The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature

Paula von Gleich

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783110760590
• eBook ISBN: 9783110761283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Literature

This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.

Part 1 Fugitivity against the Border: Afro-Pessimism, Black Feminist Fugitive Thought, and the Border to Social Death

This part develops the methodological and theoretical framework for the study by way of a cultural analysis of the travelling of border and fugitivity concepts. After a brief introduction into concept-driven cultural analysis and travelling concepts by Mieke Bal, I discuss Afro-pessimism as one of the most groundbreaking trajectories of contemporary Black studies in North America. Frank B. Wilderson’s Afro-pessimist concept of “Slaveness,” the “ruse of analogy,” and his notion of the “end of the world” will be contrasted with a selection of Chicanx and Latinx Border studies concepts (Gloria Anzaldúa’s “borderlands,” Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone,” and Walter Mignolo’s “border thinking”) as popular cultural and literary theory concepts. In juxtaposing concepts of Afro-pessimism and Border studies, the underlying logics that govern knowledge produced in these scholarly trajectories will become apparent. Summarizing central Afro-pessimist insights, I describe the antagonistic relation that Afro-pessimism proposes between Blackness and ‘the Human’ as a Black border, the ultimate border between Blackness and the position of ‘the Human.’ I then look at how scholars have developed concepts to account for this Black border and the Afro-pessimist ontology of Blackness while also focusing on performances and experiences of social life that might otherwise escape an Afro-pessimist analytic lens. By drawing on work by Black feminist scholars, such as Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, and Christina Sharpe, the second section of part 1 inquires, how we may account for the social life of the socially dead while taking the Afro-pessimist antagonism seriously. Focusing on their notions of flight and refusal, I propose to think of fugitivity as a constant struggle against the ‘Black border’ without, however, dismantling it or arriving at the other side that bodes civil life inside civil society only for the ‘non-Black.’ In this way, the concept of fugitivity successfully links analyses of fugitive experiences and performances with an Afro-pessimist structural focus on the position of Blackness. After developing the theoretical framework in this manner, the chapter closes with a second note on methodology, explaining the corpus selection and refining cultural analysis as an approach for the following literary analyses of the novels and autobiographical texts.

1.1 A First Note on Method: Concept-Driven Cultural Analysis

The term “travelling concept” was coined by Dutch narratologist and cultural theorist Mieke Bal in her book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) in order to account for the movement of concepts “between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities” (24).¹⁷ Bal proposes “cultural analysis” as a “methodological base” (5) that answers to the demands of interdisciplinary work in the humanities and its need for “methodological common ground” in the form of concepts (8). Cultural analysis, Bal submits, supplies the necessary “sensitivity to the provisional nature of concepts” (55) so that they can act as “counterparts” to the cultural object of analysis (8) and therefore operate as a “third partner in the otherwise totally unverifiable and symbiotic interaction between critic and object” (23). I follow Bal in my use of the term ‘concept.’¹⁸ Her “cultural analysis” as a “concept-based methodology” (5) will serve as the overarching methodological approach for both the development of the theoretical framework of Afro-pessimism and the concept of fugitivity in this chapter and the literary analyses that follow in the main part of the study (part 2).

Bal sums up the “priorities” that guide the practice of cultural analysis as first, “cultural processes over objects,” second, “intersubjectivity over objectivity,” and third, “concepts over theories” (44). This study takes its methodological cue especially from the last point. As Bal points out, concepts do not present themselves as exhaustive theories. They are ever-changing “miniature theories” (22), and as complex points of “accumulation of [their] own components” (51 – 52), they can never be used in precisely the same way. Thus, concepts are less than elaborate theories and much more than mere “tools” (22). They “focus interest,” “organize a group of phenomena, define the relevant questions to be addressed to them, and determine the meanings that can be given to observations regarding phenomena” (31). Therefore, choosing to work with specific concepts, such as the border, fugitivity, social death, and Blackness, shapes the knowledge produced and disseminated in many important ways. Not least, they supply this study with contexts and registers of space, place, confinement, movement, and territorial demarcation one the one hand and of enslavement, anti-blackness, and North American race relations on the other.

According to Bal, examining the concepts’ “processes of differing” (24) makes their travels, their “shorthand theories” (23), and their contexts of development accountable (40). Defining a concept is a central part of this assessment. Provisional definitions reveal what concepts do rather than what they denote. For Bal, “the valuable work lies” in the “groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean” (11). The parameter according to which she measures ‘proper’ uses of concepts that travel is therefore not correctness or precision but meaningfulness (16 – 17). When we discuss and use them to practice “detailed analysis from a theoretical perspective” (44), concepts yield “analytical insight” by enabling the analyst to ask meaningful questions with respect to both the concept used and the object of analysis (17). This leads Bal to infer that “a good concept founds a scientific discipline or field” (33; cf. Nünning 42), which makes looking at concepts like the border and fugitivity at the intersection of (German) North American studies and Black studies all the more pertinent.

Clearly, Bal’s delineation of cultural analysis and travelling concepts is far from univocal. The differentiation between “ordinary words” (23), concepts, and elaborate theories remains to be determined as the case arises, just like the ways in which a concept may act as a “common language” (22) even though it is ever-changing, flexible, and never the same during its travels. Instead of providing a full-fledged method with clear instructions, Bal supplies what she calls a “rough guide,” offering a very basic “common ground” (8) in order to remain flexible and cater to the various needs different concepts, cultural objects, and disciplines bring to the interdisciplinary approach. I use this concept-driven ‘rough guide’ to navigate through the theoretical deliberations of Afro-pessimism and the travelling route of the concept of fugitivity and the border in the following. Bal’s deliberations on the relevance of concepts and their travels guide the way through the concepts’ “processes of differing,” their provisional definitions, and, most importantly, their varying “miniature theories” and underlying logics that require close reading. They will also steer us through the literary analyses in the main part of this study that will perform close and wide readings of the literary corpus.

1.2 Travelling Border Concepts

Geographical borders are sites of intensified cultural contact and conflict where people, languages, and cultures meet, mix, and clash. As such, they are central sites of knowledge production and dissemination. Theoretical conceptualizations of borders have emerged in different localities, across various periods, and in numerous disciplines and fields of inquiry, e. g., in the political and social sciences, anthropology, and cultural and literary studies.¹⁹ Thus, border concepts may be understood with Bal as prime examples of “travelling concepts.” Research on the border between the United States and Mexico represents a key point of departure for the travels of border concepts in North American studies. As Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson observe, Chicanx studies were at the fore, before ethnic and postcolonial studies, in making “the idea of the border available, indeed necessary, to the larger discourses of American literary studies, US history, and cultural studies in general” (22). Not least with the publication of Borderlands/La Frontera by Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldu´a in 1987, the border emerged from Chicanx studies as a concept to describe and criticize (cultural) contact and exchange informed by asymmetrical power relations in the Americas. Chicanx and Latinx experiences with the US-Mexican border as a border not only between the United States and Mexico but also between North and South America have been in many cases a source of inspiration for influential border conceptualizations.²⁰

With her mix of autoethnography, autobiography, poetry, and prose in Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldu´a developed her border concept both as referring to a contested, historically and culturally specific border region in the US Southwest and as addressing social boundaries in interpersonal, intracultural, and intercultural relations.²¹ She explains in the preface to Borderlands: “The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with […] is the Texas-US Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands[,] and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest.” In their introduction to Border Women: Writing from la Frontera (2002), Debra Castillo and María Soccoro Tabuenca Córdoba describe Anzaldúa’s border concept as evoking “the intellectual project of a discursively based alternative national culture while gesturing toward a more transnational space of identity formation” (3). Anzaldu´a makes such an extension of the concept of the “borderlands” explicit by including varied border experiences. She adds to the above that “[i]n fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”

Anzaldu´a carefully combines this referencing beyond the specific cultural frame of Chicanx experiences in the US Southwest, toward an alternative, potentially idealist “contact zone” (Pratt), with a clear focus on structural violence – as expressed in a drastic, albeit very poetic way through the oft-cited metaphor of the US-Mexican border as an “open wound” (2). This combination of the role of structural violence and the specific US-Mexican context as well as the concept’s inherent potential to pertain to other (national, cultural, social, and inter-personal) contexts seem to have made Anzaldúa’s “borderlands” “[o]ne of the most widely used critical concepts in Latino/a[/x] studies […] and in border theory more generally” (Allatson 39). As Richard T. Rodríguez claims, “[i]n many ways, Borderlands set the stage for scholars who […] would begin identifying their work under the rubric of ‘Border studies’ (or ‘Border Theory’)” (202).

The notion of a contact zone that may include Anzaldúa’s borderlands as one possible form is well-known in and beyond cultural and literary studies for its more general conceptualization of a space of cultural contact across asymmetrical power relations in the long aftermaths of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. First coined in her essay “Arts of the Contact Zone” and further developed in her study of European eighteenth and nineteenth century travel writing Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4). Contact zones conceptualize (post)colonial cultural contact and communication between the (former) colonizers and the (former) colonized and enslaved (6). As she shows in her analysis of Guáman Poma’s writing,²² Pratt understands this contact as a form of forced conversation on unequal grounds in which “the subordinate peoples” find ways to talk back and self-represent through “transculturation” and “autoethnography” (“Arts” 36). In this way, the contact zone takes on the issue of resistance to subjugation and the role knowledge production and dissemination plays in this context. It therefore refers less to a specific geographical location than to an improvised interpersonal and epistemic space for communication and interaction in the (post)colonial world. The space the two parties enter is hierarchically structured, but it still leaves room for ‘the subordinate’ to negotiate with ‘the dominant’ and therefore also presupposes (a limited form of) agency on the side of the former.

Besides Borderlands, Castillo and Tabuenca Córdoba also consider Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) in their overview of border conceptualizations. They describe it as “one of the most complete and theoretically powerful surveys on recent discussions of the idea of the border in US, Latin American, Caribbean, European, and former British Commonwealth thought” (11). Interestingly, Mignolo references Borderlands’ appropriation of the colonial languages of English and Spanish as an example of his concept of “border thinking” (Local Histories 222 – 23) suggesting that it describes a more general space, like Pratt’s contact zones. He deems Anzaldúa’s concept of the border a “powerful metaphor” that “establish[es] links with similar metaphors emerging from a diversity of colonial experiences,” such as “double critique and une pensée autre, double consciousness, the Zapatista’s double translation, creolité, transculturation, provincializing Europe, negative critique introduced by African philosophers, etc.” (Delgado, Romero, and Mignolo 11). He understands these metaphors as a “conceptual arsenal making it possible to ‘think otherwise,’ from the interior exteriority of the border” (11), and aspires after a future of “pluri-versality” that is ruled by plurality as a universal, inter-epistemic, and dialogical concept connected through universal values (“Delinking” 452 – 53, 499). For this purpose, Mignolo makes broad connections between theoretical concepts localized and historicized in decidedly different contexts, assuming analogic relations to power between various groups of oppressed people around the globe, or in his words a “[c]ommon basis” in their “experience to have to come to terms with modernity/coloniality” (497).

Based on this assumption, Mignolo argues that “border thinking” occurs in various “border positions” (Local Histories 72), i. e., in the “geographical and epistemological location” of the border (309). According to him, the border offers a geopolitical position and a critical perspective from which remaining colonial structures, the “coloniality” in knowledge and knowledge production, can be decolonized. Yet, Mignolo not only considers postcolonial thinkers who live in and mov...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction or Looking for the Fugitive Life in Social Death
• Part 1 Fugitivity against the Border: Afro-Pessimism, Black Feminist Fugitive Thought, and the Border to Social Death
• Part 2 Practices of Flight: Captivity and Fugitivity in Black American Literature
• Fugitive Conclusions or the Inescapability of Captivity, Flight, and Fugitive Narration
• Index