Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life

By Christopher Freeburg

Christopher Freeburg’s  Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests.

Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects’ relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813940335

Book preview

BLACK AESTHETICS AND THE INTERIOR LIFE

CHRISTOPHER FREEBURG

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2017

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Freeburg, Christopher, author.

Title: Black aesthetics and the interior life / Christopher Freeburg.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001106 | ISBN 9780813940311 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813940328 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780813940335 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | African American aesthetics. | African Americans in literature.

Classification: LCC PS153.N5 F74 2017 | DDC 7810.9/896073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001106

Cover art: The lynching of Frank Embree, July 22, 1899, Fayette, Missouri.

(Courtesy of the Center for Civil and Human Rights)

He that walks with the wise grows wise.

— PROVERBS 13:20

To my friends

Erica, Vaughn, Adam, Ivy, Quincy, Michael, and Allyson

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Black Aesthetics and the Personal

1 The Violence Inside

2 The Beast within the City

3 Blues No More

Interlude: The Afro Samurai’s Symptom

4 Past the Chokecherry Tree

Epilogue: Nina Simone’s Script

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These are people who cheer me along with song, prayer, hugs, and other expressions of thoughtfulness, love, and grace.

I take every opportunity to thank Joseph Brown S.J., whose guidance, friendship, insights, and gift of verse keep on giving. Ken Warren is always there to help me make sense of my own ideas. Our relationship is special, and I cherish it. I am a better colleague and scholar and contributor to our profession because of him. Gordon Hutner is that fortifying and wise voice down the hall. I benefit gratefully from his lucid advice.

My colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are stellar. You’ll never find a more kind and thoughtful one than Bob Parker—except the amiable poet Janice Harrington (smile). Trish Loughran radiates brilliance and has always been willing to share it. Irving Hunt asked sharp questions that helped me throughout. Candice Jenkins and Derrick Spires continually deepen the discussions of black life and art throughout our department and university.

Curtis Perry and Michael Rothberg served as department heads during the writing of this book. They encouraged me and helped me secure much needed support and resources.

Radiclani Clytus’s encyclopedic knowledge of American culture is like a giving tree. My conversations with Stephen Best enrich my thinking. Imani Perry is an unwavering sharp critical witness.

Professors, graduate students, and staff who organize and attend the workshops and lectures at the University of California, Riverside, Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Iowa, and my alma mater, Xavier University of Louisiana—thank you for the invaluable conversations, questions and encouragement.

Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Daphne Brooks, Sam Otter, Nancy Bentley, Anne Cheng, Ross Posnock, Jennifer Fleissner, Julia Stern, Joshua Kotin, Sarah Rivett, Horace Porter, Michael Hill, Lena Hill, Dana Nelson, Bill Brown, Bill Gleason, Yogita Goyal, Bill Maxwell, Priscilla Wald, Jerry Graff and Katherine B. Graff, Walter Benn Michaels, Benjamin Reiss, Deb Vargas, Michele Elam, David Alworth, Laurence Ralph, and Theri Pickens have all given their time, insight, and affirmation at important moments. Wyn Kelley has been generous with both support and insight.

I especially thank Elise Vigiletti, Kathleen Kageff, and Sam Plasencia for their time and efforts copyediting the book.

Kenny Stalkfleet (now an attorney/philosopher, back then, a budding philosopher) participated in more conversations about objectification and black life than he ever anticipated sitting at a Starbucks bar counter (the actual counter is sadly gone now).

Sarah Morris-Jarrett is my mother—a soldier for love, sacrifice, and creative humor. Elmyra Powell sits as our family elder griot activist. My father, John Freeburg, reads everything and asks great questions and cheers me on. My sister Angela is my sweet and brilliant advocate (and Glen is hers). Marta and Mario Silva make sure I feel limitless.

The Stephen Family YMCA—Melissa Phillips, Dan Maroun, Alejandro Gomez, David Wilcoxen—keeps me in shape and feeling good. My buddy Phil Dykstra was there from the beginning. Ben Quattrone, a friend indeed, provided a home away from home in an unlikely place, a car dealership. Dale Denton, Kyle Ronnfeldt, Charlie Lang, and the good folks at Champaign Honda BMW shared their workspace, comfort food, and hearty conversation while I wrote this book.

Jonathan and Brianna’s hugs make me feel big in the universe. My wife Izabelle’s love is a divine gift.

You all keep me singing, This little light of mine . . .

Chapter 3 appeared in earlier form as James Baldwin and the Unhistoric Life of Race in the South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 221–39. Copyright 2013 Duke University Press. Republished by permission of the publisher.

The lynching of Frank Embree, July 22, 1899, Fayette, Missouri. (Courtesy of the Center for Civil and Human Rights)

Prologue

Black Aesthetics and the Personal

Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?

—T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND (1922)

Frank Embree’s violent end stands out. In the tour of lynching photographs titled Without Sanctuary, Embree stands alive, not dead.¹ The other men in the tour photos hang limp and lifeless. Embree is beaten, badly wounded, but somehow sturdy as he stares into the camera. The white mob whipped and tortured Embree into confessing that he raped a white teenage girl. Embree’s tortured confession is just one more reminder of how lynchings cruelly dehumanized men and women. Embree’s lynching epitomizes racist violence in the United States. From politics to the new social science to print media, one did not have to go far to realize that Embree and other black people were marginalized from the rights and privileges whites were entitled to.² In these racist and violent conditions black humanity and personhood disappears.³ Harvey Young made it plain: lynching objectified bodies.⁴

What strikes audiences about Embree is not just the horrific circumstance of his death, but also his stare into the camera, which reminds witnesses of his vivacity, thoughts, and desire to impress his own meaning until the very end. The photograph of Embree provokes a broader question that this book explores: how can places where personhood vanishes simultaneously uncover a forceful sense of the person? Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life takes up this question through the lens of the personal form, which I elaborate here in a brief discussion of Frank Embree’s lynching. For this photograph of Embree and throughout this book, I advance the idea that sites of objectification disclose the import, contours, and content of what it means to be a person.

What defines Embree’s objectification? According to reports of Embree’s lynching, the white mob denied him all legal recourse, and no one listened to his voice except to confirm the story that justified the lynching event: Embree brutally raped a white teenage girl; he is a black brute and a fiend who deserved to be killed.⁵ The whites who organized the mob denied Embree the rights, privileges, voice, and humane treatment that one is supposed to be afforded as a person and citizen; in these ways, the lynching event turned him into an object of white dominance.

Activist Walter White claimed that lynchings make manifest whites’ fear of black progress.⁶ If White’s observations are true, and whites indeed were possessed by fear of black progress, whites also had to see blacks as politically threatening, competitors for civic influence, goods, and economic resources. The lynch mob clearly objectified Embree, but who else but a person or group of people could be capable of capturing the social and political imagination of whites in power? The very things Embree desired to maintain—his innocence, his version of events, a fair trial, and to be remembered in a photograph—were the very things whites kept from him (with the exception of the photo). Two unequal sets of interests constitute Embree’s lynching. Thus, even one of the Ur-texts of objectification is a conflict of persons. I submit throughout this book that when white people objectify black people, there may be fierce disagreement over equality and gruesome violence, but the parties see one another as persons.

This implied agreement comes across in the final picture of Embree where he hangs dead against a tree. The men who lynched him wrapped a canvas sheet around Embree’s waist. The lynch mob wanted to suppress their shame over the aftermath of their castration of him.⁷ Only the thought and reality of another real person’s savaged genitalia creates such shame as well as the desire to hide it. The castration and the covering of it define the white community’s understanding of Embree as a person—to be destroyed, humiliated, and debased. Personhood is implied in the very grounds and making of racist violence itself.

Embree also communicates his own personhood. His final request was to have a photograph taken of him so that his parents would remember his face.⁸ While all of Embree’s requests seem ready-made by his murderers, this last one brings us back to the impact of Embree’s remarkable gaze into the camera. Embree’s stare affirms his desire to create meaning that is his alone, even if that meaning is abstract, opaque, or largely withheld. One witness said, The negro never once winced. He gazed into the crowd, never uttering a word.⁹ James Allen called Embree’s anguished look an exemplar of undiminished dignity and defiance.¹⁰ But what or who did Embree defy? We do not know. One cannot know even if Embree’s focused gaze corresponds to what he was actually thinking or if his gaze projected what he wanted witnesses to see. Embree’s stare is no confirmation of his undiminished sense of dignity in the face of his white tormentors; he confirms that we cannot know for sure what he thought. Embree exemplifies the ontological fact of difference that separates self/other, performer/audience, and insider/outsider. Embree’s silence reminds witnesses of an always available sense of epistemological limitation that stifles anyone who sees this photograph and wants to answer the question: Who is Frank Embree?

This question does not mean Embree communicates nothing. His stare indicates that he generates ideas that distinguish him from anyone else, that he has personal interest in the moment when he is completely beholden to the white powers around him. By looking at Embree one cannot know the fullest extent of his ideas, but it is crucial to recognize that he has ideas and that the notions are his; his desires, fully communicated or withheld, constitute individuated interest that provokes onlookers in the past or present to realize how estranged they could be from Embree’s actual thoughts and predilections. The photo does reveal personalized interest, yet instead of offering informative clarity, Embree’s image conveys epistemic estrangement. Epistemic estrangement distances witnesses from Embree’s own ideas. Since we cannot know his ideas, we cannot know the political inflection, if any, of his looks.

The photo of Embree exemplifies something basic, yet profound, about how to approach black personhood through the personal form. The fact that we know Embree has interests and that no one except Embree can withhold or deliver those interests defines the personal in this book. What we may want to know the most, the political substance and import of his stare, as he sees it, remains his own secret. So much of the critical study of black personhood in art and political expression focuses on how a black subject self-fashions interiority to seize full citizenship or reclaim humanity. But if we can’t rescue or extract a black subject’s politics, how can critics plot or posit black political impacts and trajectories? We can’t. What is most fascinating about Embree’s withholding and refusals, in my view, is that he is unknown, uncertain, and unaccountable to all but him. This idea demarcates the personal throughout this book: "of affecting, belonging to, a particular person and not someone else." This fundamental sense establishes the ontological grounds of what we think persons are and a constitutive feature of what we deem valuable about being a person. I argue throughout this book that this notion of the person, exemplified by epistemic estrangement, is a crucial part of the black aesthetics’ philosophical force.

Critics have tended to see Embree and other victims of lynching as important figures for the collective racial politics of both lynch mobs and antilynching activists.¹¹ With Embree in mind, I ask this question with a wider scope: can we locate the import of personhood in sites where white people in power objectify black people? For instance, Fred Moten’s analysis of black music and performance begins with objectification; in speaking objects he found resistant material objecthood, subjection and subjectivity, and value in . . . places of nonvalue.¹² Moten’s insights into the object or into other depersonalized categories like the flesh result in new analytics to illuminate the black radical tradition. Darieck Scott investigated vexed sites of black masculinity for instances of profound feelings of abjection; like Moten’s analysis, Scott’s work on black abjection uncovers that the person extends into realms that otherwise would not perceive it.¹³ Both Moten’s and Scott’s readings find subjectivity and personhood in episodes of real and figurative debasement, and, more significantly, their findings illuminate black radicalism and the galvanizing effect of power-seizing 1960s movements.¹⁴ Moten and Scott took stock in the view that black revolutionary consciousness, in Cedric J. Robinson’s words, is an internal affair.¹⁵ As Moten, Robinson, and Scott suggest, whether portraying racial uplift strategies in the 1890s or conflicts over civil rights legislation in the 1960s, black texts repeatedly emphasize the internal affair of black subjects as a crucial site for locating black collective political interests. Moten’s, Scott’s, and others’ work reveals the actual, potential, and imaginative political bridges between black aesthetic representations and the advancement or regression of black communities.¹⁶

By reading the horizon of racial conflict and black aesthetics solely in terms of black collective politics, we miss something that equally defines it: ongoing moments where black artists repeatedly invoke and dramatize questions like who am I, what do I value, where do I find community and how the answers to these questions are so often ambiguous, enigmatic, or withheld entirely. This book emphasizes that these crucial moments of uncertainty disturb, obscure, and even unhinge black subjects’ relationship to conventional black collective politics. Realizing that one’s direct liaisons to black politics of the past or present are blurry or not viable is not nihilistic but instead allows readers of this book to highlight the story of how the person appears anew as a value bearing fact in the black aesthetic tradition.¹⁷ I advance throughout that interrogating and reimagining the grounds of what it means to be a person brings out a constitutive yet undervalued dimension of black aesthetics.

I deepen my argument about personal form across the remaining chapters. Each one addresses how black people struggle to find their own sense of meaning and definition and to actualize them, yet these realizations and acts cannot be explained fully or sometimes at all by collective black politics. This book begins with the period of racial uplift with authors like Anna Julia Cooper and ends in the post–civil rights era with Toni Morrison and Nina Simone. Additionally, each chapter ends with a coda that uses a different aesthetic artifact from a different era to show remarkable conceptual and thematic continuity. These codas indicate how to marshal the chapter’s theoretical claims about the activity that distinguishes the personal form across a variety of black texts and performances.

The first chapter, The Violence Inside, focuses on Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors (1892), and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). These texts were composed on the historical stage where racial uplift politics were central to black writing. This chapter explores how writers develop notions of black personal life and value through their critique of white supremacists’ concepts of black valuelessness. Black artists demonstrate the personal form by repeatedly portraying black subjects’ willingness to distinguish one’s own commitments and beliefs from anyone else’s. It is this willingness that illuminates the substance and importance what it means to be a person in black racial uplift discourse. The chapter ends with a discussion of how mammy figures in Chesnutt’s Marrow and Winslow Homer’s painting Near Andersonville (1866) forcefully reveal their own sense of personal value by disturbing the cogency of subject/object relationships.

Chapter 2, The Beast within the City, takes on the theme that urban blight and modern mass culture dehumanize black subjects as well as encourage pathological and destructive behavior. Through Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), I analyze the power of the metropolis to depersonalize and diminish the person by transforming him or her into a hollow beast. The beast or monster is certainly figurative, but its force is and has been derived from the scholarly agreement that living in violent and impoverished conditions has diminishing effects on one’s humanity and sense of oneself. While the ominous urban walls close in on Joe from Sport and Bigger Thomas from Native Son, these writers produced an ongoing capacity for self-revelation and the desire for a recognizable self-definition in their protagonists that cannot be stamped out by what urban sociologists define as imposing structural constraints. But what these texts also demonstrate is the very urban destruction that removes personhood simultaneously sheds light on the grounds for how personhood is conceptualized and articulated as moral interpretation, belief, and purpose—one that transcends political solutions or the end of racial inequality as both Wright and Dunbar depict it. I end the chapter by studying comedian Katt Williams’s Tiger bit. I am particularly interested in how Williams performs a paradox. Williams insists that, like a tiger in a cage, everyone wants to feel real; but one can only make this vibrant and universal desire manifest through a praxis of revelation and ownership that solely makes sense in personal terms.

In chapter 3, Blues No More I discuss Ralph Ellison’s and James Baldwin’s view that racial categories create static fictions of social reality that dehumanize the categorizer and the categorized person. By critiquing static race narratives in the 1950s and 1960s, Ellison’s and Baldwin’s essays ready their readers to live in a new historical moment, with new selves, richly personalized with more democratic possibility. This possibility of new personhood and community, however, relies upon a notion that something in the self must be given up or sacrificed for the new world—an abrupt break with the past that also may mean relinquishing the very model of antiracist commitments that inspired radical change in the first place. The personal form here is not merely the ongoing possibility of personal transformation but Baldwin’s and Ellison’s insistence during the civil rights era that to achieve and affirm change current perspectives and investments must be transformed or sacrificed altogether. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Glenn Ligon artistically transforms and reinvents his own relation to civil rights history through his painting of the iconic placard, I AM A MAN.

I segue into the final chapter with an interlude titled "The Afro Samurai’s Symptom." In this break, I look at how a contemporary figure in Japanese anime, the Afro Samurai (2007), embodies 1970s racialized fantasy and a broader psychological challenge of needing to escape a traumatic past that elusively traps him. It is the lack of intimacy in his life that defines his relationship to history as well as helping me forecast the significance of interpersonal touch in the next chapter.

My final chapter, Past the Chokecherry Tree, investigates Toni Morrison’s historicist novel Beloved (1987) and the collection of black memorabilia Morrison also authored, The Black Book (1974). The flesh is a critical concept in both texts. It marks how slave traders, masters, and other whites divorce the enslaved Africans’ bodies from human personality. I examine Morrison’s work to draw out connections between dehumanized flesh and the sense of the personal, which, I submit, cannot be