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. ©Copyright by Jade Becker April 29, 2019 All Rights Reserved “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. 1 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 2 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 3 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).