Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination

Kristen Lillvis

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820351230
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities.

The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities.

This project draws on posthuman theory—an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality—in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo–slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.

CHAPTER 1

Temporal Liminality in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy

Reading for posthuman liminality in black women’s literature means that we must start simultaneously at the beginning and the end. Contemporary and even futuristic theories enhance our understanding of canonical texts, allowing us to revisit histories and ideas and interpret familiar stories in new ways. These types of border crossings pervade Toni Morrison’s neo–slave narratives, Beloved (1987) and A Mercy (2008), and come to the forefront at each novel’s conclusion, when the reader participates in the story’s creation.

Near the close of Beloved, Paul D asks Sethe to consider building a future with him as she continues the work of healing from her traumatic past. “Sethe,” Paul D states, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (Beloved 273). The bridge Paul D builds between yesterday’s experiences and tomorrow’s promises transforms in the final chapter of the novel into a type of mantra. Morrison compels her readers to consider the relationship of the past to the present and future through the repeated statement, “It was not a story to pass on” (Beloved 274–75). The reiteration of the words “to pass on” indicates both the finality of the past (“passing on” as the act of dying, of ceasing to exist in the present) and the movement of history into the future (“passing on” as the act of bequeathing knowledge or property to the next generation). As the mantra transitions from past to present tense, from “It was not a story to pass on” to “This is not a story to pass on” (Beloved 275), the links that connect past, present, and future become further intertwined. Despite the narrator’s insistence that the story not be passed on, it shifts, for the reader, from relic to reality, and the narrative’s continued trajectory into the future seems all but certain.

In her most recent neo–slave narrative, A Mercy, Morrison similarly situates her novel as an artifact that transports tales from the past into the present and future. Both Florens and her mother share stories that never make it to their intended audiences, yet these stories do not simply “talk to themselves,” as Florens fears (A Mercy 188). Instead, the historical narratives gain contemporary significance due to the reader’s interaction with the novel. The reader steps in to fill the role of the blacksmith, Florens’s lover and the desired recipient, despite his alleged illiteracy, of the narrative she carves into the walls and floorboards of Jacob Vaark’s house. Additionally, in the final chapter, the reader takes the place of Florens and hears the message that her mother “long[ed] to tell” on the day Jacob bought her daughter (A Mercy 195–96). The reader’s participation in each woman’s narrative ensures that the words move “beyond the eternal hemlocks”—beyond death or a forgotten history—and go on to “flavor the soil of the earth,” where they will find continued life in the growth of spring (A Mercy 188).

The sense of overlapping past, present, and future temporalities that Morrison offers in Beloved and A Mercy accords with posthumanist notions of liminality. Posthuman theory provides a useful framework through which to read Morrison’s neo–slave narratives and other historical narratives by black American writers, despite the seeming metachronism of studying black history through a theory that, in its name, focuses on that which is “post” human. According to posthuman theory, the subject exists within nexuses of power, knowledge, and discourse that continuously transform and are transformed by the subject. More than simply interconnected with the surrounding world, the posthuman being moves over and within the dividing lines that separate the individual from the governments, economies, technologies, communities, and people with which the individual interacts (Halberstam and Livingston 14). The problems and promise of posthuman culture stem from the multiplicity, fragmentation, and liminality of the temporalities, bodies, and subjectivities contained within—issues that, although new in terms of their relation to the posthuman subject’s existence in contemporary technoculture, have been addressed by black writers and theorists for more than a century (Eshun, “Further” 301; Yaszek, “Afrofuturism” 41–60; Gilroy, Small 178). If, as Kalí Tal argues, “the struggle of African-Americans is precisely the struggle to integrate identity and multiplicity,” then Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, novels that share stories from black history and dreams of black futurity, present through their multiplicities evidence of posthuman liminality.

LIMINAL TEMPORALITIES AND SUBJECTIVITIES IN BELOVED

In Beloved, Morrison blurs boundaries of time and subjectivity by having Sethe, her protagonist, revisit her childhood, which allows Sethe not only to reframe and revise her traumatic history but also to position her past experiences as future focused. Although often studied as a mother, Sethe must additionally be understood as a daughter who struggles with feelings of abandonment concerning the maternal care of which she never received quite enough. Sethe’s return to the position of child—a position rooted in the past yet future oriented because of the child’s continuous existence in a state of becoming—opens her to possibilities, identities, and connections from which she can access and exercise greater agency.

Posthumanist understandings of temporality and subjectivity allow for a new reading of Beloved. In the novel, Sethe’s past infiltrates her present, a temporal shift many critics have understood as immediately stifling but ultimately empowering. Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Andrea O’Reilly, and Caroline Rody find that although Sethe’s history at the Sweet Home plantation plagues her present life, her “painful reacquaintance with the past,” in Beaulieu’s words, allows her to develop more meaningful relationships with others (and with herself) in the present (Beaulieu 71). Reading Beloved through posthumanism adds a new layer of complexity to the critical study of time in the novel. Sethe does not simply reimagine or rewrite her past, as many critics assert. Nor does she return to the past to lay it to rest. Instead, Sethe understands her past, like her present and future, as existing in a state of continual development. Sethe brings her past— specifically, her childhood and mother—into her present and future, and she also brings her future into the past in order to take power from the liminal subjectivity these temporal shifts engender.

The power of posthuman liminality manifests itself most clearly in Sethe’s relationships with her mother and children. While critics typically conceive of the character Beloved as the return of Sethe’s daughter who was killed eighteen years prior to the action in the novel’s opening, Beloved’s identity extends beyond this single time and this single child: she embodies the “Sixty Million and more” captive Africans who died before they reached the shores of America (Clemons 75), as well as those who survived the Middle Passage to join the generations of the enslaved (O’Reilly 87; Horwitz 157; Bouson 152).¹ In the realm of Morrison’s novel, Sethe’s mother, a woman who died a violent death on the plantation where she was enslaved, must be included in this number, which means that Beloved represents not only the unnamed millions who suffered because of slavery but, for Sethe, both child and mother. Sethe therefore uses her relationship with the mysterious Beloved to resuscitate her role as a mother and her identity as a daughter. Through her return to the position of daughter, Sethe discovers a strength and forward-looking vision that allow her to begin building a future.

Because the connections between mother and child in Beloved transcend time and space, these lasting bonds can be considered in terms of the posthuman “becoming-subject” (Halberstam and Livingston 14). Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “becoming” to conceive of a posthuman being who experiences continual development due to a connection to surrounding elements:

Unlike the human subject-to-be (Lacan’s “l’hommelette”), who sees his own mirror image and fixed gender identity discrete and sovereign before him in a way that will forever exceed him, the posthuman becoming-subject vibrates across and among an assemblage of semi-autonomous collectivities it knows it can never either be coextensive with nor altogether separate from. The posthuman body is not driven, in the last instance, by a teleological desire for domination, death or stasis; or to become coherent and unitary; or even to explode into more disjointed multiplicities. Driven instead by the double impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself, the posthuman body intrigues rather than desires[…].(14)

Halberstam and Livingston indicate that connectivity allows the posthuman becoming-subject to exist simultaneously as self and other in the past, present, and future. Thus, posthuman theory helps articulate Sethe’s dual positioning as mother and daughter as well as the potentiality of her nonlinear development. When read through posthumanism, Sethe’s multiple identities take form as part of the posthuman “impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14), which gains specificity for Sethe as the yearning to become mother and to become self. By developing a dual self and mother identity, Sethe incorporates her dreams for the future into her understanding of her past.

The physical and emotional bonds shared by Sethe and her children evidence the liminal identities characteristic of and the liminal temporalities inhabited by posthuman becoming-subjects. Sethe’s intense connection with her children blurs the boundaries that exist between self and other, past and future. Jean Wyatt draws upon Lacan’s theory of the imaginary and symbolic orders in order to argue that rather than allowing Sethe’s children (or Sethe herself) to transition from the realm of imagined wholeness with the mother’s body to the symbolic order of (maternal) absence and loss, Morrison creates a system that, “like Lacan’s symbolic, locates subjects in relation to other subjects” but, unlike Lacan’s symbolic, refuses the paternalistic mandate for physical distance between mother and child (“Giving” 475). According to Wyatt, Morrison replaces Lacan’s understanding of the symbolic as a “move away from bodies touching to the compensations of abstract signifiers” with her view of a “maternal symbolic” that “makes physical contact the necessary support for Sethe’s full acceptance of the separate subjectivity required by language systems” (“Giving” 484). In other words, the lasting bonds between mothers and children in Morrison’s novel reveal that subjectivity depends on communal connections rather than separations. The notion of the individual developing through the community—the self forming alongside and even in conjunction with the other— corresponds with the paradox of the posthuman becoming-subject. The becoming-subject exists yet has not (and never will) fully come into being, given its impossible journey both “to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14). This constant development defines posthuman subjectivity, which makes the becoming-subject an apt figure through which to study Morrison’s characters.

Reading Sethe as a becoming-subject additionally requires an understanding of her dual identity as daughter and mother. Sethe not only intertwines her sense of self with the identities of her children, but her real and imagined relationships with her mother additionally shape her past, present, and future. By mothering others, Sethe attempts to bring into her present reality the physically and emotionally fulfilling mother–child relationship she never experienced during her early life because of slavery. Sethe remembers her biological mother—known to her simply as “Ma’am”—as a stranger she saw “a few times out in the fields and once when she [Ma’am] was working indigo” (Beloved 60). When telling Beloved and Denver stories of her childhood, Sethe foregrounds her physical estrangement from her mother, stating, “She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember” (Beloved 60–61). Although she believes her mother must have nursed her for “two or three weeks” or at least “a week or two” during her infancy (Beloved 60, 203), Sethe cannot recall receiving sustenance or comfort from her biological mother. She knows only that Nan, the woman who nursed her after Ma’am returned to the fields, nursed many children and “never had enough [milk] for all” (Beloved 203).

The deprivation of mother’s milk stands as a symbol of the maternal losses that shape Sethe’s childhood and inspire her in her adult life to mother others, including Beloved. Nancy Chodorow theorizes that the physical and emotional bonds that develop between mother and child during the feeding process are as significant as the actual sustenance a child receives. Although Freud and others have argued that the bond between mother and child comes from the physiological act of breastfeeding, Chodorow adds that the physical and emotional interaction of child and mother (or child and caregiver) creates positive feelings as well (65). According to Chodorow, time spent touching the mother while receiving food not only bonds mother and child during the child’s early life but also influences the child’s later life as an adult.

As Chodorow’s theory suggests, the absence of her mother’s milk affects Sethe during her adulthood. Specifically, Sethe’s early experiences with her mother shape her mothering. Sethe communicates her physical and emotional estrangement from her mother by stating that as a child she had “no nursing milk to call [her] own” (Beloved 200). However, as a mother, Sethe takes pride in her ability to care for her children, proclaiming that she has “milk enough for all” (Beloved 100).² When Sethe arrives at 124 Bluestone Road, her home in the free state of Ohio, her body enables her to nurse her children and also to provide for their physical and emotional comfort. Sethe celebrates the feat of surviving her escape from Sweet Home by encircling all of her children with her arms: “I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide” (Beloved 162). Wyatt argues that Sethe’s body takes on “mythic dimensions”: her “monumental body and abundant milk give and sustain life” (“Giving” 476). The fantastical expansion Sethe envisions occurring to her body and maternal capabilities allows her to physically join with her children (they move “in between” her arms) and blur the boundaries that differentiate self and other.

Significantly, Sethe’s mythic mothering shifts from giving and physically sustaining life to fulfilling her children’s (especially Beloved’s) emotional needs. Morrison again presents Sethe’s devoted mothering in stark contrast to Ma’am’s maternal absence, a juxtaposition that highlights the permeable boundaries that exist in Beloved not only between self and other but also among past, present, and future. While Ma’am lived apart from Sethe and “never fixed [her] hair nor nothing” (Beloved 60), Sethe commits herself to meeting each of Beloved’s demands. Sethe feeds, clothes, and entertains Beloved by cooking and sewing with her, and she demonstrates her affection for Beloved by playing with “Beloved’s hair, braiding, puffing, tying, oiling it until it made Denver nervous to watch her” (Beloved 239–40). Sethe’s strategy of satisfying Beloved’s physical and emotional desires by attending to her body—specifically, sating her hunger with breast milk when she is an infant and demonstrating their closeness by playing with her hair when she is a young adult—emphasizes the lasting impact of the physical and emotional relationship (or lack thereof) that exists between mother and child. In temporal terms, Sethe’s negative past experiences with her mother shape her own mothering choices in the present. Ma’am’s absence and Sethe’s subsequent suffering inspire Sethe to protect her children from the same fate by fully—and as many critics have argued, excessively—devoting her body to her offspring.

While Sethe’s maternal body provides for her children, her own daughterly body still suffers from a want of care because of her mother’s absence. Sethe attempts through her mothering to heal her past and present daughterly suffering and ward off any future pain she or her children might experience. She dedicates her body to fulfilling Beloved’s needs, transferring her body’s power to Beloved: “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became; the brighter Beloved’s eyes, the more those eyes that used never to look away became slits of sleeplessness. Sethe no longer combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur” (Beloved 250). Sethe seeks through her mothering to strengthen her children’s bodies in order to protect them—and their family link—from being appropriated by the white owner or, on a larger level, white culture.

In addition to furthering the goal of protecting her children, Sethe’s tending to others and her contentment with her relational identity can be understood to develop out of her personal need for nurturance. O’Reilly argues that Sethe’s mothering works to counter “the commodification of African Americans under slavery and the resulting disruption of the African American motherline,” the tradition of care that unites black mothers and children (139). In positioning Sethe’s mothering as a political act that empowers Sethe through the reconstitution of her motherline, O’Reilly departs from critics, including Wyatt and Demetrakopoulos, who argue that Sethe’s mothering reflects her willingness to efface her individual subjectivity in favor of a relational identity (Wyatt, “Giving” 476; Demetrakopoulos 52). Venetria K. Patton and Kubitschek likewise acknowledge that Sethe’s mothering is not completely self-effacing. Patton finds that “Sethe’s consuming love is based on a newfound selfishness once she is in a position to claim ownership of herself and her children” (128), and Kubitschek argues that Sethe’s self-interested desire to be mothered (rather than a selfish claim of ownership) motivates or contributes to her mothering of others.

Sethe seeks to assuage the pain of her past by assuming both the mother and child positions in her relationship with Beloved, which means that Beloved also exists as both mother and daughter. Morrison situates Sethe and Beloved in a mother–daughter relationship beginning the moment the childlike Beloved appears on the stump outside of 124 and Sethe feels the overwhelming urge to relieve herself, which she later understands as her water breaking (Beloved 51, 202). However, as their bond develops, Sethe begins to assume a daughterly role in relation to the maternal Beloved, a shift noticed by scholars including O’Reilly and Deborah Horwitz. Observing Beloved and her mother together, Denver notes, “Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child” (Beloved 250). In addition to appearance, Sethe and Beloved’s behavior indicates a transformation in their relationship. Although Sethe repeatedly asserts that she believes her deceased daughter has returned in the form of Beloved, she relates to Beloved as if the young woman were a reincarnation of her mother, not her daughter. Sethe compares her relationship with Beloved to her relationship with her mother, stating that Beloved “came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma’am had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one” (Beloved 203). While Sethe initially views Beloved’s actions as a daughter’s departure from and subsequent return to her mother, as she continues to consider their situation, she focuses on maternal (rather than daughterly) absences: “I wonder what they [her mother and the other women] was doing when they was caught. Running, you think? No. Not that. Because she was my ma’am and nobody’s ma’am would run off and leave her daughter, would she?” (Beloved 203). Sethe’s turn toward memories of her mother’s absence indicates that Beloved becomes a stand-in not for the devoted daughter who returns to the mother but the good mother who refuses to abandon (and, hence, returns to) her daughter.

The interior monologues Morrison presents in part 2 of her novel support a reading of Beloved as Sethe’s mother and reinforce the existence of circular or liminal temporalities in Beloved. In Beloved’s monologue, readers bear witness to the movement of the past into the present and future (and vice versa) through Beloved’s descriptions of the mother’s return to the daughter and the daughter’s return to the mother during the Middle Passage. Morrison first introduces Sethe’s mother’s Middle Passage experience through Nan, who tells a young Sethe that “her mother and Nan were together fr...