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Empathy’s Dark Labor: Feeling, Fact, and the Black Subject in Late Nineteenth Century Black Narrative By Hubert A. Cook Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 11, 2017 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Ph. D. Ellen T. Armour, Ph. D. Vera M. Kutzinski, Ph.D. Hortense J. Spillers, Ph. D. Copyright © 2017 by Hubert A. Cook All Rights Reserved !ii For Ty, Charlie, and Raheem !iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In so many ways I could not have finished this work without the love and care of a large and extensive community, many more than mentioned here. I thank you all. Thank you to my committee—Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo (my chair), Ellen T. Armour, Vera M. Kutzinski, and Hortense Spillers— for helping me, supporting me, and advising me on this journey. In my time with them, they have not only provided me with a fantastic example for how to be a scholar but also for how to be a lovely person in the world. I am deeply grateful for their example and for their unrelenting care. I received outside support for this project from the Provost Fellowship for Excellence through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that and through that the Mellon Mays Foundation provided me with resources and family. Thank you. I am also grateful to Vanderbilt for its generous support. From my Carleton world I thank Jillian BairdBurnett, Kristen Askeland, Clayton Cobb, Hudlin Wagner, Petra Crosby, Joy Klutz, Nancy Cho, Adriana Estill, and Harry Williams. During this project I had a wonderful writing group with Elizabeth Barnett, R.J. Boutelle, Lucy Mensah, and Aubrey Porterfield. Thank you for your generous insights and your friendship. Thank you to Anne Castro, Andy Hines, and Matt Duques for the same. Thank you to Bill, William, Raissa, and Katie. Thank you to Meg and Duff as well as to Sheila Baisden for your generous hospitality. !iv Donna Caplan, you’re a hero. Equal parts laughs, know-how, tough love, and care. I benefited from all and they kept me going. Thank you for your kindness. I am deeply grateful to Rietta Turner and to Bill North. You both helped me immensely and your care is deeply touching. You’re part of the family. I thank Ma, Sue, Charles, and my dad for their love. Ma, as I write this I remember fondly how you read to me. I remember our time together while I sat around the kitchen table doing homework. I thank my nephews for their love and for keeping me hip and for inspiring me. I love you all. To Lauren: I could hardly have finished this without you. You are my rock. You are my love. You send me. !v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………..…. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………….………………………….. iv LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………. viii Chapter I. Introduction: Empathy and the Vestibule ….……………………….…………..…….1 Empathy’s Historical Ties to Consumption ……………..……………………………6 Empathy’s and the Vestibule’s Potential ..………………………….…………..……10 Capital as Empathy’s Grammar …………………………………..…………………13 The Difficulties of Reading Slave Narratives ……………………………………….15 Empathy and Temporality ..………………………………………………………….16 Dangers of the Vestibule .……………………………………………………………19 Sensation not Catharsis ………………………………………………………..……26 The Chapters and the Dates Covered …..……………………………………………27 Conclusion …..………………………………………….……………………………33 II. Of Ida B. Wells, Facts, and Resigning Register of Empathy ….……………………36 Wells, Empathy, and Morality …………………………………………………..…. 37 Wells, Douglass, and the Deferred Letter …………..……………………………… 43 Wells’s Modified Approach: The Red Record ..……………………………….……72 III. “More bones as well as more flesh,” Or Charles Chesnutt’s Facts and Dangerous Fictions ….………………………………………………………………………….……77 The Colonel’s Dream: A Literary Experiment ………………..………….…….……86 Reception of The Colonel’s Dream ………………………………………………….91 !vi Chesnutt’s Earlier Hiatus from Publishing Fiction ……..…………………………106 Chesnutt’s Early Views of Fiction and Black Persons ………………….…………111 The Colonel’s Dream’s Black Characters ………………………………………….126 IV. “The recitations were over for the day”: Pauline Hopkins, the Immediate, and Voracious Progressive Era Readers …..………………………………………..………144 Recitation vs. Immediacy: An Initial Definition of Terms …………………….…..149 Recitation’s Decline and Consumption’s Growth ……………………………….…154 Hopkins’s Affective Understanding of Recitations’s Decline ..…………………… 161 A Model for Hopkins: Douglass’s Reception…………………………………..….164 Douglass, Hopkins, and the Commodified Body …………………………….……171 Encounters with Contending Forces’s Readers …………………….…….…….….183 Conclusion: Hiding Recitation in Of One Blood ……………….…………………194 V. “I answer seldom a word”: Of Du Bois, Crummell, and the Science of What it Feels to Be Black………….……………………………………………………………….….198 Literacy, Orality, and the Body in Du Bois’s Historical Moment ….………………208 Existing in Literacy …………………………………….…………………..………209 Existing in Literacy’s Fictionality …..………..………………………………….…217 The Benevolent Despot and The Philadelphia Negro………………………………227 The Anxiety of Crummell’s Influence …..…………………………………..………240 Sentience in The Soul’s of Black Folk ..……………………………………….…………274 VI. Conclusion …..…………………………………………………………………….285 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………..……………………………………….……289 !vii LIST OF FIGURES Figures Page 1. Ida B. Wells Letter, Sample One ……………………………………….…..…………57 2. Ida B. Wells Letter, Sample Two……………………………………….………..……57 3. Pauline Hopkins Contending Forces Portrait Frontispiece……….…………………184 !viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: EMPATHY AND THE VESTIBULE When, in her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horror, anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells proposed specific measures that those working to end lynchings in their communities could enact, she dismissed appeals to morals as a viable strategy. Wells offered: “Appeals to the white man’s pocket have been ever more effectual than appeals ever made to his conscience” (69).1 Wells’s assertion bared not just her outright exasperation with a readership that she had judged uncaring concerning the fate of black lives, but it also made plain her theoretical approach to readers as a whole. Wells’s assessment was that writers’ attempts to appeal to their readers’ sense of obligation to others was an ineffective way to recruit these readers to their causes. Instead, Wells theorized, writers had to appeal to readers as investors who needed to protect their investments. When I first read Wells’s assertion, her exasperation resonated with me deeply. By Wells’s writing, not yet thirty years from Emancipation in 1863, the most widely circulated expression of black writing was the slave narrative.2 I had read a number of slave narratives, many that tried to wield what one critic—citing Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and others—calls “the metaphors of moral suasion,” as slaves and former slaves often offered their narratives to readers in the hopes that they would conceive U. S. slavery as a moral failing and, consequently, act to abolish the 1 Wells, Southern Horror in Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, Jacqueline Royster, ed. 2 See Goddu, “The Slave Narrative as Material Text” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, John Ernest, ed. for an extensive discussion of the circulation of slave narratives. !1 institution.3 These narratives document overwhelming violence and brutality, and the sheer number of them—suggestive of the volume of persons that sustained the events described—left me demoralized. I had come to believe that the authors who expressed their plights in the hope that readers might alleviate their pain exhibited what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism," a term she offers to describe, “a kind of relation in which one depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the first place” (2012).4 Berlant describes herself as after “the ordinary pulses of a fraying crisis” (2012). Her interest is less in intense affects and more about those affects whose subtle presence structures our daily lives, whether these sustain us or diminish us. For this reason, she is interested in what happens when the attachments that make life livable begin to disintegrate. In Berlant's formulation, cruel optimism occurs when objects do not sustain one’s fantasy of what would bring one happiness—what, in a catch all term, Berlant calls “the good life.” Detaching oneself from the object that is preventing them from “the good life” would altogether extinguish the possibility of “the good life” and so one holds onto the object. What became clear to me after reading Wells’ assertion concerning her readers’ investments was that I was not taking into account a larger understanding of how readers already came to texts engulfed in relations that had constituted them. Contrary to the Berlant formulation, one could not choose one’s own fantasy; it was already constituting 3 See Baker, Workings of the Spirit, p. 13. 4 See Berlant, Cruel Optimism. Berlant distills her thinking on cruel optimism and her intentions for the term in an interview published in Rorotoko. See also Berlant, “Lauren Berlant: On her book Cruel Optimism.” !2 them. Such a relation between readers and texts did not just (dis)appear with the text, but it was solidified through the text. Thus, if the conditions of subjectivity needed to be negotiated, so did this already existing relationship. In other words, Wells’s assertion put pressure on constructions