The fourth dimension: Kinlessness and African American narrative

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 270-292

  Bentley, Nancy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349147783     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/596643     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. See Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, 2003); hereafter abbreviated "M."
2. See also Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2007).
3. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period, vol. 1 of Race and the American Legal Process (New York, 1978), p. 50;
4. quoted in "M," p. 226.
5. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 80.
6. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1855; New York, 1994), p. 149.
7. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1962; Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 43-51.
8. I am borrowing the figure of a "biopolitical fracture" from Elizabeth Povinelli, who revises Giorgio Agamben's notion of bare life to theorize the lived, material effects on bodies and lives when a sovereign power excludes persons and populations from the life of the polity. The "physical mattering" that results from biopolitical exclusion, Povinelli stresses, differs from the fantasy of a clean division between life and death projected by the sovereign (Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality [Durham, N.C., 2006], p. 204).
9. Steven Pinker, "Strangled by Roots: The Genealogy Craze in America," The New Republic, 6 Aug. 2007, p. 34; hereafter abbreviated "S."
10. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1999), p. 121.
11. Lisa Lowe, "The Intimacies of Four Continents," in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, N.C., 2006), p. 197.
12. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology: Theoretical and Practical (Philadelphia, 1854), p. 240.
13. Povinelli, The Empire of Love, p. 226.
14. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, 1997), p. 431; hereafter abbreviated H.
15. Amy Harmon, "Blacks Pin Hope on DNA to Fill in Slavery's Gaps in Family Trees," New York Times, 25 July 2005, p. A17;
16. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 149.
17. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), pp. 10, 164, 85, 109.
18. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 218; hereafter abbreviated BA.
19. Morrison, quoted in Gilroy, "Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison," Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London, 1993), p. 181;
20. quoted in BA, p. 218.
21. Susan Stewart, "On the Art of the Future," The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago, 2005), p. 21.
22. W. E. B. DuBois, "A Vacation Unique," appendix to Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 (Chicago, 1995), p. 221; hereafter abbreviated "VU."
23. Zamir reproduces the two versions of the narrative in existence, one that is housed with the DuBois papers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the other - partly a transcription and partly a summary produced by Francis Broderick for his Ph.D. thesis on DuBois - in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. See Francis Broderick, "W. E. B. Du Bois: The Trail of His Ideas," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1955. Zamir speculates that these versions may represent parts of a longer narrative that no longer exists. The title "A Vacation Unique" was added by Broderick.
24. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York, 1986), p. 368.
25. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; New York, 1988), p. 29.
26. See Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (New York, 1999).
27. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2004),
28. and Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, 2005).
29. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in Writings, p. 653.
30. Rancière, "Thinking between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge," trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia 1, no. 1 (2006): 3.
31. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford, 2000), p. 20; hereafter abbreviated RA.
32. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze), trans. and ed. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, 1991), p. 36;
33. quoted in RA, p. 66.
34. Rancière, "Thinking between Disciplines," p. 11.
35. Stephen Best, The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago, 2004), p. 227; hereafter abbreviated FP.
36. see FP, pp. 247-51.
37. Henry Grady, "In Plain Black and White," Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 29 (Nov. 1884-Apr. 1885): 917;
38. George Washington Cable, "The Freedman's Case in Equity," The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. Arlin Turner (1890; Garden City, N.Y., 1958), p. 62;
39. My discussion of the literary refiguring of narratives of American history is indebted to Michel-Rolph Trouillot's analysis of " unthinkable" histories in his Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).
40. Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, in Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 2002), p. 671.
41. William Dean Howells, "A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," North American Review 85 (Dec. 1901): 883;
42. hereafter abbreviated "P";
43. rpt. in Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, ed. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning (Boston, 2002), pp. 454-57.
44. Howells, "Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Short Stories," Atlantic Monthly 85 (May 1900): 699.
45. Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio: A Study of the Negro Race Problem (1899; New York, 2003), p. 132; hereafter abbreviated I.
46. Carla Peterson identifies a parallel tradition of "romance" narratives from this period that grapple directly with questions of black genealogy and feature more female-centered plots; see Carla Peterson, "Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the 'New Negro' Novel of the Nadir," in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919, ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York, 2006), p. 39.
47. When one of the male protagonists is about to be lynched, a doctor asks the men who have seized him to minimize the destruction of the black body so that he can dissect the corpse in the "interest of society" (I, p. 105).
48. Noting that "government now plays a much more direct role in marriage than it has for most of Western civilization's history," Michael Warner succinctly summarizes the enhancement of power that the state derives from monopolizing recognition of marriage. "The state merely certifies a love that is beyond law; but by doing so, it justifies its existence as keeper of the law" (Michael Warner, "Beyond Gay Marriage," in Left Legalism / Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley [Durham, N.C., 2002], pp. 283, 271).
49. Judith Butler, "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy," Undoing Gender (New York, 2004), p. 35.
50. Butler, "The End of Sexual Difference?" Undoing Gender, p. 191.
51. Trouillot, in this regard, has written that "we have never been universal" (Trouillot, "The North Atlantic Universals," in The Modern World-System in the Long Durée, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein [Boulder, Colo., 2004], p. 234).
52. Wallerstein explains that "it is the modern world-system of [capitalism] that reified the binary ... between universalism (which it claimed that the dominant elements incarnated) and particularism (which it attributed to all those who were being dominated)" (Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power [New York, 2006], p. 48).
53. Rather than rejecting any idea of universalism, however, Wallerstein argues for the need to "universalize our particulars and particularize our universals simultaneously and in a kind of constant dialectical exchange" - though conceding that this is "not an easy game" (p. 49). I am also influenced here by Butler's approach to universalism in her "Competing Universalities," in Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London, 2000), pp. 136-81.