Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen A

Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Darieck Scott, Chair Professor Leigh Raiford Professor Juana María Rodríguez Professor Michael Cohen Summer 2016 Abstract Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Darieck Scott, Chair In Ordinary Failures I develop a new conception of “diaspora” as the ordinary failure of recognitions and solidarities founded on ideological and ancestral ties. Informed by the queer studies turn toward negativity and the relational turn in African diaspora studies, my project examines the interventions of artists and writers of the diaspora who opt to recite intraracial failure (between blacks) in the face of their structurally overdetermined failure as minoritized subjects. I identify in textual and visual objects an engagement with the promise of intimacy attendant to the artist’s lived experience of diaspora and there I aim to expose the limits of diaspora discourse. My explorations of the failures of diaspora are aided by pushing on queer theories of negativity to speak to race. This project departs from traditional approaches to black failure such as the black mainstream’s condemnation or eschewal of black failure in favor of respectability politics and the black left’s redemption of failure through revisionist narratives of resistance. In doing so, this project holds space for betrayal, exhaustion, and laziness without fear of reifying speculations on the failures of blackness to allow for visions of blackness that are unbound by the binary racial logic of success and failure and instead turn our eyes toward instances in which resistance and defeat are overlapping. In the first chapter, “Reciting Diaspora,” I examine diasporic misrecognitions in the memoirs Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, Triangular Road by Paule Marshall, and My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid to interrogate what is at stake for the black diasporic memoirist in reciting failure, and the strategies these authors employ to reconcile themselves with the damage incurred in these moments of misrecognition. The second chapter, “The Repetition of Betrayal,” wrestles with the “cruel optimism” of racial solidarity and the afterlife of the suggestion of betrayal in the artwork of Wilmer Jennings to understand how the repetitive and reductive form of wood engravings contributes to a visual language of intraracial solidarity, vulnerability, and intimacy. Chapter three, “A woman should have something of her own,” examines black feminine tiredness in the neo-slave narrative Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler, the history of slave suicide, and challenges readings of resistance. The final chapter, “Desireless Diasporans,” examines black asexuality and black idleness and argues for the liberatory potential of failing to contribute to normative social and economic reproductivity. 1 Dedication For my parents, Cynthia Hawkins and John Owen. You inspire me every single day. For my grandparents, Helen and Berwin Owen, Robert Hawkins, and especially Elease Coger aka Grandma Hawkins, who always called me Dr. Owen ever since I was small. i Acknowledgements This project absolutely would not be possible without the financial support of the Ford Foundation, the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. This project was deepened by additional support from the Department of African American Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Chapter of California, the Center for Race and Gender, the Graduate Division, the Graduate Assembly, and Jason Ditzian. Immeasurable thanks is also due to undergraduate support from the Macaulay Honors College, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers, the Alumni Association of Hunter College Undergraduate Scholarship, the Schomburg- Mellon Humanities Summer Institute, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Program. Thank you also to the institutions housing documents integral to this project including, the Huntington Library, the New York Public Research Libraries, the Rhode Island College Library, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Special thanks is due to Corrine Jennings and Winston Scarlett for taking the time to speak with me formally and informally about your lives, your analysis, and your memories for the betterment of Ordinary Failures. This project has also been transformed by conferences too numerous to list here. It’s incredible to see now, on the other side of the doctoral process, that the days that seemed alternately so precious or so devastating at the time are a blur now. A few words of this Episcopalian prayer of thanksgiving convey it all: Accept, O Lord, my thanks and praise for all that you have done for me…Thank you for setting me at tasks which demand my best efforts, and for leading me to accomplishments which satisfy and delight me. Thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead me to acknowledge my dependence on you alone. Thank you also to those agents of the divine who have surrounded me with love and care who I now name. Thank you to the department for admitting me and my committee for shaping me with both gentle and rigorous words while encouraging me to follow my weird heart. Darieck Scott, Leigh Raiford, Juana María Rodríguez, and Michael Cohen must have all been meeting secretly every Tuesday night after school to coordinate the seamless dance that has been their advisement of me. There’s just no other explanation. I can’t thank all of you enough for caring not just about my little pile of words here but also about my politics and my well-being. I can’t imagine producing this project under any other conditions except in dialogue with you. Each of you has disturbed me and my sense of what is possible and what is necessary and I could not be more grateful. For their support of me and/or the project, I also thank Ula Taylor, Abigail DeKosnik, Jac Asher, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Chiyuma Elliott, Leslie Salzinger, Lynne Kimura, and Kemi Adeyemi. I also thank Mel Chen and the Designated Emphasis students of GWS 220 for workshopping my chapter on the mammy. I also must thank Lindsey Herbert for countless “walking meetings” and for her guidance in navigating this institution and her presence at each stage of my graduate process. To my CUNY Hunter College professors and friends Anthony Browne, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Jennifer Hayashida, Frank Kirkland, Joanne Edey-Rhodes, Eisa Ulen Richardson, Solita Alexander, and Mike Lamb: you have modeled for me the rigorous love of your students with intellectual and emotional availability that I now aspire to offer to my own students. You prepared me for this experience by sharing your expertise but also by insulating me with your radical love and high expectations. When I think about New York I must also thank the Audre Lorde Project’s Ejeris Dixon for taking a chance on me. I also think of and thank Dan Simmonds, my first ii Women’s Studies professor, who in the fall of my freshman year told me to apply for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and that advice has changed my life. Rest in power, you are missed. I don’t know where I would be without the political collectives that have shaped my commitments to this strange, awe-inspiring, and often plain awful world. In particular, I thank the Freirian education collective All City, especially Adam Israel, Sendolo Diaminah, and Laura Leisinger. I also thank the NYC collective of Anarchist People of Color; the Safe OUTside the System Collective of the Audre Lorde Project; the anti-turnstile collective, No Swipe, at Hunter College; the short-lived Gender Institute of Fugitive Information; the anarcha-feminist collective Before the Fall; and the various wings of the Bathroom Brigade at UC Berkeley. Special thanks to my friend Puck, who taught me how to make myself useful at a meeting, in the streets, and in an occupation, and held space for some of the hardest feelings emergent from organizing work. Thank you also to my friends. Jasminder Kaur, who took me under her wing (undoubtedly an inimitable, designer wing) to mentor me in graduate school so early on, that when I really needed her support she was already there. Zachary Manditch-Prottas, my co-conspirator in teaching and revisions and my dear neurotic compatriot in email subtext analysis. Aubrey Dillon, who became my first friend in undergrad, taught me to king, housed me in California, and models for me the integrity of merging career with commitment to the revelation of more just world. Match Horton, for awakening my interest in critical whiteness studies, for politicizing my understanding of Celtic studies, for all the late gchats that made the night less lonely. For inspiring conversations, kindness, reading recommendations, companionship in the writing struggle, and support: Lia Bascomb, Karli June Cerankowski, Christina Bush, Jamal Batts, Michael McGee, Jr., Michael Myers II, Charisse Burden, Jewlia Eisenberg, Freda Fair, Heather Rastrovac, Ralowe T. Ampu, Iván Ramos, Eric Stanley, Kathryn Benjamin, Bob Offer-Westort. Special thanks to Adam Israel, Megan Elias, and Chika Okoye for literally lifesaving feats. Joey Hirsh, who I continue to learn so much from about need and desire and forgiveness. Carl Nadler who, along with my committee, was instrumental in getting me into my qualifying exam room, I can never thank you enough. Stephanie Ho, Aurora Ortiz, John Merz, Will Scott, and especially Erica Wandner and Stephen McHale—thank you for offering your lanterns to light my inner life and spiritual journey.

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