Promiscuous Contextualities: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Problem of the Stereotype in the Politics of Representation
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Promiscuous Contextualities: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Problem of the Stereotype in the Politics of Representation Jason H. Morse A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Committee: Eva Cherniavsky, Chair Caroline Simpson Habiba Ibrahim Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2013 Jason H. Morse Abstract Promiscuous Contextualities: Race, Sex, Gender, and the Problem of the Stereotype in the Politics of Representation Jason H. Morse Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Eva Cherniavsky Department of English My dissertation project deals with the problem of the stereotype in the sexualized racialization of African Americans in the U.S. since Reconstruction. The stereotype has thus far been primarily understood as a social psychological problem rectifiable only by correcting stereotypes as “false” representations in people’s minds. More recently, postcolonial and performance studies have focused instead on its deconstructive “productive ambivalence” and the theoretical possibilities of critically inhabiting the stereotype in parodic, disidentificatory performance. I argue, however, that these treatments remain corrective, invested in the idea that a re-presentation of the stereotype will “correct” it (as if this correction would quell its representational powers or that a pre-existing, non-stereotypical “reality” exists), while also seeming to be inadequate for understanding the stereotype’s paradoxical efficacy in the present moment’s hegemony of post-racial, colorblind, and/or multicultural discourses that purport to have moved beyond stereotypical thinking. Promiscuous Contextualities builds upon this stereotype scholarship and insights from woman of color feminism and 1980-90s cultural studies’ theories of representation to ask questions about the stereotype’s representational intractability. Promiscuous contextualization names a reading practice that takes as axiomatic that stereotypes’ empirical correction is impossible and so focuses instead on understanding how stereotypes represent. This project looks to cultural production as a site from which to develop a reading practice that dwells not on “undoing” stereotypes, but instead on understanding how their protean, often contradictory, representational logics – including deploying historical narratives to produce ahistorical “natural” definitions, producing and simultaneously disavowing their own truth value, and fixing bodies to particular social definitions while remaining themselves adaptable to changes in social attitudes – might reveal their role in the relations of power that instigate them, and, more broadly, their role in framing relations of desire and identity formation as well as historiography and historical narrative and other forms of scholarship that focus on racial, gender, and sexual formation. To do so, this project tracks the role of stereotypes in the gendered sexualization of African Americans in the historical period between the post-Reconstruction era and the emergence of the African American Civil Rights Movement. The “American dilemma” of re- signifying black bodies from enslaved property to emancipated subjects involved a war of representation that forged America’s most dangerous and enduring stereotypes, such as the “Black Buck/Rapist” and the “Mammy.” The chapters progress as a series of interfaces between these stereotypes, how they are represented in cultural texts, and how these representations are engaged by scholars. I read these texts against the grain of their usual readings as correctives to stereotypes, readings that I argue are framed by particular understandings of stereotypes. Each chapter models a promiscuous contextualization of a cultural text while also showing how the texts perform their own promiscuous contextualizations of the stereotypes they engage. The first chapter reads James Baldwin’s Another Country as a theory and experiment in reading the “Black Rapist” stereotype that makes apparent its inescapability within relations of interracial desire. Baldwin’s promiscuous contextualization maps the circulation of the stereotype in these relations and in so doing reveals the extent to which his audience must reconcile their complicity with the way stereotypes frame their reading practice. I then read Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices as a re-narrativization of the history that defines African Americans as “Primitive” Others to U.S. progress. In his re-historicization, Wright figures men as historical agents while continuing to define Black women as the gendered, sexual stereotype of the Mammy, as the “Primitive” Others to the now-progressive Black men. Re-contextualizing this feminist reading within the documentary discourse of the U.S. state reveals the problem of trying to undo the stereotype’s historical indexicality. The final chapter understands Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching pamphlets and speeches as the conditions of possibility for later work like Baldwin and Wright. I argue that most scholarship reads Wells’s anti-lynching writings as a de-bunking the Black Rapist stereotype, which requires centering this stereotype within the lynching narrative as “truthful” in ways that Wells seems to trouble. I read Wells as using evidence from the white press to carefully disarticulate the relationship between the material practice of lynching and the “Black Rapist” stereotype in order to show how the white press produces this relationship. 1 Acknowledgements Any thanks I give for the years of support from a multitude of people can only ever be partial. First, I would like to thank my committee for the various ways they have supported me, influenced my thinking, and modeled ways of becoming a scholar during this PhD process. I would like to thank Eva Cherniavsky, my chair, for the intellectual, professional, and emotional support, advice, and reassurance without which this project and degree would never have been possible, and for being a model of how to live a rigorous and generous academic life. I would like to thank Caroline Simpson for shaping my thinking about literature and visual culture and for being a model of pedagogy and professorial performance. I would like to thank Habiba Ibrahim for her incisive questions about the project and the necessary discussions about the political, intellectual, and disciplinary framing of this dissertation and for being a model of how to be an engaged scholar and active junior faculty member. I would also like to thank the cohort of colleagues I have accreted over the course of my PhD work. I have been fortunate to have gone through this process with many incredibly smart and generous colleagues and have only benefitted from the many conversations I’ve had with them about our ideas, our pedagogy, and our other graduate student labors. Eva’s dissertation writing group (including especially Kate Boyd, Curtis Hisayasu, Jed Murr, Christian Ravela, Andrew Rose, Suzanne Schmidt, and Simón Trujillo) read most of this dissertation. Their insightful engagement with my writing helped shape its organization, its larger claims, and its details. 2 My work with Simpson Center for the Humanities-funded research groups helped me explore my ideas and ways of being in the academy, so I would like to thank them. The colloquia, reading groups, lectures, symposium, and conference I planned and executed with these groups at UW really helped me theorize and practice how to be the kind of engaged scholar I want to be, including how to productively mix research, pedagogy, and service in the university. I’d like to thank Queer Worlds for the work we did that helped me understand how to engage sexuality, especially Jessica Johnson whose intellectual camaraderie is only bested by her friendship. I’m enormously grateful for the critical intimacy I’ve cultivated with my comrades in the Race/Knowledge Project collective – Kate Boyd, Sooja Kelsey, Sydney Fonteyn Lewis, Jed Murr, Christian Ravela, Suzanne Schmidt, Pacharee Sudhinaraset, and Simón Trujillo – and the countless hours spent thinking and re-thinking ideas, critically reflecting on our positions and politics, and infecting the academy. The hours of conversation with Jane Lee about my project (and hardly ever about hers) were invaluable and changed the weft and warp of this dissertation. I would also like to thank the professors I’ve worked with in various capacities who have shaped in many ways my thinking about my project and/or about being in the academy, including Kate Cummings and Gillian Harkins who helped begin my process of thought by guiding me through my Master’s essay; my Graduate School Representative Shirley Yee, who asked one of the hardest questions during me exams that put me on a very productive historical path; and Chandan Reddy, Alys Weinbaum, and Michael Brown whose classes and conversations were instrumental in forging my way of thinking. 3 Finally, I’d like to say thank you to all my friends and family who’ve suffered through me in “dissertation mode” (perhaps Karl Frantz most of all). Finally, I’d especially like to thank my mother Nina H. Ward, MD for many, many forms of intellectual, moral, and financial support since forever and my father Thomas Hugh Morse, whose enthusiastic pride and interest in what I did seemed boundless. Seriously, thank you all. 4 Table of Contents Introduction: The Problem of the Stereotype in the Politics of Representation 5 Chapter One: Rufus’s Refusal: The Problem of the Black Rapist Stereotype