a hatchet to them, “severing two of the fingers from one hand and deeply mangling the other” (Webb 219). This severing not only permanently 90 disfigures Mr. Ellis’s physical body, but also impedes his ability to work with his hands, effectively severing him from his labor as a carpenter in ways that prohibit him from providing for his family and, thus, from building a home.
As a complement to these more direct physical threats to the body, the
“invisible third presence” of public opinion indirectly constrains characters’ attempts to maintain a living (Chakkalakal 48). Public opinion extends beyond
Tess Chakkalakal’s attention to marriage contracts and intimacy and climaxes at the moment when public opinion manifests as mob during the novel’s riot chapters. In less spectacular instances, too, simply raising the specter of public opinion has to power affect significant social changes. For example, white characters deploy public opinion to justify their denial of Black characters’ access to avenues for social stability such as education and work. The schoolteacher Miss Jordan dismisses the Garie children at the request of Mrs.
Stevens once it is revealed that several parents have been made aware that the
Garie children are of mixed race – by Mrs. Stevens herself or by the gossip we must assume she incited: “Miss Jordan looked aghast at this startling intelligence; if Mrs. Roth and Mrs. Kinney withdrew their patronage and influence, her little school (the sole support of her mother and herself) would be well-nigh broken up” (158). Later in the novel, the offices of “Messrs.
Twining, Western, and Twining” refuse to hire Charlie Ellis – despite his having submitted an exemplary application – because of the stir his apprenticeship might cause among their other workers.lxv Soon after, a bank- note engraver and known abolitionist Mr. Blatchford recants a job offer made 91 to Charlie in response to workers grievances: “"We won't work with niggers!" cried one; "No nigger apprentices!" cried another; and "No niggers—no niggers!" was echoed from all parts of the room” (297).lxvi From whispered gossip among white mothers to vociferous objections that fill a room, white characters’ domination of public speech spans a broad spectrum. Dashing
Charlie’s hopes of obtaining an engraving apprenticeship symbolizes a relationship between print and public opinion, as the circulation of former gives voice to the latter. The novel thus depicts sociocultural limitations placed upon Charlie’s capacity for unmediated self-expression in public.
Facing all of this precariousness in public, the novel constantly wrestles with the question of whether or not Black voice has a place in public.
The intersections of Blackness and voice in public render each term untenable by virtue of its surplus relationship to both text and bodies; we find a (white) public that cannot brook the idea of a Black body with a voice and Black bodies whose voices find sanctuary within the confines of the home. As we will see, it is in addressing the tensions of this question in public that the novel realizes its deconstruction of racial whiteness.
A Tale of Two Georges
Through sonic misunderstandings during verbal exchanges, The Garies and
Their Friends privileges voice as a mode through which to interrogate pseudoscientific attempts to hypostatize race. Webb achieves this interrogation by invoking socially contingent manifestations of voice that 92 ironize the stability of subjectivity during moments of racial passing. In contrast with other stories of passing that present the fluidity of phenotypic bodies, The Garies uses to the fluidity of voice to dissect racial paradigms.
I now turn to two separate instances of this latter sense of vocal passing to illustrate what I mean. Both instances involve characters named
George. The first George is Emily Garie’s cousin, George Winston, whose story of passing is the topic of discussion upon which the novel opens. The second George is Mr. Garie’s cousin and the novel’s villain, George Stevens – of whom Mr. Walters says everyone “can speak no good” (197). Beyond their similar filial connections to the Garies, the inspiration to read these two
Georges in tandem is furthered by what must have been editorial error in which George Stevens is referred to as “Mr. Thomas Stevens” at the outset of chapter twelve.lxvii A likely reason for this error is that the character George
Stevens might have originally been named Thomas only to be changed upon revision, inviting readers to view the characters as twinned or doubled.
Each scene features one George traversing the sonic colour-line in which the disruptions occasioned by their passing highlight the relationship between speech and race. The first half of chapter four describes George
Winston passing for white as he travels by train. The scene’s irony centers on the ways speech and voice threaten to exceed the meaning of speaking characters themselves. A porter named Ben, who is secretly collecting funds for Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee – a group of abolitionists during the
1840s and 1850s who worked to undermine the Fugitive Slave Act and help 93 escaped slaves – attempts to trick George, whom he assumes to be a white
Southerner, by affecting a degrading dialect and the sensibilities of an anti- abolitionist in hopes of securing a large tip: “I was sot free—and I often wish
… dat I was back agin on the old place—hain’t got no kind marster to look after me here, and I has to work drefful hard sometimes” (39). Ben’s plan fails, unsurprisingly, as Winston, hardly a proslavery sympathizer, reprimands him: “Any man that prefers slavery to freedom deserves to be a slave—you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Go out of the room, sir, as quick as possible!" (39). Of course, the irony is that the mistaken identity cuts both ways; Winston does not recognize Ben’s non-standard grammar and pronunciation as a performance meant for white supremacists. The reader experiences a stark contrast the next time Ben speaks, this time away from
Winston: “‘Phew!’ said the astonished and chagrined Ben … ‘that was certainly a great miss,’ continued he, talking as correct English, and with as pure Northern an accent as any one could boast” (40). Ben cannot risk wondering whether he and Winston could share similar abolitionist sensibilities, in part, because he strategically ascribes phenotype to race and race to politic. Placed at a disadvantage within the scene’s social logic, Ben does not have the luxury of presuming otherwise. Winston, too, takes his encounter with Ben at face value, and while neither Ben nor Winston is disabused of his misapprehension – both pass by one another slightly ruffled but mostly unperturbed – the scene reveals much on the subject of Black performance. 94
These performances hinge on various instances of passing. George
Winston, in a manner often associated with racial passing, allows himself to be mistaken for white to access greater social mobility. Ben passes himself off as sympathetic to the anti-abolitionist rhetoric typically associated with a proslavery South. Doing so, Ben’s command over his voice produces its own
“strategic infidelity” in relation to the performance of identity (Nyong’o
“Hiawatha” 90). More than a moment of ironic misunderstanding, however, the scene draws attention to the types of dialogues permitted across the sonic colour-line. Ben’s fidelity to the Vigilance Committee remains constant, and his reasons for acting are absolutely different from any rationale the assumed white man for whom Ben performs would ascribe. Also, the fact that he takes on this persona in the first place implies its previous successes; thus, although the target might be incorrect, the performance indirectly criticizes the way white Southerners presumably reward the performance of obsequious proslavery rhetoric with increased capital.
Ben’s plan backfires, after all, not because he fails to perform his simulation of an ingratiating former slave but rather because he is successful enough. Rather than present Ben’s failure as a caution against performances of
Blackness that risk inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes, the text undermines any such reading. A series of similes at the end of the exchange reveals that whatever passes “as correct English, and with as pure Northern an accent as any one could boast” is always already a simulation and as much a construct
(Webb 40 emphasis mine). In other words, rather than pass judgment on Ben’s 95 actions, the scene directs its criticism at the structure setting the bar rather than at a character that flouts it.
Offering a parallel to the scene involving Ben the porter and George
Winston, the scene involving George Stevens also involves a case of mistaken identity in public that centers voice. The scene consists of multiple instances that distress presumptions concerning appearance, culminating with Stevens beaten, covered in tar and mistaken for Black unable to self-identify using his words and voice. While the previous scene ended with a tacit acknowledgement of the constructed nature of what passes for properly spoken English, the instability of voice in this next scene deconstructs embodiments of racial whiteness.
The narration of Stevens’ experience disrupts the tautology at the heart of pseudoscientific attempts to objectively define Blackness. As part of his real- estate scheme meant to mask the murder of Clarence Garie, George Stevens purchases a disguise. The narrator describes the effects this disguise has on
Stevens’ features, emphasizing how the outfit brings out “the most disagreeable points of his physique ... [it] being quite in harmony with his villanous [sic] countenance” (184). The description highlights what we already know about
Steven’s disreputable character by turning a recognizably physiognomic lens – in which the face is read as an external manifestation of internal desires – on a white person. Even as the passage makes use of physiognomic tropes, it does so only as a passing reference en route to a firmer commentary on concealment in relation to the properties of Stevens’ clothing. The absence of the word disguise from the passage reinforces the ways in which this new outfit reveals rather than conceals 96 and suggests that we consider Stevens’ gentlemanly attire is more of a disguise.
The accoutrements of respectability here align with artifice and duplicity.
The initial depiction of Mr. Stevens’ face makes its point through physiognomy, the description of Stevens’ facial features after he’s beaten up and covered in tar further blurs distinctions between pseudoscientific explanations and caricaturist fictions. In his new outfit, Stevens is mistaken by a group of Irishmen as a member from a rival gang and receives a beating. Whereas the narrative previously bound Stevens’ personality to his “villainous countenance,” this description uses physical markers typically associated with caricatured depictions of blackness, such as thick lips and bulging eyes, and applies them to the description of his face: “His lips were swelled to a size that would have been regarded as large even on the face of a Congo negro, and one eye was puffed out to an alarming extent; whilst the coating of tar he had received rendered him such an object as the reader can but faintly picture to himself” (189). The hyperbolic quality of the account calls attention to the intersection between minstrelsy and pseudoscience, as if, from the narrator’s perspective, they share the same ideological impulse. The similarities emerge from the use of a conditional perfect address to the reader, which emphasizes the narrator’s distance from both the scene’s diegetic action and the interpretations of those who “would have…regarded” Mr. Stevens uncritically through a stricter adherence to such pseudoscientific indicators of race (189). This conditional perfect stresses the tautology undergirding both blackface minstrelsy and pseudoscience; for both, the complete impression of an image predetermines its legibility. In other words, the 97 text aligns pseudoscience’s underlying rationale with that of minstrelsy in that both cling to false reproductions of authenticity. The narrator goads the reader to examine their consumption of such descriptions, calling attention their potential complicity with the tropes used in describing George Stevens as an “object” they can “faintly picture.”
As this instance illustrates, the mediating voice of narration peppers the novel and often makes its presence felt during moments particularly rife with racial tension. The free-indirect speech deployed by such addresses to the reader opens an “enunciatory gap” that temporarily separates the narrator from the story’s diegesis (Peterson “Capitalism” 563). Calling attention to the narrational distance from the scene virtually objectifies the narrated action, as the constructed perspective invites a greater amount of cross-examination of the present scene.lxviii
Soon after, a group of affluent, intoxicated white men mistakes this swollen and tar-covered Stevens for racially Black. Of course, registering tar for “Black” skin renders their oversight absurd, and the ironic distance generated by the mediating screen of narration helps separate reader from both Stevens and this group of white men in a way that makes that absurdity clear. In making light of their mistake with a nudge and wink to the reader, the narrational voice ridicules the impossible ignorance of these white men who work themselves into unreasonable, illogical contortions in an effort to maintain a particular racial hierarchy and class status.
This narrational split further emphasizes a parallel split that occurs between Stevens’ own voice and body. Having thoroughly debunked the fantasy 98 of an accurate external signifier for race, the narrative shifts to address the possibility an internal signifier – the voice – as an indicator of racial difference.
As the intoxicated men surround Mr. Stevens, they begin demanding that he speak: “‘Spirit of—hic—hic—night, whence co-co-comest thou?" stammered one; sp-p-peak—art thou a creature of the mag-mag-na-tion-goblin-damned, or only a nigger?—speak!’” (190). Stevens, familiar with some of the men who have mistakenly identified him as “a darkey,” refrains from speaking, afraid “his voice might discover him” (190). Within the larger logic of the story, “discover” here means the discovery of not only his individual identity but also his nefarious orchestration of the race riots and murder plot; “discover” also gestures to more scientific practices predicated upon discovery, which is to say to an episteme founded upon one’s fidelity to discoverable empirical evidence. In this instance,
Stevens’s behavior indicates his belief in the immutability of his racial identity.
As no one is able to visually confirm his status as white, Stevens’ anxiety about speaking demonstrates his belief that the primacy of voice trumps that of the visual. In other words, despite the absence of a recognizable face, Stevens has faith he can speak and reveal his identity. So even if viewing him might not uncover his identity, he rests assured in his ability to announce it.
It is this relationship between the voice and the subject that Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar considers at length in A Voice and Nothing More, which examines the possibility of what he calls an “object voice” as the bit of voice that remains unintelligible to phonologic explanation. Considering philosophical paradigms that stressed the voice as the basic element of language 99 and written language as its supplement, Dolar traces this history of the voice within Western critical discourse: “The voice offered the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence, an origin not tarnished by externality, a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs which are anyway surrogates by their very nature, and always point to an absence” (37). Indeed,
George Stevens’ reluctance to speak hinges on his own belief in this illusion, as if there were some unassailable quality in his voice that was undeniably him, or at the very least undeniably white. Yet, when the voice, like the gaze, appears as the pivotal point of self-apprehension, it introduces a rupture that must be reconciled by constructing self-presence around an empty center where the subject emerges
“in an impossible relation to that bit that cannot be present” (Dolar 42). The voice engenders a remainder for which no amount of phonological schematization can ever account. As we will see, this is the bit that bites back when Stevens finally does speak.
The scene continues undermining any belief in an inherently racialized voice when Stevens decides to talk. Though he will not speak in front of the larger party of men, Stevens reveals his voice to a more intimate acquaintance, Mr. Morton, who happens to be among them. Pulling Morton aside, Stevens addresses him:
As soon as they were out of hearing of the others, Mr. Stevens exclaimed, “Don’t you know me, Morton?” Mr. Morton started back with surprise, and looked at his companion in a bewildered manner, then explained, “No, I’ll be hanged if I do. Who the devil are you?” “I’m Stevens; you know me.” “Indeed I don’t. Who’s Stevens?” “You don’t know me! Why, I’m George Stevens, the lawyer.” 100
Mr. Morton thought that he now recognized the voice, and as they were passing under the lamp at the time, Mr. Stevens said to him, “Put your finger on my face, and you will soon see it is only tar.” (191) Despite their more established familiarity, Mr. Morton, fails to discern any new information from the voice he hears, assuming instead that Stevens both looks and sounds “Black.”lxix Stevens tries three times to speak and have his voice carry the significance of his identity, if not in particular as George Stevens, then at the very least as racially white. But Stevens’ voice does not discover him at all. Not even saying his name proves sufficient enough in overcoming the inertia of racial signification. His repetition, “know me,” pleads for recognition as he tries to assert his individual identity by distancing himself from the image of a Black body through his voice’s presumed racial whiteness; further, if we read the plea
“know me” in a Biblical sense against Morton’s claim that he would be “hanged” if he did, we might discern the specter of lynching between the lines of their exchange, as the danger of admitting too close an intimacy with and knowledge of anything Black produces Morton’s most fervent repudiation. Frustrating Stevens’ attempts to announce who he is, Morton does not recognize any incongruity in the voice he hears and the body he sees in front of him. In this scene, then, neither voice nor vision occupies a primary space for knowledge production, and instead they work together to reinforce a constructed, subjective image of Blackness as the product of white anxieties concerning a proximity to Blackness.
Through a scene that proves more heuristic than realistic, then, the text exposes white-authored determinants of Blackness by mocking the senseless behaviors of whites bent on preserving the color line as a means to safeguard their 101 access to whiteness. Much like the intoxicated white partygoers, Morton’s impossibly absurd perceiving of tar for Black skin redirects the object of ridicule back onto the caprices of the white gaze.lxx If there is any anxiety for these white male characters, it occurs during ruptures in which body and voice do not line up neatly and meaning becomes indeterminate to the extent that it threatens the fantasy of a sustainable, authentic whiteness. In response to this uncertainty,
Stevens and Morton become active participants in the parsing of racial difference, which, in the context of this scene means generating the externality of a false
Black object (of study) in order to preserve their faith in a subjective whiteness.
The scene thus refutes constructions of race by addressing their shoddy foundations and, in a manner different from Communipaw, not by presenting the social accomplishments of its Black characters. Rather than rendering the aspirations and achievements of middle-class Blacks subject to white measurements of respectability, The Garies both promotes economic upward mobility as a means to achieve a propertied self-possession and deconstructs the racialist ideologies upon which whiteness asserts itself during the antebellum period.lxxi
If we return to the interaction involving George Stevens and Mr. Morton for just a bit longer, we find that the printed text – black ink on white pages – proves insufficient in capturing the resonant meanings at play. Mr. Morton’s response, “Who’s Stevens,” produces an aural slippage between “who’s” as contraction for ‘who is’ and ‘whose’ as possessive. The latter indicates the kind of language used in slave states when trying to ascertain the identity of a slave vis-à- 102 vis his or her relationship to a master. The linguistic slip pivoting on this word in particular crystallizes a tension central to the novel between property and self- possession, between the objects whose possession grounds the ontological stability of a subject “who is.” Importantly, the answer to the question “Who is
Stevens” remains contingent upon both character’s ability to conceive of a
Blackness stable enough to then be abjected. Their apprehension, you might say, lies in the fear of failing to provide a passable answer to this question.
It is telling that the anxiety that emerges from destabilizing whiteness manifests as an anxiety over the uncertainty of language. As Morton attempts to decipher the enigmatic presence before him, the aural slippage on “Who’s” unconsciously speaks to an uncertainty in language coincident with the uncertainty of Blackness. Occupying this liminal “neither/nor” space, voice short- circuits attempts at relegating what is spoken too firmly to either position and signals a sonic dimension that frustrates schematic explanation. Of course, written text here helps anchor meaning and makes such a misinterpretation less plausible for the reader. But screening for any potential misinterpretation is the point; the act of reading performs, in a sense, the epistemological motivation behind pseudoscience: to fix meaning by producing a legible black type.
An Insatiable Brass Throat
Having considered the ways in which the novel engages question of spoken voice,
I now turn in this final section to questions of writing. How The Garies depicts
Black characters creating text matters in terms of its own vision of establishing a
Black American novelistic writing. Robert Reid-Pharr asserts, for instance, that 103
Esther Ellis’s letter to Charlie after the riot scene constitutes “the place in the novel at which Webb most explicitly announces his project as the production of a specifically Black American literature” (71). This final section considers the two letters that follow Esther’s. They are written by the two young boys of the novel:
Charlie Ellis and his best friend, Kinch. Written during the same section of the novel discussed by Reid-Pharr, I argue these letters bridge the novel’s treatment of voice and text.
Described as “neatly done,” Charlie’s letter is his reply to a job advertisement that even garners the approval of his eldest sister (Webb 288). In fact, one might argue that Charlie’s successful emulation of bourgeois writing conceits earns him a job interview be effacing the very racial qualities which later result in his dismissal during his interview – a moment that calls attention to the forced re-embodiment of Black subjects. Reid-Pharr endorses this stance when he writes, “the fact of standardized communications removes the impress of the author’s hand from his text. It separates the black’s body from the necessity of his representation” (81). Reid-Pharr underscores how Charlie’s voice and racial identity get subsumed within the expectations of conventional exchange.
The text meditates upon this idea of disembodiment via standardized communication through an extended description of the inside of a mailbox.
Denoting that Charlie “privately” shows the letter to his sister, the text distinguishes between private reading and public circulation when Charlie deposits his letter “into the abyss” of a mailbox and introduces it into a public 104 domain. At this point, the narrator’s voice directs the following to an unspecified audience:
How many more had stopped that day to add their contributions to
the mass which Charlies’s letter now joined? Merchants on the
brink of ruin had deposited missives whose answer would make or
break them; others had dropped upon the swelling heap tidings that
would make poor men rich—rich men richer; maidens came with
delicately written notes, perfumed and gilt-edged, eloquent with
love—and cast them amidst invoices and bills of lading. Letters of
condolence and notes of congratulation jostled each other as they
slid down the brass throat; widowed mothers’ tender epistles to
wandering sons; the letters of fond wives to absent husbands;
erring daughters’ last appeals to outraged parents; offers of
marriage; invitations to funerals; hope and despair; joy and sorrow;
misfortune and success—had glided in one almost unbroken
stream down that ever-distended and insatiable brass throat. (288)
If Charlie can be said to participate in an idealized, democratic space of exchange symbolized by the mailbox (the post), his contribution precipitates its dissolution.
I would argue that putting Charlie’s letter to the mailboxes generates excesses that short circuit the system. A logic predicated on supplement permeates the passage.
The use of semicolons, for instance, perpetually defers the sentence’s end, as the organization of bodies reads like a list or series that could go on interminably.
After all, what other answer could the addressee of the passage give to the 105 narrator’s speculative question – “How many more had stopped that day to add their contributions to the mass” – than admit that there is no easy way of knowing? If this constellation of letters is meant to represent an American ethos of republican exchange – figured as the metonymic representation of the voice of the people, funneled through the “brass throat” of the US post – then what do we make of the passage’s increasingly sinister tone? Words like “condolence,”
“widowed,” and “funerals” conjure a similar sense of deathliness as that with which the novel opens, as a “swelling heap” of letters deposited into an “ever- distended” receptacle represents the mailbox in a manner not unlike a bloated corpse.
The promiscuity of the letters themselves contributes to the uneasiness present throughout. As letters “[jostle] each other” and together “[slide] down the brass throat” of the mailbox, we see that the movement of letters correlates to the movement of bodies. Their promiscuity continues as the descriptions that follow oscillate between binaries whose arrangement leads to an undoing, not to a confluence, of normative chronology and identities. Within the indeterminate space of the mailbox, we find that “widows” can precede “wives,” “absent husbands” can precede “offers of marriage,” and “erring daughters’ appeals” can precede “wedding days.” Even as each missive pertains to separate stories, their organization here by the narrator represents the inversion of a romance plot.
Moreover, this hijacking and reordering of several elements from more traditional romance novels calls attention to the extramarital sex and desire that threatens the inevitability presumed for monogamous, heterosexual coupledom. 106
Of course, it is these so-called threats and how they forestall inevitable conclusions that animate the romance plot. By showing the ways in which an
“insatiable” throat consumes letter after letter, or story after story, the passage offers a reproachful view of an American penchant for overconsumption.
Obscured within the indeterminate space of the mailbox, promiscuous letters find new and newer ways to connect, to “jostle” and “slide.” Working backwards, the desire for an infinite number of bodies to consume requires a space for those bodies to comingle. The mailbox functions as the indeterminate space for this comingling; the darkness within the mailbox, in turn, remains coincident with the position of Blackness itself.
A series of remainders throughout the passage supports further this implicit connection between consuming text and consuming Blackness, as multiple mathematical and grammatical inequalities introduce a view of the world that looks askance at fantasies of American egalitarianism. For instance, while there are no explicit references to American slavery, the various references to money and business generate questions about the socio-economic, socio-political, and mercantile systems of unequal exploitation that allow poor and rich men to profit alike. Unbalanced books meet unbalanced grammatical structures, as the parallelism organizing word pairs near the end of the passage – “hope and despair; joy and sorrow; misfortune and success” – demonstrates. Rather than organize life into a series of simplified, opposing binaries, the last pair,
“misfortune and success,” inverts the parallel structure established by the first two pairs. The inverted words either emphasize the arbitrariness of the twinning in the 107 first place, or insist that what constitutes hope and joy can easily line up with somebody’s misfortune. Figured through an incarnation of America as an
“insatiable brass throat,” the passage aligns an insatiate consumption of letters with the insatiable consumption of bodies all under the sign of what constitutes entertainment in the novel as a genre.
Whereas Charlie’s letter emulates bourgeois style, Kinch’s letter, which is bundled with Esther’s letter written to Charlie post riot scene, burlesques respectability. His letter bears the markings of a youth writing a letter to his boyhood friend – spelling that does not follow formal convention; uncomplicated grammar; the use of various inks; and, perhaps most memorably, a skull and cross-bones drawn in the postscript. The narrator marvels at the letter as much for the elegance of its sentiment as for the peculiarity of its “chirography” (265). This curiously specific word, which indicates the “style or character” of one’s handwriting, is dropped innocently into a description of Kinch’s script, stressing an individual quality in writing particular to its author (“chirography n. 1”). The singularity expressed by the chirography of Kinch’s writing emerges, within the logic of the passage, as an extension of the inks he uses. Besides red and blue ink, the narrator says that Kinch writes in a “pale muddy black which is the peculiar colour [sic] of ink after passing through the various experiments of school-boys, who generally entertain the belief that all foreign substances, from molasses- candy to bread-crumbs, necessarily improve the colour [sic] and quality of that important liquid” (265). The indeterminate composition of this darker ink, which at any moment can include anything “from molasses-candy to bread-crumbs” 108 contributes to the uniqueness of his script and mirrors the indeterminacy inherent in speech and writing. Noting the intersection between “molasses candy” and the
Caribbean, not to mention Kinch’s postscript skull and cross-bones, the passage aligns Kinch’s style with piracy in noteworthy ways. Hijacking conventions from so-called proper letters – he, for instance, signs the letter “Kinch Sanders de
Younge, Esq” – Kinch’s letter signals an approach to writing analogous to the novel’s repeated piratical treatment of traditional novelistic conventions.
Although Kinch’s letter precedes Charlie’s letter within the narrative, I invert them here so that we might recognize the ways in which Kinch’s letter prepares us to interpret Charlie’s. Having traveled though the postal system,
Kinch’s letter and the chirography of his writing endures the violent deracination
Reid-Pharr locates within the standardizing of the post. The disruption provoked by Charlie’s letter leaves its own trace that we can read through the dissolution it precipitates.
V. CONCLUSION
Considering the sonic dimensions within antebellum African American novels has the potential to challenge how we interpret this moment in Black American fiction. Caught within its own double bind of using text to illustrate that which exceeds and complicates written language, The Garies appeals to the phonographic – the writing of sound – in its reorganization of the “vexed codependency” between “sound and source” (Phonographies 7). In depicting voice through typographical markers and crafting scenes that hinge upon the significance of voice, The Garies and Their Friends amplifies the relationship 109 between sound and text. The novel envisions Black American literature through its treatment of the audible. Even as these instances separate voice from the body,
The Garies shows these eruptions as the result of their simultaneous presence and imagines a Black writerly voice through this realignment. Within its phonographic constellation of Blackness and voice, the novel aligns black letters with Black bodies, complicating written text through the sonic performances of both.
In navigating the “paradox” of denying essentialist notions of
“Blackness” but nevertheless imagining something like a Black literary voice or Black culture, the act of ridiculing proves quite helpful. Smith, as we saw, ridicules white critics such as William H. Fry for their inability (or refusal) to acknowledge the talents of Black performers. Frank Webb ridicules the institutional practices upon which whiteness founds itself and in dosing so offers a mode through which to examine the intersections at which voice, text, and Blackness meet.
The preceding chapters together provide a foundation in which to ground a discussion of Black laughter’s literary and cultural impressions. If at the intersection of voice and Blackness one finds an enduring uncertainty capable of disrupting racialist notions concerning Black subjects, no more is this uncertainty more disruptive (and thus seen as most threatening) than when it manifests as
Black laughter. The following chapter examines descriptions of Black bodies laughing in Francis (Fanny) Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian
Plantation 1838-1839 [1863] as one site at which to locate the enduring 110 connection between Blackness and laughter within white representational modes.
I extend arguments here and consider how white imperatives to manage anxieties concerning the boundlessness of Blackness manifests in the immense popularity of blackface minstrelsy as a way to manage the sensed precarity of whiteness. In particular, I examine the ways in which the minstrelsy’s performative tropes require the disciplining of Black laughter. Yet, if the disciplining of Black laughter constitutes part of minstrelsy’s entertainment, then can any instance of
Black laughter exceed the push and pull of the minstrel stage? Through a reading of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, I highlight Chesnutt’s shifting relationship to laughter and representations of laughter in literature as a way to answer this question.
111
Chapter Three
Laughing Black in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe’s sons make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, “Seven-O! Seven-O!” Smokey, stubborn fire. They shoot him to shut him up. Have to. Toni Morrison, Beloved
At stake here is the place of enjoyment in history, particularly popular and convivial forms of enjoyment that resist the censoriousness of bourgeois culture, which are deliberately offensive and crude. At stake also is the image of black culture in historical perspective. Tavia Nyong’o, “Minstrel Trouble”
I. INTRODUCTION
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, recording technology developed to where it started its transition from expensive curiosity to mass production and mass distribution. In his study of Black recording artists at the birth of the recording industry, Tim Brooks highlights the ways in the “severe limitations” of early recording technology privileged Black voice as “a special kind of voice” that would not get garbled in the recording process (5). Moreover, the technology was still at a point where each recorded gramophone cylinder was its own master copy. This meant that when George Washington Johnson recorded “The Laughing
Song,” he was paid twenty cents for each recorded cylinder (Gunn 434). Although most successful Black singers and songwriters in the earlier stage of the music industry were “primarily professional live performers who came out of the 112 minstrel show,” Johnson was “an amateur performer” first recognized because his exceptional whistling recorded well (Salem 4). Johnson continued to earn a living from recording cylinders for several years, and “The Laughing Song” went on to become one of the most sold records of the nineteenth century, spawning similar laughing songs and “the first breakout genre of the record industry” (Gunn 436).
Eventually, technologies advanced, and the reproducibility of master records advanced to where Johnson’s talents were no longer necessary: “At first they wanted Johnson all day, every day, and then they did not want him at all. By
1905, Johnson’s recording career was over” (435).
I begin with Johnson’s “The Laughing Song” and its role as one of the first majorly distributed records not to emphasize the continued imbrication of how the entertainment industry capitalizes on Black musical talent, or the ways in which recording technologies worked to obscure Johnson’s physical labor until technological advancements rendered him obsolete – though these things certainly jump to mind. Rather, I do so to underscore the extent to which Black laughter, especially in relation to tropes of blackface minstrelsy, had become a commodity by the end of the nineteenth century. Consider, for instance, the following transcription of first verse from “The Laughing Song”:
As I was coming ’round the corner, I heard some people say,
Here comes a dandy darky; here he comes this way.
His heel is like a snowplow,
And his mouth is like a trap,
And when he open[s] it gently you will see a fearful gap. 113
Then I laugh ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha,
I couldn’t stop my laughing ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha,
Ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha,
I couldn’t stop my laughing ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. (Johnson)
The descriptors used by these assumed strangers on the street depend upon racialized depictions of Blackness popularized on the minstrel stage. In referring to the song’s singer (presumably synonymous with Johnson himself) as a “dandy darky” with a “heel…like a snowplow” and “mouth…like a trap,” the spectators circumscribe the singer’s subjective presence through a series of similes predicated on Black caricature. With each simile, the spectators attempt to graft a meaning definitive enough that it fixes the uncertainty of Johnson’s presence onto his bodily exterior. Instead, they unwittingly stumble into the “trap” of his mouth, a threshold between one’s bodily interior/exterior, and are met by the sounds of his laughter laughing back. Thus, the simultaneous (re)production of Blackness depicted in the song engenders an excess embodied by Johnson’s subjective perspective (as singer) that is then expressed through the “fearful gap” of his mouth as uncontrollable laughter. What do we make of this laughter? What incites the singer’s response?
As the example of Johnson’s song illustrates, the legibility of Black laughter has a history, not as a matter of fact but rather as ongoing contingency.
Western philosophical treatises and cultural opinions concerning laughter, as discussed in chapter one, establish the conditions through which the Black laughter comes to be disproportionately associated with baser human emotions 114 and uncivilized behavior. This correlation between Black laughter and vulgarity generates vexed relationships to laughter for many Black Americans, resulting in connections between Black laughter and the politics of respectability that too quickly conflate conversations about laughter with those about blackface minstrelsy and the unintentional affirmation of racist discourse and stereotypes.
This familiar narrative produces a too facile, typically neoliberal response that foregoes nuance in favor of the self-assured comfort that comes with naming racism. Such a stance, according to critic Nicholas Sammond, also comes “at the expense of a detailed analysis of [minstrelsy’s] historically specific roots and uses” (17). Even as such detailed analyses of blackface minstrelsy that demonstrate how blackface minstrelsy served a necessary social function during the United States’ rapid industrialization have been undertaken – by Eric Lott,
Louis Chude-Sokei, and Tavia Nyong’o, for example – a detailed analysis of the ways in which Black laughter complements minstrelsy’s work remains to be done.
By that I mean the following: How does the errant laughter of Black characters play into and against the arc of minstrelsy’s performative tropes? If the eventual disciplining of the rebellious “darkey” stages the social dynamics and wishes of a dominant class, then is any oppositional laughter inseparable from and potentially complicit with minstrely’s broader performative tradition?
Disciplining the wayward commodity functions as a defining characteristic within the push and pull of minstrelsy’s comic engine/drama. The management of Black laughter required the kind of constant negotiation achieved by the proliferation of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, or as Saidiya Hartman puts it, “The 115 disciplinary vengeance of farce exercised in minstrelsy reproduced Black subjection, albeit accompanied by laughter” (Hartman 29). Hartman here refers to two kinds of laughter accompanying Black subjection: the laughter performed for an audience and the laughter elicited by that performance.
Even as Black laughter’s legibility within an American cultural context could be said to coalesce around the circulation of entertainment forms such as
“darkey” routines popularized upon the nineteenth-century minstrel stage, other lesser-discussed accounts of Black laughter broaden the scope of the history to consider. This chapter reconstructs part of this alternative history to show the ways in which Black laughter proves disruptive to the performative expectations of the minstrel stage. Building upon the work of the previous two chapters, which together examine Black laughter’s disruptive capacities, here I will read accounts of enslaved persons laughing published in Fanny Kemble’s Journal and
Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. These examples will show the ways in which Black laughter extends beyond the minstrel stage and other derogatory modes of entertainment. I will then interpret Charles Chesnutt’s representation of
Black laughter in The Marrow of Tradition.
Charting this history is not, however, meant as an argument for a more
“authentic” conception of Black laughter or Blackness that could be recycled into a cultural marketplace predicated on consuming the Other. As bell hooks describes in “Eating the Other”:
Commodity culture in the United States exploits conventional
thinking about race, gender, and sexual desire by "working" both 116
the idea that racial difference marks one as Other and the
assumption that sexual agency expressed within the context of
racialized sexual encounter is a conversion experience that alters
one's place and participation in contemporary cultural politics. (22)
At its simplest, laughter contains elements of the erotic – bodies gesticulating and opening up toward one another coupled with a promise of self-shattering. So even if sexual contact remains absent, laughter as erotic encounter could facilitate white libidinal economies of self-fashioning. In other words, despite utopian promises of a more unified world, we might trouble an idea of a neoliberal laughing with as much as a racist laughing at the Other. Thus, a conception of
Black laughter based solely on white supremacist notions of Blackness only reproduces an object to which a white liberal fantasy of freedom through contact with the Other can reattach itself. But is this always the case, and is this the only story to tell concerning Black laughter? This chapter considers the ways Charles
Chesnutt dislodges such attachments in his writing and centers the importance of laughter in imagining the possibilities for Black life in a world structured by Jim
Crow.
II: HISTORICAL CONS & CONTEXT
Describing his own view of Marrow for the Cleveland World, Chesnutt writes,
“‘The Marrow of Tradition’ seeks to show the efforts of the people of a latter generation to adjust themselves in this traditional atmosphere to the altered conditions of a new era.” Chesnutt’s use of “atmosphere” underscores his sense that racial tension at the nadir had reached such an extent that is was a constant 117 pressure exerting itself everywhere. Adjusting oneself to a new era also means negotiating a relationship to the old one. Indeed, a tension between history and memory animates much of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. “One of the major cultural tensions with which Chesnutt had to contend,” writes critic
Matthew Wilson, was that he wrote at a time “when Americans wanted to forget what he insisted they remember, when the national consensus on race was one of active forgetting” (xii). That national consensus was due in part to the ways in which popular historical romances by writers such as Thomas Dixon and Thomas
Nelson Page directed America’s reading public toward an amnesiac relationship to its racial past. Chesnutt resolves this tension in Marrow by reorienting the representation of Black laughter in his text.
Chesnutt established his literary career by addressing the ongoing consequences of history and skillfully working within the popular generic conventions of the plantation style. Chesnutt rose to fame in the final decade of the nineteenth century for his conjure tales, short stories he modeled after similar folklore-inspired tales by Joel Chandler Harris. Harris’s Uncle Remus stories remixed Black folklore stories acquired from interviews and research; Harris rendered the stories more palatable to white readers through its frame narrative, which often involved a young white boy coaxing the Black Uncle Remus to entertain him with old stories of the trickster Br’er Rabbit. This approach capitalized on a latent desire for nostalgic representations of the old South and garnered Harris much acclaim. The use of Black folklore in Harris’s stories bothered Chesnutt. Responding to a comment by Booker T. Washington 118 concerning the “infinite harm” done by such stories, Chesnutt writes, “It has been the writing of Harris and Page and others of that ilk which have furnished my chief incentive to write something upon the other side of this very vital question”
(Letters 167).lxxii
Chesnutt’s response to Harris constructs a similar frame. Chesnutt refers to the structure of his frame narrative as his “outside and inside stories” and emphasizes the extent to which he sees both as fictionalized (Letters 105 emphasis added). In the outside frame, the freed slave Uncle Julius recounts stories of life on the plantation to John and Annie, a Northern white couple who moves South for Annie’s health. Annie, the more sympathetic of the two, often recognizes the violence just beneath the surface of Julius’s stories, while John’s skepticism typically derives from his doubt concerning Julius’s intentions.
Together, John and Annie represent Chesnutt’s construction of a fictionalized white audience for his tales, in which their “skeptical and sympathetic” responses to Julius’ stories together serve as “the two poles of his intended white audience”
(Ashe 11).
Exercising an authorial control as narrator of the outside frame, we can see how John fashions for himself a safe distance from the less enjoyable specifics of
Julius’s tale. Richard Baldwin notes the “immense rhetorical value” Chesnutt reaps from using John’s voice as narrator; John’s simultaneous skepticism and obliviousness presents him as “a mixture of sensitivity and callousness” that allow him to “be treated sympathetically while his blindness to Uncle Julius’s character and to the implications of [Julius’s] tale provides ironic commentary on his own 119 character and on America’s racial absurdities” (Baldwin 389). Even as Chesnutt makes use of a familiar storyteller motif, then, he adds another layer of complexity by emphasizing how John’s recollections and status as narrator shape the written text.
The frame narrative provides Chesnutt the requisite flexibility through which to approach his goals with regard to his white audience. We find evidence of these multiple layers of narration in a letter written to Walter Hines Page dated
May 20, 1898. Discussing the possibility of using “De Noo Nigger” as a title for the story that would eventually become “Mars Jeem’s Nightmare,” Chesnutt writes, “I don’t care to dignify a doubtful word quite so much; it is all right for
Julius, but it might leave me under suspicion of bad taste” (Letters 105). Chesnutt not only illustrates awareness of the proximity between his position as author and the meaning-making power of a text but also the significant work that could be accomplished at that intersection. Shifting to discuss the subject of dialect, he writes to Page:
The fact is, of course, that there is no such thing as a negro dialect;
that what we call by that name is the attempt to express, with such
a degree of phonetic correctness as to suggest the sound, English
pronounced as an ignorant old southern negro would be supposed
to speak it, and at the same time to preserve a sufficient
approximation to the correct spelling to make it easy reading. (105
emphasis added) 120
As Chesnutt remarks on the “despairing task” of constructing dialect he also implicitly designates the distinction John’s added perspective generates within his conjure tales. After all, the phrase “would be supposed” implicates John as both narrator and supposed constructor of the tales. John’s memories of his time on the former plantation add a layer of meaning that introduces a key feature of
Chesnutt’s writing: white recollection and mythologizing of the Southern history.
In short, John as narrator becomes a character both separate and inseparable from the John of his recollections. John’s doubtful stance on Julius’s intentions, which he expresses often, shifts the attention onto the racial lens engendered by his thinking. Put another way, the construction of Julius in his memories remains inseparable from fashioning an image of himself. When Chesnutt indicates a need to create “easy reading,” he highlights the ways in which this self-fashioning exists in a reciprocal relationship with a reading audience. Ultimately, the conjure tales more readily call attention to its narrator as a character, making a spectacle of white authorship and of whiteness writ large.
In relying upon irony to support the rhetorical force of his tales, though,
Chesnutt wagers what he believed to be the significance of his writing against the caprices of his predominately white audience. As a result, not all critics find
Chesnutt’s deployment of humor as subversive or successful. To these critics, the use of Julius as a sneaky raconteur/trickster whose sly use of storytelling added a lighthearted tone to several conjure distract form the gruesome, unsettling facts relayed within his tales: “We are taken in by [Uncle Julius’s] success in the end,” writes Michael G. Cooke, “when we need to inquire into the means, the content of 121 the story itself” (55). Another concern with using Black stereotypes, of course, lay in the inadvertent propagation of the very racial inequities Chesnutt works to overturn. Rather than as a significant protest figure, Cooke instead reads Julius and his duplicity as motivated by more personal, materialistic aims. Indeed, this was a major concern for Chesnutt, who wrote for a predominately white middle class audience with little more knowledge of Black lives than those published by the very writers whose work he sought to undo. For some, the humorous tone upon which the tales end risks soothing the ruptures opened up by Julius’s recollections. As Andrew Silver suggests, Chesnutt’s conjure tale humor resulted in a “forced compliance to the proprieties and prejudices of a willfully amnesiac white America” (162). According to early critic of Chesnutt’s conjure tales
Richard Baldwin, a representational threshold appears at the site of white ignorance wherein “whites are too blind to perceive the truth about race” (398).
Checnutt responds to this limit by turning to realist fiction because through it he could “outline explicitly the white misconceptions about Blacks and the forces responsible for their formation and perpetuation” (Baldwin 398).
The Marrow of Tradition epitomizes that shift to more explicit treatments of race as a literary theme. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel not only counters popular narratives surrounding the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 but also continues
Chesnutt’s practice of responding to dominant conventions in New Southern literature. Ian Finseth calls it Chesnutt’s “fictional counter-history,” while
Matthew Wilson sees Marrow as “more confrontational” than Chesnutt’s previous work (Finseth 16; Wilson 99). Gerald Ianovici, quoting Teresa A. Godou, locates 122
Chesnutt among a collection of “African American writers [that] ‘haunt back’ the official narratives of America’s racial history” (Ianovici 36). Contemporaneous reviews of the novel similarly emphasize its oppositional stance: “The delicacy and fancy which is found in Mr. Chestnut's short stories is not present here,” reads one review for the Daily Eagle, “but in their place is a fire of passion and sarcasm that burns and scorches with the heat of a fierce indignation” (5). Indeed, the novel’s antagonistic undercurrent has been widely acknowledged both through contemporaneous reviews and later scholarly interpretation. These interpretations perhaps have much to do with William Dean Howell’s assessment of the novel as
“bitter” in his review of it for the North American Review, which might also account for a persistent downplaying of the novel’s interest in Black laughter
(882).
Sydney Bufkin’s recent article, “Beyond ‘Bitter’: Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” has done much work to challenge the ways Howells’s review has disproportionately set the tone for subsequent readings of the novel: “Critics tend to equate Howells with the novel’s audience, and Howells’ review with its reception” (231). Bufkin complicates the idea of a singular white audience’s reaction to the novel by examining an array of reviews from multiple regions and political sympathies; in reading consistent failures on the part of reviewers to
“engage with the novel’s persuasive work,” Bufkin cautions critics to “consider the assumptions and deflections inherent in our own readings” (233). It is
Bufkin’s caution in mind that I consider how Black laughter remains an underexplored aspect of The Marrow of Tradition and constitutes a part of its 123 persuasive work. To do so fully, I first offer the following historical context that includes not only more immediate events such as the Wilmington Riot and contemporaneous literary genres but also a longer history of Black laughter on the plantation.
Retrospectively, the riot appears as the inevitable consequence of unresolved racial animosity. Although the Civil War left Wilmington in ruin, the port town soon recovered due to the financial investments and organizational efforts of both locals and Northern opportunists. The Freedmen’s Bureau assisted the increasing Black population with acquiring land as well as other facets of personal and social expansion, which resulted in elaborate social networks and increased political presence for Wilmington’s Black population during the 1870s and 1880s. Soon, residual tensions over the war spilled into local and state politics, and the electoral power that Republicans gained during the late 1860s waned until 1877, when Conservatives regained control of the government.
Democratic control lasted, despite persistent push back from non-Democrats, until
1894, when a newly formed coalition between Populists and Republicans (the
“Fusion Party”) once again regained control of political offices across North
Carolina.lxxiii
Democratic responses to this coalition mobilized racist iconography and innuendo in order to whip up white pride and thus manufacture political dissent among the racially diverse Fusion Party. As part of their propaganda campaign,
Democrats used the press to foment white supremacists attitudes among public opinion. For instance, an image from the Raleigh News and Observer (October 124
15, 1898) depicts a white supplicant on his knees in prayer with the words
“Fusion Office Seeker” printed above his head while a figure (in blackface) several times larger than the white man stands over him (fig. 1). The apparent use of blackface on top of an already racially Black figure underscores the supposed threat Blackness poses to the existing political economy via an overabundance that stands in for an overrepresentation.lxxiv Moreover, the image capitalizes upon established associations between Blackness and excess. Here, the disproportionate strength suggested by stature and muscle difference implies uneven representation within the Fusion Party as a way to foment dissent between the group’s Black and white constituents.
Figure 1 “The New Slavery”
A slew of suggestive, contradictory economic judgments buttress the apparent racial identities of the two men in the image. The Black figure’s dress 125 connotes an amount of financial affluence in proportion to his stature, yet the opulence of his outfit borders on garishness. In this way, the image implicates a growing middle class of Blacks, many of whom had already been buying their freedom as artisans prior to the war. The juxtaposition in the image preys upon white insecurity in relation to financially successful Black people whose yearly earnings surpassed many white social counterparts.lxxv Negatively casting the
Black figure as gaudy new money with little fiscal conservatism also emphasized the potential threats associated with overspending on socially conscious programs, especially those supposedly benefitting Blacks over working class whites. The image’s prolepsis capitalizes on the popular associations between fusion and amalgamation, marrying political affiliation and sexual intermingling in ways meant to fracture emergent coalitions (Wilson 101). At a time when the reunification of the nation was a primary concern, we find increased attempts to police the terms upon which that unification could occur. After the riots,
Democrats, who had violently ousted the democratically elected “Fusion” Party, constructed the popular memory of the event against which Chesnutt sets his novel. J. Vincent Lowery rightly contends that controlling popular memory
“legitimized the rule of the Democratic Party and effectively denied African
Americans access to economic and political opportunities” (Lowery 414).
The literature of the time bears this out. Late nineteenth-century American literary regionalism ushered in new stylistic forms that focused on characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. In her essay “Region, Nation, and Empire,” Amy Kaplan examines the ways in 126 which the explosion of nineteenth-century literary regionalism, otherwise known as “local color writing,” served as a necessary element in the reunification of a developing national consciousness in response to both the national schism and rapid industrialization in the decades following the American Civil War. “The decentralization of literature,” Kaplan writes, “contributes to solidifying national centrality by reimagining a distended industrial nation as an extended clan sharing a ‘common inheritance’ in its imagined rural origins” (250-1). The success of some nostalgic, picturesque depictions of America’s prewar history required a type of willful amnesia that served to quash the social and political aspirations of
America’s diverse, burgeoning populations.
Given the national rupture left after the Civil War, the South benefitted especially from the so-called cohesion wrought through this literary reunification.
In other words, if as Kaplan argues literary regionalism was a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change,” the rise of a predominately white Southern literary ethos responded directly to the social, political, and financial gains Black Americans witnessed during the 1870s and 1880s.
Characteristics of this “plantation school” include the ruined plantation as the site of degeneration that is nostalgically reconstructed vis-à-vis a character’s recollections. Part of the plantation school’s propaganda campaign to revitalize an image of the South promulgates images of the “happy darkey” to serve as the mouthpiece for these nostalgic retellings (such as Harris’s use of Uncle Remus).
According to Kenneth Warren, the function of this tradition aided in white transitions to urban spaces by letting them inhabit primitivist notions in which 127
Black people occupied a pre-industrial ideal, “allowing whites to indulge their nostalgia for a lifestyle that was no longer available to them as they congregated in urban centers. The promise of Black America was an assurance that old ways and old pleasures were recuperable" (119). The availability of this happy, often laughing Black body as a trope through which to successfully reimagine a New
South was buttressed by blackface minstrelsy’s popularity throughout the nineteen century.
The narratives through which blackface minstrelsy claimed its origins conceal in plain sight the ways in which white racial anxieties constructed an image of Blackness. As Eric Lott suggests, “A strong fascination with Black men and Black culture…underwrote this popular expropriation” (“Love and Theft”
25). The psychosexual melodrama and comedy of the minstrel stage furnished the means to achieve what Lott reads as white wish-fulfillment, or what he calls
“white desire in black skin” (Love & Theft 197). To paraphrase Lott’s argument, performing mastery over the rebellious slave stages the mastering of a castration anxiety. Within the antics of the minstrel stage, the threat of castration manifests in the fear of becoming the butt of a slave’s joke and of being laughed at, but this anxiety is always kept at bay by the performative tropes of the genre that guarantee the unruly object will inevitably be disciplined. Moreover, the success of a performer such as T.D. Rice depended upon his audience cosigning this conception and thereby ensuring its reproduction. Building on Lott’s concept of theft, Tavia Nyong’o reminds us that minstrelsy “heisted an image of blackness that did not exist prior to its theft but that was constituted through this theft” 128
(Nyong’o 112). When T.D. Rice appropriated an idea of “Blackness” with which to style his own performances, his lampoons retroactively instituted a prior conception of Blackness. The production of a particular idea of Blackness, in other words, remains inextricable from the iconographic and performative elements of minstrelsy and its later incarnations in burlesque, vaudeville, and even American animation.lxxvi Even as blackface minstrelsy is often (and rightly) framed as a disgraceful American phenomenon, Nyong’o reminds us that minstrelsy is “an important site where Blackness and Americanness, identity and the marketplace, provocatively intersect and diverge on national and transnational stages” (106).
A necessary component of this “theft,” lies in controlling the significatory capacities of that laughter. As with the Dutch gaper discussed in chapter one, the sheer abundance of blackface and Black caricatures in the United States during the nineteenth century sutured the representational mastery over Black laughter performed on stage to the everyday perception of Black laughter; the grotesqueness put forward by images of Black faces laughing positioned
Blackness as a degraded state of being and helped quell white castration anxieties related to Black laughter. Any cultural artifact that could alleviate concerns associated with Black laughter sold well. For instance, the popularity of Edward
W. Clay’s late 1820s Life in Philadelphia, a series of images ridiculing Black aspirations during the early half of the nineteenth century, relied upon many unflattering representations of Philadelphia’s aspiring Black population. Even as
Samuel Otter encourages us toward a broader interpretation of the aspirational 129 behaviors ridiculed in Life, such as the French, Black people consistently carry the burden of being the clear object of ridicule. The use of malapropism and exaggerated bodily contortions generate static images that buttress the more dynamic exaggerations deployed in performances by Thomas D. Rice, whose rise in fame coincided with the circulation of these images. Rice, whose Jim Crow character peaked in popularity from the early 1830s through the 1840s, would have benefitted from the circulation of Clay’s images insofar as his audiences would be primed to interpret exaggerated, caricatured depictions of Blackness.
Jim Crow, in turn, popularized a new entertainment form and helped fashion a cultural lens through which whites interpreted the lives and behaviors of Black folk.
III: FANNY KEMBLE’S JOURNAL
To better illustrate what I mean by this cultural lens that affects white people’s everyday perceptions, I now move from the realm of performance and fiction to
Francis “Fanny” Kemble’s supposedly “truer” account of her time spent living on a Georgia plantation. Rendering Black speech in dialect and making use of the types of malapropisms such as one might find in popular theater, Kemble’s journal underscores the reciprocity between the supposed authenticity of journalistic reportage and other modes of entertainment. Unsurprisingly, these word pictures often portray the laughter of slaves as contemptible signs of a presupposed degradation or innocent childishness – which in turn serve as implicit justification for continued enslavement. Written as a series of letters to her friend Elizabeth Sedgwick, sister-in-law of novelist Catherine Maria 130
Sedgwick, Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839 describes her time spent living on her husband Pierce Butler’s rice and cotton plantation, which was spread across three islands in the bay of the Altamaha River
(David 154).lxxvii Fanny Kemble’s description of a party reveals the pervasiveness and readiness with which Jim Crow becomes a way to interpret slave performance and enjoyment:
Oh, my dear [Elizabeth]! I have seen Jim Crow—the veritable
James: all the contortions, and springs, and flings, and kicks, and
capers you have been beguiled into accepting as indicative of him
are spurious, faint, feeble, impotent—in a word, pale northern
reproductions of that ineffable black conception. It is impossible
for words to describe the things these people did with their bodies,
and, above all, with their faces, the whites of their eyes, and the
whites of their teeth, and certain outlines which either naturally
and by the grace of heaven, or by the practice of some peculiar
artistic dexterity, they bring into prominent and most ludicrous
display. The languishing elegance of some, the painstaking
laboriousness of others, above all, the feats of a certain enthusiastic
banjo-player, who seemed to me to thump his instrument with
every part of his body at once, at last so utterly overcame any
attempt at decorous gravity on my part that I was obliged to
secede; and, considering what the atmosphere was that we inhaled
during the exhibition, it is only wonderful to me that we were not 131
made ill by the double effort not to laugh, and, if possible, not to
breathe. (96-7)
Referring to the “capers” that have “beguiled” Elizabeth, Kemble acknowledges the mythlogical origin stories bandied by early, and even later, minstrel performers, who would claim intimate knowledge of slave performance to add an element of authenticity to their actions. Even she challenges the supposed authenticity of Northern minstrel performers, Kemble’s recollection nevertheless reifies the staple trope upon which that same performative gesture was based: a
“natural” musical and performance talent linked to the Black body. Kemble’s description shows how caricatured depictions and performances of Blackness by the likes of Clay and Rice penetrated popular imagination and became the lens through which to understand early nineteenth-century encounters with Black people. Kemble’s emphasis on bodily contortions, especially of the face, demonstrate a type of viewing practice that centers the face, eyes and mouth as the locus of greatest exaggeration – and, as one consequence, the site of greatest scrutiny. Despite her insistence concerning the authenticity of this particular performance, Kemble nevertheless relies upon her and Elizabeth’s shared understanding of blackface minstrelsy to convey to her friend an image of what it is “impossible for words to describe.” The “reality” of the experience and her recollection of it are inseparable from minstrelsy’s iconography.
Kemble’s reaction to the slave musical performance illustrates the way in which these viewing practices contribute to modes of white enjoyment tied to the proliferation of minstrelsy. In addition to making use of recognizable blackface 132 tropes to describe the performance, Kemble’s affective response mirrors that of white audiences’ responses to blackface. The festivities and performances,
Kemble writes, “at last so utterly overcame any attempt at decorous gravity on my part that I was obliged to secede” (97). Tavia Nyong’o identifies the feeling of being swept up in the fever of the moment as a key feature of the carnivalesque.
The “specifically participatory character of the blackface craze” was inseparable from minstrelsy’s popularity among “enthusiastic” audiences during the early nineteenth century (Nyong’o 108). By expressing an inability to resist her visceral enjoyment of the performance, Kemble expresses one of the most significant factors leading to the proliferation of minstrelsy during the nineteenth century – the joy of spectatorship. In another instance, Kemble admits the “grotesque lingo” of a female slave’s speech “once or twice nearly sent me into convulsions of laughing” (210-11). Throughout the journal, Kemble’s laughter renders legible her excitement over which she attempts to regain composure.
Meanwhile, Kemble’s laughter at the behaviors and mannerisms of slaves tells another story. From the ways in which the enslaved speak (Gullah and
English), to the music and performance talents displayed during a party held in the plantation’s infirmary, Kemble responds to much of what she witnesses by laughing. She refers to the children on the plantation throughout her Journal with such epithets as “my small cannibals” and “a pack of little black wolves”
(134).lxxviii Kemble often finds herself unable to contain a laugh in response to slaves’ laughter, even as she repeatedly expresses her inability to understand everything the slaves say; in fact, there’s little to suggest during various 133 interactions that everyone laughs for the same reasons. While Kemble’s descriptions continually position Black laughter as her sign for Black inferiority and ignorance, moments of ironic impasse punctuate her recollections.
As Barbara Lalla notes of writings produced by white colonials in Jamaica during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, buried within “full-length publications by [w]hite writers” one can discern counter-narratives and snippets of Black cultural expression, especially within moments of Black laughter (414).
In her essay on Black laughter in early Jamaican Literature, Lalla argues that a recurring sense of humor and irony runs through the “creative expression of early
Jamaicans and writers about Jamaica” that might give voice to “truths unstated and conclusions left undrawn” (423). For Lalla, Black Jamaican subjectivity emerges as the consolidation of a “deeply ingrained resilience” found in a “sense of comedy.” Lalla’s socio-historical analysis builds upon Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s work on signifyin’, a term he used to describe indirection as a verbal strategy in
Black culture. In exploiting the gap between signifier and signified to say two things simultaneously, one develops a mode of context-based group identification, as the fuller meanings of signification only avail themselves to members who share similar cultural values within a given community. For Lalla, back talk and ridiculing white oppression emerge as consistent themes in the literature she surveys.
Similar observations concerning ironic moments of laughter can be made of Kemble’s journal. Unintended moments of humor slip through, upending the double standards that framed Black life and perpetuated white racial hegemony. 134
The following description of an interaction Kemble has with younger children on the plantation illustrates this latter type of ironic rupture:
To these hardly human little beings, I addressed my remonstrances
[sic] about the filth, cold, and unnecessary wretchedness of their
room, bidding the elder boys and girls kindle up the fire, sweep the
floor, and expel the poultry. For a long time my very words
seemed unintelligible to them, till when I began to sweep and make
up the fire, [etc.], they first fell to laughing, and then imitating me.
(31)
In referring to the “unnecessary wretchedness” of the room, Kemble erases the types of labor that require cleaning another’s home and hinder the upkeep of one’s own, belying her posture as a compassionate observer. Although she comments at length on slave laughter at other points in her journal, Kemble refrains from commenting here upon this laughter and subsequent imitation of her sweeping. Kemble instead follows this passage by describing her “next object of attack…[the] incrustations of dirt on their hands, feet, and faces” (31). Rather than pause to ponder the impetus for their “game,” – she could not brook if it was anything but a game – Kemble avoids a rupture in which she is made the object of ridicule by “these hardly human little beings.” Instead, Kemble’s disapproving tone centers the importance of cleanliness of both home and body.
Put another way, Kemble’s response suggests that she sees little difference between the uncleanliness she sees and the laughter she hears. For Kemble, slave laughter and enjoyment represents a misuse of leisure time, and she repeatedly 135 insists upon the tidying of one’s domestic space and body as a more appropriate task. Although Kemble finds little wrong with her own laughter at the enslaved, their laughter, on the other hand, requires an immediate and thorough remedy.
During a different visit to the slave quarters, she writes, “At one of the doors I saw three young girls standing … they had evidently done eatings [sic] and were rudely playing and romping with each other, laughing and shouting like wild things. I went into the house, and such another spectacle of filthy disorder I never beheld” (65). Kemble’s curious use of “another spectacle of filthy disorder” both draws attention to her prior descriptions of poorly kept homes and associates the supposed disorderly behavior of children “rudely playing and romping” with the degradation of the messy homes she describes in great detail. This associative logic correlating mirth and rambunctious laughter with domestic filth allows her to simultaneously pass judgment on both. Promoting cleanliness, Kemble slyly masks her policing of slaves’ enjoyment. Blaming the supposed misapplication of an hour’s respite also ignores slave exhaustion and other such preoccupations. Her promotion of cleanliness grafts a productive imperative against “wasting in idle riot the time in which they might be rendering their abode decent” onto material space and bodies, masking Kemble’s discomfort with the seeming messiness of laughter – and with the possibilities of what might emerge from such “idle riot.”
Kemble’s apprehension sets no precedents, as leisure time on the plantation produced all manner of consternation for slave masters. Many slave revolts during the nineteenth century show how leisure activities and community forming were essential components for the planning phases of insurrection. The 136
Puerto Principe revolt during the Aponte Rebellion of 1812 in Cuba, for example, was planned primarily on weekends and during the two-week holiday from
Christmas until the Day of Kings on January 6 (Childs 123). Because slaves were expected to visit with family and friends sold off to other plantations, extended holidays “offered travel opportunities and relaxed supervision” (128). In My
Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass writes at length about the management of slave leisure as integral within the perpetuation of the peculiar institution. Discouraged from more industrious uses of their time, drinking whiskey was seen as the “most agreeable” pastime by masters (184). Douglass labels such uses of one’s holiday “conductors or safety valves” meant to dispel the “explosive elements” that develop within slavery (186). During holidays,
Douglass reports, one can witness fiddle playing, dancing, and “jubilee beating,” that last of these he refers to as a “strictly southern” style of performance in which someone beats out a rhythm and improvised comical and satirical lyrics (184).
What appears as a chaotic, unorganized performance style, however, conceals and protects avenues for pointed critique: “Among a mass of nonsense and wild frolic, once in a while a sharp hit is given to the meanness of slaveholders,” Douglass writes before transcribing one such musical tune meant to ridicule the exploitation of slave labor (Douglass 185). Mark Knowles notes that such “satirical jabs…were accented with sharp percussive hits on the instrument or body” (48-9). These rhythmic beats and lyrics also concealed covert messages between slaves and thus proved threatening to the continuation of slavery’s exploitative structures. It is the “capacity for hidden expression and 137 masked rebellion,” writes Erik Nielson, “that makes the spirituals so central to
African American cultural expression generally” (107). Nat Turner, for instance, allegedly called his accomplices to rebel through song (Jones 79-80).
A broader history of Black laughter, covered here only in brief, challenges and extends a view of Black laughter that results from its nineteenth-century minstrelization – a word for the ways in which Black laughter’s rebelliousness was simultaneously exaggerated and tamped down by the disciplinary expectations of Blackface performance. We need frameworks not limited to an analysis about whether an instance of Black laughter does or does not uphold racist stereotypes. By fleshing out a historical context for Black laughter in this way, we see how the negotiation of Black laughter within social and economic valences – not necessarily as that which antedates staged instances of Black laughter but rather occurs alongside these performances in unacknowledged forms
– constitutes a fuller terrain upon which to ground an analysis. To illustrate what I mean, I now turn to The Marrow of Tradition and show how the novel stages a struggle over Black laughter in relation to New South literary conventions. This staging first appears as if it might reproduce minstrelsy’s requisite disciplining of
Black laughter but decidedly does not. In this refusal, Chesnutt reshapes what
Black laughter and humor could accomplish for him in literature.
IV. THE MARROW OF TRADITION
In the following, oft-quoted journal entry from May 29, 1880, a twenty-two year old Chesnutt describes his inspiration for writing: 138
The subtle almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the
Negro, which is common to most Americans—cannot be stormed
and taken by assault; the garrison will not capitulate, so their
position must be mined, and we’ll find ourselves in their midst
before they think it. (Journals 140)
Critics note how these military metaphors indicate Chesnutt’s use of literature as a weapon. According to Henry Louis Gates, Chesnutt “saw the creation of literature as a weapon that could defeat racism” (116). By writing that feelings of disgust are “toward the Negro,” Chesnutt underscores how racial Blackness is not, in fact, a root or cause of racist disgust, directing his attention, instead, to feelings still
“common to most Americans.” The work Chesnutt envisions in his journal entry distinguishes between feeling and affect. An “almost indefinable feeling of repulsion,” after all, remains definable. He chooses, instead, to devote his writing to affect his audience “before they think it.” Perhaps unconsciously, he emphasizes this point through a homophonic pun on the word “mined,” in which affecting preconscious anti-blackness involves working upon the mind of his predominately white, middleclass audience. “It is the province of literature to open the way” to Black equality, Chesnutt goes on, “to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling” (Journals 140). Humor offered
Chesnutt a potent mode through which to accomplish this imperceptible work upon the feelings of his audience in his conjure tales.lxxix 139
Yet if The Marrow of Tradtion (1901) is as concerned with the role of
Black laughter and humor as his conjure stories, this concern first appears odd given the novel’s primary objective of contradicting the official “history” of the
1898 Wilmington Massacre and runs counter to accepted readings of it. Typically, scholars read the novel through a more historical lens and agree that The Marrow of Tradition challenges dominant narratives concerning the position of Southern
Democrats as saviors of a particular way of life, formulated as a direct response to the Wilmington Riot – a bloody coup orchestrated by conservative white
Democrats that left an unknown number dead and ushered in a new era of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement. Having occurred in his home state, the event left Chesnutt so distraught he soon found himself conducting interviews in
Wilmington as he prepared what would soon become The Marrow of Tradition. In
Minstrelsy and Murder, Andrew Silver interprets Chesnutt’s reaction to the riot and argues that Chesnutt inevitably abandons humor through the course of the novel. Yet, Chesnutt neither eliminates the potential for Black laughter nor really abandons humor altogether. Even as The Marrow of Tradition forgoes much of the sly subversive humor found in the conjure tales in favor of a more direct approach, and even as the novel has been infamously dubbed “bitter” by William
Dean Howells, there remains much to be said on the subject of its sense of humor and similarly wrought subversive elements.
Remember that America’s reunion imagined via regional literature maintains the advancement of economic interests at its core. Chesnutt’s framing of a cakewalk competition in chapter thirteen shows the ways in which the 140 reconciliation between North and South relies on a manipulation of Black laughter and on minstrelsy’s performative tropes. The chapter’s opening outlines the social and market imperatives driving economic reconciliation, as the impetus for the dance competition is “a party of Northern visitors” interested in learning about “social conditions” and the “negro problem” (Marrow 115). The Southern white hosts construct much of the visit in such a way as to control the image of the South for the Northerners. Hiding behind the veneer of civility and the auspices of a fair and balanced treatment of the issues, whites accompany their visitors to predominantly Black spaces, such as a Black church and mission school. The purpose for the cakewalk is “to give the visitors…a pleasing impression of Southern customs, and particularly of the joyous, happy-go-lucky disposition of the Southern darky and his entire contentment with existing conditions” (117). Chesnutt’s depiction of the visit, with its overt theatricality, illustrates the ways in which white Post-Reconstruction Southerners were highly invested in mythologizing the South, and how important the image of the “happy- go-lucky” Black subject was to this project. Typical of how Chesnutt ironizes whiteness, the winner of the cakewalk is Tom Delamere, a white aristocrat disguised and performing in blackface minstrelsy’s usual trappings; the burnt cork and garish clothing mixed with violent contortions of his body as dance and evidence of his comfort performing “darky dialect and…darky wit” all recall the manner in which minstrel performers “blackened up” to achieve their economic success (118). The scene exposes how an image of Black enjoyment was used to further capitalist and cultural projects of Southern nostalgia and, importantly, how 141 little blackface and “darky wit” deployed in this manner has to do with Black laughter.
In this, Chesnutt’s use of laughter accomplishes more in The Marrow of
Tradition than an affirmation or rejection white-authored stereotypes. Whereas
Chesnutt believed the humor of his conjure tales could function as a literary device and potential tool within a larger project to “elevate” the sensibility of white readers, Marrow does something quite different (Journals 139). It deemphasizes the elevation of its white liberal readership and explores the significance of Black humor (and laughter) between Black characters. In what follows, I consider instances of Black laughter in the novel and how they helps us locate an ideological shift in Chesnutt’s writing. The first occurs relatively early in the novel, another around the middle, while the last happens as the climax approaches. The first instance highlights the ways in which racial distinctions intersect class difference while the latter two explore how Black laughter has the capacity to precipitate white discomfort in a manner that is indirectly confrontational. Read together, these instances perform a shifting relationship to
Black laughter.
“The American Eye”
Chapter five, “A Journey Southward,” recounts the chance encounter between Dr.
Miller and his former teacher Dr. Burns as each journeys south to Wellington by train. The chapter, more broadly, exposes the hypocrisy and lopsided enforcement of Jim Crow legislation. One way it does this is by presenting two types of viewing, which the narrator assumes one after the other. In one instance, the 142 narrator emphasizes the ways in which racial distinctions between Black and white emerge as a product of “the American eye” and links sight-based constructions of race to a national ethos. To this eye, racial differences are “most striking, or at least the more immediately apparent” (49). The narrator affects a naturalist, detached objectivity in describing the racial complexions of the men.
Shifting to what we might call a colorblind perspective, the narrator eschews the importance of racial distinctions momentarily: “both [doctors] seemed from their faces and their manners to be men of culture and accustomed to the society of cultivated people” (49). The emphasis on “culture” and “cultivated people” presents a belief shared by the two doctors that the class-conscious acquisition of cultural capital might supersede racial difference as a preferred social leveler.
The imbrication of sight and legislation recurs thematically in the ways vision constructs racial binaries. Dr. Miller ponders the “conspicuously” placed signage demarcating separate passenger cars and waiting areas at stations to the extent that “the reason for this division should be kept constantly in mind … should a colored person endeavor, for a moment, to lose sight of his disability, these staring signs would remind him continually that between him and the rest of mankind not of his own color, there was by law a great gulf fixed” (56 emphasis added). Punning on two possible interpretations of “fixed,” the text underscores the paradoxical way in which Jim Crow legislation resolves the racial divide by securing it. The result is a racial climate that continuously imposes itself on Black subjective experience in ways one can never lose sight of. 143
Rather than the cultural predilection toward vision represented by “the
American eye,” Dr. Miller experiences social differences through a broader spectrum of senses. Near the end of his trip and after he has been relocated to the train’s Jim Crow car, Dr. Miller is joined briefly by a group of farm laborers
“[swarming] out from the conspicuously labeled colored waiting-room” on their way home from work:
They were noisy, loquacious, happy, dirty, and malodorous. For a
while Miller was amused and pleased. They were his people, and
he felt a certain expansive warmth toward them in spite of their
obvious shortcomings. By and by, however, the air became too
close, and he went out upon the platform. For the sake of the
democratic ideal, which meant so much to his race, he might have
endured the affliction. He could easily imagine that people of
refinement, with the power in their hands, might be tempted to
strain the democratic ideal in order to avoid such contact; but
personally, and apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy,
these people were just as offensive to him as to the whites in the
other end of the train. (60-1 emphasis added)
Dean McWilliams reads the Doctor’s joint sympathy for these workers and disdain for a law premised on race that would see them all as equal as evidence of his ambivalence (McWilliams 150). Yet, if there is a limit to Dr. Miller’s
“expansive warmth,” it rests at the question of proximity, as the atmosphere of racial tension permeates the train car and forces Dr. Miller to confront the 144 certainty of his identity. Ruffled by the encounter, he attempts to rationalize his experience once the passengers exit. “Miller breathed more freely when the lively crowd got off at the next station … His philosophy had become somewhat jaded on this journey, but he pulled it together for a final effort” (61). This “effort” consists of finding solace in “a cheerfulness of spirit” that allows Black folk the capacity to “catch pleasure on the wing, and endure with equanimity the ills that seemed inevitable” (61). Phrased as a rhetorical question, Miller’s thoughts reach out to an unspecified reader not for an answer but as much as to steady a guilty conscience. What “jaded” Dr. Miller’s philosophy remains unsaid. It could easily be the cumulative effect of being removed from a First Class passenger car and his distaste for the working class Black people having a good time. Another less apparent interpretation is that Dr. Miller, at least for a moment, identifies with those in power and with the attempts to “strain the democratic ideal,” which is to say Dr. Miller imagines a world in which he would rather identify with Jim Crow laws than risk being identified with Jim Crow the caricature, even if both are the consequences of a world viewed by an American eye.
These diversions concerning how Black laughter affects a Black middle class, for which Dr. Miller stands in, represent the beginning of Chesnutt’s longer project of rewriting the significance of Black laughter. Here, Black enjoyment thrives absent from “the embarrassing presence” of a white gaze, and the group of
Black passengers can “enjoy themselves after their own fashion” (60). Rather than presuppose some preternatural facility with music (as Kemble’s description does of the slaves on her husband’s plantation), the “musically-inclined” harmonica 145 player’s talent do “not go far beyond inclination” (60). There is, in other words, a rewriting of old tropes in literature that occurs, especially if one does not overly identify Dr. Miller’s distaste. The image of joyful Black laborers found in traditional plantation narratives receives an update insofar as Chesnutt rewrites conventional narrative expectations of exceptional Black humor, and the scene offers a sly criticism of Black bourgeois respectability politics.
Dr. Miller’s personal aversion to the possibility of being associated with a caricatured Blackness by proximity also aligns with other ways the chapter recalibrates the so-called happy darkey image. When the train pulls into a filling station, Dr. Miller sees “a huge negro, covered thickly with dust” emerge from a hiding place in order to quench his thirst from a nearby trough. The narration calls upon traditional descriptions of “an ordinary good-natured, somewhat reckless, pleasure-loving negro” only to contrast it with a sudden change to “a concentrated hatred almost uncanny in its murderousness” directed at one of the novel’s villains Captain McBane through “a glance of intense ferocity” (59). This figure we later learn is Josh Green, a man determined to exact revenge on McBane for killing his parents. According to Dean McWilliams, Green represents “the return of the society’s repressed, a dark double for both McBane and Miller” (150). Yet, if Green’s appearance indeed constitutes a return, it is one that manifests not only in vengeful anger but also in the image of a “good-natured…pleasure-loving negro” (59). In another text, you might say the jovial masks a murderous intent, but the sense that Chesnutt develops is one in which they appear as the “opposite” sides of a Möbius strip. Indeed, Green appears neither solely as rebellious Nat nor 146 obsequious Sambo, in the sense that Sylvia Wynter uses the terms in “Sambos and
Minstrels,” but rather as an always-present combination of the two in a way that shatters the disciplinary and paternalistic racial structures each in isolation legitimates for a white gaze.
In a later instance, we see how Black laughter disrupts more directly the narrative conceits of Southern literature. Chapter sixteen, “Ellis Takes a Trick,” opens with a description of a carriage ride that Major Carteret, Olivia his wife,
Clara his daughter, and Lee Ellis take to their social club. On their way, they see several Black people; some greet or salute the passing carriage while others glance “indifferently” at the group of whites. Referred to in the opening lines as a
“handsome trap,” their carriage unwittingly leads its passengers into another
“trap” of sorts, as they encounter two separate groups of Black people on the road laughing: “At one point the carriage drew near a party of colored folks who were laughing and jesting among themselves with great glee. Paying no attention to the white people, they continued to laugh and shout boisterously as the carriage swept by” (140; 142). Rather than the “embarrassing presence of white people” to which chapter five makes reference, white people here have no effect on Black social life (60).
Despite all of the fanfare surrounding Black humor during the cakewalk scene, the moment illustrates the ways in which unprompted Black jocularity remains highly scrutinized and threatening to the stability of a society rooted in white supremacy. Major Carteret boils over with anger at what he interprets as signs of indifference: “The negroes around this town are becoming absolutely 147 insufferable…They are sadly in need of a lesson in manners” (142). The irony, of course, is that the scene provides Carteret with exactly the image of contented rural Black people popularized by the plantation tradition. Chesnutt’s trap, in other words, is sprung. Carteret gets, presumably, exactly what he wants and it infuriates him. Compared to the intentions behind the cakewalk, this scene offers a different take on Southern white feelings concerning Black enjoyment. Whereas the Northern visitors described during the cakewalk chapter receive a clearly constructed image of positive race relations in the South, here we are told, “There would have seemed, to a stranger, a lack of spontaneous friendliness between the people of these two races” (142). There is no performative reconciliation to stage.
Importantly, Chesnutt does not provide an actual cause to which one might attribute the laughter. The narrative encounters this laughter in medias res; the joke or whatever incites this laughter remains absent from the stated narrative in way that nuances the chapter’s treatment of laughter. The laughter portrayed by the scene both indicates the ways in which this absence precipitates Carteret’s tantrum and signals a potential for Black social life against the racial economy of a Post-Reconstruction era South.
Unless it can somehow serve a particular purpose, as a form labor meant to buttress Southern interests for instance, expressions of Black laughter outside the controlled performative atmosphere of the cakewalk (or the minstrel stage) generate all manner of uneasiness. As Carteret passes another group “making merry,” they become “mute and silent as the grave” until the carriage passes. At this not quite indifferent response, Carteret remarks, “The negroes are a sullen 148 race” (142). More comfortable in the position of philosopher, Carteret eases his own mind by passing generalizations concerning Black people in a way that performs knowledge via observation but actually masks his self-delusion.
Carteret’s delusions are finally shattered when he is faced with Tom
Delamere’s guilt for impersonating the Delamere family’s servant Sandy
Campbell and for murdering his own aunt Polly. As he considers the inevitability of this truth surfacing, Carteret knows the white supremacist cause constructed by the novel’s secret organization, “The Big Three,” would no longer stand “in the court of morals,” and he imagines the extent of his failure: “Even the negroes would have the laugh on them… To be laughed at by the negroes was a calamity only less terrible than failure or death” (228). Indeed, the moment brings together and resolves a key tension concerning Black laughter and racist stereotypes, especially as Dr. Miller experiences it. The revelation of Tom using blackface as a disguise in the face of the fervor it inspires means acknowledging the effectiveness of his performance and thus admitting that the idea of Blackness upon which he bases it is a dangerous fallacy. “Such an outcome,” the narration extends Carteret’s thoughts, “…would throw a cloud of suspicion upon the stories of outrage which had gone up from the South for so many years” (228). A domino effect generated by this revelation would cast doubt on deceptions similarly indebted to myths about Black violence; in the context of the charges made against Sandy and the novel’s own occasional reference to lynching, these stories include those circulated in newspapers concerning rape of white women by Black men. Firmly dislodged from corrupt machinations of whiteness, the Black 149 laughter that most scares Carteret is fully stripped of any false equivalence with the tropes of blackface minstrelsy and the stereotypes of Blackness they constitute.
After considering Chesnutt’s use of laughter in The Marrow of Tradition, we might reassess Howells’s review of the novel as “bitter.” In its place, I suggest
Howells’s words used while discussing Booker T. Washington’s Up From
Slavery:
[T]he problem of the colored race may be more complex than we
have thought it. What if upon some large scale they should be
subtler than we have supposed? What if their amiability should veil
a sense of our absurdities, and there should be in our polite
inferiors the potentiality of something like contempt for us? The
notion is awful; but we may be sure they will be too kind, too wise,
ever to do more than let us guess at the truth, if it is the truth. (284)
Perhaps in his initial assessment of Marrow as bitter Howells senses a similar subtlety in Chesnutt and refuses to imagine an audience for the novel of which he was not a part. I offer Howell’s comment not simply because it speaks explicitly of a resistant Black “amiability” but also because it highlights the fragility of whiteness as a constant fear of being the butt of a joke that remains just beyond earshot.
V. CONCLUSION
In the few pages comprising Chesnutt’s unpublished fourth journal in Fisk’s
Special Collections, one encounters the following on page nineteen: “Wilmington, 150
NC February 1901: Wound up with a whole repertory of jokes” (box 13, folder 4).
Presumably written while Chesnutt conducted interviews with Wilmington’s
Black population as part of his research for The Marrow of Tradition, this enigmatic report is the only direct mention of Wilmington in Chesnutt’s journal; this is surprising when one considers how much the incident affected him. The meaning of his note is surely open to interpretation. Maybe Chesnutt simply refers to a collection of jokes published in local newspapers, some of which are pasted to the pages of his journal close to this entry. Another, admittedly more speculative interpretation is that Chesnutt refers to the interviews themselves.
Perhaps the recollections of the tragedy in Wilmington were marked by a kind of humor and laughter that stuck with him as he wrote his novel. Maybe a laugh was all his interviewees could offer the author when attempting to recall the flood of gratuitous violence visited on Wilmington’s Black residents on November 10,
1898. Maybe the laugh marks time differently. It is tough to say, though it encourages us to consider the ways Black laughter can (and does) operate as a mode of collective historical recollection that goes against the grain of an
“official” record.
151
Coda
In my discussion of Fanon, I argue for the importance of reorienting an acoustic relationship to Black speech and, importantly, Black laughter in order to understand the epistemic reordering invoked within Fanon’s work. Indeed, one’s relationship to place and space matters, and Laughter’s Fury has sought new ways to consider recurring expressions of that relationship in Black literature with regard to laughter. Whereas much of my analysis has examined descriptions of
Black laughter in relation to the pretenses and predilections of a white world and a white gaze, with these final pages I consider the role of laughter in Black community formation. I do so through the early work of portrait photographer
Dawoud Bey, particularly his photo series Harlem U.S.A., as a way to highlight the how Black laughter can help forge communities and how that forging can resist state violence.
The intimacy between people and place is a consistent theme throughout
Harlem U.S.A. especially in how Harlem’s residents touch their surroundings as a way of laying claim to space. “The images are maps of belonging,” says historian
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, “These hands, in touching what belongs to them, make contact. The touch lends a sense of gravity, it binds the subjects to their surroundings” (17). Bey’s own relationship to space and to people as the inhabitants of space is apparent throughout his Harlem series. Reflecting on his images, Bey writes, “These photographs and the experience of making them was for me a homecoming of sorts” (78). By consciously engaging with Harlem’s 152 residents before setting up each shot, Bey’s “homecoming of sorts” involves a deliberate decision to slow down the practice of photography (and of photographing Black people in particular). The interplay between photographer and subject extends through his use of a Nikkormat single-lens reflex camera, which “required slightly more effort to focus over changing distances” compared to other leading cameras (Witkovsky 8). Quoting from his personal correspondence, Art Institute of Chicago photography curator Matthew
Witkovsky writes, “this additional effort seemed to Bey part of ‘a more deliberate way of making pictures’” (8). Bey’s repeated use of “making” as opposed to
“taking” photos or “capturing” images when discussing his work indicates an approach to product and process that not only decenters the primacy of the photographer’s gaze but also the immediacy of the medium. With this deliberate approach, each image becomes its own collaboration as much as part of a series.
Black laughter emerges throughout Bey’s Harlem images as its own mode of collaboration and community formation. “The Blues Singer” (figure 2), for instance, highlights how Black laughter signifies in Bey’s early work. Bey created
“The Blues Singer” during the same period and in a similarly deliberate manner as his other Harlem photos. The Met’s notes for it indicate Bey created the photo in 1976 and printed in 1979, which suggests it was slated for inclusion in Harlem,
U.S.A.lxxx The image features a middle-aged Black man seated outside next to an electric amplifier, holding a microphone in his right hand. Behind him stand a man and a pregnant woman with their heads cropped out of the frame. All three wear floral prints, which encourages a sense of community. The singer’s facial 153 expression and posture, leaning back while clutching at stomach, are consistent with a deep, fully embodied laugh. This laughter, I think, expands Rhodes-Pitts observation regarding touch and holding onto physical objects to sound and its capacity for holding on and sustaining. The singer’s voice fills the atmosphere around him fully and comfortably, and the amplifier extends the reach of that voice. Indeed, Black laughter doubles down on the claiming of space found throughout Bey’s early images. Harlem, the image insists, is a space for Black community made manifest by an exchange of Black laughter. If, as critics have noted, Harlem U.S.A. generates an alternative set of “types” (such as barber, musician, child, mother, engineer, etc.) meant as a counter to prevailing stereotypes of Blackness, Black laughter emerges as a necessary element in Bey’s construction of Harlem. Black laughter, and the community it has a part in bringing together, is as important to Bey’s Harlem as a barber or church.
Another image from the series, “Harlem, NY” (figure 3), illustrates how
Black laughter and the community that forms through it can push on and disrupt police borders. Three older women lean on a police barricade at what appears to be block party or parade; the wooden police barricade in the foreground of the image introduces the specter of police violence and the many community protests in places such as Harlem, Newark, and Cleveland a decade prior. Their arms casually flout the directive of the barricade, crossing a metaphorical line as much as the emblazoned “police line.” The woman on the right of the three laughs with someone just beyond the frame of the image. Yet even as her arm and her laughter reaches farthest beyond the state’s symbolic and physical borders, this defiance of 154 borders importantly occurs as a result of engaging another member of the community. It is upon this point concerning community, Black laughter, and political engagement that I wish to conclude, as denying the state’s claim to space and power cannot be done alone.
Remember that, for Fanon, Black laughter is an act fundamentally removed from the racial structures of a white supremacist culture that evokes and sustains an ongoing Black consciousness. The laughter in both “Harlem, NY” and
“The Blues Singer,” in accordance with the general tenor of Harlem U.S.A., does not concern itself with a white gaze or white audience. The laughter in both images instead reaches out and insists upon solidarity on new terms and upon new ground. Here is Black laughter at the crux of community formation. Note, for instance, the way in which the singer (and his laughter) is flanked by two figures of reproduction: the mother and the amplifier. The community, the image implies, is growing, heralding an amplified capacity for speech, for protest, and for joy. 155
Figure 2 – “The Blues Singer” (Dawoud Bey) Source: The Met
Figure 3 – “Harlem, NY” (Harlem U.S.A. 48)
156
ENDNOTES i Jacobs, Joanne. “The Kids Who Laughed at the Holocaust” ii Jacobs, Joanne. “U.S. Kids Giggled at Thought of Murder” iii Koury, Renee. “Spielberg Tells Teens to Fight Intolerance: Director Talks to Kids Who Laughed at Film on Holocaust” iv See also: “laughing loudly and contemptuously” and casual references to the students’ “ignorance” in Mowatt, Raoul V. “Students Laugh at Serious Movie ‘Schindler Patrons Spur Group’s Ouster”; “broke out in giggles” in “Spielberg To Speak At School: Teens Who Laughed Will Hear Film Maker”; and “snickered” in Witt, Barry. ““An Apology for Laughs at “Schindler” Students Say They’ve Been ‘Numbed’ by Violence in Oakland Neighborhood.” v For more on Hanlon’s thoughts regarding Black spectatorship see pages 60-1. vi I use the word antagonism and antagonistic following the work of Frank B. Wilderson, in particular Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. vii Hartman, Saidiya & Frank B. Wilderson, III. “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13(2): 183-201. viii Frank Wilderson III has elsewhere referred to “the Slave” as the “anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity” (Red 11). ix De Anima, Book 3, Chapter 10: cited by Bakhtin (1984), 68. x A short list of notable people who have built their considerations of laughter, and of the comic, on this notion include Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes that “our species” is the “only joker in Nature” (“The Comic” (1843); Henri Bergson initial premise in his famous essay on laughter is “that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human” (Bergson 3-4); and William Hazlitt opens his Lectures on the Comic Writers, Etc. of Great Britain with “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the differences between what things are, and what they ought to be” (5). This last quotation ties Aristotle’s original premise to the eighteenth century’s significant elaborations to it: incongruity and superiority, which I discuss in more detail in chapter one. xi Peter McGraw’s “benign violation theory” or V.S. Ramachandran’s “false alarm theory,” for example. xii Consider, for instance, the massive archive collected within Mel Watkins’s On The Real Side: A History of African American Comedy in relation to the relatively small selection of texts presented here. xiii According to Cohn, Molière probably wrote the letter himself. xiv The nuances of Ahmed’s argument cannot be fully addressed within the scope of this chapter, though it would be interesting to consider the contact points between Ahmed’s work on fear and my work here on Black laughter. For example, does the motion of a laughing Black body, and the sonic approach of its laughter, instantiate a pivot between Ahmed’s use of “fear” and “anxiety”? 157
xv Moore’s bourgeois, respectability politics-inspired rationale for his argument (evidenced in judgmental statements concerning crime statistics and purchases of material goods on page 760) not withstanding, his article highlights some interesting interventions in how we might continue interrogating the limitations of double-consciousness through Fanon. xvi In his essay for this collection, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon,” Stuart Hall examines the institutional motivations underlying the academy’s emphatic embrace of Fanon – and of Black Skin, White Masks in particular – in relation to the social and political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s. xvii Richard Philcox translates the chapter title, “L’expérience vécue du Noir,” as “The Lived Experience of the Black” in his translation, but this chapter quotes from Charles Lam Markmann’s 1967 translation unless otherwise noted. xviii Gordon’s footnote to this statement points to his elaboration of it in his other works, including “Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000)” (7). xix Silver, Andrew. Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor 1835- 1925. Baton Rouge: LSUP. 2006. Print. xx Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1995. Print. xxi Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1997. Print. xxii For more on Gapers and their apocryphal histories, see Allison Blakely’s Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 2001. Print. In particular, see pages 54-7. xxiii Passing held different connotations leading up to and through the eighteenth- century. Sumptuary laws protected upper class citizens from the threat of people dressing up and passing above their station. David Waldstreicher notes that the distinction was less racial and more between free and indentured servants in England during the eighteenth-century (262). Nevertheless, similar anxieties concerning the stability of social status persist into nineteenth- and twentieth- century representations of racial passing. For more on this, see Waldstreicher, David. “Reading the Runaway: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic.” On the relevance of sumptuary laws in England, see Ribeiro, Aileen. Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715- 1789. xxiv For evidence of the ways in which animalistic language often accompanies white descriptions of Black people laughing, see my discussion of Fanny Kemble’s Journal in my third chapter. xxv According to Miriam Claude Meijer’s essay “Cranial Varieties in the Human and Orangutan Species,” in 1758, Dutch anatomist and anatomical illustrator of the mid-eighteenth century Petrus Camper “dissected an Angolan boy in public to refute ‘that Negroes and the Blacks had originated from white people’s intercourse with large Apes or Orang Utans’ (Camper 1772,381)” (39). In The 158
Invention of “Race”: Scientific and Popular Representations. Editors: Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominc Thomas. New York: Routledge. 2014. Print. An article published in 2008 revealed “how this association influences study participants’ basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts” (292). See Atiba Goff, Phillip Melissa J. Williams, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, and Matthew Christian Jackson. “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94.2: 292–306. 2008. Print. xxvi Sylvia Wynter considers the need for the stereotype of the “’rebellious’ Nat” to “[legitimate] the use of force as a necessary mechanism for ensuring regular steady labor” (“Sambo and Mintstrels” 151). xxvii Note, too, the ways simian imagery was used in Victorian England to dehumanize Irish populations. For examples of this, see Curtis, L.P. Apes and Angels: Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Devon: David and Charles P. 1971. Print. xxviii Though beyond the scope of this chapter, Hazlitt describes incongruity as “disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another,” opening up the possibility of examining the incongruous in terms of competing affects (7 emphasis added). xxix Lewis Gordon offers the following clarification: “Fanon unveils the neurotic situation. He needs reason, but its pursuit makes him a lover who brings too much to the relationship. Reason demands that he leaves much behind as a condition of their embrace. But how reasonable is an expectation that requires an impossible performance”(“When I Was There” 9). xxx Henry, Paget. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications.” The C.L.R. James Journal, 11.1 (2005): 79-112. Print. Moore, T. Owens. “A Fanonian Perspective on Double Consciousness ” Journal of Black Studies, 35.6 (Jul., 2005): 751-762. Print. Rabaka, Reiland. “Introduction: The Five Forms of Fanonism: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Africana Studies, Radical Politics, and Critical Social Theory in the Anti-imperialist Interests of the Wretched of the Earth” in Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization. Plymouth: Lexington Books. 2010.1-48. Print. xxxi At best, independent scholar Paulette Richards brings to our attention Fanon’s use of African American folklore, highlighting Fanon’s proficiency as storyteller in her article “Fanon as Reader of African American Folk.” Seeing Fanon as a trickster of sorts, Richards reads Black Skin, White Masks less for its theories of Black subjective experience and more for its craft and Fanon’s control over rhetoric. xxxii Bouhired avoided the guillotine when she was released along with other prisoners near the end of the war, though not before enduring reprehensible amounts of torture. A dramatization of the bombing appears in the film The Battle of Algiers (1966) during a scene that depicts the role of women who used their status as assimilated women to circumvent military checkpoints in order to deliver their bombs. 159
xxxiii In his reference to Bouhired, we see Fanon celebrating the anti-colonial struggles of both men and women. A full account of the ways gender informs this discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a thorough consideration of the complex relationship between Fanon and feminist critiques of his work, see Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, inc. 1997. Print. xxxiv We might also consider the “constant motion” Alenka Zupančič envisions as characteristic of the comic (3). xxxv The subject of colonial education has received much attention. For a retrospective synthesis of this work, see Nwanosike, Oba .F, Onyije Liverpool Eboh. “Colonialism and Education.” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 2.4 (September 2011): 624-631. Print. xxxvi Scholars in more cognition-centered fields have recently sought to test this connection. Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, in his paper correlating increased pain thresholds with increased laughter, argues in favor of laughter’s physical benefits over its cognitive benefits. Dunbar, R.I.M. “Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences (2012) 279, 1161–1167. Print. See also Dunbar, R.I.M. “Bridging the bonding gap: the transition from primates to humans” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences (2012): 367, 1837–1846. Print. xxxvii This matrix results in what John E. Dabinski identifies as “the affect of shame” (124). His article “Affect and Revolution: On Fanon and Baldwin” centers shame as “the common site of affective life under anti-black racist regimes,” so the disruption of these regimes becomes “tantamount to revolution against the affect of shame” (124; 126). Though Dabinski does say this explicitly, such a revolution represents the moment one becomes shameless. xxxviii Note the resonances between Markmann’s translation here and Constance Farrington’s translation of the colonized subjects’ initial moves toward decolonization in Wretched: “the native identifies his enemy and recognizes all his misfortunes, throwing all the exacerbated might of his hate and anger into this new channel” (Wretched 71). xxxix Consider, too, the ways Fanon was more often read as a whole during the 60s rather than the parceled book and chapter specific attentions he enjoys today. For example, see Armah, Ayi Kwei “Fanon: The Great Awakener. Negro Digest 18 (October 1969): 4-9; 29-43. Print. xl For more on the historical context of the 1960s, Black Studies, and the particular history I am gesturing toward here, see pages 107-113 in Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” A Companion to African-American Studies. Ed. Jane Anna Gordon, Ed. Lewis R. Gordon. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. 2006. Print. xli The full quotation from Fanon: “To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act” (173). 160
xlii The first chapter of Wretched, for instance, highlights the various academic and social branches that produce petty criticisms of one another and avoid the larger struggle against colonialism. xliii Weheliye footnotes that his use of “Man” comes from Sylvia Wynter’s interview with Greg Thomas, in which she revisits her position that the rise of western civilization has been coincident with the sanctification of Man. Wynter uses the phrase “genre of ‘Man’” to decry critical frameworks that make legible forms of being that are little more than synonymous and complicit with the hegemony of a white bourgeois class and its consolidated interests vis-à-vis capital (“Inter/Views” 24). xliv From Ward’s speech published the Boston Liberator on April 5. In it, he excoriates Daniel Webster, ending with a call for revolution should something such as a fugitive slave bill pass. See Black Abolitionist Papers. Eds. Carter and Ripley, Vol. 4. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1991. Print: 48-52. xlv Such dissatisfaction with Northern abolitionists was not uncommon at the time. Scholars document, for example, Frederick Douglass’ initial turn away from Garrison in 1847 and his announcement of an opposing political stance concerning the Constitution in 1851. See Benjamin Quarles’s “The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison.” The Journal of Negro History 23:2 (April 1938): 144-54. Print. William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease locate the origin of Douglass’s strife with the Garrisonians earlier, in 1841. See “Boston Garrisonians and the Problem of Frederick Douglass” Canadian Journal of History 2:2 (1967): 29-48. xlvi The history of Black oration in the United States reaches as far back as the nation’s history itself. Poet and essayist Jupiter Hammon’s 1787 “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York" is believed to be the first published speech by an African American. Maria W. Stewart was the first woman to deliver a public speech (1832). During the 1800s, notable figures such as Maria Stewart, David Walker, William Whipper, James McCune Smith, and Frederick Douglass made significant speeches on topics central to the lives of America’s Black population. xlvii The rise of the (African) American novel during the mid-nineteenth century is so widely accepted as to barely warrant mention. We know, for instance, that the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin garnered as much attention for its extraordinary sales as for its timely subject matter. Carla L. Peterson notes that an increase in fictional experimenting on the part of African Americans matches the general upward swing in fiction sales during the 1850s (“Capitalism” 562). xlviii For examples of how sound studies has influenced American studies, see Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a special issue of American Quarterly edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun. Some comprehensive examinations of sound within Black (diasporic) literature and culture include Amiri Baraka’s Blues People (1963); Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003) Alex Weheliye’s Phonographies (2005), and Julian Henriques’ Sonic Bodies (2011). Tavia Nyong’o discusses both Weheliye’s and Henriques’s projects in small axe 161
(July 2014) and provides a thoughtful digestion of their work—to which both authors each respond. xlix “Concurrent with and essential to the rise of sound studies, scholars such as Fred Moten and Elizabeth Alexander have challenged the performative axiom that modernity has given itself over almost completely to the eye” (Stoever-Ackerman 20). l Along with classic references to Cheryl I. Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” and Ian Haney-López’s work on race and immigration legislation, disproportionate incarceration rates for people of color (and Black men, in particular) against lucrative returns from the prison industrial complex as well as the 2013 dismantling of section four of the Voting Rights Act further evidence the continued imbrication of race, law, and capitalism in the United States. li Perhaps Smith was also inspired by Irving’s characterization of the Black Dutch settlers at Communipaw: “it is a well-known fact, which I can testify from my own experience, that on a clear still summer evening you may hear from the battery of New York the obstreperous peals of broad-mouthed laughter of the Dutch negroes at Communipaw, who, like most other negroes, are famous for their risible powers (Irving 99) lii Citations from Frederick Douglass’ Paper, with the exception of Heads of the Coloured People, will be given by date of publication. liii Her stage name was a probably a reference to Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” whose US tour in the early 1850s earned her over $350,000. liv Under the patronage of the Duchess of Sutherland and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Greenfield’s trip to London culminated in a performance for Queen Victoria on May 10, 1854, making Greenfield’s the first “official” recorded performance by a recognizably Black subject before European royalty – the history of Black subjects forced to parade before royalty for the sake of entertainment not withstanding. lv As my section on The Garies and Their Friends will demonstrate, pseudoscientific discourses of the nineteenth-century could be said to operate under a similar logic in which the fantasy of disentangling and discerning racial difference is predicated upon its presupposed existence. lvi Citations from Heads of the Colored People come from John Stauffer’s recent edited collection of McCune Smith’s work. See Stauffer, John. The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist. New York, NY: Oxford UP. 2007. Print. lvii Directly addressing Douglass, Communipaw says as much at the end of the first sketch in the series. lviii The full title of the first sketch, “ ‘Heads of the Colored People,’ Done with a Whitewash Brush: The Black News-Vendor” announces Smith’s disdain for perspectives that would seek to whitewash human experience, “done” with this brush even as he takes it up. lix Mary Webb has also garnered increased scholarly attention in last few years. Tavia Nyong’o, for example, writes about her in The Traffic in Poems, and Alex 162
W. Black discusses Mary Webb alongside Elizabeth Greenfield in “Abolitionism’s Resonant Bodies.” lx Despite its above average reception in England, the novel was not published in the United States until Arthur P. Davis’s 1969 reprint. lxi This anticipates the ways Kara Walker renders connections between domestic commodities and macroeconomic undeniable in her installation at a soon to be demolished Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.” lxii Even when scholars express their awareness of this tendency, they nevertheless reproduce many of its tenets. The presence of elements such as domestic tropes, filial connections, and marriage contracts that dominated more conventional bourgeois novels of the nineteenth century led Bernard Bell to call The Garies the “most novelistic” of the four known African American antebellum novels – a distinction with which critics have more or less agreed, giving little thought to whom, or what, such a designation refers (Bell 55). Even as Elizabeth Stockton expresses a desire to move her analysis beyond “Webb’s interest in African American domesticity,” she couches the bulk of her analysis on discussions concerning property between characters had indoors, bringing her argument fully home when she positions the male revolutionary and the female domestic as “twin guards of the home space” (479). lxiii For more on the topic of how pervasive such breaks from domesticity were within the latter half of the nineteenth-century American novel, see Holly Jackson’s recent book, American Blood: The Ends of Family in American Literature, 1850-1900. New York: Oxford UP. 2013. Print. lxiv Frozen with her stillborn child in her hands, Mrs. Garie’s death hauntingly echoes the deathly tableau of static, well-preserved fruit upon which the novel opens. lxv Here I pick up a thread that I discussed more fully in the previous section concerning the image of crewels and the limits of European criticism. The purveyors of the apprenticeship comport themselves anxiously when Charlie appears in response to their request for an interview. The aptly named Mr. “Western” wants to save face by hiring Charlie while his business partner Mr. “Twining” dissuades his partner by convincing him that having Charlie too close to the white workers would produce all manner of conflict (Webb 289). Cast as more benevolent, Western represents an idealized Western humanism, complete with a spirit of good feeling rooted in assimilation/integration. By contrast, Twining – as the repetition of the name in the name of the offices of “Messrs. Twining, Western, and Twining” suggests – represents a desire to twin, to organize the world along separable, nameable binaries reminiscent of strands of “twine” and the “twining” needed to keep them together. Finally, “Messrs”, as a short hand for Misters is itself derivative of “Masters,” signaling ways in which language associated with the peculiar institution remains tied to the so-called free North. The partnership between these men demonstrates that you cannot have one without the other—that, in fact, Western and Twining represent two strands of the same yarn. 163
lxvi Charlie’s rejection parallels the story of accountant Joseph C. Cassey, son of Joseph Cassey, who in 1850 Philadelphia was rejected for a position in the counting house of Edward M. Davis, a Philadelphia Quaker, Garrisonian, and leading figure in the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. lxvii Note, Werner Sollors’s edited collection of Webb’s collected works has corrected this as one of the few “errata” in the novel (Sollors 537). lxviii Listing each instance of this narrational strategy lies beyond the scope of this chapter, but the guiding voice of the narrator often interjects or repositions audience perspective during scenes involving racial and social upheaval. For example, the narrator’s presence is palpable during the scenes involving Charlie’s job search (Chapters 28-29). lxix Naming the friend “Morton” appears to be a sly reference to famed nineteenth- century pseudoscientist Dr. Samuel Morton, whose cranial measurements passed as scientific “proof” of a racial hierarchy. That the Morton in The Garies proves to be such a poor reader doubles, I think, as an implicit criticism of the scientist. lxx As Reid-Pharr notes, “the novel is always eager to ridicule any example of Black presence that is produced through white racialist fantasies” (Reid-Pharr 87). lxxi For a fuller sense of the triangulation I am drawing here, see Stockton’s discussion of nineteenth-century changes in the ways white citizens established property in “The Property of Blackness,” 475-77. lxxii Incidentally, Alice Walker also saw Harris’s treatment of Black folklore as a theft. The “effective barrier” created by Uncle Remus, she argues, generated a culture of shame with regard to Black folklore inseparable from a dominant culture’s control over the “production and dispersal of images in the media.” See “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus,” in Living By the Word (New York: Harvest Books, 1989), 25–32. lxxiii In his lengthy chapter on Chesnutt, Eric Sundquist locates the ways in which Chesnutt “tie[s] together genealogy and the politics of racial violence” within a triangulation of intimacy, politics, and violence; “fusion,” he notes, “had colloquial usage as a term for miscegenation” (409). lxxiv As Matthew Wilson notes of the image, “What is even more disturbing about the image is that it seems to be a Black figure in blackface, as if the illustrator had to exaggerate the blackness and absurdity of the figure and the only way to do so was to double its blackness” (103). lxxv As freedmen with skillsets necessary during a period of rebuilding, certain groups of African Americans were able to build substantial foundations for themselves and their families. This financial security opened opportunities for holding political office and for the evolution of the racially diverse Fusion Party. lxxvi For more on tracing blackface minstrelsy’s performative tropes, see Nicholas Sammond’s The Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Duke UP 2015). lxxvii In her introductory remarks to Elizabeth, Kemble cites Matthew “Monk” Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor as her inspiration: “I wish I had any prospect of rendering my diary as interesting and amusing to you as his was to me” (16). In discussing Kemble’s anti-slavery journal, I aim to discern the types 164
of representational strategies that could produce a work that would be both “interesting and amusing” between two white abolitionist sympathizers. lxxviii Fanny Kemble published the Journal in London, 1863. Although her sympathetic stance toward slavery’s abolition never wavered, Fanny did not publish her journal in 1839 because Piece threatened to keep her from seeing her children if she published something so harmful to his business. By 1863, though, the ink on her divorce papers had long dried and her children were of age. The journal arrived stateside soon after when it was published by Harper and Brothers in 1864. lxxix Chesnutt echoed this more utilitarian use of literature twenty-one years later when referring to The Marrow of Tradition as “purpose fiction” (“Chesnutt’s Own View” 5). lxxix There is some confusion concerning whether “The Blues Singer” appeared as part of Bey’s original exhibition. Art historian Kellie Jones cites it as part of the collection the Walker Art Center’s artist retrospective Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, while the Art Institute of Chicago did not include it as part of its more recent collection of the complete set.
165
166
Works Cited
Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele. The Spectator: with Notes and Illustrations. In Six Volumes, Volume I. London Stereotype Edition. Holborn: A. Hancock. 1822. Print.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. 2004. Print.
Andrews, William L. “Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932),” African American Writers: Second Edition, Volume 1, Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001: 111-22. Print.
Armah, Ayi Kwei “Fanon: The Great Awakener. Negro Digest 18 (October 1969): 4-9; 29-43. Print.
Ashe, Bertram D. From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources.” Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT U Press, 1968. Print. [1965].
Baldwin, Richard E. “The Art of The Conjure Woman,” American Literature 43.3 (November 1971): 385-398. Print.
Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. Print.
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924. Print.
Bey, Dawoud. “Reflections on Harlem U.S.A.” in Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. The Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012: 78-9. Print.
Black, Alex W. “Abolitionism’s Resonant Bodies: The Realization of African American Performance.” American Quarterly 63.3 (2011): 619-639. Print. 167
Blake, Art M. "Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio.” American Quarterly 63.3 (2011): 531-553. Print.
Blakely, Allison. Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 2001. Print.
Brooks, Daphne A. “’Sister, Can You Line it Out?’ Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55.4 (2010): 617-627. Print.
Brooks, Tim. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890- 1919. Urbana: Illinois UP, 2004. Print.
Brown, Elaine. The Condemnation of Little B. Boston: Beacon P, 2004. Print.
Brown, William Wells. Three Years in Europe; Or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met. London: Charles Gilpin, 1852. Project Gutenberg. Web. 15 January 2015.
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer, 2000): 821-865. Print.
Bufkin, Sydney. “Beyond ‘Bitter’: Chetnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition,” American Literary Realism 46.3 (Spring 2014): 230-250. Print.
Carpio, Glenda R. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Chakkalakal, Tess. Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011. Print.
Chasar, Mike, “The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes.” American Literature. 80.1 (2008): 57-81. Print.
Chesnutt, Charles W. "Charles W. Chesnutt's Own View of His New Story The Marrow of Tradition." Cleveland World 20 October 1901: 5.
---. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Richard H. Brodhead, Editor. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.
---. The Marrow of Tradition. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1969 [1901], Print. 168
---. “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889-1905. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert C. Leitz, III. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.
---. “Unpublished Journal: 1901.” Box 13, Folder 4. MSP 19. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Collection. Special Collections, Fisk University Libraries, Nashville, TN. 18 June 2015.
Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC P, 2006. Print.
"chirography, n.1." OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2015. Web.
Molière and Ruby Cohn. “Letter on Tartuffe.” The Tulane Drama Review 8.2 (Winter 1963): 175-85. Print.
Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Print.
"crewel, n.1." OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2015. Web.
Curtis, L.P. Apes and Angels: Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Devon: David and Charles P. 1971. Print.
Dabinski, John E. “Affect and Revolution: On Fanon and Baldwin” PhaenEx 7 (fall/winter 2012): 124-158. Print.
David, Deirdre. Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2011. Print.
Diluilio Jr., John J. “The Coming of the Super--Predators.” The Weekly Standard 27 November 1995: 23. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 3/27/13
Dinius, Marcy J. “‘Look!! Look!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal,” PMLA 126.1 (2011): 55–72. Print.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Trans. Mercer Cook. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974. Print.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print.
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1855]. Print.
169
Duane, Anna Mae. “Remaking Black Motherhood in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends. African American Review, 38.2 (2004): 201-212. Print.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1999 [1903]. Print.
Dunbar, R.I.M. “Bridging the bonding gap: the transition from primates to humans” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences (2012): 367, 1837–1846. Print.
---.“Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences (2012) 279, 1161–1167. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Comic.” Theories of Comedy. Ed. Paul Lauter. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1964: 378-387. Print.
Fabi, Maria Giullia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2004. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.
---. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2008. Print [1967]
---. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Print.
---. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Print.
---. Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Print.
Finseth, Ian. “How Shall the Truth Be Told? Language and Race in ‘The Marrow of Tradition,’” American Literary Realism 31.3 (Spring 1999): 1-20. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious: The Standard Edition. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989. Print. [1960].
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey:A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
170
Goff, Phillip Atiba, Melissa J. Williams, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, and Matthew Christian Jackson. “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94.2: 292–306. 2008. Print.
Gordon, Lewis R. “Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing: Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, V, Special Double-Issue (Summer 2007): 5-12. Print.
---. “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday” The C.L.R. James Journal, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 1-49. Print.
---. “When I Was There, It Was Not: On secretions once lost in the night” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 12:3, 8-15. Print.
Gunn, Joshua. “Canned Laughter.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 47.4 (2014), “EXTRAHUMAN RHETORICAL RELATIONS: Addressing the Animal, the Object, the Dead, and the Divine”: 434-454. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Ed. Alan Read. Seattle: Bay P, 1996. 12-37. Print.
Hanlon, Dennis. “Does Anyone Have the Right to Say, ‘I Don’t Care’?: Resistance and Reverence at Schindler’s List” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies. 39.1 (Spring 2009): 53-65. Print.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1997. Print.
Hartman, Saidiya & Frank B. Wilderson, III. “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 183-201. Print.
Hazlitt, William. “Lectures on the Comic Writer, Etc. of Great Britain” in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt. A.R. Waller & Arnold Glover, eds. London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1903. Print. [1819].
Henriques, Julian. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.
Henry, Paget. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications.” The 171
C.L.R. James Journal, 11.1 (2005): 79-112. Print.
Hobbes, Thomas. The Treatise on Human Nature and That on Liberty and Necessity. London: J.M. M’Creery, Black-Horse-Court, 1812. Print. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992. Print.
Howells W.D. “An Exemplary Citizen,” The North American Review 173.537 (Aug. 1901): 208-288. Print.
---. “A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction,” The North American Review, 173: 541 (Dec. 1901): 872–88. Print.
Ianovici, Gerald. “ ‘A Living Death’: Gothic Signification and the Nadir in ‘The Marrow of Tradition,’ MELUS 27.4 “Varieties of Ethnic Experience” (Winter 2002): 33-58. Print.
Irving, Washington. A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasy. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829 [1809]. Print.
Jackson, Holly. American Blood: The End of Family in American Literature, 1850-1900. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Jacobs, Joanne. “The Kids Who Laughed at the Holocaust.” San Jose Mercury News 24 January 1994: 7B. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 10/15/12
---. “U.S. Kids Giggled at Thought of Murder.” Calgary Herald (Final Edition) 26 January 1994: A5. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 10/15/12
Johnson, George W. “The Laughing Song.” Posted by Nathaniel Jordon. Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, December 8, 2012. June 16 2015.
Jones, Arthur C. Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993. Print.
Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, Empire,” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Eds. Emory Elliott, Cathy N. Davidson, et. al. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.
Keeling, Kara. “Electric Feel: Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain” Cultural Studies 28.1 (2014): 49- 83. Print.
172
---. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.
Kemble, Francis Anne. Journal Of A Residence On A Georgian Plantation In 1838-1839. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1864. Print.
Khalfa, Jean. Review of Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin White Masks': New Interdisciplinary Essays. Ed. Max Silverman. Modern Language Review 102.2 (Apr. 2007): 527-528. Print.
Knowles, Mark. Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002. Print.
Koury, Renee. “Spielberg Tells Teens to Fight Intolerance: Director Talks to Kids Who Laughed at Film on Holocaust.” San Jose Mercury News 12 April 1994: 1A. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 10/15/12
Lalla, Barbara. “Black Laughter: Foundations of Irony in the Earliest Jamaican Literature,” Journal of Black Studies, 20.4 “The African Literary Imagination” (June 1990): 414-425. Print.
Lambert, Lèopold “#LAW /// Jacques Vergès’s Rupture Defense: From Antigone’s Anger to Djamila Bouhired’s Laughter” The Funambulist: Bodies, Design, & Politics. (Apr. 2014) Web. Accessed Nov. 24 2014.
Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.
---. “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 23-50. Print.
Lowery, J. Vincent. “Appendix M: Remembering 1898: Literary Responses and Public Memory of the Wilmington Race Riot” 1898 Wilmington Race Riot — Final Report (May 2006): 413-428. Online.
McWilliams, Dean. Charles Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. Print.
Meijer, Miriam Claude. “Cranial Varieties in the Human and Orangutan Species” The Invention of “Race”: Scientific and Popular Representations. Editors: Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David, and Dominc Thomas. New York: Routledge. 2014. Print.
Molière and Ruby Cohn. “Letter on Tartuffe.” The Tulane Drama Review 8.2 (Winter 1963): 175-85. Print. 173
Moore, T. Owens. “A Fanonian Perspective on Double Consciousness ” Journal of Black Studies, 35.6 (Jul., 2005): 751-762. Print.
Mowatt, Raoul. “Students Laugh at Serious Movie ‘Schinlder’ Patrons Spur Group’s Ouster.” San Jose Mercury News 20 January 1994: 1B. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 10/15/12
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. 1985. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print.
Nielson, Erik. "‘Go in De Wilderness’: Evading the ‘Eyes of Others’ in the Slave Songs," Western Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (March 1, 2011): 106-17. Print. Nwanosike, Oba .F, Onyije Liverpool Eboh. “Colonialism and Education.” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 2.4 (September 2011): 624-631. Print.
Nyong’o, Tavia. “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies after the Millennium” Small axe 44 (2014). Print.
---. “Hiawatha’s Black Atlantic Itineraries,” in The Traffic in Poems. Ed. Meredith L. McGill. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008. Print. 81-96.
"organ, n.1." OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2015. Web.
"organ, v." OED Online. Oxford UP, March 2015. Web.
Otter, Samuel. Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Parvulescu, Anka. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge: MIT P, 2010. Print.
Pease, William H. and Jane H. Pease. “Boston Garrisonians and the Problem of Frederick Douglass.” Canadian Journal of History 2:2 (1967): 29-48. Print.
Peterson, Carla L. Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Print.
174
---. “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the African- American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4.4 (1992): 559-583. Print.
Pile, Steve. “The Troubled Spaces of Frantz Fanon” Thinking Space (Critical Geographies Book 9) Ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift. New York: Routledge: 260-278. Print.
Quarles, Benjamin. “The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison.” The Journal of Negro History 23:2 (1938): 144-54. Print.
Quashie, Kevin Everod. “The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet.” African American Review 43.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2009): 329-43. Print.
Rabaka, Reiland. “Introduction: The Five Forms of Fanonism: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Africana Studies, Radical Politics, and Critical Social Theory in the Anti-imperialist Interests of the Wretched of the Earth” Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization. Plymouth: Lexington Books. 2010.1-48. Print.
Read, ALan. “Preface.” The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Ed. Alan Read. Seattle: Bay P, 1996. 8-9. Print.
Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
“Review of The Marrow of Tradition," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 November 1901. Online website. ChesnuttArchive.org 11 February 2016. Online.
Rhodes, Pitts, Sharifa. “Keeping Time” in Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. The Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012: 14-7. Print.
Ribeiro, Aileen. Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715-1789. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print.
Richards, Paulette. “Fanon as Reader of African American Folklore” The Journal of Pan African Studies 4.7 (November 2011): 126-133. Print.
Salem, James M. “African American Songwriters and Performers in the Coon Song Era: Black Innovation and American Popular Music.” The Columbia Journal of American Studies, n.d. Web. 30 March 2016.
Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. Print. 175
Sexton, Jared. “The Soial Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” Intensions Journal Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011). Web. 22 March 2013.
Shalev, Eran. “Ancient Masks, American Fathers: Classical Pseudonyms during the American Revolution and Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic, 23.2 (Summer 2003. Print. 151-172.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. Print.
Silver, Andrew. Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor 1835- 1925. Baton Rouge: LSUP, 2006. Print.
Smith, James McCune. “Letters” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. [electronic source]. 3 March 2013
--“Heads of the Colored People” in Stauffer, John. The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987) “Culture and Countermemory: The “American Connection”: 64-81. Print.
Spolar, Christina. “The Kids Who Laughed Till It Hurt; Students' Reaction To 'Schindler's List' Fires Racial Tensions.” Washington Post 10 March 1994, C1. LexisNexis® Congressional; Accessed: 10/15/12
Sollors, Werner. “Introduction.” Frank J. Webb: Fiction, Essays, Poetry. New Milford: The Toby P, 2004. Print.
Stauffer, John. The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Stockton, Elizabeth. “The Property of Blackness: The Legal Fiction of Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends.” African American Review. 43.2-3 (2009): 473-86. Print.
Stoever-Ackerman, Jennifer. “The Word and the Sound: Listening to the Sonic Colour-line in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative” Sound Effects 1.1 2011. Online.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American 176
Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.
“Transcript of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)” December 1856. Ourdocuments.gov. Web 27 April 2016. Online.
Villet, Charles. “Hegel and Fanon on the Question of Mutual Recognition: A Comparative Analysis” The Journal of Pan African Studies. 4.7 (Nov. 2011): 39-51. Print.
Waldstreicher, David. “Reading the Runaway: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 56.2 African and American Atlantic Worlds (April 1999): 243-272. Print.
Ward, Samuel Ringgold. “Speech by Samuel Ringgold Ward Delivered at Faneuil Hall” in Black Abolitionist Papers Vol IV. Ed. C. Peter Ripley & Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1991: 48-52. Print.
---. "To the Readers of the Citizen." Impartial Citizen [Syracuse] 24 Apr. 1850: n. pag. Black Abolitionist Papers (1981): fiche 6, grids 452-53. Microfilm.
Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.
Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy. Chicago: Chicago Review P, 1994. Print.
Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997 [1857]. Print.
Weheliye, Alexander. “Engendering Phonographies: Sonic Technologies of Blackness” Small axe 44 (July 2014): 180-90. Print.
---. Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theoreis of the Human. Durham: Duke UP. 2014. Print.
---. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.
Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.
Wilson, Matthew. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2004. Print. 177
Witkovsky, Matthew S. “Rebirth of a Nation” in Dawoud Bey: Harlem U.S.A. The Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012: 8-13. Print.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Proud Flesh Inter/Views: Sylvia Wynter” Interview with Greg Thomas. Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness. No 4 (2006). Online.
---.“On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” A Companion to African-American Studies. Ed. Jane Anna Gordon, Ed. Lewis R. Gordon. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Print.
---.“Sambos and Minstrels” Social Text No.1 (Winter 1979): 149-156. Print.
---.“The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism” boundary 2, 12.3 (Autumn 1984). 19-70. Print.
---. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black’” Hispanic Issues Volume 23: National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Laitin America. Eds. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan & Antonia Gómez-Moriana. New York: Routledge. 1999. Print.
X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Penguin Books, 1973. Print.
Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Print.