Archives of Flesh

African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781479843626
• eBook ISBN: 9781479830015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals



In Archives of Flesh, Robert Reid-Pharr reveals the deep history of intellectual engagement between African America and Spain. Opening a fascinating window onto black and anti-Fascist intellectual life from 1898 through the mid-1950s, Reid-Pharr argues that key institutions of Western Humanism, including American colleges and universities, developed in intimate relation to slavery, colonization, and white supremacy. This retreat to rigidly established philosophical and critical traditions can never fully address—or even fully recognize—the deep-seated hostility to black subjectivity underlying the humanist ideal of a transcendent Manhood.



Calling for a specifically anti-white supremacist reexamination of the archives of black subjectivity and resistance, Reid-Pharr enlists the principles of post-humanist critique in order to investigate decades of intimate dialogues between African American and Spanish intellectuals, including Salaria Kea, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Lynn Nottage, and Pablo Picasso. In the process Reid-Pharr takes up the “African American Spanish Archive” in order to resist the anti-corporeal, anti-black, anti-human biases that stand at the heart of Western Humanism.

1

War Archive

Some stories are too complicated, too dear to tell with elegance. On the afternoon of June 18, 2006, Chanel Petro-Nixon, a sixteen-year-old eleventh grader at Brooklyn’s sprawling Boys and Girls High School, left her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant to apply for a job at a local Applebee’s restaurant. Her body was found four days later stuffed into a trash bag and dumped in front of 212 Kingston Avenue in the adjacent neighborhood of Crown Heights. The girl was a casualty of war. She left home a typical Brooklyn teenager, with processed hair and a face full of red and brown possibility, only to be caught in one of the many snares systematically laid for the weak and unwary. Was she murdered for her trainers, her phone, her sex? A broken body left on the side of a busy city street, Chanel’s corpse represented a stunningly efficient closure of a key circuit within Atlantic society and culture. Like her lost, nameless, and long-forgotten ancestors, the girl was refuse, a creature whose gender, class, and color established her as “only flesh,” an entity indistinguishable from her use value. No one was shocked that she was killed, only that the killing was so uneconomical and messy. To attach blame to something as common and expected as the murder of a black girl would be a far too gummy, much too sentimental procedure. The angel of history turns its bemused face in our direction, stunned by the clumsy vigor with which we mourn the ever-increasing detritus. How strange, how profoundly impotent, to pick through reeking mountains of trash, vainly seeking redemption in hastily discarded relics.

This is an essay about war. It is a necessarily confused meditation on the peculiar ways systematic violence against humans is narrated in the liberal communications industries of the United States and Europe. It is a shocked articulation of the blatantly apparent gender, race, and class biases that attend these narratives. Every day, ships and planes embark from the shores of my country loaded with men and hardware ever ready to release breathtaking violence against real and imagined threats to what we name “our way of life.” This, we are told, is war, the sovereign practice of Man. At home the violence is just as omnipresent but never so spectacularly or ostentatiously celebrated. The beatings, shootings, endless identity checks, and mass incarcerations continue apace with no real end in sight. Yet we are reminded daily of the privileges, honors, and responsibilities that are the hallmarks of membership in this grandest of the grand hordes. One must stand in the light of Manhood or risk sinking again into the muck. Domestic space becomes martial space. The female and the black must be attacked, must be systematically exploited in order to maintain the basic, everyday ideological structures that support Man’s Pyrrhic victories over his animal self.

This is an essay about archives. It is an attempt to make plain the intimate connection between systematic forms of violence and the methods by which we identify, evaluate, store, catalog, and transmit what we take to be the most precious examples of civilization and tradition. In the process I mean to provoke a radical blurring of the “obvious” distinction between practices of war and intellectual/institutional practices of documentation. I argue that the clumsiness with which the contemporary intellectual is expected to approach the (non)topic of a viciously murdered black girl is itself a continuation of not only a process in which black life is continually sacrificed to the exigencies of white supremacy and capitalism, but also one in which the value of our intellectual practices is often predicated on how far we can remain from any direct engagement with this fact. If one takes seriously the reality that notwithstanding her age, race, gender, and class, Chanel Petro-Nixon was a living/struggling/resistant subject, then it becomes essential that we treat her murder not as the culmination of a process in which the “stillborn” black, the individual who never achieves social status, is inevitably culled, but instead as part of a centuries-long process in which (black female) potentiality has been actively targeted for exploitation. I reject out of hand the liberal conceit that systematic murder and abuse are first and foremost effects of ancient and not yet fully conquered forms of racism and woman hating. Chanel’s murder was not an atavistic act. Instead it should be seen as evidence of the absolute modernity (one is wont to say sobriety) of her attackers. It is the quite logical continuation of the basic modes of human intercourse developed in the crucible of colonization and Atlantic slavery. I will state again, therefore, my disappointment with and distrust of those humanistic disciplinary practices that were developed precisely to articulate—and then obscure—the ideology of Man through recourse to modes of aloof scholasticism that sniff at profound forms of violence as unfortunate, but nonetheless not quite possessing enough conceptual weight to unbalance “ancient” modes of study and critique.

I have allowed myself to dwell on this subject, to admit my unseemly fears and frustrations, because there is no way that I can maintain the ethical project that I have launched without paying attention to the reality that the structures and ideologies of war have so indelibly marred the most basic discursive and ideological assemblies of humanism. Of course I mean to maintain focus on the fact that slavery and enslavement were first and foremost martial procedures such that for better or worse, to be the descendant of slaves, to walk with a black/brown/yellow/red face through the crowded streets of New York, is to be read as defeated (and thus hostile and dangerous), while to be the descendants of slavers, one’s face glowing with hues of cream and pink, is to be marked as conquering (and therefore slothful and smug). I also mean to state unequivocally that war is by definition a raced, classed, and gendered practice, one in which the name of the game is at once to delimit radically the space available to females, people of color, and working-class persons while also actively and energetically exploiting their productive and reproductive potentialities. Our incessant scripting of war as something that happens “over there” is a means by which not only to service (read discipline, punish, incarcerate, extinguish) the “homeland” but also to attach the most blandly sentimental narrative procedures to the process, to evacuate accounts of war of any sustained and complicated consideration of the constant—and necessary—implication of the domestic and especially the female in broadly organized processes of bloodletting. It is for this reason that I continually note that domestic space is always already war space. Maintaining this stance allows us, among other things, to move past sentimental accounts of slavery and colonization, the belief that these systems were first and foremost nonsystematic returns of Man’s natural tendency toward racialist antipathy, “fixable” disruptions in the march of humanist ideality, lapses that one might more or less easily address through essentially therapeutic practices of good feeling and liberal kindheartedness. The brittleness of our narratives of war is evidence of how little we have allowed ourselves to imagine what the everyday effects of the martial cultures of slavery and colonization actually are. Part of the reason that it is easy for charges of white supremacy to be so effortlessly batted away is the simple fact that our methods of naming are often so very underdeveloped and parochial. We become obsessed with whether a pink thigh might nestle comfortably against a brown one on the seat of a crowded subway car, because to admit that all of our scurrying to and fro is established by—and in support of—efforts to extract value directly from the flesh of huge swaths of the human population would entail levels of radicalization that would forever disrupt the humdrum comforts of our ever so meticulously undertheorized lives.

I am looking for a rhetorical bridge with which to join my shock and disgust about the death of Chanel Petro-Nixon, the desecration of her flesh, with the presumably noble history of Black American engagements with Spain and Spaniards during both the so-called Spanish-American War and especially the Spanish Civil War. I want to avoid the exultant narratives of black male military advancement that structure so much within the official archives of these events. The gender politics surrounding black men’s participation in American military campaigns inevitably turn on the rearticulation of dominant notions of Manhood, notions that insistently repeat models of diminution, compression, and leveling of the human form, which are key aesthetic/ideological manifestations of the Man/human bifurcation that stands at Western humanism’s conceptual center. The African American soldier remains infinitely aware that perhaps his most important challenge is to collapse the distinction between the black male and the (black) Man. A significant portion of the black soldier’s militancy involves his constant effort to increase his stature, to articulate himself in ever more expansive arenas, particularly the grand theater of (anti)colonialist war.

In this sense, black male militants have simply continued in a minor key the androcentric and deeply homoerotic rhetoric of a masculinity seeking its release from the suffocating limitations of a feminized domesticity. Even Paul Gilroy’s extremely clever articulation of the sailing ship as a living “micro-political system in motion” is built upon a set of fantastic images of all-male environments that is in serious need of revision. The image of the ship is so potent precisely because it evokes both confinement and expansiveness. The sailor enters into the (in)security of the floating cell in order to achieve his escape. Still, even as I can readily see the complexity and beauty of this image, I recognize that it cannot contain all the possibilities available to us in the fecund pit of Atlantic modernity. Though the ship is a key metaphor for Atlantic culture, it is not the key. Throughout Archives of Flesh I focus equally on ports, brothels, prisons, camps, and markets, locations at which the complicated workings of gender might be more easily discerned, if only because they are less encumbered by dreams of male exclusivity. I insist that we reevaluate the image of discarded female flesh with which I began this chapter. We must recognize the important work that this ugly picture does as we attempt to define the contours of modern culture and aesthetics. Moreover, as I have argued already, the inability to read this image outside the most deeply sentimental modes is itself evidence of an ideological assembly in which the black and the female are always already dead subjects such that the unceremonial dispersal of their remains is less a travesty than a matter of unremarkable, if unsightly, housekeeping. I will ask, therefore, not so much that we bring the wars home, but instead that we acknowledge that these homes, these sturdy desks, handsome chairs, and pleasant scenes glimpsed through leaded glass are not simply the detritus of war but also the very modes through which the “obvious” need to protect “us” from “them” are advanced.

They Are Called Negritos

Perhaps the most important, most useful conceptual advance in African Diaspora Studies of this generation was Brent Edwards’s out-of-hand rejection of teleological notions of pan-Africanist structures of feeling (“I am African because I feel African”) in favor of a rigorously materialist—and dynamic—conception of diaspora in which the focus remains on structure and production, the many individuals and institutions articulating and translating African identity between key nodal points in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.1 What many scholars of the African diaspora either miss or ignore, however, is the fact that in this work, traditional intellectuals were—and are—a distinct minority, one decidedly marginal to the project of articulation that Edwards so ably narrates. African Americans are much more likely to exit the confines of the fifty states as working-class laborers, especially soldiers, than as novelists, painters, dancers, critics, or political activists. I would press this argument even further by returning again to the idea of refuse with which I began this chapter. The black in transit is perhaps most often transported as a thing that has lost value in its “native” location. What is, in fact, being transmitted is an empty cipher, a container into which meaning and value might readily be added. Blackness becomes first and foremost a cultural artifact, an idea, raw material waiting to be processed. Still, I must admit that I am delighted by the way that the word “refuse” allows for a species of undisciplined and obstinate theoretical play. Blackness may be that location ever filled with trash, detritus, and useless ephemera, but it is also a location of repudiation, negation, and critique. One of the few dodges available to the subject who has been discarded and discounted is indeed the ability to refuse, to resist rearticulation into dominant social and ideological structures, to decline to bow (or perhaps to do so with a sort of theatrical hesitancy) before the most sacred totems of “civilized” society. The black face that presents itself too abruptly within the precincts of self-satisfied (white Western) civilization seems always to be saying “No.” Certainly one of the reasons that African Americans are so easily read as angry, dangerous, and criminal is that our very presence short-circuits jubilant narratives of American and European exceptionalism. Even a single dark individual in the cheering crowd reminds one that these grand boulevards and regal monuments, those stunning feats of cultural sophistication might easily—and rightly—be read as emblems of bloodthirsty acts of violence, acts made more obscene still by rigorous enforcement of a sort of ungainly and only half-effective cultural amnesia.

To gain deep insight into the mechanics of African American internationalism, one must always consider the evidence of the remarkably consistent ways American and European cultural productions have depended upon slavery, colonization and war as primary vessels for their development. The prosecution of what was dubbed the “Splendid Little War,” referring to the relatively easy 1898 victory of the United States over Spain, accomplished between the months of April and August with engagements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and a remarkable naval victory in Manila, was self-consciously understood by President McKinley and other members of the American political elite as a necessary continuation of the role of the United States as a specifically white Anglo-American country whose destiny was to dominate presumably backwards “colored” peoples in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.2 It takes no great stretch of intellect or imagination to understand that with the acquisition of Alaska with its largely aboriginal population in 1867; the consolidation of U.S. influence in Latin America, home to huge communities of blacks, Indians, mulattoes, and mestizos; the annexation of Hawai’i in 1894; the near total domination of the Cuban economy and its foreign policy after the enactment of the Platt Amendment; and the occupation of the Philippines until the country’s independence in 1946, American “republicans” had little trouble understanding and announcing themselves as the prophets of white supremacy and colonization.3

What gives pause, however, what stuns the less than romantic student of African Diaspora Studies, is the fact that 1898 was also a key moment in not only the articulation of African American internationalism, but also the articulation of what one might think of as “modern blackness,” a post-slavery, “New Negro” aesthetic in which black individuals utilized the mechanics of war to proclaim an African American avant-garde. Taking place only two years after the Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which initiated more than five decades of state-sponsored, federally supported racial segregation, the Spanish-American War provided a number of key opportunities for African American soldiers and the communities they represented. As Willard B. Gatewood rightly notes, the war gave many black men their first opportunity to fight for the United States as citizens of the republic. The larger-than-life image of the black in uniform, eager to risk his all in the service of country, would presumably blunt the viciousness of increasingly hostile whites against their black compatriots. Barring that, the “colored” nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines could provide key outlets for ambitious young blacks eager to advance in business and the professions.4 “I may visit the United States now and then,” wrote African American physician and soldier W. C. Warmsley to the Washington, D.C., Bee, “gaze once more upon the monument, . . . visit the Capitol Building and White House, converse with my many friends and acquaintances and again enjoy their proverbial hospitality, but to make the States my home, never!” (quoted in Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees,” 231).

For black soldiers, participation in the war involved a set of complex negotiations among competing ideologies of gender, race, and nation. As Warmsley noted, enlisting in the Ninth Infantry and practicing his trade in the relative comfort of eastern Cuba provided a means of at least partial escape from the racial terror of the United States. What I would add to this commentary, however, is the fact that this form of martial escape was absolutely necessary to the production of the idea of the New Negro. Indeed, the post-slavery African American individual confident in his citizenship was a notion self-consciously fashioned in the crucible of war, most specifically the Civil War and, as we will see, the wars of Indian removal and the Spanish-American War. It was an identity built upon a negotiation with (if not exactly a refusal of) the systematic violence practiced at all levels of American society against black people.

As many African American intellectuals—including many of W. C. Warmsley’s fellow soldiers—recognized, the U.S. incursions into both Cuba and especially the Philippines were largely motivated by the very rabid white supremacy that stood at the heart of the Plessy decision.5 The route that took the physician from Washington, D.C., to Santiago was one that meandered through some of the stranger peculiarities of American-style racialism. Dr. Warmsley was a member of one of the four all-black “immune units” (the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Volunteer Infantries), a subset of ten regiments composed of individuals thought to be immune to ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. War Archive
• 2. Lorca’s Deathly Poetics
• 3. Langston’s Adventures in the Dark
• 4. Primitive at the Plantation’s Edge
• 5. Richard Wright in the House of Girls
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author