Downloads a Copy of the "Manual of Uniform Control Devices" and Constructs His Signs with the "Proper Shade of Green (Pantone 342)

Home , Possession (Byatt novel), Troubles (novel)

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Jade Becker for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on April 29, 2019.

Title: “We Share a Common Disinheritance”: Subjectivity, Dispossession, and Antiblackness in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

Abstract approved: ______Elizabeth Sheehan

Recent work in moral philosophy has displayed a renewed interest in ethics and ontology that consider the social constitution of the subject. However, these approaches to ethics, exemplified in Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, often neglect the problem of antiblackness, which Afro-pessimist scholars argue operates at the level of ontology. Through a close examination of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paul

Beatty’s The Sellout, this thesis suggests that the dispossessive violence of antiblackness presents a formidable challenge to an ethics based in relationality. This thesis also attends to the way these novels attempt to theorize black being beyond this violence.

I position these novels together because they share a common concern for the possibility of subjectivity and resistance amid a normative antiblackness. Their formal similarities also undercut narratives of racial progress in order to show that antiblack racism is a problem fundamental to modern notions of the human. While neither novel attempts to solve the problem of antiblackness, their attempts to gesture to new forms of subjectivity open the path toward more generative resistance.

“We Share a Common Disinheritance”: Subjectivity, Dispossession, and Antiblackness in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

by Jade Becker

A THESIS

submitted to

Oregon State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Presented April 29, 2019 Commencement June 2019

Master of Arts thesis of Jade Becker presented on April 29, 2019

APPROVED:

Major Professor, representing English

Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Dean of the Graduate School

I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.

Jade Becker, Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the members of my thesis committee. To Dr. Elizabeth Sheehan, thank you for your encouragement and support especially during the later stages of this project. To Dr. Raymond Malewitz, thank you for your openness in discussing the joys and challenges of research and pedagogy, and for your generative input on this project. To Dr. Anita Helle, thank you for your enthusiasm in stepping into this committee on such short notice. And to Dr. Susan Bernardin, thank you for graciously accepting to serve as my Graduate Council Representative. I would also like to thank Dr. Iyunolu Osagie for her insight, kindness, and encouragement. I wish you the very best.

I would like to thank my fellow graduate students, especially the MAs, for the support and friendship they have offered over the past two years. Special thanks to Ian Ferris, Brooke Landberg, and Bhishma Mago. My own intellectual development has been profoundly impacted by each of you (for the better, I hope!), and I thank you for your eagerness to share your lives with me.

I would also like to thank my friends and family outside of Oregon State University, without whom this project would not be possible. To Bill Jolliff, thank you for listening, asking good questions, and not pretending to know the answers. To Daniel Roberson, thank you for your willingness to speak the truth, and for your commitment to having a good time while you do it. To Ryan Lackey, thank you for your hospitality as I balanced schoolwork and a lengthy commute. And to my parents, Laurel and Karl Becker, thank you for your openness, sincerity, and empathy as I try to figure out how to live a life worth living.

Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Bree Becker, for her unceasing support at every step of this process. Thank you, also, for listening; for your patience, kindness, and joyfulness in the face of difficulty. Finally, thank you for your love.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction: The Human After Antiblackness ...... 1

Chapter 1: “You’re Nobody, Son – You Don’t Exist”: Subject Formation and the Question of Antiblackness ...... 10

Chapter 2: Refusing One’s Proper Place: Ontopology and the Promise of Home . . . . 39

Coda: Being After Dispossession ...... 66

Works Consulted ...... 69

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to Bree Becker.

Introduction

The Human After Antiblackness

In his article “Black Boys and Native Sons,” published in 1963, Irving Howe leveled a now-infamous critique of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, claiming that his decision to describe his protagonist’s experience as independent of the “‘sociology’ of his existence” represented a betrayal of Ellison’s responsibility as an African-American author to protest the unjust conditions of black life in America. Ellison, as a black novelist, had no authority to concern himself with the “human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and

American,” because the social conditions into which he was born would so profoundly affect his conception of the world (Invisible Man xxii). Howe writes, “How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried?” (Howe 354). Decades later, while getting his

M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, the novelist Paul Beatty had a similar encounter with the beat poet

Gregory Corso, who became angry after listening to Beatty’s work, telling him, “you don’t get it

– you have to be universal” (Denny).

The condemnations issued by Howe and Corso reflect a similar attitude not only about what constitutes universality but also about whose experience can be deemed to take part in the shaping of the universal. Though Corso demands of Beatty that he write “universally” while

Howe precludes that very possibility for Ellison, for both of these men the universal is not that which might be said of every human, but that which might be said of those who are to be considered humans—in this case, those who belong to the socio-political category of whiteness.

For Howe, to write independently of the social and cultural circumstances of one’s life is a capacity reserved for white authors, while for Corso, the very character of universality is whiteness. These claims reflect an implicit conflation of humanness with whiteness which

locates the subject’s capacity for universality in the possession of a white—or perhaps more accurately, nonblack—body. This exclusion, then, signifies a kind of ontological violence.

These appeals to a normative human “universal” are indicative of the fundamental problem behind most universalizing claims, which is not that they are universalizing, but that they do not accommodate all cultural particularities and are often weaponized to level judgment against those particularities they fail to recognize. In an attempt to avoid this exclusivity, recent contributions to critical theory have demonstrated a renewed concern for developing a noncoercive universal that might correct this violence, gesturing toward relationality and vulnerability as the condition for ethics for the socially constituted subject. Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself is emblematic of this approach. Returning to the scene of address as the moment of the subject’s emergence, Butler writes, “in the beginning I am my relation to you, ambiguously addressed and addressing, given over to a ‘you’ without whom I cannot be and upon whom I depend to survive” (80). This Other is never constrained to the individual immediately addressing the subject; rather, the subject is always addressing and addressed by a set of inherited norms which govern behavior, and by the language that mediates the scene of address. And because the formation of the subject is dependent on these social conditions, the scene of address, in which recognition is conferred by a real or imaginary “you,” is vital to that subject’s survival.

Thus, in the same moment that this address confers subjectivity, the operation of the social conditions constitute a kind of dispossession for the subject, a relationality that cannot be escaped. In Butler’s formulation, it is this common dispossession, and not an exclusive universality, which unifies human subjects. If the experience of subjectivity is necessarily to become vulnerable to the Other—to depend upon the Other’s recognition—then ethics must emerge from one’s understanding of oneself as profoundly and inevitably implicated in the lives

of Others. Butler insists that it is “our willingness to become undone in relation to others” that constitutes our chance at becoming human (136).

However, this celebration of vulnerability as the precondition for becoming human neglects to consider the way the violence leveled by antiblackness operates at the level of ontology, foreclosing the possibility for recognition by reducing the black body to nonhuman status. The developing field of Afro-pessimism has vigorously argued that hegemonic definitions of the human rely on a proprietorial logic which depends upon the deprivation of black humanity. Frank Wilderson suggests that the enforcement of this conception of being emerges from the institution of slavery, during which time slave owners needed to establish an ontological difference between themselves and the black bodies they had transmuted into property. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman writes that in the years after abolition whiteness remained marked as “a valuable and exclusive property essential to the integrity of the citizen- subject and the exemplary self-possession of the liberal individual” (119). In examining the celebrated writ of habeas corpus and its deployment against black bodies in the United States,

Alexander Weheliye likewise concludes that “liberal ideas of personhood and property” have been vital to the perpetuation of black exclusion in the U.S. (81). As the dominant framework has thus sought to establish selfhood through recourse to one’s possession of whiteness, so too has this proprietorial notion of humanity depended upon the simultaneous dis-possession of black subjects. This dispossessive violence materializes in the judgment leveled by Howe and

Corso insofar as it exposes the extent to which the universal has depended (and continues to depend) upon the exclusion of black experience. But unlike the dispossession that facilitates subjectivity, this antiblack violence forecloses the possibility of mutuality and recognition by depriving the black body of humanity. Rather than facilitate induction into the realm of the

human—into the universal, as it were—the black subject’s vulnerability to the Other can result in ontological annihilation.

In this respect, the fiction of Ellison and Beatty offers a more compelling engagement with the problem of black exclusion and the possibility for subjectivity. Despite the purposive exclusion of their writing from the realm of the universal, both novelists maintain a hope for expressing human experience in excess of this violence. In “The World and the Jug,” Ralph

Ellison responds to Howe’s criticism with the insistence that “American Negro life . . . is human life” (23). Likewise, in an interview with The Paris Review, Beatty concludes that “we’re still just humans creating” (Jackson). To better understand what these novelists mean by “human,” and how they hope to survive the totalizing violence of antiblackness, this thesis examines how

Ellison’s Invisible Man and Beatty’s The Sellout navigate the ambivalence of dispossession in their representations of subjectivity. Rather than deny the dispossession of the subject and seek humanity through self-possession, these novels locate the possibility for new modes of being and care in the midst of an antiblack world in the recognition of one’s implication in the lives of

Others. My use of care here emerges from the work of Christina Sharpe, who understands the term to refer to the ongoing work of survival, a kind of reciprocal solidarity and consciousness in the midst of antiblack violence. In recognizing that the subject’s survival depends upon the

Other, this form of care emerges from a willingness to be “given over” to the Other. At the same time, the subjective dispossession inflicted by antiblackness becomes the occasion for the protagonists of these novels to think about if, how, and when one might refuse this vulnerability produced by their relation to others in order to enact this care and protect the black subject from annihilation. As such, this project distinguishes between a generative dispossession that results, in certain circumstances, from the subject’s implication in the lives of Others, and the violent dispossession of antiblackness that forces the black subject outside the realm of being.

By dramatizing the possibility and violence embedded in the paradigm of dispossession,

Ellison and Beatty offer an important corrective to Butler’s notion of the subject. Additionally, in emphasizing the way these novels understand the experience of subjectivity as inevitably one of dispossession, this reading comes as a sharp contrast to traditional readings of Invisible Man, which inaccurately describe the narrator’s journey as the pursuit of a kind of Emersonian individualism, and will hopefully provide a generative starting point for future scholarly engagements with The Sellout, which has only received moderate critical attention since its publication in 2015.

Of course, neither Ellison nor Beatty are ultimately able to resolve the problem of black exclusion from the realm of the human, and this apparent but inevitable failure speaks to the non-progressive nature of post-slavery time, and unsettles narratives of racial progress which would neglect the ontological roots of antiblackness. This shared orientation to the conditions of black life in America makes their pairing in this project particularly fruitful. Despite the decades that separate Ellison’s Invisible Man and Beatty’s The Sellout, both novels are intent upon demonstrating that the very same racism that steered the slave ship, that passed the Fugitive

Slave Act of 1850, that emancipated black people from one form of enslavement only to coerce them into another, is the racism that continues to kill black women, men, and children thoughtlessly today.

Indeed, while the former takes place prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the latter frequently refers to “the black dude” in the Oval Office, closer scrutiny reveals that the discrepancies between Ellison’s New York City and Beatty’s Los Angeles County are at most superficial. For example, both of these novels situate their protagonists in the midst of a growing racial optimism. When the Invisible Man reaches New York, he is greeted by the façade of a burgeoning culture of racial equality; he finds a black police officer directing traffic at an

intersection; white New Yorkers treat him amicably as they pass one another on the street; and the honesty of the son of a New York businessman cultivates in him a hope for being seen as more than a member of his race. Likewise, The Sellout, which takes place during the Obama presidency, offers glimpses of country that is finally “moving beyond” race. The narrator recalls how Foy Cheshire proclaimed that the country “had finally paid off its debts” with the election of Barack Obama, and Beatty repeatedly invokes prominent black politicians and celebrities

(though, often, with the purpose of exposing how little power they actually wield) (Beatty 289).

Quickly, however, the dream of race-transcendence is replaced by a portrait of a pervasive antiblackness. After encountering the black police officer directing traffic, the Invisible

Man watches as black men carry leather pouches around the city, reminding him “of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang” (164). And for all the young businessman’s seeming progressivism, he ends up embodying the prototypical well-meaning

“colorblind” racist, telling the Invisible Man that “[s]ome of the finest people” he knows are

Negroes, and ultimately offering him a job as his valet (Invisible Man 190, 192). As for The Sellout, the entire novel is preoccupied with rupturing the myth that the United States has overcome racial stratification, foregrounding the “specter of segregation” in its depiction of educational, financial, and social inequalities inflicted by a normative antiblackness (168). White characters profess that they don’t see race, even as they comply with the repeated social and physical death of nonwhite characters.

What is apparent is that despite the cultural distance produced by two or three generations and a slew of Civil Rights laws, the nameless narrators of Invisible Man and The Sellout live and breathe the very same annihilating miasma of antiblackness. As such, in order to provide a suitable vocabulary for the kind of normative violence the novel’s characters endure, my analysis consults the recent work of Afro-pessimist thinkers, who understand the destruction of

black being to be the very “ground we walk on” (In the Wake 7). In its apprehension of black exclusion as normative and ontological, Afro-pessimism eschews approaches to antiracism that champion reform rather than revolution, and its commitment to imagining alternative modes of being in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery” resonates with what I have identified as one of the more important literary goals of Ellison and Beatty. 1

In order to best trace these patterns of dispossession as they take place on the pages of these novels, I have divided this thesis into two chapters. The first chapter attends to the ways

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout imagine the conditions of Black life in what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery,” demonstrating how the operation of antiblackness in the scene of address ultimately prohibits the very relationality Butler describes as emerging from the subject’s vulnerability to others (Lose Your Mother 7). Here, I utilize Calvin L.

Warren’s discussion of “black being,” which is the transformation of the black body into

“available equipment,” to describe the peculiar condition of the Invisible Man’s invisibility. I then mobilize Warren’s analysis of antiblack strategies of “outlawing” to demonstrate how this invisibility manifests in The Sellout through the narrator’s default criminalization. As black subjects beset by a normative antiblackness that pervades all areas of life, the novels’ protagonists are continually rendered as embodied nothings, stripped of their Being by their vulnerability to the violent dispossession that occurs in place of recognition. This chapter also employs Hortense Spillers’ language of the “living laboratory” to illuminate the way these characters are instrumentalized and relegated to object status at the moment of their contact with Others (68). While the unnamed narrators of these novels are similarly dispossessed by the climate of antiblackness, each gestures toward vastly different modes of thinking about survival and care in light of this subjective dispossession. In the second part of this chapter, my analysis shifts to consider the ways the Invisible Man and the Sellout respond to the spectacle of black

suffering, which constitutes an important site of subjective dispossession, as it metaphorically delivers the black body over to the witnesses of the violence. By either refusing or embracing this subjection, the narrators attempt to develop alternative modes of being to that which has been prescribed by normative antiblackness.

The second chapter of this project examines the way these novels conceive of the subject as dispossessed to his or her particular topos or physical locality. In the work of Ellison and Beatty, place becomes yet another facet of the subject’s fundamental dispossession, inextricable from the others and yet powerfully constitutive on its own. But in the same way that the black subject’s dispossession to norms, to language, and to Others results in ontological violence, so too does his or her dispossession to and by place become interrupted by the operation of a normative antiblackness, which threatens to transform both land and bodies into property to be managed and mobilized for economic and political interests. In tracing the spatial operation of this violence in the novels, I attend to the way the respective protagonists attempt to survive and then recuperate their violated relation to place. In this respect, the Invisible Man’s relation to place differs greatly from that of the Sellout. Where the Invisible Man refuses the logics of possession that construct an ideology of home, the Sellout attempts to reclaim that relation through an appeal to possession by putting his hometown of Dickens back on the map of California after it has been covertly erased. This chapter mobilizes some settler colonialist critique in order to clarify the problems wrought by a purely possessive relation to place, and to suggest that antiblackness functions along the same logics as the colonized world, which Frantz

Fanon suggests is fundamentally “a world compartmentalized” (Wretched of the Earth 15). This operation of antiblackness across place is shown to carry the same subject-killing implications of the dispossession manifested in the Invisible Man’s invisibility and in the staged subjection of

Hominy Jenkins, one of the The Sellout’s primary characters. The chapter concludes with a

consideration of how the novels attempt to resist this ontopological violence, gesturing finally to possible lines of inquiry for future study.

Most vitally, this project attempts to demonstrate the richness and limitations of dispossession as a mode of understanding subjectivity in an environment that has been ruptured by the normative violence of antiblackness. My analysis of these novels by Ellison and Beatty extends and qualifies the model of subjectivity put forward by Judith Butler by placing it in contact with the problem of antiblackness. Simultaneously, this intertextual conversation adds to previous critics’ engagements with the representations of identity formation in Invisible Man and

The Sellout by better accommodating the way they both imagine the racialized subject’s relation to his or her social conditions.

Chapter 1

“You’re Nobody, Son – You Don’t Exist”: Subject Formation and the Question of

Antiblackness

THE QUEST FOR THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Invisible Man and The Sellout have been repeatedly read as novels concerned with the narrator’s journey toward self-definition in spite of the social forces that surround them. In the case of The Sellout, which has garnered some critical attention since its publication in 2015, most of this commentary has focused on the way the novel understands the individual’s relationship to the covert racial ideology which dominates Beatty’s fictionalized Los Angeles County. In a recent article about Beatty’s satire of white privilege in The Sellout, for example, Steven

Delmagori suggests that the novel’s magnification of instances of racial oppression upon the individual level helps to illuminate the way these aggressions are always connected to broad-scale structural racism. Likewise, in a collection on African-American satire, Christian Schmidt argues that Beatty’s novel strategically dismantles conventional narratives of black racial identity through a deliberate exaggeration of those narratives. He categorizes Beatty’s style here as

“degenerative,” which is to say that he deconstructs the problem without providing an alternative, choosing instead to dwell in the discomfort caused by the current social order.

Finally, in “Home and Dwelling: Re-Examining Race and Identity Through Octavia Butler’s

Kindred and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout,” Scott Astrada traces the contradictory nature of individual identity in the novel, and notes how the narrator’s fidelity to the individual “over the confines of historical identity” makes him a traitor to the narrative of racial progress in the United States

(Astrada 117). Astrada recognizes the significance of history and historical memory in the narrator’s constitution as a subject, but this is always in tension with the narrator’s own journey toward self-identity. While these critics offer some important insights into the novel’s treatment

of race and identity, these articles also represent only the first steps toward a robust engagement with The Sellout’s depictions of subjectivity.

Similar questions about the role of the social in the constitution of the individual have been a subject of great concern for Ellison and the many scholars that have taken an interest in

Invisible Man. In interpreting his novel, Ellison suggests that Invisible Man champions a kind of

Emersonian individualism, celebrating the subject’s journey toward self-determination in the midst of the social forces that would threaten that sense of self. In an interview with The Paris

Review in 1955, Ellison insists that Invisible Man is, essentially, a “novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality,” and that the narrator’s task is ultimately to learn how to cast off the various “social role[s] he is to play as defined for him by others” and instead look within himself for enlightenment (“The Art of Fiction” 45). He insists that the central theme of American literature is the individual’s search for identity against the influences of the social; for Ellison, “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are” (41). In these words we might discern an echo of Emerson, who writes in “Self-

Reliance” that the inner voice of truth grows “faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members”

(Emerson 21). What must be sought and achieved, then, is a subjectivity sufficiently set apart from the social forces that would threaten to shape it—or unshape it, perpetrating a violent arrogation of identity against the individual.

Since then, many critics have used Ellison’s analysis of Invisible Man to inform their discussions of identity in the novel, occasionally even adopting the language of the author. In

“Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture,” for example, Morris Dickstein recapitulates

Ellison’s paradigm of passing from illusion to reality, contending that Invisible Man is not principally about “the shaping of a life, but the unshaping of illusions, and about breaking

through to a new awareness of what you can do and be” (Dickstein 40). With the help of

Ellison’s commentary, Dickstein links Invisible Man with liberal individualism, and reads the novel as a kind of allegory for the individual’s journey toward self-possession. Critics like James

Albrecht and Jack Turner have offered similar interpretations, arguing that Ellison’s novel celebrates the ideal democratic individual. As well, Albrecht points to the protagonist’s recourse to self-expression—writing the memoir—as an underlying affirmation of an expressive individualism.

Instead of present the narrator’s journey as one that ends with the achievement of some kind of inner enlightenment, however, Invisible Man often appears to undermine that as a possibility, depicting a subject always in the process of formation through various relations that comport him outside of himself. And if the novel’s structure as a memoir is meant to suggest something about the writer’s subjectivity, surely it is that the subject is fundamentally opaque and incoherent: the narrator’s recollection of events is repeatedly shown to be faulty, as he is often unable to offer a complete account of his emotions, his actions, and the actions of others.

Additionally, while Ellisonian readings of Invisible Man tend to treat racialism as a simple obstacle—an illusion to be broken through—the novel appears to gesture instead to the ways in which racialism is central to modern conceptions of the human, complicating the possibility of moving from invisibility to visibility which has often been celebrated by critics like Albrecht,

Turner, and Dickstein. In order to more faithfully interpret Ellison’s novel and its implications for the nature of the subject, we might first abandon the impulse to use the author’s words as a guide and instead attend to the trajectory of the Invisible Man’s development as it occurs in the text.

Thankfully, a comparatively small but growing number of critics are taking notice of the opacity at the center of the novel’s approach to subjectivity. Jim Neighbors’s “Plunging (Outside

of) History: Naming and Self-Possession” argues that the narrator’s desire for a stable identity is repeatedly troubled by moments of misrecognition and opacity, noting that the Invisible Man’s identity is repeatedly cast as a kind of “plunging,” of moving into “the potentially infinite play of difference—of a trembling movement of simultaneous making and unmaking” (232).

Additionally, Shelly Jarenski attends to the significance of race in the novel in “Invisibility

Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Jarenski uses the Invisible

Man’s invisibility to look beyond conventional paths toward agency and dignity, using Judith

Butler’s “abject” to explore how it offers him—and the reader—new modes of thinking about subjectivity outside of the sphere of visuality, which is easily coopted by the white hegemony.

In light of these developing critical discussions of both Invisible Man and The Sellout, this chapter argues that these novels depict the experience of subjectivity as an experience of dispossession, of being comported outside oneself by another. This dispossession, which Butler characterizes as necessary for the subject’s emergence, is frequently interrupted by a normative antiblackness, which deprives the racialized body of humanity. In other moments, however, the inevitable dispossession of the subject to the Other brings about the possibility for alternative modes for thinking about care and survival in the midst of this antiblack violence. By tracing the patterns of violence alongside the moments of generative relationality, this reading hopes to better account for the way questions of subjectivity and race are intertwined in these two novels, as well as attend to the strategies and practices used by narrators of Invisible Man and The Sellout to navigate the tension between the need for self-defense and vulnerability in the face of dispossession.

VIOLENT DISPOSSESSION AND BECOMING

From the start of Invisible Man, the selfhood of Ellison’s narrator is characterized by opacity and interruption. The first words—“I am”—recall the scene of address, and attempt to posit a self, a reliable “I” able to account for itself (Invisible Man 3). As Butler suggests, however, in making such an attempt, one already finds oneself “implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration” (8). In the act of speaking, he must submit himself to the mediation of a language he cannot own, dispossessing him of his perspective as his. His budding selfhood is also given over to those with whom he comes in contact, those who would be able to recognize and inaugurate him as a subject.

For the narrator, however, whose racialization remains implicit in this scene, this dispossession prompts not recognition, but ontological violence. When the Other refuses him even a glance, he is deprived of the very “I am” through which he attempted to enter into the scene of address (3). The Other’s poor vision places him outside the realm of being. At the same time, his attempt to explain himself to his interlocutor here results in another kind of self- splitting, reflected in his vacillation between first- and second-person perspectives. When

“bumped against by those of poor vision,” he remarks that “you often doubt if you really exist. . . . You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you” (4). Through his appeal to this generalized “you,” the

Invisible Man dramatizes DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness, wherein he sees himself always from his own eyes and from the eyes of others. He becomes simultaneously an “I” and a

“you.” And yet this “you” with whom he identifies remains distinct from the listening “you” that also dispossesses him of his stable sense of identity, creating an unresolvable sense of slipperiness as he attempts to assert a recognizable self.

His attempts to resolve the failure of the Other to see him also reinforces the inefficacy of language to assure him recognition, and thus self-identity. Moments after asserting “I am,” the listening “you” wrests control of his account away from him. The narrator must draw back, must attempt to correct the failure of the “you” to properly understand the language that he has chosen to deploy, and that, in another sense, has been chosen for him: “I am an invisible man.

No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your

Hollywood-movie ectoplasms” (3). Rather than give form to his burgeoning subjectivity, this interruption of the account undoes him further. In appealing to a common cultural history which he then defines himself against, the “I” has little recourse for being recognized by the

“you.” It is only in the third sentence of the narrator’s account that a form begins to take shape—he is “a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids”; he “might even be said to possess a mind”—but even so, his appeal to the corporeal, to flesh, does not assure him recognizability nor self-possession (3). However tangible the body may seem to be, it fails to provoke his recognition as a human being even by the man he later beats in the street.

In this way, the narrator’s invisibility, which results from his racialization, interrupts his claim to humanity. In Ontological Terror, Calvin Warren suggests that this kind of erasure is fundamental to the integrity of Western metaphysics, which is thoroughly enmeshed in antiblackness. In Warren’s formulation, in order for the human being to achieve ontological status—to “be,” in the metaphysical sense—it must be defined against nothing. For ontology, this nothing is simultaneously a terror and a necessity—it exists to not exist. In the case of modernity, it is “the Negro” that serves this “weighty, burdensome, and dangerous function” of shoring up the ideology of humanity (37). Black being, which Warren denotes with the provocative “being,” is necessarily not ontological; rather, as nothing, black being is simultaneously a terror to be eradicated and a necessary presence/absence that secures the

metaphysical value of the (white) human. In practice, black being involves the destruction of the

“primordial relation” between human and being (the relation between the flesh and body), and the reconstitution of the black as instrument (67).

By theorizing his own invisibility, then, Ellison’s narrator brilliantly anticipates this postmetaphysical formulation of being after blackness. He literalizes the violence of black being; he becomes the embodied nothing against which the white man who bumps into him defines his own humanity. In the forced severing of human and being, the Invisible Man’s body is wrested from his own control, signifying what it must for the dominant metaphysical regime. The images of (non)being that interrupt his account are objects of terror—the spook that haunts Edgar

Allan Poe, the Hollywood-movie ectoplasm. Like the Invisible Man himself, these horrors represent that which the human utilizes to secure its grasp on being. The Invisible Man comes to

“exist absolutely for the other,” as Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks (1). As an embodied nothing, the narrator becomes that necessary horror that the human requires for the preservation of the current metaphysical order.

The Prologue of The Sellout follows a remarkably similar form, as the narrator attempts to account for himself before his imagined audience. As with the Invisible Man, his account is ultimately interrupted by a normative antiblackness; however, for Beatty’s protagonist, this ontological violence manifests through the operations of law and legality upon the black body.

For Warren, the law is a crucial tool for the enforcement and regulation of ontology according to the precepts of Western metaphysics. Fundamentally, law is put in place to protect and enforce the existence of the human being (67). But because black being constitutes an embodied nothing, the law that enforces being must push it outside the realm of law. As such, Warren argues, “the essence of the law [is] nothing other than antiblackness” (64). Rather than enforcing the constitutional presumption of innocence, for example, the law renders “black being

continuously vulnerable, accessible, and uncovered” (75). And while the law attempts continuously to eradicate blackness, it cannot do so, since its relegation to the status of an object—of available equipment—is vital for shoring up the status of the human being. This strategy of deprivation, or necessary exclusion, Warren terms “outlawing” (75).

In The Sellout, the law is similarly configured as a tool for the dissemination of antiblackness. Despite taking place during the presidency of Barack Obama, whom Beatty’s narrator calls “the black dude” (likely to foreground the extent to which Obama’s racial identity absorbed all other components of his identity in the public eye), the social, political, and legal landscape of the novel’s slightly fictionalized version of the United States is shown to uphold and be upheld by a pervasive but insidious system of racial stratification (Beatty 289). As a legal subject, the narrator is repeatedly positioned in the current of the country’s history of juridical antiblackness. Awaiting trial for slave owning, he recalls the three-fifths clause, the civil rights struggle, the Dred Scott decision. Like Dred Scott, who, while appearing human was determined not to be, the Sellout himself becomes something of a “colored conundrum,” an ontological contradiction (8). And in light of the history and present of legally sanctioned black death, he remains skeptical that any legislative gesture toward equality carries any real power. He lambasts the civil rights movement’s leaders, calling them “zombies” who “would’ve called the whole civil rights thing off” if only they’d “tasted that unsweetened swill that passed for iced tea at the segregated lunch counters in the South,” and claiming that he can’t be blamed for the fact that

“the only tangible benefit to come out of the civil rights movement is that black people aren’t as afraid of dogs as they used to be” (19). For Beatty’s narrator, the law itself upholds the de facto racial segregation of the nation. He writes, “Be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you’re either citizen or slave” (6). For the Sellout, the law is imbricated in antiblackness; to appeal to it is to put one’s faith in an utterly broken system.

As such, it is through the operation of the law, which negates recognition for the black subject, that the Sellout finds himself dispossessed at the very moment he attempts to offer an account of himself. Unlike the Invisible Man’s optimistic “I am,” the Sellout’s first words already reflect his implication in the suffocating social conditions of antiblackness, which have placed him outside the realm of the human. He begins: “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything” (Beatty 3). Addressing some real or imaginary “you,” the narrator offers an account of his actions to explain how he arrived where he is. As with the

Invisible Man, his recourse to language interrupts his perspective as his, and the normative antiblackness that is the occasion for his speaking forecloses the possibility of his emergence independent of that violence. His chance of achieving a kind of recognizability is already marred by the operation of “outlawing,” through which he must still attempt to put forward a self. He assures his interlocutor that, contrary to what the climate of antiblack sentiment might suggest, he is not a criminal. As Butler’s theory of the subject concludes, these social conditions do not merely act upon the subject, they precede the subject, such that any attempt to enter the realm of being is conditioned by these inherited norms. Accordingly, the operation of this normative antiblackness, as with the Invisible Man before him, renders the Sellout an object of terror before he can get a word in; though he insists that he has neither burgled a house nor masturbated publicly, he is already outlawed, a defendant who lost his case before it began.

This procedure of outlawing is ultimately shown to constitute his very sense of self. He feels “an “omnipresent guilt that’s as black as fast-food apple pie and prison basketball,” such that being tried before the Supreme Court for reinstituting slavery and racial segregation has left him “unburdened of the racial shame that makes a bespectacled college freshman dread Fried

Chicken Fridays” (17). Rather than live in the contradiction that is the “freed black” under the dominant racial regime, simultaneously possessing and not possessing a body, the narrator seems

to suggest that his placement in state custody has, in a way, confirmed his sense of himself as nothing, as purely criminal. To be officially deprived of his rights as a citizen of the United States comes as a kind of relief for the subject whose rights have been silently taken away from the start, resolving for him “the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent” (18). By his own account, he is rendered pure function for the white hegemony.

Rather than facilitate the possibility for relationality, the vulnerability of the Sellout and the Invisible Man to these social conditions leaves them without a chance of becoming human.

Though they cannot avoid their dependence on the Other to bring about their emergence, the normative antiblackness that disrupts the scene of address makes recognition and subjectivity impossible, as the black body is transformed into available equipment. Black life becomes raw material for the maintenance and growth of state power. For both the Invisible Man and the

Sellout, to be black is to become, as W.E.B. DuBois writes, a problem (3).

VIOLENCE AGAINST THE BODY

This pattern of violent dispossession is compounded by the physical violence inflicted against the narrators in both Invisible Man and The Sellout. The Invisible Man’s reawakening in the

Liberty Paints hospital demonstrates the extent to which the exploitation of the Black body is a crucial tool for refusing black subjectivity at the moment of subject emergence. Returning to an impaired consciousness of his surroundings, the narrator finds himself in something that resembles equally a hospital and a womb. Though “sitting in a cold, white rigid chair,” he notes that he had been “laved with warm liquids, felt gentle hands move through the indefinite limits of my flesh” (231, 238). As his treatment progresses, he looks down to observe a cord being pulled from his stomach, and recoils, feeling as if “the cord were part of me” (244). The medical care he receives from the doctors is vital for his literal (and subjective) survival. Staging a classic

scene of address, one of the doctors holds up a sign to the mute narrator that reads, “WHAT IS

YOUR NAME?” to which he fails to reply (Invisible Man 239). Trying to recover his identity, he remarks, “was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body” (240). Rather, thinking “vainly of many names,” the narrator confesses that “it was though I was somehow a part of all of them, had become submerged within them and lost”

(240-241). At the site of his emergence, the Invisible Man encounters his own opacity; he describes “plunging into the blackness of [his] mind,” and wonders about the origins of his incoherent thoughts (239).

His failure to summon a coherent identity here is also suggestive of his dependence on the Other. Indeed, rather than emerge from some primordial essence, the narrator’s chance to become a recognizable self—an “I”—relies on a “you” that asks, “Who are you?” The scene in the hospital also brings to light the way the subject is always dispossessed to the immanent

Other—the Other within oneself. In the Invisible Man’s birth scene—a scene that might be read as his conception—we are given a picture of subjectivity as utterly given over to the Other.

Rather than welcome him into the realm of the human, however, his treatment by the physicians of the factory hospital ultimately inducts him into the afterlife of slavery, that post- slavery time in which “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (Lose Your Mother 6). While the Invisible

Man repeatedly claims to be human—he says, “I am a man of substance,” and, “we are all human”—the normative antiblackness that works within the scene of address forecloses his possibility of emergence and inflicts a violent dispossession upon the narrator (3, 239). When the

Invisible Man is asked during his treatment in the factory hospital, “WHAT IS YOUR

MOTHER’S NAME?” he finds himself reconfigured as the product of a machine:

Mother, who was my mother? Mother, the one who screams when you suffer—but

who? This was stupid, you always knew your mother’s name. Who was it that

screamed? Mother? But the scream came from the machine. A machine my

mother? . . . Clearly, I was out of my head. (240)

He knows his mother by her screaming; it is her public abjection that defines her as such. As well, the Invisible Man corrects the verb tense of the question in his mind, recalling Hartman’s claim that to live in the afterlife of slavery is to “lose your mother,” to be utterly disconnected from belonging (Lose Your Mother 85). So, at the site of his metaphorical and subjective birth, the

Invisible Man must turn to the screams of the machine as a kind of surrogate mother: “A machine my mother?” (240). In motherhood’s reconfiguration as machine, as the workings of a factory, we come to know the Invisible Man (and the Invisible Man comes to know himself) as product, commodity, equipment. In her groundbreaking work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,

Christina Sharpe understands these kinds of transformations to be indicative of a persistent, totalizing antiblackness born out of the advent of slavery but still operating across the country today. For Sharpe, Black life is always positioned “in the wake” of slavery, in the roiling waves that follow the slave ship as it crosses the Atlantic. Here, the Invisible Man is returned to the hold of the slave ship, where bodies were first turned into property. The hold transforms being into something else, something like cargo; as Spillers writes, “Under these conditions . . . the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver” (Spillers

67). After the slave dungeon, Middle Passage, and the coffle, Sharpe suggests, blackness is produced in yet another hold: “the birth canal” (74). With the help of the hospital, he is born “in the belly of the state,” a victim of the “long dehumaning project” of the wake (74).

At the same time, he endures electric shocks while shackled to the rigid white chair, as if made a prisoner from the very moment of his figurative rebirth. In the Invisible Man’s re-

emergence in the hospital room, the language of birth becomes contiguous with that of death as he is tortured and imprisoned by the physicians. Where previously he had been described as a newborn baby, here he becomes a death-row inmate. As the crew of doctors prepares to administer what may be shock therapy, the narrator notices that his “head was encircled by a piece of cold metal like the iron cap worn by the occupant of an electric chair” (233). As he stumbles in and out of consciousness, the white doctors who treat him also comply with the logic of the hold, ushering him into nonbeing. One doctor wonders aloud if cures that would be effective for “a New Englander with a Harvard background” would actually work in this more

“primitive” case (236). Another suggests that they try castration (236). And when they apply the electric shock to the narrator, they joke excitedly, “Look, he’s dancing . . . They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!” (237). This scene returns the Invisible Man to the

“womb in which the slave was born . . . a factory,” and exposes the extent to which the current order of being depends upon the exclusion of blackness (Lose Your Mother 111).

Beatty’s narrator similarly merges calculated physical violence with a scene of subject emergence. The Sellout’s childhood is predominantly characterized by bodily and mental abuse by his social-scientist father, who called his childhood home “the Skinner Box” and treated his son like a “gangly, absentminded black lab rat” (Beatty 27). Under his dubious care, the narrator becomes the subject of a variety of sociological experiments, many of which result in his being tortured, beaten, or otherwise seriously injured. Ironically, in his father’s attempts to prove black people’s cognitive capacities are equal to those of white people, he effectively inducts his son into the condition of black being, transforming him into available equipment.

As if to recall the rebirth scene in the factory hospital in Invisible Man, the narrator of The

Sellout recounts how his father used him to adapt the Milgram Experiment, in which test subjects were asked to administer electric shocks to another participant when they answered a question

incorrectly in order to test their obedience to authority figures. Rather than administer a shock to some anonymous Other, however, in his father’s version of the experiment the narrator is placed before a mirror, and told to deliver the shock to the “stupid nigger” in the mirror whenever he answers a question incorrectly (31). In this way, the episode clearly recalls Lacan’s mirror stage, which serves as a foundational moment of subjectivity, signifying the child’s simultaneous identification with the image and self-alienation from the world (Lacan 76). As such, the experiment serves not only to test his “servility,” as his father suggests, but is also framed as a formative moment in the narrator’s emergence as a self-conscious subject. As his father observes the experiment, he refers to his son as “the subject,” and, upon answering a question incorrectly, the narrator identifies himself in the image: “I watched myself in the mirror jitterbug violently for a second or two” (32). For Lacan, this passage through the mirror stage signifies one’s entrance into the realm of language and the symbolic order, and requires a sacrifice of that pre-symbolic sense of being. It is a moment of being given over without one’s consent, and so, in this respect, the child’s first experience of subjectivity becomes one of dispossession. For Beatty’s narrator, the trauma of this identification via dispossession is amplified by the antiblackness that mediates his vision of the boy in the mirror. His father wears a “Ronald Reagan Halloween mask,” holding him in tension between two possible identifications—that of the “white authority figure” who purports to be his father, and the image of the boy in the mirror whose only function here is to be punished, violated, and reviled

(31). He becomes like the Antillean schoolboy who identifies himself with the “civilizing colonizer, the white man who brings truth to the savages” (Black Skin, White Masks 126). Yet in the same moment, the image in the mirror which is meant to provide the point of identification becomes an embodied nothing, confirmed by the narrator’s repeated obedience to his father’s commands to press the button. He remarks that he willingly self-administered the shock because

he, like his father, “was curious. [He] wanted to see what happens when you bequeath a ten- year-old black boy to science” (33). For both the narrator and his father, the black body becomes mere equipment, ontologically empty and utterly vulnerable to violation. In the same way that the torturous treatment of the Invisible Man inaugurated his rebirth, the narrator’s experience of emergence as a self-conscious subject is as much one of birth as it is of disembodiment and violence.

Tracing the interruptions of the normative in the scene of address in both Invisible Man and The Sellout offers a clearer sense of the way these novels dispense with the self-possessed subject in favor of a dispossessed subjectivity. However, as the normative ontology is ultimately shown be upheld by the exclusion of blackness from the realm of being, these novels also provoke an important qualification for Butler’s celebration of vulnerability. As Ellison and

Beatty demonstrate, the self-dispossession leveled by this antiblackness does not lead to subjectivity, but instead relegates their respective narrators to the status of objects.

SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE IN INVISIBLE MAN

While these novels thoroughly explore the multiple registers of the exclusionary dispossession of antiblackness, their responses to this dispossession vary greatly. And while neither are ultimately able to resolve the problem, their attempts to think about mutual care and survival amid this exclusion hold the potential to reimagine being beyond antiblack, proprietorial definitions of the human. In addition to tracing these moments of genuine subversion, the following sections in this chapter will also attend to those occasions when the narrators of these novels risk reaffirming the logic that perpetuates antiblackness in the first place.

As a member of the Brotherhood, the Invisible Man delivers several speeches that attend to the reality of this violence while offering some tentative paths forward. These speeches do not

allow the Invisible Man to somehow transcend his opacity and vulnerability as a subject; instead, they showcase the way he attempts to strategically inhabit and refuse the space of dispossession to imagine new modes of being in the wake of antiblackness. Rather than give himself up to the violence that has characterized his experience so far, as an orator the Invisible Man advocates for a renewed relationality between himself and his audience that emerges from his vulnerability to the Other and ultimately leads to mutual care.

Critics have often read the Invisible Man’s speeches as deceptive, in part because of his affiliation with the Brotherhood, as well as his peculiar inability to know exactly what he means as he speaks. In Ralph Ellison and the Politics of the Novel, for example, H. William Rice considers the Invisible Man to be a “charlatan . . . manipulating audiences with the oldest snake oil in the book: rhetoric” (9). He also suggests that his speeches afford the narrator a kind of visibility that does not exceed narcissism, and that it is only in his decision to retreat underground to write that he becomes invisible. For Rice, the Invisible Man’s speeches—in particular, the speech he delivers at Tod Clifton’s funeral—are mere reproductions of the Brotherhood’s existentially violent instrumentalization of the people (40).

To be sure, the Invisible Man does not totally escape the tendency to treat the death of

Clifton as an opportunity. Prior to delivering the speech, he considers whether or not he could spin the young man’s death to facilitate the growth of the Brotherhood. Clifton’s death (and subsequent funeral) are scandals to many: murdered by a police officer in the street while peddling Sambo dolls, he is dismissed by the members of the Brotherhood as a traitor.

Organizing the funeral, the narrator considers that despite the “betrayal” committed in the selling of the dolls, the Brotherhood “had to make the most of what we had” in order to attract

“lost members back into the ranks” (448). When the Brotherhood confronts him about his decision to honor Clifton with a funeral, he justifies his decision by telling them, “We had lost

our prestige in the community. I saw the chance to rally the people, so I acted” (466). In these remarks he appears to recapitulate the instrumentalizing violence of antiblackness.

Similarly, his first speech for the Brotherhood, in which he addresses the dispossessed

(non)residents of Harlem, initially bears all the signs of re-creating the logic of the hold; that is, of transforming (predominantly) black subjects into raw materials. The venue is lined with police, suggesting the Brotherhood’s essential distrust of the people; Brother Jack addresses the crowd “like a bemused father listening to the performance of his adoring children” (later the

Invisible Man will accuse him of being their “great white father”) (340, 473); the narrator remarks that he feels “as remote as though I stood in the highest balcony looking on” (339). At first there is the appearance of unity—“the audience seemed to have become one, its breathing and articulation synchronized”—but this is like the false unity that emerges in the hold, in the relegating of many people to one reduced identity: the crowd, available equipment (340). The possibility of reciprocal recognitions is curtailed by the brightness of the lights, which obscure the audience from the speaker’s view, and the narrator once again is returned to the hold (341).

The light was so strong that I could no longer see the audience, the bowl of human

faces. It was as though a semi-transparent curtain had dropped between us, but through

which they could see me—for they were applauding—without themselves being seen. I

felt the hard, mechanical isolation of the hospital machine and I didn’t like it. (341; emphasis mine).

Here, we observe echoes of what Sharpe calls the orthography of the wake, those strategies and tactics used to reconfigure black being to nothing. We are returned to the scene of the narrator’s rebirth by and into the machine, where his being was rearranged as commodity, materials to be utilized. The members of the audience, as victims of the hold, become a “bowl of human faces” to be consumed, put on display, or held onto for later use (341). And while the

“semi-transparent curtain” that falls between the Invisible Man and his audience is clearly

evocative of W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of the veil, here it affords him no second sight; instead, it serves only to obscure the audience’s vision. Unable to see the audience, he must address “the microphone and the cooperative voice before [him]” (342). As a result, the Harlemites who attend the event are excluded from the scene of address, deprived of the possibility of subjectivity. It is only through the assertion of a single voice from the audience, who responds and serves as interlocutor to the Invisible Man’s speech, that the performance can move in any way beyond the erasure inherent to the structure, setting, and organization of the event.

However, just as the perverse relation established through antiblackness breaks with relationality and renders the black body an object to be utilized, so too do the demands that the

Invisible Man maintain a consistent self-identity lead “to an ethical violence that knows no grace of self-acceptance or forgiveness” (Giving An Account 135). Rather than discount the Invisible

Man’s orations because they fail to totally transcend the logics of antiblackness that condition his existence, I endeavor here to acknowledge these failures while delineating the way the speeches themselves both recognize the logic of the wake and refuse the naturalization of black subjection. While acknowledging and existing within the purview of a normative antiblackness, the narrator-as-speaker refuses the spectacle of black death, and practices a form of care that emerges from an awareness of his inevitable implication in the lives of Others. Out of this orientation emerges the acceptance of a shared dispossession, and a commitment to resist the persistent erasure of black life.

His project of imagining Black life beyond the totalizing ontological violence of antiblackness begins with conscious recognition that it is continually in process. He takes these dispossessions to be normative, “the ground we walk on” (In the Wake 7). He tells his rapt audience, “These are the days of dispossession, the season of homelessness, the time of evictions” (Invisible Man 343). Saidiya Hartman echoes these words in her journey to the slave

forts in Ghana when she writes that “the experience of slavery had made us an us . . .

Dispossession was our history” (Lose Your Mother 74). And while in these lines the Invisible Man is literally addressing the pattern of encroachment that has left his audience homeless, the ontological implications of dispossession emerge in his commentary on the normative subjection that comprises the everyday lives of black people in Harlem:

They’ve got a slogan and a policy, they’ve got what Brother Jack would call a ‘theory

and a practice.’ It’s “Never give a sucker an even break!” It’s dispossess him! Evict

him! Use his empty head for a spittoon and his back for a door mat! It’s break him!

Deprive him of his wages! It’s use his protest as a sounding brass to frighten him

into silence, it’s beat his ideas and his hopes and homely aspirations into a tinkling

cymbal! A small, cracked cymbal to tinkle on the Fourth of July! (342-343)

In the eyes of the Invisible Man, these material dispossessions point to the transformation of blackness into utter vulnerability in order to uphold the current order of Being; this is not an anomaly, but a crucial element in the operation of U.S. democracy. The black person is violently reshaped with an empty head and a door-mat for a back. He is remade by this violence “to tinkle on the Fourth of July”—to be afraid at the sound of independence—which clarifies the integral role blackness plays in the constitution of the white American (343).

The solution to this relegation to nonbeing, however, cannot be achieved through recourse to acquisition or inclusion. Reclaiming the capacity to possess from those bent on dispossession merely affirms the structures that justify that dispossession in the first place

(Moten and Harney 17). As Alexander Weheliye claims, attempting to regain one’s humanity in the eyes of the state ultimately reifies the state’s definition of that humanity (Habeas Viscus 81).

In other words, political resistance based in the hope for inclusion may appear to disrupt the

“acquisitive violence” of dispossession, but on a fundamental level they reflect an agreement

with the logic that justifies the dispossession of the Invisible Man and his audience, equating personhood with property and humanity with whiteness (Moten and Harney 17).

Rather than succumb to the promise of inclusion, then, the Invisible Man’s method of self-defense consists not in the reclamation of a lost humanity necessarily, but in an insistence upon collective care in the midst of these patterns of dispossession. For the Invisible Man, antiblackness has perpetrated a dispossession of sight: “they’ve dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we’re born. So now we can only see in straight white lines” (343). We might read these “straight white lines” as simultaneously the pattern on a prison jumpsuit and the prescribed path to freedom under the climate of antiblackness. In the theft of sight, the enemy’s strategy is hegemony itself, what Antonio Gramsci refers to as the manufacturing of consent, dictating the limits of what is possible. As such, the Invisible Man asserts, “Let’s take back our pillaged eyes! Let’s reclaim our sight; let’s combine and spread our vision. Peep around the corner, there’s a storm coming. Look down the avenue, there’s only one enemy. Can’t you see his face?” (344). Rather than emphasize the potential of the individual to achieve humanhood, the narrator here gestures toward the survival of this violence through a renewed consciousness or, to use Sharpe’s term, “wakefulness” (4).

This emphasis on renewed consciousness and mutual care inaugurates a kind of thinking about identity that moves beyond the possessive or “acquisitive” self that undergirds the individualism of antiblackness. The Invisible Man’s idea of a reciprocal gaze as a form of subjective self-defense nods to the subject’s opacity and vulnerability to the Other, and it is out of this opacity—out of the subject’s limited self-knowledge—that there emerges the possibility for an ethics. Further, this reclamation of sight yields a moment of transference between the audience and the narrator, who feels he has “become more human” with the audience’s eyes upon him. Suddenly aware of his implication in the lives of the people in the audience, the

constitution of the narrator changes. He becomes “someone new . . . transformed” (353). As he realizes later, it is this mutually constitutive relation that saved him from “disintegration” (353).

We see a reiteration of this approach in the Invisible Man’s attention to black life and suffering in his speech at Tod Clifton’s funeral. In his address to the funeral procession, the

Invisible Man accepts dispossession as a condition of life but refuses the logics of the hold which would make black suffering a spectacle. As Hartman argues, dramatized scenes of black suffering often simply “immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity,” facilitating self- reflection on the part of the viewer rather than care (3). And despite their purpose to prompt empathy and identification, they ultimately serve to evacuate the sufferer of their humanity in the eyes of observers and naturalize the condition of black suffering. In his address to the procession, the narrator acknowledges this pattern, telling them Clifton’s death is “an old story,” that it “was perfectly natural” (456-457). Clifton’s crime was that he “thought he was a man and that men were not to be pushed around. . . . he forgot his history” (457). The phenomenon of black death constitutes the order of being under which the Invisible Man and the funeral procession must live. However, rather than repeat the ontological violence that would transform

Clifton into an object of pity, the narrator sharply criticizes the tendency to make the suffering of black bodies a spectacle to be enjoyed. He asks, “What are you waiting for me to tell you?

What good will it do? What if I say that this isn’t a funeral, that it’s a holiday celebration, that if you stick around the band will end up playing ‘Damit-the-Hell the Fun’s All Over’? . . . Go home, he’s as dead as he’ll ever die” (454). Clifton’s death was “a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world” (458). In his condemnation of the public’s pleasure in Clifton’s suffering, the Invisible Man does not deny the pattern of ontological violence, but instead attempts to re-see Clifton in light of the operation of this violence. Invoking Clifton’s name repeatedly, recounting his physical and

personal particularities, and reclaiming his cause of death from the state, the Invisible Man offers an “account counter to the violence of abstraction” which denies the dehumanization inflicted by police violence (In the Wake 131).

The hold of the slave ship manifests again in the shape of Clifton’s coffin, that “box with the bolts tightened down” (458). In the Invisible Man’s address, this imprisonment becomes a metaphor for post-slavery death-in-life: “He’s in the box and we’re in there with him, and when

I’ve told you this you can do. It’s dark in this box and it’s crowded. It has a cracked ceiling and a clogged-up toilet in the hall. It has rats and roaches, and it’s far, far too expensive a dwelling”

(458). Conflating the coffin with the tenement buildings in Harlem, the Invisible Man understands that “to be Black is to be continually produced by the wait toward death”; the coffin, the hold, is an inhabitation that all too easily becomes totalizing (In the Wake 88). And yet he asks that his listeners attempt to imagine what exists beyond or outside that death: “Tod

Clifton is crowded and he needs the room. ‘Tell them to get out of the box,’ that’s what he would say if you could hear him. ‘Tell them to get out of the box and go teach the cops to forget that rhyme. Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire’” (Invisible Man 458). We might read this exhortation, then, as a call to continually refuse the associations of blackness, subjection, and violence.

In sharp contrast to the inhuman and malleable mass of listeners the Invisible Man imagined himself addressing at the start of this speech, this moment inaugurates the dissolution of the crowd and the emergence of “the set faces of individual men and women” (459). As the procession attends to the dead, the Invisible Man’s sense of failure for not having touched upon any “political issues” in his speech transforms into vulnerability and impressionability. This moment is fleeting—a mere paragraph later, he reflects that “the crowd’s emotion had to be organized”—but in its brevity we might understand better the extent to which the Invisible Man

cannot transcend his own opacity even as he intends to care for the people who have been forced to live in the “box with the bolts tightened down” (460, 458). However, in the spontaneity and fervor of his momentary recognition of the faces in the crowd, we might recognize his (albeit compromised) goal of imagining a kind of being beyond antiblackness to be miraculous but possible.

In refusing to re-create the spectacle of black death, the Invisible Man effectively disrupts the logic of antiblackness while attending to the dead and dying. In the prevailing atmosphere of the wake, his speech troubles the logics that uphold responses of sustained mourning and outrage, which ultimately lead to the naturalization of suffering. Rather than instrumentalize and thus further dispossess Clifton of his subjecthood, in this scene we witness a re-seeing of black life that exists within but exceeds the metaphysical violence of antiblackness.

Here, Ellison offers a glimpse of what it means to exist within the “disaster and possibility” of post-slavery life (In the Wake 134).

INHABITING HORROR IN THE SELLOUT

Where the Invisible Man attempts to navigate violent dispossession by imagining relations of solidarity and mutual care, The Sellout offers a strikingly different portrait of what it means to rupture and inhabit this space of subjective dispossession. In its preoccupation with its characters’ positions in relation to “the past that is not yet past,” the novel revitalizes antiblack tropes as a way to bring attention to the ideological forces that have come to internally structure their consciousnesses (In the Wake 9). Concerned with addressing similar mechanisms of black exclusion and dehumanization, The Sellout diverges in its vision from that of Invisible Man, opting instead to give shape to the various mechanisms of antiblackness that have become “invisible” in the excitement for a “post-racial” future. Where continued racial segregation in schools has been

rationalized by nonracial terms—geography, socio-economic status, cultural differences—

Beatty’s narrator chooses to stage the construction of a new whites-only school. Where these same terms are used to justify wealth inequality and social exclusion, the narrator places “whites only” signs on buses and storefronts. In this way, Beatty’s narrator hopes to expose the mechanisms of antiblack racism and foreground their absurdity so that they might be dismantled.

That said, the novel’s attempt at disrupting the dispossessive logics of antiblackness ultimately risk folding back into that violence. The Sellout’s dissimulation of conventional narratives of blackness often involves the resuscitation of antiblack tropes—and occasionally the wholesale absorption of characters into those tropes—without offering viable strategies for self- defense or alternative kinds of self-making. As a way of understanding Black being-for-others, in the sense that Fanon describes it, the embodiment of these reductions and stereotypes by the characters in The Sellout cultivates a sense of post-slavery subjectivity as utterly self- dispossessed—violently, eagerly given over to social and historical conditions from the start, and these ironic representations are fraught with questions of audience, pleasure, and performance.

Beatty’s experimentation with the severity of black self-dispossession manifests most clearly in Hominy Jenkins, who is introduced and developed throughout the novel as a man whose subjectivity has been utterly constituted by the dominating force of antiblackness. Now retired from acting, Hominy began his career with the Little Rascals, as Buckwheat’s understudy and the show’s “stunt coon” (Beatty 71). The subject of violence masquerading as comedy,

Hominy’s blackness served as the raw material for the show’s “slapstick racism,” but also resulted in his being edited out of the final cuts of the most racist episodes (71). The violence

Hominy bears in his performances manifests in the demand for him to embody what Sianne

Ngai describes as a “racialized animatedness,” a kind of hyper-emotionality or -zealousness that

establishes the black subject as particularly vulnerable to external control (Ngai 95). In one episode, titled “Frankly, Ben Franklin,” Hominy is attached to a kite and zapped by lightning in an experiment to discover electricity. In other episodes (many which did not air), Hominy is doused with “sunny-side-up eggs, paint, and pancake flour avalanches” (71). In the show, he speaks excitedly, his few lines the punchlines of jokes that reinforce his racialization. Because this animatedness emphasizes the racialized subject’s corporeality and emotionality, Ngai argues that it ultimately serves to shore up notions of race as a biological reality rather than a political category (95). In his instrumentalization by the cast, Hominy returns us to Warren’s notion of black being, the transformation of the black body into raw materials for producing the human as white. Like the Invisible Man and the Sellout, Hominy becomes “a living laboratory,” that space in which “we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between human personality and cultural institutions”

(Spillers 68). In this process of utter objectification, Hominy is dispossessed of subjectivity, and is rendered in and through the orthography of the wake.

Hominy continues to perform this animatedness into his adult life, which would suggest that Beatty’s use of the affect is meant to highlight the way Hominy’s psychology remains affected by the social conditions that surrounded his upbringing—that “the past is not yet past”

(Lose Your Mother 18). Beatty’s novel is also careful to situate Hominy’s animatedness in relation to previous discourses and representations, demonstrating that it is not essential, but merely a foregrounding of the way the subject is historically constituted. When Hominy pretends to faint from the pleasure of eating an orange, the narrator remarks that there must have been “some of both the old vaudevillian and the stunt coon still left in him” (Beatty 188). And after rescuing him from a suicide attempt, the narrator describes Hominy’s “minstrel smile, pearly white, wide and servile, beaming blankly at me” (76). He remarks that Hominy became “[u]nable to

distinguish between himself and the corny ‘I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave’ trope” (77). By emphasizing the way Hominy’s affect recapitulates blackface minstrelsy, Beatty’s narrator aims to demonstrate how the normative antiblackness that shapes representations of African-Americans continues to permeate Hominy’s sense of self. Hominy thus serves as a reminder of the subjective dispossession at the center of the production of blackness.

Given the extent to which Hominy’s blackness is shown to be performative, questions of audience, performance, and enjoyment become all the more urgent. Beatty’s depiction of

Hominy is clearly meant to underscore the way antiblackness infiltrates the consciousness of its victims, but the novel remains largely complicit with this subjective violence by restraining him to that abject state. Most notably, the novel frequently and humorously recounts scenes in which violence against Hominy is graphic and burdened with pleasure. Shortly after Hominy’s appointment as the narrator’s slave, the narrator finds him “standing in [his] front yard, shirtless and barefoot and lashed to the curbside mailbox, demanding that [he] whip [him]” (78). After some deliberation, the narrator does so, and, it is implied, with some degree of pleasure. He remarks that it ended up taking “three sheriff’s deputies to pull me off his black ass” (78).

What’s more, Beatty proceeds to describe the violence in his characteristically dazzling prose. He writes,

I’ll never forget the sound of my leather belt against the Levi Strauss denim as I

unsheathed it from my pants. The whistle of that brown-and-black reversible whip

cutting through the air and raining down hard in loud skin-popping thunderclaps on

Hominy’s back. The teary-eyed joy and the thankfulness he showed me as he

crawled, not away from the beating but into it; seeking closure for centuries of

repressed anger and decades of unrequited subservience and begging me to hit him

harder, his black body welcoming the weight and sizzle of my whip with groveling

groans of ecstasy. I’ll never forget Hominy bleeding in the street and, like every slave

throughout history, refusing to press charges. (79)

Here, Beatty draws striking connections between the plantation romance and the formation of a post-slavery subjectivity. But rather than counter the violence of abstraction and objectification found in plantation romance, in which the evils of slavery are erased and replaced with portraits of slaves enjoying their oppression, Hominy is rendered almost entirely through these abstractions, these resuscitated stereotypes. Along with his configurations into the minstrel and the “stunt coon,” Hominy now becomes the slave contented with his subjection. In his depiction as pure stereotype, we might read along with Christina Sharpe in Monstrous Intimacies that “[t]hese formalized reductions, these would-be stereotypes seem to point away from those enslaved persons who wrote or narrated their own stories of slavery and escape and instead . . . point to those enslaved people who appear as so many black forms in the background of those narratives as well as in other anti- and pro-slavery texts” (156). Rather than recall the actual history of black people under the institution of slavery, Hominy is used to revive the white imagination of blackness, and his projection out of this imagination further entrenches his belonging to the space of nonbeing. And so, despite the signs that direct us to think of

Hominy’s blackness as performance, his enthusiastic revival of antiblack stereotype risks gesturing toward a naturalized subjection, a man for whom exclusion is, perhaps, right. The extremity of the cruelty on display in these scenes becomes what Christina Sharpe calls “an uncanny pleasure,” and prompts witnesses to look and look again, further reinforcing notions of the black body as equipment to be manipulated, enjoyed, and subjected (Monstrous Intimacies 160).

On the other hand, Hominy may be said to exercise a new form of agency by performing this highly exaggerated racialized identity. His apparent enjoyment of his brutalization suggests that he is performing slavery “in drag,” his parody of the plantation slave identity bringing into

question the notion of an original or authentic identity behind the performance (Gender Trouble

138). Ultimately, however, this reading of Hominy’s racialization is worthy of some concern, as

Butler herself suggests in her discussion of drag that “[p]arody by itself is not subversive” (139).

In the encounter with the parodic performance, one must be careful not to celebrate those performances which “become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (139). Indeed, I argue that reading Hominy Jenkins as a racial drag performer risks recapitulating the same antiblack logic which transforms the reality of black suffering into an abstracted occasion for self-reflection and enjoyment for the white viewer. After all, the gaze that is entertained by this representation must also be considered, and prompts us to ask whether or not pretending to agree with a force so pervasive as antiblackness always ends up becoming actual agreement. At publication, The Sellout was marked by widespread critical acclaim; the novel was awarded the Man Booker Prize, and the vast majority of reviewers have praised it for its Swiftian mode of satire and its biting commentary on racism in the United

States. However, many of their responses to Hominy reflect the same kind of “uncanny pleasure” of looking and looking again at black subjection (Monstrous Intimacies 160). In his review for The Sellout, literary critic Derek Maus performs the kind of instrumentalization that Hartman warns against, calling Hominy a “conceptual grotesquer[y]” that we must “grapple with” (955).

Likewise, Leland Cheuk, a reviewer for Prairie Schooner, calls the scene of Hominy’s graphic beating “outrageously funny” (174). So, while Hominy’s reification of antiblack tropes through his animatedness and subjection offer a striking illustration of the afterlives of slavery as they continue to rupture the present, we might ask if the pleasure Beatty’s work evokes in readers threatens its ability to resist or think outside of those ruptures, effectively folding back into a vision of post-slavery subjectivity as defined by its violation. This is not to advocate for a return to representations that advocate for social inclusion in favor of demonstrating the conditions of

black life in the afterlives of slavery. Rather, it is to suggest that we investigate alternate “modes of attending to Black life and Black suffering,” imagine what exists in excess to or beside the wake left by transatlantic slavery while simultaneously acknowledging the way it continually relegates Black life to the status of nonbeing (22).

In this regard, Ellison’s Invisible Man offers more generative—if still fleeting— approaches to the problem of the antiblack dispossession, imagining new modes of being that emerge from one’s implication in the lives of Others while refusing the mechanisms that would exploit that inescapable relation. Beatty’s novel, on the other hand, appears to rely upon the magnification of that exploitation; as such, it leaves us with characters who are all but lost in the patterns of subjection it attempts to critique. Additionally, in their shared concern about the possibility of selfhood in the wake of antiblack racism, these novels provoke an important revision for Butler’s paradigm of subjectivity, suggesting that one’s vulnerability to dispossession must also be tempered with strategies of refusal and self-defense.

Chapter 2

Refusing One’s Proper Place: Ontopology and the Promise of Home

As the previous chapter argued, post-slavery subjectivity is inevitably constituted by processes of violent dispossession, which break with the relationality of recognition and transform the black body into raw materials to be manipulated or destroyed. This is the metaphysical holocaust brought on by ontology, which depends upon an enforced “not seeing” of blackness (Warren 71). The invisibility of the Invisible Man—or of Hominy Jenkins, whose selfhood becomes a mirror for the white imagination—suggests that the antiblack world’s refusal to see results in his own failure to be. The subject is inevitably given over to the Other in the scene of address—a dispossession that, under the normative antiblackness of twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States, has disastrous results. When the possibility for recognition is foreclosed by the operation of the “epidermal racial schema,” relationality is unevenly withheld, and the post-slavery black subject is rendered an embodied nothing (Black Skin, White Masks 92).

As Warren writes in Ontological Terror, this form of black being (which he writes as black being) emerges not through a granting of being, but through its execration. For Warren, blackness “is” nothing.

The role of place, however, cannot be neglected in examining the fundamentally relational conditions of subjectivity. If the emergence on the subject is facilitated through an encounter with the Other, then the physical locality one occupies and by which one is surrounded must also be understood to be integral to that subject’s emergence. In the same way that the subject cannot be understood independently of its relation to a set of impersonal, inherited norms that govern that subject’s recognizability, so would it be impossible to understand the subject without a consideration of the relation to the impersonal, inherited physical world that, in a literal sense, makes possible its very breathing. In Dispossession: The

Performative in the Political, an exploratory meditation on the role of dispossession in the enactment of hegemonic control, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou suggest that just as the self is contingent on its relation to others, it achieves its shape largely in relation to its geographic locality, as well (18). In Specters of Marx, Derrida identifies this connection between the

“ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, . . . the topos,” with the term “ontopology”

(103). Insofar as any identity can be said to exist, then, it is understood to be contingent not only on the body, the mind, the Other, but also on the physical place it occupies and, in the case of something like national identity, appropriates. In his elaboration of the role of topos in

Heidegger’s contemplations of being, Jeff Malpas likewise remarks upon the importance of place in any formulation of one’s being and identity, its being-there (7). According to Mishuana

Goeman, the cultivation of cultural identity emerges from an understanding of place as “a meaning-making process rather than a claimed object” (72). The subject’s “[e]xperiences of land become expressions of the self” (75). We see this intimacy between place and self rendered beautifully in the prologue to Invisible Man, where the narrator describes his subterranean retreat allows him to better feel his “vital aliveness” (7). Or, in The Sellout, where the olfactory “Stank” of Dickens is a marker not only of location but of identity, even after the town is officially erased from the map (113).

When the subject’s implication in place is ignored or exploited, processes of physical dispossession and land encroachment signify not only a physical uprooting, but an ontological uprooting, as well. Unsurprisingly, for Frantz Fanon the regulation and deprivation of space constitute the primary mechanisms by which colonial control is exerted. The colonial world is fundamentally “a world compartmentalized,” operating along logics of containment and dislocation that render the black subject inhuman (Wretched of the Earth 15). By establishing boundaries and regulating movement within and across those boundaries, the situation of the

colony produces the colonized subject, “a man penned in” (17). Athena Athanasiou argues that it is ultimately this strategy to relegate each subject to his or her “assigned proper place” that defines late-modern hegemonic power, no less in antiblack and colonial regimes (22). Fanon’s portrait of the colonized sector is an image of containment, but also of a people excluded from being, re-made in the image of the place they are forced to occupy:

You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with

no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly

together. The colonized’s sector is the famished sector, hungry for bread, shoes, coal,

and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its

knees, a sector that is prostrate. It’s a sector of niggers, a sector of towelheads.

(Wretched of the Earth 4)

The dispossession inflicted by this calculated uprooting not only illustrates the cruelty of colonial occupation, but also the inescapable intimacy between place and the possibility of subjectivity.

Fanon is not alone in understanding this: Saidiya Hartman recalls this near-apocalyptic scene when she tours the barracoons in Ghana, in which all is reduced to blood, earth, and shit;

Christina Sharpe when she recognizes in the prison system a “land based slave ship”; C.L.R.

James in his genealogy of the confinement of those earliest slaves in the Americas (In the Wake

75).

BEING AND PLACE IN INVISIBLE MAN AND THE SELLOUT

In light of this ontopological dimension of subjectivity, and the creative means by which ontology refuses to see blackness, this chapter extends the portrait of Invisible Man and The Sellout offered in the previous chapter by examining the way these novels attend to the subject’s relation to place, and how instances of material and spatial dispossession are shown to signify a

serious ontological violence but also afford the black subject an opportunity for generative resistance. Confronted by the dislocation of place perpetrated by dominant antiblack social and political structures, the nameless narrators of both novels are compelled to seek alternatives to normative logics of home and property. In the case of Invisible Man, this resistance takes the form of a kind of evasion, as the narrator’s underground dwelling allows him to exist beyond the purview of the law.

In sharp contrast to the Invisible Man’s approach, Beatty’s narrator insists upon recognition by the state, engineering compelling strategies for reclaiming a sense of home for the disenfranchised black people of the fictional city of Dickens. In this way, The Sellout risks reaffirming those “dreams of possession” which undergird the very patterns of violent dispossession they attempt to resist. As such, this chapter demonstrates how the rejection of the ideology of home in Invisible Man illuminates some of the possible pitfalls of the Sellout’s approach. This is not to say that The Sellout simply fails in this regard, but that its limited vision elucidates those forms of resistance of which one must be wary. The inability to progress—to effectively dismantle the mechanisms of antiblackness—also testifies to the non-progressive nature of black life in post-slavery time, to the fact that, as Hartman writes, “we are still looking for an exit from the prison” (133). In attending to these novels’ various attempts to locate that exit, my goal is not to condemn, but to foreground the inventiveness with which these novels dwell with the problem, even as the work of abolition remains interminable.

In Invisible Man, the role of place in the constitution of the subject is seen most clearly in moments of trauma, where characters are suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of the topos through which they have come to understand themselves. In these scenes, one dispossession

(that of the subject to place—a relational dispossession) is replaced by the distinctly violent dispossession that breaks with relationality. Walking in Harlem, the Invisible Man stumbles

across the eviction of an elderly couple that is still underway, white officers piling their possessions outside the home while they sit outside and watch, helpless to change the situation or reason with the officers, who are themselves not issuing evictions but merely "doing all the toting" for the marshals (269). In this scene, the intimate connection between the subjective and material violence of antiblackness is made clear, as the laying-bare of the couple's possessions is simultaneous a laying-bare of the couple's identities. Noticing that what he'd "taken for junk was actually worn household furnishings," the Invisible Man looks away, "ashamed to witness the eviction" (268, 270). Indeed, the Invisible Man is surprised to find that he is utterly disturbed by the scene of the eviction: cataloguing the "clutter of household objects," he feels "nauseated"

(271-272). In the mess outside the tenement building, the Invisible Man finds the man’s free papers along with "three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped 'Void'"

(272), implicitly pairing the physical displacement of the couple with the accompanying deprivation of subjectivity that comes in a society where, as Athena Athanasiou writes, "having is constructed as an essential prerequisite of proper human being" (Butler and Athanasiou 13). The objects strewn across the dirty snow assume a metaphysical weight, their exposure to the growing crowds suggestive of the couple's own displacement from themselves. Looking again upon "this junk," the Invisible Man remarks that "all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been" (273). In this scene of material dispossession, place and self are shown to be contingent on one another. Dislocated from its stewards, the property of the elderly couple becomes mere junk; similarly, when deprived of the physical locality they identify as home, the couple die a kind of metaphorical death. They join the ranks of the “living dead,” as it were, no longer subjects but shells of subjects, whose deaths are, as the indifference of the marshals testifies, perfectly natural. The necropolitical significance of this scene is not lost on Brother

Jack, whom the Invisible Man meets shortly after. Shoving cheesecake into his mouth, he posits

that the evicted couple are “living, but dead. Dead-in-living . . . a unity of opposites” (290). The state need not murder the couple; their social death can be inaugurated through this careful deprivation of place (Mbembe 39). This exploitation of the couple’s ontopology means that state-sanctioned material deprivation offers a path for the more insidious subjective genocide of antiblackness to be accomplished.

The narrative tension in The Sellout is likewise driven by a felt connection between subject and place. The narrator’s attempts to re-establish the city of Dickens emerge out of an awareness that the self is inevitably given over not only to norms that govern one’s recognizability, but also to the physical location of one’s emergence as it conditions that recognizability. Though the narrator remains effectively nameless throughout the text, he reflects upon his identity fairly early in the narrative, concluding, “Like the entire town of Dickens, I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more. Dickens was me. And I was my father” (40).

There appears, for Beatty, to be exist a kind of transference between oneself and one’s environment, such that one comes to be fundamentally shaped by one’s relationship to that environment.

However, this constituting relation between place and self is quickly interrupted by the logics of containment and possession. Despite the appearance of post-raciality—legislated racial integration, the black Supreme Court judge, Barack Obama in the White House—the narrator frequently draws our attention to the way the city remains divided into racially determined sectors (Beatty 289). The residents of Dickens remain held within the logics of black subjection, which are tied to the selective and unequal distribution of space across racialized populations.

Though constituted by their relation to their topos, this topos is “the belly of the state,” as Sharpe calls it: a place defined by the arithmetic of black social and physical death (In the Wake 74).

When students from the local middle school visit the narrator’s farm, they identify themselves by

gang affiliation; the boundaries of racial sectors of the city are policed; taking the public bus around the city, the narrator notes, “From Manhattan Beach down to Cabrillo, they called you nigger and expected you to run. El Porto north to Santa Monica, they called you nigger and expected you to fight. Malibu and beyond, they called the police” (121). As mentioned above, the residents of Dickens live with what the narrator comically calls “the Stank, an eye-burning, colorless miasma of sulfur and shit birthed in the Wilmington oil refineries and the Long Beach sewage treatment plants” (114). Dickens, the city in which people of color are contained, is that place in which the afterlife of slavery is most pronounced. To live in Dickens is to experience

“the residence time of the hold, its long durée” (In the Wake 70). Contained here, the residents are infinitely violable, necessary casualties of the calculated compartmentalization of the world, topographically and ontologically. Like the evicted couple in Invisible Man, Dickensians are subject to the state’s capacity to “define who matters and who does not” (Mbembe 27). They are relegated to the “proper place” to which they have been assigned, contained in this space of not- mattering, of the negation of being as defined by the antiblack hegemony (Butler and Athanasiou

22).

PROPERTY AND ANTIBLACKNESS

Under the weight of this overwhelming dislocation, Fanon warns that, understandably, the colonized man will be beset by “dreams of possession,” by the prospect of reclamation (5).

Crucially, however, it is this tendency toward self-possession, whether through the cultivation of the illusion of self-determination or material acquisition, that “represents the real danger,” as

Fred Moten and Stephano Harney write in The Undercommons (17).

Indeed, as many critics have suggested, the very logic that makes the acquisition of property possible and lawful are those that propagate the continued subjugation of black bodies

globally. As Frank Wilderson argues, the institution of slavery relies not on the commodification of labor-power, but on the commodification of the enslaved person’s “very being” (8). The notion of property itself might be understood, then, as a production of antiblackness, perpetuated by ontology’s transformation of the black body into a resource to be utilized

(Warren 6). A clear parallel between this transformation of personhood into property (black personhood in particular) is readily observed in the colonial drive to transform land, occupied by

Native peoples, into property—a resource to be managed, protected, and utilized for economic and nationalistic gain. The two logics are intertwined—both land (property) and black bodies

(equipment) are made ready to be manipulated. Wilderson sees this transformation of black bodies into property as utterly formative for the racial stratification that continues to structure life in the United States. Indeed, after Emancipation, the proprietorial notions of the self that undergirded hegemonic notions of the human as white were not abandoned. Rather, they were reconfigured to accommodate the development in discourses surrounding civil rights.

Saidiya Hartman connects these proprietorial notions of the self to similarly proprietorial relations of land, and suggests that these relations have shaped and continue to shape the way subjectivity is understood and recognized in the so-called post-racial era. Rather than bring about a redefinition of humanity as transcendent of race, the event of Emancipation merely resulted in a more thorough imagining of whiteness as coextensive with humanity. Similarly, while Emancipation resulted in the prohibition of the state-sanctioned ownership of black people, the prevailing logics of property, work, and personhood paved the way for what is perhaps a more potent rearticulation of black subjection through discourses of personal responsibility, indebtedness, and self-possession.

Finally, this conflation of being and property is enforced by a strategic articulation of law and legality. In “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” Samera Esmeir argues that antiblack

conceptions of humanity are bolstered and supported by the legal apportioning of humanity through the discourse of human rights. Samera Esmeir calls the form of humanity resultant of this “conflation of the human and its assigned legal status” a “juridical humanity,” which, despite making possible protective measures under the law, ultimately leaves open the path to racial and colonial logics through the suggestion that humanity can be both granted and withheld by the governing powers (1547). The rationality behind these exclusions from the protection of human rights—and thus from the realm of the human—always functions in the interests of the hegemony. Subjects are recognized by their possession of their juridical humanity, or their deprivation of that humanity. Alexander Weheliye likewise argues against the implementation of a legal humanity, which “exacts a steep entry price, because inclusion hinges on accepting the codification of personhood as property” (77). As the previous chapter also suggested, we might understand law as a mechanism that enforces and regulates being. Calvin Warren writes that this function of the law is usually concealed, but that it constitutes its most important purpose—“to divide the world into human subjects [Dasein] . . . and the world of things, those entities lacking such protection of any relation, but whose existence is necessary for the human to operate within the world” (72). Such is the legally apportioned place for black subjects: the world of things. Consenting to the legally-defined paradigm of humanity inducts the post-slavery subject into what Hartman calls “the double bind of freedom: being freed from slavery and free from resources, emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject” (Scenes of Subjection

116). This double-bind of freedom is deeply felt by the characters that populate the work of

Ellison and Beatty, for whom the law’s deprivation of place always constitutes a dislocation of self.

THE CITY OF DICKENS AND BLACK BEING

The law’s destruction of black being is made clear through the legal erasure of the city of

Dickens from the map of California. The city’s inhabitants’ relegation to a space of nonbeing through the denial of their relation to a particular topos reflects the law’s refusal to recognize blackness as ontological. This negation is a necessary denial, however; the ontological destruction of Dickens is required in order to maintain a continued sense of security for the predominantly white regions of Los Angeles County that surround it. If the abiding ideology of personhood is proprietorial, such that, as Athena Athanasiou writes, "being and having are constituted as ontologically akin to each other," poverty-stricken Dickens is truly an encounter with nothing, a nothing that, paradoxically, takes up space, is marked by road signs, and comprises other embodied nothings within it (Butler and Athanasiou 13). Accordingly, Dickens, California,

"was quietly removed like those towns that vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the

Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident" (57). Of course, to the residents of Dickens, the city’s disappearance "was no accident. It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down" (Beatty 57). Caught in the afterlife of slavery—of "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment"—he residents fall far outside the hegemonic notion of the human (Lose Your Mother 6). As such, the city, “aka the Last Bastion of Blackness,” as the narrator calls it, must be relegated to black being, existence to not exist (Beatty 150). And while the state’s lack of interest in physically dispossessing or disposing of the people may seem incongruent with this execration of being, it is actually vital for this process of outlawing that the former Dickensians stay in this place.

Seeing no reason to displace people who do not exist, the law sentences them to nonbeing by withholding the ontopological relation. After Dickens disappears, the narrator remarks,

“suddenly I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself” (Beatty 40). Likewise, the city’s erasure prompts a crisis for Hominy Jenkins, which leads to a suicide attempt. After the narrator rescues Hominy, he confesses that “when Dickens disappeared, I disappeared” (77).

And despite the narrator’s intimation that “most Dickensians were relieved to not be from anywhere,” he quickly finds that, inexplicably, the disappearance of Dickens significantly boosted the demand for his services as the city’s on-call crisis counselor, or as he calls himself, the “Nigger Whisperer” (58). Since the town’s erasure, he writes, “I found myself in my pajamas, at least once a week, standing barefoot in an apartment complex courtyard, bullhorn in hand, staring up at some distraught, partially hotcombed-headed mother dangling her baby over a second-floor balcony edge” (59). Thus, the ontological annihilation of Dickens as a place presents a vastly different threat to the subjects who inhabit it than would their outright dispossession

(58). By denying that the colonized sector exists, the logic of containment—of the hold—is not weakened but made more effective in its violence. How, after all, can one move from nowhere to somewhere?

DREAMS OF POSSESSION IN INVISIBLE MAN

Given that law and property are thoroughly implicated in antiblackness, any form of resistance to the systematic and strategic dislocation of place inflicted by the antiblack hegemony must begin with an understanding that dispossession is not an experience that can be evaded in toto. Though the ontopological dimension of the subject can also not be denied, recourse to self-possession will only recapitulate the onticide of antiblackness. The pitfalls of conceding to the colonialist compartmentalization of the world according to the tenets of legality and possession are grave, configuring the black subject as, once again, “a material, a resource to be used” (Invisible Man 508). And yet, as Fanon understands, the desire for possession is not

something so easily avoided. In navigating their relation to place, the promise of achieving humanity through recourse to possession becomes a significant hurdle for the Invisible Man and the Sellout.

Ellison is eager to familiarize the reader with the Invisible Man’s “dreams of possession” in the Edenic vision of the Southern black college he cultivates and critiques early in the narrative. After receiving a scholarship to the institution, which provokes a feeling of

“importance” of which he “had never dreamed,” the Invisible Man describes the campus as a lush, utopian sanctuary (32). He begins, “It was a beautiful college. The buildings were old and covered with vines and the roads gracefully winding, lined with hedges and wild roses that dazzled the eyes in the summer sun” (34). With “[h]oneysuckle and purple wisteria” hanging

“heavy from the trees,” their scents mixing “in the bee-humming air,” the campus offers a vision of a world reconciled, untouched by death. The rabbits are “so tame through having never been hunted,” and the narrator walks at night without fear (35). He describes the “bridge of rustic logs, made for trysting, but virginal and untested by lovers,” and the sound of hymns floating

“over all, clear like the night, liquid, serene, and lonely” (35). In “The Genesis of Eden:

Scriptural (Re)Translations and the (Un)Making of an Academic Eden in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man,” Claudia May remarks that Ellison’s portrait of the college contains many parallels to

Genesis 1, as both narratives cultivate the possibility of living “together peacefully,” without being harmed by sin, or, within the context of the United States, antiblack racism (May 424).

It is no surprise, then, that this sanctuary initially serves as an ideal vehicle for the

Invisible Man to cultivate a stable identity. The campus itself becomes a signpost for the

Invisible Man’s sense of self; he finds himself given over not only to the ideology which undergirds this dream of home, but also to the physical environment which houses that ideology. He remarks, “Here within this greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever

known” (99). He cultivates a “connection between these lawns and buildings and my hopes and dreams” (99). His sense of self is tied deeply to this place—or at least to his imagining of this place—and his relation to the campus conditions his self-consciousness. His time at the college comprises a whole “other life” for the Invisible Man, one that dies after his departure (37). To further this sense of the self as embedded in place, the Invisible Man experiences a kind of socio-physical death when he is expelled later for taking Mr. Norton to the “slave-quarter section” (102). At the prospect of his forceful displacement from the place in which he nurtured a sense of being at-home, he endures what feels like “a total disembowelment,” and his vertigo sounds almost like a violent murder: “my head went over again, against a tree this time, and I could hear it splattering the flowering vines” (146). The severing of his relation to the college results in the concurrent severing of his identity.

As becomes clear, however, the Eden-like realm of the college is one utterly complicit in the logics of antiblackness. Commonly read as a critique of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist politics and the resultant founding of the Tuskegee Institute, the southern college rearticulates the very logics of containment thought to be abolished by Emancipation.

Ellison’s depiction of the college effectively dismantles the ideology of home through a creation narrative that helps to expose the antiblack ideology undergirding of the institution.

This “creation story,” in which the visiting speaker Reverend Homer Barbee recounts the founding of the college, is meant not only to tell the story of the Founder’s escape from slavery and his subsequent establishment of the college; it is simultaneously (and perhaps more importantly) communicating something about who the students can and should be. Like ancient accounts of creation, Barbee’s narrative is primarily mythic, articulating the concerns and beliefs of the storyteller. Both the narrative of the college’s Founder and that of Genesis 2, for example, are structured in such a way as to convey an argument about identity and function over material

origins. Rather than tell a story about the historical beginnings of the cosmos, the Genesis accounts are largely recognized by biblical historians to be narratives about the character of the

Hebrew God and His relationship with Earth and its inhabitants, as well as correctives to competing creation myths like the Enuma Elish, which viewed the known world as a product of unimaginable divine violence. Where biblical narratives of creation likely resisted hegemonic understandings of the cosmos, Barbee’s sermon is given over to the dominant cultural understandings of Emancipation, freedom, and humanity.

Barbee’s narrative, like that of Booker T. Washington in the “Atlanta Exposition

Address,” enacts an erasure of the histories of antiblackness exemplified in the industry of racial slavery to preserve a narrative of white benevolence and retain white land possession. For

Barbee, Emancipation is a terror, upsetting the happy logics of black containment that upheld the social order. The South becomes “this barren land . . . this land of darkness and sorrow, of ignorance and degradation, where the hand of brother has been turned against brother, father against son, and son against father; where master has turned against slave and slave against master; where all was strife and darkness, an aching land” (118). The disrupted boundaries also include those of property and the regulation of space according to racial identity. Rather than bring about the possibility of freedom, the end of slavery brought “clouds of darkness all over the land,” putting the “whole region . . . in a terrible tension” (118). Stripped from Barbee’s narrative of Emancipation and Reconstruction is any mention of the conditions of slavery, of the outright commodification of the black body. As such, liberation from these unnamed terrors brings only “fear and hatred that crouched over the land like a demon waiting to spring” (119).

The students are made to believe that both “black folk and white folk” had suffered equally in this struggle, both “wanting to go forward, but each fearful of the other” (119). The false equivalency between the state-sanctioned black social and physical death and the unsettling of

white property ownership in Barbee’s narrative make possible the quiet, ostensibly benevolent resumption of power by the college’s white patrons. If, as Barbee says, “[e]veryone is perplexed with the question of what must be done,” the solution proffered by white multimillionaires can be accepted free of suspicion, though it is certainly a plot to preserve the antiblack social order

(119).

Barbee’s portrait of the Founder himself (a stand-in for Booker T. Washington) reinforces the Washingtonian tropes of subservience and obedience. Per the Founder’s example, they are encouraged to grow in “humility” and “sweet patience,” and, in a surreptitious misreading of the words of Jesus, render “unto Caesar that which [is] Caesar’s” (120). What’s more, the students are told to be grateful for the “fruits” of the Founder’s struggle which they enjoy today (120). In the context of the white patrons’ cooptation of the college, however, this gratitude is quickly transformed into a new kind of servitude. Indeed, later, Mr. Norton tells the

Invisible Man that he owes “much of [his] good fortune in attending such a school” to Mr.

Norton’s daughter (42). The students display their thankfulness for the Founder’s victory not through forging their own paths to freedom, but through blind obedience to the white patrons, who come to resemble new masters, not companions in the fight for equality. These exhortations from Barbee push the students not into freedom, but into that “double-bind of freedom” that Hartman describes in Scenes of Subjection. In their service to the white millionaires, the students are inducted into this stunted form of freedom.

More importantly for the question of place and identity, however, the white patrons’ implicit lordship over the college follows the colonial logic of containment that Fanon describes in Wretched of the Earth. The burdened freedom the college offers enforces boundaries around what it is possible for the students to achieve and think. Barbee’s creation story describes the erection of borders, of limits to freedom. Rather than allow students to find expressions of

themselves in the land, their relation to topos is dictated to them according to the interests of the white patrons. Their ontopology is replaced by a hegemonically assigned “proper place” (Butler and Athanasiou 22). The narrator recounts,

This was our world, they said as they described it to us, this our horizon and its

earth, its seasons and its climate, its spring and its summer, and its fall and harvest

some unknown millennium ahead; and these its floods and cyclones and they

themselves our thunder and lightning; and this we must accept and love and accept

even if we did not love. (112)

The promise of the college to be a “sanctuary where students can find respite from the scourges of racism and racist ideology” proves to be a deception, then, as its very roots are shaped by the logics of containment and possession (May 425). May concurs, noting that for Ellison, the college “cannot be separated from the wider American society, or be unaffected by those whose financial contributions ensure its longevity” (425). However, as Ellison is sure to communicate, it is not merely that this particular “dream of possession” fails to live up to its promise, but, as

May writes, “no ideology of place or home” can adequately “define the experiences of an individual, a people or a nation through one location” (426).

The mythic topos of the college effectively inducts the students into what Hartman calls the “burdened individuality of freedom,” and cements a sense of responsibility in black subjects to “repay this investment of faith and prove their worthiness” of the gift of freedom (Scenes of

Subjection 115, Invisible Man 131). The “freed” Invisible Man finds himself indebted to his white benefactors, and finds hope for racial progress in humility, espousing the necessity for black people to exercise “social responsibility,” which garners him a scholarship to the college, and “a thunderous applause” from his amused audience of white men (Invisible Man 17, 31). Rather than bring about further liberation for himself and others, his subscription to this ideology of self-

possession proves itself complementary to antiblackness. The Invisible Man deftly captures the ambivalence of the freedom offered by the college in his recollection of the statue of the college

Founder:

the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a

veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am

standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered

more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient

blinding. (36)

In addition to challenging DuBois’s notion of the veil once again, here Ellison evokes Thomas

Ball’s Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing in a similar fashion above a kneeling slave. Ostensibly a testament to the victory of Emancipation, the statue is cast here as a mere reconfiguration of the subjection of slavery, perpetrating the theft of sight against which the Invisible Man will later warn the dispossessed Harlemites.

Barbee’s creation story, along with the prescribed limits of the campus and the serpentine rhetoric of the white patrons, thus serves only to rewrite the narrative undergirding the antiblack social structure, and obscure the way the sanctuary of the college actually functions to contain and compartmentalize black bodies so as to consolidate the power of the white multimillionaires. The Invisible Man’s attachment to the Edenic campus inevitably signifies his compliance with his own containment, subjection, and dispossession. Contrary to the appearance of black autonomy that Dr. Bledsoe and the other black administrators display, the college functions instead as another, if slightly more comfortable, hold, in which black life is contained and instrumentalized.

DREAMS OF POSSESSION IN THE SELLOUT

Much like the Invisible Man’s attempt to locate identity within the hegemonic framework he inherits through the college, the narrator of The Sellout seeks to transcend the dispossession inflicted on the residents of Dickens by re-establishing a legible relation between the former city and its inhabitants. He does this largely through recourse to the language of juridical humanity, the legal constraints that make a city—or a people—recognizable by the state.

Early on, the narrator reasserts Dickens's existence by affixing replacement signs for those which had been taken down on the freeway. To ensure that the signs conform to the county's standards, he downloads a copy of the "Manual of Uniform Control Devices" and constructs his signs with the "proper shade of green (Pantone 342) . . . the exact dimensions (60" x 36"), letter size (8"), and font (Highway Gothic)" (88). For Beatty, the signs appear to carry an ontological power, pushing Dickens (and its residents) closer to reclaiming a sense of being. After completing the signs and installing them "over the El Segundo Boulevard overpass," Hominy remarks that "signs are powerful things. It almost feels like Dickens exists out there in the smog somewhere" (88). And while the narrator’s preoccupation with adhering to the “proper” specifications of overpass signs is undoubtedly a satirical jab at the bureaucratization of contemporary American life, it ultimately offers an important glimpse into the possible failures of his endeavor to reclaim Dickens from the realm of black being.

The immediately apparent risk of the narrator's attempt to resist the dispossessing force of antiblackness by putting Dickens back on the map is that it implicitly depends upon recognition from the state, and so consents to the dominant logic by which recognition is conferred to some and withheld by others, the very same logic that justifies the subjection and containment of the disenfranchised Dickensians. In other words, the narrator's appeals to the governing authorities by building signs, founding schools, and establishing sister cities accept the terms of juridical humanity that made the subjugation of the people of Dickens possible in the

first place. Furthermore, while the project of inclusion is certainly appealing—like the colonized's "dreams of possession"--the question must be entertained that if the current notion of humanity is so deeply distorted by antiblackness, why should inclusion into the realm of that humanity be so desired? Though Beatty's narrator's recourse to development and recognition promises the possibility of survival for the Dickensians, these approaches seem to foreclose the possibility of understanding (black) humanity outside of or in excess to the logics of property is curtailed, and so the underlying social, economic, and political structures that justify the erasure of people of color (whether from the map or from the earth itself) remain intact, if a little flustered by the terror of ceding recognition to a community of embodied nothings.

REDEFINING THE TERMS OF RECOGNITION IN THE SELLOUT

While the narrator appears to traffic in recognition, the terms by which he insists upon it often upset the very terms of juridical humanity, and in fact draw attention to the way legal personhood in the United States has propagated an enduring condition of black nonbeing.

Creating a painted boundary around the community of Dickens in order to re-establish the city limits—ostensibly affirming the logic of containment and compartmentalization—the narrator ultimately offers the residents an opportunity to explore the way their “[e]xperiences of land become expressions of self” (Goeman 75). The painted boundary—and, in particular, the act of painting the boundary—becomes a crucial means by which the people can re-establish their relation to the locality from which they had been ontologically displaced. The narrator recounts,

Sometimes, after retiring for the day, I’d return the next morning, only to find that

someone else had taken up where I’d left off. Extended my line with a line of their

own, often in a different color. Sometimes the line wouldn’t be a line at all but drops

of blood, or an uninterrupted string of graffiti signing off on my efforts. (Beatty 107)

The drawing of the boundary may not evade concern in its preservation of the problematic

“dreams of possession,” which imagine the subject’s ontopological relation to follow an ideology of home, but it does appear to successfully rearticulate the process of boundary-making as an expression of community self-definition where it was previously a mode of regulating and subjugating (racialized) others. The collectively-drawn boundary around what was formerly

Dickens carries a metaphysical weight. He recalls watching elderly members of the community

“standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side” (108-109). The narrator likewise finds himself reluctant to cross the boundary, a sense of community identity already forming. The boundary becomes an expression of self, re- creating and recalibrating the subjectifying (if limited) relation between subject and place.

Importantly, the line exceeds the narrator’s vision for it, belonging simultaneously to all and none of the citizens, but constituting them as subjects nonetheless.

In re-establishing the subjectifying relation between person and place, however, it is doubtful whether this ad-hoc rewriting of the city limits offers a formidable enough challenge to the logic of proprietorial selfhood. In delimiting a space in which relation is possible, the residents of Dickens remain seduced by the salvific promise of a place of one’s own, and their sense of being is still correlated to their sense of having, however well it is collectively experienced and distributed. The boundary necessarily ascribes a limit to community identity, as well. So while the community’s insistence to be recognized pushes back against the dispossessive rupture caused by the state’s erasure of Dickens, it does so only on the surface, leaving the logics of boundary-making and containment intact. Indeed, while many of the narrator’s efforts to get

Dickens back on the map are creative in the way they reimagine how a city can come to be, they

ultimately build upon the foundation laid by the logics of property, failing to genuinely challenge the ideology that justifies further social and physical subjugation.

REDEFINING THE ONTOPOLOGICAL RELATION IN INVISIBLE MAN

Contrary to this accommodationist approach to the dispossession of place, the Invisible

Man redefines the ontopological dimension of the subject by wholly retreating from the realm of law and property. If the Invisible Man finds his first identity within the boundaries of the Eden- like gardens of the college, his final self is found in exile, in a dark hole beneath the streets of

Harlem. His retreat to this nonspace, where he accepts his invisibility and launches covert battles against the world above, signifies an acceptance of his self-dispossession even as it reflects a refusal to be victimized by that dispossession. In his awareness of the claim antiblackness exerts on his life, the Invisible Man appropriates his own social death in a move that nearly resembles the figure of the martyr, who, as Terry Eagleton writes, accepts the “self-divestment which is forced upon you . . . to seize the chance to convert it into the alternative self-abandonment of love” (39). As we saw in the previous chapter, the Invisible Man often appears less concerned with ending dispossession than possibilities of life and resistance within it. For the Invisible

Man, it is a "common disinheritance" which provides him and the other inhabitants of Harlem an opportunity to explore identity outside property (345).

His abandonment to the proprietorial logic of dispossession comes in the form of his retreat into a relative underworld, a hole that "is warm and full of light" (6). Law and property as they are commonly wielded fail to reach beneath the surface of the earth, where the Invisible

Man does not, to all appearances, take up space. This is accomplished, at least in part, by discarding the visual as a mode of being. In W.E.B. DuBois's analysis, it is the phenomenon of seeing oneself through the eyes of others that inaugurates one into double-consciousness. The

black body must first be seen in order to be transformed into available equipment, before it can be sorted into the colonized sector where, as Fanon writes, "You die anywhere, from anything"

(Wretched of the Earth 4). The racial epidermal schema of antiblackness depends upon the ocular, on the continuity of seeing in order to classify those who do not belong and enforce the parameters of acceptable being. That which can be seen is that which can be relegated to the world of things, made into mere resource. Liberty Paints's definitive color is, after all, "Optic

White," and the production of that "right" (non)color of white is entirely reliant on the withering body of Lucius Brockway, who remarks to the narrator that there "ain't a continental thing that happens down here that ain't as iffen I done put my black hands into it!" (218). Whiteness becomes clearly defined only by its comparison (and destruction) of blackness (Monstrous

Intimacies 168). Even in the Brotherhood, which purports to ignore the individual in favor of the collective, the Invisible Man cannot escape "the scopic regime of racialization," under which he remains the spiritual-singing Negro, the next Booker T. Washington (“‘I Am I Be’” 107).

Invisible retreats into invisible, where he becomes unsortable, unintelligible. Undetected, he steals electricity from Monopolated Light & Power. Undisturbed, he plays Armstrong over the phonograph for the city dwellers to hear above him. No longer capable of affording nor depriving him of his juridical humanity, the Invisible Man's hole provides him an opportunity to enact his quiet sabotage. He lays just outside the realm of recognizability, and thus, in a paradoxical move, takes a kind of agency over his utter self-dispossession.

Accordingly, the invisibility of the Invisible Man—along with his estrangement from embodiment, which he records in the novel's epilogue—moves him so far outside hegemonically recognized modes of being that he enjoys a kind of respite from the ontological violence of

“black being.” In his hibernation, he becomes, purely, a mind (Invisible Man 580). This affords him a new form of ontology that exceeds the bodily. For the Invisible Man, it is only in "shaking

off the old skin" that we can really hear him: "Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through?" (581). No longer affected by that "peculiar disposition of the eyes" that rendered him invisible in the first place, his listeners cannot help but hear him (3).

This transformation is Alexander Weheliye's primary concern in "'I Am I Be': The

Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity," in which he argues that the Invisible Man finds a subjectivity within the sonic rather than the visual, effectively circumventing the domination of the ocular

(107). His relation to the surface world notwithstanding, the Invisible Man’s recourse to playing

Louis Armstrong on the phonograph provides an entirely novel point of identification for the narrator, one in which he and Armstrong are "joined not only by their social invisibility as black subjects but also by their reliance on sound to transmit their invisibility" (112). Armstrong's

"What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue" illuminates the Invisible Man's own invisibility even as it provides for a new, relational mode by which the subject can emerge, one that undercuts the the claim of antiblackness on the visual and embodied as modes of classifying and containing subjects. Weheliye writes that this "subject appears at the spatiotemporal crossroads, where the performer's ghostly sounds merge with the ear of the listener on those lower frequencies, and resound the black subject's visual invisibility" (112). The communal space of listening becomes an occasion for being.

To be sure, this radically new orientation to being is predicated upon the selective and strategic affirmation of self-dispossession, the knowledge that one is always already given over to the Other. By evading those modes of being—spatial, visual—that are easily coopted by the regulatory violence of antiblackness, the Invisible Man enters a kind of fugitive subjectivity that finds freedom in the blindnesses of those hegemonic ontologies. His is not another self-

possession, but a shirking of the logic of possession. In the novel's final pages, he becomes a voice without a bodily cause, preempting the antiblack drive to displace, manipulate, or instrumentalize.

Rather than retreat entirely from the compartmentalized world in which property dictates being, as the Invisible Man does, Beatty’s narrator leaps toward an ironic reversal of these logics in order to unsettle their near-sovereign power over subjectivity. Characteristic of his highly satirical vision, resistance to antiblack domination comes through reification—by exposing the utter absurdity of the racial epidermal schema when taken to its limit. As such, the refusal to stay in one’s “assigned proper place” comes through an enthusiastic resignation to the regulatory dispossession of Jim-Crow- and slavery-era laws and stereotypes. When his birthday approaches, all Hominy Jenkins wants is “some racism and I’ll be straight,” prompting the narrator to affix official-looking signs reading, “PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS,

DISABLED, AND WHITES” on the public buses in Dickens (128). And while the other bus- goers are surprised to find these signs, it is “not so much from disbelief that the city had the nerve to reinstitute public segregation, but that it had taken so long to do so” (129). Rather than explicitly challenge the cultural logics that permeate their world, the signs serve to make apparent that which had been disguised in post-racial rhetoric; for the residents, the signs bring into focus the blurred reality of the afterlife of slavery. And when a white woman, hired by the narrator, enters the bus, Hominy’s enthusiastically relinquishes his seat, because “to him that seat, as hard and plastic and orange-brown as it was, was her birthright, and his gesture was a tribute, a long- overdue payment to the gods of white superiority” (131). If Rosa Parks’s act of refusal to stay in her “‘proper’ place” recognizes the extent to which the regulation of space serves as “the raw material of sovereignty” and seeks to challenge the antiblack ideology that undergirds its enactment, Hominy’s consent to his dispossession inverts that refusal, reifying the operation of

black being—of the state’s enforcement of black life as “invisible to our predators and yet somehow still vulnerable” (132). It is a refusal to forget that one lives in the afterlives of slavery in a nation that has traded the outright legislation of antiblack dispossession for obscurantist practices that justify racial stratification with nonracial language. What’s more, Hominy’s inverted refusal comes as an ironic reversal of discourses of freedom and equality, which purport to have eradicated the racialized regulation of space to which Hominy testifies here.

To be sure, the narrator’s commentary on the scene here makes it difficult to locate in

Hominy any kind of subversive impulse; rather, his acquiescence to the logics of antiblackness serves as a demonstration to the other riders, who recognize on his smiling face “a mask from our own collections. The happy mask we take out of our back pockets, and like bank robbers whip out when we want to steal some privacy or make an emotional getaway” (131). In this we might hear echoes of the “common disinheritance” the Invisible Man describes as he talks to the crowd about the dispossessed elderly couple, whose eviction (or “disposal,” as Achille Mbembe might call it) is reframed and displayed for all to see as something shared, not necessarily isolating.

Hominy’s voluntary self-divestment is a collective experience of memory, its meaning extending beyond the single moment and into each observing subject. Indeed, later in the novel, Charisma, the vice principal of Chaff Middle School, tells the narrator that “the specter of segregation has brought Dickens together,” united in this shared understanding of the normative condition of antiblackness as it operates spatially, denying humanity through the regulation of life (163). Such an understanding, for Beatty at least, opens the path toward a generative resistance. By some miracle, his efforts result in Dickens being placed back on the map. Again, however, the significance of this victory is somewhat dampened by the fact that it would seem to affirm hegemonic definitions of city and self.

TOD CLIFTON AND HOMINY JENKINS

Hominy Jenkins’s refusal-by-consent clearly echoes Tod Clifton’s suicide by police in

Invisible Man. Just as Hominy's eagerness to relinquish his seat for the white woman is read as a betrayal of so-called post-racial antiblackness, which depends upon the invisibilization of racial subjugation for the preservation of its discursive power, Tod Clifton's willful death at the hands of a white police officer signifies a kind of refusal to accept the place that history has assigned him. By relinquishing his life at the hands of the officer, Clifton decides to “plunge outside of history,” a phrase that not only implies that history itself is a regulatory discourse that constrains an individual to certain actions, thoughts, and even selves, but also that one’s relation to history is, in essence, a spatial relation (438). To remain within the bounds of history is to consent to the compartmentalization of the world and to the subjective and spatial dispossessions that this compartmentalization necessitates. If history is dictated by historians, and Clifton’s historian is the officer who pulled the trigger, then to accept the constraints of history is to accept the conditions of black being (439). In this way, as both Jenkins and Clifton teach us, to conform to history is to consent to a violent dispossession, but to “plunge outside of history” is to exchange that dispossession for another, for one that is, as the Invisible Man tells us, “uncomfortable” and

“burdensome,” but which might, in reality, make them “the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious” that “they themselves failed to understand” (441). This deliberate self- dispossession does not resolve the problem of opacity nor does it ease the pain of alienation, but it does offer a disruption of the logics of antiblackness that regulate and enforce the parameters of being itself. By rejecting the narrative of history—that which tells us who we are and how we got here—these men prompt both of the novels’ protagonists to confront the reality of the wake. In their “running and dodging the forces of history,” both the Invisible Man and the

Sellout come to recognize that black people have all already been dispossessed by history, and

that the narrative of self-possession—whether through self-determination or dreams of a physical home—is untenable (Invisible Man 441).

The Sellout’s deliberate plunging outside of history is finally captured in the narrator’s reinstitution of segregation, which leads to fruitful disruptions of the state’s unchecked denial of black humanity. The narrator fakes the establishment of an whites-only school, which leads to higher test scores and attendance at Chaff Middle School; he places “coloreds only” signs in local businesses, which in turn are met with greater safety and higher revenue; as the novel reaches its end, he is called upon far less often to cajole black residents from committing suicide; the public buses continue to be segregated, and remain some of the safest places in the city. And his trial before the Supreme Court sees him vindicated, as one of the Justices notes that his violation of the law meant to secure civil rights for everyone had accomplished that goal far more effectively than the law itself ever had. In the context of the novel, then, his project of resegregation serves to expose the law as a weapon of antiblackness.

In their attunement to the way one’s being is always bound up in one’s relation to place,

Invisible Man and The Sellout attempt to imagine new modes of antiracist resistance that take into account the ontological violence perpetrated by land dispossession. As both narratives demonstrate, the same instrumentalizing logic that transforms the black body into equipment is at play in the regulation and compartmentalization of space, such that these forms of exploitation cannot be separated from one another. At the same time, the strengths and limitations of the novels’ approaches to these problems suggest that the subject’s fundamental dispossession to place cannot be denied, but must instead be redescribed in order to evade the exploitation of proprietorial logics.

CODA:

Being After Dispossession

Ellison and Beatty end their narratives in the beginning, returning the reader to the first moments of (mis)recognition that would come to characterize the narrators’ burdened journeys toward (and away from) self-identity. Breaking the illusion of linearity and the false promise of closure, the Invisible Man welcomes the reader back to his hole in the ground, and the Sellout stands once again before the Supreme Court, the circumstances of their dispossession unchanged. In this “painful boomeranging” of history our nameless protagonists become true postmetaphysical philosophers, attempting to imagine life outside the current ontological order

(Invisible Man 15). Indeed, the final pages of these novels—which are, paradoxically, the first— assume the form of the manifesto, declarations of an evasive, contradictory selfhood that attempts to both accommodate the opacity and vulnerability of the subject, as well as evade the regulatory violence of Western metaphysics. In place of a prescribed moral or ontological order, the Sellout puts forward the theory of Unmitigated Blackness, “the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. [It’s] the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living” (Beatty 277). And in his inhabitation of this unsettled space, we might hear echoes of the Invisible Man’s own theory of self, which equally embraces impossibility and contradiction. From within his hole in the ground, he writes,

I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because

though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal

pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I

love. . . . I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love” (580)

And so it is in the beginning that I would also like to bring this thesis to a close, by returning to the insistence by Ellison and Beatty that “we’re still just humans creating” (Jackson). Rather than read this as a demand that they be recognized and inducted into the hegemonic realm of the human, we might instead conclude that, through their novels, Ellison and Beatty are warning that the current paradigm of humanity is itself deeply flawed, in serious need of re-examination.

To that end, I have advanced a reading of Invisible Man and The Sellout as preeminently concerned with the question of black humanity in the midst of a normative antiblackness. In the first chapter, I examined the way the violence of antiblackness forecloses relationality in the scene of address and renders the black subject an “embodied nothing,” to use Calvin Warren’s words. I also detailed the way the characters in both novels attempt to resist this dispossession, whether through the Invisible Man’s public speeches or Hominy Jenkins’s staged subjection. In the second chapter, I attended to the constitutive function that place performs in the formation of the subject, suggesting that the black subject’s implication in his or her environment is coopted by antiblack economies of property ownership. This chapter argued that recourse to the promise of home, what Frantz Fanon calls “dreams of possession,” ultimately affirms the compartmentalizing and possessive logic of the colonizer, which threatens to transform land and bodies into resources. Faced with this dilemma, the narrators of these novels attempt to reframe their relation to place, either by retreating outside the realm of the visible (in the case of the

Invisible Man), or by rallying for recognition by the state (in the case of the Sellout).

My goal throughout this thesis has been to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional readings of Invisible Man at least, these novels do not champion the individual’s quest for self- determination, but instead depict the experience of the subject as constituted by processes of self-dispossession. And while in some instances this universal self-dispossession certainly holds the potential for a noncoercive ethics as Butler suggests it does, the subjective, material, and

spatial violence inflicted by antiblackness in these novels indicates that a wholesale embrace of this vulnerability to the Other can result in social and physical death for the black subject. As such, in addition to correcting previous critical readings of these novels and their representations of subjectivity, this thesis has argued that the near-totalizing violence of antiblackness as demonstrated in these works presents an obstacle for an ethics based in vulnerability and relationality that must be addressed. And while neither the Invisible Man nor the Sellout are able to offer a totally coherent anti-antiblackness, their attempts to confront the dispossession that conditions black life after slavery gesture toward the possibility for subjectivity outside or beyond the violence that threatens to eclipse them.

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1 As a school of thought, Afro-pessimism emerged in large part from Frantz Fanon’s work in Black Skin, White Masks, and Hortense Spillers’s in “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammarbook.” In “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers demonstrated that the racism implicit in the Moynihan Report of 1965 could be traced back to the transmutation of black bodies into flesh during the transatlantic slave trade. Turning to the records of the slave ships, Spillers notes that slavery stripped its victims of the subject-positions of “male” and “female,” and discarded the idea of the family for a limited, proprietorial familial structure based around maternity (66). Building on this important work, Saidiya Hartman published her landmark study Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror, and Self- Making in the Nineteenth Century to suggest that the very discourses of humanity, human rights, and freedom were complicit in the continued subjection of black bodies in the United States. Indeed, the event of Emancipation was shown to bring about a proliferation of new, more covert tactics for ensuring racial stratification. Since then, thinkers like Calvin L. Warren and Frank Wilderson (who coined the term “afro-pessimist” in his memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid) have concluded more explicitly that antiblackness is not incidental but vital to the ontological and epistemological structures that uphold U.S. democracy. As such, Afro-pessimism eschews any notion that reform will provide the path toward racial reconciliation, and instead maintains that the dismantling of antiblackness would require the uprooting of the very fabric of Western civilization. From this understanding of antiblackness as the founding moment of modernity and integral to Western metaphysics, Afro- pessimism puts forward a view of history as static, rather than linear, intent on demonstrating the continuity between the first slave ships of the seventeenth-century and the police murders of Treyvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and many others. In this view, it is not so much that nothing has changed throughout the centuries since slavery, but merely that the mechanisms of antiblackness engendered during that time have persisted and been

reconfigured into the present through a variety of social and political practices aimed at continuing the trend of violence against black life. Saidiya Hartman calls this the “afterlife of slavery,” that non-progressive time in which “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (6). Christina Sharpe refers to this post-slavery time, this stasis-in-motion, as “the wake,” invoking the image of the waves behind the slave ship to denote the ongoing and repeated ruptures slavery has wrought. The “pessimism” of Afro-pessimism thus refers not to an abandonment of efforts to combat antiblackness, but instead to these thinkers’ outlook on whether or not antiblackness will ever truly come to an end.