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Blackness, Melancholy, and Duplicities That Bind religions Article Recovering the Irrecoverable: Blackness, Melancholy, and Duplicities That Bind Joseph Winters Religious Studies and African and African American Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA; [email protected] Abstract: In this article, I critically engage Stephen Best’s provocative text, None Like Us. The article agrees with Best’s general concerns regarding longings for a unified black community or a We before the collective crime of slavery. Yet I contend that melancholy, which Best associates with black studies’ desire to recover a lost object, can be read in a different direction, one that includes both attachment and wound, investment and dissolution. To think with and against Best, I examine Spike Lee’s School Daze in conversation with Freud, Benjamin, and Morrison. Keywords: Stephen Best; melancholy; doubling; black studies; Sigmund Freud; Walter Benjamin; Toni Morrison; Spike Lee; the irrecoverable Spike Lee’s 1988 film, School Daze, continues to strike different chords every time I watch and experience it anew. The story takes place at a fictional historically black university called Mission College during homecoming weekend. This coming-home, Citation: Winters, Joseph. 2021. this three-day gathering of current students and alumni, is replete with tensions and Recovering the Irrecoverable: rifts, reminding the viewer that gathering and dispersion can happen simultaneously. Blackness, Melancholy, and Throughout the film, we encounter standoffs and physical altercations between the socially Duplicities That Bind. Religions 12: conscious Fellas (who are initially screened leading an anti-apartheid demonstration) 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/ and the Gammas, the prominent fraternity on campus; we hear the rivalry between the rel12040276 light-skin, long-haired Gamma Rays and the short-haired, darker skinned “Jigaboos” in a scene that combines the musical, parody, and allusions to ball room dance; the viewer Academic Editor: K. Merinda also experiences hostilities between the Fellas and local residents at a KFC restaurant, Simmons a predicament where the accusation of whiteness acts as a stand-in or code for class conflict. In addition to these series of tensions, the film depicts, without developing, Received: 22 February 2021 the complexities of black gender, exemplified by the rule that a Gamma man cannot be Accepted: 30 March 2021 a virgin and the presumed sexual availability of black women for the culmination of Published: 16 April 2021 the fraternity/manhood initiation process. We also experience the insecurities of black masculinity during the film through repeated dismissals of the “sissy” or the “fag”, as if Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral proper black manhood is determined by a queer outside, by an off-screen Other that only with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- makes an appearance through ridicule and imitation (Lubiano 2008, pp. 49–51). All of iations. these events take shape under the vigilance of the college president and the chairman of the Board of Trustees who worry that protests, demonstrations, and visible discord threaten to turn away wealthy donors. If Lee’s School Daze treats black college life as a microcosm for blackness in the US, then the film visualizes Hortense Spillers’ claim that black peoplehood is defined by rupture (Spillers 2003, p. 258). Copyright: © 2021 by the author. The film’s opening sounds and the sequence of photographic images brings to (still) life Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. something like a legacy or tradition born in and through the break, the Middle Passage, the This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and violent accumulation of fungible labor, and the imposition of social death. While hearing conditions of the Creative Commons the sonorous voices of the Morehouse Glee Club singing the spiritual, “I’m Building Me Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// a Home,” a picture of a slave ship, or a stowage design, appears twisting and turning creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ across the screen. In order to bring this ship design into focus, our attention has to pass 4.0/). through a torque; it has to move around in some way. Following the ship and an image of Religions 2021, 12, 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12040276 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2021, 12, 276 2 of 11 a slave cabin, the opening montage shows a collection of race men and women, including Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Martin Luther King, Jr. We witness images of black pioneers like Jackie Robinson as well as shots that remind us of the fatal cost of black protest and leadership. As the choir repeats “Building Me a Home,” it is easy to think of the succession of captured moments as a progressive movement toward settlement, wholeness, belonging, etc. To put it differently, the introduction presents a lineage or a foundation that acts as a proleptic reference point regarding the divisions within blackness that School Daze dramatizes. There is an august history of struggle and accomplishment that ultimately connects the Gammas and the Fellas, the Gamma Rays and the Jigaboos, the Mission College students and the local residents. And yet, the lyrics of the spiritual also include “this earthly heart is gonna soon decay,” a line that coincides with the soul needing a permanent place to stay. Notwithstanding the implicit contrast between the eternal and the temporal, one might take the earthly decay allusion to be an acknowledgement of de-composition and dissolution (processes that hang alongside the desire to build and establish). As the singer associates moaning, and mourning, with building a home, we might hear this spiritual in a manner that refuses to separate be-longing and anguish, endurance and dispossession, togetherness and alienation.1 Finally, the interplay between sound and image, the aural and the visual, introduces a kind of dissonance—even as the opening sequence depicts something like a unifying tradition, the pathos of the moan unsettles and agitates the viewing/listening subject. Perhaps the voice, the moan, the hum, and the call and response bring together multiple affects and dispositions that refuse the will to coherence, enabling us to see in the succession of snapshots transience and dispersion as much as the construction of a heritage. The film depicts this dispersion when the character Julian, or Big Brother Almighty, tells the Afro-centric Dap that his home is Detroit, not Africa; or when the local resident at the KFC rejects being called “brotha” by one of the Fellas, claiming that there is no kinship between them. Since the spiritual, as Du Bois points out, always carries a tone of “death and disappointment” (Du Bois 1994, p. 157), the film’s introduction anticipates a kind of failure, or certain investments being frustrated and thwarted. While Stephen Best’s masterful text, None Like Us, does not engage Spike Lee’s film, the tropes and scenarios in the film are germane to Best’s concerns about black studies. According to Best, “a communitarian impulse runs deep within black studies. It announces itself in the assumption that in writing about the black past “we” discover “our” history; it is implied in the thesis that black identity is uniquely grounded in slavery and the Middle Passage; it registers in the suggestion that what makes black people black is their continued navigation of an “after-life of slavery,” recursions of slavery and Jim Crow for which no one appears able to find the exit ... ”(Best 2018, p. 1). Similar to the assumptive logic of School Daze, Black Studies in Best’s reading presupposes that blackness is coterminous with the middle passage and that what connects black people, in the Americas especially, is a shared experience of slavery’s aftermath. While Best is sympathetic to “attempts to root blackness in the horror of slavery,” (Best 2018, p. 1) he worries that this reflexive move leaves black studies overburdened by history, tethered to a slave past that we assume is continuous with the present. For Best, this yearning for rootedness and reclamation needs to be supplemented by “the recognition that there is something impossible about blackness, that to be black is also to participate, of necessity, in a collective undoing” (Best 2018, p. 2). Instead of concentrating on blackness as heritage, tradition, memory, and belonging, he wants to nudge blackness toward alienation, withdrawal, discontinuity, and unfitness. Blackness does not come into being as desire to build and preserve but as will to negation and self-dissolution. To put it another way, he aims to bring Black Studies closer to queer studies’ insistence on anti-sociality and self-shattering.2 Black Studies, similar to one reading of the photographic construction of black history in School Daze, is too invested 1 On the relationship between moanin and mourning (which understands the moan as a sonic cry that can be heard in the image), see (Moten 2003). 2 He finds this particularly in the work of Leo Bersani. Religions 2021, 12, 276 3 of 11 in disinterring and reclaiming the past. It continues to revolve around the grand idea of heritage. Consequently, Best re-directs attention to those aspects of blackness that cannot be transmitted, to that which is unfit for history, to what cannot be elucidated by and within the archive. Much of Best’s criticism revolves around a concern that Black Studies has been unduly motivated by melancholy and what he calls melancholy historicism. Thinking of an array of authors, such as Saidiya Hartman, Anne Cheng, and Ian Baucom, Best notices in this melancholy historicism a hidden desire to recover the past or what has been erased from history. Within discourses about black people, this melancholic disposition fosters a forensic imagination in which scholars perpetually return to the primal scene of blackness, the crime of the middle passage.
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