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The Excessive Present of Abolition: the Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance

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The Excessive Present of Abolition: the Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance iii The Excessive Present of Abolition: The Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School Of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Jesse Aaron Goldberg May 2018 iv © 2018 Jesse Aaron Goldberg v THE EXCESSIVE PRESENT OF ABOLITION: THE AFTERLIFE OF SLAVERY IN LAW, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE Jesse Aaron Goldberg, Ph.D. Cornell University The Excessive Present of Abolition reframes timescales of black radical imaginaries, arguing that Black Atlantic literary and performative texts and traditions resist periodization into past, present, and future. Their temporalities create an excessive present, in which the past persists alongside a future that emerges concurrently through forms of daily practice. I intervene in debates in black studies scholarship between a pessimistic view that points backward, arguing that blackness is marked by social death, and an optimistic view that points forward, insisting that blackness exceeds slavery’s reach. Holding both views in tension, I illuminate the “excess” that undermines this binary. The law’s violence in its rendering of black bodies as fungible exceeds its capacity for justice, and yet blackness exceeds the reach of the law, never reducible to only the state of abjection conjured by the structuring power of white supremacy. I theorize the excessive present through literature and performance in contrast to legal discourse – notably the 1783 British case Gregson v Gilbert, which is striking because it records a massacre of 131 people as an insurance case, not a murder case. The 1781 Zong Massacre recurs through each of my chapters, via J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting The Slave Ship, David Dabydeen’s 1995 poem, “Turner,” M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book of poetry Zong!, and Fred D’Aguiar’s 1997 novel Feeding the Ghosts. My first chapter examines the presence of Turner’s painting within Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric to understand how processes of subjection and abolition exceed the periodization of history. The second chapter meditates on the murder of Eric Garner to concretely situate periodization in relation to law and reads Dabydeen’s poem and Angelina Weld Grimke’s 1916 play Rachel through debates about queer vi futurity. The third chapter develops an understanding of futurity and liberatory potentials in Philip’s Zong! alongside texts by Harriet Jacobs and Sutton Griggs. Finally, the fourth chapter examines neo-slave narratives by Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, and D’Aguiar to show how these novels articulate the excessive present as an ethical problem which calls for readers to enact abolitionist politics after the moment of reading ends. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jesse A. Goldberg grew up in de facto racially segregated Long Island, New York before moving upstate to attend the State University of New York College at Geneso in 2008. At Geneseo, he pursued a double-major in English and philosophy as well as a minor in the Edgar Fellows Honors Program. He graduated from Geneseo in 2012 as a Geneseo Presidential Scholar and an awardee of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award and began graduate school at Cornell University. At Cornell, he was an active member of shared governance at the department and university levels, as well as a longtime member of the graduate student union, Cornell Graduate Students United. He served as President of the Americanist Reading Group from 2015-2017 and was an enthusiastic member of the Race and Ethnic Studies Reading Group. Finally, in addition to teaching in the English department and the American Studies program at Cornell, he was an instructor with the Cornell Prison Education Program, through which he taught at Five Points prison, Cayuga prison, and Elmira prison. iv For my students, whatever the shape of the classroom in which we may have met. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The work represented by this dissertation has been anything but an individual endeavor. I am grateful for the many individuals who have nurtured this project over the past few years and would not have made it to the final page without a single one of them. This project was nurtured by a committee of incredible mentors, each as rigorous as they are supportive. I am indebted to Margo Crawford’s intellectual generosity. As a mentor, she has allowed me to fail and helped me find the tools to begin again, reminding me along the way that the journey of an intellectual project is a long one, and, importantly, one which can be beautifully multi-dimensional. I am grateful for her critical feedback on every draft of every chapter of this dissertation, especially her push for me to constantly critique my own moments of being seduced by a strand of thinking without understanding the implications for my project. Like Crawford, Grant Farred has been an intellectual mentor since I first entered graduate school; his was the first course I attended at Cornell. I will never forget the moment when he stopped me in the middle of fumbling for an answer to a question I had not thought sufficiently about and said, “Perhaps you should stew in your discomfiture.” His rigorous feedback has made me a stronger thinker and taught me the value of revision as a practice of not mere editing, but of thinking itself. I owe some of my most fundamental pedagogical conviction to his teaching and mentoring. Shirley Samuels has consistently been a mentor in all facets of the word, demystifying the process of professionalization while at the same time asking pointed, critical questions of the content of my project. I am grateful for the way in which she pushes me to historicize my thinking and ground it in the concrete when I am most tempted to fly off into abstraction. While we may not all always agree, I truly believe my project would have been much more impoverished without the balancing rigors of Samuels and Farred pushing me to vi think both concretely and abstractly, historically and theoretically. And I am grateful to Dagmawi Woubshet, who perhaps more than any other mentor I have ever had made it his mission to teach me to write clearly, a task which I am still learning to pursue. Any deficiencies in my prose are wholly mine, but I am sure that I can credit my moments of greatest lucidity to Woubshet’s encouragement to slow down and say it plain on the sentence level. In addition to my formal mentors, other faculty at Cornell have indelibly shaped my thinking as it has developed throughout this project. I am enormously grateful to Sara Warner for teaching me how to speak and write in a truly interdisciplinary fashion, and to Olúfe mị́ Táíwò for teaching me that one can be a scholar of the law while maintaining the most critical of postures to its violence. Additionally, Elisha Cohn has been nothing short of an excessively generous mentor, going above and beyond to support my professional and intellectual growth, encouraging me to think deeply about my place in my field and the stakes of my work. Finally, C. Riley Snorton not only helped me find language through which to articulate relationships between blackness, law, time, and queerness, but modelled an ideal of rigorous scholarly pedagogy in holding members of an intellectual community responsible to each other and the work on which we stand. I continue to learn from the example he has set. I have been fortunate to have gone through Cornell with some truly brilliant and warm colleagues. Xine Yao was the first fellow graduate student I remember “looking up” to because of her fierce commitment to working to better every community of which she was a part, and I have learned more from her than I probably even realize. Her friendship is one the most important things that I found at Cornell, and I continue to strive to emulate the work ethic and political ethics she models. My own work would have never dared to go to some of the places that it has without the encouragement and prodding of Marquis Bey, who has become one of my vii closest intellectual kin as well as a fiercely loving friend. And I would not have made it through graduate school or completed this project without the support of a number of people for me not only as a writer but as a whole person; thank you Kristen Angierski, Anna Waymack, Verdie Culbreath, Anna McCormick, Lanre Akinsiku, Alex Chertok, Jane Glaubman, Mee-Ju Ro, Amber Harding, Esmeralda Arrizon-Palomera , Ji Hyun Lee, Christina Black, Jessica Abel, Ezra Feldman, Brigitte Fielder, Jonathan Senchyne, Nolan Bennet, Alex Black, Nici Bragg, Emily Rials, Kaylin O’Dell, Nancy Quintanilla, Daniel Morgan, Gabriella Friedman, Katherine Thorsteinson, Nathaniel Stetson, Vincent Hiscock, Pablo Garcia Pinar, Evan Bruno, Stephen Kim, Maddie Reynolds, Noah Loyd, Becky Lu, Jessica Rodriguez, Philippa Chun, Honey Crawford, Joshua Bastian Cole, Amaris Garcia and all those who have helped me keep my sanity and think with difficult questions of violence and all that exceeds it. Additionally, my time at Cornell was enriched by so many people who have always been there to help me find my way; my deep gratitude to Michele Mannella, Corrine Bruno, Sara Eddleman, Vicki Brevetti, Kara Peet, Karen Kudej, Kathy Griffiths, Lynn Lauper, Adrienne Clay, Rob Scott, and Jessica Brewer. I have been fortunate to have built intellectual community outside Cornell as well. Thank you to Colleen Boggs, Annie McClanahan, Koritha Mitchell, Damon Sajnani, Kyessa Moore, Susan Quesal, Nirmala Vasigaren, Mina Nikolopoulou, RJ Boutelle, Yumi Pak, Paul Fess, Sean Gerrity, Cera Smith, Tyrone Palmer, and Kimberly Juanita Brown. Beyond the academy, I am grateful to my fellow decarcerators – Tali, Paula, Phoebe, Edwin, Cruz, Keeli, Erin, Joey, Sarah, Laura, Aurora, Zillah, Shari, Lily, Elan, and everyone else – who through nearly a year of ups and downs of activist and organizing work put into practice a future of the here and now.
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