The Unquiet Dead: Race and Violence in the “Post-Racial” United States

The Unquiet Dead: Race and Violence in the “Post-Racial” United States J.E. Jed Murr A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Dr. Eva Cherniavsky, Chair Dr. Habiba Ibrahim Dr. Chandan Reddy Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2014 J.E. Jed Murr University of Washington Abstract The Unquiet Dead: Race and Violence in the “Post-Racial” United States J.E. Jed Murr Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Eva Cherniavksy English This dissertation project investigates some of the ways histories of racial violence work to (de)form dominant and oppositional forms of common sense in the allegedly “post-racial” United States. Centering “culture” as a terrain of contestation over common sense racial meaning, The Unquiet Dead focuses in particular on popular cultural repertoires of narrative, visual, and sonic enunciation to read how histories of racialized and gendered violence circulate, (dis)appear, and congeal in and as “common sense” in a period in which the uneven dispensation of value and violence afforded different bodies is purported to no longer break down along the same old racial lines. Much of the project is grounded in particular in the emergent cultural politics of race of the early to mid-1990s, a period I understand as the beginnings of the US “post-racial moment.” The ongoing, though deeply and contested and contradictory, “post-racial moment” is one in which the socio-cultural valorization of racial categories in their articulations to other modalities of difference and oppression is alleged to have undergone significant transformation such that, among other things, processes of racialization are understood as decisively delinked from racial violence. The project demonstrates how antiblack and related forms of racialized and gendered violences are crucial to the production of “post-racial” forms of common sense and the relations of value they help to govern. These formations of common sense work to crowd out and subsume subaltern and other common senses of race and value, even as they draw upon and transmute radical and decolonial histories in complex ways. Following work by Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Kara Keeling and others, common sense is understood here as a site of struggle over the possible. It lends the present its moments of seeming coherence, but it is also where the past asserts itself in the service of potential futures that call out to the present in partially occluded and potentially redemptive ways. Engaging with scholarship in US American studies, Ethnic Studies, and related fields, the project turns to a wide range of cultural sites and forms. Chapter One turns to Paul Beatty's novel The White Boy Shuffle to build the theoretical and historical scaffolding for the project's approach to the “post-racial moment.” My reading attempts to think through the way the novel invokes different forms and histories of antiblack violence to apprehend the racial present and to imagine how social lives and landscapes survive, surreptitiously, (in)visibly, and sonically. Chapter Two takes up mainstream film to think through the development of common sense(s) of white anti-racism, with a particular focus on how white male heteromasculinity remakes itself in popular culture through an intimacy with racialized suffering and both critiques and renewals of US state power. Chapter Three extends in another direction the theorization of whiteness as a structure of racialized and gendered violence by turning to the purportedly oppositional common senses of race, rebellion, and exchange that circulate in rock music cultures. In attempting to sketch anew a series of (im)possible connections between presumptively white indie rock music cultures and racial blackness, my focus is on opening ground for investigating how material histories of race, gender and sexuality are embodied, animated, reworked and lived in writing, performance, and sound. Chapter Four reads visual artist Nick Cave's soundsuits as interventions into the dominant logics of the post- racial moment. Cave's mobile assemblages or ensembles of discarded objects cite and embody and sound out whole histories of fabrication, collective acts of world-making, moving and looking. The immersive, enveloping quality of the soundsuits in exhibition and performance take in their viewers, sometimes literally, and if they flirt with exoticized and authentic otherness and with fantasies of alternative embodiment, but they also enunciate other grammars of embodiment and disallow the willed forgetting of ongoing histories of racial and colonial encounter and violence. Table of Contents Acknowledgements …............................................................................................................ii-iv Introduction Unquiet Circulations .................................................................................. 1 Chapter One The Politics of Race in the “Post-Racial” Moment …............................. 23 Chapter Two Spaces of (Black) Death, Fantasies of (White) Renewal: On the Common Senses of White Anti-Racism …...................... 66 Chapter Three All Your History's Ablaze: (White) Rock, Violence, Blackness …....... 110 Chapter Four Second Skins: Nick Cave's Soundsuits and the Common Sense of Post-Racial Embodiment …....................................................... 162 Bibliography .......................................................................................... 201 Murr i Acknowledgements Debt seems such an insufficient and even violent category through which to attempt to name the forms of attachment, intimacy, support, and collaboration that shape our projects and the life currents and movements out of which they emerge. This is particularly true for those of us whose relationship to the university is inseparable from unpayable student loan debt. But I'm interested in other debts, the debts that “stay bad,” something like what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe as “real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt.” These are debts held in and for each other, where the logic of repayment doesn't hold or hold sway. Some debts, though, are primarily financial. I have benefitted, at the University of Washington Seattle, from a Hilen Fellowship in American Literature and Culture and a David Bonderman International Travel Fellowship, and, at UW Bothell, from a Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Fellowship and a Community-Based Research and Learning Faculty Fellowship. I also received travel and research support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Department of English, and the Graduate School, as well as a Hilen Endowment award to participate in the Futures of American Studies Summer Institute at Dartmouth College. I am grateful to the Hilen Endowment, Eva Cherniavsky, Kathleen Woodward, Kate Cummings, Donald Pease, Miriam Bartha, Martha Groom, David Bonderman, Brook Kelly, Bruce Burgett, Kathy Mork, Paul Markham, and others instrumental in making these funding sources available. As a mentor, advisor, and teacher, Eva Cherniavsky models the best kinds of critical, collaborative labor, and she works tirelessly against the individualizing and isolating work of the university. The dissertation writing group she organized and led over the last several years and the incredible time she devoted to each of our projects challenged and encouraged and frustrated us in the most productive ways. As a reader for each moment of this dissertation, she opened avenues and pathways I could not have discerned and made me interrogate the presumed coherence of the most basic terms through which we seek to glimpse the movements and operations of power, culture, race, and violence. None of us quite know how to thank her. My other committee members have inspired and pushed me at key moments over the past several years. Habiba Ibrahim's careful and critical interventions are always welcome, and her questions and re-framings linger and re-present themselves long after she's offered them. From the moment I arrived at UW, Chandan Reddy's glowing brilliance has been an insistent, revelatory, and striking presence. I feel blessed to have some connection to his work and thinking. R. Radhakrishnan, as an informal committee member and as a mentor, friend, teacher, and much more, has opened worlds for me and asked me to investigate, on so many registers, how such openings become possible and where they might travel. Nikhil Pal Singh helped set out for me a rich and expansive intellectual and political terrain in which to work. Alys Eve Weinbaum challenged me to be a different kind of marxian thinker. Rebecca Aanerud, Matt Sparke, Louis Chude-Sokei, Gillian Harkins, Caroline Simpson, Tom Foster, Vicente Rafeal, Anis Bawarshi, and Juan Guerra helped make my coursework at UW vital and vibrant. At the University of Massachusetts, Jules Chametzky, Joseph Skerrett, Sut Jhally, Stephanie Luce, Bill Strickland, James Smethurst, Paula Chakravartty, Richard Wolff, and John Bracey enlivened my thinking and pushed me in new directions far beyond (what I then knew to be) American studies. My greatest teachers there, though, were the incredible, motley, sometimes fractious, and temporary communities of students and organizers for whom organic intellectual Murr ii practice most often meant “guerilla pickets,” office takeovers, massive

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