Power Relations in Black Lives

Christa Buschendorf (ed.) Power Relations in Black Lives American Culture Studies | Volume 17 Christa Buschendorf (ed.) Power Relations in Black Lives Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias I would like to thank copy-editor Dr. Björn Bosserhoff for his thorough and proficient work as well as for his exceptional personal commitment to this project. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-3660-8. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoD- erivatives 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commercial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contacting rights@ transcript-verlag.de Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Typeset by Dr. Björn Bosserhoff Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3660-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3660-8 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839436608 For Bernhard Contents Preface | 9 Introduction: Key Concepts of Relational Sociology as Tools of Hermeneutics Christa Buschendorf | 11 Satin-Legs Smith and a Mississippi Mother: Dissections of Habitus in Gwendolyn Brooks Astrid Franke | 35 Intellectual Disposition and Bodily Knowledge: Richard Wright’s Literary Practice Stephan Kuhl | 55 “You have to leave home to find home”: Charismatic Violence and Split Habitus in Ralph Ellison’s Second Unfinished Novel Nicole Lindenberg | 77 (Post-Black) Bildungsroman or Novel of (Black Bourgeois) Manners? The Logic of Reproduction in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor Marlon Lieber | 101 “You People Almost Had Me Hating You Because of the Color of Your Skin”: Symbolic Violence and Black In-Group Racism in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier Johannes Kohrs | 123 Black Women’s Business: Female Entrepreneurship and Economic Agency in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child Stefanie Mueller | 145 “What’s the Position You Hold?”: Bourdieu and Rap Music Timo Müller | 165 “Decolorized for Popular Appeal”: ‘True’ Stories of African American Homelessness Wibke Schniedermann | 183 Understanding Ferguson: Suburban Marginality and Racialized Penality in the Age of Neoliberalism Luvena Kopp | 205 Transformations of Oppression: The Case of Bayard Rustin Nicole Hirschfelder | 237 Introducing Disagreement: Rancière’s Anti-Sociology and the Parallax of Political Subjectivity and Political Economy (of Racism) Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich | 257 Contributors | 281 Preface This book is the result of “communicative enthusiasm,” to borrow an ex- pression that Pierre Bourdieu used in a rare statement of professional exu- berance to characterize the cohesive interaction within his research group. Except for two guests – Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich and Timo Müller – all contributors to this volume were at some point members of a long-standing study group. Its research program has focused on the methodological question addressed in the essays collected in the current volume, namely how to make use of the concepts of relational sociology, represented by Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, in the field of literary and cultural studies in general and in (African) American Studies in particular. The question emerged, as so often happens in our field, out of serendipitous reading – suggested, in this case, by my husband, Bernhard Buschendorf. The “communicative enthusiasm” developed above all during the com- pact courses my husband and I would over many years jointly devise and teach, for instance, on “Key Concepts of Relational Thinking,” “Symbol Theories,” “Sociological Theories of Power,” or “Theories of Ideology.” Students, doctoral students, and young faculty members from the Depart- ment of Comparative Literature at Universität Duisburg-Essen and from the American Studies Department of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt would meet at Haus Bergkranz, a university-owned house located in the picturesque Alpine village of Riezlern, Kleinwalsertal. There we would enter into very intense and, as it were, never-ending discussions, hardly interrupted even when we took a break hiking in the mountains or when in the evening we would sit at the bar – “playing one of the most extraordinary games that one can play, that of research” (Bourdieu, In Other Words 26). In grateful memory of the best of experiences academic life has to offer, I would like to thank all the participants of the seminars and reading groups who by entering the playfield and engaging in the exciting game of intellectual work have enlivened and enriched it. Christa Buschendorf Introduction Key Concepts of Relational Sociology as Tools of Hermeneutics CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF More than one hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclama- tion, the history of slavery still looms large in the United States. The notion of a post-racial society that prospered under the nation’s first black presi- dent mistook the admittedly significant advancement embodied by a political icon for a substantial decline of discrimination against African Ameri- cans. Quite to the contrary, under the Obama presidency systemic racism returned with a vengeance, most obviously in the substantial increase of police brutality – from targeting black youth with stop-and-frisk practices to the notorious cases of the killing of unarmed black men by police officers. The idea that a black family in the White House would lead to the colorblindness of the nation may have been nourished by wishful thinking. To hold on to the illusion of colorblindness has become more difficult under the Trump presidency, as white supremacist groups increasingly feel en- couraged to come to the fore. Ultimately, however, the widespread denial of a deeply ingrained racism rests on the powerful ideology of individualism that constructs the individual as essentially free and thus fully respon- sible for his or her fate. What on the one hand forms the core of the staunch American belief in upward mobility, known as the American Dream, on the other hand leads to the prevalent conviction that poverty, poor education, and bad housing must be mainly the responsibility of those who did not try hard enough to escape the unfavorable living conditions into which they 12 | CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF were born. Thus, black inequality – today manifested most obviously by what Loïc Wacquant has defined as the “hyperghetto” (cf. “Deadly Sym- biosis”) – has frequently been blamed on African American culture rather than on structural conditions. In his discussion of the controversy between American liberals who commonly lean toward structural factors and con- servatives who rather focus on aspects of culture, William Julius Wilson maintains: It is an unavoidable fact that Americans tend to deemphasize the structural origins and social significance of poverty and welfare. In other words, the popular view is that people are poor or on welfare because of their own personal shortcomings. Per- haps this tendency is rooted in our tradition of “rugged individualism.” (Wilson 43) It is undoubtedly for this very belief in individualistic explanations that, notwithstanding the fact that “the majority of poor people in the United States are white, […] the public face of American poverty is Black” (Taylor 49). As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes, “ideologies do not work when they are only imposed from above. The key is widespread acceptance, even by the oppressed themselves” (25). Taylor does not address the question why the oppressed would accept an ideology that not only enhances discrimination against themselves but also contributes to the reproduction of the inequalities of the given social order. Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Eli- as, the sociologists on whose concepts the authors of this collection draw, do pose this question, and both formulate their answers on the basis of relational theories of power. In Bourdieu’s oeuvre it is the concept of “symbolic violence” that – in- terrelated with the concepts of “habitus,” “field,” and “capital” – serves to explain why “the established order, with its relations of domination, its rights and prerogatives, privileges and injustices, ultimately perpetuates it- self so easily, apart from a few historical accidents, and that the most intol- erable conditions of existence can so often be perceived as acceptable and even natural” (Masculine Domination 1). As “a gentle violence, impercep- tible and invisible even to its victims” (1), it contributes to the misrecogni- tion of domination and thus to the reproduction of the established order. The normalization of unequal power relations is also a concern of Elias. In his essay “Towards a Theory of Established-Outsider Relations,” a con- ceptualization of the field study The Established and the Outsiders he had INTRODUCTION | 13 earlier undertaken together with John L.

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