Black Cultural St

Black Cultural Studies

david marriott
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This chapter focuses on books published in the eld of black cultural studies in 2011. It is divided into two sections: 1. Visual Culture, which reviews Leigh Raifords Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, Nicole Fleetwoods Troubling Vision, John Bowles Adrian Piper, and Nicholas Mirzoeffs The Right to Look; 2. Cultural and Literary Theory, which examines works on legal rituals, violence, Du Bois mid-century writings, African-American literary history, and post-black identity in America.

1. Visual Culture
The year saw historical studies in the role of photography in black social movements, representations of blackness in US visual culture, the artist Adrian Piper, and countervisuality in the context of decolonialism. Leigh Raifords Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African-American Freedom Struggle explores, through analyses of the civil rights and black power movements, how African Americans used photography to address black political freedom struggles and resistance. Raiford states the political rationale in her Introduction to the book, which recalls Martin Luther Kings urging, in 1963, of the need to bring Americas brutal racial inequalities to light: The brutality with which ofcials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caughtas a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caughtin gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world (p. 1). Kings awareness of the importance of visual media, and especially photography, to the struggle for civil rights, informs Raifords study and its insistence, restated throughout, that visual media forms an important part

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2 | Black Cultural Studies of black cultural history (and cultural politics), and that black activists used image media to challenge and disturb the unquestionably racist visual hegemony of American culture. Can photography serve to construct new racial epistemologies, she asks, or does it always edify dominant paradigms? That is, can the black body (photographed) as abject and discredited sign be made to signify differently? (p. 35). The implicit assumption herethat photography is a way of knowing the worldis never really questioned as such in the book, despite Raifords repeated arguments about the use of photography as a political intervention. Devoting a chapter each to antilynching (mainly Ida B. Wells and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), civil rights (mainly SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and Black Power (mainly the Black Panther newspaper and Emory Douglass photo collages), Raiford examines how black activists used photography to both unmake and remake black identity (p. 9). The key word here, despite its limitations, is identity. For Raiford, images of identity, almost by denition, embody relations of power, but the question of how they are invested or disinvested with desire (hence their force, or seductiveness) is not really explored or taken up. For example, we learn that the SNCC enlisted and trained photographers, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality also had several photographers on their books. We also learn that some political leaders were also photographers, including Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young, James Forman and Robert Zellner. It is signicant, however, that Raifords account does not really get inside the oppositional force of these photographs in any but a culturalist, rather than an affective, sense. And so even though we do learn much about how activists turned photographs into posters, pamphlets, and displayed them in freedom houses; or about how Gordon Parks, Charles Moore and Frank Dandridge photographed the civil rights movements events and gures for Life, and about how photographs of violence against protestors appeared on the front pages of the New York Times et al., aside from opposition and contradiction, the presentation of these details assumes that these photographs were fully consonant, and never resistant to, such appropriations. One notable exception is the response, by Burke Marshall of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, to the photographs of the 1963 Birmingham campaign showing the use of police dogs and re hoses on protestors, which he said stirred the feelings of most whites in the country. Or that of President Kennedy, who said that the images made him sick, and that their eloquence exceeded that of explanatory words. These responses all refer to the

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Black Cultural Studies | 3 libidinal-affective force of photography, but the extent to which they denote a political response perhaps demands a more affective notion of the political, and a more psychoanalytical interrogation of why some images leave a trace, an imprint, whereas others do not. The key point in all this is that photography was not only vital to black political activism and resistance, but it also helped to frame new ways of seeing race and identity in America. Activists used photographs to remake black identity, reframe national identity, and reject dominant racial ideology. Consequently, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare is a valuable study of how visual culture acquires cognitive truth as politics, but also how political convictions shape our understandings of photography (its epistemology, limitations, and capabilities). It is this more dialectical insightinto the troubling encounter between race and visual media in Americathat distinguishes Raifords historical study. Indeed, towards the end of the book, she asks: Why these images now? What do they tell us about our contemporary crises? Her answer is not altogether surprising: these images inform us that the past is not over, and continue to offer a charged political language through which to voice dissent (p. 220). In Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole R. Fleetwood analyses a persistent issue in American culture: that seeing blackness is troubling, aberrant, exposing. The book is ostensibly a study of how blackness becomes visually knowable through performance, cultural practices, and psychic manifestations (p. 6). As such, Troubling Vision combines ideas from visual culture and media studies with performance and critical race theory, popular culture and feminist theory with lm theory and psychoanalysis. And yet, the thread that links all of these concerns together moves through the following points: (1) if the presence of the black body always already troubles the scopic regime of whiteness, how might theories of visuality and performance open up other ways of seeing and doing blackness? Or, (2) how might the discourse of blackness [that] is predicated on a knowable, visible and performing subject be engaged in a way which disrupts the role of visuality and performance together as they produce black subjects in the public sphere? (p. 6) Although such a question recalls Raifords study of how media can be politically, epistemologically, corrective, Troubling Vision is centrally concerned with how images of blacks are traversed by relations of force, fear, disavowal and phobia, and how these relations are never simply errors that can be corrected, but are necessarily involved in structures of projection and antagonism that range from photography to fashion, black popular culture to feminist digital art media.

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4 | Black Cultural Studies Fleetwood emphases the multi-faceted nature of blackness as sign, index and symbol: It is not rooted in a person, history, or thing, although it has many histories and many associations with people and things. Blackness lls in space between matter, between object and subject, between bodies, between looking and being looked upon. [. . .] Through its circulation, blackness attaches to bodies and narratives coded as such but it always exceeds these attachments. (p. 6) Accordingly, rather than appropriation, Fleetwood is interested in how blackness takes on various fantasmatic roles in American visual culture, and how black artists have challenged these projections by opening up other productive possibilities in their representations of Afro-America (p. 6). Troubling Vision opens with Charles Teenie Harris, a community photographer in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, who shot 80,000-plus images of black community life from the 1930s to 1970s, images which are attuned to the pleasures and pride of the subjects, and which are rarely tendentious. Fleetwood contrasts Harris rich, varied tableaux with the ways in which civil rights-era reportage pursued an iconic repertoire of (white) violence and (black) abjection, images in which social order and symbolic form are closely allied to a dimension of visual language that could be easily decoded, and so taken for granted. Why is it that the latter is taken to dene an historical erai.e. becomes iconicwhereas the former is taken to signify indexical and quotidian values sans important ethical and political questions? (p. 28). Nothing that Fleetwood shows us of Harris photography makes this question seem ridiculous or one-sided. Indeed, as Fleetwood presents him here, the work of Harris offers an interesting challenge to the radical perspectives of the photographs displayed in Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare. In other chapters of her book, Fleetwood considers how black women have used art to reinscribe stereotypical representations depicting them as a spectacle, aberrant and pathological (p. 118). An interesting study of the hip hop mogul as the new icon of Americana and the ultimate American citizen (p. 154), also raises interesting questions about race and commodity. Another chapter looks at Jamel Shabazzs photographic documentation of black urban life and fashion in 1980s New York: again, how do black artists use these various genres of visuality to recongure and/or repudiate repressive images of blackness as such? In a chapter on the digital media artist Fatimah Tugger, Fleetwood argues, and in dialogue with feminist media and technology studies, that in the quasi-concept of the

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Black Cultural Studies | 5 visible seam, Tugger has developed an aesthetic practice capable of making visible or revealing the gaps, erasures, and ellipses in dominant visual narratives and their underlying ideology (p. 30). The effect of her digital manipulations is not simply montage or hypervisuality, but a drawing of attention to the way in which each image is dened by the residues it leaves and cannot contain, and which opens to ever newer horizons of the image. I think this insight lies behind Fleetwoods more general formulation, in Troubling Vision, of how images of blackness, in terms of the all but imposing demands they place on the attention of the seer, tend to invoke thoughts of failure, fracture, and excess. Fleetwood pursues these themes, which remain of immense importance in black visual culture studies, through various antimonies, genres and periods, and the stakes involved raise difcult questions. In Chapter Two, for example, Her Own Spook: Colorism, Vision, and the Dark Female Body, she offers a comparative analysis of two plays written by black female playwrights: Yellowman (2002) by Dael Orlandersmith and Color Struck (1926) by Zora Neale Hurston. The story both plays tell is one of repetition: wherein the story of the dark-skinned black woman who falls victim to the color binary (black/white) is then returned to the gender antimony of male/female, as a symbolic resolution of her subjection and subjecthood. If colorism, under pressure from biopolitical notions of inheritance, privileges a certain way of knowing and detecting racial value and identity, it can only do so from the presumption, by extension, that blackness is both visibly identiable and knowable, and can be read and seen as such, in both a juridical and ontological manner. What this transparency leaves out is how the (racist) perspective itself generates uncertainty and anxiety about the limits of that body, both in terms of its description and prescription as a juridical and litigious uncertainty (hence the endless analogies and metaphors about the proper or authentically black body). For Fleetwood, the tensions engendered by the relationship between color and value, the visualization of intra-racial distinction, and how intraracial distinction is visualized, performed and experienced as psychic trauma demonstrate the ontological retreat (or failure) of racial authenticity, but also highlight how the power to uphold or legitimate colorist ideologies cannot be satisfactorily established without appeals to the mysterious ineffability of a nature in thrall to biological essentialisms (pp. 723). Concerning excess: what Fleetwood discovers, unsurprisingly enough, in the performance works of Renee Cox, Ayanah Moor and others, are concepts and theses, fantasies and discourses, by which the black woman is invariably cast in the role of being too much as compared with white

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6 | Black Cultural Studies femininity (who seems ever destined to play the role of Goldilocks in such discourses). In thrall to this excess esh, or what lies beyond it, such narratives continue to inform both sociology and aesthetics, and the various ways in which black women are made to stand in for an irreducible heteronomy within the body politic. Better put, she is literally the visible seam of the socio-symbolic logic of what binds white femininity to normality. Here, Fleetwood looks at the media art of Tuggar to critique Western notions that produce black female bodies as pre-technological and folkloric, or as the pre-civilized origin of civilized sexual morality. Troubling Vision is a powerful study, not so much of what blackness means as what it is used to do and perform, and thus how blackness gets attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices in the visual sphere (p. 20). Accordingly, for Fleetwood, troubling visions of blackness highlight the desire to have the cultural product solve the very problem that it represents (p. 3). It is in this rupture, this opening, where Fleetwood nds room for her investigation of the unanswered, or disavowed, nature of blackness, making Troubling Vision an important contribution to black visual culture studies. John Bowles Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is a thoughtful study of the artists early work, from 1968 to 1975, which Piper suggests foreshadows the later work that deals overtly with racism and sexism in the art world and society (p. 25). Bowles situates Pipers work in relation to conceptualism and minimalism before asking how it relates to feminism and contemporary political art by African Americans. We learn that Piper achieved success at an early age with her conceptual and minimalist pieces, which were included in important museum and gallery exhibitions in New York and Europe (p. 39). Such abstract work required the viewer to evaluate it without reference to the artists touch or intention. Yet as Bowles reports, Piper has stated repeatedly that people generally assumed that Adrian Piper was a white man, and that once her gender and race became knownthrough a studio visit by a critic or curator, for examplesupport for her work evaporated. For this reason, Piper has stated that her early work was informed by gender and race discrimination, but it remains unclear whether such informing was about how the work was read, or more about Pipers awareness, in retrospect, of a signicant ideological misreading. Bowles identies a contradiction here: Pipers apparently conicting assessmentsthat she did not intend her work to be political but that it reects the racism and sexism she facedpresent a problem for the art historian (p. 77). Indeed, Bowles book interrogates this problemof the tensions between Pipers own statements about her work and the works themselvesas part of the effects of meaning and

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Black Cultural Studies | 7 identity which Piper, throughout her career, has worked to undermine. The political antagonism between (racial) meaning and form, in sum, cannot be reduced to either form or identity, and precisely because Pipers works are taken up, more generally, with how the logic of racism-sexism makes epistemological sense by eliding that which is judged, felt, and seen to be different. Whence the suspicion that these contradictions open up a deeper problem about whether art, black art, can be entirely conned to racialsexual sense without duly rendering the question of form as a mere metaphor of the political. It can only be political if it already makes sense in such terms, but it cannot be political if its masquerade as sense is essentially incompatible with such language: given how much is at stake, it is therefore not surprising that most of Pipers works are centrally concerned with exposing the perplexity that race can induce in the (white and black) viewer. Or that her work attempts to link the cognitive activity that goes into racial (mis)recognition with more directly political and embodied engagements and practices involving performance art and self-alienation. Piper performs her role as artist in order to alienate herself from her work, Bowles writes (p. 15). She does so through a process of objecticationthat is, the negotiation of a continuous and complex relationship to subjectivity that enables the subject to regard itself as if the subject and subject-as-object are separable (p. 50). Bowles suggests that self-alienation is itself a theoretical-political activity for Piper, but his reading stops here, and he doesnt ask the further question as to why self-alienation, in its myriad forms, expresses the force of a desire in the work, or why this vision of the artist-as-subject-object is able to resist the very notion of alienation (which presumes that there is already something to be alienated), and precisely because the place from which the subject seems to be regarding itself cannot be delimited by structure, form, or indeed the very concept of a subject. For example, Bowles writes: By means of a double estrangement, Piper alienates herself from her self-image and from her artwork (p. 242). But is this alienation merely a politico-logical outcome of the work, or does it point to something more aporetic in Pipers sense of herself, a sense that has informed her philosophical aesthetic from its conceptual beginnings (as her many readings of Kants Critique of Pure Reason attest) to the later works on stereotypes? Is this notion of self-alienation entirely convincing? Bowles observes that Pipers performance of black masculinityin the Mythic Being seriesis imperfect: her slight frame and light skin do not conform to the image (presumably that of a black man). But isnt that the point? By making the viewer reect on their own presuppositions and by returning the gaze, isnt Piper trying to indicate how a whole baggage of racial-sexual

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8 | Black Cultural Studies preconceptions acquire cognitive force, and so are difcult to displace, regardless of their accuracy or verisimilitude? Bowles Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is one of the few monographs on Piper and, as such, is an important addition to studies of her work, art history, and Afro-American visual culture studies. However, in his reading of some of Pipers more infamously demanding texts, he clearly hasnt examined them in the ways in which they displace their own necessary displacements, or in the way that they exploit conceptual-philosophical frameworks to form a compulsive set of utterances and determinations. Nicholas Mirzoeffs The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality extends the themes of excess and resistance discussed above to include a rethinking of visual culture from the comparative perspective of postcolonial theory, art history, and media studies, political theory, and contemporary social thought. In his concern with the political weight of images, Mirzoeff charts what he calls the right to look back (but why he conceives of looking as a right remains as a question throughout: can the gaze be universalized in this way, and how are such rights determined or maintained?). Beginning from late seventeenth-century Atlantic plantation slavery, Mirzoeff moves from a compelling study of British imperialism to European fascism; the book ends in the present period of counterinsurgency, identied as a militarized necropolitics, with the US industrial complex at the helm. Mirzoeff tells us in the Preface, with the by now standard mantra, that the book was partly inspired by the visual imagery of the Iraq war, and the shocking photos of Abu Ghraib, and asks why these images have had so little political impact (which is rather misleading since it is not at all clear what impact is being referred to here). Drawing upon a rich variety of textual and visual materials, Mirzoeff contextualizes the question by addressing the multiple ways in which Western imperial power has envisioned both itself and its others in history. Because Mirzoeff works within a postcolonial framework the question is examined from the viewpoints of various colonial and imperial histories. An integral part of his story is how imperial power has been resisted and radically transformed by the revolutionary reimaginings of subalterns (like Raiford, the emphasis is notably on the visual culture of resistance rather than complicity or collusion, as if the latter were somehow less progressive, or were itself resistant to the discourse of resistance that determines Mirzoeffs accounts of postcolonial imaging). The modern imaginary, Mirzoeff argues, was formed at the point in which the enslaved and their allies [. . .] visualized themselves as making history (p. 79), renaming themselves the people. Since the time of the Haitian revolution, whose social and political reverberations are discussed in vivid detail, visuality has been haunted

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Black Cultural Studies | 9 (and motivated) by the spectre of emancipation and, more broadly, by the fear of [its] undoing (p. 276). Modernity is thus formulated as an ongoing and unnished confrontation between visuality and countervisuality (or what Mirzoeff presents as an ongoing antagonism between the European gaze and the [subalterns] right to look). From the outset Mirzoeff argues that neither visuality nor countervisuality are simply about perception per se, but about the visualization of history (p. 2), which includes material and ideological dimensions. Visuality is here understood as a way of organizing the world, the way in which authority is made visible, natural. The crux of the matter is how certain forms of visuality entail exclusionary notions of history: when, having shown how maps and missionary expeditions, GPS systems and leaked execution videos, are all implicated in historical forms of violence [which] is the standard operating procedure of visuality, Mirzoeff locates in the subaltern an attachment to just those violences (but here the visual politics situates the subject rather than destroying it) (p. 292). Mirzoeff charts this confrontation in a predictably linear history: from the rst materialization of this violence in the slave plantation, surveilled by the overseer who stood as a proxy for the sovereign, rod in hand, to Abu Ghraib, his concern is with why this ability to assemble a visualization and render it authoritative, over and against any claims of those subjected to it, is implicity and inherently violent. The effect of all this is to present a history of visual culture in terms of a Manichean allegory, but one which occasionally loses sight of the multiple different ways of looking in both the imperial metropolis and the colony. Indeed, I am not convinced that Mirzoeff, given his reliance on antagonism, isnt aware of this, but because antagonism as such is absolutized a certain theoretical nuance tends to go missing from the account. Accordingly, the chapters are organized around three central motifs, or what Mirzoeff calls complexes of visuality: the plantation complex (16601860), the imperial complex (18601945), and the military-industrial complex (1945present). As Mirzoeff argues, each is in some degree still active in the present, and each is composed of a distinctive, albeit intersecting, conguration of three techniques: classication, social organization and aesthetization. Together, both locally and globally, they work to naturalize relations of domination and subordination, aiming to render the relation between power and authority neutral. Each complex, the author argues, takes on both a standard and intensied form, for example, in the new panoptic vision of the war on terror, all insurgents have to be seen without being able to see the drone that is surveilling them. This example will already give some idea of what each complex is supposed to illustrate of

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10 | Black Cultural Studies dominance and its revisability, and how the so-called subject of surveillance cannot be understood outside of certain socio-historical frames of visibility. Written as a counterhistory, The Right to Look is also the story of resistance from the places of visualitys application (p. 8) in the elds, in the streets and in the skies. Countervisuality is an attempt to recongure visuality as a whole (p. 24). Mirzoeff names as countervisuality the active refusal of visualitys claims to authority and (like the other authors in this section), moves through a variety of media in order to illustrate this resistance: from slave revolts and general strikes, to public displays, art and parody (and like the other authors, this founding opposition between domination and resistance is never really put in question). Caricature, engravings, posters, paintings and lms (including Pontecorvos Battle of Algiers) are thus theorized as objects in struggle, but the impression created is that they are also unable to resist this visual theory of resistance: if they bring into view alternative ways of imagining and modes of becoming that aim to challenge and undo authoritative regimes, this almost obligatory type of description suggests, paradoxically, that they have no resistance to the theory of resistance which, it could be said, violently reduces their singularity (as vision) to a counterhistorical vision (of resistance). It is thereby difcult not to read this narrative as yet another ideological allegory of resistance in which the three visual complexes that the author distinguishes become the locus and issue of a counterhegemonic praxis, but in ways that necessarily violates their singularity as visual forms (rather than as, say, revolutionary symbols or metaphors). Mirzoeffs own political commitments to the oppressed, subjected and rebellious are never in doubt, but in the end the demand for transformation of the visual perhaps leaves unanswered the more elusive question of how the visual per se comes to acquire political value and form? Overall, the seven major chapters are dense and multi-faceted, punctuated by close textualvisual analysis, along with numerous illustrations, a series of plates, and extensive examples. The Right to Look is a huge compendium of countervisual culture, but there is a certain sameness in the opposition between authoritarian visuality (p. 308) and countervisuality which is itself abstract, presumed, and never really questioned.

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2. Cultural and Literary Theory

The languageand futilityof rights is also central to Colin Dayans The Law is a White Dog: although the language of rights is perilously abstract, the practice of taking them away is very concrete (p. 94). After the rst part to

Black Cultural Studies | 11 which we shall return, the strategy here, directed against how humans are reduced to non-persons by dint of law, is to tell the story of those who have become the living dead through legal rituals. Her history of negative personhood focuses on slaves, animals, criminals, and detainees who are disabled by law (p. xii). The history she tells is quite extraordinary: from death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, rape by correctional ofcers, to a rst-hand account of life in a supermax prison, and much else besides: the entombment of the living that made an end to the death penalty possiblebut only because the notion of life unworthy of life has become pervasive. Chapter One, Holy Dogs, Hecubas Bark, introduces the topic of civil death whereby felons, monks and nuns although alive in body are dead in law. Via an analogy with Hecuba, the shape-shifter, which the author uses as the metaphor for the shape-shifting and undoing of status that are the focus of this book, Dayans study is a history in which the law (dis)possesses persons, and an attempt to show how these dispossessions underpins much of American legal history (p. 17). In a narrative which includes asides on zombies, spiritual lepers, to prisoners warehoused indenitely; disappeared ghost-detainees tortured and held incommunicado in prolonged detention; sick cows kicked and prodded in slaughterthe rationales and rituals of terror proliferate (and the comparisons just proliferate), the argument relies on an analogy of those deemed legally dead to the soulless or (dis)possessed person and animal (p. 34). This reliance on analogy is itself an analogical account of how ancient and modern law disciplines and punishes, and the density of the comparisons sometimes makes this a difcult book to discuss, despite the quality of attention to the various examples. And yet in pursuing her theme with the sense of the cultural-political stakes involved, in The Law is a White Dog Dayan has written a provocative and troubling study of American law. Chapter Two, Civil Death, opens with the eponymous white dog: in Haitian myth, an oungan (priest) may steal the spirit of a dead person and trap them in the body of a dog with white skin. This myth underlies Dayans notion of the sorcery of the law and how it materializes dispossession in legal culture. However, and for reasons that may beg some questions, the magic of the law is not the same thing as magic as law: the law that has the capacity to turn persons into things is, in effect, magical because sacred; but the legal rituals through which the magic of the law turns persons into things, are taken to denote a fetishistic violence of subjection: the links between these two formulations of sorcery are never claried in terms of sovereignty, and at one point, perhaps under pressure from her own

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12 | Black Cultural Studies promiscuous use of analogy, Dayan argues that the civil body of law is analogous to the spirit of the dead person trapped in the white skin of the dog. The question then becomes are the mysteries of lawthe founding authority of lawby extension, a kind of hoodoo voodoo? At this point, the analogically juridical formulations of The Law is a White Dog imply that the real mystery of the laws magic lies in the very structure of analogy which usurps and dispossesses the argument at every turnand even confounds the split in law between rule and prescriptionand in ways that historically, or conceptually, leave the various readings in a kind of limbo. That said, the strongest element of the book is when Dayan makes analogical comparisons between involuntary servitude and slavery: for example, she compares the legal use of corruption of blood to categorize gradations of blackness: metis, marabou, griffonne, sacatra, mulatto, mustee, octoroon, quadrons etc. (p. 44). She also charts how criminals have been forced into involuntary servitude, for instance, chain gangs, in a way that is strictly comparable to legal slavery. Dayan is able to argue that the whole tribunal of punishment in the US is rooted in removing the slave and the criminal from legal personhood, indeed their subjection can only be satisfactorily established with that removal. And so, neither slaves nor criminals are protected under the terms of the constitution. Whence the strange situation in which a slave could be a person in law only when having committed a crime; otherwise they remained property without the rights of legal personhood. Dayans book simply tracks the repetition of this dispossession from the slave to the criminal to the animal and on to the detainees held at Guantanamo. Accordingly, in Chapter Three, Punishing the Residue, Dayan argues that the so-called civilized world that sponsors execution, prolonged and indenite solitary connement, excessive force, and other kinds of psychological torture, has led to a terrain of disgured personhood (p. 71). Chapters Four and Five, Taxonomies, and A Legal Ethnography, expand on how law, ostensibly dealing with the treatment of slaves by their owners, as well as their status as reproductive capital, identies the approximate nature of chattels, not just as a legal principle but as a metaphysical truth (p. 127). Most clearly, perhaps, the keeping of the two in approximate likeness not only recasts slaves as nonhuman things to be treated and exchanged as property, but also sidesteps the need to explain how a thinking agent [can be reduced] to the status of property (p. 137). This is of course of a piece with what Dayan calls the laws cruelty in making slaves liable for crimes for which their owners were not held accountable, but denying them rights and obligations that goes with the agency of legal persons.

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Black Cultural Studies | 13 Chapter Six, Who Gets to Be Wanton, is about Tatiana, the Siberian tiger who escaped from a zoo and killed Carlos Sousa in 2007. In this encounter between the forces of law and the emblems of savagery, Dayan examines how the rights of humans are pitted against the treatment of animals (pp. 177, 179). At issue here is who gets to be wanton: wanton in the sense of insolent or reckless of justice and humanity (p. 196). In looking at how the law frames intent, she discusses how medieval trials of animals came to distinguish humans from animals in terms of subjective liability; or, generally put, reasonableness gone reckless. Dayans claims about liability suggest the coming into being of an object emptied of agency, who is no longer a victim but instead a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy (p. 181). In Chapter Seven, Skin of the Dog, Dayan discusses Katrina and its aftermath: the dogs and people left behind in the ooded city, as an allegory of how people are dehumanized: I return to the history of criminal and civil law in order to extend the fate of Katrina dogsand their owners lossto larger questions of judicial interpretation and its consequences. Actions against or unconcern with dogs are related to the giving or withholding of legal personality from human animals (p. 211) The entire argument works by and through analogy: The sight of citizens turned refugees in their own country made me think about abandoned dogs. Not because I want to equate people with dogs, but because the proximity between them helps us to grasp the relationship between legal status and proprietary interests (p. 210). But one could also say that it is precisely because the argument is in thrall to the socio-symbolic logic of analogy that it never overlooks the way law binds status and propriety to the mysterious ways of analogy: either way, whenever Dayan writes such sentencesand they are ubiquitousit leaves the argument in a curious state of uncertainty which takes the point and edge off the history of the dispossession of persons that is at the heart of the book. For these kinds of analogies pretty much fall into the same kind of impasses that we levelled at the allegories of resistance above, and it is interesting that Dayan leaves the relation between law and analogy as a task of thinking the magic of law, and one which seems unable to answer the question of how this central analogy is already both lawful and spectral (p. 252). Again, by showing how the white dog puts law squarely in the courts of sorcery and magic in the temple of law, and in ways which are certainly complicated, why is this supplemental relationship, above all, a relationship to be known from the perspective of analogy? Is this the only way that the story of persons excluded from the legal ctions of personhood can be known?

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14 | Black Cultural Studies Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica explores the relations of Jamaica to global discourses of violence. Deborah A. Thomas writes: because this is a book about violence in Jamaica that circulates beyond Jamaicas shores, it is also a book about diaspora and transnationalism (p. 3). Bringing together anthropology, history, political economy and popular culture, Thomas employs an interdisciplinary framework to understand the violence on which she focuses. Exceptional Violence is study of the relations between culture and its relationship to history, to violence, and to notions of and practices of citizenship in Jamaica (p. 4). Thomas is determined to show that culture is also about the appropriateness and availability of representations, about who has the power to create representations, and the relationships between representation and economic development (ibid.). Exceptional Violence is divided into ve chapters: Chapter One, Dead Bodies, 20042005 looks at the story of contemporary violence in Jamaica in terms of the legacies of slavery and its [inuence on] various related modes of production on contemporary notions of political authority, including the legacy of social death and technologies of punishment (p. 18). In essence, Thomas argues that death became normalized and foundational in Jamaicas early social and political development, and that the ways creole populations (slaves and masters, overseers and traders, maroons and indentured laborers) created themselves was through and in relation to conditions of death and disease, not in spite of them (p. 50). Thomas writes: violence and death was in fact foundational to state formation in Jamaica, during the colonial period and beyond (p. 51), and that this dialectic continues in present-day Jamaica with profound consequences for national and diasporic notions of belonging. Chapter Two, Deviant Bodies, 2005/1945, explores how the idea of Jamaica as the birthplace of violence derives from a culturalist approach to the understanding of economic inequality, and why ideas of dysfunction and deviance have gained so much traction in presentations of black workingclass life on the island. The implication is that violence has become known as Jamaicas natural cultural resource and that this notion has transnational implications not only for the islanders, but also for understanding Jamaican diasporic communities in Great Britain, Canada and the United States (pp. 745). Accordingly, the importing of US social theory into denitions and practices of black family life has led to notions of aberrant cultural pathologies being used to explain the pervasiveness of violence on the island and, to that extent, a vicious circle of pathology and violence is the result. Thomas argues that this has led to the transnationalization of the culture of poverty project, and one which has had dire consequences

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Black Cultural Studies | 15 for working-class blacks who have become the focus of state and cultural engineering, including the targeting of reproductive rights (p. 56). Chapter Three, Spectacular Bodies, 1816/2007, is concerned with the spectacularity of violence in Jamaica which is traced through popular culture (p. 19). The argument here is that such spectacularity has actually been a constituent part of governance since British rule and, although the inuence of US versions of heroic masculinity and gun violence are inescapable, the understanding of that inuence is itself a violent extraction of colonial violence from present discussions of badmanism and positive badness, an extraction that obscures a more complicated imperial history (p. 98). Again, for Thomas, violence in Jamaica is neither simply an inside or outside phenomenon, but derives from a complex dialectic between history and culture, representations and practices of self. And so, in response to the idea that violence is somehow endemic to Jamaican culture and so requiring disciplinary techniques of containment, Thomas working hypothesis is that such assumptions ignore historical and cultural precedents: For many Jamaicans, neither the history of slaveryand, in particular, the experiences of embodied terrornor the history of resistance to slavery is part of every day acts of memory and identity formation (p. 112). One telling example of such disavowal is the ways in which the tourism industry has helped to convert the history of slavery to memorial sites, but in ways that render the links between the past violences of slavery and the violences of the present ahistorical or virtual. Here again the justication of memory requires an emptying out of historical time, and representation makes history itself unknowable, or imaginary. The scenario is not exactly a new one, and might therefore be described as itself an historical sign of the postcolony, but what distinguishes Thomas presentation is how such an imaginary history repeats the violence of the past. Similarly, Chapter Four, Public Bodies, 2003, makes a case for saying how the debates around the Redemption Song statue in Emancipation Park, bring into relief ongoing struggles over the terms of cultural citizenship and public representations of Jamaicannessstruggles whose racial, gendered, and sexual dynamics are constituted transnationally (p. 20). The chapter illustrates this tension between the representation and the erasure of violence and resistance. For rastafarians and reggae musicians, on the other hand, the history of the violence of slavery and resistance to that history have become key sources of black pride in the antiracism struggle in Jamaica. What is authentically Jamaican and black is directly tied to that history. The last chapter of the book, Resurrected Bodies, 1963/2007, explores the changing relationships between rastafari and the Jamaican state, by

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16 | Black Cultural Studies focusing on the 1963 massacre of rastafarians in the Coral Gardens area of Montego Bay. Thomas uses this incident to further think through the process of memorialization, but also to address, more generally, the limits and possibilities of reparations as a framework through which we might seek greater recognition of the historical rootedness of contemporary inequalities, not only in Jamaica, but throughout the black world (p. 174). At the heart of the chapter is the assertion that testimonies at this annual event have introduced counter-nationalist narratives through which community solidarity, authority, and futures are envisioned (p. 21). In that sense, rather than continue the ction of an imaginary historical scenario, such narratives mark an innovative reworking of a reparations framework (ibid.). Indeed, this kind of memory work allows us to understand contemporary identity, especially with respect to Jamaicans own representations of their history, but also how those identities came to be (pp. 1768). Of interest here is how people can reimagine their futures (and themselves) in a variety of modes, practices and places. Thomas places the rastafarians of western Jamaica at the centre of these discussions for reparations because they are the primary advocates for the implementation of this kind of mobilization around issues of ownership and cultural heritage in Jamaica. Rastas, she argues, in their resistance to the reduction of culture to commodication, have also helped to articulate the ties that bind reparations to social justice and transformation, as well as place Jamaican identity within the common concerns of the black disapora. In her conclusion to the book, Thomas revisits the notion of reparations and writes: What is needed to generate real justice, in other words, is a sustained conversation about historyand about the place of the past in the presentin terms other than those of righteous blame or liberal guilt. This conversation must also envision the future in new ways and on new terms (p. 238). Exceptional Violence makes a compelling case precisely for a more dialectical account of past and present in Jamaica today. The meaning of time and history in black America is also the focus of the next two books under review. In question, is the future of black politicophilosophical identity. In The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Mid-Century, Eric Porter revisits Du Bois mid-century writings, such as Dusk of Dawn (1940), and In Battle for Peace (1952): at issue is how these writings qualify, or complicate, Du Bois overall thinking on race, national identity and citizenship in the context of colonialism and empire, but also how they inform contemporary demands for an historical materialist understanding of race in the context of globalization and neoliberalism. In his Introduction, Porter writes: Just as he [Du Bois] was aware of the ways that

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Black Cultural Studies | 17 elements of racial regimes largely consigned to the past could make their way into new social formations, we can pay close attention to how he interrogated social and ideological projects that were emergent at this moment but which continue to shape our present (p. 15). Taking his inspiration from Du Bois iconic formulations of the race concept and the color line, Porter looks to the mid-century writings to come to a deeper understanding of race in the past and present while also mindful of a certain limitation in Du Bois cold war politics (p. 17). In Chapter One, Race and the Future World, Du Bois analysis of the race concept . . . as a group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies [the words are Du Bois] is explored for what Porter describes as Du Bois growing conviction that, although race was a destabilized concept, the social role of which multiplies as its putative irrelevance is celebrated, the demand to reject, or expel it, answered neither races epistemological nor ontological persistence, nor its complicated history (p. 44). Porter rightly argues that the constant morphing of the forms and legitimations of racist exclusion derives fromand informsthe changing nature of race as a concept, but the extent to which race continues to be used and abused at the level of thought itself remained a source of ambivalence in Du Bois analysis. To conceive of, or name, a postracial moment, is not necessarily the same thing as freeing ones thought from racism. The key is to offer an account of race that does not reify it once more as a timeless essence in the attempt to go beyond it. For Porter, Du Bois mid-century writings on race explore this ambivalence in multiple forms and genres: whether via Marxism, historical materialism, aesthetics or social theory his explanation of race provides neither an overall coherent narrative or text, but denotes a more or less dialectical critique of what he saw as the ideology of colour blindness. In Chapter Two, Beyond War and Peace, Porter turns to what Du Bois referred to as the world-historical problem of color and democracy. Specically, he takes up Du Bois ercely idiosyncratic response to the Atlantic Charter, and his belief that it could well lead to the preservation of racial hierarchies and colonial relations rather than their ending, or democratic redemption. Here Du Bois apprehension about the Charter was prophetic, and saw the seeds of a new imperial order arising from the defeat of European fascism and colonialism and subsequently the perpetuation of racial ideologies with America at the helm (an outcome he sought to counter by arguing that the struggle for civil rights in the US must be part of a global discussion of human rights.) On the other hand, it is not easy to see how that discussion could take place without a reading of race in the context of global capital (in fact to the extent that Du Bois continued to insist on the

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18 | Black Cultural Studies importance of political economy in race relations his work remains relevant, argues Porter. That said, it would have been interesting to read more on this, especially given Porters reservation about Du Bois praise of Communist regimes after the Second World War). Chapter Three, Imagining Africa, Reimagining the World, provides an illuminating account of how Du Bois thinking about racial economics in America was informed by his descriptions or theorizations of the ongoing colonial exploitation of Africa, and how this was carried out in writings that stressed the linked futures of Africans and African Americans (p. 144). In the nal chapter, Paradoxes of Loyalty, Porter examines Du Boiss involvement with the Peace Information Center (PIC), his subsequent trial (re the Stockholm Peace Appeal) and acquittal, and his writings about these events. Of particular interest here are Porters reections on Du Bois notion of the suspect citizen, especially in the wake of 9/11for Du Bois, loyalty for the minority subject entails a disidenticatory Americanism, forged from a simultaneously alienated and complicit position (p. 165). Once again, ambivalence (meaning of course an ironic relationship to race as historical text that is itself informed by the textual heterogeneity of history) is a major part of Du Bois thinking on how race both exceeds and forecloses notions of citizenship and subjectivity. Porter negotiates this nexus by arguing why critical race theorists and historians should revisit these midcentury writings. As such, The Problem of the Future World will be of interest to scholars in those elds, as well as Du Bois studies, and African-American history more generally. Kenneth Warrens What Was African-American Literature? originally given as a series of lectures at Harvard, addresses the origins of African-American literary history in Jim Crow segregation, and asks why, given that that period is now over, race segregation continues to inform debates on what makes African Literature into an identiable tradition. Warrens answeras indicated by the was in his titleis that the desire for a literary tradition dened by the meaning and history of racial segregation is demonstrably anachronistic, while simultaneously being mistaken in its understanding of the implications of American inequality for contemporary Afro-America as a whole (inequality here bizarrely understood in terms of the ongoing relevance of Afro-American literature, where the stakes of history and injustice are highest, and it really does seem to matter what Afro-American authors do, or do not do). At the centre of Warrens book is the conviction that the hard-won responses to Jim Crow remain too seductive for writers in the present, and that the politics that emerges from such seduction amounts to a kind of wounded attachment and thus, bewilderingly, continues to act as if race

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Black Cultural Studies | 19 segregation is the obstacle to be overcome, and without it, it simply makes no sense to write as an African American. More generally, Warren asks how should blacks resist absent the systematic social and political constraints imposed on the nations black population by white supremacists? Warren takes such constraints as the examples of what to avoid, and why racial subordination and exploitation no longer carries the conviction, moral and existential, that it once did. Accordingly, the wish to reestablish the cogency of Jim Crowon ethical or aesthetic groundsraises doubts about the cognitive truths of African-American literature; for the claim that there should be an African-American literature only makes sense in relation to Jim Crow (or such is the argument). The problem with this narrative is its rather stark either-or: African-American literature can only hallucinate its persistence or continue the comforting set-up that is its own demise. So far so bad. The reader, prepared to say that Jim Crow has not come to an end and that the most obvious expressions of segregation and discrimination characteristic of Jim Crow have only been replaced by more covert but equally pernicious manifestations of racism, may be surprised to nd Warren agree, but then he adds: current inequalities are simply more subtle attempts to reestablish the terms of racial hierarchy that existed for much of the twentieth century, and, as such, to confuse these with Jim Crow is to misunderstand both the nature of the previous regime and the dening elements of the current one (p. 5). In short, the politics of African-American literature is a politics but one that is now dened by post-Jim Crow inequalities in which a relatively privileged black minority can appeal to the inequalities of Jim Crow in order to secure its own claims for social justice (p. 131)? This is Warrens answer as to the meaning of was and consequently makes the following points: (1) the recognition, from the 1970s onwards, that AfricanAmerican literature is a class discourse that essentially serves the interests of both black and white elites; (2) and the problem that denes such literature now (the example is Man Gone Down (2007)) is how to make the personal victories and defeats of those with petit bourgeois aspirations matter in the broadest sense (p. 131). And once the problem is put this way, the solution is clear: attempts to link material activity to the representative imperatives of textual racism (which is not in fact representative at all for most African Americans) speak to political class prerogatives rather than class solidarities. Its a move, in any case, that conates the desire for self-betterment with the political recognition of black equality (and one that necessarily contradicts the force of racial oppression as the signicant force of African-American literature).

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20 | Black Cultural Studies But why do these political antagonisms lead Warren to question the meaning and truth of how texts generate a tradition (and also, just as centrally, contradict them?). Why presume that all texts within an identiable tradition relate to that tradition in the same way, or indeed play out the same contradictions? Reading breaks down here, in a kind of antinomian presentation of history: Warren argues that Jim Crow writing was prospective in its imagining of a future beyond Jim Crow, whereas African-American literature now is retrospective, because of an essential nostalgia for the kinds of racial solidarity achieved during segregation itself, and because of the political moralism which makes the abuses of the past the crux for understanding the disappointments of the present. In a society that no longer sanctions Jim Crow, Warren writes, there could not be a literature structured by its imperatives. When racial identity can no longer be law, it must become either history or memorythat is, it must be either what some people once were but that we no longer are, or the way we once were upon a time, which still informs the way we are (p. 96). But why then insist on a logic of Law (that of Jim Crow) as the logos of African-American literature? One could argue that such formulationsrepeated throughoutthemselves show less than a sophisticated understanding of historical repetition, of how historical narratives become political or not, or how certain politics acquire dening narratives. The question of what is past, or ever only the past, is precisely what is at stake here, and precisely because the meaning of the present invariably informs such discussion. Warrens argument that we [and who is this we?] have to put the past behind us is perhaps too simple and too tidy a narrative of both cultural formation and political antagonism. This rather bleak either-or perhaps loses sight of how the ction of race unity or representation of the race isnt ever the nal word on contemporary African-American literature. It also loses sight of the ways in which literary textsin their modes of presentationentail both prospective and retrospective imaginings of history. Perhaps African-American literature was not invented during Jim Crow but precisely arises out of Jim Crow as a way of delimiting, and thereby rendering, its narrative as a future history? If, as Warren says, the mere existence of literary texts does not necessarily indicate the presence of a literature, then clearly the question of what gets to count as literature is just as imaginary (and retrospectively fraught) as the decision to say when a text indicates the absence of a literary tradition. And to say that African-American literature has come to an end suggests it is Warren who is fascinated by the ends of things, and who hallucinates their demise, and in ways that suggest neither simply resignation, nor triumphalism, but a suspect judgment of history.

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Black Cultural Studies | 21 What Was African-American Literature? is a signicant challenge to conventional readings of African-American intellectual history (and, as such, has some afnities with Houston A. Bakers Betrayal reviewed in YWCCT 18[2010]). As such, it will be of interest to historians, literary scholars and African-American scholars more generally. s Whos Afraid of PostThis brings me, nally, to the review of Toure Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now, and, more specically, its investment in that post (as a question of racial solidarity, loyalty and history). Postblack refers to the sense of identity dening the post-civil rights black middle-class, and denotes a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form and which, by the same denition, attack[s] and destroy[s] the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing Blackness (p. 6). Postblackness has no patience with self-appointed identity cops and their cultural bullying (p. 7); but this impatience with constraint is quite a different claim from that of protean possibility. What this shape-shifting means, according to the 105 African-Americans interviewed in the book, is a liberating pursuit of individuality (and here we are dealing with an individuality that is dened against various constraints). Black artists-creators, are no longer burdened with the obligation to be representative (of the race) (and here the connections to Warrens own questioning of racial solidarity is of interest). Thus Kara Walker, seen here as a post-black artist, mines modern visions of slavery for comedy without disrespecting slaves (p. 39). Post-blackness also means an expansion of collective identity into innity: Its whatever you want it to be (p. 12). It is not at all clear from the context (even expanding that context to mean the whole of innity) what this notion of identity as innite is supposed to mean: it seems to me to describe quite precisely the notion of a disidentied loyalty that Du Bois described as a right response to US race relations. For it is, in fact, only in the US that post-black has to enter this banal dialectic with solidarity (rather than an afrmation of a transnational, or diasporic notion of identity), and the repeated distinction between authenticity and disloyalty seems to have no validity outside a discourse of what it means to be essentially black. Consequently, post-black is taken to dene a uency in interethnic calls it, but one which still harks relations, or mode-switching, as Toure back to the history, if not the poverty, of a shared oppression: as such, Blackness is an important part of them but does not necessarily dominate their persona (and one assumes here that blackness does not dominate because of the freedoms secured through greater access to the marketplace) (p. 9). If blackness has become so innite and malleable, then what is its s own object or limit, and what is its interpretation or critique? Toure

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22 | Black Cultural Studies negative prescriptionsblackness is not thispresupposes freedom from but nowhere is the notion of choice settled, or brought into radical relation with that of political economy. If We all win! by dint of being black, surely this assumes a questionable equality of opportunity for all blacks? Even without questioning that assumption, the form of the afrmation of the post is not himself says, if there is a core meaning to in itself very convincing: as Toure being black and that who I am is indelibly shaped by blackness, it is not at all clear whether the self-formation being described is a socio-historical necessity or mere contingency of historical events, or a fantasy that is itself a sign of inner alienation (p. 17). Post-black identity, we learn, resides in the need to live with and transcend new and subtle but pervasive forms of racism: Post-black does not mean post-racial (p. 12). This new racism is invisible and unknowable, always lurking in the shadows, and resides in the secret phobias of whites (and blacks?): but this racism remains the unthematized transcendental of Whos Afraid of Post-Blackness (that is to say, without history or content, politics or conviction). fully assays the complex and messy and uid possibilities and Toure dangers inherent in post-blackness (p. 58), but solely via reference to what it is like to be black and middle class in contemporary America. The book is at its most interesting when contributors address what is identiable as a set of repressions, rather than wished-for liberations: at least here we discover how s opening remarks are being lived and questioned in ways that are both Toure more agonistic and nuanced (and which do not trumpet the demise of soli charts as a new black darity, nor reify it). We can be sure that what Toure condence in the elds of autobiography, music, art, interviews, comedy and popular social analysis, is an important cultural phenomenon, but the claim that this movement speaks for an entire generation does nothing more than repeat the loyalties of race tradition but with the ironic, or cynical, understanding that the reasons that used to make such appeals to tradition meaningful are no longer binding, and indeed no longer dene a collective racial identity. Whence the notion that blackness is now a choiceand one that, as usual, more or less always is dened as the rightful claim to an identity, to be taken on or not within the environs of neoliberal America.

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Books Reviewed
Bowles, John. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment. DukeUP. [2011] pp. 325. $25.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 9204. Dayan, Colin. The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. PrincetonUP. [2011] pp. 368. $29.95 ISBN 9 7806 9107 0919.

Black Cultural Studies | 23

Fleetwood, Nicole R. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness. UChicP. [2011] pp. 218. $25 ISBN 9 7802 2625 3039. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. DukeUP. [2011] pp. 385. $26.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 9181. Porter, Eric. The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Mid-Century. DukeUP. [2010] pp. 237. $23.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 8122. Raiford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the AfricanAmerican Freedom Struggle. UNCP. [2011] pp. 312. $45 ISBN 9 7808 0783 4305. Thomas, Deborah A. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. DukeUP. [2011] pp. 298. $23.95 ISBN 9 7808 2234 8122. . Whos Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now. FreeP. [2011] Toure pp. 251. $25 ISBN 9 7814 3917 7563. Warren, Kenneth. What Was African-American Literature? HarvardUP. [2011] pp. 192. $24 ISBN 9 7806 7406 6298.
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