Literary geography and sovereign violence: Resisting Tocqueville's family romance

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Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 27-50

  Shapiro, Michael J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

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EID: 23044520675     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540002500103     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1990), vol. 2, p. 197.
2. Democracy in America, Ibid., p. 193
3. Democracy in America, Ibid., p. 197.
4. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 85.
5. Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 219.
6. Cloudsplitter Ibid., pp. 220-221.
7. Cloudsplitter Ibid., p. 222.
8. Cloudsplitter Ibid., p. 223.
9. Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his report on "the Negro family" in 1965.
10. For a review of its implications and the controversy it attracted, see Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967).
11. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 60.
12. The quotations are from Lauren Berlant, "The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Notes on Diva Citizenship," in Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays in Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 229.
13. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1700-1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976).
14. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 101.
15. Disagreement, Ibid., p. 13.
16. Disagreement, Ibid., p. 19.
17. Jacques Ranciere, "Politics, Identification, and Subjectification," October 61 (summer 1992): 59.
18. "Interview with Jacques Ranciere: Democracy Means Equality," Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997): 31.
19. Ranciere, note 13, p. 39.
20. Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1998), p. 7.
21. As Donald Lowe notes, the estate-based society was organized on the basis of a set of formal prerogatives, authorized by God. Estate society was thus ascriptive; statuses were hierarchically fixed, and "the major concerns within that formalized hierarchy were precedence, honor, and territoriality." History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 63.
22. M. M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84-258.
23. John Stuart Mill, "M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America" (first published 1840), in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. 2 (New York: Holt, 1874), p. 85.
24. Tocqueville, note 1, vol. 1, p. 25.
25. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 170.
26. Ibid., p. 169. Tocqueville was not a simplistic moralizer, however. Allowing in his model of cultural encounter a degree of cultural pluralism, he lamented the demise of the "noble savage," feeling that Native Americans were undeserving of the destruction of their way of life that the European invasion had wrought. Nevertheless, as Connolly puts it, "the historical consolidation of the civi-territorial complex requires the elimination of the Indian" (p. 170). Tocqueville, despite his qualms, is able to "come to terms with violence that is undeserved" (p. 171). The European habitation is a form of justice sanctioned by history. In comparison, the "injustice injustice" (p. 171) cannot be as telling for Tocqueville as was, for example, the injustice of slavery. And, most essentially, contrary to the many readings that locate Tocqueville as a sophisticated sociologist, the myopic gaze he trained on Native American social organization constituted a continuation of European violence by other means - what Jacques Derrida has called a "violence of representation." Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 79-153.
27. Harry Liebersohn, "Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing," American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (1994): 746.
28. American Historical Review Ibid., p. 754.
29. Tocqueville, note 1, vol. 1, pp. 331-434.
30. Ibid., p. 334.
31. Ibid.
32. For a historical treatment of the various masks that slaves employed to survive not only in the face of the dangers from punishment of their owners but also from the shame among those who shared their behavioral dilemmas, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South," American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1228-1252.
33. Contrary to Tocqueville's observations and predictions, throughout the history of African Americans, from slavery to the present, negotiating an existence in a white-dominated world has required a variety of kinds of role playing, and black society has been more or less continually constituted on the basis of survival and resistance practices. Certainly, the spaces of resistant civic association in which African Americans convened at the time Tocqueville made his observations were necessarily recalcitrant to the white, sociological gaze. An extreme (and well-known) case was Nat Turner's rebellious band. They met in the woods to plot their insurrection, not only to escape white surveillance but also because it was the only space not controlled at all moments by their white owners. Turner's rebellion, which occurred during the summer of 1831, while Tocqueville was making his observations, was not an isolated incident. The bulk of slave testimony indicates that "the slaves were constantly resisting and rebelling" (Mike Thelwell, "Back with the Wind: Mr. Styron and the Reverend Turner," in John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner: The Black Writers Respond [Boston: Beacon, 1968], p. 87).
34. Tocqueville, note 1, vol. 1, p. 356.
35. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (New York: Verso, 1998).
36. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 Ibid., p. 14.
37. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 Ibid., p. 18.
38. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 Ibid., p. 17.
39. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 Ibid., p. 27.
40. M. M. Bakhtin, "The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)," in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 11.
41. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Ibid., p. 13.
42. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Ibid., pp. 23-24.
43. The injustice-in-justice and immorality-in-morality remarks here reflect William Connolly's contrast between Tocqueville and Nietzsche. See William E. Connolly, "Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence," in Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward Alker, eds., Challenging Boundaries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 147.
44. Moretti, note 34, p. 37.
45. Pierson, note 4, p. 121.
46. Bakhtin, note 39, p. 53.
47. See Bakhtin's explication of the heteroglossic structure of the novel in his "Discourse and the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, note 21, pp. 257-422.
48. See Banks, note 5, p. 423, for an explicit treatment of this dimension of racism.
49. "Inheriting Slavery," interview with Katie Bacon in Atlantic Unbound; on the internet at http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/unbound/ bookauth/eballint.htm.
50. Ball, note 19.
51. Pierson, note 4, p. 606.
52. Giorgio Agamben, "The People," Public 12 (1995): 10.
53. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 6.
54. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Ibid., p. 15.
55. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Ibid., p. 174.
56. Exemplary of an investigation guided by this perspective is Robert Putnam's study of "civic traditions" in contemporary Italy, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
57. See Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 65-78.
58. The best-known study that treated the issue of inequality on the basis of individual life trajectories is Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and School in America (New York: Basic, 1972).
59. For a critique of this orientation in the liberal-theory approach to inequality, see Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
60. Michael Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society," Social Text 45 (winter 1995): 34.
61. The expression is from Houston A. Baker, "Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere," Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 10.
62. See, for example, John Fiske's analyses in Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), which, in contrast with simplistic treatments of television as a social narcotic, shows the many ways it is implicated in sociality.
63. Thomas Keenan, "Windows of Vulnerability," in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 130.
64. For more on this point, see Lynn Spigel, "The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America," in Beatrice Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 1992), pp. 185-217.
65. See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 10.
66. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America Ibid. 1994 10
67. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America Ibid., p. 11.
68. This point is made in Stephen Haymes, Race, Culture, and the City (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. 70.
69. Goody Mob, "Cell Therapy" (New York: LaFace Records, 1995).
70. Michael Eric Dyson, "Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood," Cultural Critique, no. 21 (1992), p. 124.
71. Michael Eric Dyson, "Between Apocalypse and Redemption: John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood," Cultural Critique, no. 21 (1992), p. 124., Ibid.