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Bodily Trespass: an Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century

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Bodily Trespass: an Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century African American Literature by Maleda Belilgne Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Karla FC Holloway, Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 ABSTRACT Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century African American Literature by Maleda Belilgne Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Karla FC Holloway, Supervisor ___________________________ Priscilla Wald ___________________________ Frederick C. Moten ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Maleda Belilgne 2011 Abstract Bodily Trespass situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the “unreal” and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins’ turn of the twentieth-century serial Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the “nadir” of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and “rival” black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space. In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes’ The Real Cool Killers, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial “interfaces.” These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Ralph Ellison’s “The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the iv fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call “scalar consciousness,” a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic’s rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order. v Dedication To Atlaw and Admas-- who taught me to look inside vi Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………...…iv Chapter One – Theorizing the Black Fantastic…..………………………………………..1 1.1 Topologies of Resistance: Dysaesthetic Slaves and Rival Geographies…….14 1.2 Contemporary Implications…………………………………………….……30 Chapter Two – Embodied Politics: Pan-Africanism in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, Or, the Hidden Self………………………………………………………………………35 2.1 Occultism and Mysticism: Hopkins’ Pre-Pan Africanism…………………...41 2.2 Plessy and the Poetics of the Fantastic………………………………………49 2.3 The Fecund African Landscape……..……………………………………….61 2.4 A Practice of Diaspora…………………………………………………….....67 2.5 Flight to Freedom: The Virtues of Catharsis………………...………………80 Chapter Three – The Black Fantastic and the Black Metropolis………………………...85 3.1 Trussed Up Like Gulliver: The Restriction of Black Mobility and the Construction of National Identity………………………………………………. 89 3.2 “It’s the Skin We in:” Chester Himes’ Marginal Men………………………97 3.3 “And a Body’s Got the Right to Live!” - Petry’s The Street……………….114 3.4 “If Only No One Would Look Intruded Upon:” Brooks’ Psychosocial Cityscape………………………………………………………………………..121 3.5 Towards a Solution…………………………………………………………129 Chapter Four – Clearing a Space to Listen: The Fantastic as a Discourse of Aurality…133 4.1 Solicitude and Amusement: Excavating the Black Fantastic………………141 4.2 Slave Sublime: The Confessions of Nat Turner……………………………149 4.3 The Art of Locomotion: Frederick Douglass’ Composite Nation………….159 vii 4.4 The Unlucky Migrant: Ellison’s King of the Bingo Game……….………...164 4.5 Sonny’s Blues: The Scream as a Metonym of the Fantastic………………..177 4.6 Tripping the Light Fantastic: What America Would Be Like Without Blacks…………………………………………………….....................187 References………………………………………………………………………………192 Biography..……………………………………………………………………………...202 viii Introduction—Theorizing the Black Fantastic “Metaphors. Like what they used in poetry and stuff. The stuff folks dreamed up when they was making a fantasy, while what she was talking about was real. As real as them young hands in front of her.” (Mama Day 294) “The cause, in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and more curable, as a general rule.“ (Samuel Cartwright 332) Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic is a study of the intersections among the body, community, and text in the fiction of twentieth-century black American writers. By the “fantastic,” I mean a literary mode in the Todorovian sense that vacillates between the orders of the real and the surreal (25).1 The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that has its origins in the bodily and psychic deprivations of the Middle Passage (Christol 164, 167).2 The fantastic is a strategy for the production of space and an affirmation of black humanity that mediates the corporeal and ontological effects of social death. The inaugural experience of New world Africans—no longer African and not yet American—trapped within the “metaphysical spaces of the white imaginary” is marked by spatial constriction at a variety of scales (Spillers 67, Morrison 163). The reproduction of social relations requires spatial articulation that adheres to the mandates of the dominant order. By the same token, to deny a people the space to live-- the space to be--is to extinguish their humanity--to circumscribe them in a borderland between the living and the dead.3 What we see in black fiction is a response to this 1 Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 2 It is a crisis that echoes today in the mass incarceration of youth of color. See Lois Wacquant’s “"Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh." 3 Bonnie J. Barthold, author of Black Time refers to this as a “No Man’s Land” (43). 1 negation and a fierce insistence on the “immanence” of black subjectivity.4 Bodily Trespass argues that the black fantastic is a discourse of spatial production--a means of recording the trauma of spatial deprivation and an ameliorative gesture that serves as the condition of possibility for the "progressive transformation of those conditions" (Calhoun 40, Christol 164-66). In thinking through the fantastic, and its relationship to black American cultural production, one discovers the centrality of what I term scalar consciousness.5 The preservation of black ontology requires a keen awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Scalar consciousness highlights the importance of spatial trespass-at the corporeal, domestic, urban, and internationalist nodes--to the restructuring of social relations. Textual worlds give us access to places we would not otherwise have access to. The fantastic as a discursive mode draws our attention to the production of the social real and to the possibility of enacting the unreal. The three modalities I identify in this dissertation—the fantastic as a discourse of black internationalism, the fantastic as a discourse of urbanity, and the fantastic as a discourse of aurality—represent efforts by 4 Manthia Diawara uses this term, in In Search of Africa, as a signifier of “blacks’ inability to escape a stereotypical identity” (254). I use it in a similar sense, but to opposite ends—as illustrative of the resilience of black subjects. 5 I use the term “scalar” in a manner that references critical geographer Neil Smith’s conception of “jump[ing] scales” (60). Smith identifies scalar manipulation as key to social and political transgression. "Scale,” he notes, “ is the criterion of difference not between places so much as between different kinds of places" (64 emphasis added). Scalar consciousness, then, maximizes the transgressive potential of spatial occupation by transforming social relations that inform the production of space. In physics, “scalar” signifies a “quantity, such as mass, length, or speed, whose only
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