Copyright by Jennifer Denise Williams 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Jennifer Denise Williams Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire, and Racial Identification Committee: Ann Cvetkovich, Co-Supervisor Helena Woodard, Co-Supervisor Mia Carter Neville Hoad Joni L. Jones Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire, and Racial Identification by Jennifer Denise Williams, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2006 Dedication For the loved ones I have mourned during the completion of this project: My father, Loy Williams, my great aunts Beulah Littles and Mary Caldwell, and my friend, Arin Hill. Acknowledgements The completion of this project would not have been possible without an extended network of intellectual and emotional support. My appreciation far exceeds the boundaries of these pages. I owe many thanks to my advisors, Ann Cvetkovich and Helena Woodard, for their unflagging feedback and encouragement throughout my entire writing process. I could not have possibly done this without your mentorship and support both in the classroom and outside of it (and most often in a different time zone). I owe both of you a debt of gratitude for the impact you have had on the development of my scholarship and my professional life. I also want to thank Mia Carter, Joni L. Jones/Iya Omi Osun Olomo, and Neville Hoad for serving on my committee. The intellectual gifts that each of you have shared with me have shaped the direction of my scholarship. I am also grateful for the support of Barbara Harlow during my tenure at UT and the sense of intellectual community and “homespace” nurtured by E3W’s Third Thursdays. I owe many thanks to my friends and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation group, Lynn Makau, Kris Hogan, Lisa Avery, Casey McKittrick, Lee Rumbarger, and Jodi v Sherman for reading early drafts of my work and offering critical feedback. I would also have been lost without the support of the other members of my cohort, Miriam Schacht, Colleen Hynes, Keilonne O’Brien, and Virginia Raymond. Trinity College’s Ann Plato Dissertation Writing Fellowship also afforded me the opportunity to devote focused time to the formative chapters of my dissertation. I am thrilled to have had that opportunity and to have formed lasting collegial relationships with faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality department. And to my friends and sistafriends who have continued to surround me with love, who have fed me and nursed me back to health, made me CDs and who are there through the laughter and the tears, I feel so blessed. Peggy Brunache, Eve Dunbar, and Lynn Makau (aka “The Girls of St. Thomas”), your friendship means so much to me. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have you all in my life; I feel so fortunate to have the mentorship and sisterhood of women who have gone through this process before me and are willing to help me along my journey, Kimberly Brown, Angela Bolin, Suzette Spencer, and Thea Hunter; I am also grateful for the listening ears and timely hugs from my friends Celeste Henery, Alisa Perkins, Shaka McGlotten, Rebecca Lorins, Keisha-Khan Perry, Jeff Jaeckle, Alison Perry, and Rana Emerson; and for the enduring friendship and love of Wenona Wynn, Montrice Wright, and Mia Rogers. This project is the outcome of a long journey, amidst roadblocks, stumbles, and some indescribable moments of pure lightness. But each step along the way, I knew that if I should happen to fall, there would always be someone there to vi catch me: my mother, Betty Williams. There are no words to describe my love and gratitude for you. vii Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire, and Racial Identification Publication No._____________ Jennifer Denise Williams, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Supervisors: Ann Cvetkovich and Helena Woodard Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire and Racial Identification explores a diverse archive of African American literary and cultural texts in order to reveal loss as a necessary condition of racial identification. To support this assertion, this study broaches a theoretical gap that persists between black literary and cultural studies and revisionist approaches to psychoanalytic theory. Using the lens of trauma theory, Black Mourning reframes cultural memory and black subjectivity in ways that supplant performances of racial authenticity with an affective politics. Black expressive culture and performance aesthetics undergird this critical model. Chapter One “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning” configures cultural memory in relation to the formation of modern blackness. Chapter Two “‘Nobody Knows My Name’: Ann Petry’s The Street and Black Women’s Blues Protest” uses a blues aesthetic to access hidden texts of black female sexual trauma. Chapter Three “The Queerness of Blackness: Marlon Riggs’s Black Is … Black Ain’t” looks at embodied trauma as an a foundation for reimagining black collectivity. The fourth chapter “Archiving Blackness: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Post-Soul Aesthetics” moves beyond fixed narratives of race to conceptualize innovative ways of archiving blackness. viii Table of Contents Introduction: The Blues of Blackness............................................................. 1 Chapter One: Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning............... 31 Chapter Two: Ann Petry's The Street and Black Women's Blues Protest .. 77 Chapter Three: The Queerness of Blackness: Marlon Riggs's Black Is … Black Ain't ................................................................................................................114 Chapter Four: Archiving Blackness: Danzy Senna's Caucasia and Post-Soul Aesthetics .......................................................................................................140 Epilogue: "A Moment to Mourn" .................................................................164 Bibliography ..................................................................................................177 Vita ................................................................................................................196 ix Introduction The Blues of Blackness Blackness is performed to a blues soundtrack. This familiar coupling of black and blue underscores the extent to which blackness is linked with grief. To be sure, African American literature and culture are rife with expressions of loss, mourning, and “the blues.” These structures of feeling articulate the impact of a traumatic history on black subjectivity. Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire, and Racial Identification explores a diverse archive of African American literature and culture in order to reveal loss as a necessary condition of black subjectivity. Modern black subjectivity results directly from a history of traumatic loss, namely the transatlantic slave trade and the physical and cultural displacement of people of African descent through the Middle Passage and by means of forced and voluntary migration in the United States. The cultural memory of these traumas has produced unifying narratives of racial identity in black public culture and aesthetics that betray a desire to recuperate an irrecoverable past.1 Yet, cultural memory sometimes involves cultural forgetting. Unifying narratives typically elide processes of rupture, revision, and exchange; they forego the routes of New World blackness for roots.2 In other words, these quests for an uninterrupted racial continuity rely on fantasies of origin and performances of 1 authenticity. These performances of “authentic” blackness tend to be maintained by models of cultural production that are both gendered and sexualized. By reconceptualizing African American literary and cultural history through trauma, I hope to identify ways to construct cultural memory and black subjectivity that neither fall back on narratives of origin nor revel in performances of authenticity. I allude to the blues in order to suggest that the structures of feeling within black expressive culture provide such a model. The difficulty of representing or speaking trauma and the elision of racial trauma in official historical discourse have generated alternative forms of expression. Since The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), black writers, scholars, and cultural critics have identified black music as a privileged site of cultural memory and a mode of expressing sorrow. As a result, the aesthetics and affect of black music are often adapted to other forms of cultural expression—like literature, performance, film, and the visual arts—as a medium through which the ineffable can be articulated. Although cultural forms like black music have been used to bolster claims of racial authenticity, the structures of feeling contained within the music itself gesture toward more complicated ways of remembering and expressing trauma and reimagining black subjectivity. The texts that I have selected for this dissertation—Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Marlon Riggs’s Black Is … Black Ain’t (1995), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1999)—all 2 draw on black musical affect and aesthetics to access cultural memory and to amend unifying narratives of blackness. The folksongs from the mouths of Georgia’s