The University of Chicago Black Vertigo: Attunement
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BLACK VERTIGO: ATTUNEMENT, APHASIA, NAUSEA, AND BODILY NOISE, 1970 TO THE PRESENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2019 Copyright 2019 by Lauren Michele Jackson. All rights reserved. And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some wooly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow. —Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977) Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... v Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction: Blackness in Flux .................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 Attunement in Toni Cade Bambara’s Post-Cool Blues Scenes .............................................................................. 8 I. That 70’s Feeling ......................................................................................................................... 8 II. The New Blues .......................................................................................................................... 17 III. The New Old Blues .................................................................................................................. 22 IV. Attuned to the ’70s ................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 2 Aphasia, Logorrhea, and Language (Dis)order in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ......................................... 40 I. Introducing White Aphasiology ............................................................................................ 40 II. Weathering the Weather ......................................................................................................... 47 III. Logorrhea and the Curse of Grown Folks Business ........................................................... 60 Chapter 3 A Nauséaste Noir in Hilton Als’ White Girls .............................................................................................. 69 I. Blackness Before Eyes............................................................................................................ 69 II. You and Whose Army? .......................................................................................................... 89 Chapter 4 A Noisy, Black Phatic with Two Ellisons, Kanye West, anD Nicki Minaj ........................................................ 99 I. Nausea to Vomit ..................................................................................................................... 99 II. Phatic Noise .......................................................................................................................... 110 III. The Laughter of the Rapper ................................................................................................ 115 The BravaDo Laugh ............................................................................................................................. 116 The Rapper’s Sacrifice .......................................................................................................................... 125 Bodily Noise ........................................................................................................................................ 129 Coda............................................................................................................................................................ 137 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 141 iv Acknowledgements Every study is the result of a collaboration, whether or not this is made known in its byline. The names of the many scholars and artists whose life’s work became crucial to the explication of this project can be found in the dissertation itself. Here I give my thanks to those whose touch brought this to fruition, without whom this document (and all that follows from it) could not come to pass. To Lauren Berlant, whose patience and guidance made the difficult questions irresistible, whatever format my inquiry took. I thank them for their brilliance and care, for taking this work seriously even as I wandered, for a steady glossary of pop cultural touchstones and great sense of humor. To Adrienne Brown, who has nurtured my thinking and execution from my first quarter on campus. I thank her for her keen eye and attention to the shallows and the gaps and simultaneous concern for the student behind the work. To Travis A. Jackson, I give thanks for coming along for the ride and putting the starch in my musical suspicions. To Ken Warren, a generous reader who I thank for his measured counsel and ideological sparring. I thank Jacob Harris and Brandon Truett, my closest peers and allies, for solidarity and a true life line in gossip. I thank Professor Jean-Thomas Tremblay for their friendship, genius, and empathy. I thank a number of workshops and their coordinators and attendees for receiving and tough-loving early portions of this dissertation: Medicine and Its Objects, especially Paula Martin and Camille Roussel; 20th/21st Century, especially Nell Pach, Jean-Thomas, Steven Maye, and Patrick Jagoda; and Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies, especially Marcus Lee. I thank also the fellow affiliated fellows of the Franke Institute. v For their support, for keeping all of us afloat, I thank the matchless past and present staff in the Department of English: Racquel Asante, Angeline Dimambro, Jessica Haley, Laura Merchant, Lex Nalley, and Hannah Stark. I thank Jorge Cotte, who got me on my Afro-pessimist grind, who is my biggest supporter and confidant. I thank my family—Mommy, Tom, John, and the late, great Queen Brown, my Nana—who always believed unconditionally. I thank especially my parents, Mommy and Tom, for financial assistance in leaner times. I am thankful the financial and institutional aid provided by a Mellon Humanities Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Thanks, finally, to my rambunctious U of I bunch, my necessary and ongoing dose of normal. vi Abstract Black being is vertiginous. Dizziness, loss of balance, nausea, double vision, altered speech— the medical symptomatology of vertigo resembles black aesthetics in contemporary literature and art. Octavia Butler’s Dana is “dizzy, nauseated” when she becomes a human conduit for the present afterlife of slavery; “I was going to throw up,” says Percival Everett’s Monk in the middle of the African American section of the bookstore. Beyoncé’s “Déjà Vu,” staged at the scene of the Big House, incited fans to petition her record label for a reshoot, listing problems with her “erratic, confusing and alarming” dancing body. Black being, from within and outside, feels unstable. But, as the medical and aesthetical shows, it’s more than just a feeling. “Black Vertigo: Attunement, Aphasia, Nausea, and Bodily Noise, 1970 to the Present” argues that vertigo arises as a dominant aesthetic through line to feel, think, write, and sound blackness from the late-1960s onward. Across various genres, disciplines, and aesthetic commitments, the blackness of black being—the black idiom—is gathered by disorganization and sickly ambiguity registered between local and global scales. Vertigo is produced and experienced, resisted and harnessed. It is the masterwork of white supremacist violence and advanced technologies of surveillance that subject black lives to routine disruption and upheaval by the state. It is also a matter of migration, of new ecologies and overlapping histories incompatible with linearity; it is, therefore, also a matter of culture, the indeterminacy of the “black” in black aesthetics in a landscape where black aesthetics are liable to go viral. Vertigo is also a matter of methodology, responsible for forms of black expression nimbly attuned to cultural, political, and social dizziness as an everyday state of affairs. The affective categories I examine emerge at one historical moment when the idiom for blackness is in flux. Vertigo may be found on either side of the Thirteenth Amendment, however this study takes the contemporary as its special focus. Bound by national movements of the 1950s vii and 1960s, the socio-political accord of what blackness does and how blackness feels had frayed by the start of the 1970s, ushering forth the period canonically known for fragmented politics and wayward cultural expression. I recover this moment as intensifying the sense of disorganization that would guide black aesthetics for the rest of the century and into the next. Nascent in earlier periods, the sensations I associate with vertigo come to the fore to make sense of a black being freed