Extravagant Abjection

Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780814740958
• eBook ISBN: 9780814741351
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series



2011 Winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award presented by the Modern Language Association

Challenging the conception of empowerment associated with the Black Power Movement and its political and intellectual legacies in the present, Darieck Scott contends that power can be found not only in martial resistance, but, surprisingly, where the black body has been inflicted with harm or humiliation.

Theorizing the relation between blackness and abjection by foregrounding often neglected depictions of the sexual exploitation and humiliation of men in works by James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Samuel R. Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we’re racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power—indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, “power” assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.

In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter–intuitive power—as a resource for the political present—found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

1

Fanon’s Muscles

(Black) Power Revisited

I WANT TO begin my exploration of blackness in its relation to abjection and sexuality where this relation is at once seen to be foundational, and strenuously denied, by following the flow of two currents I identified earlier, Fanon and Black Power/Black Arts. In doing so I want to explore as thoroughly as I can the key theoretical questions and terms of this project that I flagged in the introduction—mainly, abjection and power. This exploration will merge into a close consideration of one of the figures for black abjection that the book examines, the recurring metaphor in Fanon of “tensed muscles.”

Not Your Daddy’s Fanon

Frantz Fanon, a son of the French Caribbean island of Martinique, psychiatrist of Lyons, France, and Blida, Algeria, activist, propagandist, and politician in the war for Algerian independence, theorist of decolonization in Africa, was also, of course, a kind of Abrahamic father for intellectuals and artists associated with the Black Power Movement in the United States. The “of course” here flows smoothly on the tongue in the context of a project of African American literary and cultural analysis because the notion of a “Black Atlantic,” in which the forced expatriation of millions of Africans to European colonies in the Americas gave rise to a cross-oceanic transferal not only of bodies, goods, and capital but also of discourses, ideas, memes, and cultural practices, is now well established as an almost required foundation for African Americanist inquiry.¹ That the activists of the Black Power Movement were enthusiastic participants in this theater of exchange long before the term Black Atlantic came into use in the various fields of cultural studies is evident in the almost insouciant facility with which they invoked Fanon’s name and work. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was published in English in 1965, having been translated from the original French Les damnes de la terre (1961). In the preface of the 1967 call to action Black Power, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton evoked Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, but directly quoted only two figures, Frederick Douglass and Frantz Fanon; Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth claims precedence, a lengthy quotation from it given the last word of the preface and positioned as the summation of Ture and Hamilton’s project, which is the elucidation of a Black Power analysis and politics.² The Black Panther Party, the official dogma of which often departed from the more cultural nationalist stance of many Black Power thinkers, but the appeal and image of which was solidly associated in public representations with the Movement, anointed Fanon as one of the leading theorists of its revolutionary struggle: Huey P. Newton cited Fanon first and foremost along with Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara as the most influential figures he and Bobby Seale read when they conceived the party. In Newton’s 1967 party newspaper column, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” the Algerian Revolution as depicted in Wretched provides a primary example of how to pitch battle against the powers-that-be by embodying the wisdom of the masses rather than relying on the elite secrecy of a self-styled vanguard. Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed Wretched the “Bible” of black liberation, as did Newton.³ LeRoi Jones, on the cusp of his transformation into Amiri Baraka, in an essay signaling his abandonment of Greenwich Village Beat bohemianism for Harlem Black Arts Movement nationalism, called on Fanon without first name, as if to a body of work with so solidly established a presence that its syllables alone are its credentials: “If we take the teachings of Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X (as well as Frazier, DuBois and Fanon), we know for certain that the solution of the Black Man’s problems will come only through Black National Consciousness.”⁴

This last invocation is most interesting to me, not only because of the bent of my academic training but because it seems to me to encapsulate the way Fanon in the minds of Black Power thinkers became a name with which one conjured broadly vague but puissant political effects. Fanon is in Baraka’s mention a rhetorical device: a metaphor that moves beyond the simple metonymy of “Fanon” for “the works of Fanon” to “Fanon” for the revolutionary struggle in Algeria in which he participated, for the engaged intellectual analysis of that struggle, for engaged intellectual work as such in revolutionary struggle against colonialism and white supremacy in general, and as a kind of imprimatur endorsing Baraka’s personal struggle to attain influence and effect the kind of successful social and political change that his invocation imputes to Fanon.

Fanon’s power as a name to conjure with was a quickly achieved effect. Baraka’s essay appeared in 1965, the same year of the first appearance of the English translation of Wretched, which Jones must have read speedily, and been powerfully affected by, as by the world-altering shock of revelation. Baraka, looking back in his autobiography, writes that his arrival in Harlem could “only be summed up by the feelings jumping out of Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land or Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.” Interestingly in this account of the period just prior to his move to Harlem in 1965, Baraka notes that “Frantz Fanon’s books were popular, Grove Press had brought out The Wretched of the Earth.”⁵ Baraka’s recollection partially condenses the passage of time and the ordering of events. Only half of Fanon’s books were available to the non-French-reading audience during the years about which Baraka writes in his autobiography: Wretched was published by Grove in 1965; the same year, Monthly Review Press published the English translation of Fanon’s collection of essays about the Algerian Revolution, L’an V de la revolution africaine (1959), under the title Studies in a Dying Colonialism, which was subsequently republished by Grove in 1970, along with Toward the African Revolution (Pour la revolution africaine). Black Skin, White Masks (formerly Peau noire, masques blancs) did not appear until 1967. Newton’s similar statement that “[w]e read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth” in his account of the founding of the Black Panther Party probably also refers to he and Bobby Seale having only read Wretched, and possibly Studies in a Dying Colonialism, by the time that the party began operating in 1965–66.⁶ The enthusiasm of their first falling-in-love encounter with Fanon through Wretched and the telescoped memory that fuses their later readings of subsequent translations of Fanon’s work with that encounter together illustrate my point about the way that Fanon’s adoption by Black Power intellectuals had something akin to the quality of references to, in Cleaver’s and Newton’s ecstatic words, the biblical, or to any set of works agreed to be foundational:⁷ the ease of reference to what Jesus or Shakespeare or Marx or Freud said or would say—the popularity of these figures, at least as, or most precisely as, names—is also a fairly clear indication of how difficult it can be to square what the names are evoked to suggest with anything the thinkers themselves have actually argued.

Certainly Baraka’s summons of Fanon to the altar of “Black National Consciousness” in his essay, particularly in a paragraph that Baraka begins with the assertion, “Nations are races,” would indicate that he misread Fanon just as he later misremembers the timing of his encounter with Fanon’s work.⁸ Especially in Wretched, Fanon is at pains to repudiate the equation between the nation and race.⁹ In “Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weaknesses,” Fanon discourses at length about how the failure to articulate a sufficiently thought-through political program during revolutionary action against the colonizers in Africa too easily leaves the revolution’s accomplishments vulnerable to racist dogma—“foreigners out”—that merely masks the native bourgeoisie’s attempts to assume the social and economic position of the ousted colonials, and leads eventually to the reassertion of tribal conflicts, and sometimes to the identification of the government with one tribe. In Fanon’s estimation, to believe that nations are races is to defeat the truly liberatory nation before it can be achieved, and enthusiasms such as Baraka’s, taken too far, are a triumph of counterrevolutionary stupidity, a relapse into the “primitive Manichaeism” of white supremacists and colonialists.¹⁰ It is not without reason, then, that Baraka scholar Jerry Gafio Watts wonders “whether Baraka had actually read Fanon.”¹¹

Black Power and Black Arts intellectuals ignored or deemphasized Fanon’s tendency to treat blackness as a strategic instrument in a contest for political supremacy: for Black Power writers and activists, blackness describes a social and economic condition, a vibrant culture to be endorsed on its own terms, an essence and a kind of telos. As Baraka writes in 1965, despite—and because of?—being enthralled by Fanon, “blackness … is the final radical quality in social America.”¹² But my interest here is not in needling Baraka or his contemporaries for failing to report accurately Fanon’s complex and rather capacious arguments—particularly since Newton’s misreadings, if they can be called such, were different from Baraka’s because he did not espouse cultural nationalism; and Baraka, in one of his many about-faces, later came to similar conclusions as Fanon about the mistake of equating nation and race.¹³ Their positions and Fanon’s on blackness are deeply intertwined despite their divergence, in that blackness cannot be a successful instrument either of domination or resistance without its also being lived as a set of conditions that are endowed with truth-value, without its becoming, in practice, a social “essence.”

In any case, Black Power intellectuals were not unaware of how Fanon’s theorizing of the Algerian, African, and Caribbean situations complicated their attempts to transplant him to a U.S. context, despite the lucidity with which they felt Fanon’s prose could describe their own battles. Fanon himself of course had freely made reference in Black Skin, White Masks to the works of Richard Wright as fictionalizations and examples of the racial dynamics viciously operating on both sides of the Atlantic and had thus indicated a methodological sympathy for analyses relying on a kind of black universalism. But in Wretched, in a discussion of the question of culture in its relation to nationalist revolution—a moment he chooses, as he does at moments in Black Skin, to lay bare the insufficiency of Negritude (and thus black cultural nationalism) as a foundation for his notion of nationalist revolution—Fanon asserts the essential heterogeneity of struggles against white supremacy and struggles against colonialism. “The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites, … and … the problems which kept Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta.”¹⁴

Such admonitions undoubtedly played a part in shaping the apparent self-consciousness with which Newton, Ture, and Hamilton, at least, tried to make use of Fanon’s writing. They could quote him at length, and selectively, as we all do when we quote those whom we revere, but the looseness of these appropriations was also balanced by—was also linked to, as the necessary and constitutive obverse of those sloppy appropriations— an explicit effort at translation, the result of which was the sometimes awkward model of internal colonialism, spelled out at some length in Black Power. The “analogy” between Fanon’s struggles against colonialism on the African continent “[o]bviously … is not perfect,” Ture and Hamilton admit; still, pace the revered Fanon, they ask, “But is the differentiation more than a technicality?”¹⁵ In the late 1960s, in a context in which the FBI would soon identify the Black Panther Party as a premier threat to the nation’s internal security and unleash COINTELPRO to destroy the black nationalist movement, it understandably seemed direly urgent for Ture, Hamilton, Newton, and others to judge the difference between Algeria and the United States as that between different techniques applied to a fundamentally similar situation—white domination and exploitation of black or colored folk. For these writers, the appropriations and translations we might now group under the heading of “Afro-Diasporic Black Atlantic transnational intellectual flow” asserted the political ideal of a PanAfricanism that was a straw to be grasped against the hurricane winds of white supremacist anti–Civil Rights Movement backlash, and it was an act of solidarity with “Third World” anticolonial struggles generally.

What Fanon said to them is naturally not what Fanon might say to us, today. I invoke their invocations of Fanon precisely for their enthusiastic imprecision, exactly because of this forty-year pedigree of creative, even sloppy interpretations of his texts in a U.S. context, in order to stake a claim to Fanon as a theorist on whom I can rely to read the politics of African American literature. In the middle and late 1960s, in the formation of the Black Power Movement and black nationalism from which flow, at the very least, the predicates of contemporary academic study of African American literature and culture, in that crucible which still informs the political terms and cultural forms by which those of us asserting a black identity or participating in a tradition of black creativity operate—for, despite my (or our) reservations about, distaste for, and conscious opposition to nationalisms, is our project not still the same, the valorization of blackness under the conditions of, and against, a persistent white supremacist domination?—for that project, there was a perceived need for Fanon. This need established a place for him in the African American, as well as the Afro-Diasporic, intellectual tradition. If it is arguably true that Fanon was often wrong, as recent biographer David Macey quotes one of Fanon’s Algerian comrades as regretfully acknowledging, and if it is true that his American interpreters were sometimes wrong even concerning those things about which Fanon might have been right, and if it is the case that Americanizing Fanon dangerously ensnares his work in the misleading labyrinths of “seriously flawed translation,” I say that it is also true that this need for Fanon—for what he assayed but might not have been able to complete or achieve, for what could not or did not translate of his thought from Martinique to France to Algeria and from French to English—strongly persists.¹⁶ I reach for Fanon, with the eagerness and hunger of Jones becoming Baraka, in Fanon’s invented and admittedly spurious capacity as the sketch artist of a hazy black universalism, the Einstein of an inchoate Unified Theory of Blackness, the very kind of theory which, arguably, he both attempted and disavowed. I take Fanon up in the manner that Newton et al. did, in much the same partly reverential, yet nevertheless ruthlessly appropriative spirit, with an attitude of willful—though, I hope, scrupulous—misreading that one brings to bodies of work occupying biblical status.

For me, Fanon is still needed to provide guidance for interpreting the meanings and operation of blackness in fields of repres...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Blackness, Abjection, and Sexuality
• 1 Fanon’s Muscles: (Black) Power Revisited
• 2 “A Race That Could Be So Dealt With”: Terror, Time, and (Black) Power
• 3 Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject
• Notes on Black (Power) Bottoms
• 4 The Occupied Territory: Homosexuality and History in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts
• 5 Porn and the N-Word: Lust, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man, and a Derangement of Body and Sense(s)
• Conclusion: Extravagant Abjection
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
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