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abjection
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Author's Roundtable
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Darieck Scott
by Unit for Criticism
On Monday, 9/28 the Unit for Criticism held the first of three Fall 2009 Author's Roundtables featuring Darieck Scott, Assistant Professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing his forthcoming book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. Illinois respondents for this event were Marc D. Perry (Anthropology and African American Studies,) Richard T. Rodriguez (English & Latino/Latina Studies), and Emily Skidmore(History). We are pleased to post on Kritik a guest blog on the event by Dan Tracy (English) as well as the full responses for Rodriguez and Skidmore.In the above photo, Darieck Scott and Marc Perry speak to one another.
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The extent to which the abject might be recuperated for some kind of political potential has been an occasional focus of queer studies; Darieck Scott’s forthcoming book specifies that question, and raises its stakes considerably, by asking it of “black abjection,” or the history of debasement under slavery and Jim Crow. Scott argues that two responses have dominated black literary and critical focus on this topic. The first, typified by the work of Frantz Fanon and the writers of the Black Arts movement, demands a recuperation and celebration of abjected blackness before an ultimate turn away from it. For Fanon, especially, “blackness is constituted by a history of abjection, and is itself a form of abjection” (Scott 6). The second response comes from late 20th-century neo-slave narratives, texts that try more deeply to historicize slavery in order to question the idea of an abject history. In these narratives, slaves engage in forms of resistance that complicate our sense of the power relations evoked in narratives of abjection.
Both of these solutions attempt to overcome abjection, or, in the case of the neo-slave narratives, to refute its sufficiency as historical description. Scott, by contrast, in introducing his book on Monday evening, provoked us by asking whether retaining abjection might be the more politically effective move. Although he finds neo-slave narratives compelling, he notes that the black abject continues to hold a powerful grip on the contemporary imagination despite its historical deficits. Reading (often against the grain) Fanon, James Weldon Johnson, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany, Scott suggests that a strain of latent power (and, in Delany, explicit erotic pleasure) undergirds the figuring of black abjection. If one is racialized through abjection, he suggested, then this racialization “offers capabilities, not just debilities.”
In Fanon’s corpus, Scott emphasizes, the metaphor of “tensed muscles” repeats to figure the moment of abjection, signaling this latent power for political response. Moments of male-on-male rape from Baraka and Morrison signal the pitfalls of the Black Arts and neo-slave narrative responses to black abjection but also suggest abjection’s potential. The danger Scott locates is the shared imperative of both projects to celebrate a black male subject who embodies normative masculinity: a subject both homophobic and misogynistic. Yet these moments of rape also figure a loss of sexual subjectivity that could allow for the development of a different kind of male subject. Here, Scott acknowledges his debts to Hortense J. Spillers’s feminist argument that the devastation caused to gender roles among black slaves by the middle passage was an opportunity, carrying the potential for longer-lasting changes to gender norms. Likewise, he argues that the moment of black abjection opens up a range of potential responses that need not be limited to a revivified patriarchal masculinity. The final chapter of his book, on Samuel Delany’s literary pornographic novel The Mad Man, argues that its turn to a fantasy of black abjection creates another possibility: pleasure, through the resignification of racist violence in erotic contexts that the black protagonist (who searches out white sexual partners who will humiliate him) finds surprisingly liberating.
Much of the discussion in response to Scott’s work centered on the potential political and methodological problems it raises. Richard T. Rodriguez suggested the importance of Scott’s work in rethinking the usual disempowered take that figures the sexual bottom as both emasculated and feminized. Particularly in the context of the chapter on Delany, Marc D. Perry, in his response, asked if this recuperation of the abject risked fetishizing violence. He also wondered if a writer like Fanon, often critiqued as masculinist, could be incorporated into this project without reproducing his problematic relationship to gender. Emily Skidmore, in turn, wondered if calling the male-on-male rape in Morrison’s Beloved “homosexual” might flatten out the history of sexuality. She also called attention to the diversity of Scott’s archive, asking whether the abjection he discusses is specific to African-American experience or indicative of African diaspora more broadly.
Two of Scott’s responses struck me as especially suggestive of his project’s emphasis and aims. First, he clarified that he was not offering the recovery of abjection as the only—or even the best—resource for a political response to racial inequality. Instead, he draws attention to it precisely because most anti-racist work misses it entirely. Second, Scott at one moment rather boldly defended the possible distortions of the history of abjection in any contemporary political or literary recovery (especially, in this case, Delany’s novel), arguing that while it is a position of privilege that allows us to transform that history rather than live it, we are also inheritors of that history and how it is imagined. Thus, he suggests, we are entitled to use that history of abjection in any way that will help to mitigate its legacy of psychological and social hurt.
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Above photo: Emily Skidmore and Ricky Rodriguez.
I want to begin by thanking Professor Darieck Scott for sharing his work with us this evening. However, it is important that my gratitude be supplemented with a sense of indebtedness. And while I don’t want to make this response all about me, I do want to acknowledge that the selections I’ve read from his forthcoming book provide invaluable insights as I think through the transition from my first book to my current project on Latino masculinity, sexuality, and fantasy. Allow me to explain. Like the texts Scott critically appraises for the ways in which the black bottom has historically been rendered as a figure often signaling an abdication of power, in my book Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics I treat a handful of Chicano authored texts that raise the subject of homosexuality only to object to its assumed complicity with a failed masculinity and, as a result, sexual passivity. Indeed, the appearance of gay men in various Chicano movement (and movement inspired) literary texts are conveniently rendered “bottoms”; that is, they are cast as failed men who, for a struggle hinging on reproductive futurity, presumably wish they were women. In short, these bottoms are incapable of generating la familia in the heteronormative terms set forth in Chicano empowerment narratives. After reading Scott, I realized that I failed to say anything about the queer political potential of bottom status. For after pointing out the ways in which anal penetration is deemed an act of subjugation, I simply argue against this typecasting (reading it in a way that, after learning from Scott, now seems quite obvious) and mark it as the exertion of heteropatriarchal domination over gay men. Yet Scott’s work, while indeed registering the force of domination at work in representations of the bottom, further insists that the “willed enactment of powerlessness” also “encodes a power of its own—a kind of skill set that includes pleasure in introjecting and assimilating the alien (perhaps, alienation itself), a sense of intimacy acquired even in situations of coerced pain, a transformation, through harm, of the foreign into one’s own.”
Professor Scott’s reading of Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man is provocative as it is essential for thinking about the crucial significance of the bottom, especially the black bottom. Unlike the smooth equation of unwilling consent with anal penetration in texts by Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison, for example, Delany’s novel offers a counternarrative in which protagonist John Marr, Scott argues, “navigates the position of sexual/racial ‘bottom’ as a complex, empowered political persona, and potentially demonstrates how a history of sexual domination endows the figure of blackness with nimble abilities, with a form of power.” Moreover, “John uses his activities and fantasies and their historical resonance of racial subjugation, and the intense pleasure these acts give him largely because of that resonance, to open the way to a sense that he operates within a greater sphere of freedom and power than he did before engaging in his sexual practices.” The coordinates of this “greater sphere” match up with Delany’s aptly-named “pornotopia,” the cartographic context of The Mad Man. And just as reconfiguring the bottom does not simply lead to his mobilization as a figure for radical empowerment in performing a reversal of social hierarchies, pornotopia, Scott cautions, does not line up with discernable “utopias, those golden Edens imagined by emancipatory narratives: Here the erotic and sexual are not liberating as some hoped they might prove to be in the Sexual Revolution, though they are of course political in their work in and with human relationships.” But unlike those who cast the bottom as the end of reproduction, Scott crucially emphasizes the generative function of both the bottom and pornotopia: “We do not find emancipation here; but we find movement toward it, however ponderous, along a particular asymptotic curve.” Within pornotopia—and I would insist outside of it, thanks to Scott’s deft and searing theoretical formulations—the bottom stands as both an embodied subjectivity and a meeting ground of its own on which contests for power repeatedly play out.
I also do not want to lose sight of the fact that Scott’s black bottom is a subject of desire. Sex—or rather, what I take as more to the point, sexual fantasy—is the setting where submission and pleasure are intertwined. In The Mad Man, Scott insists, racialized discourse produces meaning that does not sidestep historical matter or lapse into careless decontextualization but rather grapples with fantasy scenarios shot through with social and political phenomena. The goal, Scott maintains, is “to address the historical (or little-r ‘real’) in the mode of the fantastic, and to invest the fantastic with a consciousness of the painful, horrific historical reality that makes the fantasy appealing (precisely in its also being appalling). And for the black bottom, this means deriving sexual/erotic pleasure specifically from the history—as well as the present enactment—of an abjection that gives rise to the racialized subject-that-is-also-an-object.” The far reaching potential of Scott’s book, I believe, rests on an illuminating proposal of reconfiguration through fantasy. And if we continue hold on to Laplanche and Pontalis’s classic assertion that fantasy “is not the object of desire, but its setting” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 26), then pornotopia is indeed one such setting where we might begin to imagine other possibilities.
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I truly enjoyed the opportunity of reading Darieck Scott’s work, as I found it provocative and insightful. I particularly enjoyed the ways in which het seamlessly brought together a broad range of sources—from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to Samuel R. Delany’s pornographic novel, The Mad Man. These texts discuss a wide array of historical and cultural contexts and yet, as Scott so eloquently illustrates, are connected through their shared interrogations of power, blackness and abjection (categories that turn out to be mutually constitutive). I come to Scott’s work as a historian, and my own research focuses on turn-of-the-twentieth-century newspaper narratives produced around moments of “revelation” wherein the biological sex of an individual who was born female but lived as male was discovered. I seek to uncover the ways in which local communities made sense of such “queer bodies,” and thus I found in Scott’s discussions of spectacle and abjection particularly instructive, as these two concepts are central to my own work. I was also taken with Scott’s imagining of the work of historical analysis. In the Introduction, Scott writes:
Again I want to emphasize that mine is not an historical or even an historicist project. In this book the tool of historicizing will be less important than the tools of theorizing and imagining—inventing by use of the stage set by history without attending too scrupulously to the particulars of historical incident. My aim here is not to seek the revelations of history, but to emphasize that key component of the work of historical excavation that involves the construction of the past: that is, to imaginatively work with—and re-work, and work over, and maybe, if we are lucky, work through—the material that history provides (MS p.12).
Now, perhaps it may seem all too predictable that I, as the historian at the table, might take issue with this method, and I do admit that when I first read this passage I was quite skeptical. After all, I’ve spent the past several years being taught over and over again (and, in turn, reiterating to my own students) that the particularities of a given historical incident are vital to understanding the event’s meaning and its wider significance. Yet, by the time I reached the end of the selected readings, I was mostly convinced. Indeed, I found this method to be especially effective in Chapter 5, in which Scott skillfully illuminates how histories of subjugation continue to circulate within erotic fantasies.
I also particularly liked the section of chapter three titled, “power and/as abjection: the black in black masculinity.” Perhaps because of my own research interest in embodiment, I was taken by Scott’s reading of the chain gang scene from Beloved as a scene of dismembering, wherein Paul D’s corporeality is divested of that which was its chief claim to power and value: active sexuality. Scott writes: “Where the black (male) body in its Fanonian incarnation is a surface upon which white psychic needs and desires are projected, here that body satisfies the white male body directly and physically, as sexual plaything; it is the white guard's corporeality which now is the focus of interaction between white and black.” (MS p.23). I thoroughly enjoyed Scott’s reading of Morrison vis-à-vis Fanon here, and found the insights brought forth to be smart and illuminating. However, I was a bit curious about Scott’s later contention that in this scene, “homosexuality is more the means by which domination and torture are effected between white and black men and, problematically, it is a measure of his abjection” (MS p.20). It seems to me that perhaps one danger in not attending too scrupulously to the particulars of historical incidents is projecting backwards modern identity categories, in the quoted passage, I question the imputed relationship between sex acts and sexual identities, particularly given the fact that homosexuality was not yet clearly defined as an identity category in the period in which Beloved takes place.
Of course, I realize that Scott’s reading of Beloved has more to do with Morrison’s choices in representing scenes of abjection than it does with the specificities of the actual experience of sexual violation of male slaves at the hands of white men. Indeed, I think that Scott’s larger point here in illuminating the potentially liberatory possibilities within the all-too-often ignored historical experiences of sexual violation and emasculation under slavery still stands, and, furthermore, is a provocative and important point. However, I wonder if, by describing Paul D’s experience as “something that might be called homosexuality,” Scott runs the risk of flattening the history of sexuality a bit. Indeed, while today’s readers might understand the chain gang scene in Beloved as an example of homosexuality, Paul D’s historical antecedents would not be likely to understood the experience in that way: as abjection and emasculation, yes, but as homosexuality, I’m not sure. This, perhaps, is a small point as Paul D’s experience on the chain gang is referred to as “homosexual” at only a few points throughout the chapter, and yet the paucity with which the term is deployed seems to me to suggest that it is, perhaps, not an unnecessary label. I wonder, in other words, what is gained by labeling Paul D’s experience as “something that might be called homosexuality”?
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